by Max Weber
184) In his description of Württemberg Pietism, Ritschl has already indicated (in volume 3 of the work which we have frequently quoted) what a powerful role purely political factors play in this—even in influencing the form taken by Pietist devotion.
185) Of course, Calvinism too, at least the genuine variety, is “patriarchal.” And the connection between the success of Baxter’s ministry and the domestic character of the industry in Kidderminster comes out clearly in his autobiography. See the passage quoted in the Works of the Puritan Divines, p. xxxviii: “The town liveth upon the weaving of Kidderminster stuffs, and as they stand in their loom, they can set a book before them, or edify each other. . . .” Nevertheless, the patriarchalism which is based on the Reformed, and especially the Baptist, ethic is of a different kind than that which is based upon Pietism. This problem will concern us in a different context.
186) Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, 3rd ed., vol. 1, p. 598.
Frederick William I’s description of Pietism in general as being an affair suitable for rentiers tells us more about this king than it does about the Pietism of Spener and Francke; the king had very good reasons for opening his states to the Pietists by his edict of toleration.
187) A helpful introductory survey of Methodism is provided by the excellent article on “Methodism” by Loofs in the Realenzyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche, 3rd ed. The works of Jacoby (especially the “Handbuch des Methodismus”), Kolde, and Jüngst are also useful. On Wesley: Tyerman, Life and Times of John W., London, 1870f. The book by Watson, Life of Wesley (also available in German translation), is popular. One of the best libraries of books on the history of Methodism is at Northwestern University in Evanston, near Chicago.
188) This affinity is historically determined—if we disregard the personal influence of the Wesleys—on the one hand, by the dying away of the dogma of predestination, and, on the other, by the powerful reawakening of the principle of “sola fide” among the founders of Methodism. This, however, was chiefly motivated by the missionary character of Methodism, which brought about a rebirth (with certain changes) of certain medieval methods used in the “revivalist” sermon, and combined them with Pietist forms. The phenomenon definitely does not fit into a general “subjectivist” line of development. In this regard, it comes after Pietism and even after the medieval piety of Saint Bernardine.
189) This is how Wesley himself occasionally characterized the effect of the Methodist faith. The affinity with Zinzendorf’s “blessedness” is clear.
190) See, for example, Watson’s Life of Wesley (German edition), p. 331.
191) J. Schneckenburger, Vorlesungen über die Lehrbegriffe der kleinen protestantischen Kirchenparteien, edited by Hundeshagen, Frankfurt, 1863, p. 147.
192) Whitefield, leader of the predestination group, which, through lack of organization, broke up after his death, largely rejected Wesley’s doctrine of “perfection.” In fact, this is merely a surrogate for the Calvinists’ idea of “proof.”
193) Schneckenburger, op. cit., p. 145. Slightly differently in Loofs, op. cit.
194) Thus the conference of 1770. The 1744 conference had already recognized that the words of the Bible were “a hair’s breadth” away from Calvinism, on the one hand, and antinomianism, on the other hand. In view of their obscurity, there was no reason to split for doctrinal reasons as long as the validity of the Bible remained as a practical norm.
195) The Methodists differed from the Herrnhut community over the doctrine of the possibility of sinless perfection, which Zinzendorf in particular rejected. For his part, Wesley perceived the emotional quality of Herrnhut devotion as “mysticism” and described Luther’s views on the “law” as “blasphemous.”
196) John Wesley occasionally stresses that whereas everyone else, for example, Quakers, Presbyterians, and High Churchmen, had to believe dogmas, the Methodists did not.
On the above subject, compare also the (admittedly summary) account in Skeats, History of the Free Churches of England 1688–1851.
197) Although of course it may detract from it, as it does in the case of today’s American Negroes.
Furthermore, the often markedly pathological character of Methodist emotion (in contrast to the relatively mild emotionalism of Pietism) may—alongside purely historical reasons and the public nature of the process—have more to do with the stronger ascetic permeation of life in those regions where Methodism is common. However, this is a matter where only neurologists are qualified to pronounce. (There are a number of perceptive hypotheses on the effect of “emotional repression,” etc., in the previously quoted work by W. Hellpach.)
198) Loofs (op. cit., p. 750) strongly emphasizes that Methodism differs from other ascetic movements by the fact that it came after the English Enlightenment era. He places it in parallel to the (admittedly very much weaker) renaissance of Pietism in Germany in the first third of this century.
Nevertheless, following Ritschl, Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung, vol. 1, pp. 568f., we must surely be permitted to draw a parallel with the Zinzendorf variety of Pietism, which—unlike that of Spener and Francke—is also a reaction against the Enlightenment. However, in Methodism, as we have seen, this reaction took a very different direction from that taken by the Herrnhut movement, at least to that part of it which was influenced by Zinzendorf.
