ABSTRACT
Swedish church historian Hilding Pleijel, in the course of his study of the reading habits of Swedish Lutherans in the centuries following the Reformation, deems Johann Arndt (1555-1621) to be “the most influential figure in Lutheran Christianity since the days of the Reformation.”1 Arndt did not merit such an evaluation through his work as a preacher or as a public figure. The several pastorates he held, after abandoning plans for a career in medicine to pursue the study of theology at Wittenberg, Strasbourg, and Basel, were in mostly small parishes throughout Germany. Although he received his theological training during the years of postReformation debate over the precise delineation of doctrine (e.g., the definition of those points which separated Lutheran from Reformed Christians in the 1577 Formula of Concord), Arndt remained mostly aloof from the so-called Konfessionalisierung, the confessionalizing of Lutheran theology. Instead, he devoted his scholarly energies to producing editions of late medieval mystical writings, including the Theologia Deutsch, The Imitation of Christ and the sermons of Johannes Tauler. More than any other factor, though, Arndt’s influence upon Lutheran Christianity lies in his Sechs Bücher vom wahren Christentum, the most extensively reproduced, translated and disseminated devotional book in Protestant Europe. Indeed, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this single text was more widely read than the writings of Luther. Published in various stages of completion between 1605 and 1610, by the middle of the seventeenth century, the popularity of this book was so great that pastors felt compelled to remind their parishioners not to neglect the study of their Bibles in their enthusiasm for Arndt’s True Christianity.2
