Notes
Heppe, Geschichte des Pietismus in der reformierten Kirche (Leiden, 1879), a book which even with Ritschl's standard work cannot yet be dispensed with for England, and here and there also for the Netherlands. Even in the nineteenth century in the Netherlands Köhler, Die Niederl. ref. Kirche, was asked about the exact time of his rebirth.
129. They attempted thus to counteract the lax results of the Lutheran doctrine of the recoverability of grace (especially the very frequent conversion in extremis).
130. Against the corresponding necessity of knowing the day and hour of conversion as an indispensable sign of its genuineness. See Spener, Theologische Bedenken, II, 6, 1, p. 197. Repentance was as little known to him as Luther's terrores conscientiæ to Melanchthon.
131. At the same time, of course, the anti-authoritarian interpretation of the universal priesthood, typical of all asceticism, played a part. Occasionally the minister was advised to delay absolution until proof was given of genuine repentance which, as Ritschl rightly says, was in principle Calvinistic.
132. The essential points for our purposes are most easily found in Plitt, Zinzendorf's Theologie (3 vols., Gotha, 1869), I, pp. 325, 345, 381, 412, 429, 433 f., 444, 448; II, pp. 372, 381, 385, 409 f.; III, pp. 131, 167, 176. Compare also Bernh. Becker, Zinzendorf und sein Christentum (Leipzig, 1900), Book III, chap. iii.
133. "In no religion do we recognize as brothers those who have not been washed in the blood of Christ and continue thoroughly changed in the sanctity of the Spirit. We recognize no evident (= visible) Church of Christ except where the Word of God is taught in purity and where the members live in holiness as children of God following its precepts." The last sentence, it is true, is taken from Luther's smaller catechism but, as Ritschl points out, there it serves to answer the question how the Name of God shall be made holy, while here it serves to delimit the Church of the saints.
134. It is true that he only considered the Augsburg Confession to be a suitable document of the Lutheran Christian faith if, as he expressed it in his disgusting terminology, a Wundbrühe had been poured upon it. To read him is an act of penitence because his language, in its insipid melting quality, is even worse than the frightful Christo-turpentine of F. T. Vischer (in his polemics with the Munich christoterpe).
135. See Plitt, op. cit., I, p. 346. Even more decisive is the answer, quoted in Plitt, op. cit., I, p. 381, to the question whether good works are necessary to salvation. "Unnecessary and harmful to the attainment of salvation, but after salvation is attained so necessary that he who does not perform them is not really saved." Thus here also they are not the cause of salvation, but the sole means of recognizing it.
136. For instance, through those caricatures of Christian freedom which Ritschl, op. cit., III, p. 381, so severely criticizes.
