German Pietism and the Problem of Conversion by Jonathan Strom (review)

If the conversion experience has long been understood to have been central to Pietist identity and spirituality, Jonathan Strom's new book on the subject questions that view, showing that the importance of conversion to Pietism was only imposed and recognized retroactively, becoming, as it were, a kind of Pietist origin myth.

"Conversion" in this sense means not a transition from one religion or confession to another (Jews being baptized, Catholics becoming Lutherans), but rather "an inward change of heart" (2)—in German, Bekehrung, rather than Konversion. Strom starts with a tour of the existing scholarship, which has long taken it for granted that Pietists were marked by a conversion experience. Given the otherwise unclear and contradictory definitions of Pietism, the seemingly clear-cut necessity of experiencing conversion had become the easiest or best way to delineate Pietism (both for contemporaries and for subsequent Pietismusforscher): those who were converted (or at least on their way) were Pietists, and those who were "unconverted" did not belong. Strom, by contrast, shows how conversion experiences and narratives did not actually simplify things for contemporary Pietists, either in terms of their spirituality or sense of belonging, but rather posed a number of fundamental problems.

Strom begins with the supposedly archetypal Pietist conversion narrative, that of August Hermann Francke. Francke was influenced by Theophil Großgebauer's notion of a dramatic and specific (that is, datable) conversion experience. His long-running struggles with doubt and despair came to a head in 1687, and he emerged "a completely different person" (1), joyous and confident of his salvation. Francke recorded his conversion narrative within several years of the resolution of his crisis, and he even circulated it among other Pietists, anonymously, via Philipp Jakob Spener, but it was not published and remained largely unknown during his own lifetime. It was only after Francke's death in 1727 that his conversion narrative was rediscovered, published, and held up as a model by his two successors, his son and son-in-law, Gotthilf August Francke and Johann Anastasius Freylinghausen. Even so, Francke's conversion narrative only acquired real notoriety in the early nineteenth century; then, in 1880, Albrecht Ritschl's Geschichte des Pietismus assumed Francke's experience to be exemplary and thereby obscured the nuance and complexity of the conversion for contemporaries. Subsequent Pietismusforscher followed Ritschl's erroneous lead.

From there, Strom surveys early Pietist conversion narratives and identifies several "hot spots," where a number of Pietists wrote conversion narratives at the same time, such as Erfurt in 1691, when Francke first recorded his conversion. Strom finds that, even though conversion narratives were inspired by others, there was no pattern. Even a popular collection of conversion narratives, like Johann Heinrich Reitz's Historie der Wiedergebohrnen (1717–1730), presented a wide range of experiences among various people. Not only was there no standard conversion experience, but there was also no agreement that such narratives were necessary or even appropriate: Spener was opposed to them, because he worried that they might become normative and then mislead or discourage people. Indeed, after he came to Halle in 1692, Francke did not talk about his own experience, and instead of a one-and-done conversion, he preached repentance (Bußkampf) as a lifelong spiritual struggle.

In a later chapter, Strom explores the problem of conversion and the Bußkampf after Francke's death. Conversion became an ongoing issue, due to controversies within Halle Pietism regarding the imposition of a conversion "litmus test" for potential pastors and due to Moravian polemics that alleged an obsession with repentance among Halle Pietists. Increasingly, the concern was that an obsession for a specific conversion (Bekehrsucht) would discourage people or lead them to radicalism.

The longest chapter examines a later "hot spot" of conversion narratives in the 1730s and 1740s. Dargun in Mecklenburg was the apanage of Duchess Augusta, an unmarried daughter of the duke. In the 1730s, at the instigation of her...