Elizabethtown College’s Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies invited Dr. Jonathan Strom to discuss some old books. Strom won the Young Center’s Dale W. Brown Book Award for his own book, “German Pietism and the Problem of Conversion,” back in 2019. But, his book talks about some other books much older than that.
Strom Zoomed in to discuss some early Pietist conversion narratives. These were records of 17th and 18th century people’s embrace of Christianity. But many of these stories are not your typical born-again fare. Many sound strange to modern ears and there is a reason for that.
Strom says that in the 1700s, a group of elite theologians controlled the Pietist community’s massive printing industry. These gatekeepers’ biggest fear was someone putting out a heart wrenching narrative of their religious awakening and then breaking all ten commandments the next day.
Strom explains, “Only when someone has reached the end of their life can one really judge that a conversion was authentic.”
In other words, unless they were dead, they could still screw up. In that case, the safest option for conversion narrative publishers was to scrawl HOLD FOR RELEASE on the cover page and wait for the writer to die.
“Only after they had passed away would an older conversion narrative written decades earlier be dusted off and published,” Strom said.
The problem was the community was hungry for these accounts and were not willing to wait for their fellow Pietists to die.
That is where the execution narratives come in.
Think about it. A man commits a murder and is sentenced to be broken on the wheel — or however they did it back then. He’s waiting on death row. Priests are offering him spiritual comforts anyway. Why not get a book out of it?
And they got many books out of it. The majority of Pietist conversion narratives from this time were written by priests tending to the condemned. These books were a bit formulaic; they all ended the same way.
Strom describes the end of one such account: “He eventually had a breakthrough to grace and joyous conversion. He no longer dreaded his execution. He went to his execution joyfully and willingly, calling it his ‘wedding day’ because of his anticipation for union with Christ after his death.”
Sadly, these accounts of grace before the axe fell pointed out a hack for suicidal Christians to end it all out without ending up in hell. Some of these execution narratives were also “suicide by proxy narratives.” Desperate people could simply murder someone whose salvation was already assured, you know, like a priest or a child. Then they just needed to have a teary-eyed epiphany before they were executed, and their souls were sitting pretty.
Numerous other accounts Strom sifted through tell even stranger conversion tales. People dusted each other’s chairs with powders they believed would bring on frenzied states to make conversion more likely. Others fed their friends papers with magic words on them. One narrative recounted a man spitting one of these papers out to find it had turned into a toad.
A subject like this stretches the imagination and presents a challenge for a writer. Do they report on the more sensationalistic accounts or do they stick with the commonplace but verified?
Strom says this is a dilemma it took him a while to solve. He points to an unverified record of a bizarre suicide by proxy case. A priest feared for his life as a woman stalked him, hoping to kill him and be saved on death row.
“How do you deal with this woman’s experience? This account is all we have of her. How do we work with that? Do we just dismiss it as so tainted it has no value?” Strom said.
In Strom’s opinion, simply ignoring the account (though it is outlandish and probably touched by ancient biases) would not be “dealing fairly.”
“That’s all we have of that poor woman, who was clearly deeply, deeply troubled. So, we have to take it seriously even as we acknowledge the distortions,” Strom said.
But what about more superstitious stories?
In those cases, Dr. Steven Nolt, Interim Director of the Young Center Dr. Steven Nolt , says, “We want to take seriously the way figures in the past understand their own story even if we, today, would position it in a different context.”
Strom likewise advises humility. “What I want us to do is ask about our own time. What is something someone fifty years or a hundred years from now might look back and go ‘Oh. Is that what they thought? Isn’t that interesting.”
Good advice for us all. If you do not think little Generation Alpha will grow up to look at some of the things we believe and give us the “OK Boomer” treatment — well, then you are as delusional as the guy with the toad.
