Protestant Reformation
The next great split in Christianity came during the Protestant Reformation in sixteenth-century Europe, which is often dated to the moment in 1517 when a German Bible professor and Augustinian monk named Martin Luther nailed ninety-five arguments against the Roman Catholic Church to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg. This Reformation took up the all-important question of salvation or, to be more precise, the question of how to get it. Are Christians saved from sin by some combination of faith and works, as Catholics maintained? Or, as Protestants maintained, is sola fides, faith alone, sufficient to wipe away our sins and admit us to heaven?
As the term Reformation implies, most of the great Reformers—Luther (1483–1546) in Germany, John Calvin (1509–1564) in Geneva, Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531) in Zurich—wanted to reform the Roman Catholic Church, not foment revolution. Inspired by Renaissance efforts to go back to the roots of things, they wanted to leapfrog the innovations of medieval Catholicism and return to the models of the early church. In the face of growing literacy and an expanding middle class, they wanted to conduct worship and read the Bible in local languages rather than the Latin mandated by the Vatican. They wanted to do away with the controversial practice of selling indulgences (chits of sorts to reduce punishment for sin). And they saw no reason why priests could not marry. But as they preached their key themes—“justification by grace through faith,” “the priesthood of all believers,” and sola scriptura (Bible alone)—these Reformers became accidental revolutionaries. And when Catholics reaffirmed their traditions (in no uncertain terms) at the Council of Trent (1545–63), the schism was complete.
Protestants agreed with Catholics on the problem of sin and the solution of salvation, but the two sides disagreed on the techniques that would take you to this goal. In many ways, this historic debate reprised Hindu and Buddhist debates about whether the religious goal came through self-effort or other power. What is really required of us for salvation? Loving our neighbor and doing the sacraments? Or simply putting our trust in the saving power of Jesus? The Protestant/Catholic debate also turned on whether redemption was a gift (as Luther argued) or (as the Vatican insisted) an exchange of sorts in which through acts of penance believers paid down their sin debts. Here Catholics drew on their tradition and the Epistle of James (“So faith also, if it have not works, is dead in itself,” James 2:17, Douay-Rheims) to argue that both faith and works were necessary. But Luther, who had struggled mightily to find assurance of his salvation only to discover that no combination of prayer, asceticism, and spiritual exercises could kill the “monster of uncertainty” that bedeviled him, argued for sola fides (“faith alone”).11 For as Paul had written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live” (Romans 1:17, RSV).
Like devotional Hindus, Protestant Reformers insisted that the religious goal could be attained by all who offered up their everyday activities to the divine. Not only monks and nuns have sacred vocations; ordinary people have callings too. If this appeal made Protestantism plausible, what made it spread was the printing press, which, combined with widespread literacy, made it possible for the first time in world history to get up a religious rebellion quickly and inexpensively. The French intellectual Régis Debray is exaggerating when he writes that “without the alphabet … there would be no God,” but without the printing press there would be no Protestants.12
The Catholic Counter-Reformation reacted to Protestant attacks by reaffirming traditional doctrines on such matters as sin, salvation, and (especially) the sacraments, and by establishing such groups as the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), whose founder, Ignatius of Loyola, famously pledged, “What I see as white, I will believe to be black if the hierarchical Church thus determines it.”13 But Catholics also developed their own version of Hindu devotionalism. At the Council of Trent, the Vatican affirmed the importance of interior piety by insisting that laypeople make confession at least once a year. In 1609, bishop of Geneva Francis de Sales wrote Introduction to the Devout Life, the first Catholic spiritual classic addressed to laywomen.
Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, and Anabaptists
Because of the Protestants’ insistence that all could (and should) read the Bible in their own language, by the light of individual conscience, and with minimal (if any) reference to tradition, Protestantism itself splintered. Today its four main branches are Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, and Anabaptist.
The Lutheran branch, strong in Germany, Scandinavia, and the American Midwest, comprises followers of Martin Luther who formed denominations such as the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America and various state churches in Europe, including the Church of Sweden and the Church of Norway. Lutherans emphasize liturgy in their worship services, which are also characterized by the robust singing of hymns, some (such as “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”) written by Luther himself. Although Lutherans reject the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, which says that the bread and wine in Holy Communion are actually turned into the body and blood of Jesus, they argue for the “real presence” of Jesus at the Eucharist.
The Reformed branch includes Protestants influenced by John Calvin’s beliefs in the absolute sovereignty of God, the total depravity of human beings, and the predestination of all people before birth either to heaven or to hell. Although Calvinism coalesced in Scotland under the influence of Calvin’s student John Knox (1514–72), history’s most famous Calvinists were the Puritans who left England for New England in the seventeenth century and helped to turn Calvinism into the dominant religious impulse in colonial and early America. Reformed denominations include Presbyterianism, the leading Protestant body in South Korea.
