2. The magpie.
Word of the Day: Catachrestical
A representation of the dead Christ, attended by the Virgin Mary or by holy women and angels.
Extremely strict devotion, or affectation of piety.
1. The principle or practice of the Pietists.
2. Strict devotion; also, affectation of devotion.
Pietism
Encyclopedia Britannica
PIETISM. Pietism is the name of an exceedingly influential, instructive, and interesting movement in the Lutheran Church which arose towards the end of the 17th and continued during the first half of the following century. The name of Pietists was given to the adherents of the movement by its enemies, as a term of ridicule, like that of “Methodists” somewhat later in England. The origin and nature of the movement itself may be both traced to defects in the Lutheran Church of the time and to isolated efforts to correct them. That church had in the 17th century become a creed-bound theological and sacramentarian institution, which orthodox theologians ruled with almost the absolutism of the papacy. Correctness of creed had taken the place of deep religious feeling and purity of life. Christian faith had been dismissed from its seat in the heart, where Luther had placed it, to the cold regions of the intellect. The dogmatic formularies of the Lutheran Church had usurped the position which Luther himself had assigned to the Bible alone, and as a consequence they only were studied and preached, while the Bible was neglected in the family, the study, the pulpit, and the university. Instead of advocating the priesthood of all believers, so powerfully proclaimed by Luther, the Lutheran pastors had made themselves a despotic hierarchy, while they neglected the practical pastoral work of caring for the moral and spiritual welfare of their flocks. One of the consequences, as the Pietists believed, of all this was that immorality, irréligion, and heathenish ignorance of Christianity abounded in the land, and cried to heaven against an unfaithful church. As forerunners of the Pietists in the strict sense, not a few earnest and powerful voices had been heard bewailing the ...shortcomings of the church and advocating a revival of practical and devout Christianity. Amongst them were Jacob Boehme (Bemen), the theosophic mystic; Johann Arndt, whose principal devotional work on True Christianity is universally known and appreciated; Heinrich Müller, who described the font, the pulpit, the confessional, and the altar as the four dumb idols of the Lutheran Church; the theologian Johann Valentin Andrea, the court chaplain of the landgrave of Hesse; Schuppius, who sought to restore to the Bible its place in the pulpit; and Theophilus Grossgebauer of Rostock, who from his pulpit and by his writings raised “the alarm cry of a watchman in Sion.” The direct originator of the movement was Philip Jacob Spener. Born in Alsace January 13, 1635, as a child trained in piety under the influence of a devout godmother and books of devotion recommended by her, particularly Arndt’s True Christianity, accustomed to hear the sermons of a pastor who preached the Bible more than the Lutheran creeds, he was early convinced of the necessity of a moral and religious reformation of the German church. He studied theology, with a view to the Christian ministry, at Strasburg, where the professors at the time were more inclined to practical Christianity than to theological disputation. He afterwards spent a year in Geneva, and was powerfully influenced by the strict moral life and rigid ecclesiastical discipline prevalent there, and also by the preaching and the piety of the Waldensian professor Antoine Leger and the converted Jesuit preacher Jean de Labadie. During a stay in Tübingen he read Grossgebauer’s Alarm Cry, and in 1666 he entered upon his first pastoral charge at Frankfort-on-the-Main, profoundly impressed with a sense of the danger of the Christian life being sacrificed to zeal for rigid orthodoxy. Pietism, as a distinct movement in the German church, was then originated by Spener by religious meetings at his house (collegia pietatis), at which he repeated his sermons, expounded passages of the New Testament, and induced those present to join in conversation on religious questions that arose. These meetings were largely attended, produced a great sensation, and were soon imitated elsewhere. They gave rise to the name “Pietists.” In 1675 Spener published his Pia Desideria, or Earnest Desires for a Reform of the True Evangelical Church, the public literary exposition and defence of his position and aims. In this publication Spener made six proposals as the best means of restoring the life of the church :—(1) the earnest cultivation of a more general and thorough familiarity with the Holy Scriptures by means of private meetings, ecclesiolae in ecclesia·, (2) a practical carrying out of the principle of the universality of the Christian priesthood by a participation of the laity in the spiritual government of the church and by the holding of family worship; (3) a serious laying to heart of the fact that a knowledge of Christianity must be attended by the practice of it as its indispensable sign and supplement; (4) the conversion of