What Is a Protestant?
"God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. I appeal to you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree and that there be no dissensions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment. For it has been reported to me by Chloe's people that there is quarreling among you, my brethren." (1 Cor. 1:9-11)
Any conversation between Catholics and Protestants has to begin with a serious and complicated question: what is a Protestant?
There are thousands of distinct Protestant denominations and church groupings, and they are hard to define and harder still to summarize. The category "Protestant Christianity" holds so much diversity that it is nearly impossible to name beliefs or practices that all Protestants share. Whether we are speaking about church government, doctrine, morality, or missions, there is a wide variety of approaches, some of them contradictory, sometimes within a single church or denomination. Even the label itself is contested. Some readily accept it, some accept it grudgingly, and some reject it even though practically everyone outside their group regards them as Protestant.
What causes these divisions? The answer is also complicated. Many Catholics would say it is because everyone becomes his own pope, deciding for himself the right interpretation of Scripture, which leads to doctrinal chaos. Luther and Calvin agreed on sola scriptura and sola fide, but they disagreed on central questions of biblical interpretation, and such disagreements often split churches and formed new denominations. At the same time, Protestants in completely different denominations may agree on central doctrines and still be divided over other issues, such as leadership. The Westminster Confession, for instance, was drawn up by the Westminster Assembly in England in 1646 and became the doctrinal standard for many Presbyterian and Reformed churches, yet the Church of England never adopted it. There are divisions over the biblical form of church government, over a church's relationship with secular authority, over how to fund missionaries, and over whether musical instruments belong in worship. There are also independent congregations that refuse fellowship within their own denomination but form networks and associations with churches outside it. It is not easy to pin down beliefs that represent all Protestant Christians, so the label can mislead. I explore the term "Protestant" here not to showcase division but to show how hard it is to compare Catholic and Protestant beliefs when Protestants do not share a common body of doctrine.
Reformation and Renewal
Before we answer the question, we should call to mind something that keeps reasserting itself in the history of Christianity, which is the need for reform. Because the Church is both a human and a divine institution, its human element always needs reform. God raises up reformers from time to time to call the Church's children, and especially her leaders, back to Christ. Because we have the powerful example of the Apostolic Church in the Acts of the Apostles, there is an authentic Christian longing for that fire, zeal, and radical, self-sacrificial love. We look around our church, our community, and our country, and we see plenty of Christian leaders who act nothing like the Apostles and plenty of the faithful who act nothing like the martyrs, confessors, and heroes who converted the Roman Empire to Christ. To re-form means to return to the original form, and too often leaders in the Church are found wanting, inadequate, or even hostile to the Gospel that gives the Church her life and meaning.
However, reforming the Church is much harder than it looks, and this is as true in America today as it was in Renaissance Europe. Reformers often get as many things wrong as right, and they take the hasty approach of blowing it all up and starting over. Reformers then become revolutionaries and rebels against the very Church they set out to save, and much is lost. Convinced of the truth of their claims and determined to bring about necessary change, they tend to make a violent mess, and their pride may lead them to reform the wrong things. History also shows that when reformers try to exercise restraint, their followers often push for more, believing the reformation has not gone far enough in purifying the Church. In their eyes there is still too much evil, corruption, false teaching, and false practice. They say, "If only we could get back to the apostolic times when the Church was young and zealous!" That attitude misleads, because the apostolic Church had its own problems, errors, and splits as human hearts tried to hijack the Gospel for gain. Just ask Simon the magician (Acts 8), or Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5), or Judas, or St. Peter, who denied Christ three times and later acted the fool in Antioch until St. Paul rebuked him publicly (Gal. 2:11-14). The Church has been full of fools who think they know better than God, in the first century, the sixteenth, and the twenty-first. True reform starts with acknowledging that I may be just such a fool.
Throughout the history of the Catholic Church, some reformers broke away, started their own churches, and spread their own version of the Gospel. We must not forget, however, the reformers who really did change the Church for the better. These saints and scholars, leaders and followers, men and women, kept the faith while they challenged the corruption of Church leadership. They did not deny that leadership's authority, but they bravely decried its abuses, and they worked to reform the Church without tearing it down. It is easy to go to war in the name of purity and to take the axe to the tree for the sake of restoring things to how they should be. The work of true and lasting reformation is hard. It is drudgery to stay within the Church through times of corruption, scandal, and seemingly ceaseless conflict among her members, and it is hard to give one's life for Christ's Bride when men in leadership are forsaking her. Yet we must not stop working and suffering in humble faithfulness to renew, reform, and restore her. Whether we call it faith and morals or doctrine and discipline, we all stand in need of the Holy Spirit, who intercedes for us "with sighs too deep for words" (Rom. 8:26).
What's in a Name?
