SPENER, Philipp Jakob (1635-1705), “the father of Pietism,” was born 13th January 1635, at Rappoltsweiler in Upper Alsace. He received his earliest education from his subsequent brother-in-law, Joachim Stoll, chaplain to the count of Rappoltstein, whose wife was Spener’s godmother. After a brief stay in the grammar-school of Colmar he entered the university of Strasburg in 1651 as a student of theology,—living there with an uncle, and holding quite aloof from the student-life of the place. He devoted himself to philology, history, and philosophy, and won his degree of master (1653) by a disputation against the philosophy of Hobbes. He then became private tutor to the princes Christian and Charles of the Palatinate, and lectured in the university on philology and history. From 1659 to 1662 he visited the universities of Basel, Tübingen, and Geneva, and commenced the study of heraldry, which he pursued throughout his life. In Geneva especially his religious views and tendencies were turned in the direction of his subsequent Pietism. He returned to Strasburg in 1663, where he was appointed preacher without pastoral duties, with the right of holding lectures in the university. Three years afterwards he was invited to become the chief pastor in the Lutheran church at Frankfort-on-the-Main. He had previously married a lady of his mother’s choice, who made him an excellent wife and bore him eleven children. Immediately after his removal to Frankfort he commenced that line of pastoral work which issued in the movement called Pietism (q.v. ). In 1686 he accepted the invitation to the first court chaplaincy at Dresden. But the elector John George III., at whose personal desire the post had been offered to him, was soon offended at the fearless conscientiousness with ...which his chaplain sought to discharge his pastoral duties; and the opposition of the Saxon university of Leipsic to the Pietistic movement and to Spener personally served to render the chaplain more decidedly a persona ingrata to the elector. Spener refused to resign his post, and the Saxon Government hesitated to dismiss him. But in 1691 the Saxon representative at Berlin induced the court of Brandenburg to offer him the rectorship of St Nicolas in Berlin with the title of “consistorialrath.” In Berlin Spener was held in high honour, though the tendencies of the court and the Government officials were rather rationalistic than pietistic. One of the most important works of this period of his life was the foundation of the university of Halle (1691), which he directed. All his life long Spener had been exposed to the incessant attacks and abuse of the orthodox Lutheran theologians, who generally charged him with the errors in doctrine and extravagances in practice of followers who had borrowed from him everything rather than his wisdom and caution. With his years his opponents multiplied, and the movement which he had inaugurated presented increasingly matter for hostile criticism. In 1695 the theological faculty of Wittenberg formally laid to his charge 264 errors, and only his death (5th February 1705) released him from these fierce conflicts.
Though Spener has been justly called “the father of Pietism,” hardly any of the errors and none of the extravagances of the movement can be ascribed to him personally. So far was he from sharing them that Ritschl maintains (ii. p. 163) that “he was himself not a Pietist,” as he did not advocate the quietistic, legalistic, and semi-separatist practices of Pietism, though they were more or less involved in the positions he assumed or the practices which he encouraged or connived at. The only two points on which he departed from the orthodox Lutheran faith of his day were the requirement of regeneration as the sine qua non of the true theologian, and the expectation of the conversion of the Jews and the fall of Papacy as the prelude of the triumph of the church. He did not, like the later Pietists, insist on the necessity of a conscious crisis of conversion, nor did he encourage a complete breach between the Christian and the secular life.
Spener was a voluminous writer. The list of his published works comprises 7 vols. folio, 63 quarto, 7 octavo, 46 duodecimo; and in one year he had answered 622 and had still to answer 300 letters. The most important of his works for their bearing on his history are Theologische Bedenken, in 4 parts, Halle, 1700-1702; Letzte theologische Bedenken, with a life of Spener by Canstein, Halle, 1711; Concilia et judicia theologica Latina (posthumous), Frankfort, 1709.
See Hossbach, Philipp Jakob Spener und seine Zeit (Berlin, 1828, 2d ed. 1853, 3d ed. 1861); Tholuck, in Herzog-Plitt’s Real-Encyklopädie (2d ed., vol. xiv.); Oass, Protestantische Dogmatik (Berlin, 1857); Ritschl, Gesch. des Pietismus, ii. p. 97, sq. (Bonn, 1884); and Sachsse, Ursprung und Wesen des Pietismus (Wiesbaden, 1884).
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