We're at lecture 23 now, a war from the fire of God in the heart of Germany, pietism, and Bach. Late 17th century, and the 18th century, as we saw last time, was the rise of the Enlightenment, and its rebellious offspring, romanticism. But it was during the same time when we have the Enlightenment and Romanicism flourishing that we have in the church revival. Fortunately, the churches began to wake up to the task that was before them in confronting their culture in the name of Christ, and revival came first to Germany. The early or rather late 1600s in Germany, the movement that we called pietism began, and we're going to look at that today. And then from Germany spread in the early 1700s to England, in what is known in history as the evangelical revival, and then part of that movement moved to the American colonies and what we call the Great Awakening. We'll look at the evangelical revival and the Great Awakening later. And it was during this same period that Protestant church music reached its greatest expression, I think, in the wonderful music of Handel, and especially Bach. Both of those German composers were born within a few months of the great work by Isaac Newton on his discovery of the theory of gravity, and other scientific theories that he founded in Principia, which was published in 1686 and 1687. As we come today to look at pietism and Bach, I'd like to begin with a prayer from one of the great Moravian leaders and we'll end the class with a prayer from Johann Sebastian Bach. Count Zendorf was the leader of the second phase of the pietist movement, the movement that focused on the people called Moravians. Zendorf was a wealthy young lawyer count in Germany, sometimes called the rich young man who said yes, because he did give his life to the service of the Lord. There's a story about Zendorf that at one point he was viewing a very famous painting by the artist, Gomenico Fetti, the painting called EK Homo, the whole of the man, picturing the scourging of Jesus and the suffering of Jesus that is trial before his crucifixion. With the inscription, the bottom of that painting, with these words, I have done this for you, what have you done for me? And Zendorf wrote, I have loved him for a long time, but I have never actually done anything for him. From now on I will do whatever he leads me to do, certainly his life from that point on was dedicated to the service of his Lord. He wrote a number of hymns, and I'd like to use two verses of one of those as our opening prayer for this lecture, words from Count Zendorf, let us pray. Jesus lead thou on till our rest is won, and although the way be cheerless, we will follow calm and fearless guide us by thy hand to our Fatherland. Jesus lead thou on till our rest is won, heavenly leader still direct us, still support, control, protect us till we safely stand in our Fatherland, amen. Become today to the problem of dead orthodoxy, I wish we did not have to come to that problem, but we do, and I need to talk a little bit about it. At the very time when orthodoxy, with its rich heritage from the reformers and their successors, should have been alive and vital in preaching the gospel and living the gospel in the Western world, which was beginning to be tempted to turn away from that gospel at that very time, when it should have been powerful to counter the new trends unleashed by the Enlightenment, their develop. In the end, the Christian Church is what we commonly call a dead orthodoxy. Confusion of confessional adherence with the life of faith, believing in the doctrine of justification by faith is not the same thing as being justified by faith. And in the confessional churches in Europe, there was a satisfaction with being orthodox in doctrine, being Lutheran or being reform, and not seeking to apply those great doctrines to the issues of human life. The other way to put it would be to say that there was a separation between doctrine and life, or between head and heart. These things held together by the reformers and others that followed them now began to be separated. It was true of the reformed churches, especially on the continent, churches in Holland and in Switzerland, France and other places, but this trend was perhaps we could say even more true of the Lutheran churches, where doctrinal element was decisive and church discipline hardly existed. A Swedish Lutheran bishop put it this way, he said that nothing in Christianity is more slack than slack Lutheranism. I didn't say that Lutheran said that, and he should know what he's talking about, but it was among the German Lutherans that revival first came. Not only did the deadness develop in the Lutheran churches, but the new life, the revival that would bless the continent and the British Isles and North America. First came a warrant from the fire of God in the heart of Germany, in the words of Cotton Mather, very far from Germany in New England, but he felt the warrant that issued from the revival in Germany. And that revival is the movement of the pious. There are two parts of that movement, one focused around the mantle of Jacob Spainer and the second around Nicholas Ludwig Count von Zinsendorf. Spainer was a Lutheran pastor, like all Lutheran pastors