the habit of making merely didactic, and often bitter, attacks on the heterodox and unbelievers into a treatment of them instigated by genuine affection and animated by the simple desire of doing them good; (5) a reorganization of the theological training of the universities, in such a way that young divines should be urged not only to diligence in their studies but above all to lead devout lives; and (6) a different style of preaching, namely, in the place of pleasing rhetoric, the implanting of Christianity in the inner or new man, the sold of which is faith, and its effects the fruits of life. This work produced a great impression throughout Germany. Although large numbers of the orthodox Lutheran theologians and pastors were deeply offended by it, its complaint and its demands were both too well justified to admit of their being pointblank denied. A large number of pastors at once practically adopted Spener’s proposals. In 1686 Spener accepted an appointment to the court-chaplaincy at Dresden, which opened to him a wider though more difficult sphere of labour. He succeeded in reviving the catechetical instruction of the young in religious truth in Saxony. In Leipsic, where Scriptural exegesis had almost wholly disappeared, a society of young theologians was formed under his influence, for the learned study and devout application of the Bible. Three magistri belonging to that society, one of whom was August Hermann Francke, subsequently the founder of one of the noblest works of Pietism—the orphanage at Halle—commenced courses of expository lectures on the Scriptures of a practical and devotional character and in the German language, which were zealously frequented by both students and townsmen. The lectures aroused, however, the ill-will of the other theologians and pastors of Leipsic, and their promoters, charged with having slighted the established worship of the land as well as true learning, were ordered to discontinue them. Francke and his friends left the city, and with the aid of Christian Thomasius and Spener founded the new university of Halle, which became the chief home of the Pietists, and the object of the jealousy and unsparing attacks of the older universities of Wittenberg and Leipsic. The theological chairs in the new university were filled in complete conformity with Spener’s proposals. The main difference between the new Pietistic school and the orthodox Lutherans was not one affecting doctrine directly, inasmuch as Spener adhered in every point to the Lutheran faith. The difference arose from his conception of Christianity as chiefly consisting in a change of heart and consequent holiness of life, while the orthodox Lutherans of the time made it to consist mainly in correctness of doctrine. At the same time, the greater importance which he attached to the religious life and to practical godliness than to correctness of belief, and his restoration of the Bible to its place of superiority over the creeds, involved numerous possible departures from and advances beyond the Lutheranism of the 17th century. Again, the earnestness with which he had insisted on the necessity of a new birth, and on a separation of Christians from the world, led to exaggeration and fanaticism among followers less distinguished than himself for wisdom and moderation. Many Pietists soon maintained that the new birth must always be preceded by agonies of repentance, and that only a regenerated theologian could teach theology, while the whole school shunned all common worldly amusements, such as dancing, the theatre, and public games, and affected a severe austerity with regard to dress, meals, and conversation. Through these extravagances a reactionary movement arose at the beginning of the 18th century, one of the most distinguished leaders of which was Loescher, superintendent at Dresden. But it was only as the opponents of Pietism gradually ceased their attacks that the movement lost its strength and by degrees handed over its vital truths and truest work to various representatives of a new and better age of the church. As a distinct movement it had run its course before the middle of the 18th century. The spirit of the school of Spener long made itself felt amongst the Protestants of north and south Germany, and particularly at Halle. Pietism could claim to have contributed largely to the revival of Biblical studies in Germany, and to have given a Biblical basis once more to theology. It also made religion once more an affair of the heart and the life, and not merely of the intellect, to which theologians had reduced it. It likewise vindicated afresh the rights of the Christian laity in regard to their own beliefs and the work of the church, against the assumptions and despotism of an arrogant clergy. It thus revived eternal elements of Christianity that had been long neglected, and was a distinct agent in preparing the way for modern advance in religion and theology. But it sprang from a temporary necessity, and, like similar phases of Christian life, lacked the philosophical and scholarly depth, the human and secular breadth, and the progressive impetus of a permanent and world-subduing religious movement.
