W. Owen Chadwick
Movement that began
in northern Europe in the early 16th century
as a reaction to medieval Roman Catholic doctrines and practices. Along with
Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, Protestantism became one of three
major forces in Christianity. After a series of European religious wars in the
16th and 17th century, and especially in the 19th century, it spread throughout
the world. Wherever Protestantism gained a foothold, it influenced the social,
economic, political, and cultural life of the area.
Origins of Protestantism
The name Protestant
first appeared at the Diet of Speyer in 1529, when the Roman Catholic emperor
of Germany ,
Charles V, rescinded the provision of the Diet of Speyer in 1526 that had
allowed each ruler to choose whether to administer the Edict of Worms. On April
19, 1529, a protest against this decision was read on behalf of 14 free cities
of Germany and six Lutheran princes who declared that the majority decision did
not bind them because they were not a party to it and that if forced to choose
between obedience to God and obedience to Caesar they must choose obedience to
God. They appealed either to a general council of all Christendom or to a synod
of the whole German nation. Those who made this protest became known to their
opponents as Protestants, and gradually the label was applied to all who
adhered to the tenets of the Reformation, especially to those living outside Germany . In Germany the
adherents of the Reformation preferred the name evangelicals and in France Huguenots.
The name was
attached not only to the disciples of Martin Luther (c. 1483–1546) but also to
the Swiss disciples of Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) and later of John Calvin
(1509–64). The Swiss Reformers and their followers in Holland ,
England , and Scotland ,
especially after the 17th century, preferred the name Reformed.
In the 16th century Protestant
referred primarily to the two great schools of thought that arose in the
Reformation, the Lutheran and the Reformed. In England in the early 17th century,
the word was used to denote “orthodox” Protestants as opposed to those who were
regarded by Anglicans as unorthodox, such as the Baptists or the Quakers. Roman
Catholics, however, used it for all who claimed to be Christian but opposed
Catholicism (except the Eastern churches). They therefore included Baptists,
Quakers, and Catholic-minded Anglicans under the term. Before the year 1700
this broad usage was accepted, though the word was not yet applied to
Unitarians. The English Toleration Act of 1689 was entitled “an Act for
exempting their Majesties' Protestant subjects dissenting from the Church of
England.” But the act provided only for the toleration of the opinions known in
England
as “orthodox dissent” and conceded nothing to Unitarians. Throughout the 18th
century the word Protestant was still defined in relation to the
16th-century Reformation.
The context of the late medieval church
The Protestant
Reformation occurred against the background of the rich ferment of the late
medieval church and society. It has been difficult for two reasons to gain a
proper understanding of the relationship between the late Middle Ages and the
Reformation. One reason is the tradition of the sectarian historiography of the
period. Catholic historians had an interest in showing how much reform occurred
before and apart from the activities of the Protestant reformers of the 16th
century. Protestant historians, on the other hand, portrayed the late medieval
church in the most negative terms to show the necessity of the Reformation,
which was characterized as a movement that broke completely with a corrupt
past.
The second reason
for difficulty in understanding the period is that the 15th-century critics of
the church were not “Pre-Reformers”; they neither anticipated Protestantism nor
acquired their importance from the Reformation. The events of that period were
also not “Pre-Reformation” happenings but had an identity and meaning of their
own.
The existence of
reform efforts in the 15th-century church from Spain
and Italy northward through Germany , France ,
and England
has long been acknowledged. Some of these were directed against abuses by the
papacy, the clergy, and monks and nuns. The pious, for example, abhorred Pope
Innocent VIII (1484–92), who performed marriage ceremonies for his own
illegitimate children in the Vatican ,
and Pope Alexander VI (1492–1503), who bribed his way to the throne of St.
Peter and had fathered eight children by three women by the time he became
pope. The public was also increasingly aware of and angered by extravagant
papal projects—patronage of art and architecture, wars of conquest—for which
funds were exacted from the faithful.
The distaste for the
papacy increased at a time of rising nationalist spirit. The popes, who had
long intervened in European political affairs, faced setbacks when European
monarchs acquired new power and asserted it against both the papacy and the
local clergy.
During this time of
rising national consciousness, a generation of theologians appeared who
remained entirely within the context of medieval Roman Catholicism but who
engaged in fundamental criticisms of it. Thus William of Ockham (d. 1349?)
spoke up as a reformer within the Franciscan order, which he hoped to return to
its original strict rule of apostolic poverty. Ockham argued that Pope John
XXII was a heretic because he denied that Jesus and the Apostles were
possessionless. Ockham saw the papacy and empire as independent but related
realms. He believed that when the church was in danger of heresy, lay
people—princes and commoners alike—must come to its rescue. This meant reform.
Another English
theologian, John Wycliffe, also challenged the church's abuse of power and
questioned its doctrines. Wycliffe encouraged reform of the church and its
teachings and granted uncommon spiritual authority to the king. His primary
source of inspiration for reform was the Bible. Wycliffe gave impetus to its
translation, and in 1380 he helped make it available to rulers and ruled alike.
In Bohemia ,
Jan Hus, who became rector of the University
of Prague , used that
school as his base to criticize lax clergy and the recent prohibition of
offering the cup of wine to communicants. He also exploited nationalist
feelings and argued that the pope had no right to use the temporal sword. Hus's
bold accusations were judged heretical and led to his death by burning at the
Council of Constance in 1415.
Alongside a piety
that combined moral revulsion with nationalism, Christian humanism was a
further sign of unrest in the late medieval church. In Italy Lorenzo Valla
(1407–57) used philology and historical inquiry to expose a number of
forgeries, including the Donation of Constantine, which purportedly granted
control over the Western Roman Empire to the pope. In Germany Johannes Reuchlin
(1455–1522) studied Greek and Hebrew, the biblical languages, and was involved
in an international controversy that pitted intellectual freedom against
ecclesiastical authority. Desiderius Erasmus (1466/69–1536), the most famous
and important of the Northern or Christian humanists, used his vast learning
and his satiric pen to question the practices of the church. Because of his
philosophy of Christ, which stressed a focus on the Bible and rejected much
medieval superstition, Erasmus, a lifelong Catholic, was accused of laying the
egg that hatched Luther.
While these
reformers attacked people in high places, they also regarded the Catholicism of
ordinary people as needing reform. Such practices as pilgrims visiting shrines
or parishioners regarding the relics of saints with awe were open to abuse. The
pestilences and plagues of the 14th century had bred an inordinate fear of
death, which led to the exploitation of simple people by a church that was, in
effect, offering salvation for sale.
Despite instances of
anticlericalism and polemics against the church, most of the faithful remained
loyal and found the church to be the vehicle of their eternal salvation.
Nothing is more erroneous than the notion that, early in the 16th century, Europe was ripe for a reform of the church.
Martin E. Marty
The continental Reformation: Germany , Switzerland , and France
The role of Luther
Luther said that
what differentiated him from previous reformers was that they attacked the life
of the church, while he confronted its doctrine. Whereas they denounced the
sins of churchmen, he was disillusioned by the whole scholastic scheme of
redemption. The church taught that man could atone for his sins through
confession and absolution in the sacrament of penance. Luther found that he
could not remember or even recognize all of his sins, and the attempt to
dispose of them one by one was like trying to cure smallpox by picking off the
scabs. Indeed, he believed that the whole man was sick. The church, however,
held that the individual was not so sick that salvation could not be earned
through faith and good works.
The indulgence system
The church's
anthropology and soteriology (doctrine of salvation) allowed a system of
indulgences to develop. Based on the notion that Jesus and the saints had built
up a treasury of merit that could be shared with worthy Christians, the
indulgence at first applied only to penalties imposed by the church on earth.
One of the earliest examples of this practice was Pope Urban II's grant of a plenary
indulgence to the knights of the First Crusade. Over time the benefits of the
indulgence were expanded to include penalties imposed by God in purgatory, and
ultimately the means of acquiring an indulgence were so diluted that one could
be purchased. The granting of indulgences proved to be a popular way of raising
money for the church particularly because, unlike tithes, it was voluntary. By
this means crusades, cathedrals, hospitals, and even bridges were financed. In
Luther's day immediate release from purgatory was offered, and the remission
not only of penalties but even of sins was assured. Thus the indulgence
encroached upon the sacrament of penance.
Luther was
desperately earnest about his standing before God and Christ. The woodcuts of
Christ the Judge on a rainbow consigning the damned to hell filled Luther with
terror. He believed the monastic life was the best way to acquire the extra
merits that would more than balance his account. Becoming a monk, he subjected
himself to rigorous asceticism, but he felt that this effort would not enable a
sinner like him to stand before the inexorable justice and majesty of God.
Frequent confession simply convinced him of the fundamental sickness of the
whole person, which caused him to question the goodness of a God who would make
human beings so weak and then damn them for what they could not help. Relief
for Luther came through the study of the Psalms, particularly the 22nd Psalm,
which contains Christ's words quoted on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast
thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46, Mark 15:34). Evidently, Christ, who was
without sin, so identified himself with sinful humanity that he felt estranged
from God. Christ the Judge seated upon the rainbow had become Christ the
Derelict upon the cross, and here the wrath and the mercy of God could find a
meeting point that allowed God to forgive those utterly devoid of merit. He
could justify the unjust, and humanity need only accept the gift of God in
faith. This doctrine of justification by faith alone became the watchword of
the Reformation.
The formulation of
Luther's doctrine of justification by faith alone coincided with the expansion
of his own duties. He had become professor of the newly founded University of Wittenberg and a vicar in his order with
pastoral duties over 11 houses. At the same time, the new archbishop of Mainz,
Albert, initiated the sale of indulgences—feverishly hawked by the Dominican
Johann Tetzel—with half of the proceeds to be retained by him as reimbursement
for his installation fee as archbishop, the other half to go to the pope to
fund the building of the Basilica of St. Peter's at Rome. For this indulgence
Albert made unprecedented claims. If the indulgence were on behalf of the donor
himself, he would receive preferential treatment in case of future sin, if for
someone else already in purgatory, he need not be contrite for his own sin.
Remission was promised not only of penalties but also of sins, and the vendor
of the indulgences offered immediate release from purgatory. Luther was
outraged by the sale of indulgences and claims made for them. His doctrine of
justification not only was critical of the abuse of the doctrine of indulgences
but denied the very idea that humans could earn salvation.
Ninety-five Theses
Against the actions
of Albert and Tetzel and with no intention to divide the church, Luther
launched his Ninety-five Theses on October 31, 1517. In the theses he presented
three main points. The first concerned financial abuses; for example, if the
pope realized the poverty of the German people, he would rather that St.
Peter's lay in ashes than that it should be built out of the “skin, flesh, and
bones of his sheep.” The second focused attention on doctrinal abuses; for
example, Luther argued that the pope had no jurisdiction over purgatory and if
he did, he should empty the place free of charge. The third attacked religious
abuses; for example, the treasury of the merits of the saints was denied by
implication in the assertion that the treasury of the church was the gospel.
This was the crucial point. When the papacy pronounced Luther's position
heretical, he countered by denying the infallibility of popes and for good
measure that of councils also. Scripture was declared the only basis of
authority.
Luther found support
in many quarters. Already a widespread liberal Catholic evangelical reform
sought to correct moral abuses such as clerical concubinage, financial
extortion, and pluralism (i.e., the holding of several ecclesiastical benefices
by one man). He also ridiculed the popular superstitions associated with the
cult of the saints and their relics, religious pilgrimages, and the like. This
movement had representatives throughout Europe, notably John Colet in England , Jacques Lefèvre in France, Francisco
Jiménez de Cisneros in Spain ,
Juan de Valdés in Naples ,
and, above all, Erasmus. Although he would come to oppose Luther, in 1519
Erasmus wrote to the elector Frederick III the Wise, Luther's prince, telling
him that as a Christian ruler he was obligated to see to it that his subject
should have a fair hearing.
Yet despite this,
Luther would have been speedily crushed had Pope Leo X and the curia not been
over zealous in silencing the putative heretic. Leo's difficulties were
worsened by the contemporary political situation. At the moment when Luther
appeared to be foredoomed, an election for the office of Holy Roman emperor was
pending, and Henry VIII of England ,
Francis I of France, and Charles I of Spain were all candidates for the
office. The pope opposed all three because the position entailed control over Germany , and
the augmentation of power to one would destroy the balance of power. Instead he
preferred a minor prince, and none fitted the role better than Luther's
protector, Frederick the Wise of Saxony. In consequence the pope dallied in his
response to Luther, and even after Charles was elected, the pope was willing to
play Frederick
against the new emperor. Finally, on June 15, 1520, nearly three years after
the Ninety-five Theses, Leo issued the bull Exsurge Domine (“Arise, O
Lord”), which condemned Luther's teachings on 41 counts. Luther burned a copy
of the bull in Wittenberg ,
declaring his action a trifle and that the pope and papal see should be burned.
Luther's manifesto
Luther employed the
summer of 1520 to bring out some of the great manifestos of the Reformation.
His Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation called upon
the ruling class in Germany ,
including the emperor, in whom Luther had not yet lost confidence, to reform
the church externally by returning it to apostolic poverty and simplicity. This
appeal to the civil power to reform the church was a return to the earlier
practice of the Middle Ages when emperors more than once had deposed and
replaced unworthy popes. Luther also argued that the papacy of his day was only
400 years old, meaning that it was the Gregorian reform that had extended the
church's jurisdiction into secular and political matters and had asserted that
the lowliest priest did more for mankind than the loftiest king. Luther
countered with the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, including
Christian magistrates. Any layman was spiritually a priest, though not
vocationally a parson. The Christian ruler, then, being himself a priest, could
reform the church in externals, as the church might excommunicate him in
spirituals. The liberal Catholic reformers could sympathize with Luther's
program except for its identification of the papacy with Antichrist, which
recalled the accusations of medieval heretics.
Another tract, The
Babylonian Captivity of the Church, suggested that the sacraments
themselves had been taken captive by the church. Luther even went so far as to
reduce the number of the sacraments from seven—baptism, the Eucharist or mass,
penance, confirmation, ordination, marriage, and extreme unction—to two. He
defined a sacrament as a rite instituted by Christ himself as revealed in
Scripture; therefore only baptism and the Eucharist were strictly sacraments,
and penance and the other traditional sacraments were either dropped or their
definitions were altered. For example, extreme unction was dropped, but
confession, which Luther thought was wholesome, was preserved as a voluntary
act that could be made to any fellow Christian. Marriage, on the other hand,
was not a Christian sacrament, because it had not been instituted by Christ but
by God in the garden of Eden and was valid not only for Christians but also for
Muslims and Jews. Baptism was to be administered but once and to infants on the
grounds of their dormant faith.
Luther's greatest
offense, however, concerned his teachings on the mass. The wine, he asserted,
should be given to the laity along with the bread, as in the Hussite practice.
No masses should be said for the dead by a priest alone without communicants,
because the Eucharist involved fellowship not only with Christ but also with
believers. The most drastic change, however, was that Luther denied the
doctrine of transubstantiation, according to which, during the performance of
the rite of communion by a priest, the elements of bread and wine, though
retaining their accidents (i.e., appearance) of colour, shape, and taste, lost
their substance, which was replaced by the substance of the body of Christ. He
rejected transubstantiation because he believed it was an opinion developed by
medieval theologians and was not revealed in Scripture.
Luther taught the
doctrine of consubstantiation, though he never used that term. He believed that
the Lord's Supper was one of the central mysteries of the faith and that the
body of Christ was physically present in the communion offering because Christ
said, “This is my body.” Therefore, Christ's body must be “with, in, and under”
the elements of the offering. The bread and wine, however, do not change their
substance, and, for Luther, there was no miracle of the mass in which the
priest was thought to alter the substance of the sacrifice. This view undercut
sacerdotalism, which emphasized the intermediary role of the priest between God
and humankind, since the words of the priest did not bring the body of Christ
to the altar. The undercutting of sacerdotalism destroyed the hierarchical
structure of a church that culminated in the papacy.
