Johann Wilhelm Petersen

Johann Wilhelm Petersen (1649-1727) was a German Lutheran theologian and one of the leading figures of radical Pietism. Born in Osnabrück, he served as a pastor in Hanover and later as a church superintendent, but was removed from office in 1692 over his millenarian teachings and spent the rest of his life as an independent writer. Influenced by the English mystic Jane Leade, he and his wife Johanna Eleonora Petersen became the foremost continental advocates of the restoration of all things, and his treatise Mysterion Apokatastaseos Panton (1700) offered an extended defense of universal restoration in the tradition of Origen. He died at Zerbst in 1727.

The landmark of German Pietist universalism: Petersen's three-volume defense of the Wiederbringung aller Dinge — the restoration of all things — cast as a dialogue between Philaletha and Agathophilus, which ignited a decades-long controversy in German Protestantism and fed the stream that reached England and America through works like The Everlasting Gospel (Siegvolck, also in this collection). The scan is served by the University of Rostock over IIIF, page by page, with no PDF download; the record is linked in this book's metadata. In German.

(Note: this summary was automatically generated and may be inaccurate.)