The name "Protestant" comes from the Diet of Speyer in 1529. When the imperial diet reversed an earlier concession and moved to enforce the edict against Luther, the Lutheran princes and cities issued a formal protest, and they became known as Protestants. Luther had been excommunicated in 1521, and his followers had already begun forming their own churches. Given enough time, these original protesters also fell into dispute. Within Lutheranism today there are many churches, synods, and denominations. The conservative Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LCMS) and the more liberal Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), for instance, disagree on core doctrines such as the inerrancy of Scripture, yet both call themselves Lutheran.
For our purposes, the label "Protestant" refers to any branch of Western Christianity that broke away from the Catholic Church in the 1500s or later and shares similar objections to the Catholic Church's claim to be the apostolic and authoritative Church that Christ founded. Under this definition there are three main families of the Reformation: the Magisterial reformers, the Radical reformers, and the English Reformation. There are also the so-called proto-Protestants who share an affinity with the later reformers. Finally, there are great movements that led to new denominations and even new expressions of Christian life, such as Pentecostalism. Let us start with the Reformation of the 1500s and expand from there.
The Magisterial reformers are Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Ulrich Zwingli, and the branches of Christianity most directly associated with them are Lutheranism and the Reformed churches. Luther and Calvin are the two main figures of the Protestant Reformation and are usually the ones people mean by "the Reformers." Calvinism has many offshoots, such as John Knox's Scottish Presbyterianism and the Dutch Reformed Church.
The Radical reformers thought Luther and Zwingli had not gone far enough in rejecting Catholicism, and they launched the Anabaptist branch of Protestantism. "Anabaptist" means re-baptizer. The Anabaptists denied infant baptism and admitted only the baptism of adults. This practice of credobaptism (believer's baptism), as opposed to paedobaptism (infant baptism), is widespread in Protestant churches today. The Anabaptist movement eventually became several churches. The two best known are the Mennonites, named for Menno Simons, and the Amish, who split from them in 1693 under Jakob Ammann.
The English Reformation under King Henry VIII drew on both Lutheran and Reformed ideas but kept many Catholic practices and beliefs, because it saw itself as a middle way between the Catholic Church and the Reformed churches. Calvinist influence within the Church of England produced the Puritan movement, which thought the Crown had not gone far enough in ridding itself of Catholicism. Later, in the 1700s, three Anglican priests, John and Charles Wesley and, at first, George Whitefield, preached in Great Britain and America and began Methodism, from which came the Methodist churches and the Holiness movement of the 1800s.
There are also the so-called proto-Protestants of the centuries before the Reformation, such as the Waldensians, who followed Peter Waldo, the Hussites of Bohemia, who followed Jan Hus and from whom the Moravian Church descends, and John Wycliffe in England, who translated the Bible into English. A common thread unites these reformers: disgust with the corruption of the clergy, a desire to restore the Apostolic Church, and a desire for the Scriptures to be the center of life and doctrine for every Christian.
Leadership and Secular Authority
One major disagreement within Protestantism concerned Church and State. Should magistrates have authority over the church or not? The Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican churches held that magistrates had rightful authority within the church, and that the church could use the magistrate to suppress heresy and maintain discipline so long as the magistrate's demands were biblical. These became the official, established churches of various countries, uniting throne and altar. There were theological currents before the Reformation that favored state control over the Church. After all, Israel's Levitical priests were subject to King David's authority. And since so many bishops were corrupt and worldly, people hoped that government intervention would bring needed reforms. Luther saw whole countries adopt Lutheranism in his lifetime. The Dutch Reformed Church became the public church of the Netherlands, which is no surprise, since John Calvin had made Geneva into something close to a theocracy, and John Knox tried to do the same in Scotland with Presbyterianism.
Not everyone was happy with this arrangement. The Radical Reformation rejected all secular authority over the church. Though they were few and scattered across Europe and later North America, the radicals were ambitious writers, and their ideas spread rapidly. From these and other movements came the Free Churches, independent of the state in every form and therefore often persecuted by it. The English Separatists, or Nonconformists, rejected the established Church of England and suffered greatly for it until Parliament passed various acts of toleration. Aware of this complicated European history, America's Founders rejected an established national church in the First Amendment, which makes every church in the United States a free church in practice.
Protestant groups can also be classified by their structures of leadership, or polity. Hierarchical churches, such as the Anglicans, certain national Lutheran churches, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and the United Methodist Church, are organized around episcopal polity, which means that bishops exercise authority over local churches. Bishops appoint pastors, address matters of discipline in local congregations and in the denomination as a whole, and set doctrine, life, and practice for the congregations under them.