Diet of Worms
But what was to be
done with Luther? On December 10, 1520, instead of submitting, he defiantly
burned the papal bull together with a copy of the canon law. The normal course
would have been to excommunicate him (which indeed occurred on January 2, 1521)
and then turn him over to the political authorities for execution, but Frederick the Wise
insisted that he be given a fair hearing. Consequently, the diet of the empire
(not an ecclesiastical council), meeting at Worms in the winter and spring of 1521 would
hear his case. Luther was brought before the diet and given an opportunity to
repudiate his books and recant his teachings. He did neither and gave a long
speech, in German and Latin, defending his ideas. When asked for a simple
answer he replied: “I will answer without horns and without teeth. Unless I am
convicted by Scripture and plain reason—I do not accept the authority of popes
and councils, for they have contradicted each other—my conscience is captive to
the Word of God, I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against
conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me. Amen.” The emperor then
placed Luther under the imperial ban. The bull of excommunication by the church
was formally released only later. Frederick
the Wise at this point intervened and wafted Luther away to a place of hiding.
Luther was concealed
for a year at Frederick 's
castle of the Wartburg. During this period he produced one of his most
important works, a translation of the New Testament from the Greek text of
Erasmus into an idiomatic and powerful German that contributed greatly to the
shape of the modern language. Nothing did so much to win popular adherence to
his teaching as the dissemination of this translation.
But some were not so
convinced. Many of the liberal Catholic reformers, like Erasmus, recoiled from
Luther's paradoxes, from his confidence that his interpretation of Scripture
was correct, from his acceptance of the doctrine of predestination, which makes
of God a tyrant when he elects some and damns others regardless of their
behaviour. The German national movement collapsed. Then in Luther's own circle,
variant forms of Protestantism arose, which in the aggregate are variously
described as the left wing of the Reformation or as the radical Reformation.
The terminology does not matter so much as the recognition that no neat
classification is possible.
Radical reformers related to Luther's reform
Luther's impact on
his contemporaries was profound, particularly on two figures whose activities
anticipated many developments to come. One was Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt
(c. 1477/81–1541), who believed that art and music should be abolished as
external aids to religion and that the presence of Christ's body on the altar
should be interpreted in a spiritual sense. He extended Luther's doctrine of
the priesthood of all believers to mean that all laymen were pastors.
Accordingly, if one person was assigned the tasks of a parson, he was to dress
no differently than other parishioners and, like others, should work with his
hands. Moreover, the clergy was not only permitted to marry but required to do
so. The sabbath was to be strictly observed. This program, involving a blend of
spiritualism and legalism, anticipated the Puritan movement. The sensory aids
to religion were to be discarded by those advanced in the spiritual life and by
law snatched away from those still weak.
A much more
disquieting figure than Karlstadt was Thomas Müntzer (c. 1490–1525), a man of
learning and an apocalyptic firebrand, who may be regarded as the first
formulator of the concept of the Protestant Holy Commonwealth. Unlike Luther,
with whom he was first associated, Müntzer believed that the elect, those
predestined by God for salvation, could be sufficiently identified to form a
distinct group. Müntzer's test was the new birth in the spirit. Recognizing
that among the wheat there might be some chaff, however, he did not regard the
test as an absolute determinant. Rather he accepted it as an adequate trial for
the formation of a community bound together by a covenant. The mission of this
group was to set up the Kingdom of God on Earth, the Holy Commonwealth ,
by wiping out the ungodly, often identified with the rich and powerful. In the
attempt they would have to endure suffering, and here Müntzer drew from German
mysticism the theme of walking in Christ's steps toward the cross. But the
trial would end in triumph, for the Lord Jesus would speedily come to vindicate
his saints and erect his Kingdom.
Müntzer appealed to
the Saxon princes to implement his program, but they banished him. He found a following
among the rebels of the German Peasants' Revolt (1524–25) and led them at the
Battle of Frankenhausen, where they were butchered, and he was captured and
beheaded. Luther execrated Müntzer's memory because he seized the sword in
defense of the gospel and challenged the social order. Some Marxists, on the
other hand, later exalted Müntzer as the prophet of social revolution because
he was the only one of the Reformers who had a deep feeling for the suffering
of the socially oppressed. In grasping the sword he did not essentially differ
from Huldrych Zwingli, Gaspard de Coligny, or Oliver Cromwell—three other
militaristic Protestants.
Zwingli and his influence
Zwingli (1484–1531),
the great figure in Swiss Protestantism before Calvin, was more committed to
military action than Müntzer and died in battle. He became a Reformer
independently of Luther, with whom he agreed concerning justification by faith
and predestination, but with whom he disagreed concerning the rite of
communion. The Lord's Supper was understood by Zwingli simply as a memorial to
Christ's death and as a public declaration of faith by the recipient. Zwingli,
in fact, denied that Christ was present in the bread and wine of communion and
thus rejected the teachings of both Luther and the Roman Catholic church.
Although Luther, Zwingli, and others met at Marburg in 1529 to resolve their differences,
they could not find common ground on the doctrine of the Lord's Supper. Luther
and Zwingli's failure to create a unified front among Protestants at the
meeting had fatal consequences for Zwingli.
His other teachings
reveal further differences but also similarities with the other Reformers.
Zwingli drew from Erasmus and Karlstadt, notably from their disparagement of
the sensory aids to religion. Zwingli, though an accomplished musician,
considered that the function of music was to put the babies to sleep rather
than to worship God. Consequently, the organ was dismantled and the holy images
removed from the cathedral at Zürich. Like Luther, Zwingli retained the baptism
of infants, a rite that he believed recognized that the child belongs to the
people of God just as the child in the Hebrew Bible belonged by circumcision to
Israel .
Analogy with Judaism applied at many points because Zwingli, like many before
him, regarded the Christian congregation as the new Israel of God, an elect
people, reasonably identifiable not by the new birth Müntzer anticipated but by
adherence to the faith. This company could be called theocratic in the sense
that it was under the rule of God, whom church and state should alike serve in
close collaboration. The identification of the whole populace of Zürich with
this elect people was the more tenable because those not in accord with the
ideal were disposed to leave. Zwingli approved of an aggressive war to
forestall interference from the Roman Catholic cantons. In 1531, he fell in the
second war of Kappel but left an important legacy, especially for the group who
formed the mainstay of the radical Reformation.
The Anabaptists
The radicals
restricted their biblicism to the New Testament and espoused three tenets that
have come to be axiomatic in the United States : the separation of
church and state, the voluntary church, and religious liberty. They called
themselves Baptists but were called Anabaptists by their enemies because they
were accused of rebaptizing adults. They believed, however, that immersion of
infants was not true baptism because the rite itself was not regenerative but
the outward sign of an inner experience—the rebirth in the spirit—of which only
an adult was capable. The Anabaptists also believed in the possibility of a
Christian society whose members were marked both by the conversion experience
and by a highly disciplined deportment. In obedience to the New Testament, they
repudiated swearing oaths and recourse to violence, whether at the behest of a
magistrate or in war, respectively. The saints, they believed, should withdraw
from the wicked world.
The Anabaptist
program was perceived as a threat to the social and political order by
Catholics and Protestants alike. The Diet of Speyer in 1529, for example,
subjected the Anabaptists to the penalty of death with the concurrence of
Catholics and Lutherans. One of the first Anabaptist leaders, Felix Manz, was drowned
in Zürich in 1527, and persecution eliminated other Anabaptist leaders, most of
them educated and moderate men, over the next decade. Less temperate spirits
came to the fore, sustaining their courage by setting dates for the speedy
coming of the Lord. One band of Anabaptists filled with apocalyptic zeal and
led by John of Leiden, gained control of the town of Münster
in Westphalia in 1534. Contrary to the
pacifist tenets of their fellows, they seized the sword and, in accord with Old
Testament practice, they restored polygamy. The town was captured by an army of
Catholics and Lutherans who executed the leaders and publicly exhibited their
bodies in iron cages hung from the tower
of St. Lambert 's Church.
Other groups
In Holland Menno
Simonsz (c. 1496–1561), the founder of the Mennonites, returned to the original
Anabaptist teachings and repudiated violence, polygamy, and the setting of
dates for the coming of the Lord. The Mennonites survived partly by acceding to
military service in Holland , partly by migration
first to eastern Europe and then to the Americas . The Hutterites, followers
of Jakob Hutter (died 1536), were allowed to establish themselves on the
estates of tolerant Moravian nobles who accepted excellent craftsmanship in
field and shop in lieu of military service. Because of subsequent persecution
the Hutterites also migrated to the New World .
The Swiss branch, called the Amish, still survives in the United States .
The entire pattern of ideas has reappeared in various combinations in
subsequent history, not only among the Church of the Brethren and the Quakers
but among all of the free churches disclaiming a state connection.
The role of Calvin
Another form of
Protestantism was Calvinism, named for John Calvin (1509–64), a French humanist
and doctor of law whose conversion to the Protestant reform forced him to flee France . In Basel , at the age of 27,
he published Institutes of the Christian Religion, which in successive
editions became the manual of Protestant theology. Calvin agreed with Luther on
justification by faith and the sole authority of Scripture. On the sacrament of
the Lord's Supper he took a position between the radical Swiss and the Lutheran
view. Thus he believed that the body of Christ was not present everywhere, but
that His spirit was universal and that there was a genuine communion with the
risen Lord. Calvin likewise took a middle view on music and art. He favoured
congregational singing of the Psalms, which became a characteristic practice of
the Huguenots in France and
the Presbyterians in Scotland
and the New World . Calvin rejected the images
of saints and the crucifix (that is, the body of Christ upon the cross) but
allowed a plain cross. These modifications do not, however, refute the
generalization that Calvinism was largely opposed to art and music in the
service of religion but not in the secular sphere.
In contrast to
Luther, Calvin began his Institutes not with justification by faith but
with the knowledge of God. Luther found refuge from the terror of God's
dispensations in the mercy of Christ. Calvin could more calmly contemplate the
frightfulness of God's judgments because they would not descend upon the elect.
Luther, as noted, saw no way of knowing who were the elect. He could not be
sure of himself and throughout his life struggled for faith and assurance.
Calvin had certain approximate and attainable tests. He did not require the
experience of the new birth, which is so inward and intangible, though to be
sure later Calvinism moved away from him on this point and agonized over the
signs of election. For Calvin there were three tests: the profession of faith,
as with Zwingli; a rigorously disciplined Christian deportment, as with the
Anabaptists; and a love of the sacraments, which meant the Lord's Supper, since
infant baptism was not to be repeated. If a person could meet these three tests
he could assume his election and stop worrying.
If one could achieve
such assurance, an enormous release of energy could be directed to the glory of
God and the erection on Earth of a holy commonwealth. Calvin once observed that
“the Church reformed is the kingdom
of God .” He saw more of a
possibility of its realization through the efforts of the elect because service
to the Kingdom did not require a particular vocation. Any worthy occupation is
a divine calling demanding unremitting zeal. Luther had emphasized the secular
callings instead of the monastic, which in the Middle Ages alone had been
called a vocation. With Calvin the point was not so much that one should accept
one's lot and rejoice in the assigned task, however menial, as that the work
would contribute to the larger realization of the Christian society.
Calvin had a
concrete opportunity to realize his vision. The city of Geneva
had recently thrown off the authority of the bishop and of the duke of Savoy and had not yet
joined the Protestant Swiss Confederation. The Protestant city of Bern , Geneva 's ally in the
struggle for independence, was the source of Protestant preachers who
evangelized Geneva .
The city was threatened by civil war. The bellicose preacher Guillaume Farel,
unable himself to contain the violence he had helped to unleash, laid hold of
Calvin, who was merely passing through the city, and impressed him into the
unwelcome task of leadership. After several turbulent years, banishment, and
recall, Calvin directed for the last two decades of his life the city that John
Knox considered “the most godly since the days of the apostles.”
Attempts to achieve
independence had been made by Protestant churches in Basel
and Strasbourg
but had failed. In Geneva ,
the goal was made more attainable, despite the turmoil, by the establishment of
control over the composition of the population. At the outset all the Catholics
who would not submit to the new regime had to leave. For those who remained,
excommunication from the church meant banishment from the city. Calvin ensured
that one who was not in the graces of the church could not for long be a member
of the community. A further factor ensuring a select constituency was the
influx of 6,000 refugees from France ,
Italy , Spain , and, for a time, from England into a
city of 13,000. Thus in Geneva ,
church, state, and community came to be one. The ministers and the magistrates
with differentiated functions were both the servants of God in the erection of
this new Israel; and the comparison with ancient Israel was the more striking
and the inner cohesion the more intensified because Geneva also was begirt by
foes, the duke of Savoy and the duke of Alba, like the old Canaanites and Philistines.
Calvinism in France
The situation in France was not altogether unlike that in Germany .
Although the decentralization of government was not as great, some French
provinces enjoyed considerable autonomy, particularly in the south, and it was
in the Midi and French Navarre that the
Protestant movement had its initial strength. Then, too, noble houses were
continually conspiring to manipulate or eviscerate the monarchy, and, as a
result, religious issues came to be intertwined with political ambitions. The
ruling houses—first the Valois from Francis I
through Henry III and then the Bourbon, beginning with Henry IV—sought to
secure the stability of the land and the throne by quelling sectarian strife
either by the extermination or toleration of religious minorities.
The ground was
better prepared for the reform of the church in France
than in Germany
because of the efforts of the Catholic scholar Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples and
the bishop of Meaux, Guillaume Briçonnet, and others. King Francis I and his sister
Margaret of Angoulême not infrequently intervened to save humanist reformers
from the menaces of the obscurantists, and Margaret's daughter, Jeanne
d'Albret, the queen of Navarre ,
a feudatory of France ,
provided an asylum for the persecuted in her domain, though she did not herself
espouse the Huguenot cause until 1560. When Lutheran teaching first began to
infiltrate France, Francis I, who would not abet heresy, fluctuated in his
policy of repression, depending on whether he desired a political alliance with
the pope, the Ottoman Turks, or the German Lutherans. The year 1534
precipitated a crisis when placards were posted in Paris savagely attacking the mass. Severe
repression followed. Bishop Briçonnet made his submission. Farel fled to Geneva , Lefèvre to Strasbourg ,
and Calvin to Basel .
Henry II, the son of Francis, intensified repression, particularly when France and Spain made peace in 1559 and thus
were free to devote attention to the suppression of heresy at home. The
persecution of the Huguenots, as the Protestants came to be called in France , would
have been intense save for the death of the king in a tournament.
At this point the
rivalry of the noble houses injected itself more overtly into the religious
struggle. The crown, with its alternating policy of eradication or recognition,
was flanked by two extreme houses, the Catholic House of Guise and the Huguenot
family of Admiral Coligny, for whom the religious issue was of intense concern.
Under Francis II the Guises were ascendant because the queen, Mary (later queen
of Scots) was of that house. Some of the Huguenots, foreseeing the suppression
in store, hatched the Conspiracy of Amboise, an attempted assassination of the
leaders of the Guise party and transfer of power to the House of Bourbon.
This was plainly
rebellion and acutely raised a problem with which Protestants had long been
wrestling. The Lutherans had to face it earlier when the Diet of Augsburg in
1530 gave them a year in which to submit on pain of war. The Lutheran princes
then formed the Schmalkaldic League to resist arms with arms, but Luther was
loath to condone any use of the sword in defense of the Gospel and absolutely
forbade any recourse to violence on the part of a private citizen against the
magistrates. This had been his reason for opposing the Peasants' War. But now
the jurists pointed out to Luther that the emperor was an elected ruler and
that if he transgressed against the true religion he might be held to account
by the electors, who also were magistrates. Thus arose the doctrine of the
right of resistance of the lower magistrate against the higher. The concept
lost its pertinence in Germany
after the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, which granted toleration to the Lutherans
in the territories where they predominated. Minorities in Lutheran and Catholic
lands were granted the right of migration without loss of goods.
But the Calvinists
were not included in the peace, which had no legal bearing in France , and the
problem of armed resistance again became acute. Calvin would not condone the
Conspiracy of Amboise because it was not led by a lower magistrate. The term
was now applied to the princes of the blood in line for succession to the
throne. This meant the House of Bourbon. The Conspiracy of Amboise failed.
