What is Protestantism?
The word "Protestant" began as a legal protest at a German assembly in 1529, but it has come to name a whole branch of Christianity — and the commentators treat it as both a real work of God and a form that outlived its power. Understanding it means holding two things together: what the Reformation recovered, and what it never regained.
Where the Name Came From
The word was born out of a political dispute, not a doctrine. But writers trace what stood behind the protest to something deeper than the incident that produced the label.
J. N. DarbyThe mere name is nothing. It came from an act of German Electors at the Diet of Spires protesting against the recess of that Diet, passed only by a majority of votes when they had left, which they held to be illegal... But Protestantism, used as a popular name, was the protest of the conscience, given energy by faith, against the most horrible system of iniquity that ever crushed and overwhelmed the human conscience.
Older Than Its Name
A common charge is that Rome is ancient while Protestantism is recent. One writer answers by separating the sixteenth-century term from the thing it stood for, and names the groups who held it long before Luther.
Andrew MillerThe term, we may admit, in its meaning in the sixteenth century was new, but not the thing it represented. The truth of God and its authority over the conscience were what the Protestants contended for. In this sense, Protestantism is as old as Christianity; and has always existed, though buried, from the time of Constantine to the sixteenth century, under a mass of error and ever-increasing superstition.
Through those centuries he points to the Waldenses, the Albigenses, the followers of Wycliffe and the Bohemians as "the four great branches of the noble stock of witnesses for Christ and His gospel."
Two Positive Truths, Not Only a Protest
Protestantism was never merely negative. Two truths in particular were recovered, and writers note that later generations have often kept one while losing the other.
J. N. DarbyThere were two things in Protestantism — the authority of the word, and justification; some have lost nowadays one of these things, others another.
The effect of the second truth was to set consciences free from a system, not just to correct an idea.
Frederick W. GrantThe blessed doctrine of justification by faith everywhere brought souls, held fast in bondage, into liberty and the knowledge of a Saviour-God. The ecclesiastical yoke could no longer hold those whom the truth had freed.
A Movement of Faith, Not Politics
Because the Reformation reshaped nations, it is often read as a political revolution. Grant insists the facts point elsewhere, and uses Luther's stand at the imperial council at Worms as the evidence.
Frederick W. GrantThis was the first and most powerful element in Protestantism; not a political movement, but a movement of faith. Luther, alone at Worms, in the presence of the mightiest political power in Europe, was God's testimony that the work was of Him: His strength was shown in human weakness.
The Work of the Spirit and the Form Left Behind
Commentators draw a sharp line between the revival itself and the religious system that carried its name afterwards. Several read the letter to the assembly at Sardis in Revelation — a church with a reputation for life but dead — as a picture of what followed.
C. H. MackintoshYou must always distinguish between a work of the Spirit of God and the state of things resulting from it through man's interference, human management, earthly machinery, freezing the form when the power was gone. The Reformation was a distinct work of the Spirit of God, a wave of spiritual power. Protestantism is the powerless form which, through human weakness and Satan's craft, has followed that glorious season of divine visitation.
Why the decline was predictable is explained by what protest can and cannot supply.
Hamilton SmithThere is no vital power in Protestantism as such. Life is found in faith in the living Christ, not in protesting against evil. So any movement that depends for its existence on protest against evil is bound to sink into spiritual dullness and death.
What It Did Not Recover
The Reformation restored the gospel to individuals. Writers are agreed it did not restore the doctrine of the church, and one names the arrangement that damaged it — churches organised by nation and backed by the state.
Raymond K. CampbellIt was the formation of National Churches, supported by the State, which enrolled practically everyone, regardless of spiritual life or new birth by the Spirit of God, that marked the Protestant movement.
Grant refuses to make the Reformation the final standard, precisely on Protestant grounds: "They are not really loyal to the Reformation who accept anything besides Scripture as the measure and test of this." He is equally blunt about its fragmentation: "The divisions of Protestantism are its shame, and to glory in them is to glory in one's shame."
A Charitable Verdict
Darby, though critical, urges generosity — and rests it on the one thing Protestantism has kept.
J. N. DarbyI think people ought to have great tenderness towards Protestantism; they do own the word of God. They may be the more guilty, having more light and not living up to it: but at least in principle they own God's authority in His word, while many others put the church in its place.
Summary
- Protest — the name came from a legal objection by German rulers at Spires in 1529, but what it stood for was conscience awakened by faith against a crushing religious system.
- Recovery — that protest carried two positive truths: the authority of God's word, and justification by faith.
- Antiquity — those truths are as old as Christianity; witnesses held them for centuries before the word "Protestant" existed.
- Power — the Reformation itself was a work of the Spirit; Protestantism is largely the form that remained after the power passed.
- Limit — it freed individuals but left the truth of the church unrecovered, and its divisions are its shame — yet it still owns the Bible as God's authority, and for that it deserves respect.