The Styles Of Protestant Worship
For most people, Protestantism is encountered primarily through the regular acts of worship of its churches. Protestantism is most regularly experienced and encountered as a living reality through its Sunday worship and its marriages, baptisms, and funerals. Any account of how Protestantism manifests itself must therefore include description and analysis of Protestant worship. Yet this is not the easiest of tasks, mainly because of the astonishing variety of forms of worship now encountered...
New Models Of The Church
The limitations of the traditional denomination were being felt by some by the late 1950s.25 Some strongly entrepreneurial Protestants found themselves increasingly frustrated by the institutional inertia of denominational structures, which increasingly appeared to them to be unresponsive bureaucracies that were uninterested in local initiatives or innovations. Such frustration, of course, is not new. The great Protestant preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick, who played such an important role in the...
Redefining The Other Changing Attitudes Toward Catholicism
As we have stressed throughout this work, Protestantism gains its sense of identity through both internal and external factors. Internally, this sense of common identity arises from a shared commitment to certain beliefs and norms such as the centrality of the Bible. Yet Protestantism has also been shaped by the perception of a common threat from a significant enemy Catholicism. From its beginnings until very recently, this has been an integral aspect of Protestant identity. The importance of...
Early Protestant Disinterest In Mission
Protestant interest in mission overseas took some considerable time to develop. During its formative phase, Protestantism seems to have had little interest in the notions of mission or evangelism. Neither John Calvin nor Martin Luther had any particular concern to reach beyond the borders of Christendom. In particular, Calvin's model of evangelism, evident in his approach to the French situation, is primarily that of the reformation of Catholics that is to say, the conversion of people from one...
The Origins Of The Bible Belt
The emergence of the Bible Belt is one of the most puzzling features of American Christianity.40 The original heartlands of Protestantism were in the greater New England area, especially Massachusetts. It was here that Congregationalism and Presbyterianism took root and quickly became the most significant and dynamic forms of Protestant self-expression in the region. The southern colonies tended to be dominated by a socially conservative and quietist Anglicanism, which lent tacit support to the...
The Origins Of The Reformation At Geneva
During the 1520s, evangelical reforming movements achieved considerable success in the cities of Switzerland. Although the movement began in Zurich, by the late 1520s it had won over some of the leading cities of the area, including Basel and Berne. Yet these were all German-speaking cities. As the decade came to an end, interest began to develop in converting some of the French-speaking regions and cities to the west of Switzerland to the reforming cause such as the Pays de Vaud and the cities...
The Protestant Work Ethic
The phrase the Protestant work ethic is widely used in contemporary Western culture to designate the belief that work has intrinsic value in its own right and for its own sake.53 This, it must be noted, represents a secularized version of this work ethic it might more accurately be described as the post-Protestant work ethic. Protestantism's own rigorously theological reevaluation of the place of work in human life and culture, however, would continue to influence Western culture albeit in a...
The Global Expansion of Protestantism
By the end of the nineteenth century, Protestantism was well on its way to becoming a global faith. Catholicism had already made significant inroads in many parts of South America, Africa, and Asia, owing to the great voyages of discovery of the Portuguese and Spanish navigators. It had inflicted serious damage on European Protestantism. By 1590 roughly 50 percent of the landmass of western Europe was dominated by Protestantism by 1690 this proportion had dropped to 20 percent. This radical...
The Swiss Alternative Zwingli And The City Of Zurich
During the 1520s, reforming movements sprang up in many territories and cities in western Europe.12 Our story here concerns a priest who celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday on New Year's Day 1519 by being installed as the people's priest at the Great Minster in the Swiss city of Zurich. Huldrych Zwingli 1484-1531 would never achieve Luther's fame and is today seen as ranking behind Luther and Calvin, in terms of both his ideas and his activities. Yet he played a vitally important part in...
Painting Protestantism And Iconoclasm
Ordinary people encountered the medieval Catholic church not so much in the form of its abstract ideas but through its practices and images. The liturgy of the church, especially the mass, enacted the theology of the church, setting out dramatically a visual grand narrative of human history and experience. The church's ritual observances and symbolic gestures shaped the congregation's perception of the world and their own location within it. It offered spectacle and instruction, theater and...
Elizabeth I And The Stabilization Of English Religion
Recognizing the need to secure religious stability in England, Elizabeth set about crafting a Settlement of Religion that would bring at least some degree of unity to a deeply divided nation.29 The basic elements of the Settlement were the Act of Supremacy, which affirmed Elizabeth's sovereignty over the national church and abolished any papal power, and the Act of Uniformity, which aimed to enforce religious uniformity throughout the nation, making church attendance compulsory on Sundays and...
The Church As The Bearer Of The Word
One of the most significant and distinctive Protestant beliefs concerns the nature of the church. As we saw earlier, the medieval church in western Europe offered a strongly institutionalized account of how salvation was effected. There was no salvation outside the institution of the church it was by membership in the sacral community and observation of its rites that the individual secured salvation. Continuity with the apostles was safeguarded by historical institutional continuity, which was...
Protestant Mission And Native Americans
While the predominant model of Protestant mission in the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth century involved missionaries working abroad, it is important to appreciate that a quite different model emerged in North America as Protestant settlers encountered Native American cultures. Missionary work began in New England in the seventeenth century as Puritan settlers made contact with local tribes. The Puritan missionary John Eliot 1604-90 became interested in the culture and language of...
The Accidental Revolutionary
Why do seemingly insignificant events have the capacity to spark firestorms History is laden with seemingly minor incidents that escalated with astonishing rapidity, leading to outcomes that seemed out of proportion to the original event. Why did the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo in June 1914 set off the horror known as the Great War How could the death of a relatively insignificant individual in an obscure part of Europe ignite such a disastrous conflict Or, going back...
The Bible and Protestantism
One of the most enduring descriptions of Protestantism comes from the English theologian William Chillingworth 1602-44 . In his The Religion of Protestants the Safe Way to Salvation 1637 , he famously declared that the Bible, the Bible alone, is the religion of Protestants. This is perhaps one of the most familiar statements of one of the slogans that emerged from the early Reformation and is characteristic of Protestantism as a whole the Latin phrase sola Scriptura by Scripture alone .1 At its...
Oppositionalism And The Shaping Of American Protestant Identity
How was a sense of identity shaped and reinforced within American Protestantism until the eve of the First World War This important question penetrates to one of the fundamental questions probed throughout this volume namely, what is it that actually defines Protestantism For the first Protestant settlers, their Protestant identity was what had singled them out for victimization and discrimination in Jacobean and Caroline England. Their sense of identity, already strong, was reinforced by their...