Francis II died, and was succeeded by his brother, the young Charles IX. The
queen mother, Catherine de Médicis, took the lead and sought to avert religious
war by granting the Huguenots limited toleration in restricted areas in the
edict of 1562. When François, duc de Guise, discovered the Huguenots worshiping
outside the prescribed limits, as he claimed, he opened fire, setting off the
Massacre of Vassy and the wars. The Huguenots now were led by a prince of the
blood, Louis I, 1st prince de Condé, of the House of Bourbon. Calvin approved.
There followed three inconclusive wars. Condé was killed in the first and
François, duc de Guise, was assassinated. His son, Henri, who succeeded him as
the duke of Guise, believed in the complicity of Coligny, the new leader of the
Huguenots. At the end of 10 years of indecisive conflict, Catherine made
another effort at a settlement to be cemented by the marriage of Henry of
Navarre, a Bourbon, the son of Jeanne d'Albret and the hope of the Huguenots,
and her own daughter Margaret (Marguerite de Valois), a Catholic. The leaders
of all parties came to Paris
for the wedding. The duke of Guise made an attempt on the life of Coligny,
which failed. Then the Guise, with the connivance of Catherine and her son
Charles, who panicked, tried to wipe out all of the leaders of the Huguenot
party in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day in August 1572. Other massacres
followed in the provinces.
Charles IX was
succeeded by his brother, Henry III, two years later (1574). Such was the
revulsion against the massacre that the king could rule only by forming an
alliance with the Huguenot Henry of Navarre. A fanatical Catholic was thereby
so outraged that he assassinated the king. Both sides had abandoned the fiction
of the inferior magistrate and had gone in unabashedly for popular revolution.
Henry of Navarre became Henry IV, but he was unable to take Paris
and rule France
so long as he was a Protestant. In order to pacify the land he made his
submission to Rome
and promulgated an edict of toleration for the Huguenots, the Edict of Nantes,
in 1598. It gave them liberty of worship again in limited areas but full rights
of participation in public life. The edict remained in force until the
revocation in 1685.
The Reformation in England and Scotland
Henry VIII and the separation from Rome
In the meantime the
Reformation had taken hold in England .
The beginning there was political rather than religious, a quarrel between the
king and the pope of the sort that had occurred in the Middle Ages without
resulting in a permanent schism and might not have in this instance save for
the overall European situation. The dispute had its root in the assumption that
the king was a national stallion expected to provide an heir to the throne. England did not have the Salic law, which in France forbade female succession, but England had
just emerged from a prolonged civil war, the Wars of the Roses, and the new
dynasty needed a male heir to maintain its hold on the throne and to prevent
the resumption of civil war. Catherine of Aragon, the queen of Henry VIII, had
borne him numerous children of whom only one survived, the princess Mary, and
more were not to be expected. The ordinary procedure in such a case was to
discover some flaw in the marriage that would allow an annulment or a divorce.
In this instance the flaw was not difficult to find, because Catherine had been
married to Henry's brother Arthur, and canon law, following the prohibition in
the book of Leviticus (20:21), forbade the marriage of a man with his deceased
brother's widow. At the time of the marriage the pope, Julius II, had given a
dispensation to cover this infraction of the rule. The question now was whether
the pope had the authority to dispense from the divine law. Catherine said
there had been no need for a dispensation because her marriage to Arthur had
not been consummated and there had been no impediment to her marriage to Henry.
The knot would have been cut by some casuistry had Catherine not been the aunt
of Emperor Charles V, who was not prepared to see her cast aside in favour of
another wife. Clement VII, wishing neither to provoke the emperor nor to
alienate the king, dallied so long that Henry took the matter into his own
hands, repudiated papal authority, and in 1534 set up the independent Church of
England, with the king as the supreme head. The spiritual head was the
archbishop of Canterbury ,
Thomas Cranmer, who married Henry to Anne Boleyn. She bore the princess
Elizabeth, and still another wife, Jane Seymour, bore the future Edward VI.
Henry's basic
concern was political, but the alterations in the structure of the church gave
scope for a reformation that was religious in character. Part of the impulse
came from the survivals of Lollardy, part from the Lutheran movement on the
Continent, and even more from the Christian humanism represented by Erasmus.
Although Henry retained much Catholic doctrine, especially transubstantiation,
and ecclesiastical organization, he did introduce important changes, including
the suppression of the monasteries, the introduction of the Bible in the
vernacular in the parish churches, and permission to the clergy to marry,
though this last reform was later revoked. The resistance to Henry's program
was not formidable, and the executions resulting were not numerous. Henry was
impartial in burning some Lutherans who would not submit to his later
reactionary legislation and toward some Catholics who would not accept the
royal supremacy over the church, notably John Fisher and Thomas More.
On his ascension to
the throne in 1547, young Edward VI was hailed as England 's
Josiah, the young 7th-century-BC king of Judah who enforced the Deuteronomic
reform. Edward, it was held, would rid the land of idolatry so that England might
be blessed. Protestantism advanced rapidly during his reign through the
systematic reformation of doctrine, worship, and discipline—the three external
marks of the true church. A reformed confession of faith and a prayer book were
adopted, but the reformation of the ecclesiastical laws that would have defined
the basis of discipline was blocked by the nobility in Parliament.
The death of Edward
and England 's return to
Roman Catholicism in 1553 under Queen Mary was interpreted by Protestants as
God's judgment that England
had not taken the Reformation seriously enough. Many, including Cranmer, died
as martyrs to the Protestant cause, and others fled to the European continent.
Those in exile experimented with more radical forms of worship and discipline,
and published material justifying rebellion against an idolatrous ruler. Exiles
also produced two large volumes of incalculable consequence for English
religious thought, John Foxe's Actes and Monuments, popularly known as The
Book of Martyrs, and the Geneva Bible. The most popular books in England for
many years after their publication, they provided a view of the country as an
elect nation chosen by God to bring the power of the Antichrist (understood to
be the pope) to an end.
Elizabeth I, assumed
the throne in 1558 and was hailed as the glorious Deborah (a 12th-century-BC
Israelite leader), the “restorer of Israel .” She did not, however,
restore it far enough for some English Protestants, particularly the Puritans.
Indeed, she distrusted the challenge to authority and feared the disorder that
either extreme evangelical zeal or extreme Catholic zeal could cause. Two
statutes promulgated in her first year—the Act of Supremacy, stating that the
queen was “supreme governor” of the Church of England, and the Act of
Uniformity, ensuring that English worship should follow The Book of Common
Prayer—defined the nature of the English religious establishment. In 1563
the church's primary legislative body, the Convocations of Canterbury and York,
defined standard doctrine in the Thirty-nine Articles, but attempts to reform
the prayer book further and to produce a reformed discipline failed. Defeated
in the convocation, the reformers came to rely more on Parliament, where they
could always depend on strong support.
The role of John Knox
In Scotland the
Reformation is associated with the name of John Knox, who declared that one
celebration of the mass is worse than a cup of poison. He faced the very real
threat that Mary, Queen of Scots, would do for Scotland
what Mary Tudor had done for England .
Therefore Knox defied her in person on matters of religion and, though a
commoner, addressed her as if he were all Scotland . He very nearly was,
because in the period prior to 1560 many an obscure evangelist had converted
much of the lowlands to the religion of John Calvin. The church had been given
a Presbyterian structure, culminating in a General Assembly, which had actually
as great and perhaps a greater influence than the Parliament. Because of her
follies, and very probably her crimes (complicity in the murder of her husband),
Mary had to seek asylum in England .
There she became the focus of plots on the life of Elizabeth until Parliament decreed her
execution. Presbyterianism was established in Scotland ,
making possible the union of Scotland
with England .
Knox is frequently reproached
for his intolerance regarding the celebration of mass, but one must remember
that the year 1560 marked the peak of polarization between the confessions.
Similar intolerance had been mounting at Rome .
Paul III, after an abortive attempt at reform, had introduced the Roman
Inquisition in 1542. His successor, Paul IV, placed everything that Erasmus had
ever written on the Index. The Council of Trent began sitting in 1545,
introducing rigidity in dogma and austerity in morals. The Protestant views of justification
by faith alone, the Lord's Supper, and the propriety of clerical marriage were
sharply rejected. All deviation within the Catholic fold was rigidly
suppressed. When Carranza, the archbishop of Toledo ,
returned to Spain in 1559,
after assisting Mary in the restoration of Catholicism in England , he
arrived in time for the last great auto-da-fé of the Lutherans. Under suspicion
for ideas no more heretical than those of Erasmus, he was incarcerated for 17
years in the prison of the Inquisition. The liberal cardinal Giovanni Morone
was imprisoned during the pontificate of Paul IV, and under Pius V, Pietro
Carnesecchi, an Erasmian and one-time secretary of Clement VII, was burned in Rome . Knox and Pope Pius
V represent the acme of divergence between the confessions.
Roland H. Bainton
James C. Spalding
The rise of Puritanism
Origins
Puritanism first
emerged as a distinct movement in a controversy over clerical vestments and
liturgical practices during the reign of Elizabeth .
Immediately following the Elizabethan Settlement, Protestant clergy could,
within reason, choose what to wear while leading worship. Many preachers took
this opportunity to do away with the formal attire as well as other practices
traditionally associated with the Roman Catholic mass. In 1564, however, Elizabeth demanded that Matthew Parker, the archbishop of Canterbury , enforce
uniformity in the liturgy. He did so somewhat reluctantly with the publication
of his Advertisements in 1566. Those who refused to wear the prescribed
garb were mockingly called “Puritans” or “precisians” for their unwillingness
to submit in these seemingly minor points to the supremacy of the queen.
The form of church
government was a second controversial issue among Elizabethan Protestants. In
1570 Thomas Cartwright (1535–1603) delivered a series of lectures at the University of Cambridge proposing that presbyterian
government, or government by local councils of clergy and laity, might be an
improvement over the current system of archbishops, bishops, and appointments.
Cartwright was dismissed for his opinions and fled to Geneva . Two years later John Field and Thomas
Wilcox anonymously published an Admonition to the Parliament, which
pushed Cartwright's ideas even further. In reply John Whitgift, the vice-chancellor
at Cambridge ,
maintained that the government of the church should be suited to the government
of the state and that episcopal government best suited monarchy. In this
dispute most Puritans shied away from extremes and supported some form of
episcopacy, but a small number went beyond even Cartwright and Field in seeking
to effect immediately a “reformation without tarrying for any.” These
Separatists, such as Robert Browne (d. 1633), broke with the established parish
system to set up voluntary congregations that covenanted with God and with
themselves, chose ministers by common consent, and put into practice the
Puritan marks of the true church.
The leaders of the
Puritan movement, however, including Cartwright (who had returned to England in
1585) and Field, repudiated the Separatists and sought to set up
“presbyterianism in episcopacy,” or a “church within the church.” This
compromise between presbyterianism and episcopacy was preferred by the most
prominent Puritans, who instituted a system of informal public meetings of
clergy and laity, called “prophesyings,” to expound and discuss the Bible.
Edmund Grindal, who had succeeded Parker as archbishop of Canterbury in 1576, favoured these meetings
because of their educational value for the rural population. But the
prophesyings were also occasions for local Puritan clergy, laity, and gentry to
mobilize, and they were viewed by Elizabeth
as a political threat. An increasingly clear alliance between Puritans and
certain factions within Parliament did not allay Elizabeth 's fears.
Thus, the queen
ordered Grindal to suppress the prophesyings. When he refused, Elizabeth effectively suspended him from the
exercise of his office. This suspension further alienated Puritans. Meetings
continued, often in a modified form, called classis or conferences,
which were loosely coordinated by Field in London . Following Grindal's death in 1583,
Whitgift, Cartwright's old opponent, advanced to Canterbury . Whitgift had no hesitance in
closing down the prophesyings, but he proceeded with caution in formal
prosecution of Puritans. Extended ecclesiastical hearings by the Court of High
Commission, under the leadership of John Aylmer, and civil proceedings by the
Star Chamber were accompanied by the imprisonment of only a few of the most
prominent Puritans.
Whitgift's policy,
along with the death of Field and other Puritan leaders between 1588 and 1590,
effectively ended any grand plan for a continuing reformation of the English
church under Elizabeth .
The generally moderate Elizabethan Puritan movement was over, and the forces of
reform dispersed into various parties and programs ranging from nonseparating
congregationalism (as advocated by William Ames) to open subversion of the
established hierarchy as in the anonymous Marprelate Tracts (1588–89). Despite
failure to promote reform in matters of church structure, the Puritan spirit
continued to spread throughout society. Protestants with Puritan sympathies
controlled colleges and professorships at Oxford
and Cambridge ,
had the ears of many leaders in the House of Commons, and worked tirelessly as
preachers and pastors to continue the preaching of Protestantism in its
distinctively “hot” Puritan form to the laity.
Martin E. Marty
Puritanism under the Stuarts (1603–49)
Events under James I
Puritan hopes were
raised when James VI of Scotland
succeeded Elizabeth as James I of England in
1603. James was a Calvinist, and he had once signed the Negative Confession of
1581 favouring the Puritan position. In 1603 the Millenary Petition (which
claimed 1,000 signatures) presented Puritan grievances to the king, and in 1604
the Hampton Court Conference was held to deal with them. The petitioners were
sadly in error in their estimate of James, who had learned by personal
experience to resent Presbyterian clericalism. At Hampton Court he coined the phrase “no
bishop, no king.” Outmaneuvered in the conference, the Puritans were made to
appear petty in their requests.
The situation
remained tense during James's reign as he pursued monarchist and episcopal
policies that failed to resolve contemporary difficulties. Following the
Hampton Court Conference he appointed Richard Bancroft as Whitgift's successor
as archbishop of Canterbury
and encouraged the Convocation of 1604 to draw up the Constitutions and
Canons against Nonconformists. Conformity in ecclesiastical matters was
imposed in areas where nonconformity had survived under Elizabeth . Furthermore, the enforced reading
from pulpits of James's Book of Sports, dealing with recreations
permissible on Sundays, in 1618, was an additional affront to those who
espoused strict observance of the sabbath, making compromise more difficult.
For many Puritan groups compromise was unacceptable anyway, and in 1607 a congregation from Scrooby ,
England , fled to Holland and then migrated on the Mayflower to
establish the Plymouth Colony on the shore
of Cape Cod Bay in North
America in 1620. Of those who remained in England , a
number of clergy were deprived of their positions, but others took evasive
action and got by with minimal conformity. Members of Parliament supported the
Nonconformists and argued that the canons of 1604 had not been ratified by
Parliament and therefore did not have the force of law. Moreover, men of
Puritan sympathies remained close to the seat of power during James's reign.
Events under Charles I
Despite the presence
of controversy, Puritan and non-Puritan Protestants under Elizabeth and James
had been united by adherence to a broadly Calvinistic theology of grace. Much
of Whitgift's restraint in handling Puritans, for instance, can be traced to
the prevailing Calvinist consensus he shared with the Nonconformists. Even as
late as 1618 the English delegation to the Synod of Dort supported the strongly
Calvinistic decisions of that body. Under Charles I, however, this consensus
broke down, creating yet another rift in the Church of England. Anti-Puritanism
in matters of liturgy and organization became linked with anti-Calvinism in
theology.
The leaders of the
anti-Puritan and anti-Calvinist party, notably Richard Montagu, whose New
Gagg for an Old Goose (1624) first linked Calvinism with the abusive term Puritan,
drew upon the development of Arminianism in Holland. In contrast to Calvinists
who emphasized God's predestination of a few to salvation and damnation of the
rest of humanity, Arminians stressed God's offer of salvation to all humankind.
English Arminians added to this an increased reverence for the sacraments and
liturgical ceremony. Richard Neile, the bishop of Durham ,
was the first significant patron of Arminians among the hierarchy, but by the
time William Laud was appointed bishop of London
in 1628, he was the acknowledged leader of the anti-Puritan party. London was regarded as
the stronghold of Puritanism, and a policy of thorough anti-Puritanism was
begun there.
Laud, who became
archbishop of Canterbury
in 1633, was clearly a favourite of Charles. He promoted Arminians to
influential positions in the church and subtly encouraged the propagation of
Arminian theology. His fortunes turned, however, when he attempted to introduce
into the Church of Scotland a liturgy comparable to the Anglican Book of
Common Prayer. When “Laud's Liturgy” was introduced at the Church of St. Giles
at Edinburgh , a riot broke out leading to a
popular uprising that restored Presbyterianism in Scotland .
