Pietism & Bach

By the middle of the seventeenth century, the Reformation was 150 years old and German Lutheranism was in trouble. The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) had devastated Germany; perhaps a third of the population died from combat, famine, and disease. The Lutheran Church emerged formally victorious in 1648 at the Peace of Westphalia, but spiritually exhausted. Its theology had become what later historians called “Lutheran Scholasticism” or “Protestant Orthodoxy” — enormously sophisticated, enormously long, and enormously cold. Preaching in the state churches had become detailed doctrinal exposition aimed at distinguishing Lutheran from Calvinist, Calvinist from Roman, Roman from Anabaptist, with almost no address to the living heart of the congregation. Church attendance was compulsory, communion automatic, sin barely confessed.

Out of this dry soil, beginning around 1670, a movement grew that is now called Pietism. Its name was originally a term of contempt — “those Pietists,” “those pious ones” — applied by its Orthodox Lutheran opponents; the Pietists adopted the insult as a badge. Pietism did not mean adding new doctrines. It meant recovering what the magisterial Reformation had always taught about the necessity of personal conversion, the regenerate heart, practical holiness, daily engagement with Scripture, and cell-group fellowship with other Christians — and making those recoveries visible in the weekly life of the parish and the home.

Within two generations, Pietism had launched the first sustained Protestant foreign mission (the Danish-Halle mission to Tranquebar, India, 1706); had produced the first major institutional Protestant social ministries (orphanages, schools, hospitals, Bible societies); had sent Count Zinzendorf’s Moravian Brethren out as a global missionary community (see Lesson 26); had shaped the Wesleys and the Great Awakening (Lesson 20); and — through the deep Pietist piety of the Bach and Buxtehude family cantorates — had produced the most profound flowering of Christian music in history. This lesson traces that story.

To understand Pietism, one has to understand what it was reacting against. The long generation after Luther and Melanchthon produced a Lutheranism that turned inward to define itself precisely.

Spener’s six proposals in the Pia Desideria:

The book hit German Lutheranism like a bomb. It went through multiple printings, provoked endorsements and counter-attacks, and within twenty years had set off an intellectual civil war within Lutheranism that would last more than a century. Spener himself was never a rebel — he remained loyal to the Lutheran confessions, continued to hold high Lutheran offices (Dresden court chaplain, Berlin provost), and insisted that Pietism was a renewal within orthodoxy. Orthodox Lutheran opponents like Valentin Löscher (the Wittenberg dogmatic theologian) fiercely disagreed.

The Danish-Halle Mission (1706). In 1705, King Frederick IV of Denmark, under the influence of his Pietist court chaplain, decided that the Danish trading colony of Tranquebar on the southeast coast of India needed Christian missionaries to the Tamil people. He asked Francke at Halle for candidates. Francke sent Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg (1682–1719) and Heinrich Plütschau (1677–1752). They landed at Tranquebar on 9 July 1706 — the opening of the modern Protestant foreign mission movement, 87 years before William Carey went to India, 116 years before Adoniram Judson left for Burma.

Ziegenbalg learned Tamil in his first year on the field, translated the New Testament into Tamil by 1714 (the first Protestant translation of any biblical book into an Indian language), established a Tamil printing press in Tranquebar by 1712 (casting the type himself from German models), founded schools for Tamil boys and girls, and wrote a vast ethnographic study of Hindu religion that stood alone for two centuries. He died at 36, worn out by climate and labor. His successors continued the Tranquebar mission until 1845, when the London Missionary Society took it over — nearly 140 years of continuous Protestant presence.

Nikolaus Ludwig, Count von Zinzendorf (1700–1760), grew up in Francke’s Halle Orphanage as a nobleman-boarder in the Pädagogium. The Pietist piety he absorbed there would shape the rest of his life. The story of his adult conversion, his adoption of the exiled Hussite Unity of the Brethren onto his Saxon estate at Herrnhut in 1722, the extraordinary Pentecost at Herrnhut on 13 August 1727, and the explosive Moravian missionary movement that followed — reaching the West Indies (1732), Greenland (1733), Georgia (1735), South Africa (1737), and beyond — is told in detail in Lesson 26.

For the present lesson, note the direct pipeline. Spener taught Francke. Francke taught Zinzendorf. Zinzendorf’s Moravians, on the storm-tossed ship Simmonds in January 1736, taught a terrified young Oxford priest named John Wesley what it meant to face death with peace in the Lord. Two years later, 24 May 1738, that priest’s heart was “strangely warmed” in a Moravian meeting on Aldersgate Street in London. The Evangelical Revival in England and the Great Awakening in America — covered in Lesson 20 — are unthinkable without that pipeline from Spener’s Frankfurt living room.

The sacred music of Bach. In his Leipzig years alone Bach composed at least five complete cycles of cantatas — roughly 300 cantatas, of which about 200 survive. Each cantata was a twenty-minute musical meditation on the Gospel and Epistle readings for that Sunday. He composed two great Passion oratorios (the St. John Passion, 1724, and the St. Matthew Passion, 1727), the enormous Christmas Oratorio (1734, actually six cantatas for the twelve days of Christmas), the Magnificat in D major (1723/1733), and, at the end of his life, the towering Mass in B Minor (completed 1749, after forty years of revision).

