Believing and Belonging

Believing and Belonging

Believing and Belonging

Some Distinctive Protestant Beliefs

What do Protestants believe? And how do those belief commitments show themselves in the values and actions of Protestant communities? How do Protestant ideas manifest themselves? The historical narrative already presented has highlighted at least some of the main themes of Protestant belief, while hinting at an endemic diversity that is essential to the movement’s origins and development. This chapter explores some of the beliefs that have been characteristic of Protestantism throughout its history and briefly describes some of the more distinctive ideas and emphases of the various groups within the movement.¹

Yet it is not enough simply to describe these ideas. A deeper question must be addressed: What difference do they make? What role have they played in shaping Protestantism, in aiding or hindering its advance, and in determining its characteristic concerns? Ideas shape actions and attitudes. In this chapter, we examine the ways in which specific Protestant ideas have influenced the development of the movement.

One of those beliefs has already been considered in great detail in the previous chapter—the fundamental, identity-giving Protestant emphasis on the supremacy of the Bible, traditionally stated using the Latin slogan sola Scriptura. While this “scripture principle” is not intended to exclude other theological resources, it makes absolutely clear that scripture is the ultimate foundation and the final court of appeal for Protestant belief and action. Other resources may be useful and helpful; they do not, however, possess the same weight as scripture. The Westminster Confession of Faith summarizes this position well:

The whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture; to which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men. (I, 6)

It is important to appreciate from the outset that the Protestant strategy of prioritizing an engagement with the Bible has led to a multiplicity of belief outcomes. In one sense, “Protestantism” designates a way of doing theology rather than any given set of possible or specific outcomes. The question of which is the “right” interpretation of the Bible raises a series of fundamental issues about who has the authority to make such a judgment—about who owns Protestantism. There is no equivalent within Protestantism of the pope, the Vatican, or the “Congregation of the Faith”—to mention the centralized authorities within Catholicism—even though individual denominations, organizations, societies, and networks recognize certain “authority figures” within their own ranks. It is clearly inappropriate to try to homogenize this complex picture or impose a doctrinal uniformity upon the components of global Protestantism when this clearly does intellectual violence to them.²

In general terms, Protestantism reaffirmed the core beliefs of Christian orthodoxy as these were set out by the Council of Chalcedon (451), particularly the “two natures” of Jesus Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity. Although the Reformation of the sixteenth century subjected the entire gamut of Christian belief to critical reexamination in the light of biblical foundations, these two core areas were found not to require reformation by the mainline reformers.

Nevertheless, some radical reformers, regarding these beliefs as being inadequately grounded in the Bible, spawned movements, however small—such as evangelical anti-trinitarianism—at this early stage. A reaffirmation of the core dogmatic beliefs of the early church may be characteristic of Protestantism, but it has never been univocal. A significant minority—and they cannot be dismissed as a “lunatic fringe”—have had other views. The radical wing of the Reformation argued, not without reason, that mainline reformers such as Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin had been inconsistent and failed to apply their biblicist reforming agenda to all areas of the church’s life and thought. If the use of the term “radical” implies that there were obvious limits to the application of the sola Scriptura principle overlooked by those in this camp, it must be noted that they merely advocated consistent usage of the principle. The category of “radical Protestant” is thus more than a little problematic, its legitimacy depending on whose perspective is taken.

It is, of course, possible to argue that the anti-trinitarian movements of the sixteenth century were not Protestant. Such an argument, however, introduces a prescriptive component into any account of the movement, by which the agendas of power groups intrude into a serious historical investigation of what, as a matter of fact, Protestants actually believed.

The present chapter is deliberately subtitled “Some Distinctive Protestant Beliefs” to make the point that, while Protestants share certain core beliefs with other styles of Christianity, there are points at which they diverge. C. S. Lewis offered an image that may be helpful at this point. In his influential Mere Christianity, Lewis suggests that we think of a great house in which a large hall has a number of rooms leading off to its sides. The hall is the Christian faith, and the rooms are its different constituent elements—Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and so forth.

In one sense, Protestantism belongs to Lewis’s broad category of “mere Christianity” in that it shares the core beliefs of Christianity as a whole—such as belief in God, the hope of heaven, and so on. Our concern in this chapter is to explore the rooms leading off from this hall that contain beliefs specific to Protestantism, or versions of more general Christian beliefs that are held in a specific form within Protestantism. To understand Protestantism, it is important to understand at least some of these beliefs. This chapter identifies and explores some—but not all—of these beliefs as a means of grasping what Protestantism is all about.