Charles sought to
put down the Scots in the so-called Bishops' Wars. To wage war Charles needed
to raise revenue, but the only institution that could approve new taxes was
Parliament, which had feuded with Charles in the 1620s and was dissolved by him
in 1629. In April 1640 the Short Parliament met but was quickly dissolved by
Charles because its members wanted to discuss a list of grievances before
approving funds for the war. Charles proceeded against the Scots but, his
armies were no match for Scottish forces. In 1640 he was faced with an army of
occupation in northern England
demanding money as a part of its settlement. Short of funds, Charles was forced
to call Parliament again, and this time he would be forced to deal with it.
Religion played
perhaps the key role in the parliamentary elections, and Calvinists came to
dominate the House of Commons. Puritans, increasingly alienated from the
ecclesiastical and civil hierarchy since the mid-1620s, saw an opportunity to
turn the Church of England from Arminianism and to carry out reforms that had
been held in check since the Elizabethan Settlement. Arminianism in theology,
liturgy, and government was linked in the popular mind with Catholicism, as
fears of a Spanish conspiracy to undermine Protestant England became
widespread. The first act of the Long Parliament (1640–53), as it came to be
called, was to set aside November 17, 1640, as a day of fasting and prayer.
Cornelius Burges and Stephen Marshall were appointed to preach that day to
members of Parliament. Their sermons urged the nation to renew its covenant
with God in order to bring about true religion through the maintenance of “an
able, godly, faithful, zealous, profitable, preaching ministry in every parish
church and chapel throughout England and Wales” and through the establishment
of a civil magistracy that would be “ever at hand to back such a ministry.”
Hundreds of similar sermons were preached on monthly fast days and on other
occasions before Parliament during the next few years, urging the people to
adopt “true doctrine,” “pure worship,” and “the maintenance of discipline” as a
means to claim God's blessing so that England might become “our Jerusalem, a
praise in the midst of the earth.”
Civil war
Charles, it had
become apparent, was the patron of the Arminians and their attempt to redefine
Anglican doctrine. Arminians in turn favoured Charles's causes against Puritans
and Parliament. This alliance held despite increasing pressure on Charles to
cooperate with Parliament on economic and military matters. The resulting civil
war between the forces of the king and those of Parliament was hardly just a
religious struggle between Arminians and Calvinists, but conflict over religion
played an undeniably large role in bringing about the Puritan Revolution. As
Protestantism split, so did English society.
Fighting broke out
in 1642, and after the first battles members of Parliament called together a
committee of over 100 clergymen from all over England to advise them on “the good
government of the Church.” This body, the Westminster Assembly of Divines,
convened on July 1, 1643, and continued daily meetings for more than five
years.
A majority of the
Puritan clergy of England
probably would have accepted a modified episcopal church government.
Parliament, however, needed Scotland 's
military help. It adopted the Solemn League and Covenant, which committed the
Westminster Assembly to develop a church polity close to Scotland 's
presbyterian form. A small, determined assembly group of “Dissenting Brethren”
held out for the freedom of the congregation, or “Independency.” Others, called
Erastians, argued that the church was subordinate to the state and wanted to
limit the offenses under the power of church discipline. Because both groups
had support in Parliament, the reform of church government and discipline was
frustrated.
Dissent within the
assembly was negligible compared with dissent outside it. Pamphlets by John
Milton, Roger Williams, and other Puritans pleaded for greater freedom of the
press and of religion. Such dissent was supported by the New Model Army, a
Parliamentarian force of 22,000 men led by Sir Thomas Fairfax (1612–71) as
commander in chief and Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) as second in command. The army's
support for this dissent was made all the more significant because its leaders
had become the real power in England
after their defeat of Royalist forces. Late in 1648 the victors feared that the
Westminster Assembly and Parliament would reach a compromise with the defeated
Charles that would destroy their gains for Puritanism. In December 1648
Parliament was purged of members unsatisfactory to the army, and in January
1649 King Charles was tried and executed.
The age of Cromwell (1649–60)
Although the House
of Lords was abolished, both Parliament and the assembly continued to sit on a
“rump” basis (containing only a remnant of their membership after the purges).
In May 1649 the government of the Commonwealth was declared and Cromwell
emerged as England 's
lord protector. He was a typical Puritan who saw the judgment and mercy of God
operating in human affairs and believed that his military success was a sign of
God's blessing of his work.
The Independent
clergyman John Owen guided the religious settlement under Cromwell. He
maintained that the “reformation of England shall be more glorious than of any
Nation in the world, being carried on, neither by might nor power, but only by
the spirit of the Lord of Hosts.” Doctrinal error was a problem for both Cromwell
and Owen, but, as Owen explained, it was better for 500 errors to be scattered
among individuals than for one error to have power and jurisdiction over all
others.
Such was the basis
for a pluralistic religious settlement in England under the Commonwealth in
which parish churches were led by men of Presbyterian, Independent, Baptist, or
other opinions. Jews were permitted to live in England , but Roman Catholics and
Unitarians were not allowed to hold religious views publicly. Cromwell was
personally willing to tolerate The Book of Common Prayer, but Parliament
was not. Voluntary associations of churches were formed, such as the
Worcestershire Association, to keep up a semblance of order among churches and
pastors of differing persuasions.
In the upheaval
brought on by the wars, radical groups appeared that both challenged and
advanced the Puritan vision of the New Jerusalem. The Levellers (a republican
and democratic political party) in the New Model Army in 1647 and 1648
interpreted the liberty that comes from the grace of God freely offered to all
through Christ as having direct implications for political democracy. In 1649,
the Diggers (agrarian communists) planted crops on common land—first at St.
George's Hill near Kingston and later at Cobham
Manor, also near Kingston —to
bring forth God's millennial kingdom, which they understood to be an
unstructured community of love with a communal economy. In the same year, the
Fifth Monarchy Men (an extreme Puritan millennialist sect), presented their
message of no compromise with the old political structure and advocated a new
one, composed of saints joined together in congregations with ascending
representative assemblies, to bring all men under the kingship of Jesus Christ.
As distinct units these groups were short-lived. A more enduring group was
founded by George Fox (1624–91) as the Society of Friends, or Quakers, which
pushed the Puritan position against popery to its logical conclusion by
rejecting the need for ministers, sacraments, or liturgy in the church.
Puritanism had never been a monolithic movement, and accession to power
generated factionalism. The limits of the Puritan spirit showed clearly in the
widespread persecution of the Quakers.
The Restoration (1660–85)
After the death of
Cromwell, chaos threatened, and in the interest of order even some Puritans
supported the restoration of Charles II as king. They hoped for a modified
episcopal government, such as had been suggested in 1641 by the archbishop of Armagh , James Ussher (1581–1656). Such a proposal was
satisfactory, however, to many Episcopals, Presbyterians, and Independents.
When some veterans of the Westminster Assembly went to Holland in 1660 to meet with Charles before
he returned, the king made it clear that there would be modifications to
satisfy “tender consciences.” These Puritans were
outmaneuvered, however, by those who favoured the strict episcopal pattern. A
new Act of Uniformity was passed on May 19, 1662, by the Cavalier Parliament
that required reordination of many pastors, gave unconditional consent to The
Book of Common Prayer, advocated the taking of the oath of canonical
obedience, and renounced the Solemn League and Covenant. Between 1660 and when
the act was enforced on August 24, 1662, almost 2,000 Puritan ministers were ejected
from their positions.
As a result of the
Act of Uniformity, English Puritanism entered the period of the Great
Persecution. The Conventicle Act of 1664 punished any person over 16 years of
age for attending a religious meeting not conducted according to The Book of
Common Prayer. The Five Mile Act of 1665 prohibited any ejected minister
from living within five miles of a corporate town or any place where he had
formerly served. Still, some Puritans did not give up the idea of
“comprehension” (the idea that all ecclesiastical factions might yet find
common ground). There were conferences with sympathetic bishops and brief
periods of indulgence for Puritans to preach, but fines and imprisonment were
frequent. Consequently, Puritanism became a form of Nonconformist
Protestantism.
Charles, who
converted to Roman Catholicism on his death bed, had steered a course through
the turmoil among the various religious factions, but his successor and openly
Catholic brother, James II (1685–88), could not. Fear of Roman Catholic tyranny
and James's poor judgment united both establishment and Nonconformist
Protestants. This new unity brought about the Glorious Revolution (1688–89),
establishing William and Mary on the throne. The last attempt at comprehension
failed to receive approval by either Parliament or the Convocation under the
new rulers. In 1689 England 's
religious solution was defined by an Act of Toleration that continued the
established church as episcopal but also made it possible for dissenting groups
to have licensed chapels. The Puritan goal to further reform the nation as a
whole was transmuted into the more individualistic spiritual concerns of
Pietism or else the more secular concerns of the Age of Reason.
Puritanism in the English colonies
A decade before the
landing of the Mayflower (1620) in Massachusetts ,
a strong Puritan influence was established in Virginia . Leaders of the Virginia Company
who settled Jamestown
in 1607 believed that they had a covenant with God, and they carefully read the
message of their successes and failures. A typical Puritan vision was held by
the Virginia
settler Sir Thomas Dale. His strict application of laws disciplining the colony
probably saved Jamestown
from extinction in 1611, but he also earned a reputation as a tyrant. Dale
thought of himself as a labourer in the vineyard of the Lord, as a member of Israel building
up a “heavenly New Jerusalem.” Like Cromwell later, Dale interpreted his
military success as a direct sign of God's lending “a helping hand.”
Puritan clergy saw
an excellent opportunity for their cause in Virginia . The Reverend Alexander Whitaker,
the “apostle of Virginia ,”
wrote to his London Puritan cousin in 1614: “But I much more muse, that so few
of our English ministers, that were so hot against the surplice and
subscription, come hither where neither is spoken of.” The church in Virginia , however,
became more directly aligned with the English establishment when the
settlements were made into a royal colony in 1624.
In New
England , however, the Puritans had their greatest opportunity.
Between 1628 and 1640 the Massachusetts Bay Colony was developed as a covenant
community. Governor John Winthrop stated the case in his lay sermon on board
the Arbella:
Thus stands the
cause between God and us; we are entered into covenant with Him for this work;
we have taken out a commission; the Lord hath given us leave to draw our own
articles . . . Now if the Lord shall be pleased to hear us and bring us in
peace to the place we desire, then hath He ratified this covenant and sealed
our Commission, [and] will expect a strict performance of the articles
contained in it.
The failure to
perform the articles, in this view, would bring the wrath of God down upon
them.
Church organization
in the colony was determined by John Cotton, who pursued “that very Middle-way”
between English Separatism and the presbyterian form of government. Unlike the
Separatists he held the Church of England to be a true church, though
blemished; and unlike the Presbyterians he held that there should be no
ecclesiastical authority between the congregation and the Lordship of Christ.
Cotton proposed that the church maintain its purity by permitting only those
who could make a “declaration of their experience of a work of grace” to be
members. Cotton's plan ensured that church government should be in the hands of
the elect.
Inspired by Thomas
Cartwright, the Puritans of the Bay Colony fashioned the civil commonwealth
according to the framework of the church. Only the elect could vote and rule in
the commonwealth. The church would not govern, but it would prepare the
“instruments both to rule and to choose rulers.” Biblical law was the primary
law for ordering both church and state.
The colony
prospered; thus it seemed evident that God was blessing Puritan performance. As
a result the leadership could not take kindly to those who publicly criticized
their basic program. Hence Roger Williams in 1635 and Anne Hutchinson in 1638
were banished from the colony even though they could declare their experience
of the work of grace. More troublesome than these dissenters were persons such
as Mary Dyer. She and other Quakers who returned again and again after being
punished and banished were finally hanged. It was difficult for the state to
keep the church pure.
Fearing that the
Westminster Assembly, established by the Parliament to reform the church, would
impose a new form of church government on them, churches from the four Puritan
colonies—Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth , Connecticut , and New
Haven —met in a voluntary synod in 1648. They adopted
the Cambridge Platform, in which the congregational form of church government
was worked out in detail. The standard for church membership came into question
when it was found that numbers of second-generation residents could not testify
to the experience of grace in their lives. This resulted in the Half-Way
Covenant of 1657 and 1662 that permitted baptized, moral, and orthodox persons
to share in the privileges of church membership except for partaking of
communion.
Late in the 17th
century it was apparent to all that the ideal commonwealth was not being
maintained. Ministers pointed to wars with the Native Americans and other
problems as signs of God's judgment. Another sign of the failure of the
commonwealth and God's displeasure was the appearance of what many people
thought were witches. The Salem
witch trials and hangings took place in 1692 during a period of declining
confidence in the old ideal.
Other colonies
Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth , Connecticut ,
and New Haven were not the only variations on
the main theme of realizing the holy commonwealth in America . Roger Williams and the
other founders of Rhode Island
must also be regarded as Puritans with the “one principle, that every one
should have liberty to worship God according to the light of their
consciences.” William Penn's “holy experiment” in Pennsylvania represented the Quaker
variation of the Puritan experiment. When Penn became owner of this vast tract
of land, he saw it as a mandate from God to form an ideal commonwealth. In New Jersey , Puritans from the New
Haven colony who were dissatisfied with the Half-Way Convenant
sought to reestablish the pristine Puritan community at Newark . Maryland , which had been established under
Roman Catholic auspices, soon had a strong Puritan majority among its settlers.
Indeed, there was no colony in which Puritan influence was not strong, and one
estimate identifies 85 percent of the churches in the original 13 colonies as
Puritan in spirit.
The expansion of the Reformation in Europe
By the middle of the
16th century, Lutheranism had spread into the various principalities and
kingdoms of northern Europe . The duchy of
Württemberg, after the restoration of Duke Ulrich, adopted reform in 1534; its
outstanding Reformer was Johannes Brenz and its great centre Tübingen. Brandenburg , and its capital Berlin ,
embraced reform in 1539, and in that same year ducal Saxony ,
until then vehemently Catholic, changed sides. Elisabeth of Braunschweig also
converted in 1539, but only after much turbulence did her faith prevail in the
land. Albert of Prussia, whose wife was Danish and who was a member of the
Polish Diet and grand master of the Teutonic Order, took a stand that was very
significant for the north. He secularized the order and in 1525 acknowledged
himself a Lutheran. In Scandinavia Denmark
toyed with breaking with Rome
as early as the 1520s, but it was not until 1539 that the Danish church became
a national church with the king as the head and the clergy as leaders in
matters of faith. Norway
followed Denmark .
The Diet of Västerås (1527) officially declared what had for some time been
true, namely, that Sweden
was an evangelical state. The outstanding Swedish Reformers were the brothers
Olaus and Laurentius Petri. Finland ,
under Swedish rule, followed suit. The Reformer there was Mikael Agricola,
called “the father of written Finnish.” The Baltic states of Livonia
and Estonia
were officially Lutheran in 1554. Austria under the Habsburgs
provided no state support for the evangelical movement, which nevertheless
gained adherents. In Moravia ,
as noted earlier, the Hutterites established their colonies under tolerant
magnates.
The reform movement
also spread into eastern Europe. Although it remained predominantly Roman Catholic , Poland
acquired a large Protestant minority in the late 16th century when the Danzig
area, and its German Lutheran population, came under Polish control, and when a
large contingent of the Bohemian Brethren migrated to Poland after
the Habsburg ruler attempted their extermination. Several Polish nobles adopted
their pacifism and wore only swords made of wood. In 1570 the anti-Trinitarian
Socinians, named after their leader Faustus Socinus, flocked from Italy to Poland
where they received asylum, perhaps merely because they were Italian, from the
Italian queen of Poland ,
Bona Sforza. They flourished in Poland
until dispersed by the Counter-Reformation and survived in small groups until
the 19th century. Much more extensive was the Calvinist influx not only into Poland
but into the whole of eastern Europe. This variety of Protestantism appealed to
those of non-German stock because it was not German and no longer markedly
French, as well as because of its revolutionary temper and republican sentiments.