199) Among the Baptists, only the “General Baptists” can be traced back to the original movement. The “Particular Baptists”—as previously mentioned—are Calvinists, who restrict church membership on principle to the regenerate, or at least to those who make a personal profession, and therefore are avowed voluntarists and opponents of all state churches, although in practice under Cromwell they were not always consistent. Our only interest in them is in a different connection. But neither do we need to concentrate on the General Baptists, important though they are as bearers of the Baptist tradition. We are concerned essentially with the Mennonites and—especially—the Quakers. Unquestionably, the latter, which in formal terms are a new foundation of George Fox and his companions, are in their fundamental ideas simply a continuation of the Baptist tradition. The best introduction to their history, which at the same time illuminates their relationship with Baptists and Mennonites, is found in Robert Barclay, The Inner Life of the Religious Societies of the Commonwealth, 1876. The best Baptist library seems to be the one at Colgate College in the state of New York.
200) It is one of the many merits of Karl Müller’s Kirchengeschichte to have given well-deserved prominence to the Baptist movement—outwardly modest but in its way magnificent. More than any other, it suffered under the merciless persecution of all the “churches”—simply because it wanted to be a sect in the strict sense of the word. After the catastrophe of the eschatological tendency in Münster which emerged from it, the movement was discredited for five generations (e.g., in England). Above all, constantly repressed and pushed into a corner, it was only long after its original foundation that it arrived at a coherent formulation of its religious beliefs. Thus it has produced even less “theology” than it might otherwise have done, even though the scope for this was limited, since its principles were, in themselves, hostile to the treatment of faith in God as an academic “science.” This was scarcely to the liking of the more old-established professional theologians (even those of its own time), who were less than impressed. But even several of the more recent theologians take the same view. Ritschl, for example, in Pietismus, vol. 1, pp. 22f., treats the “Anabaptists” with little impartiality, indeed with nothing short of contempt. One feels tempted to speak of a theologically “bourgeois” [bourgeois] standpoint. And this was despite the fact that Cornelius’s fine work (Geschichte des Münsterschen Aufruhrs) had been in existence for decades. Ritschl interprets all this as a collapse—as he sees it—into “Catholicism” and senses direct influence from the followers of the Spiritual and Franciscan movements. Even if such influences were provable here and there, they
would be very sparse. And, most important, the historical facts are, surely, that the official Catholic Church treated the innerworldly asceticism of laymen, wherever this led to the formation of conventicles, with extreme suspicion, and tried to direct it into the path of the formation of orders—in other words, to take it out of the “world.” Or it would link it with the mendicant orders and subordinate it to their discipline, thus deliberately categorizing it as second-class asceticism. Where it did not succeed in this it sensed the danger that the cultivation of subjectivist ascetic morality could lead to a denial of authority and to heresy. The Church of Elizabeth—with the same justification—took a similar view of the “prophesyings,” the semi-Pietist Bible conventicles, even where they did not infringe in any way against “conformism.” The Stuarts expressed the same thing with their Book of Sports—of which more later. The history of numerous heretical movements, but also, for example, of the humiliati and Beguines, as well as the fate of Saint Francis, provide further evidence.
The preaching of the mendicant monks, especially the Franciscans, no doubt helped in many ways to prepare the ground for the ascetic lay morality of Reformed and Baptist Protestantism. But the many points of similarity between the asceticism within Western monasticism and the ascetic manner of life within Protestantism—which we shall have to stress again and again, as they are so instructive in the context of our investigation—are ultimately due to the fact that of course all forms of asceticism based on biblical Christianity must inevitably have certain important features in common—also to the fact that every form of asceticism of whatever confession requires certain well-tried means of “mortifying” the flesh. Regarding the following account, it has to be said that its brevity is due to the fact that the Baptist ethic is of only limited importance for the problem to be discussed in this chapter, namely, the religious foundations of the “bourgeois” [bürgerlich] idea of the calling.
The social side of the movement has been deliberately left aside for now. At present we can only deal with those aspects of the history of the older Baptist movements that have subsequently influenced the character of the sects which are of most interest to us: Quakers and (less centrally) Mennonites.
201) See above, note 133.
202) On the origin of this term and changes it has undergone, see Ritschl’s Gesammelte Aufsätze, pp. 69f.
203) Of course, the Baptists have always refused to accept the term “sect.” They are the Church in the sense of the Epistle to the Ephe-sians (5.27). But in our terminology, they are a sect, and not only because they lack any relationship to the state. Admittedly, the relationship between church and state as it existed in the early Christian period was their ideal (for the Quakers too, see Barclay), since for them, as for many Pietists (Tersteegen), only the purity of the churches “under the cross” was free from suspicion. But under an unbelieving state, and certainly “under the cross,” even the Calvinists would be obliged, faute de mieux—as would the Catholic Church in the same circumstances—to favor the separation of church and state. Nor are they a “sect” because acceptance into membership of the Church occurred de facto through a contract between the community and the catachumens. Formally, that was the case, for example, in the Dutch Reformed churches (as a result of the original political situation) after the old Church Constitution (see von Hoffmann, Kirchenverfassungsrecht der niederländischen Reformierten, Leipzig, 1902). No, the reason is that, in accordance with its principles (which we shall examine shortly), the Church could only be organized on a voluntarist basis if it was not to include within it unregenerate people and thus deviate from the ancient Christian model. In the Baptist communities the concept of the “Church” expresses the situation that actually existed for Reformed Christians. We have already indicated that even among these people definite religious motives led toward the “Believers’ Church,” and we shall be looking at the consequences of this later.