In the previous chapter, we noted that diversity has arisen within Protestantism as a result of differing approaches to biblical interpretation, or because of multiple outcomes of essentially the same approach. The agreement of all Protestant groups on the priority of the Bible does not—and indeed could not—lead to a homogeneity of interpretations. The importance of this becomes clear at many points throughout this chapter.

JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH ALONE

One of the most distinguishing features of Western Christianity is its insistence that the basis of salvation is not any form of human privilege, merit, or achievement, but the graciousness of God. The idea is found throughout the New Testament, particularly in the letters of Paul: “By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works” (Ephesians 2:8–9).

The implications of these ideas were explored and clarified during the Pelagian controversy, which pitted Augustine of Hippo against the Rome-based British theologian Pelagius. Where Pelagius argued that humanity is required to do certain things and behave in certain ways to secure God’s favor, Augustine argued that such actions and behavior are the result, not the cause, of being accepted by God. Divine acceptance is an act of total grace that leads to the moral and spiritual transformation of the sinner.³

Although little interest in these matters was shown by the early Swiss Reformation, which was primarily concerned with the renewal and reform of the life and morality of both the church and individual Christians, these issues lay at the heart of the emerging evangelical reformation at Wittenberg. Throughout the late 1510s, Luther and his colleagues Andreas Karlstadt and Nikolaus von Amsdorf sought to renew Augustine’s reforming agenda in the face of what they believed to be a fresh outbreak of Pelagianism in the contemporary church. Although historians have noted the unacceptable generalization in their thinking—Luther and his colleagues were extrapolating, with no justification, from a local situation to the entire church—there is little doubt that they had some valid grounds for concern.

What gave the Lutheran Reformation its distinctive character was its decision to change the terminology in which the question of human salvation was conceived. Up to this point, the Christian tradition had focused on the Pauline notion of “salvation by grace” (Ephesians 2:8) and used this vocabulary in its discussion of how humanity is reconciled to God. Luther and his colleagues now used a different Pauline category to express substantially the same notion: “justification by faith” (Romans 5:1). The reasons for this shift in vocabulary are not fully understood.

This change in terms defined the contours of Protestantism. From now on, Protestant writers would discuss how the individual secures salvation using the specific terminology of “justification by faith” and would tend to regard any other form of words as unacceptable. Initially, their Catholic opponents followed suit: the Council of Trent chose to address its opponents using their own terminology. However, by the middle of the following century Catholicism had reverted to the traditional means of discussing the question in terms of salvation by grace. The prioritization of the idea of justification by faith was now a Protestant distinctive.

As we noted earlier, the doctrine of justification by faith was central to Luther’s reforming agenda.⁴ This concern was often summed up in the Latin slogan sola fide, “by faith alone.” It is important to appreciate that this concept is notionally independent of the early Reformation emphasis on the supreme importance of the Bible. The Reformation in eastern Switzerland, though rigorously focused on the Bible, did not develop any such doctrine of justification sola fide.

Luther was adamant that the doctrine of justification by faith was fundamental to the recovery of Christian identity and integrity at the time of the Reformation.⁵ If humanity became righteous in the sight of God because of its good actions, the whole gospel of grace was compromised. Salvation was a gift, not something that was earned through achievements or merit. Arguing that contemporary Catholicism taught “justification by works,” Luther insisted that Paul’s doctrine of “justification by faith” was definitive for Christianity. And to make sure that there were no misunderstandings about this, he added the word “alone,” lest anyone see faith as one among a number of causes of justification—including works.

This addition caused a furor. Catholics pointed out that the New Testament nowhere taught “justification by faith alone”; indeed, the Letter of James explicitly condemned this idea. Luther responded by making the point that his slogan encapsulated neatly the substance of the New Testament, even if it did not use precisely its original words. And as for the Letter of James, was it not “an epistle of straw” that ought not to be there in the New Testament anyway? This second argument caused considerable unease within Protestant circles and was not maintained by Luther’s successors.

Luther’s doctrine of justification won wide—but not universal—acceptance within early Protestantism. Zwingli and other eastern Swiss reformers of the late 1510s clearly entertained a vision of reformation that did not entail this idea and may even have been contradicted by it. Many Swiss and Rhineland reformers of the 1520s were nervous about the idea, believing that it suggested that Christians were relieved of any obligation to do good works. Bucer, perhaps showing his ethical sympathies with Erasmus of Rotterdam, set out a doctrine of double justification, which ensured a robust link between God’s act of gracious acceptation and the human response of grateful moral action.⁶ Some Anabaptist writers also distanced themselves from it, again expressing anxieties about its biblical foundations and moral implications.

