Protestantism Research Paper

Protestantism represents a form of Christianity that spread in five hundred years from northwest Europe to every continent. This global version of the faith derives from a cluster of movements within Western or Catholic Christianity in the early sixteenth century and thrives in the form of thousands of independent church bodies. Rejecting the authority of the pope, Protestants almost universally profess that the Bible—that is, the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament—is the authoritative source and norm of their teaching. Through the centuries, Protestantism quite naturally took on the culture of whatever new environments its churches spread to. Thus Lutherans in Namibia differ in many respects from those in Norway, yet both stress the grace of God and are critical of any teaching that they associate with the historic Catholic teaching that insisted on human endeavors to impress and please God.

Global Protestantism Today

Early in the twenty-first century, religious demographers estimate that about 370 million people are Protestant. Often associated with Protestantism but insisting on its Catholic character is Anglicanism, the heritage of the Church of England, which numbers 82 million adherents; a third group, informally labeled Independents, numbers 415 million. Taken together, after 2000 these non-Roman Catholic varieties of Christianity, all of which derived from the sixteenth-century Reformation, have over 800 million followers. (By comparison, there are an estimated 101 million Roman Catholics and 217 million Eastern Orthodox adherents.) Demographers estimate that by 2025 the Protestant numbers will grow from 370 million to almost half a billion, a sign that Protestantism is not confined to the period of early prosperity from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century, but faces a prosperous yet at the same time an ambiguous future. While these are necessarily imprecise numbers, the totals suggest the enormous historical importance of this movement.

The momentum of Protestantism, however, has dramatically shifted. While much of its base remains in northwest Europe, the point of its origin, the membership there is often nominal. In some Scandinavian nations, for instance, over 90 percent of the population will be listed as Protestant because most children are baptized by the Lutherans, yet church participation is very low. Meanwhile, in sub-Saharan Africa, where several thousand new members are added every twenty-four hours, Protestants, especially in forms called “Pentecostal” or “charismatic,” as they expand, are known for their vital and even exuberant patterns of worship and are among the chief deliverers of health care and works of mercy.

Protestant Origins in Western Europe

While Protestantism did not receive its name until 1529, historians of Protestantism characteristically date its rise from sporadic pioneering reform movements in England under John Wycliffe (1320–1384), William Tyndale (1494?–1536), and others. They and their followers combined efforts to translate the Bible into English and then to use biblical teachings, as they interpreted them, to criticize the Catholic Church. The Czech reformer Jon Hus (1372–1415), a critic of Catholic practices who died for his faith, endeavored to break the hold of the hierarchy and to teach lay people to base their views of divine grace on the Bible.

While the English reformers and the Hussites were put out of the Catholic Church or put to death, many other reform movements which tested the Roman church of the day, denouncing it as legalistic, corrupt, and inefficient as a deliverer of the message of divine grace, remained within the Church. Typical among this group were humanists like Desiderius Erasmus (1467?–1536) of the Netherlands, a man who satirized the papacy and monasticism with a wit and savagery unmatched by most of his Protestant-leaning contemporaries. However, Erasmus and other humanists in the universities of England and throughout the Holy Roman Empire on the continent could not envision carrying their reform to the point of a break with the papacy.

Breaks that led to permanent breaches began to occur in the second decade of the sixteenth century. Most visible and best-remembered among them were the university-based reforms at Wittenberg in Saxony. A cluster of monks and professors led by Martin Luther (1483–1546) set out to attack the Church’s modes of dealing with people who sought salvation and attempted to live a moral life. Luther and his followers saw the Papacy as repressive, self-centered, and corrupt, and declared their intent to recast Church teachings from within Catholicism. However, they became so upsetting to both the Church and the Holy Roman Empire that Rome took action—usually, as in the case of Luther, it excommunicated them as heretics. Many other critics left voluntarily.