A second structure is presbyterian polity, from presbyter, meaning elder. Elders represent the local church at regional and national assemblies, and these assemblies hold considerable power over local congregations. They meet regularly in synods and conferences to decide matters of discipline, doctrine, and mutual support. Presbyterians are organized into regional bodies called presbyteries, which regulate practice and belief and can even remove pastors and churches.
In contrast to episcopal and presbyterian polity, congregationalist churches reject hierarchy of any kind. Each local church governs and supports itself. It usually has a board of elders elected from the men of the church, with deacons to assist them. The congregation searches for and hires the pastor, who then governs and teaches it together with the deacons and elders. Congregational churches may join voluntary associations or conventions that pool resources, build ties, and offer doctrinal direction, but each congregation remains fully autonomous. Baptists and many nondenominational churches use this model. In a sense, then, every nondenominational church is a denomination unto itself, especially when it has several satellite campuses under one executive pastor and board of elders.
Finally, there are the cultural divisions between conservative and liberal, fundamentalist and progressive. The secularization of the West and the elevation of the natural sciences over biblical theology pushed Christianity to the cultural margins as a private belief system or code of morality. On this view, science makes claims about reality, while faith is private and personal. As Darwinian evolution became mainstream science and the accepted age of the universe went from about six thousand years to billions of years, some Christians pushed back. Fundamentalists rejected the claims of modern science wherever they seemed to contradict the literal meaning of the Word of God. Other Christians adjusted their interpretation of Scripture to make room for scientific claims. Liberal Protestantism was an Enlightenment approach to Christianity that reinterpreted supernatural events as allegory rather than history. This had obvious consequences for Bible-alone Christians, who now heard that the Bible was riddled with errors and scientifically backward. Churches split as groups accepted or rejected evolution or the Big Bang. Even denominations that largely kept traditional doctrine began to divide over politics and morality. In the 1800s it was slavery. In the 1960s it was the sexual revolution, Marxism, and civil rights. In our own century it is the morality of same-sex relationships. The United Methodist Church, for instance, split in 2022, when the Global Methodist Church was formed over these questions. Today churches align with networks and conventions that are either politically conservative or progressive. The liberal ELCA is in full communion with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) but has no fellowship with the conservative LCMS. Baptist congregations may belong to the Progressive National Baptist Convention or to the conservative Southern Baptist Convention. Two liberal churches, or two conservative ones, in completely different denominations often have more in common than two churches within the same denomination.
Movements within Protestantism
We also need to talk about movements within Christianity. Like confessional statements, they can create new groups, churches, and denominations, or they can unite like-minded people across denominations. Movements testify to the diversity of the human heart and to the relevance of faith in Christ to everyday life. They are often born when some dimension of Christianity has been ignored or suppressed. Reformers try to recover it and draw a large following of people who sense that something is missing. Problems arise when a movement obscures as much as it reveals, because it tends to overemphasize what had been forgotten, and the pendulum swings to the opposite extreme. So, despite their original intentions, movements become another source of division within the Body of Christ.
The original Reformation attacked the teachings of Catholicism, and in doing so it made doctrine the highest priority of orthodox Protestantism. Wars were fought over doctrine. This priority on doctrine overly intellectualized the faith for two generations, and a reaction arose. A new movement called Pietism placed its emphasis on prayer, practice, and devotion. It began in Lutheran Germany around 1670 and spread throughout Europe. Pietism stressed repentance, conversion, and regeneration. It sought holiness, treated theology as secondary to experience, gathered people in private homes to study the Bible, insisted that knowledge be joined to charity and forgiveness, and set out to win over unbelievers. Pietism flourished in Protestant Europe, especially in the universities, as an antidote to the heresy-hunting and preoccupation with doctrine that had held sway before. However, Pietism carried the seeds of its own decline. Its insistence on subjective experience over doctrine and liturgy removed the guardrails, and fanatical groups formed around alleged prophecies, visions, and mystical states, some of which became scandalous. In reaction, others rejected orthodox Christianity altogether and swung the pendulum the other way, toward a new center: rationalism, which holds that human reason alone judges every truth claim, whether from the Bible or from science. Pietism, preoccupied with inner feelings of holiness, had no intellectual answer to rationalism, and rationalism supplanted it in practically every theological school and university in Europe.
The Pietist conviction that Christianity is at its core a matter of the individual heart never left Protestant Christianity. We hear it in the often-repeated phrase "Relationship, not religion." In Britain and America, this emphasis on inner conversion and devout practice grew into the immensely important First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, and out of it came what we now call Evangelical Christianity. Where the liturgical churches emphasized communal ritual, Evangelical Christianity focused on the individual experience of repentance and conversion, known as being "born again." Preachers such as Jonathan Edwards spread this understanding of conversion. Baptist churches grew rapidly among both white and black Americans. At Oxford, the brothers John and Charles Wesley, with George Whitefield, had formed a group called the Holy Club, whose members strove methodically for practical holiness and were mocked as "Methodists." Methodism spread rapidly in Britain and America during the Awakening. Wesleyan theology emphasized a "second work of grace" after justification and the new birth, in which the Holy Spirit makes the Christian holy.
