Certainty in Orthodoxy and Pietism
Their piety had a much different face than that of Rome. They understood the essence of Christianity in a wholly new and original way. Returning to the refreshing, living source of Scripture, they drew from it a spirit and power that changed the topography of Christian Europe. It was the piety of the psalmists, the prophets and the apostles that again lived in them and spoke through their words.
They were imitators of Christ who, though God's Son, became the Son of Man, and counted nothing human strange to Him.
Their description of the faith also answers to this standard. With them faith is not hope and opinion, not guess and conjecture, not even knowledge and assent, but certain knowledge and firm trust, a consciousness and conviction so strong and final it excludes all doubt and fear. Just listen to the humble but at the same time bold language in the Heidelberg Catechism of the Christian who gives an account of the hope that is within him. He is firmly assured that he is a living member of Jesus' church and that he will eternally remain so. He lives in the childlike trust that not only others but he personally has been forgiven and granted eternal righteousness and salvation by God out of pure grace, and only on the merits of Christ.
In this confession the Christian has received a voice. He stands in the freedom of the children of God. God's Spirit testifies with his spirit that he is a child of God. He believes and therefore he can speak.
Here the Christian life has gained its independence. It is dependent on no other creature; it is bound only to God and His Word. Here faith finds nothing and no one in the world, only God.
Certainty in Orthodoxy and Pietism This joyful note echoed on into the time of the Canons of Dordt. But then gradually it weakened, and uncertainty and fear entered the language of faith. The faith of the sixteenth century became the
orthodoxy of the seventeenth. People no longer confessed their beliefs, but they only believed their confessions. Among most of the people this orthodoxy prepared the road for rationalism. Religion became a matter of reason, the truth regarding eternal things was now dependent on historical proofs and rational argument, and the certainty of faith became confused with rational insight. On the other hand, within the small circles of the faithful it evoked another reaction; they were not satisfied with merely rational knowledge but sought the essence of salvation in experience. This movement gradually devolved into pietism.
As more and more people with genuine faith saw the bastardized forms of historic and temporal faith developing, they began to lose their own certainty and belief. There had to be an essential difference between these different faiths, a difference like that between life and death, between genuine trust in God's grace in Christ and purely rational assent to truth. But there was a great risk of confusion, selfdeception, and false security. To point out the difference between true and false grace, between the born-again at their worst and the others at their best was a difficult, exacting task. Accordingly, the believer was prompted to turn inward in order to assure himself about the reality of his own faith.
In this self-examination he was soon guided by the meditational works of devotional writers. They traced the life of the soul from its most intimate beginnings, analyzing its most hidden motions, and describing it in a long series of subtle but often confusing signs.
Never before or since has the hidden life of fellowship with God been studied more deeply and earnestly.
Arguing against the cold orthodoxy of their time, they said that knowing is not enough; real faith is experience. It isn't enough to hear the domain of spiritual things described by others; one must have seen it with one's own eyes. To talk about the disease like a knowledgeable doctor doesn't mean much; one must have experienced the disease as well as the healing. The first is mere cold,
historical word-knowledge. Only through experience does one first understand the truth. Experience discovers in the words of Scripture an entirely new spiritual meaning; it shows us a truth behind the truth, not because it wants to say something else, but because we have then experienced and benefited from it in our hearts.
Gradually the list of requisite experiences on heaven's way was expanded. It began with a deep feeling of misery, a painful experience of guilt, and a fatal thunderbolt from the Sinaitic law.
Anyone who has not heard the judgment of doom proclaimed by the law has no need for the gospel's declaration of pardon. The sick, not the healthy, need the Great Healer. Jesus came to call the sinners, not the righteous, to repentance. Believing parents, baptism, Christian nurture, confession of faith, the Lord's
Supper—these do not make such an experience superfluous. Instead of enshrining the notion that those so blessed are included in God's grace, they should serve as warnings so we do not deceive ourselves, as many do, about eternity. Everyone, including covenant children, must pass through the judgment of God's law to know himself in his lost state and to learn with the publican to cry for grace out of the depths of misery.
Such a feeling of lostness may last a long time or only a short while.
Even if a ray of light penetrates to the soul, opening the eyes to redemption in Christ Jesus, one may not immediately believe and throw oneself on the promises of God, for this incurs the danger of a presumed, stolen faith, and stolen goods do not prosper. First the right and courage to believe has to be given by God. So all sorts of spiritual preparation had to precede the act of embracing God's promises in faith.
Faith was not immediately certain of itself right from the beginning.
There was a difference between the essence and the well-being of faith, between a shelter-seeking trust and an assured trust. The first years of faith were full of sighing and lamentation, praying and
hoping. Certainty was attained only after a series of experiences spread over many years. It was not given with faith itself, nor did it issue from it. Certainty was often added from the outside, mechanically, by special revelations. Sometimes it occurred through the sudden intrusion of some Bible passage. Or the soul might suddenly be inundated by a glorious light, prompting the believer to say with Jacob: I have seen the Lord face-to-face and my soul is saved. Occasionally the Lord Jesus showed Himself directly to the seeking soul and filled it with heavenly joy. Or the believer might, like Paul, be drawn up into the third heaven and led into the inner chamber by the King. Only then had he attained the highest rung of faith, and a place among the established, assured believers.
But few ever made it this far. Most continued to stumble forward along life's way in sighing and lamentation. They were a poor, wretched people always preoccupied with their own misery, seldom if ever rejoicing in the redemption that was theirs in Christ Jesus and never coming to a life of joy and gratitude. They preferred to be addressed as Adam's polluted offspring, as sinners under God's judgment; they drew comfort from the promises God gave to the worm Jacob and the people of Israel.
Because there was no light and happiness in their souls, everything around them looked dark and gloomy too. They spoke of earthly life as a life of trouble and grief. The world was to them nothing but a vale of tears, a desert, a Meshech. They would have preferred to withdraw from it completely and restrict themselves to the narrow circle of likeminded people. Family and society, science and art, state and church were given up to unbelief and revolution as wholly spoiled and unredeemable. The spiritual lives of these people were nurtured only through small group discussions and by reading old authors. For the rest they waited quietly, patiently discharging their duties until the time would come to put off this body of sin, or until the swift return of Christ.