It had been a question from the beginning whether the mutual charity and the sense of being up against a systematic Aristotelian Orthodoxy would be enough to keep the evangelical mix together and with it the sense of fraternity among evangelicals of various stripes. Zinzendorf had tested patience to the limit in one direction, and finally led his community to financial disaster. Edwards had tried to reclaim evangelicalism for Reformed Orthodoxy at the price of having to rewrite the Orthodoxy, to disclaim the religious affections of much of what passed for evangelicalism, and to sustain the whole by an artificial typology of biblical harmonisation. In his later years Wesley successfully torpedoed even moderate millennialism, but could not keep his American followers in line, and bequeathed a community more prone to internal fragmentation than was British society at large. Could anything be done? Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702–82), a Württemberger, thought it could, and his prescription was to abandon the old evangelical hostility to ‘system’, and to create on conservative principles what no other evangelical had contemplated, a grand synthesis of Bible, history and science. The watchword of this new system was that favourite slogan of early Central European evangelicalism, ‘life’.

Oetinger

Oetinger was the son of the Town Clerk of Göppingen, and was given the best education available at the monastic schools of Blaubeuren and Bebenhausen, followed by university studies at Tübingen, with a view to his entering the church. It was, however, never very clear where he would fetch up.