More languages
More actions
Protestantism | |
|---|---|
Protestant Christianity | |
 | |
| Founded | 1517 |
| Founder | Martin Luther |
Protestantism is the name for the family of Christian churches, denominations, and movements that originated in the theological revolt of bourgeois nature against the feudal Roman Catholic Church during the European Reformation of the sixteenth century, as well as those formed through further splits from the main Protestants. The name comes from the Latin protestatio, a public declaration and was first applied specifically to the German princes and imperial cities who issued a formal Protestation at the Diet of Speyer in 1529, objecting to the Catholic majority's resolution to stop the spread of Lutheranism within the Holy Roman Empire. The term broadened to span all followers of the new teachings emerging from the Reformation.[1]
Despite diversity, the Protestant traditions share a lot of foundational theological commitments that distinguished them from Rome. These include the rejection of papal/pope supremacy and focusing instead on sola scriptura, scripture alone as the standard of Christian teaching. Alongside this is the doctrine of sola fide, justification by faith alone. Protestantism rejected monasticism as a spiritually superior job, reduced the number of sacraments recognized by Rome from seven to two (Baptism and the Lord's Supper), abolished mandatory monk celibacy, eliminated the celebration of saints and the use of images in worship, and demanded that liturgy be conducted in the national languages of the followers rather than in Latin.[1]
Protestantism as a movement emerged from the crisis of late medieval Catholicism, in which doctrinal corruption, the commercialization of salvation through the sale of indulgences, and the wealth of the Church hierarchy had created dissatisfaction across all classes of European society. What sparked it was the Augustinian monk and professor Martin Luther, who in 1517 publicly challenged the Catholic Church on the sale of indulgences which would later become a rejection of the pope and catholicism with the printing press allowing the spread of his ideas, which was not possible previously. Protestantism was an expression of the bourgeoisie seeking to break from the ideological and institutional structure of feudalism, the Church which can be seen as the great landlord and the top of the feudal hierarchy. [1]
History[edit | edit source]
Martin Luther's attack on Rome and the Catholic Church served the bourgeois interest, and the German princes which stood to confiscate Church properties were among his biggest supporters, though Luther was revolutionary he was not willing to go further as the preacher Thomas Müntzer who attempted to give the Reformation a genuinely revolutionary and egalitarian character with the German Peasants' War of 1524-25, Luther showing his allegiances signaled to crush the revolutionary peasants revolt which was the largest mass-mobilization in Europe before the French Revolution, confirming the bourgeois nature of the Reformation. [1]
Not long after Protestantism began to split, such as in Switzerland, Ulrich Zwingli developed an independent Reformed theology in Zurich, departing from Luther on the question of the Lord's Supper, which Zwingli viewed as a commemorative act rather than involving any real presence of Christ. John Calvin, whose Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536 provided Calvinism, which preached predestination and its vision of a disciplined, morally regulated community, proved compatible with the interests of the merchants and early industrial bourgeoisie. [1]
Henry VIII of England interested in annulling his marriage, could not be accommodated by the papacy, as it was constrained by the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor Charles V alongside Henry’s interest in dissolving and confiscating the church’s land, power and wealth which resulted in a break with Rome and Catholicism but keeping a great amount of Catholic characteristics, creating an Anglican Britain that retained episcopacy and much of the Catholic liturgical inheritance though Henry’s decision not to fully break from Catholicism created a theological rift that was one of the reasons for the English Civil War a century later. [1]
In Britain, the crypto-Catholic monarchy and the growing Protestant landlords in Parliament and merchants initiated the first out of the bourgeois revolutions in Europe, with Protestant sectarianism functioning as the ideological vehicle for the establishment of bourgeois and parliamentary power against the Crown and the Catholic Church, from this conflict we saw some revolutionary groups born such as the Levellers and Diggers excluding the Fifth Monarchists. The religious conflicts between Catholics and Protestants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to the Thirty Years' War killed an estimated 4 to 8 million people from battle, famine, and disease alongside destroying Central Europe. [1]
With the consolidation of capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Protestantism lost its revolutionary character and became, like Catholicism before it, an instrument of European imperialism. [1]