PIETISTS, JURISTS, AND THE EARLY ENLIGHTENMENT CRITIQUE OF PRIVATE CONFESSION IN LUTHERAN GERMANY

From the 1680s to the 1720s German Lutheran pastors’ use of private confession and suspension from Communion as a means of disciplining wayward parishioners generated seminal theological and intellectual debates. They were driven by Pietists and secular natural law jurists and concerned ultimately the purported corruption in the early Christian church that led to the abusive, unwarranted, and centuries-long intrusion of clerical power into secular affairs. By investigating these debates, this essay reveals in new ways the constructive collision of two different intellectual predispositions—one clerical, the other legal—that propelled the early Enlightenment in Germany. Letters from the 1680s and other writings of Philipp Jakob Spener, the father of German Pietism, show how he and fellow clergymen wrestled with specific pastoral challenges regarding the disciplining of allegedly unrepentant and incorrigible sinners. Christian Thomasius, a central figure in the early Enlightenment, and other secular natural law jurists vigorously rebutted the Pietists’ claims by critically examining the practice of confession in the primitive church, thereby exposing the historical origins of priestcraft. In doing so, Thomasius highlighted affinities between his work and that of the radical Pietist Gottfried Arnold, who had indicted the clergies of Christian churches for their unjust and inveterate persecution of religious dissidents. But Thomasius also faulted Arnold for weaknesses in his biblical scholarship. Thomasius's criticism points to the special form of biblical scholarship that secular natural law jurists had helped to develop and that predisposed them to embrace radical interpretations of Scripture, a potent stimulant of early Enlightenment thought.