204) The historical importance of this symbol for the preservation of the church communities—because it created an unambiguous and unmistakable characteristic—has been very clearly shown by Cornelius (op. cit).
205) We may disregard here certain similarities to it in the doctrine of justification of the Mennonites.
206) It is perhaps this idea that underlies the religious interest in the question of how one should understand the incarnation of Christ and his relationship to the Virgin Mary, which, being often the only purely dogmatic section, seems so out of place in the very oldest documents of the Baptists (e.g., in the “Confessions,” published in Cornelius, appendix to vol. 2, op. cit.). See also K. Müller, Kirchengeschichte, vol. 2, 1, p. 330). Similar religious interests also underlay the disagreement in Christology between the Reformed Church and the Lutherans (in the doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum).
207) It is expressed especially in the strict refusal (originally) to have dealings in civil [bürgerlich] life with those who had been excommunicated. This was a point which even the Calvinists conceded, despite their principle that civil affairs [bürgerlich] were immune from spiritual censure. More on this later.
208) It is well known how this principle was expressed in seemingly unimportant external matters among the Quakers (refusal to remove one’s hat, to kneel, to bow, and to use the plural form of address). But the basic idea is common in some degree to every form of asceticism, which, in its genuine form, is therefore “antiauthoritarian.” In Calvinism it was expressed in the principle that only Christ should rule in the Church. As far as Pietism is concerned, we only need to think of the trouble that Spener had in justifying titles by reference to the Bible.
As far as the ecclesiastical authorities [Obrigkeit] were concerned, Catholic asceticism suppressed this tendency through the oath of obedience, in which obedience itself was interpreted as a feature of asceticism. By turning this principle of obedience on its head, Protestant asceticism laid the historical foundation for the special character of the contemporary democracy of the nations influenced by Puritanism, as distinct from that which is based on the “Latin spirit.” It is the basis, historically speaking, for the “disrespectfulness” of Americans, which some find repugnant and others refreshing.
209) Admittedly, for the Baptists this applied, from the start, principally to the New Testament, and not as much to the Old Testament. In particular, the Sermon on the Mount enjoys a special esteem as a social and ethical program.
210) Schwenckfeld had already taken the view that the external administration of the sacraments was an adiophoron, while the “General Baptists” and the Mennonites held firmly to baptism and communion, and the Mennonites added the washing of feet.
211) For this, the Baptist denominations, especially the Quakers (Barclay, Apology for the True Christian Divinity, 4th ed., London, 1701—kindly placed at my disposal by Eduard Bernstein), appeal to the words of Calvin in the Institutio Christiana, vol. 3, p. 2, where indeed there are quite unmistakable similarities to the Baptist doctrine. Also, the older distinction between the revered “Word of God”—as the revelation of God to the patriarchs, prophets, and apostles—and “Holy Scripture” as that portion of it which they recorded, came close to the Baptist view of the nature of revelation (although there was no historical connection). The mechanical doctrine of inspiration and thus the strict bibliocracy among Calvinists is likewise only the product of a development in one particular direction, which occurred during the sixteenth century, while the Quaker doctrine of the “inner light,” which rested on a Baptist foundation, is the result of an opposing development. The sharp distinction between the two was no doubt also the result of constant debate.
212) This is emphatically contrasted with the Socinians. “Natural” reason knows nothing of God (Barclay, op. cit., p. 102). In this way, the “lex naturae” has again undergone a modification from its normal position in Protestantism. There can, on principle, be no “general rules,”12 no moral code, for God shows everyone their individual “calling” by means of the conscience. We are not
to do “good”—in the generalizing sense of “natural” reason—but God’s will, which is written in our hearts in the new covenant and is expressed in the conscience (Barclay, pp. 73, 76). This irrationality in morality, which follows from the heightened antagonism between the divine and the creaturely, is expressed in words which are fundamental to Quaker ethics: “What a man does contrary to his faith, though his faith may be wrong, is in no way acceptable to God . . . though the thing might have been lawful to another” (Barclay, p. 487). In practice, of course, this irrationality could not be sustained. The “moral and perpetual statutes acknowledged by all Christians,” for example, represent for Barclay the limits of what may be tolerated. In practice these contemporaries felt their ethics to be—apart from some features peculiar to themselves—comparable with those of Reformed Pietists. Spener constantly reiterates that “everything good in the Church is suspected of being of Quaker origin,” and appears to envy the Quakers for this reputation (Consilia Theologica, vol. 3, 6, 1, dist. 2, no. 64.) Refusal to swear an oath, when that refusal was based on a biblical text, is enough to show that their degree of emancipation from the Scriptures was strictly limited. At a later stage we propose to deal with the social and ethical significance of the maxim, viewed by many Quakers as the essence of the entire Christian ethic: “Do unto others as you would that they do unto you.”
213) Barclay justifies the necessity of assuming this possibility, because without it “there should never be a place known by the Saints wherein they might be free of doubting and despair, which . . . is most absurd.” Of course, the “certitudo salutis” depends upon it. See Barclay, op. cit., p. 20.
