With the coming of eighteenth-century Pietism, the preaching of a considerable number of Protestant pastors took a very different direction. The Pietists continued to develop the Puritan concern for inward piety, but they developed it to the point where they began to lose interest in the text of Scripture in itself. One sometimes gets the impression that they were interested in Scripture primarily because it produced religious experience. This was particularly the case with German Pietism. At the beginning of the Pietist movement Philipp Spener (1635–1705) had advised the preacher not to waste
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