The map of early Protestantism indicates that a great number and variety of sites developed quickly. In England, a controversy between the Pope and King Henry VIII led to a sundering of ties and the birth of the Anglican Church. In Switzerland, reformers such as Huldreich Zwingli (1484–1531) and John Calvin (1509–1564) complemented or competed with Luther and the Germans and with Scandinavian leaders, while more radical reformers spread through Switzerland and the Lowlands. By mid-century essential changes in allegiances had occurred and Protestantism had reached its early geographical limits. However, Mediterranean Catholics on the Iberian Peninsula, in France, and in the Italian states were unmoved, as were Eastern Europeans, whose Catholic churches abutted Orthodox churches in Russia, Poland, and Greece.

The Inner and Outer Expressions

The early Protestants, who acquired their name almost accidentally from the act of some princes who “protested” imperial and Catholic action at the Diet of Speyer in 1529, were more frequently referred to with a more congenial and positive term, evangelical. Although five centuries later that name appears to characterize only conservative Protestantism, in the beginning it simply implied that those who professed it were devoted to the evangel, the message of the New Testament gospels. They were not to be confined by Roman Catholic Church law and did not define themselves as legalistic followers of Jesus and the church. Instead, they professed to take the risk of governing the church and inspiring individual members’ lives with the message of grace as mediated only by the Christian gospels and voiced in the acts of preaching and prayer.

The inner expression of Protestantism arose from the way some Christians gave expression to this evangel, how they worshiped and lived. The outer expression refers to the ways in which Protestants in various societies and cultures related to governments and economic and social powers.

The Gospel and the Inner Life of Protestants

Once the hold of the papacy and the Catholic hierarchy was tested and broken, the people called Protestant set to work to give voice and form to personal and church life in ways that would distance them from Rome and yet keep them within the Christian tradition, a tradition that they were soon to claim as belonging more rightfully to them than to the members of what they considered a corrupt Catholic church. Many Protestant leaders, especially the Anglicans and the Lutherans, continued to think of themselves as representing a kind of Catholicism without a pope, and they affirmed all that they could from the life of the existing Church. Yet their criticism of its forms was often searching, radical, and even savage. In fact, for many, the pope became not a faulty follower of Christ but the Antichrist.

Although they were unwilling to be defined only negatively vis-a-vis the Roman hierarchy and church or canon law, Protestants had difficulty defining themselves positively. The genus had to include everyone from Anabaptists, ancestors to latter-day Mennonites and radical Baptists, to church bodies that worshiped in very formal ways, including the use of incense and what radicals considered reintroducing the trappings that belonged in Rome, not in evangelicalism. The genus also had to include Protestants who supported the religious establishment, who did not sever the ties between religion and regime, separate “church and state,” or cease taxing the whole citizenry for church support. At the same time, in the same cluster, were Protestants—again, the Anabaptists and Baptists led the way—who wanted religious life in their churches to be independent of political organizations and leadership; they advocated very simple forms of worship that demonstrated their distance from Rome.

Authority and Grace

Despite these diversities and the outlooks and actions of many charismatic reformers who started independent movements, some broadly defined motifs can be used to characterize most Protestants. First, most of them did and still do give highest priority to the canonical scriptures, which they share with Catholics. Most Protestants, however, want to downgrade Catholic affirmations of church tradition and papal interpretations of the Bible. They may affirm that the Christian faith had been expressed through the ages wherever Catholics were baptized or where they observed the Lord’s Supper (“the Mass”) as a second sacrament, where the gospel of Jesus Christ was read, and where it served as the basis of preaching and teaching to summon people to faith and the living of a godly life. The Protestant rejection of so much tradition and its refusal to turn to other authority, led Protestants to put a major, sometimes unique, stress on divine revelation in Scripture (on the interpretation of which the various groups disagreed with each other). One frequent statement of this motif was the authority of sola scriptura (scripture alone).