The Compact of Warsaw (1573) called the Pax Dissidentium (“The Peace of
Those Who Differ”), granted toleration to Roman Catholics, Lutherans,
Calvinists, and Bohemian Brethren, but not to the Socinians.
In Hungary , the Turkish victory at the Battle of
Mohács in 1526 brought about a division of the land into three sections, with
the northwest ruled by the Habsburg Ferdinand, the eastern province of Transylvania
under Zápolya, and the area of Buda under the Turks. Even before this date
Lutheran ideas had made slight inroads in the German and Magyar sections of Hungary .
Although Roman Catholicism would predominate among the Hungarian population,
Calvinism made gains, and the anti-Trinitarians found a permanent home in Transylvania . The weakness of the government and the
diversity of religion in this whole area made for a large degree of toleration.
On the other hand,
the Reformation gained no lasting hold in Spain
or Italy .
In Spain
this was primarily the result of the conflicts of the previous century, when
Christians strove to achieve political, cultural, and religious unification by
converting or expelling the unbelievers—the Jews and the Moors. The Inquisition
was introduced in 1482 to root out all remnants of Jewish practice among the
Marranos, the Jewish converts to Christianity. The non-Christian Jews were
expelled in 1492. Then Granada
fell and the same process was applied to the Moriscos, the Moorish converts,
and the unconverted Moors, after a century, also were expelled. Because the
process had thus far been successful, the pressures were relaxed, and Spain enjoyed a
decade of Erasmian liberalism in the 1520s. But with the infiltration of
Lutheranism, the machinery of repression again was brought into force.
In Italy sectarian and heretical movements
had proliferated throughout the Middle Ages. But one by one they had been
crushed or absorbed by the church. Furthermore, the Reformation failed to take
hold in Italy
because of the tradition of moral preaching by the friars. Another
consideration was that the new religious orders—the Capuchins, Theatines, and
Jesuits—tapped into currents of popular spirituality while gaining papal
favour. The new orders became a mighty force in counteracting Protestant
infiltration, which nevertheless did take place. Venice
was a centre, with its branch house of the Lutheran banking family of Fugger,
and so was Lucca .
At Naples the Spanish mystic Valdés, though not
a Protestant, expounded a Catholic reformist piety, and some of his followers
were attracted to the movements coming from beyond the Alps .
Calvinism gained a hold, but the Roman Inquisition, as above noted, was
established in 1542, and those with Protestant leanings either made cloisters
of their own hearts, went to the stake, or crossed the mountains into permanent
exile. Ironically, the most radical theological views of the Reformation were
those propounded by the Spanish and Italian anti-Trinitarians.
Roland H. Bainton
James C. Spalding
Martin E. Marty
Protestant renewal and the rise of the
denominations
The setting for renewal
Survival of a mystical tradition
The Thirty Years'
War (1618–48) was the background for the intensification of a desire for
spiritual renewal. Although historical research has modified the exaggerated
contemporary accounts of the war's effects, it is unquestionable that distress
in central Europe was widespread and profound.
In some places the economy was reduced to barter, schools were closed, churches
were burned, the sick and needy were forgotten. Spiritual and moral
deterioration accompanied the physical destruction.
During the war
notable signs of renewal appeared. For example, interest in earlier devotional
literature developed, which reflected the pious mysticism of Johannes Tauler
(c. 1300–61), Thomas à Kempis (c. 1380–1471), and other German, Dutch, and even
Spanish authors. The mystical tradition had lived on into the Reformation
century and found representatives in Caspar Schwenckfeld (1489–1561), Valentin
Weigel (1533–88), and Jakob Böhme (1575–1624). Although both Lutherans and
Calvinists opposed the ideas of these mystics, they adopted many of their
religious and theological ideas.
Catholic recovery of Protestant territories
After the Peace of
Westphalia in 1648 ended the last of the so-called wars of religion, sectarian
competition continued and Catholic powers hoped to regain territory from
Lutheran Protestantism. For example, Louis XIV identified French power with
universal French acceptance of the Roman Catholic faith. In 1685 he revoked the
Edict of Nantes and expelled thousands of Huguenots, who fled to England , Holland ,
or Germany ,
much to the advantage of those countries. French refugees became prominent in
English religious life, and in Prussia
they founded flourishing congregations known as the French Reformed. In 1702 a determined group of Huguenots in
the mountains of the Cévennes in France , known as the Camisards,
rose in rebellion but were suppressed by military power two years later. There
was a further small outbreak of war in 1709. For a time the few surviving
Huguenot congregations met only in secret. They were led by Antoine Court (1695–1760), who secured
ordination from Zürich and founded (1730) a college at Lausanne to train pastors. French Protestants
barely held out until the French Revolution, after which they had a revival.
Another shock to
Protestantism was the conversion of Augustus II, elector of Saxony ,
to Roman Catholicism in 1697. It appeared as though Protestantism was not even
safe in its original home. The conversion involved political motives; Augustus
was a candidate for the throne of Poland
and was loyal to his new allegiance, assisting the Roman Catholic church in Poland and also, somewhat, in Saxony ;
but such assistance had no effect on the Lutheranism of Saxony.
Protestant scholasticism
The 17th century was
at once the high era of Protestant systematic orthodoxy and the age when the
first signs of its dissolution appeared. The axioms of the Reformation were
worked out in a great and systematic body of doctrine, based on the notion that
the Christian faith was best defined by its doctrines.
The theologians
defended and the pastors taught Luther's or Calvin's dogmatic systems—relying
also upon authoritative sources such as the Formula of Concord (1577) in
Lutheranism or the conclusions of the Synod of Dort (1618) in Calvinism—which
were extended and made into a tradition. Protestant theological systems of all
variety were worked out in many volumes, appealing always to reason and to
biblical authority and seldom to feeling or conscience. This period is known as
the age of Protestant orthodoxy or scholasticism. But that pejorative term came
later when the axioms on which the systems were founded were no longer accepted.
These were the last scriptural theologians before the period of the
Enlightenment, when the understanding of Scripture was altered. The old axioms
were changed by Pietism, science, and philosophy.
The rise of Pietism
The influences of
English Puritanism reached the Continent through the translation of works by
Richard Baxter (1615–91), Lewis Bayly (1565–1631), and John Bunyan (1628–88).
Most frequently read were Baxter's A Call to the Unconverted, Bayly's The
Practice of Piety, and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.
Dutch
Pietism—influenced by Englishman William Ames (1576–1633), whose Medulla
Sacrae Theologiae (1623; The Marrow of Sacred Theology) and De
Conscientia (1630; On Conscience) were basic textbooks for federal
or covenant theology and Puritan casuistry in England and New England—was
represented by Willem Teellinck, Johannes Coccejus, Gisbertus Voetius, and
Jodocus van Lodensteyn. Impulses from these men became a part of the reform
movement that had already appeared in German Lutheran circles and was to be
known as “Reform Orthodoxy.” Important representatives of Reform Orthodoxy were
Johann Arndt (1555–1621) and Johann Dannhauer (1603–66). The “pectoral [heart]
theology” of these orthodox Lutherans found its highest expression and widest
audience in the writings of Arndt, who may well be called the “father of
Pietism.” His chief work, Four Books on True Christianity (1606–10), was
soon being read in countless homes. Although Arndt stressed the notion of the unio
mystica (mystical union) between the believer and Jesus, a 17th-century
Lutheran doctrinal addition, the central Arndtian theme was not that of
mystical union but stressed repentance, regeneration, and new life, which would
become the essence of Pietism.
Alongside the
orthodox piety of the 17th century, among the most significant contributions to
spiritual renewal were the rich treasures of Lutheran hymnody. Examples from
this classical period of church song are the works of Philipp Nicolai
(1556–1608; “Wake, Awake” and “How Brightly Beams the Morning Star!”), Paul
Gerhardt (1607–76; “O Sacred Head Now Wounded,” “O How Shall I Receive Thee,”
“Put Thou Thy Trust in God”); and Martin Rinkart (1586–1649; “Now Thank We All
Our God”).
Pietism in the 17th century
The various streams
of concern for renewal converged in the life and work of Philipp Jakob Spener
(1635–1705). In 1666, after earning his theological doctorate at Strasbourg , he was called to be superintendent of the
clergy in Frankfurt am Main in the principality of Hesse ,
where he was soon distressed by the conspicuous worldliness of the city. His
sermons urged repentance and renewal, and each Sunday afternoon he held
catechism classes for both children and adults. This led to efforts to
revitalize the rite of confirmation, which, since the days of Martin Bucer, had
been practiced in Hesse .
The origin of the
so-called collegia pietatis (assemblies of piety) has been traced to a
sermon of 1669, in which Spener exhorted the laity to come together on Sunday
afternoon to review the morning's sermon and to engage in devotional reading
and conversation “about the divine mysteries” instead of meeting to drink, play
cards, or gamble. In 1670, at the request of his parishioners, such meetings
were held each Sunday and Wednesday at Spener's home. Although some of the Frankfurt ministers, over whom Spener was superintendent,
denigrated the collegia pietatis, the practice flourished and became a
distinguishing feature of the movement. Those who attended the meetings were
soon called Pietists.
In a relatively
short time, Spener became a household name and Spener was called “the spiritual
counselor of all Germany ”
because of his writings and extensive correspondence. Most significant was the
publication in 1675 of his Pia Desideria (Pious Desires), the
first part of which reviewed the low estate of the church. Spener charged civil
authorities, who had been de jure heads of the church since before the Peace or
Augsburg
(1555), with irresponsible caesaropapism (the doctrine of state control over
church). He likewise flayed the clergy, many of whom he regarded to be
scandalous and self-seeking, often confusing assent to “true doctrine” with
faith. The laity, too, he claimed, were not blameless. Drunkenness must not be
excused as a German peccadillo; prostitution, adultery, fornication,
homosexuality, thievery, and assault must be rooted out lest people lose God's
promised salvation, he declared. The second part of the work reminded readers
of the possibility of better conditions in the church: “. . . we can have no doubt
that God promised His church here on earth a better state than this.” When the
full number of heathen (Gentiles) had been brought in, God would even convert
the Jews. But the fulfillment of these hopes was not to be achieved by sitting
with folded hands. Part three, therefore, set forth a six-point reform program:
1. The Word of
God—the whole Bible, not merely the pericopes (biblical texts used in a set
sequence in worship services)—must be made known widely through public and
private reading, group study (conventicles under the guidance of pastors), and
family devotions.
2. There should be a
reactivation of Luther's idea of the priesthood of believers, which included
not only the “rights of the laity” but also responsibility toward one's
fellows.
3. People should be
taught that Christianity consists not only in knowing God's will but also in
doing it, especially by implementing the command to love one's neighbour.
4. Religious
controversies with unbelievers and heretics unfortunately may be necessary. If
they cannot be avoided, they should be entered prayerfully and with love for
those in error.
5. Theological
education must be reformed. Professors must see that future pastors are not
only theologically learned but spiritually committed.
6. Finally,
preaching should have edification and the cultivation of inner piety as its
goal.
The book received
popular acclaim. The clergy, however, felt threatened by the implications of
the program's emphasis on the laity even though Spener meant to focus on the
clergy. Theology professors resented Spener's criticism of their teaching and
advocacy of curricular reform. Spener responded by emphasizing the collegia
pietatis.
He faced further
difficulties, however, because the conventicles became divisive and abrasively
Donatistic (Donatism was a heresy from the early church that held that priests
must be morally pure or the sacraments would not be valid), developing into
“little churches within the church” (ecclesiolae in ecclesia). To stem
separatism and unorthodox attitudes, Spener wrote tracts on the doctrines of
the spiritual priesthood (1677) and ecclesiology (1684). In the latter he
argued that despite the faults of the church its teachings were not false and
separation from its worship services and sacraments was wrong.
Spener's influence
had spread widely by 1686. In many circles, not least among the nobility, he
was praised and imitated. In other quarters his emphases produced vigorous and,
in many instances, unjust criticism. Weary of opposition and controversy,
Spener accepted a call to be the court chaplain in Dresden , where he was soon disillusioned by
the unresponsiveness and vulgarity of the court and the hostility of the
pastors. While in Dresden he wrote Impediments
to Theological Study (1690), which was hardly calculated to win friends at
the famous University
of Leipzig , and made the
acquaintance of a young instructor, August Hermann Francke (1663–1727), who
became his successor and the second great leader of Pietism.
By 1691 Spener
welcomed a call to Berlin from the elector of Brandenburg , who soon brought in other Pietists, opened
his domain to persecuted French Huguenots, and made Berlin
a strong spiritual centre, thus taking religious leadership away from rival Saxony . All of this was enhanced by the founding of a new
university at Halle
(1694), the theological faculty of which became, with Spener's and Francke's
influence, the academic centre of Pietism.
Spener's years in Berlin were not without
bitterness. The conflict between Protestant Orthodox theologians and Pietists
had mounted to a high pitch. The theological faculty at Wittenberg , for example, charged Spener with
284 deviations and prayed that God would save “our Lutheran Zion” from the
ravages of pietistic heresies.
During his last years
Spener collected and edited several volumes of his papers (Theologische
Bedencken), continued his friendship with and support of Francke at Halle,
and, significantly, served as a sponsor at the baptism of Nikolaus von
Zinzendorf, who was to lead evangelical Pietism in a new direction. Spener died
on February 5, 1705.
Meanwhile, Francke
became the central figure of Pietism. While a student at Leipzig , he engaged in group Bible study and
was one of the organizers of a collegium philobiblicum (assembly of Bible
lovers), which was dedicated largely to the scholarly rather than devotional
approach to the Scriptures. A religious experience in 1687 led Francke to make
conversion, which was traditionally characterized by a severe penitential
struggle and commitment to holy living, the norm for distinguishing true
Christians from unbelievers. Francke's Pietism stressed a legalistic and
ascetic way of life. Under Francke's leadership (he became professor in 1698)
Halle became famous not only for its university but for the many “Halle
institutions” that sprang up: an orphan asylum with affiliated schools, a
publishing house and Bible institute, the Collegium Orientale Theologicum
(Oriental College of Theology) for linguistic training of missionaries, and an
infirmary that the medical faculty welcomed as compensation for the
university's lack of a hospital. All of this gave Halle and Franckean Pietism an energetic and
activist character, particularly since Francke believed that religious reform
and societal reform went hand in hand.
18th-century Pietism in central Europe and England
One of Francke's
institutions in Halle
was the paedagogium (1698), a boarding school for the sons of well-to-do
parents who lived at a distance. Nikolaus Ludwig, Graf von Zinzendorf (1700–60),
the godson of Spener, who attended the Halle boarding school from 1710 to 1716,
was greatly influenced by his godfather and then by Francke. At the age of 14
he organized the “Order of the Grain of Mustard Seed,” whose youthful members
pledged themselves to reach out in ever-expanding love to “the whole human
race.”
By 1721 Zinzendorf
had settled down on his estate (Berthelsdorf) near the Bohemian border, where
he organized believers into a nonseparatist ecclesiola in ecclesia,
which denied the Halle Pietists' demand for penitential remorse as a mark of
“heart religion.” Zinzendorf formulated the slogan that came to be of great
importance in the history of revivals: “Come as you are. It is only necessary
to believe in the atonement of Christ.”
A small band of
Moravian exiles took refuge on his estate in 1722. Looking upon this event as
an opportunity to realize his cherished project of “the Mustard Seed,”
Zinzendorf gave up his position in the Saxon civil service and welcomed other
Moravian refugees, who, like him, had been influenced by Pietism. Zinzendorf
soon organized the colony of Herrnhut into the community of the Bohemian
Brethren. They were not to separate from the Lutheran Church of Saxony and
would attend services in the village church at Berthelsdorf and call upon the
local pastor for ministerial acts. They regarded themselves as “the salt” of
the earth, an ecclesiola from which “heart religion” would be
disseminated throughout Christendom. Under Zinzendorf's “superintendency” the
Herrnhut Brethren became more and more a distinct church, the reborn Moravian Church , or Unitas Fratrum (“Unity of the
Brethren”). Although Zinzendorf received a license as a minister in 1734 and
three years later was consecrated bishop, he left Herrnhut under pressure from
the Saxon government in 1736. He did evangelical work in western Germany , England ,
and North America, where he established important missionary centres in Germantown and Bethlehem ,
Pennsylvania . He returned to
Herrnhut in 1749 and presided over the Church of the Brethren until his death
in 1760.