Luther responded by calming such fears—particularly in his “Sermon on Good Works”—arguing that all he was saying was that good works are the natural result of having been justified, not the cause of that justification. Far from destroying morality, Luther simply saw himself as setting it in its proper context. Believers perform good works as an act of thankfulness to God for having forgiven them, rather than in an attempt to persuade or entice God to forgive them in the first place.

These ideas were consolidated by Luther’s colleague Philip Melanchthon, who drew a distinction between justification (the act in which God accepts a sinner as righteous) and sanctification (the process in which God transforms and renews the sinner). Developing the idea of “forensic justification,” Melanchthon argued that God imputes Christ’s righteousness, won by his obedience on the cross, to individual sinners, so that they are vindicated or acquitted of sin in the heavenly courtroom. There is thus no need for any notion of “purgatory,” because the believer is now clothed with the perfect righteousness of Christ.

At one level, the Reformation can be seen as a replay of some of the leading themes of the Pelagian controversy between Augustine of Hippo and Pelagius. Although the debate was wide-ranging, one of its central themes was the human capacity to do good without the assistance of God’s grace. Pelagius held that humanity can fulfill the divine law unaided; God created humanity with the capacity for perfection, and they are thus under obligation to achieve it. Augustine argued that God’s grace is essential at every stage in the Christian life. Humanity is fallen, damaged and wounded by sin, and needs healing and restoration—something they cannot achieve themselves. God’s gracious assistance can be discerned in operation from the beginnings of faith to its fulfillment.

Following Luther and Calvin, mainline Protestantism sided with Augustine in this dispute, regarding him as a generally trustworthy interpreter of the Bible and defender of divine grace. Melanchthon saw the Reformation as recycling this older controversy, with Protestantism playing Augustine’s role and Catholicism Pelagius’s—a suggestion that was not well received by Catholics, who emphasized their shared opposition to Pelagianism.

It is important, however, to note the dissident voices within Protestantism on this matter. Zwingli and other Swiss reformers of the late 1510s, followed by some Anabaptist leaders of the 1520s and 1530s, saw their reforming work primarily in terms of the renewal of morals and set out reforming agendas that were closer to Pelagius’s ideals than many realize.⁷ Later, John Wesley suggested that Pelagius’s idea of “Christian perfection” was laudable and ought to be pursued by Christians.

The Council of Trent responded by criticizing the emerging Protestant consensus on justification at a number of levels. First, Trent insisted that the notion of justification by “faith alone” was unacceptable in that it failed to do justice to the New Testament emphasis on the place of love in the Christian life. More significantly, Trent argued that justification is a complex process, enfolding both acceptance and subsequent transformation by God. In other words, Trent insisted that the word “justification” denoted what Melanchthon understood by both “justification” and “sanctification,” rolled into a single concept. This argument was a recipe for confusion, and it almost certainly underlies the popular nineteenth-century Protestant misunderstanding that Catholicism taught “justification by works.”

The Protestant doctrine of justification had implications for the traditional Catholic cult of the saints. The saints were believed to work wonders, and their relics were highly prized. Most importantly, they were understood to play a role in ensuring the salvation of individuals through their righteous and effective prayer.⁸ The doctrine of justification rendered the cult of the saints redundant. They would add nothing to what Christ had done; there was nothing they could achieve that had not already been secured through Christ’s saving death.

That having been said, a growing body of evidence points to early Protestant leaders being treated as if they were traditional saints during the first phase of the movement.⁹ Both Melanchthon and Luther became the object of stories of miraculous events—such as the village whose well dried up after Luther’s censure of its citizens for supporting Karlstadt. Luther’s birthplace in Eisleben began to attract pilgrims and was rumored to have miraculously survived destruction by fire several times. These ideas seem to have persisted into the seventeenth century—perhaps confirming the views of those who suggest that humanity is intrinsically religious.

