Historical marker in modern-day Rincon, GA that honors the two Lutheran pastors of the “Salzburgers” – Historical Marker Databaseįirst, Geordan Hammond points out that the young Wesley, during his troubled tenure as a missionary in colonial Georgia, encountered not only the Herrnut Pietism of Moravian missionaries, but also the Halle Pietism of Johann Martin Boltzius and Israel Christian Gronau, two Lutheran pastors sent to shepherd a group of Protestant emigrés from Catholic Austria known as the “Salzburgers.” Drawing on reports from Boltzius and Gronau only recently translated from German, Hammond summarizes discussions between Wesley and the Salzburgers’ pastors on everything from sacraments to ecclesiology to hymnody. The first two entries in this section of the book demonstrate the clear influence of various strands of German Pietism on Wesley, but also the limitations of that influence.
(Quotations from the second chapter described below.) Outler (chief editor of the widely cited - in this volume among others - The Works of John Wesley), took pains to distance Wesley from Pietism, claiming in 1964 that his subject “was never the typical pietist” and then twenty years later leaving Pietism out of a list of “diverse influences that converged in” him. Yet perhaps the most significant Methodist historian of the 20th century, Albert C. He is included in Carter Lindberg’s popular collection, The Pietist Theologians, and tertiary sources will often describe Pietism as being at least a significant influence on Wesley.
Part four of our romp through The Pietist Impulse in Christianity raises another deceptively simple question, “Was John Wesley a Pietist?”Įven if one accepts a definition of “Pietist” that encompasses people other than early modern German Lutherans, Wesley is a controversial figure.
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