very much influenced by Luther, which is good. But Spainer began to detect something in Luther that he felt contemporary Lutherans were forgetting. He said if Luther should rise again today, he could not recognize as his disciples many of his spiritual descendants. And what Spainer saw in reading Luther was that Luther emphasized both head and heart, both doctrine and piety. And Spainer felt that too many Lutherans in his time were just satisfied to be Orthodox and did not live for the Lord and love the Lord with all their hearts. This German Lutheran pastor was also influenced by the Dutch second Reformation that we have talked about earlier and its parallel movement of English puritanism. Spainer became a pastor in Frankfurt and serving in his Lutheran state church there, he did something very unusual, doesn't sound unusual to us because it's part of. Normal church life today, but when Spainer did it, it was unusual. He began to meet with members of his church in small groups or prayer in Bible study. Collegiate Piaittatus, he called them colleges or groups of piety or spirituality. I suppose this is the beginning of the small group movement, which has been used in various ways from this point on down to the present. And Spainer also to promote the spirituality, which he hoped to create within his church by small groups of prayer and Bible study to promote that. He wrote a book actually a long preface to a reprinting of another book by Johann Art called True Christianity. Art was a Lutheran pastor, studied with Malanthan and stressed the importance of the work of God and the work of Christ within the heart of man, not just orthodox head, but a renewed and spiritual heart. He didn't see why Spainer would be attracted to art's writing and he wrote his own long preface called Pia Desideria, or heartfelt desires for a God-pleasing improvement of the true Protestant church. In that book that Spainer wrote, there is a bold attempt that the church be reformed. Spainer mingles Frank criticism of the Lutheran church with a program for renewal and revival that I'll try to summarize in just a few minutes. After his time as pastor in Frankfurt, he became connected with a new University of Hala, actually Spainer had to make several moves because doing what he had done caused some Lutherans to think that he was not orthodox. It was something different about this minister and they were not altogether comfortable with him and so controversy surrounded him and he moved a number of times, finally going to Berlin in 1692 at the invitation of the Elector of Brandenburg and then to the new University of Hala, which had been just founded, which now became a center, the center, for the Piatist movement. Spainer went to Hala and Hala becomes synonymous with Piatism in Germany and its influence were a white. At Hala, Spain had a very unique colleague, a man named August Hermann Franke. Franke was 27 years younger than Spainer but these two men worked together to further the Piatist movement. Franke was invited by Spainer to Hala to serve as professor of Greek and Hebrew. He taught those two languages at Hala but soon a whole series of institutions began to spring up at Hala. Orphanage, printing press, house for widows and numerous charitable institutions began to be developed at Hala as someone has supported by Franke's faith and not much else. This was not ministry that the state church was supporting but it was something that Franke believed that God would have him do. And Franke wrote a book about his believing God to create these various institutions. The book is called Piatist Linsus, Piety of Hala, or, and this is the significant subtitle, a public demonstration of the footsteps of a divine being yet in the world. Franke was attempting to say by believing that God will do great things in the world and praying to him to do these things then we can see that God yet exists in the world. Public demonstration of the footsteps of a divine being yet in the world. That book had great influence in church history. It influenced George Mueller and Charmin who went to Bristol and England and founded the famous orphanage in Bristol. It influenced Hudson Taylor who began the China Inland mission to reach Chinese in the inland of that great country or Christ. It influenced Amy Carmichael who went to India and started the Donovan Fellowship. And it influenced Francis and Eve Schaefer who went to Switzerland to fall in La Brie, believing that God would provide for their needs and praying to him for support of these ministries. Well, that's the first phase of the Piatist movement, the Spainer Franke Hala movement. There's a second phase I want to talk about now, the Moravian movement connected with Count Sinzendorf. Spainer died in 1705. Sinzendorf was a little boy only five years old then. But he later became a student at Hala and a lawyer and a Lutheran minister combined a number of careers. But a man of determined devotion to the Lord, I have one passion. He wrote it is he. Sinzendorf found his life's work providentially when 300 Christians, refugees called Moravians, came to his estate. He had heard you in 1722. These Moravians traced their spiritual ancestry back to John Huss, the