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There are no extraordinary Christians; but being an ordinary Christian is an extraordinary thing. How I wish I would have understood that when I was a new Christian. But I didn’t. Soon after my conversion I began a quest to become the best possible Christian. In so doing I fell prey to teachings that promised me a Christian life superior to that of ordinary Christians. What I did not know was that I had embraced pietism. I didn’t become an extraordinary Christian and I did walk straight into error. My journey into the “deeper life” oftentimes involved embracing contradictory teachings....

1. The historical coordinates We give the name "pietism" to a phenomenon in church life which certainly has a particular historical and "confessional" starting point, but also has much wider ramifications in the spiritual life of all the Christian Churches. Pietism made its appearance as a distinct historical movement within Protestantism, at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, around 1690-1730. [1] Its aim was to stress "practical piety," as distinct from the polemical dogmatic theology to which the Reformation had initially given a certain priority.2 Against the intellectualist and abstract understanding of God and of...

Though lacking Scriptural support for this, I contend that hell consists in some small part in viewing films with English subtitles. Babette's Feast, however, is an exception - a must-see film for adherents of confessional orthodoxy. The film is set in Denmark in the nineteenth century. A bleak, windswept coastal fishing village is inhabited by the exceedingly bleaker remnants of a barely discernible historic Lutheran orthodoxy. The film begins with the village remnant already drinking fully from the founts of a crossless, mystical "Christian" pietism. Vestiges of a long-lost orthodoxy appear only in the names of two sisters within the...