The influence of the
Moravians on the Evangelical Awakening in England was significant. By 1775
there were 15 Moravian congregations in England , and at one of these John
Wesley, founder of Methodism, had his famous “Aldersgate Street Experience”
(1738). His conversion experience occurred while he was listening to a Moravian
preacher reading Luther's Preface to the Romans. As Wesley noted later,
while he was
describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I
felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt that I did trust in Christ . . .; and an
assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins.
Joining the Moravian
society in Fetter Lane ,
London , Wesley also journeyed to
Hernnhut to learn about the people to whom he owed so much. Although Wesley
later parted from the Moravians, his initial experience of saving grace in the
company of the Brethren shaped the wide-reaching evangelical movement
associated with Wesley, his brother Charles, and George Whitefield.
18th-century Pietism in Scandinavia and America
Denmark-Norway
The age of orthodoxy
in the Dano-Norwegian kingdom, as in Germany , had a deeply spiritual
side, which was manifest in the hymns of Thomas Kingo (1634–1708) and the
teaching of Holger Rosenkrantz (died 1642) and Bishop Jens Dinesen Jersin (died
1632). Arriving in Copenhagen at the turn of the
century, Pietism was welcomed, strangely enough, by the unpietistic king
Frederick IV (1699–1730), whose royal chaplain, the German R.J. Lütkens,
approved of the pietistic pastors and won Frederick 's
support for missions in India .
The king sought out missionaries in his kingdom but found none. He then turned
to Germany ,
where, through Lütken's contacts, he discovered two young Halle-trained Pietists,
Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg (1683–1719) and Heinrich Plütschau (1678–1747).
Ordained at Copenhagen in 1705, they became the
founders of the famous Tamil mission at Tranquebar ,
India , in 1706.
The Tamil mission stimulated interest among the Halle Pietists in evangelical
work including the Norwegian Pietist Thomas von Westen's mission to the Sami
(then known as the Lapps) in northern Norway, and the Norwegian Hans Egede's
pioneering evangelical work in Greenland. King Christian VI, moreover, was
known as the “Pietist on the throne” because he supported an orphan home and
schools modeled after Halle ,
a missionary institute, and even conventicles (a 1741 decree permitted them
only under pastoral leadership). Erik Pontoppidan, court preacher at Copenhagen and later bishop of Bergen
in Norway ,
made a lasting contribution with his Truth unto Godliness, a commentary
on Luther's catechism that combined law and the gospel, orthodoxy and pietism.
Virtually a national reader for many generations, especially in Norway , this
“layman's dogmatics” continued to influence American Lutheranism into the 21st
century.
In 1703 three
pastors from New Sweden on the Delaware River ordained Justus Falckner, a
Halle-educated Pietist, for service among the mostly Pietistic Dutch Lutherans
in New York. Many German Pietists emigrated to North America—often traveling
through London , where they were helped by the
Pietist court chaplain M. Ziegenhagen—including those from the Rhineland and
southern Germany who settled
in New York and Pennsylvania
and from Salzburg who settled in Georgia .
Accompanying the Salzburgers were two pastors selected by Francke, J.M.
Boltzius and I.C. Gronau, who shaped the spiritual life of the Georgia
settlement. Zinzendorf's visit to America
(1741–42) led to a clash between his type of Pietism and that of Halle , represented by
Henry Melchior Mühlenberg (1711–87). The victory belonged to Mühlenberg, who
became the organizing genius and spiritual leader of the American community and
was later called “The Patriarch of American Lutheranism.”
Rationalism
From the early days
of Christianity, some theologians had argued that Christian truth could be
vindicated by reason. In the early 17th century a number of theologians,
including the Latitudinarians in England , began to emphasize the use
of reason. Their best representatives were the Cambridge
Platonists—philosophical theologians at Cambridge
(c. 1640–80)—who claimed that reason was the reflection of the divine mind in
the soul.
During the 17th
century the successes of science, especially the work of Sir Isaac Newton
(1642–1727), persuaded many people of the power of reason and of the necessity
to test all things by reason. The German thinker Christian Wolff (1679–1754) of
Halle
approached theology as if it were a form of mathematics, seeking a truth that
would be incontrovertible for all reasonable people. Under prompting from
Pietists of Halle, he was expelled from Prussia in 1723. But before Wolff's
death Rationalist theologians had displaced the Pietists in control of Halle University
and had made it the centre of Rationalist theology in German Protestantism.
In England the
same trend among the disciples of John Locke (1632–1704) led to the rise of
Christian Deism, which held that Christianity was a new version of the natural
religion of the human race. The English Deists permanently influenced
Protestant thought by forcing theologians to answer them and thereby to treat
the philosophy of religion with seriousness. The most important of all the answers
to the Deists lay in the work of Bishop Joseph Butler (1692–1752), whose
sermons and Analogy of Religion formed the most cogent defense of
traditional Christianity on the basis of science and philosophy.
Rationalist
theology, contemporaneous though certainly not in harmony with Pietism and
evangelicalism, began to modify or even destroy the traditional
orthodoxies—i.e., Lutheran or Calvinist—of the later Reformation. Rationalist
theologians insisted that goodness in God could not be different in kind from
goodness in humans and therefore that God cannot do what in an individual would
be immoral. Although they accepted the miracles of the New Testament—until
toward the end of the 18th century—the Rationalists were critical of miracles
outside the New Testament, since they suspected everything that did not fit
their mechanistic view of the universe.
Evangelicalism in England and the Colonies
Methodism
The evangelical, or
Methodist (named from the use of methodical study and devotion), movement in England led by John Wesley was similar to the
Pietist movement in Germany .
While a fellow of Lincoln College , Oxford ,
Wesley organized a group of earnest Bible students, made a missionary
expedition to Georgia ,
and became a friend of the Moravians. Like the Pietists he emphasized the
necessity of conversion and devoted much of his life to evangelistic preaching
in England .
He did not intend any separation, but the parish system of the Church of
England was incapable of adjustment to his plan of free evangelism and lay
preachers. In 1744 Wesley held the first conference of his preachers; soon this
became an annual conference, the governing body of the Methodist societies, and
was given a legal constitution in 1784. The Methodist movement had remarkable
success, especially where the Church of England was failing—in the industrial
parishes, in the deep countryside, in little hamlets, and in hilly country,
such as Wales , Cumberland , Yorkshire, and Cornwall . In 1768 Methodist emigrants in the
American colonies opened a chapel in New York ,
and thereafter the movement spread rapidly in the United States . It also succeeded in
French-speaking cantons of Switzerland .
The Methodist
movement seized upon the emotional and spiritual conscience that Protestant
orthodoxy neglected. It revived the doctrines of grace and justification and
renewed the tradition of moral earnestness, which had once appeared in
Puritanism but which had temporarily faded during the reaction against
Puritanism in the middle and late 17th century. In England it slowly began to
strengthen the tradition of free churchmanship, though for a century or more
many English Methodists believed themselves to be much nearer the Anglican
Church from which they had issued than any other body of English Protestants.
Hymns—hitherto confined (except for metrical Psalms) to the Lutheran
churches—were accepted in other Protestants bodies, such as the Church of
England, the Congregationalists, and the Baptists as a result of the Methodist
movement, which produced some of the most eminent hymn writers, such as Philip
Doddridge (1702–51) and Charles Wesley (1707–88).
The Great Awakening
Churches in the 13
American colonies practiced the Congregational or Baptist church polity on a
scale not known in Europe . Anabaptist groups
required evidence of faith, which sometimes meant public testimony of the
conversion experience. Larger American congregations required a similar
testimony that was more solemn and at times more emotional. Calvinistic pastors
in New England , seeking the religion of the
heart, gave unusual stress to the necessity of an immediate experience of
salvation. Pastors found that a wave of emotion could sweep through an entire
congregation and believed that they could here observe conversion that resulted
in a better life for the converted. These traditions and growing
dissatisfaction with rationalism and formalism in religious belief and practice
led to the Great Awakening, a revivalist movement of the first half of the 18th
century. The movement owed something to the German Pietist T.J. Frelinghuysen
(1691–c. 1748) and something to John Wesley's colleague George Whitefield
(1714–70). The chief mind at the beginning of the Great Awakening, however, was
that of an intellectual mystic rather than of a conventional Calvinist preacher.
Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) was the Congregational pastor at Northampton
in Massachusetts ,
where the conversions began in 1734–35. In the mid-18th century, waves of
revivals and conversions spread throughout the colonies. These revivals,
although led by Congregationalists and Presbyterians, resulted in the formation
of many small, independent, Bible-centred, Baptist groups. American revival
leaders, like Wesley in England
and Zinzendorf in Germany ,
were forced to practice their ministry outside the established churches.
The movement was not
native to North America . But the conditions of
the American frontier gave this kind of evangelicalism a new vigour, and from America it
permanently influenced the future development of Protestantism. In the towns and
new cities with moving populations, Protestantism found methods that became a
feature of evangelical endeavours to reach the unregenerate or the unchurched
crowds of the coming industrial cities.
Legacies of the American and French
Revolutions
The American
Revolution and the French Revolution changed the history of Western society as
well as the history of the Protestant movement. The American Constitution, with
its implied separation of church and state, was influenced by the spirit of
free churchmanship from colonial days, the religious mixture of immigrants
continually arriving from Europe, the reaction against the “Church and King”
alliance that prevailed in Britain ,
and the secular spirit of the Enlightenment. The French Revolution and Napoleon
made the idea of the secular state an ideal for many European liberals,
especially among the anticlericals in Roman Catholic countries. The American
pattern was probably more influential than the Napoleonic in Protestant Europe.
The Protestant states of Germany, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Switzerland,
England, and Scotland, which were all accustomed to established Protestant
churches, for a time met no strong demand anywhere for disestablishment. In all
those places the members of the free, or dissenting, churches were able to
secure complete toleration and civil rights during the 19th century, but in no
Protestant country was the formal link between state and an established church
totally broken during the 19th century. At least as an outward and historical form,
established churches remained in England ,
Scotland ,
and all the Scandinavian countries.
The revival of Pietism
In the late 18th and
early 19th centuries, a reaction against the Enlightenment occurred in Germany . In
philosophy, literature, and music it found expression in German Idealism and
Romanticism. Indeed, a number of religious thinkers sought to point out the
banality of the Enlightenment and to preserve and awaken genuine Christianity.
Among these was Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88), a theologian given to brilliant
paradoxical thought, who understood Luther's theologia crucis (theology
of the cross) better than any other 18th-century person. Matthias Claudius
(1740–1815) was another representative of the antirationalist mood of the dawn
of the 19th century. Johann Friedrich Oberlin (1740–1826) mixed his biblicistic
piety with a concern for social missions. J.A. Urlsperger (1728–1806) sought to
promote piety by organizing the Christentumsgesellschaft (“A Society for
Christianity”), the German counterpart of the British Society for Promoting
Christian Knowledge. Out of it grew the Basel Mission Society. G.C. Storr
(1746–1804) and J.F. Flatt (1759–1821) represented the “Old Tübingen school” of
biblical Supernaturalism.
It was in such a
climate that the revival of Pietism occurred in many German congregations. The
people involved in it were not interested, at least in the beginning, in
reviving former confessional differences. They were satisfied with being known
as “Christians” or “evangelicals.” But gradually these new Pietists, influenced
by Romanticism's admiration for the past, began to assert the need to link
their interests with the traditional confessional heritage of the church. True
religion (Pietism), they argued, is really Lutheranism properly understood.
Thus beginning with a renewal of heart religion (Pietism), they came to a
neoconfessionalism.
There were three
discernible “schools” in this revival of Lutheranism. “The Repristination
Theology” (i.e., restoration of earlier norms), led by Ernst Wilhelm
Hengstenberg (1802–69), made 17th-century orthodoxy normative for the
interpretation of Luther's teachings and fought the rising historical-critical
approach to the Bible by affirming the verbal inspiration and inerrancy of
Scripture. A second group, the Neo-Lutherans, felt that the Repristinationists
or “Old Lutherans,” though not wrong, needed correction and improvement
especially in their view of the church, the ministry, and the sacraments. These
Neo-Lutherans, influenced by Romanticism, were the German counterpart of the
Oxford Movement in England .
The chief exponents of this group were Wilhelm Löhe (1808–72), who had great
influence on American Lutheranism, and August Vilmar (1800–68). The third
group, the so-called Erlangen
school, rejected Rationalism, Repristination, and Romanticism and asserted a
theology that recognized the relationship of faith to history, thus providing a
new setting for understanding both the Bible and the Lutheran confessions.
Chief representatives were Gottfried Thomasius (1802–75) and J.C.K. von Hofmann
(1810–77).
The great
19th-century German and Scandinavian immigration that began in 1839–40 included
many “Old Lutherans” from Prussia
whose original pietistic impulses had given way to a high-church
confessionalism. Colonies of about 1,000 “Old Lutherans” under J.A.A. Grabau
settled in the vicinity of Buffalo , New York , and others in and around Milwaukee , Wisconsin .
They were the forerunners of the Buffalo Synod (1845). Saxon immigrants under Martin
Stephan and Carl Ferdinand Wilhelm Walther also arrived in 1839 and settled
near St. Louis , Missouri , to become by 1847 the Missouri
Synod. Stephan had practiced conventicle Pietism in Germany and had influenced Walther
and others in this direction. Walther and other Missouri Synod leaders later
moved to a staunch confessionalism that left little room for conventional
Pietism. The Norwegians, who also arrived in 1839, were almost entirely of the
Haugean persuasion, and one of their first leaders, Elling Eielsen (1804–83),
was an extremely legalistic lay follower of Hans Nielsen Hauge (1771–1824), a
Norwegian Pietist who criticized the established church and stressed daily work
as a divine calling. The Danish immigrants, fewer in number, eventually split
over the question of Pietism. The anti-Pietists were known as “the Happy
Danes,” while the Pietists were called “the Sad Danes.” Swedish Americans
adhered to various forms of Pietism.
The era of Protestant expansion
Toleration
The great Protestant
advance depended in part on the existence of the secular state and on
toleration. As late as 1715 the Austrian government had denied all protection
of the law to Hungarian Protestants. After the French Revolution, however, the
few survivals of this old church–state unity were rapidly whittled away. Even
in countries in which one church was established, all churches were given some
protection; Protestant groups could spread, though slowly and with difficulty,
in Spain or Italy . Even in
tsarist Russia ,
which did not recognize toleration, Baptists obtained a foothold from which
they were to build the second largest Christian denomination of Soviet Russia.
Wherever western European and American ideas were influential, Protestant
evangelists could work fairly freely, especially in the colonial territories of
Africa and India .
Although the secular
state contributed to Protestant (and Roman Catholic) expansion and variety, it
also confronted all churches with the challenge of redefining their role in
secular society and their relationship with the state. The American pattern, in
which the state must have no constitutional connection with religion, was
influential among the older churches of Europe .
In Protestant countries where state and church had been in alliance since the
Reformation, the effect was twofold: the state adopted a neutral attitude
toward the leading denominations of its territory; and the state church pressed
harder toward independence from all forms of state control. Lutheran Germany
produced a strong movement toward independence in the mid-19th century. In Scotland the
evangelical movement demanded the right to appoint parish ministers without
state interference. The refusal of this demand by the courts and government led
to a schism when Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847) formed the Free Church of Scotland
in 1843 with nearly half the members of the Church of Scotland. The two
churches continued side by side until their reunion in 1929. In Switzerland a
Reformed theologian, Alexandre-Rodolphe Vinet (1797–1847), pressed for the
separation of church and state and in 1845 founded the Free Church.
In England the drive for the
independence of the state church was a feature of the Oxford Movement, led by
John Henry Newman (1801–90) in 1833. That movement, unique in Protestant
history, asserted its independence by emphasizing all the Catholic elements in
the Protestant heritage and came close to repudiating the Protestant tradition.
Newman himself became a Roman Catholic in 1845 and was made a cardinal in 1879.