The Anglican Communion comprises denominations that grew out of the notorious split of King Henry VIII (1491–1547) from the papacy in 1534—a split precipitated by, among other things, Henry’s resolve not to let his marriage to Catherine of Aragon stand in the way of marriage to a hot young thing named Anne Boleyn. Anglican denominations include the Church of England and the Episcopal Church (United States). Traditionally strong in England and former British colonies such as Australia, the Anglican Communion is now particularly vibrant in Africa, which is home to more than half of the world’s 80 million Anglicans. Anglicans, who see themselves as charting a middle path between Catholicism and Protestantism, are in many respects quite close to Catholics. They refer to their clergy as priests, commemorate the lives of the saints, and typically celebrate Holy Communion every Sunday. In The Book of Common Prayer (1549) and the King James Bible (1611), Anglicans produced documents whose prose did for modern English what Dante did for modern Italian, which is to say they gave it birth.
The term Anabaptist literally means “rebaptizer,” but Anabaptists are defined more by their attitudes toward war and government than by their practice of adult baptism. The Amish and the Mennonites are among the Anabaptist “peace churches,” whose members insist on the sharp separation of church and state. Mennonites and Amish alike seek to live simple lives amidst the hubbub of modernity, refuse to participate in war, and many maintain an old-fashioned agricultural lifestyle free of such modern amenities as automobiles and electricity.
The Protestant and Catholic Cosmos
There are many ways to make sense of Christianity’s Protestant/Catholic divide. Catholics constitute “the world’s oldest continuously functioning international institution,” while Protestants are the new kids on the block.14 Catholics have a pope and the Vatican, while Protestants have neither. But the central difference between the two concerns how each populates the world with sacred power.
For Catholics, the cosmos is filled with people and objects saturated with the sacred. You can access God by praying to the saints, parading through the streets on their feast days, or going on pilgrimage to churches named in their honor. Some of the more popular saints, who serve as Catholicism’s exemplars, are: St. Francis of Assisi, the founder of the Franciscan monastic order, who sought God among the poor and in the church
of sun and sky; St. Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes; and the Virgin Mary, whose life Catholics celebrate on the feasts of the Annunciation, Immaculate Conception, and Assumption, and whose “Ave Maria” (“Hail, Mary”) prayer is at any given moment on the lips of millions of Catholics worldwide (including football fans at the University of Notre Dame). Catholics also access God through seven sacraments performed by priests: baptism, confirmation, reconciliation (aka penance or confession), Holy Communion, marriage, ordination of priests, and anointing of the sick (aka last rites). The key moment in the Catholic Mass comes when the bread and wine of the Eucharist are transubstantiated into the body and blood of Jesus. Relics, such as the Shroud of Turin (said to be the burial shroud of Jesus) and the body of Saint Peter in St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, also tap into the mystery of the divine. So does the Bible, though in this tradition the Word of God must be interpreted in light of church authority and tradition. (Unlike most Protestant Bibles, Catholic Bibles come with explanatory notes.) Finally, Catholics have a pope whose special powers have extended since 1870 to papal infallibility, the ability to speak without error on matters of doctrine and morals.
Protestants empty this Catholic cosmos of saints and relics, which they see as superstitious. Their exemplars are ordinary “knights of faith,” who according to the Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard go back to Abraham himself. Of course, Protestants have heroes, such as civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and German Nazi resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but they do not pray to them or celebrate their feast days. In fact, they criticize Catholics for allowing their devotion to Mary (whom Catholics claim was conceived without sin) to overshadow in some cases their devotion to Jesus Himself. Protestants also reject papal authority and typically refer to their clerics not as priests but as ministers or pastors. Though Quakers reject sacraments entirely, most Protestants reduce Catholicism’s seven sacraments to two: baptism, a desert-born initiation rite, typically understood as both a dying and a rising, in which initiates are cleansed either by immersion in water or by having water sprinkled over them; and Holy Communion, a communal meal of bread and wine (or, in some cases, grape juice), also known as Eucharist, Lord’s Supper, and Mass that harks back to the Last Supper Jesus shared with his disciples on the eve of His crucifixion. The key moment in Protestant worship services comes not when the bread and wine are shared but when the Bible is read to the congregation and the minister (who in this case can be a woman) interprets that text for the congregation. So while Catholics can get to God through saints and relics and popes and priests and sacraments and the Bible, Protestants get to God without intermediaries and read the Bible with God’s guidance alone rather than through a net of papal authority and church tradition.15
One effect of these differences is that there is less room for female exemplars in the Protestant tradition. Though Catholicism, which does not allow female priests, is often criticized as sexist, it was Catholics who put angels’ wings on women and gave us a litany of female saints, not least the Virgin Mary herself. Protestants clipped these wings and demoted visionaries such as St. Hildegard of Bingen and martyrs such as St. Agnes to the status of mere mortals. Although Protestant themes seem to resonate with modern Western values such as liberty and equality, half of today’s Christians are Catholics. A bit over a third (36 percent) are Protestants, one in eight (12 percent) is Orthodox.16
Christians identify less and less each year with labels of this sort, however. It is now rare to find a Presbyterian who can explain Calvin’s doctrine of predestination or a Methodist who can explain the teachings on sanctification of Methodism’s founders, John and Charles Wesley. And since the aggiornamento (“updating”) of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), Catholics have come closer to Protestants on many key issues, not least their view of the church as a “people of God” rather than a hierarchy of popes and bishops. Today many of the world’s biggest churches are nondenominational, and many adherents to Christianity prefer to identify themselves simply as Christians rather than as Presbyterians, Methodists, or even Catholics.
