ABSTRACT
It is a bold person who attempts a global definition of Pietism that will satisfy all current participants in its study. As W.R. Ward comments in his magisterial study of the Protestant evangelical awakening in Europe and North America, “Pietism has constituted one of the most relentlessly contested battlefields of modern historiography, disagreement about when it began being so well balanced by its obscurity as a concept, and the whole so confused by the application of often arbitrary theological preferences ... among German theologians, that inevitably a French critic has appeared to ask whether it ever existed at all.” Perhaps the only comparable long-standing debates of ecclesiastical concepts – both of which have arguably direct connections with Pietism – would be those about Puritanism and Anabaptism.1