Under the leadership of the survivors, the Oxford Movement transformed the
worship, organization, and teaching of the Church of England within the
traditional polity of an established and Protestant church. The remarkable sign
of this change was the revival from 1840 on of nunneries and from 1860 on of
monasteries.
On the whole the
trend was toward a free church in a free
state . A few conservative theorists, especially the
German Lutheran Friedrich Julius Stahl (1802–61), strenuously defended the old
link between throne and altar and the necessity for a single privileged church
to prevent revolution and rationalism. Other theorists saw the church as the
religious side of the nation. In England Frederick Denison Maurice defended the
established church along these lines; and in Denmark , more easily because the
population was so largely Lutheran, N.F.S. Grundtvig shrank from every form of
denomination or confessionalism and wanted to make Christianity the spiritual
expression of Danish national life. Grundtvig's movement had extraordinary
success; but Denmark , and to
a lesser extent Sweden and Norway , were
exceptions to the trend. The older Protestant churches steadily moved farther
away from the state and unsteadily but gradually secured more autonomy in their
organization.
The rise of American Protestant influence
Since the 16th
century the two great Protestant powers had been Germany
and England , but by 1860 a third force emerged in the United States .
After 1820 American frontier conditions contributed to the growth of Protestant
denominations such as the Disciples of Christ, which formed in 1832 from
revivalist groups. Many immigrants to America were Catholic, and in time
Catholicism would be the largest single denomination in the United States, but
the tone of American leadership and culture remained Anglo-Saxon, liberal, and
Protestant. Moreover many German and Scandinavian Lutherans emigrated to America , and American Lutheranism expanded until
it rivalled Germany and Scandinavia as centres of Lutheran life and thought.
Because Lutheran leadership came largely from European pietistic groups,
American Lutheran churches tended to be more conservative in theology and
discipline than the churches in Germany .
The spread of missions
As European and to a
lesser extent American power grew in the 19th century, the Protestant churches
entered their greatest period of expansion. Confronted at home by new
industrial cities, they developed social services on a scale hitherto unknown,
including hospitals, orphanages, temperance work, care of the old, extension of
education to the young and to working adults, Sunday schools, boys' and men's
clubs in city slums, and the countless organizations demanded by the new city
life of the 19th century. Abroad they carried Protestantism effectively into
all parts of Africa that were not under French or Portuguese influence, so that
in southern Africa the Bantu became largely a
federation of Protestant peoples. In India British and American missionaries
steadily increased the strength of the newer Indian Christian churches. In
China Christianity, hitherto confined to the seaports and to the remnants of
Roman Catholic missions in the 17th century, expanded deep into the interior
because of the work of the China Inland Mission (founded 1865) and other
evangelical groups that were financed from England
or the United States .
Japan
had been closed to Christianity since 1630, and after its reopening in 1859
American and British missionaries created Japanese Christian churches. American
missionaries developed Protestant congregations in the countries of South and Central America . All of the main Protestant
denominations—Lutherans, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Congregationalists,
Baptists, Methodists—developed into worldwide bodies, and all suffered strain
in adjusting their organizations to meet these extraordinary new needs.
Revivalism in the 19th century
One of the most
prominent features of Protestantism in the 19th century was the development of
the camp revival to meet the needs of an industrial and urban society. Although
the urban poor seldom went to church, they listened to evangelical preachers in
halls and theatres, or on street corners. Methodists and Baptists, familiar
with revivalistic methods, made great strides, especially in the United States .
Their efforts were not confined to reaching the working class. The English
Baptist Charles H. Spurgeon (1834–92) accepted a ministry to the educated and
secured a large audience in London .
William Booth (1829–1912), a former Methodist preacher, and his wife,
Catherine, established an evangelical mission for the poor in east London that was known
from 1878 as the Salvation Army. They directed their mission to the people on
the street corners, using brass bands and even dancing to attract attention.
They differed from the Methodist revivalist tradition in their belief in the
necessity of a strong central government under a “general” appointed for life.
They also abandoned the use of sacraments. At first the Salvation Army faced
much hostility and even persecution, but by the end of the 19th century it had
securely established its place in Britain and had become a worldwide
organization.
Karl Olof Rosenius
(1816–68), influenced by Methodist preaching, introduced revivalism into
Swedish Lutheranism. Although Rosenius was also influenced by Zinzendorf and
Pietism, his new movement was quite unlike the little groups of Pietism. The
Pietists wanted to bring men to salvation from the world, whereas the
Bornholmers (as they later came to be called in Denmark
because of a famous episode in evangelism on the island of Bornholm )
wanted to declare salvation for the world. The movement had influence in Norway and Denmark
and even in the United
States .
In the United States
the development of revivalism was particularly marked in the expansion of the
moving frontier. The memory of the Great Awakening (c. 1725–50) remained
powerful in the 19th century, and revival meetings took place in cities as well
as in the western camps. Famous evangelists emerged, including Charles Grandison
Finney (1792–1875) and Dwight Lyman Moody (1837–99), to lead revivals in
American cities.
The evangelical
movement in Protestantism of the 19th century moved away from the traditional
churches of the Reformation—Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anglican—to create new
forms of church life and new organizations. These new institutions used lay
preachers and were more concerned with individual conversions than with church
order or church affiliation. Consequently, they developed a tendency, not
common before the Pietist movement, to identify Protestantism with
individualism in religion. These evangelical activities produced separate
Christian organizations that still called themselves Protestant.
The secular state
allowed and in some cases stimulated further growth among the Protestant
churches. Apocalyptic expectation of the Second Coming of Christ contributed to
the emergence of a number of important radical Protestant groups and churches.
In Britain
in 1827 John Nelson Darby (1800–82) founded the Plymouth Brethren, who
separated themselves from the world in preparation for the imminent coming of
the Lord. The Catholic Apostolic Church ,
formed in 1832 largely by the Scotsman Edward Irving , likewise prepared for the second
coming. Apocalyptic groups also formed in the United States . The apocalyptic
prophecies of William Miller (1782–1849) in the 1840s led to the formation of
the church of the Seventh-day Adventists. The Mormons (Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-day Saints), founded by Joseph Smith (1805–44), emerged from similar
expectations of the imminent end. Another set of groups arose from the revival
of faith healing, the most important being the Christian Scientists, founded in
1879 by Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910), who set up her first church in Boston .
New issues facing Protestantism in the 19th
century
Churches and social change
Attacks on the
churches during the 19th century (and after) were both social and intellectual.
Rapidly growing cities and industry created a proletariat estranged from
religious life. Many political leaders, especially in Europe ,
claimed that the churches were bulwarks of a society that must be overthrown if
justice was to be secured for the working class. Social and economic thinkers
such as Karl Marx (1818–83) argued that religion was the opium of the people,
that it bade human beings to be content with their lot when they ought to be
discontented.
In response to such
views, in nearly every European country, Catholic or Protestant, there came
into existence groups of “Christian Socialists,” who believed that workers had
a right to social and economic justice and that a Christian ought to work
toward achieving social justice for them. Except for these basic tenets,
however, the political and theological views of Christian Socialists varied
greatly. Adolf Stöcker (1835–1909), a court preacher in Berlin ,
was an anti-Semitic radical politician; Charles Kingsley (1819–75), a clergyman
novelist in England ,
was a warmhearted conservative who deeply sympathized with and understood the
working class. The most profound of all the Christian Socialists was Frederick
Denison Maurice (1805–72), a theologian of King's College in London until he was dismissed in 1853. He
then became a London pastor, and finally a
professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge .
But in England and the
United States the radical Protestant denominations—especially Baptists and
primitive Methodists—did as much for the workers' religion as the intellectual
leadership of a few Anglican theologians. In some cases the endeavours made
Socialist parties possible for the Christian voter; in others they persuaded
Christian voters or politicians—without actually voting for a Socialist
party—to adopt policies that led toward a welfare state. Nevertheless, they
made Christians more conscious of their social responsibility. In the United States
the Social Gospel had great appeal for the churches at the end of the 19th
century, and its most influential leader was a Baptist, Walter Rauschenbusch
(1861–1918).
Biblical criticism
Protestantism, and
Christianity in general, also encountered an intellectual onslaught from
thinkers who declared that the advance of science and of history proved the
Bible, and therefore Christianity, untrue. The great issue for Protestants and
all Christians in the 19th century was the question of biblical criticism;
i.e., whether a person could be a Christian and even a good Christian though he
held some parts of the Bible to be untrue. On the one hand, Protestantism stood
by the Bible and declared that the truth of God came from it. On the other,
Protestantism rested in part on a fundamental belief in the liberty of the
human spirit as it encountered the Bible. Protestantism was thus seldom
friendly to the tactic of meeting argument merely by excommunication or by the
blunt exercise of church authority. The theological faculties of German
universities, where the question of biblical criticism was first raised,
suffered much internal stress, but they arrived at last at the conviction that
reasoned criticism—even when it produced conclusions opposed to traditional
Christian thinking—should be met by refutation rather than by authority. Thus
German Protestantism showed an open-mindedness in the face of new knowledge
that was influential in the 19th century. Owing in part to this German example,
the Protestant churches of the main tradition—Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican,
Congregational, Methodist, and many Baptist communities—adjusted themselves
relatively easily (from the intellectual point of view) to the advances of
science, to the idea of evolution, and to progress in anthropology and
comparative religion.
In such a flux of
ideas, with the Protestant tradition seemingly under internal attack from
liberal Protestants, there was naturally a wide variety of approaches, both in
philosophy and history. The German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831)
proposed that Christianity should be restated as a form of Idealistic
philosophy. This view was influential both among German thinkers and Oxford philosophers of
later Victorian England. This approach, however, was subjected to critique, the
most powerful of which was published by the Danish philosopher Søren
Kierkegaard, who argued that philosophy failed to account for the depths and
tragedies of human existence. An earlier opinion sought to justify Christianity
on the basis of the religious feelings commonly found in humanity. The
influential German theologian F.D.E. Schleiermacher (1768–1834) attempted to
infer the Christian and biblical system of thought from an examination of human
religious experience. Throughout the 19th century the appeal to religious
experience was fundamental to liberal Protestant thinking, especially in the
attempt to meet the views of modern science. Probably the most important of the
successors to Schleiermacher was Albrecht Ritschl (1822–89), who wholly
rejected the ideas of Hegel and the philosophers. He distinguished himself
sharply from Schleiermacher by repudiating general religious experience and by
resting all his thought upon the special moral impact made by the New Testament
on the Christian community. Between 1870 and 1918 the Ritschlian school was one
of the leading theological schools of Protestant thought.
Meanwhile, scholars
made great strides in the study and exposition of the Bible. Freed from the
necessity of defending every one of its details as historical truth, university
professors put the books of the Bible into a historical setting. German
biblical scholars, many of whom were influenced by Hegel, were the first to use
the new approach freely. Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860) of the University of Tübingen applied the methods of Hegelian
philosophy to the books of the New Testament, which he conceived to be products
of the clash between the Jewish Christians led by Peter and the Gentile
Christians led by Paul. This theory, known as the Tübingen theory, soon receded
in influence; but Baur's commentary on New Testament texts remained a landmark
in the study of the Bible. A number of excellent biblical scholars appeared
after Baur, including Joseph Barber Lightfoot (1828–89) of Cambridge who demolished the Tübingen theory
by showing the later 1st-century origin of most of the New Testament texts.
Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930) of Berlin
vastly enlarged the understanding of early Christianity. Insisting that the
simple message of Jesus had been obscured by church dogma, he defined the
essence of Christianity as love of God and neighbour. Harnack's work also
summarized the results of a century that was revolutionary in the area of
biblical study.
Protestantism in the 20th century
Mainstream Protestantism
World War I broke Europe 's waning self-confidence in the merits of its own
civilization and, because it was fought between Christian nations, weakened
worldwide Christianity. The seizure of power by a formally atheist government
in Russia in 1917 brought negative pressure on Christendom and sharpened the
social and working class conflicts of western Europe and the United States.
During the following 40 years the Protestant churches in Europe
suffered inestimable losses in adherents and formal influence.
In Germany
Protestantism faced the challenges of Nazi totalitarianism after Adolf Hitler's
rise to power in 1933 and the tragedy of World War II. For the churches, which
had historically been able to count on a neutral, if not benevolent state, this
was a new situation. At first Nazi rule was welcomed by many Protestant church
leaders and laity, since the Nazis seemed to share the conservative values
which the churches also cherished. Quickly points of tension emerged,
especially when the government prevented converted (and baptized) Jews from
serving as clergy and when a liberal fringe group within German Protestantism,
the so-called German Christians (Deutsche Christen) which advocated an Aryan, non-Semitic
Christianity, began to enjoy subtle government support. The Confessing Church ,
a loose association of churchmen led by Martin Niemöller and others, emerged to
stand for (or “confess”) the traditional teaching of the church. This
opposition prompted the Nazis to withdraw their support from the German
Christians by the mid-1930s. During the war Theophil Wurm of Württemberg
protested against the government's inhumane activities, and Pastor Heinrich
Grüber, until his arrest, ran the Büro Grüber, which sought to evacuate and
protect Jews. Some church leaders, notably the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
paid with their lives for their associations with resistance to the Nazi
government. Despite the increasingly obvious character of the Nazi regime, the
public protest of the churches against Nazism remained largely confined to
issues affecting them directly.
At the end of the
war Germany
was divided, and Russian armies controlled eastern Europe. Although the
situation for Protestant groups in some parts of eastern Europe, including Transylvania , Hungary ,
and Czechoslovakia
was less severe, all the churches in the area came under pressure. Most Germans
were evacuated or deported from the three Baltic states of Lithuania , Estonia ,
and Latvia .
Although Lutheran communities remained there, they were subjected to
persecution, especially under the rule of Joseph Stalin. The greatest losses
suffered by the Protestant churches were the result of the division of Germany . The
settlement between the victorious powers gave large areas of former
German-speaking (and largely Lutheran) portions to Poland ,
and many (approximately 8 million) Germans were expelled; most went to western Germany . East Germany (the German Democratic Republic),
occupied by the Soviet Union in 1945, included Wittenberg and most of the original Lutheran
homeland and was the sole Marxist country with a largely (70 percent)
Protestant population. The Protestant churches were the chief link between East
and West Germany
(the Federal Republic of Germany), and the annual meeting, or Kirchentag,
was the single expression of a lost German unity. But construction of the
Berlin Wall in 1961 stopped this communication and isolated the East German
churches. East German Protestants persevered despite governmental financial
pressures, restrictions on church-building, and the establishment of the Free
German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend), a secular organization that competed for
the attention of young people by offering members access to recreational
facilities, organized holidays, and higher education. The vigorous way the
Protestant churches in East
Germany celebrated the 450th anniversary of
the Reformation on October 31, 1967, demonstrated their strength in the
communist state. The emergence of the peace movement in the German Democratic
Republic in the late 1970s and 1980s, which could be seen as an opposition
group to the communist regime, took place under the protection of the
Protestant churches, and the churches were the rallying points for the
demonstrations of 1989 that eventually led to the collapse of the communist
regime and the unification of the two Germanies.
In Russia , a
deeply Orthodox state before 1917, the Baptist community grew significantly in
the generation after the revolution. The flexibility and simplicity of Baptist
organization made it more suitable to activity under difficult legal
conditions. After Stalin's death in 1953, there was evidence of rapid advance;
but after 1960 the Baptist communities, like Orthodox communities, again came under
often severe pressure. The dissolution of the Soviet Union
meant greater freedom and a greater public role for the Orthodox church. All
the same, the Orthodox church stood behind legislation making missionary work
by non-Orthodox churches in Russia
virtually impossible.
The material losses
that Great Britain suffered
in World War II and the end of the British Empire
in the years after 1947 had serious effects on the Protestant churches in
former British territories. Britain
could no longer fund overseas churches as it once had done, and, although Australia , Canada ,
and the United States
provided financial support, change in the government of the local churches
occurred with mixed results. In some areas the new leadership was ill-prepared
for its role, but in others leaders had been gradually prepared to take control
of church government (a process hastened by Britain 's changed circumstances).
