Читать книгу The World's Christians - Douglas Jacobsen - Страница 63

The years 1650 to 1800 were a time of both consolidation and creativity for the Protestant movement. By 1650, most of the Protestant state churches of Northern Europe had settled into a form of faith called confessionalism, a theologically defined, church‐centered, usually regionally based form of Protestantism that stressed correct doctrine and the proper worship of God. Not much emphasis was placed on religious experience or on the need to rethink religious beliefs in the light of emerging knowledge, and confessional Protestants felt little or no compulsion to communicate their vision of Christian faith to people living outside the borders of their own nations. While this form of Protestantism was acceptable to many people, it was stifling to some.

In the seventeenth century, Pietism developed as an alternative to confessionalism. The Pietist movement began in Germany, under the leadership of the Lutheran minister Philip Jakob Spener, and quickly spread elsewhere. Pietism stressed the personal and experiential aspects of Protestantism, including dedication in prayer, careful study of the Bible, moral self‐discipline, and compassionate service to the needy. For the most part, pietistic Protestants were content to practice their emotion‐enhanced faith under the umbrella of the European state churches, though some pietistic groups built small chapels or meeting houses where they could gather during the week for study and prayer. The most prominent exception to this rule was Methodism, a pietistic movement within the Anglican Church that eventually broke away from the Church of England and became a new denomination. Almost all the various forms of Protestant Pietism emphasized the importance of sharing one’s faith with others, and in the late 1700s and early 1800s this concern led Pietists to launch the first foreign Protestant missions.

Along with confessionalism and pietism, rationalism emerged as another major Protestant sub‐movement during these years. This was the era of the Enlightenment, when intellectual elites were convinced that reason was the only guide for intelligent living, and Protestant rationalists sought to reform Protestantism by applying reason to both historical Protestant beliefs and to the Bible itself. While they continued to reference the Bible as an important source of insight, Protestant rationalists thought there was much to learn from other sources of knowledge, including the study of the natural world and logic. Seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century rationalists like John Locke and Thomas Jefferson favored a moralistic (as opposed to doctrinal) understanding of the life and teachings of Jesus, and the legacy of the movement lives on today in a broad variety of Protestant thinkers who emphasize reason and science in their theological reflection on Christian faith. While Protestant rationalists thought they were advocating a form of Christianity that was universal and that transcended differences of race, culture, and gender, most scholars today see Protestant rationalism as a quintessentially white, western, and male way of thinking.