Alongside these large-scale works, his instrumental music — the Well-Tempered Clavier (two books of 24 preludes and fugues each, in every major and minor key), the Goldberg Variations, the Art of Fugue, the Brandenburg Concertos, the solo sonatas for violin and cello — is among the most profound instrumental music ever written. The theologian Karl Barth famously said that he imagined the angels in heaven playing Bach for God when they were on official duty, and Mozart when they wanted to relax.

Bach’s theology. Bach was a confessionally orthodox Lutheran — he was required to sign the Book of Concord on taking the Thomaskantor post, which he did without hesitation — but he lived in the Pietist generation and absorbed deep Pietist piety. His personal Bible, a three-volume annotated Luther Bible known as the Calov Bible (edited by Abraham Calovius), survives today at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. Bach underlined passages, wrote marginal notes, and dated his annotations. At 1 Chronicles 25 — David organizing musicians for Temple worship — Bach wrote, “N.B. This chapter is the true foundation of all church-pleasing music.” At 2 Chronicles 5:13–14 — the glory cloud filling Solomon’s Temple when the musicians played — he wrote, “Where there is devotional music, God with his grace is always present.”

Bach’s manuscripts. Every one of Bach’s sacred scores carries three inscriptions, in his own hand. At the top of the page, before he wrote a single note: J. J. (Jesu Juva — “Jesus help”). In the body of especially significant cantatas: I. N. J. (In Nomine Jesu — “in the name of Jesus”). And at the bottom of the last page, when the composition was complete: S. D. G. (Soli Deo Gloria — “to God alone be glory”). He did this for the church cantatas, where it might be expected. But he also did it for the secular works — the keyboard music, the Brandenburgs, the solo violin sonatas. To Bach, all music was God’s. Every piece he completed he handed back to the God who had enabled him to write it.

The St. Matthew Passion (1727). For many Christians Bach’s greatest work is the St. Matthew Passion, premiered at St. Thomas on Good Friday, 11 April 1727. It lasts nearly three hours, is scored for double chorus, double orchestra, and soloists, and sets the text of Matthew 26–27 verbatim, interwoven with poetic meditations and Lutheran chorales. The central chorale, O Sacred Head Now Wounded (a hymn that derives from Bernard of Clairvaux — see Lesson 30) appears five times in the Passion, each in a different harmonization, each pulling the listener closer to the cross. The Passion was performed occasionally in Leipzig during Bach’s lifetime and then forgotten for almost a century until Felix Mendelssohn, at twenty, conducted the celebrated 1829 revival in Berlin that began the modern Bach renaissance.

His death. Bach’s eyesight failed in his last years, and a botched surgery by a traveling English eye doctor (John Taylor, who also damaged Handel’s eyes) left him blind and in poor health. On 28 July 1750, fifteen days after receiving the sacrament from his Pietist-sympathetic pastor, Bach died. His last work, the Art of Fugue, was left unfinished; the final fugue breaks off in the middle of a measure on the subject B-A-C-H (in German musical notation, the notes B-flat, A, C, B-natural — his own name). His son C. P. E. Bach added a note on the autograph manuscript: “Over this fugue, where the name BACH appears in the countersubject, the composer died.”

Pietism reshaped Protestant Christianity in ways that are often invisible because they have become universal. A partial inventory of what came from this movement:

Pietism is not without its critics, and a fair assessment notes the dangers.

A mature Protestant assessment of Pietism neither romanticizes it nor dismisses it. The movement recovered pastoral urgencies the orthodoxy of the generation after Luther had largely forgotten, birthed missions and institutions that blessed the world, and produced (in Bach) a body of art that is a distinctly evangelical glory. It also carried within it tendencies that later eras would mishandle. The task for us is to accept its gifts and to be warned by its failures.

• Philipp Jakob Spener, Pia Desideria, trans. Theodore G. Tappert, Fortress Press, 1964 — the founding document, barely 100 pages, essential
• August Hermann Francke, The Footsteps of Divine Providence (1701), reprint Moody Press
• F. Ernest Stoeffler, The Rise of Evangelical Pietism, Brill, 1965 — and his companion German Pietism During the Eighteenth Century, 1973
• Dale W. Brown, Understanding Pietism, revised ed., Evangel Publishing House, 1996
• Douglas H. Shantz, An Introduction to German Pietism, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013 — current scholarship
• Christopher Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician, W. W. Norton, 2000 — the standard modern biography
• Robin A. Leaver, J. S. Bach and Scripture: Glosses from the Calov Bible Commentary, Concordia, 1985 — Bach’s own Bible annotations
• John Eliot Gardiner, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven, Knopf, 2013 — a performer’s theological reading
• Erik Routley, The Music of Christian Hymns, GIA Publications, 1981 — on the Pietist hymn tradition and its English reception
• Listen: Bach’s St. Matthew Passion (the Herreweghe, Suzuki, or Gardiner recordings), the Christmas Oratorio, and Cantata 140 (Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme)

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