Second, while Protestants differed from each other in interpreting the scripture, most found in the writings of Paul and classic teachers such as Augustine an accent on divine grace. In this case, the distinctive elements were sola gratia (grace alone) and sola fide (faith alone)—people were saved from sin and from eternal punishment by the graceful and generous action of God, especially through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, in whom they had faith. Catholics, of course, also acknowledged divine initiatives, but in the eyes of Protestants their emphasis on the need to please God through personal merit or works made them subject to Rome, which stipulated exactly how they should acquire merits and which works were beneficial to those who would be saved.

Continuing to baptize and to celebrate the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion, the sacred meal that memorialized Jesus and, most said, was a means of imparting grace among believers, the majority of evangelical Protestants simplified worship. Preaching, singing hymns, and saying prayers became the main features.

Authority and Public Life

Protestants, whose early breakthroughs were often connected with particular nationalist or territorial movements and strivings by political rulers, knew that they had to find ways to promote civil life and instill obedience among populations. Few were ready to go so far as to repudiate existing earthly authority, be it that of emperors, monarchs, princes, or magistrates. Indeed, many of the latter converted to Protestantism and gave protective cover to reformers who were allied with them and who promoted their cause. By 1555 at the Peace of Augsburg, all but the radical reformist Protestant leaders had signed on to a concept that they took for granted: cuius region, eius religio (whoever determined the government of a region stipulated what religion should be favored or have a monopoly).

That halfway stage of reform led many Protestant leaders to adopt a servile attitude to their government, and many clergy became lower-grade civil servants. Dependent upon the government for funds, they were often uncritical of rulers, and Protestant radicals charged that they were replacing the tyranny of the pope with the tyranny of princes. Yet from the beginning, early Protestant witnesses to the value of conscience and of relative autonomy in respect to spiritual choices produced a widespread restlessness that by the middle of the seventeenth century had led to edicts and settlements of toleration in England and elsewhere.

A century later, these protesting impulses and liberated consciences served many Protestants as they teamed up with political thinkers, revolutionaries, and statesmen, to draw a line of distinction between the sphere of religion and the civil authorities—to use the terms of American constitutionalist James Madison—or the separation of church and state, Thomas Jefferson’s term. Such distinguishing and separation became marks of Protestant life in the United States after 1787, and were important instruments in determining Protestant church life when its missionaries founded churches in Asia and Africa, where no form of Christianity became more than a small minority presence.

Not all the external life of Protestant Christians had to do with government and politics. There was also an accent on personal ethics, based on the gospel in ideal circumstances, though many evangelical churches developed laws and nurtured legalistic ethics. As religion and regimes became more independent of each other, the ethic of “faith made active in love” inspired Protestants during and after the eighteenth century to invent many forms of voluntary associational life. Their churches formed groups where leaders and followers could promote charity and reform. The legacy of these inventions in the late eighteenth century, especially in Anglo-America, is evident wherever the Protestants took their efforts to convert people, even on continents where Protestants were never more than a minority presence.

Protestant Phases of Development

The first generations of Protestantism were what sociologist Emile Durkheim called “effervescences,” bubblings-up, hard-to-discipline eruptions, usually marked by the language and life of an outstanding leader. By the second generation such movements, in order to sustain themselves and give an accounting of their ways, saw the rise of definers. Thus in the Church of England, Richard Hooker (1554–1600) brought legal expertise to the drafting of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity. John Calvin, arriving on the scene slightly later on the scene of reform than Luther or Zwingli, was himself a principled systematic theologian and defined the Calvinist or Reformed wing of Protestantism with his Institutes of the Christian Religion. Martin Luther, a man of contradictions who favored paradoxical language, gave place to university systematicians in the seventeenth century, giants of dogmatic expression like Johann Gerhard. The impulse among the second-generation leaders was to reintroduce more legalistic norms and in some cases to adopt the scholastic approach to faith which their predecessors had criticized. This meant that they offered philosophical defenses of the verbal inspiration of the Bible or reasoned apologies for the existence of God and the workings of grace.