Protestant martyr, the 15th century. And they had been persecuted and exiled from place to place, wandering about seeking a refuge when they found Sinzendorf's huge estate. The fact that 300 people can move in with him shows that it must have been a pretty big place and he took them all in. Nothing much happened for a few years. The Moravian group was disorganized and somewhat imbitered by what had happened to it and certain tensions developed in the fellowship there. And Sinzendorf, I think, was discouraged with the whole process of trying to absorb and help these Christian people. But something happened in the summer of 1727 that the Moravians liked to speak about as the golden summer. Revival came to this group, had heard you. And they were united and glassed by God and used mightily in so many ways that I will try to describe in a moment in the work of the Lord. Eventually, these Christians became a separate church called the Moravian Church or the United Brethren. Let me talk now about the distinctives and the contributions of the Piotists and the Moravians. We usually refer to the two movements as separate but I see it as one movement of piotism with the early and later development. And there are distinctives are very similar. First, spiritual awakening, revival, renewal in the church is a concern of the Piotists and the Moravians. And they attempted to do this in two simple ways, first Bible study. You might think this would have been so obvious that people would have been doing this all along. But by the time we come to the Piotists, people who study the Bible are the ministers and the church leaders and people in the church don't study the Bible much. They just listen to the long, doctrinal sermons that they are being given week by week. But under the influence of Spainer, personal Bible study, small group Bible study, these things become important in the life of the church and in the life of the individual Christian. I think as a result of that, we can see something that we call biblical theology developing. Whenever you have an emphasis on biblical theology is over again systematic theology. There's a piotist at work somewhere there to underscore and emphasize the need to study the Bible consecutively as it was written. One of the great Lutheran pastors and piotists who did so much to further the study of biblical theology was Johannes Albrecht Vingel. His nomenovie testimony was a commentary on the New Testament, penetrating in pithy exegesis of the New Testament which was used and admired by John Wesley. Not only an emphasis on Bible study, but an emphasis on prayer. The prayer meeting now becomes an important part of church life, at least in piotist circles. Not just the formal Sunday service, but prayer meetings frequently through the week. In fact, in the golden summer of 1727, a prayer meeting started, which is very famous in church history. It was a prayer meeting that lasted 100 years. Now, it was not that the whole community was praying for 100 years, but around the clock, 24 hours a day, one man and one woman from the Moravian community at Parenthood. Committed themselves to pray, so any time of the day or night at that Moravian center, there were two people praying. And that went on for 100 years. So, it's no wonder that prayer is a very important part of the Moravian revival, and it's no wonder that the Moravians were able to do some great things as God blessed them and answered their prayers. One of the important things that the Moravians did was to focus on issues of social concern. Certainly Christians had been concerned about the poor and the needy for this, but so often these people hurt in society and in great need were forgotten. But the Moravians lived in such a way that they would be able to reach out to those in the Moravians adopted a very simple lifestyle, dress simply and live simply, lived in communities in order that they could share what they produced with the needy, the poor and the prisoners and the sick. And then it's through the effort, faith of the pious and the Moravians, that the Protestant church began to become involved in the worldwide mission of the church. We'll look at the history of missions a little bit later and put this all in context. The Catholics were already quite active for some time, but it took a while for the Protestants to begin to see their responsibility in missions. And as we come to that lecture, we'll try to discover why it took so long for this to happen, but the pioneer movement in Protestant missions is the movement of the Piotists and the Moravians. The first Protestant missionaries to go out were the Hala missionaries, missionaries, Piotists, missionaries from Hala who went out to India in 1700 and six. It's almost 100 years before William Kerry, who is usually referred to as the father of modern missions. And then the second phase of the missionary work of the Piotists came with the Moravians. The story of the mission to St. Thomas in 1732, the mission of Dober and Nietzschemann, missionaries who went to St. Thomas to preach to the slaves in that Danish possession. As it was in those days, that story is told in a film called First Fruits, which is a very effective picture of the early