Mormonism
Christians have also produced a parade of new denominations that do not fit into the three classic categories of Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Orthodoxy. Many of these, including the Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Christian Scientists, are American products. The most successful of these mold breakers (also American made) is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, now one of the world’s fastest growing religious movements.
The LDS Church began in upstate New York in the early nineteenth century when evangelicals were getting up the string of revivals now referred to as the Second Great Awakening. In the midst of this swirl, a confused teenager named Joseph Smith Jr. (1805–44) was overtaken with the sort of afterlife anxiety that had led Martin Luther to reject what he saw as the sacraments-for-salvation exchange of the Catholics. So he too turned to God for help, asking in this case which of the many Protestant denominations was true. None of them, God reportedly replied. Soon thereafter, an angel named Moroni told Smith of gold tablets buried in the fifth century in a hill not far from his home. Smith dug up the tablets, used two seer stones to translate their “Reformed Egyptian” into English, and published the results in 1830 as the Book of Mormon. In this book, Jesus travels to the New World after His resurrection and before His ascension, planting His true church in the soil of the Americas.
Mormons, as LDS Church members are popularly known, share affinities with Protestant groups, but they do not see themselves as Protestants, and many Protestants return the favor by refusing to see Mormons as Christians. While Mormons assert their bona fides as Christians by affirming their love of Jesus, many born-again Christians (in keeping with the Christian preoccupation with doctrine) claim that Mormonism veers too far away from traditional Christian creeds to qualify as Christian. Mormons often claim, for example, that God has a body, and that humans can become gods. At least until the 1890s, they saw Old Testament practices of polygamy and theocracy as a warrant for them to go and do likewise. Though Mormons view the Bible (“as far as it is translated correctly”) as the Word of God, they also recognize three extrabiblical books as scripture: the Book of Mormon, Pearl of Great Price, and Doctrine and Covenants. Finally, Mormons believe in ongoing revelation, which allows their presidents to modify beliefs and practices via prophecy.
Widely persecuted from the start, the Mormons are a reminder that freedom of religion is a hope rather than a reality, even in the United States. In response to anti-Mormon bigotry and hostility, the Mormons moved westward from New York to Ohio and Missouri before settling in Illinois, where Smith was arrested, jailed, and then killed by a mob in 1844. Mormons migrated to their current home in Salt Lake City, Utah, under the direction of their “American Moses” Brigham Young (1801–77). Though long seen as dangerously un-American, Mormons are now widely viewed as quintessentially American. The most popular American novelist of the early twenty-first century—Stephenie Meyer of Twilight series fame—is a Mormon. The HBO show Big Love features a Mormon family. And LDS members such as David Archuleta of American Idol are so inescapable on reality shows that some critics are starting to complain that Mormons have “colonized reality television.”17 Yet most of the 14 million members of the LDS Church now live outside the United States, and about a third of that figure call Latin America home—an extraordinary achievement given that the Mormons’ dietary code (the Word of Wisdom) prohibits the drinking of coffee.18
The Evangelical Century
After the Reformation, the next great event in Christian history was the rise of evangelicalism in the nineteenth century and the rapid evangelization of what came to be known as the Christian West. In 1822, U.S. president Thomas Jefferson prophesied that Unitarianism—a form of Christianity that rejects the Trinity, viewing Jesus as a great moral teacher but not divine—would overtake the United States.19 He was wrong. This task was allotted instead to evangelicals, who
set out over the course of this “evangelical century” to Christianize both the United States and the world.
Historian David Bebbington has defined evangelicalism in terms of four distinguishing marks: Biblicism (an emphasis on the Bible as the inspired Word of God); crucicentrism (an emphasis on Jesus’s redemptive death on the cross); conversionism (an emphasis on the experience of the “new birth”); and activism (an emphasis on preaching and performing the gospel).20 In the early nineteenth century these characteristics coalesced into a movement. Thanks to great revivals in England and the United States, and to the heroic missionary efforts of Methodist circuit riders and Baptist farmer-preachers, Anglo-America was rapidly missionized, and evangelicalism became the dominant religious impulse in the Protestant world.
Christianity is a missionary religion. Unlike Jews and Hindus, who do not typically seek to make converts, Christians have long heeded Jesus’s “Great Commission” to “go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19, NIV). Christianity started as a movement of Jewish reformers. Jesus was Jewish, as were His disciples, who came to affirm that He was the Messiah long awaited by the Jews. But Paul, a convert from Judaism, decided to preach his message of sin and salvation to Jews and Greeks alike. It was not necessary, he decided, for converts to Christianity to become Jewish. Christian men did not need to be circumcised, and Christian families could eat pork without shame. So the Christian movement set up outposts among Greek speakers in the places Paul’s biblical letters would make famous (Corinth, Galatia, Ephesus, Philippi, Colossae, and Thessalonica).
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