Such defining legalism and scholasticism, especially where Protestants were linked with and dependent upon civil authorities, could follow a predictable means toward an unsurprising end. That is, they often appeared to degenerate into desiccated or fossilized forms, inert, incapable of keeping the evangelical spark alive. Such kinds of settlement bred restlessness. Thus, in a third long generation or short century of Protestant life, inspired leaders and movements from within devoted themselves anew to the inner life of the individual prayerful soul, the piety of believers, and the reform of worship. These eighteenth and early nineteenth century movements, concurrently in the reveil in French-speaking lands, the Glaubenserweckung among German speakers, and the “awakening,” “revivalist” or “pietist” movements in the British Isles and the American colonies or young United States, brought forth fresh accents.

Now the concentration was on the personal experience of God acting through the Holy Spirit to lead individuals from indifference or apathy to fervent faith. The converts, once “awakened” or “revived,” were to turn to their reprobate or spiritually lifeless and wicked neighbors and convert them. Then they were to form small groups, often within the established church, as was the case with Jonathan Edwards or George Whitefield, the towering figures in colonial America at mid-century, or with John Wesley, who eventually moved out of the Church of England to form Methodism. In general, these awakened movements matched and fed the democratic spirit of the times and empowered lay people to engage in works of reform and missionary endeavor.

In the nineteenth century, the age of colonialism, such awakened Protestants, moved by the sense that they were advancing the millennium (for Christ’s return to Earth) or promoting human progress through conversion and reform, boarded ships from the British Isles, western European nations, and the United States, and took their gospel to the Middle East, Asia, and the Pacific Island world, sometimes but with less success in Catholic Latin America, and finally to Africa. Most of these evangelical missionary movements date from the 1790s in England and after the 1810s in the United States.

Gifted college graduates, ambitious entrepreneurs, and sacrifice-minded men and women accompanied their message of salvation with efforts to educate heal and then provide physical benefits for the populations they reached. It is easy to connect their moves with colonial and imperial impulses, but without the entrepreneurs and conquerors they could probably not have moved as efficiently as they did. Yet they paid a high price, because anti-colonialism eventually made it necessary for them to distance themselves from many of the Euro-American missionary endeavors—in sub-Saharan Africa, for example. They developed what they thought of as autochthonous Protestant churches—that is, churches rooted in the cultural soil of their new country.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new expression of Protestantism called Pentecostalism broke forth. Pentecostals claimed that their charismatic form of Christianity was as old as the biblical prophets and the New Testament. They believed they were reviving gifts of early Christianity, which had long fallen into disuse. They “spoke in tongues,” for example; they prophesied and claimed miraculous healings. Pentecostalism quickly became a dominant form among Protestant late-arrivals in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Some demographers claimed that over 570 million Protestants, Anglicans, Independents, and sometimes even Roman Catholics were Pentecostal. Having become the dominant form in the emerging world, Pentecostalism seemed ready to become the most prominent form of global Protestantism as the European churches declined in numbers and significance.

One Millennium Ends, Another Begins

Through centuries, Protestantism developed many schools of theology, not least impressively in the twentieth century, long after many cultural observers had expected such fresh flowerings in a secular world. These schools reflected the dominant philosophies of the day, as their ancestral versions had done during periods characterized, for example, by idealism and the Enlightenment. In the same way existentialism, language analysis, phenomenology, and other philosophies inspired Protestant thinkers, usually in university settings, to rework biblical and historic evangelical motifs to meet new challenges. These included coming to terms with whatever industrialization, urbanism, globalization, and humanistic crises brought to people’s lives. Far from fading, as it seemed to be doing in its own heartland, Protestantism in the early twenty-first century represents a confusing, explosive, adaptive force in secular and religiously pluralistic settings. Hard-line reactive Protestant fundamentalists resist adaptations, but their leaders manifest an ability to engage in invention on the ever-changing front of Protestantism.

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