efforts of the Moravian missionaries. These men knew that if they went to St. Thomas to preach to the slaves, it could be that they would have to sell themselves into slavery in order to have access to the slaves. And yet they went anyway and began the work of the preaching of the gospel in the West Indies. I lived in Jamaica, I often preached in large Moravian churches, the South Coast and up in the Highlands of the island of Jamaica, a mission to that island not long after the mission to St. Thomas in 1732. The man named Christian David went to Greenland in 1733. His mission to Greenland is celebrated in William Cooper's poem Hope, which has the line C. Germany, sin forth her sons to for salvation on the farthest north. And Spagenberg was sent to Georgia in 1735 as a missionary to the American Indians. There's a famous painting in Moravian history which is often referred to, it's called The Sampling of the Nations.
It was painted just 15 years after the two missionaries went to St. Thomas and it shows Christ seated on the throne in heaven surrounded by people from many lands and many countries. And these are actual people with actual names, some of the first converts of the Moravian mission in their great work of the Sampling of the Nations. Moravian missionary strategy was to go out and preach the gospel and sample the nations to win to Christ some from every tribe and tongue and kindred. And they did that and we certainly honor the Moravian Church for being pioneer in the effort of world evangelization. Now before I end this lecture, I want to talk about another man from Germany, Johann Sebastian Bach. He was born two centuries after Luther and reared in the shadow of the Borkberg at Isonach. He was born in 1685, just 15 years before Count Zinsendorf and so his life overlaps to some extent the life of the great Moravian leader. Bach was a German Lutheran. He was not one of the Moravians and although he greatly appreciated the writings of the piety, he remained in the state church as a loyal Lutheran. He served for a time as a court musician but he believed that God was calling him to devote his life to church music and we know him as the fifth evangelist. That means Matthew, Mark, Luke and Bach. John, the fifth evangelist because he wrote some 300 contadas musical sermons with the texts usually taken from the scripture lessons for the day. The minister would prepare the sermon on that text and Bach would write the music. So much of the great musical heritage that comes from Bach comes from his wheat by wheat production of these contadas. Bach was a Bible student and a confident theologian. We know that his library contained many volumes of Luther and also many of the writings of Spaner and the pietyst. His Bible is at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis at least one of his Bibles. Concordia says that the Bible is there, although Dr. Hans Beyer told me that he saw another Bach Bible in Germany last summer. Bach may well have had two Bibles. I expect he had a number of Bibles but one of those Bibles ended up in St. Louis at Concordia and is one of the treasures owned by the seminary. It's interesting to have a look at that Bible that Bach owned. It is a version copy of Dr. Martin Luther's great translation and has notes in it from Abraham Collab, one of the Lutheran Orthodox scholars that I spoke about in an earlier lecture. Bach has annotated the Bible at various places in the margin, especially in the book of Chronicles where there is a great deal of information about music. Bach has written his comments in the margin, drawing from Chronicles and from other places in the Bible what he believes is church music that is God pleasing. Bach was certainly a Christian who lived with his Bible and his music flowed out of his theological orthodoxy and biblical knowledge and out of his own personal piety. Often on his manuscripts, his musical manuscripts he would place the letters SDG solely Dale Gloria to the glory of God alone or sometimes you'll find the letters J, J, J, Jesu, Juba, Jesus helped me as he worked on these great musicals. Contributions to the history of the church. Bach died on July 28, 1750. His unfinished corral to before I thrown my God I stand which was being dictated because of his failing eyesight reveals that Bach was genuine to the last bar. Closing verse was on his lips grant that my end may worthy be in that I wake I face to see. Bach often sign his name with his initials Johann Sebastian Bach, drawn in a way that it looks like a musical note. And certainly we honor this man as one who has made a significant contribution to the history of the church. I was listening to Richard John Newhouse lecturing recently he was explaining that when he left the Lutheran church to become a Roman Catholic one of his dismayed Lutheran friends said to him, but what about Bach? It didn't even say Luther at that moment, but how can you possibly leave Bach which shows something of the importance of Bach not only for Lutherans but for all Christians. And so in the history of the church even though we've come to a period of dead orthodoxy there is life, life in this new movement of piotism and its successor movement parallel movement in