The Second Great Awakening, from about 1800 to the 1840s, was mainly an American phenomenon, and it converted many who had been Enlightenment deists, skeptics, or agnostics. This revival was driven less by the old ideal of reforming the Church than by the hope of restoring the New Testament Church. It is a fascinating period, because new denominations were created not only through division but in an effort at Christian unity. The hope was that a fresh approach to "biblical Christianity" would build a broad consensus on doctrine and common life and lead to a new apostolic age. From this came the Restoration Movement, later called the Stone-Campbell Movement, which tried to gather all Christians into one body. Its churches refused the denominational labels the Reformation had produced and preferred simple biblical names: "Christians," for Barton Stone's movement (1804), and "Disciples of Christ," for the movement of Thomas and Alexander Campbell. The two movements united in 1832 because they saw how much common cause they had. The union did not last. By 1906 the movement had divided into the Christian Churches and the Churches of Christ, and the cause of the split was whether musical instruments may be used in worship. The Churches of Christ still worship without instruments. The Christian Churches divided again in the late 1960s along liberal and conservative lines, into the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the independent Christian Churches and Churches of Christ. These Restorationist groups distance themselves from creeds, confessions, and any title not found in the New Testament. They also tend to reject the label "Protestant" and do not regard themselves as denominations, so they are generally known as nondenominational churches. The same restorationist climate in America also produced the Mormons (1830) and the Adventist movement of the 1830s and 1840s.
Finally, we would be remiss not to mention the Holiness movement, Pentecostalism, and the Charismatics. This history begins with the Methodist doctrine of a second work of grace. The first work of grace is justification, usually understood in the Protestant terms Luther laid out, and the second sanctifies the believer. Phoebe Palmer, a Methodist teacher, taught that entire sanctification can happen in a single moment rather than gradually over a lifetime. Her teaching launched the Holiness movement, which produced new denominations out of the old Methodist Episcopal Church, among them the Wesleyan Methodist Connection (1843), formed partly over the main Methodist church's weakness on slavery, and the Free Methodist Church (1860). In Britain, the Salvation Army grew out of the Holiness movement. Later in the century came a cluster of new Holiness churches, including the Church of God (Anderson, Indiana), the Church of the Nazarene, the Pilgrim Holiness Church, the Church of God in Christ, and the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church.
Pentecostalism arose in Topeka, Kansas, in 1901 and, more famously, at the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles in 1906. It added to the Holiness movement the conviction that speaking in tongues is the normal outward sign of baptism in the Holy Spirit, which many early Pentecostals called a third work of grace. Pentecostalism is varied. Some Pentecostals deny the Trinity ("Oneness Pentecostals") and some do not. Some are Calvinist and some Arminian, and some accept baptismal regeneration while others reject it. The Assemblies of God produced its own confession, the Statement of Fundamental Truths (1916), and sees itself in the lineage of Martin Luther and John Wesley. Other Pentecostal bodies include the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, the Foursquare Church, and the Church of God of Prophecy. The Charismatic movement resembles Pentecostalism but does not insist that tongues or any other charismatic gift is the required outward sign of baptism in the Spirit. The Vineyard is one of the best-known charismatic denominations, but most charismatics belong to established churches and denominations, even those with no Methodist, Holiness, or Restorationist roots. Protestants disagree sharply about these gifts. Cessationists argue that the miraculous gifts ceased with the Apostles, because they served to confirm the New Testament revelation, and they regard claims of miracles today with suspicion, as self-deception, the work of charlatans, or demonic influence. Continuationists, found in the Holiness, Pentecostal, and Charismatic movements, hold that the gifts continue.
Conclusion
It is hard to summarize the last five hundred years of Christianity, and harder still to point to any one doctrine, structure, or movement and say, "That is Protestant Christianity." It has been suggested that the closest thing to a unifying element is sola scriptura. Once ecclesial authority is rejected, whether that of bishops, the pope, or an ecumenical council, all that is left is one's own interpretation of Scripture. The difficulty arises when a thousand groups each claim to offer the right interpretation of Sacred Scripture and then fall into fundamental and irresolvable disputes. Are miracles a sign of salvation or a demonic deception? Is one "born again" in baptism, in an adult act of faith, or in an inner experience of conversion? Is the Eucharist the real presence of Christ or a symbol?
These disputes should lead us to two larger questions. The first is how we can resolve them according to the truth and not merely by consensus or convenience. The second is how this irresolvable state came about in the first place.