The two most recent German writers on the history of Pietism— Heppe and Ritschl—have given a much wider meaning to the term, including under it nearly all religious tendencies amongst Protestants of the last three centuries in the direction of a more serious cultivation of personal piety than that prevalent in the various established churches, and manifesting itself particularly in the ascetic shunning of “worldly” practices. The term then embraces the Anabaptist, Moravian, Metnodistic, and other kindred tendencies of the religious life, which are generally regarded rather as simply related than genetically connected phenomena. Ritschl, too, treats Pietism as a retrograde movement of Christian life towards Catholicism. It is also customary with some German writers to speak of a later or modern Pietism, characterizing thereby a party in the German church which was probably at first influenced by some remains of Spener’s Pietism in Westphalia, on the Rhine, in Würtemberg, and at Halle and Berlin, and which at the commencement worked to some extent on the lines of the earlier movement. The party was chiefly distinguished by its opposition to an independent scientific study of theology, its principal theological leader being Hengstenberg, and its chief literary organ the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung. The party originated at the close of the wars with Napoleon I.
Amongst older works on Pietism are Walch’s Historische und theologische Einleitung in die Religionstreitigkeiten der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche, 1730; Tholuck’s Geschichte des Pietismus und des ersten Stadiums der Aufklärung, 1865; II. Schmid, Die Geschichte des Pietismus, 1863; Goebel's Geschichte des christlichen Lebens in der Rheinisch-Westfälischen Kirche, 3 vols., 1849-60; and the subject is dealt with at length in Domer’s and Gass’s Histories of Protestant theology. The two chief recent works which use the term in the wider sense just referred to are Heppe'β Geschichte des Pietismus und der Mystik in der reformirten Kirche, (1879) which is sympathetic, and RitβchΓs Geschichte des Pietismus (vol. i. only yet published, 1880), which is hostile. See also Nippold's article in Theol. Stud, und Kritiken, 1882, pp. 347-392∙ , and Riggenbach ’ s article, “Pietismus,” in Herzog's Encyklopädie, 2d ed.
9th ed. Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. 19, p. 83 — signed J. F. S.
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One of a sect professing great strictness and purity of life, despising learning, school theology and ecclesiastical polity, as also forms and ceremonies in religion, and giving themselves up to mystic theology. This sect sprung up among the protestants of Germany, in the latter part of the seventeenth century.
One of a class of religious reformers in Germany in the 17th century who sought to revive declining piety in the Protestant churches; -- often applied as a term of reproach to those who make a display of religious feeling. Also used adjectively.
Alt. of Pietistical
Of or pertaining to the Pietists; hence, in contempt, affectedly or demonstratively religious.