Arabianism and also in people like Bach and others in the state churches of Europe. And even though in many ways dead orthodoxy was settling over those churches there are individuals who love and serve the Lord. I'd like for us to end this lecture with words from Johann Sebastian Bach in the form of a prayer. So I will pray these words now as we conclude. Let us pray. Come Holy Ghost, God and Lord, be all thy graces now outpourred on each believer's mind and heart, thy fervent love to them in part. Lord, by the brightness of thy light, thou in the faith that men unite of every land and every town, this to thy praise. O Lord, our God, be sung, alleluia, alleluia, amen. A few minutes, questions, comments, disser. Question is, what happens to the Arabians after the 300s subtle had perneed with Count Bonson's in the north? There were other Arabians elsewhere already but it was the group that perneed that organized and invigorated the whole movement. So Arabians were scattered throughout Germany and they tended to move around and take with them their message. They went to England and there's a very important movement of Arabians that influences John Wesley. In fact, we'll see that Wesley is probably converted through the ministry of the Arabians. And their numbers really never grew to be huge but their influence was very, very significant. The Arabian Church has lasted all the way down to the present to import Arabian sinners in this country or Bethlehem in Pennsylvania and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, both of which were settled by Arabians. But unfortunately the evangelical theology and the missionary vision and some of the great things that I've been talking about that mark the early Arabian movement is those things are not really characteristic of the modern church. The question is what is Moravian doctrine? It was Lutheran but it began to take on these distinctive infacies and at the beginning I would say Moravian doctrine was orthodox evangelical Protestant teaching. The Moravians did in time develop some unfortunate attitudes I think in terms of theology. I'll just mention two. One was to emphasize a kind of rigidity in Christian living which at first was very good. There were people that needed to rise up in German culture and say Christians ought to live like Christians thinking of Dr. Chappell's message just a few minutes ago. I certainly think the early emphasis on the Moravians was a corrective but as Francis Schaper said in the quotation that Dr. Chappell used sometimes these things can become ends in themselves and there was a kind of list mentality that developed in the Moravians that was not altogether healthy. At first a real corrective very much needed in German orthodoxy then later a kind of ended itself and a kind of deadness again set in. By the time we come to the great awakening in America Whitfield for instance is he wants to light the Moravians he wants to feel that he's on the same side with them and they're on the same side with him but he's suspicious that in terms of theology they're beginning to lose interest. So one of the difficult things in church history is to keep a balance. The Moravians corrected a false balance by bringing the heart back in to go along with the head and then sooner or later lost the head and had only the heart left. So what began as a great movement to balance orthodoxy ended up as an extreme on the other side. Yes. The church polity of the Moravians is very much like the Lutheran church not congregational precisely but some elements of congregationalism. The church polity was not all that significant for the Moravians I think although the organization of their communities was very significant. Moravian movement was almost like a Protestant order like the Roman Catholic order where people joined and moved together and lived together and ate together and fellowshiped together and worked together. There were not vows like the Roman Catholic orders required but a kind of communal life existed among the Moravians. Yes. The question is handled in Bach for in the same time was handled equally concerned about church music. Well, the very fact that I just mentioned handled and then gave a few minutes of a lecture on Bach shows my impression that Bach was the man whose life was really devoted to God as a church musician. I don't want to judge handled because I don't know as much about him but my impression is that he operated somewhat on another level and that when you look for an example of a person who uses great music for the edification of the church, certainly the Messiah was wonderful and has done that. Bach was producing this work constantly relatively unknown in his time. I have always been amazed to read the biography of Charles Hodge by his son A. A. Hodge who tells about Charles Hodge is going to Germany in the early part of the 19th century. And his letters back home, one of which said, I've just heard music from an old composer that seems interesting and nobody much knows who he is or talks about him much but maybe someday you'll be better known and his name was Bach. Hodge was just hearing that music in Germany so even in Germany it wasn't well known as it is today. We'll start now.