Pietism Archives - Jack Kilcrease

Throwback Post

Although the Formula of Concord affirmed Luther’s concept of justification by the word, Lutherans of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century quickly returned to the problematic paradigm St. Augustine bequeathed to the West. In this, Lutheran theology tended to take the sacramentalist trajectory in the Augustinian Dilemma.¹ This is probably partially based on the early Lutheran desire to polemically to differentiate itself as a confessional tradition from Calvinism. It is also possible that there were lingering Melanchthonian undercurrents regarding how question of sin and grace was conceptualized. Nevertheless, the largest catalyst for the almost total abandon of the doctrine of election lay in the overreaction to the teaching of a Swiss Lutheran theologian named Samuel Huber.²

Samuel Huber and Theological Overcorrection

Samuel Huber began his career in the Reformed communion.³ Having been censored for some his views of divine grace, he left the Reformed confessional camp to become a Lutheran and taught at Wittenberg.⁴ Huber held that because the grace of God was universal as the Formula of Concord had taught, then it must logically follow that election was also universal.⁵ In teaching this, he was not affirming universalism as many of his contemporaries claimed, but merely conflated election with the gracious invitation of humanity to trust in the gospel.⁶

Aegidius Hunnius, Superintendent and Faculty of the University of Wittenberg

In response to Huber’s claim, Aegidius Hunnius⁷ and Leonhard Hütter⁸ asserted that election is merely God’s passive foreknowledge regarding who would come to faith and preserve it to the end of their lives (ex praevisa fide). Although humans cannot initiate their relationship with God,⁹ humans could lose their faith as Luther had himself affirmed.¹⁰

From the possibility of apostasy, later Lutheran theologians like Johann Gerhard drew the conclusion that preserving or wrecking faith was a matter of contingent human volition (albeit, supported by the power of the Holy Spirit), and hence not subject to the predestining will of God.¹¹ Because God clearly foreknew who would continue to cooperate with him after regeneration and who would fall away, predestination was little more than divine foreknowledge of human faith.¹²

This deviation from Luther and the teaching of the Formula of Concord came to be known as the teaching of intuitu fidei (“in view of faith”) and was eventually established the standard teaching of Lutheran Scholasticism with surprisingly little resistance.^[1] Lutherans generally held to the intuitu fidei teaching until the nineteenth century when the Neo-Lutheran movement rediscovered Luther’s doctrine of election. In the United States, this rediscovery sparked the “Election Controversy” of the 1870s and 1880s fought between a series of midwestern German and Norwegian immigrant denominations.^[2]

The teaching of intuitu fidei had many difficulties, not least among them was that it was conceptually incoherent. The premise of the Lutheran Scholastics remained that God actively created and sustained faith in Christians.^[3] What the teaching of intuitu fidei suggested was that God passive foreknew his own active work of communicating and sustaining the faith in the elect. To say that God passively foreknew his own active work is absurd and incoherent. Pastorally, the teaching proved to be a disaster because it held that believers could never genuinely possess assurance of their election, but only that God had at the present moment justified them if they were not actively resisting his grace. The late Lutheran Scholastic David Hollaz baldly claimed that believers could never have full assurance of their salvation until their deathbed.^[4] Thus, intuitu fidei placed the accent very heavily on the human subject’s initiative in continuing to worthily cooperate with the divine grace offered in the means grace. Indeed, it ultimately assumed that humans did indeed contribute something to their salvation.^[5] Inevitably, this teaching led to a return to the anxiety of whether one had appropriately cooperated with divine grace, albeit now following a line of reason anticipated by Melanchthon’s psychologization of faith.

In the last decades of the seventeenth century there emerged a tradition within Lutheranism called “Pietism.”^[6] Pietism is often seen as the antithesis of Scholastic Orthodoxy, with which it fought with for theological supremacy until well into the eighteenth century.^[7] Nevertheless, there is a continuity between the two theological traditions in that they both accorded a definitive role to the human subject in cooperating with divine grace. Therefore, it is arguably the case that Pietism inherited Scholastic Orthodoxy’s problematic theology of sin and grace, and simply drove the disastrous pastoral implications intuitu fidei heresy to its logical conclusion.

[1] Kolb, Bound Choice, Election, and the Wittenberg Theological Method, 266; Schmid, The Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, 272-92.

[2] Eugene Fevold, “Coming of Age: 1875-1900,” in The Lutherans in North America, ed. E. Clifford Nelson (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980), 313-25.

[3] Schmid, The Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, 458-80.

[4] Ibid.,292.

[5] Kolb, Bound Choice, Election, and the Wittenberg Theological Method, 266

[6] See: Douglas H. Shantz, An Introduction to German Pietism: Protestant Renewal at the Dawn of Modern Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Heinrich Schmid, The History of Pietism (Milwaukee: Northwestern Publishing House, 2007).

[7] F. Ernest Stoeffler, German Pietism During the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1973), 57-8. See Lutheran Orthodoxy’s classic critique of Pietism in: Valentin Ernst Loescher, The Complete Timotheus Verinus, trans. James Langebartels, and Robert Koester (Milwaukee: Northwestern Publishing House, 2006).

From the draft manuscript for Jack D. Kilcrease, Justification by Word (Lexham Press, forthcoming).