Pietists
Watson's Biblical & Theological Dictionary
PROTESTANT, a denomination in the seventeenth century, which owed its origin to the pious and learned Spener,” as Dr. Mosheim calls him, who formed private devotional societies at Frankfort, in order to cultivate vital and practical religion; and published a book entitled Pious Desires,” which greatly promoted this object. His followers laid it down as an essential maxim, that none should be admitted into the ministry but those who not only had received a proper education, but were also distinguished by their wisdom and sanctity of manners, and had hearts filled with divine love. Hence they proposed an alteration in the schools of divinity, which embraced the following points: 1. That the scholastic theology, which reigned in the academies, and was composed of intricate and disputable doctrines, and obscure and unusual forms of expression, should be totally abolished. 2. That polemical divinity, which comprehended the controversies subsisting between Christians of different communions, should be less eagerly studied, and less frequently treated, though not entirely neglected. 3. That all mixture of philosophy and human science with divine wisdom, was to be most carefully avoided; that is, that Pagan philosophy and classical learning should be kept distinct from, and by no means supersede, Biblical theology. But, 4. That, on the contrary, all those students, who were designed for the ministry, should be accustomed from their early youth to the perusal and study of the Holy Scriptures, and be taught a plain system of theology, drawn from these unerring sources of truth. 5. That the whole course of their education was to be so directed as to render them useful in life, by the practical power of their doctrine, and the commanding influence of their example. Such, in ...substance, is Mosheim’s account of the meditated reforms in the public schools. But it was not intended to confine these reforms to students and the clergy. Religious persons of every class and rank were encouraged to meet in what were called Biblical colleges, or colleges of piety, (we might call them prayer meetings,) where some exercised in reading the Scriptures, singing, and prayer, and others engaged in the exposition of the Scriptures; not in a dry and critical way, but in a strain of practical and experimental piety, by which they mutually edified each other. This practice, which always more or less obtains where religion flourishes, as, for instance, at the Reformation, raised the same sort of outcry as at the rise of Methodism; and those who entered not into the spirit of the design, were eager to catch at every instance of weakness or imprudence, to bring disgrace on that which, in fact, brought disgrace upon themselves, as lukewarm and formal Christians. In so saying, Master, thou reproachest us also.” This work began about 1670. In 1691 Dr. Spener removed from Dresden to Berlin, where he propagated the same principles, which widely spread, and were well supported in many parts of Germany by the excellent Professor Francke and others, until the general decline of religion which has unhappily prevailed in Germany for the last half century. See NEOLOGY. PI-HAHIROTH. The Hebrew _pi_ answers to the modern Arabic word _fum_, signifying mouth;” and is generally applied to the passes in the mountains. In the English and Septuagint versions, Hahiroth is taken as a proper name; and the whole word would imply the mouth or pass of Hahiroth or Hiroth, whatever particular origin or signification may belong to that word. The name, however, sufficiently explains the situation of the children of Israel; who were hemmed in at this place, between the sea in front, and a narrow mountain pass behind; which no doubt encouraged Pharaoh to make his attack upon them in so disadvantageous a position; thinking that they must inevitably fall an easy prey into his hands, or be cut to pieces: when their deliverance, and his own destruction, were unexpectedly wrought by the parting of the waters of the sea. The place where this miracle is supposed to have happened, is still called Bahral-Kolsum, or the Sea of Destruction; and just opposite to the situation which answers to the opening called Pi-hahiroth, is a bay, where the north cape is called Ras Musa, or the Cape of Moses. That part of the western or Heroopolitan branch of the Red Sea where, from these coincidences, the passage most probably took place, is described by Bruce as about three leagues over, with fourteen fathoms of water in the channel, nine at the sides, and good anchorage every where. The farther side is also represented as a low sandy coast, and an easy landing place. See RED SEA.
Watson's Biblical & Theological Dictionary
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Pietra dura
Webster's Dictionary 1913
Hard and fine stones in general, such as are used for inlay and the like, as distinguished from the softer stones used in building; thus, a Florentine mosaic is a familiar instance of work in pietra dura, though the ground may be soft marble.
Pietro
Encyclopedia Britannica
PIETRO. See Piero.
9th ed. Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. 19, p. 84
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1. piety in principle, is a compound of veneration or reverence of the Supreme Being and love of his character, or veneration accompanied with love; and piety in practice, is
2. the exercise of these affections in obedience to his will and devotion to his service.
3. Piety is the only proper and adequate relief of decaying man.
4. Reverence of parents or friends, accompanied with affection and devotion to their honor and happiness.
1. Veneration or reverence of the Supreme Being, and love of his character; loving obedience to the will of God, and earnest devotion to his service.
2. Duty; dutifulness; filial reverence and devotion; affectionate reverence and service shown toward parents, relatives, benefactors, country, etc.
No thesaurus entries found for "piet".
King James Bible KJV Bible
Berean Standard Bible BSB Bible
1 KJV and 0 BSB verses contain “piet”
But if any widow have children or nephews, let them learn first to shew piety at home, and to requite their parents: for that is good and acceptable before God.
But if a widow has children or grandchildren, they must first learn to show godliness to their own family and repay their parents, for this is pleasing in the sight of God.