Protestantism
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Protestantism
Protestantism is the family of Christian traditions that originated in the sixteenth-century Reformation, when reformers such as Martin Luther (1483–1546), Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531), and John Calvin (1509–1564) broke with the Roman Catholic Church over questions of authority, salvation, the sacraments, and church order.[1] Beginning with Luther's Ninety-Five Theses (1517), the movement shattered the religious unity of Latin Christendom and established, alongside Catholicism, a distinct form of Christianity organized around the authority of Scripture, justification by faith, and the priesthood of all believers. Protestantism is significant not only as a religious tradition but as a force in the making of the modern world: historians and sociologists have linked it to the spread of literacy and printing, the rise of individual conscience, new forms of voluntary association, and — most famously in Max Weber's thesis — the ethos of modern capitalism.[2]
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The Reformation constituted a break from the medieval Catholic system on three interrelated levels: the symbolic, the ideological, and the organizational.
Symbolic Changes
Medieval Catholicism operated with a densely populated sacred cosmos — God at its apex, but accessed through an elaborate hierarchy of mediators: the Virgin Mary, the saints, angels, the priesthood, and the Church's sacramental system. Protestantism collapsed much of this intermediate structure. Devotion to the saints, the cult of Mary, pilgrimage, relics, indulgences, and purgatory were rejected as unscriptural accretions — in Robert Bellah's phrase, "a great deal of the cosmological baggage of medieval Christianity is dropped as superstition."[3] The sacramental system was reduced from seven sacraments to two — baptism and the Lord's Supper — and the Eucharist was reinterpreted: against the Catholic understanding of the Mass as a real re-presentation of Christ's sacrifice, the Reformers taught that Christ's death on the cross was a "once-for-all" historical event (Hebrews 7:27, 9:26–28, 10:10), which the Supper commemorates but does not repeat.[4] Icons and images were removed or destroyed in waves of iconoclasm, and the Bible — translated into vernacular languages and disseminated through the new print technology — replaced the sacramental altar as the central sacred object and symbol of Protestant devotion.[5]
Ideological Changes
The doctrinal core of the break is conventionally summarized in the solas: sola scriptura (Scripture alone, not Scripture-plus-tradition, as the final authority), sola fide (justification by faith alone, not by works or mediated grace), sola gratia (grace alone), and solus Christus (Christ alone as mediator).[6] Each struck at a pillar of the Catholic system. Justification by faith alone denied that salvation could be earned, purchased (as with indulgences, the immediate target of the Ninety-Five Theses), or channeled through the Church's treasury of merit; salvation was God's free gift, received in faith. The "priesthood of all believers" denied that clergy constituted a spiritually superior estate with a mediating role between laity and God — in Bellah's terms, the old "religious two-class system" was replaced by a direct relation between the individual and transcendent reality.[7] In its Calvinist wing, Protestantism added the doctrine of predestination and — of enormous sociological consequence — the sanctification of worldly calling: ordinary work, business, and family life became the arena in which God was served, so that "religious action was now conceived to be identical with the whole of life."[8]
Organizational Changes
The organizational break was equally radical. Papal authority over the churches of the Reformation was repudiated outright, and with it the transnational hierarchy of the Roman Church. Monasticism was abolished in Protestant territories, monasteries dissolved and their wealth appropriated by secular rulers; clergy were permitted — in Luther's case, encouraged — to marry, dissolving the boundary between a celibate religious estate and the laity.[9] In place of a single international church, Protestantism produced territorial and national churches (the Lutheran Landeskirchen, the Church of England) subject to state authority, and, in its Reformed and later Free Church forms, congregational polities and voluntary associations of believers. New institutions of discipline and education followed: catechisms, vernacular schooling, and an unprecedented emphasis on mass literacy so that believers could read Scripture themselves. Where the Catholic Church had claimed to be the sole institutional mediator of salvation, Protestantism fragmented into a plurality of churches and sects — a structural pluralism that, in Bellah's analysis, contributed to "a more flexible multi-centered mode of social organization based more on contract and voluntary association."[10]
Consequences
Historians and sociologists have tied these changes to durable features of the modern world: the spread of literacy and mass education, the elevation of individual conscience against institutional authority, the development of voluntary association, and — in Weber's famous and still-contested thesis — an "inner-worldly asceticism" that helped generate the spirit of modern capitalism.[11] Bellah, for his part, made the Reformation the sole exemplar of the "early modern" stage of religious evolution, arguing that with it "pressures to social change in the direction of greater realization of religious values are actually institutionalized as part of the structure of the society itself" for the first time.[12]
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Footnotes
- ↑ Euan Cameron, The European Reformation, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation (New York: Viking, 2004).
- ↑ Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner, 1958 [1904–1905]).
- ↑ Robert N. Bellah, "Religious Evolution," American Sociological Review 29, no. 3 (1964): 369.
- ↑ Bellah, "Religious Evolution," 369; MacCulloch, The Reformation.
- ↑ Cameron, The European Reformation.
- ↑ Cameron, The European Reformation.
- ↑ Bellah, "Religious Evolution," 368–69.
- ↑ Bellah, "Religious Evolution," 369; Weber, The Protestant Ethic.
- ↑ MacCulloch, The Reformation.
- ↑ Bellah, "Religious Evolution," 370.
- ↑ Weber, The Protestant Ethic.
- ↑ Bellah, "Religious Evolution," 370.