Thus the so-called younger churches came to be a new fact of world
Christianity, led by people who no longer saw the history of Christianity
solely through European eyes. This was to be of primary importance in the
ecumenical movement. Meanwhile, the secularizing trend of a technological age
assailed the old European churches and had an even greater effect upon the areas
where the younger churches ministered.
The growth of
Protestantism outside its traditional home—Lutheranism in Namibia , Anglicanism in South Africa , Pentecostal and Evangelical
churches and sects in South America and Asia—helped compensate for losses in
Europe and North America . Because of
conversions and population growth, the Protestant church actually increased in
size as it changed its scope and ethos in the postwar period.
There were also
surprising survivals and reappearances of Protestantism in areas of the world
where its demise had been predicted. In 1948–49 the communist seizure of power
in China
effectively ended Protestant missions there. By 1951 there were few European
missionaries left in the country, and the Chinese churches were forced to exist
without foreign aid. They came under severe pressure, especially during the
so-called Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and '70s, and could no longer
evangelize. The partial reopening of China to the West and the cautious
measures granting more freedom of religion and speech beginning in the late
1970s and the 1980s led to new contacts between Chinese Protestants and
Westerners. Several million Protestants and other Christians are believed to
have endured the persecution of the two previous decades, and, however
uncertain their futures remained, they represented a vital group of believers.
Conservative and Evangelical forms of
Protestantism
The most important
movements in 20th-century Protestantism are usually called Pentecostalism,
Fundamentalism, and Evangelicalism. Often characterized as conservative or
reactionary, these traditions offer exuberant expressions of faith that are in
some ways progressive. Moreover, these are important for their contribution to
the expansion of Protestantism beyond its traditional geographic boundaries.
Pentecostalism
Pentecostalism grew
out of Wesleyan Holiness movements at the turn of the 20th century in the United States .
The movement first appeared in 1901
in Topeka , Kansas ,
and in 1906 in Los Angeles when the first
Pentecostals began to “speak in tongues.” A form of unrepressed speech, this
glossolalia involves speaking or singing in unintelligible syllables. Adherents
claim that they “yield” themselves to the Lord. Normally the syllables they
speak or sing are unintelligible, though some claim that they speak in
recognizable foreign tongues as the disciples of Jesus did at the first
Pentecost (Acts 2:14), from which the movement derives its name. Pentecostals
believe that they must experience a “second baptism,” beyond water baptism, in
which the Holy Spirit comes to them. They not only speak in tongues but
interpret them; they prophesy; and many engage in healing, claiming that
miraculous healing did not cease after the apostolic period, as many other
Christians believe.
The Pentecostal
movement in the United
States developed among rural poor whites and
urban blacks in the South. After the mid-20th century, fast-growing
denominations like the Assemblies of God made Pentecostalism one of the most
visible forms of Protestantism and became increasingly acceptable to the middle
classes. After 1960 the movement spread into mainstream faiths like the
Episcopal, Lutheran, and Presbyterian churches, where participants often called
it a “charismatic” movement.
Pentecostalism had
its greatest success in the Caribbean, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa . Many prophetic movements erupted there in which
Christians adopted emotional forms of worship and healing. Pentecostalism in
these parts of the world was often the religion of the poor, bringing hope to
people in nations that were emerging from colonialism. Pentecostals built on
the work of the missionaries of a century earlier and were often neither
anti-American nor anti-European, as some liberation movements were. They often
accented “otherworldliness” and avoided politics or identified with
conservative and even repressive regimes.
Fundamentalism
The second major
movement, Fundamentalism, combined late 19th-century premillennialism (the
belief that Jesus will return before the millennium to usher in the messianic
kingdom) with defenses of biblical inerrancy. It took its name from The
Fundamentals, a series of tracts that were issued between 1910 and 1915 in the United States . In 1919 and 1920,
Fundamentalism became a formal and militant party in denominational conflict in
the United States .
The growth of
Fundamentalism was due to the spread of both Darwinian evolutionary theory and
higher criticism of the Bible, both of which found acceptance in liberal
Protestant churches. Fundamentalists in the United States felt that these two
movements subverted seminaries, bureaus, mission boards, and pulpits in the
northern branches of various Protestant denominations. The Scopes trial in
1925, in which the Fundamentalist champion William Jennings Bryan fought
against the teaching of evolution in schools and defended the Genesis record as
being scientific, coincided with the climactic battles between liberals and
fundamentalists in the mainstream Protestant churches.
Despite the setback
at the Scopes trial, Fundamentalism exercised great influence on American life
in the 20th century. It prospered most when it moved from political passivity
to open participation, particularly in support of Ronald Reagan's successful
presidential bids in 1980 and 1984. Although the televangelist Pat Robertson
was unsuccessful in his presidential run in 1988, Fundamentalists remained
politically active in the 1990s, focusing on opposition to abortion, support
for a constitutional amendment to permit prayer in public schools, a large
military defense budget, and support for Israel . Fundamentalists also
created a network of Bible colleges, radio and television programs, and
publishing ventures. In the early 1940s they formed several rival organizations
that steadily grew in numbers and assertiveness. In the later 20th century
groups like Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and Robertson's 700 Club
demonstrated the continued strength of the movement and the effectiveness of
the television ministry.
Evangelicalism
The third movement,
Evangelicalism, has been best represented by the ministry of Billy Graham and
journals like Christianity Today. This group agrees with Fundamentalism
on core doctrines such as the virgin birth, substitutionary atonement (that
Christ's suffering and death atoned for man's sins), the physical resurrection
of Jesus, and biblical inerrancy.
Although
Evangelicals and Fundamentalists share a number of beliefs, they differ on an
equal number of core teachings. Evangelical scholars, for example, doubt that
accepting the doctrine of biblical inerrancy is the best way to assert their
belief in biblical authority. Many Evangelicals also reject the
premillennialism that is popular with Fundamentalists. Evangelicals differ in
style, too, and often find Fundamentalists too negative in their attitudes
about culture, too withdrawn into sects, too blustery and judgmental. When the
National Association of Evangelicals formed in 1942, the Fundamentalist right
mounted the same sort of attack on it that had been used against the mainstream
moderates and liberals. Most Evangelicals preferred to see themselves not as
Fundamentalists but as perpetuators of the 19th-century Protestant mainstream.
To that end the
Evangelicals gradually entered the world around them. They became involved in
liberal arts colleges rather than building Bible schools, engaged in social
programs, and criticized conservative Protestantism's overidentification with
militarism and unfettered capitalism. They also acquired considerable if unpredictable
political power in the United
States and elsewhere.
Evangelicals were
also ecumenical; Graham welcomed Catholic and mainstream Protestant leaders on
his platforms, and he prayed with many kinds of Christians whom Fundamentalists
would shun. Whereas Fundamentalists and Pentecostalists had counterparts in the
Third World , Evangelicals tended to form
international movements and hold conferences designed to bring Christians of
many nations together. While Fundamentalists usually split off into churches of
their own, Evangelicals remained connected to mainstream denominations and
increasingly moved fully into the mainstream. Nevertheless they always
endeavoured to keep alive their doctrinal distinctiveness and their passion for
witnessing for Christ.
Theological movements within Protestantism
In the 20th century
dramatic changes in Protestant theology took shape. This was due partly to
general doubts about European liberalism after World War I and particularly to
a reaction against the Nazis' evoking of liberal theology to support some of
their views of society.
In both the 19th and 20th centuries, liberal theology was criticized for narrowing Christianity to the limits of what individuals believed themselves to be experiencing or for turning objective truth into subjective feeling. Though no conservative, Kierkegaard was the most extreme of these critics. All conservative theologians opposed the liberals on these grounds, but in the 20th century there was a reaction even within the liberal camp. Beginning in 1918 Karl Barth and Emil Brunner led a reaction against all theologies emphasizing religious experience. This theological movement, called Neoorthodoxy, widely influenced Protestant thinking in Europe and the
The limitations of
the Neoorthodox approach were revealed by the German theologian Rudolf Bultmann
of Marburg , who
sought to “demythologize” the New Testament by discovering its core truths and
thus allowing its significance for faith to be more fully disclosed. Although
refugees from Nazi Germany, such as Paul Tillich, interpreted European
developments for Americans, the Neoorthodox synthesis did not outlast those who
gave voice to it. Consequently, Protestant theology after the mid-1960s was in
disarray. Europe lost its hegemony, though
certain theologians, among them Wolfhart Pannenberg and Jürgen Moltmann, began
to take elements of Neoorthodoxy and combine them into variously described
movements, such as “theology of hope,” “political theology,” “theology of
revolution,” or Protestant versions of “liberation theology.” Espoused in the
Third World by theologians who stressed that God sides with the oppressed and
the poor and in the United States by feminist or black theologians who developed
new interpretations of biblical and traditional texts, these theologies called
into question the alleged patriarchalism, elitism, and racism of earlier
academic theology.
The ecumenical movement
The ecumenical
movement was at first exclusively Protestant (though Eastern Orthodox leaders
soon took part). Its origins lay principally in the new speed of transport
across the world and the movement of populations that mixed denominations as
never before; the world reach of traditional denominations; the variety of
religion within the United States and the problems that such a variety created;
and the younger churches of Africa and Asia and their contempt for barriers
raised by events of European history for which they felt no special concern.
There was always a strong link with the missions, and an American Methodist
missionary leader, John R. Mott, whose travels did much to transform the
various ecumenical endeavours into a single organization, personified the
harmony of missionary zeal with desire for Christian unity. The World
Missionary Conference at Edinburgh
in 1910 marks the beginning of the movement proper, and from it sprang
conferences on life and work (led by the Swedish Lutheran archbishop Nathan
Söderblom), as well as conferences on faith and order. In the beginning Roman
Catholics refused to participate; the Eastern Orthodox participated only
through exiles in the Western dispersion; and the Nazi government refused to
allow Germans to go far in participating. By the end of World War II in 1945 it
was evident that there was a new atmosphere, and the World Council of Churches
was formally constituted at the Amsterdam
conference in 1948. The entire movement depended for most of its money and for
part of its drive on the Americans; but its headquarters was in Geneva, and,
under the guidance of its first general secretary, Netherlands Reformed
administrator W.A. Visser 't Hooft, it never lost sight of the fact that the
traditional problems of divided Christian Europe had to be met if it was to
succeed.
In the years after
1948 the ecumenical movement brought Protestants into an ever-growing dialogue
with the Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholics. After John XXIII became pope
in 1958, Roman Catholics began to participate in the ecumenical movement. Although
the definitions of the second Vatican Council (1962–65) were unacceptable to
most Protestants, they had a breadth quite unlike the definitions of the first
Vatican Council in 1870 and encouraged those (usually liberal) Protestants who
hoped in time to lower this greatest of barriers raised by the 16th century.
Since then several Protestant denominations have engaged in ecumenical
discussions with Roman Catholicism. In 1999 Lutherans and Catholics signed a
“common declaration” on justification, the topic that had been the major
theological issue in the Reformation of the 16th century.
E. Clifford Nelson
Martin E. MartyW.
Owen Chadwick
General works on the
history of Protestantism include Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of
Christianity, rev. ed., 2 vol. (1975), with useful bibliographies; and
Émile G. Léonard, A History of Protestantism (1965–68; originally
published in French in 3 vol., 1961–64).
Late Middle Ages and Reformation
Useful introductions
to the late medieval and Reformation period are Thomas A. Brady, Heiko A.
Oberman, and James D. Tracy (eds.), Handbook of European History, 1400–1600:
Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation, 2 vol. (1994–95); Hans J.
Hillerbrand (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, 4 vol.
(1996); Heiko A. Oberman, The Dawn of the Reformation: Essays in Late
Medieval and Early Reformation Thought (1986, reissued 1992); Francis
Oakley, The Western Church in the Later Middle Ages (1979, reissued
1985); Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform (1250–1550): An Intellectual and
Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (1980); and Lewis
W. Spitz, The Protestant Reformation, 1517–1559 (1985, reissued 1987).
Major figures of the Reformation
There are numerous
studies of the lives of the major figures of the Reformation. Among the more
important studies of Martin Luther are Roland D.H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A
Life of Martin Luther (1950, reissued 1995); Erik H. Erikson, Young Man
Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (1958, reissued 1993); and
Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil (1989, reissued
1993; originally published in German, 1982). Good introductions to the life and
influence of John Calvin are William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth
Century Portrait (1988); and Alister E. McGrath, A Life of John Calvin:
A Study in the Shaping of Western Culture (1990, reissued 1996). For the
life and work of Huldrych Zwingli see Ulrich Gäbler, Huldrych Zwingli: His
Life and Work (1986; originally published in German, 1983); and Robert C.
Walton, Zwingli's Theocracy (1967). The revolutionary career of Thomas
Müntzer is best studied in Hans-Jurgen Goertz, Thomas Müntzer: Apocalyptic,
Mystic, and Revolutionary, ed. by Peter Matheson (1993; originally
published in German, 1989); and Tom Scott, Thomas Müntzer: Theology and
Revolution in the German Reformation (1989). Useful studies of John Knox
are Roger A. Mason (ed.), John Knox and the British Reformations (1998);
and W. Stanford Reid, Trumpeter of God: A Biography of John Knox (1974,
reissued 1982).
Puritanism
For Puritanism, see
William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism: or, The Way to the New Jerusalem as
Set Forth in Pulpit and Press from Thomas Cartwright to John Lilburne and John
Milton, 1570–1643 (1938, reissued 1984); Christopher Hill, Society and
Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (1964, reissued 1997); Patrick
Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1967, reissued 1990);
Samuel Eliot Morison, The Intellectual Life of Colonial New England, 2nd
ed. (1956, reprinted 1987; originally published as The Puritan Pronaos,
1936); and Francis J. Bremer, The Puritan Experiment: New England and
Society from Bradford to Edwards, rev. ed. (1995).
Arminianism and Pietism
For Arminianism, see
A.W. Harrison, The Beginnings of Arminianism to the Synod of Dort
(1926); and Carl Bangs, Arminius: A Study in the Dutch Reformation, 2nd
ed. (1985). For Pietism, see F. Ernest Stoeffler, The Rise of Evangelical
Pietism (1965, reissued 1971), and German Pietism During the Eighteenth Century
(1973).
Missionary Expansion
For Protestant
missionary expansion, see vol. 3–7 of Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of
the Expansion of Christianity, 7 vol. (1937–45, reissued 1971); and Stephen
Neill, A History of Christian Missions, 2nd ed. rev. by Owen Chadwick
(1986, reissued 1990).
Protestantism in the 19th and 20th centuries
For the 19th and
20th centuries, see Kenneth Scott Latourette, Christianity in a
Revolutionary Age, 5 vol. (1958–62, reissued 1973); David B. Barrett (ed.),
World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Study of Churches and Religions
in the Modern World, AD 1900–2000 (1982); and Bryant L. Myers, The
Changing Shape of World Mission (1993).
American Protestantism
For American
Protestantism, see H. Shelton Smith, Robert T. Handy, and Lefferts A.
Loetscher, American Christianity: An Historical Interpretation with
Representative Documents, 2 vol. (1960–63), a general guide; Edwin S.
Gaustad, A Documentary History of Religion in America, 2nd ed., 2 vol.
(1993), a comprehensive overview; William Warren Sweet, The Story of
Religion in America, 2nd rev. ed. (1950, reissued 1983); and Robert T.
Handy, A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities,
2nd ed. rev. and enl. (1984), on cultural intentions.
Special topics
For the social
Gospel, see Charles Howard Hopkins, The Rise of the Social Gospel in
American Protestantism, 1865–1915 (1940, reprinted 1982). For churches
under the Nazis, see J.S. Conway, The Nazi Persecution of the Churches,
1933–45 (1968, reprinted 1997). For the ecumenical movement, see Ruth Rouse
and Stephen Charles Neill (eds.), A History of the Ecumenical Movement,
1517–1948, 4th ed. (1993); and Harold E. Fey (ed.), A History of the
Ecumenical Movement, Volume 2, 1948–1968: The Ecumenical Advance, 3rd ed.
(1993). Research findings related to primarily American Protestant church
history are published in Church History (quarterly).
W. Owen Chadwick
Roland H. Bainton
James C. Spalding
E. Clifford Nelson
Martin E. Marty
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