Dale W. Brown, who writes from a perspective sympathetic to pietism, identifies five central motifs: 1) a turn to the practical; 2) a primitivist reading of Scripture, which is described as Biblicism; 3) an emphasis on sanctification and ethics; 4) an emphasis on religious experience; 5) acts of mercy (Dale W. Brown, Understanding Pietism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), 27–28).

Pietism was a historical movement with precursors well before the Reformation but which arose after the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. As I wrote in Recovering the Reformed Confession,

Pietism is not to be confused with piety, which describes the Christian life and worship; pietism describes a retreat into the subjective experience of God. According to one writer, pietism, whether Lutheran or Reformed, is a critique of orthodoxy. Even in its mildest forms, at its heart, pietism flows from dissatisfaction with objective religion, with the classical Reformed and Lutheran Word and sacrament piety, from dissatisfaction with the ordinary. Pietism seeks “the life and liveliness of faith” rather than the “truth of faith.” (C. John Weborg, “Pietism: Theology in Service of Living toward God,” in The Variety of American Evangelicalism, eds. Donald W. Dayton and Robert K. Johnston (Downers Grove: Inter-Varsity Press, 1991), 161.)

Paul Tillich wrote that the “subjectivity of Pietism, or the doctrine of the ‘inner light’ in Quakerism and the other ecstatic movements, has the character of immediacy or autonomy against the authority of the church. To put it more sharply, modern rational autonomy is a child of the mystical autonomy of the doctrine of the inner light” (Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), 286.).

More from Recovering: “Dale W. Brown, who writes from a perspective sympathetic to pietism, identifies five central motifs: 1) a turn to the practical; 2) a primitivist reading of Scripture, which is described as Biblicism; 3) an emphasis on sanctification and ethics; 4) an emphasis on religious experience; 5) acts of mercy” (Dale W. Brown, Understanding Pietism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), 27–28).

In all its forms then, for pietism, one’s experience of the divine presence is ultimately more important than what one believes or knows or where one attends church or how often one receives the Lord’s Supper. However orthodox a particular pietist might be, if one has to choose between orthodoxy and experience, the pietist chooses experience. Even in defending pietism against the charge that it is overly subjectivist and a revival of late medieval mysticism, F. E. Stoeffler conceded that pietism, “had no one system of theology, no one integrating doctrine, no particular type of polity, no one liturgy, no geographical homogeneity.” Certainly several of these claims cannot be made of confessional Reformed theology. We have a theology, an integrating doctrine (covenant theology), a polity, and a form of worship (See D. G. Hart, The Lost Soul of American Protestantism (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 20–24; F. E. Stoeffler, The Rise of Evangelical Pietism (Leiden: Brill, 1971), 13).

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