Here are some relevant quotes from the episode.
I think this is an excellent reminder/warning.So the theological pendulum swung in Scholasticism way out toward a purely academic philosophizing. Then in the Reformation swung back toward Scripture as the basis of Faith and practice.
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By the middle of the 17th C, Protestant dogmaticians defined the fundamentals of saving faith in such elaborate detail no one but an advanced scholar could hope to know them.
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What came eventually to be called Pietism began simply as several uncoordinated efforts on the part of pastors to get their people to live out what they claimed to believe.
Pietism never became an established church or denomination. Rather, it was a movement that infiltrated most of the Protestant groups of Europe and aboard. It was the Pietistic urge to walk humbly with God that launched may of the distinctives that have marked a vibrant Evangelical Faith. Things like Bible printing and distribution, foreign missions, orphanages & schools, hospitals & ministries for the disabled & elderly. Pietists did all they could to fulfill the commandments to love God & others, and to carry the Gospel to the lost.
But, and here’s where the swinging pendulum ran too far with the Pietistic reaction to Protestant Scholasticism—In the move to prove true faith changes lives, some Pietists embraced the slogan “Life, not doctrine.” Instead of a balanced Both/And, they advocated an Either/Or that pitted theology against behavior.
Orthodoxy & Orthopraxy were divorced.
This indifference to doctrine saw Pietism becoming an unwitting ally to the Enlighten-ment’s attack on the Central Truth claims of Orthodox Christianity. Then it helped fuel the sentimentalism of the Enlightenment’s own pendulum swing into Romanticism.
With Pietism’s emphasis on the individual experience of conversion and a personal walk with God, the sense of Christian Community took a massive hit as well. Jesus wasn’t just the Savior of the world, He was now a PERSONAL Savior; the Savior of ME, rather than US. So, one of The Gospel’s greatest attractions, the priority & reality of restored love for God and others that had been so appealing since the first days of the Church, was diluted. Under a maturing Pietism, Christianity went from being a Faith that called people into community through a mutually shared life, to more of an individualistic focus on one’s personal experience of conversion & a daily walk with God.
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So, some might ask – Why are we talking about Pietism in a series on Heretics and Heresy?
Good question.
Pietism itself isn’t heretical, not even close. But its history reveals an important truth the wise will glean. In emphasizing one thing, there’s the tendency to de-emphasize another. When balance is lost to the swinging pendulum of trends in human society, a door is opened to errors that can do great harm.
Pietism’s emphasis on personal conversion and the individual’s walk with God became an unwitting ally to the Enlightenment’s assault on historic, orthodox Christianity. It helped pre-position hundreds of thousands for the sentimentality, emotionalism, and anti-intellectualism of Romanticism.
Pietism is one of many reminders that a good thing can become a bad thing when it’s not carefully made to be a balanced thing.
We can see in history the results of overreaction and overemphasis in other theological movements as well.
I note that Anabaptism itself has at times had a similar aversion to theology/doctrine and also tended to just focus on life or behavior. Anabaptism is different because it's more focused on results and community than Pietism, which was more individual and experience-focused. But the point is the same: Orthodoxy & Orthopraxy, not one or the other.
Luther reacted to the errors of Catholicism - corruption, dead works, ritualism, and so on. In many ways, he did not go far enough - ecclesiology, relationship of the Christian to government, persecution of heretics, etc. But in his soteriology, he reacted strongly to Catholicism, and in the process, overreacted - going so far as to say, "Sin boldly." Now, that may have been hyperbole, and Luther said many other things that were different. But his theology tended toward overemphasis on justification and less on newness of life in the Holy Spirit. Whether he intended it or not, that's what happened in Lutheran churches.
Calvin also overreacted, with similar results to Luther. Instead of Catholic works and penance doctrine, he emphasized total depravity, so that in his theology, people have no free will to choose to follow Christ; instead, everyone was unconditionally chosen or damned from the beginning of creation.
Menno Simons and the Anabaptists reacted to the magisterial Reformers because they did not separate the church from the state and did not try to set up a pure church filled only with true believers. But in their emphasis on purity and church discipline, they ended up arguing over tertiary matters and excommunicating each other, damaging their witness to the watching world. Menno even excommunicated the Swiss Brethren for not accepting his strict views on excommunication.
Pelagius overreacted to moral corruption in the 5th century church. Born in Britain, he took his faith seriously, lived an ascetic life like many others around him, and became a monk. Then he went to Rome for further study, and was shocked by the lack of morality in the church there. His concerns were more pastoral than theological; he was worried about people being apathetic about their own sins. So he said everyone has the natural ability to not sin, without needing any supernatural enabling by God. Just look to Christ's example and choose not to sin. His theology made Christ into merely an Example and not truly a Savior.
Augustine had been a pagan, and not just any pagan but a rank sinner, prior to his conversion to Christ. His theology also came from his own experience. He didn't reform by his own self-will or a vow to do better. In his view, he had been completely in the power of sin until God's grace rescued him, and so he owed it all to God's mercy. He referenced Romans 7, "Who will free him from this death-laden body, if not your grace, given through Jesus Christ our Lord?" So like Calvin, he found no place for free will, overemphasized human inability, and taught double-predestination.
Fundamentalism overreacted to liberalism and tended to lack grace and humility, made too many debatable questions into essentials of the faith (or devolved into constantly arguing about what the essentials and non-essentials are), and tended to set up too many man-made rules and boundaries, especially in the conservative Mennonite case.
Related to that, J.S. Coffman began in the late 1800's to preach about his list of ordinances (which is where conservative Anabaptists today get our list of 7 ordinances). There was a desperate need for more Biblical teaching and awareness of why Anabaptists practiced what they did, and Coffman's teaching helped. But it tended to lead to the elevation of certain commands over all others and a sort of mystical ritualism as a result. Coffman himself commented later, “The Virginia church and conference has done much legislating to keep our people down out of the world in dress and other things, but in spite of all the keeping down they have done, their young men are now more conformed to the world than ours at Elkhart where we do not legislate much, but do some teaching on this point, and instead put our young people to work and have them contend for these principles…. They have tried too much to do by force of law what grace alone can do. What is it worth to keep people down in any sense if they submit only by constraint? We are in the dispensation of grace, and I shall never again help to legislate on outward forms as I did once in the Virginia conference when I did not know better. But I shall work harder in another way for the same principle.”
How about me or you? Some of us may have tendencies to react against standards in the church from our youth; some react against things we see in the broad evangelical movement, and so on. For example, if we overreact to Calvinist or evangelical theology, we may end up saying things about our own works and abilities that are contrary to what Menno Simons himself said here. Can we take care not to have a reactionary theology?
