Religion: 400 YEARS OF PROTESTANTISM

Protestantism did not spring fully formed from the minds and mouths of the Reformers. When Martin Luther nailed his famed 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg’s Schlosskirche in 1517, he was merely giving customary advance notice of the position he would defend at the weekly discussions of the city’s theologians. He was at first dismayed at the chain reaction set off by his attack on the sale of indulgences; only later did he hammer out the fundamentals of what he and his followers held to be a rebirth of the true Christian church.

Luther placed the supreme Christian authority in the scriptures instead of in the church, as Roman Catholicism does. To this end, he translated the Bible into colloquial German. Leaning heavily on the epistles of Paul, he held that man could not be saved by works or sacraments, but only by faith. But he kept intact two Roman Catholic sacraments—Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

French-born John Calvin founded the University of Geneva in 1559, and its students helped make the explicit, consistent, theological structure of Calvinism into the most influential and powerful Reformation church in Europe. Chief addition of Calvin to Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith was the emphasis upon man’s utter helplessness before an awesome and all-powerful God who had predetermined until the end of time who would be saved by His grace and who would be left to the eternal damnation all men deserved. In his doctrine of the Communion, Calvin differed from Luther and the Catholics in teaching that the presence of Christ in the Eucharist is spiritual, not physical.

These Reformation churches made their greatest strides in northern Europe—Germany, Scandinavia, Switzerland and the Low Countries. In France they made little headway against such violent suppression as produced the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of thousands of Calvinist sympathizers in 1572. Calvinism—under the name of Presbyterianism—became the national Church of Scotland in 1560. Like the Church of England, wherever the major Reformation churches flourished, they followed the Catholic pattern of state-church partnership and were just as savagely relentless as the Roman Church in persecuting religious minorities.

These Protestant minorities had many common denominators, whether, like the Waldensians, they originated before the Reformation, or with it, like the Anabaptists. They were small, fervent groups of men & women who tried seriously to return to the simplicity of primitive Christianity. They drew a sharp line between the church and the world, emphasized the mystical, unmediated approach to God, the “priesthood of all believers” and the strict separation of church & state. Sometimes, as with the Baptists and Quakers, the sects themselves surged to sudden brief popularity. But in Europe, their influence was greatest in liberalizing the Protestant state churches on whose sufferance they lived.

In the settling of America, this interplay between the institutional churches and the radical, otherworldly sects took on new dimensions. In the aphorism of Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the sects in America tended to become churches and churches to become sects. The Lutherans, Calvinists and Anglicans took root mainly in the settled areas, ministering to limited communities of their own faithful. The sectarians—e.g., the Baptists and Methodists and Disciples of Christ—were pushing out into the frontier where America was in the making.

As the frontier settled down, they too began to build stone churches with stained-glass windows, and adjust their forms and liturgies to the traditional patterns of the middle class. Gradually a new, American kind of Protestantism came into being, a blur of church and sect, of institutionalism and enthusiasm, still bearing the tolerant, “do-gooding,” democratic marks of the frontier.

From this reshuffling U.S. Protestantism gained much. Forced to rely for support upon their own congregations rather than on the state, the churches which in Europe had been over-institutionalized tended in the U.S. to become lay churches, warm and democratic. Freed of dependence on temporal governments, they gained new power to discriminate between Caesar and God. And the sects, on their part, gained something of the responsibility and saner ordering of the spirit for which the Apostle Paul pleaded so eloquently with the Corinthians.

But in the U.S., Protestantism lost much, too. Christians began thinking of themselves not primarily as Christians but as Augustana Lutherans, or Reformed Presbyterians, or Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptists. Denominationalism became demonic. And with so much control in the hands of a material-minded laity, secularism became the weakness of Protestantism as sacerdotalism had been the Achilles’ heel of Catholicism.