Since the Second World War, there has been growing hesitation within many sections of Protestantism concerning its traditional way of speaking about salvation.¹⁰ While some have insisted that Protestants are bound by their tradition to speak and think in this manner, others have expressed anxieties over its continued use, especially in the light of a growing consensus among New Testament scholars that the notion of “justification by faith” is not as central to the thought of the New Testament, or even Paul himself, as Luther and others appear to have believed.¹¹ Many follow Albert Schweitzer, who suggested that the idea of justification was only a “subsidiary crater” in Paul’s thought, rather than constituting its core and center. Why, many Protestant scholars have asked, should the movement be obliged to replicate Luther’s interpretation of Paul when it appears questionable at points? Are not Protestants meant to constantly reexamine their ideas in the light of the biblical material rather than accept interpretations inherited from the past, however venerable or influential? Others have expressed concern that the phrase “justification by faith” is virtually unintelligible to modern secular humanity, and they suggest that other biblical concepts might be redeployed to remedy the situation.¹² It remains to be seen where this debate will lead in the future.

So why did this doctrine play such an important role in the first phase of Protestantism? After all, the basic ideas underlying the doctrine were known in earlier periods of the history of Christian thought. The answer to this question is complex and nuanced and relates particularly to the emergence of the idea of the “individual.” Although the origins of a sense of individual, personal identity, one that could be affirmed over and against one’s place as a member of society at large, can be traced back to the early Middle Ages, there is no doubt that Renaissance humanism gave this notion a new sense of importance, as well as an injection of intellectual energy.¹³

The doctrine of justification made a powerful appeal to this emerging sense of individual identity. One’s relationship to God was a personal matter, involving the creator and the creature. Justification was an act of personal graciousness and acceptation of the sinner by a God who promised to forgive sins and renew human nature. Each individual believer mattered profoundly to God and could not be reduced to an ecclesiastical statistic. Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith was widely understood to mean that the individual relates directly to God, without having to involve the institution of the church or its priests or rites. The doctrine resonated profoundly with the notion of a privatized, personal faith. This is not what Luther intended; it was, however, how he was understood by his appreciative readers throughout Europe during the 1520s.

This individualist understanding of the doctrine of justification became so influential that second-generation Protestants felt the need to restore the balance and remind their followers of the corporate dimensions of faith. Christianity was not just about the individual’s personal relationship with God; it had implications for an individual’s existence in the community. Calvin’s comments on the role of the church can be seen as an important corrective to a radically individualist reading of Luther. God uses certain definite earthly means to work out the salvation of his elect; although he is not absolutely bound by these means, he normally works within them. The church is thus identified as a divinely founded body within which God effects the sanctification of his people. “You cannot,” Calvin argued, “have God as your father unless you have the church for your mother.”

This naturally leads us to consider Protestant reflections on the nature of the church itself and its importance for the development of Protestantism.

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 transmitted by the laying on of hands and passed down from one generation of the successors of the apostles to the next. This strongly institutionalized vision of the church was often defended by citing a maxim of the third-century martyr Cyprian of Carthage: “Outside the church, there is no salvation.” Anyone who wanted to be saved had to belong to the Catholic church.

The detachment of the fledgling Protestant churches from this body was thus fraught with theological peril. Were these breakaway communities really Christian churches? Could they offer the same salvation and spiritual security as the Catholic church? These were no academic questions, but matters of ultimate significance. Salvation was a serious matter in the sixteenth century.

The Protestant response to these entirely proper questions was to offer a new vision of what it meant to be a “Christian church.” As we shall see, the new theory removed any necessity for institutional continuity with the medieval church. It opened the way for the radical proliferation of “churches” in the modern period by laying the conceptual foundations for a way of thinking about the nature of the church that encouraged entrepreneurs to set up their own churches, breaking away from older communities if necessary. To understand Protestant theorizing about the church is to gain insights into the remarkable ecclesiastical diversification and fragmentation that subsequently took place throughout the West.

For the mainline reformers, there were two—and only two—essential elements of a Christian church: the preaching of the word of God and the proper administration of the sacraments. As Calvin put it:

Wherever we see the Word of God purely preached and listened to, and the sacraments administered according to Christ’s institution, it is in no way to be doubted that a church of God exists. For his promise cannot fail: “Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20).¹⁴

Calvin’s definition is significant as much for what it does not say as for what it does explicitly affirm. There is no reference to the necessity of any historical or institutional continuity with the apostles. For Calvin, it was more important to teach what the apostles taught than to be able to show an unbroken line of institutional continuity with them. (It should be remembered here that Calvin himself was never ordained; he was simply licensed as a pastor by the city council of Geneva.) After all, does institutional continuity guarantee intellectual fidelity? For Calvin, the Catholic church had suffered from institutional drift and lost its grounding in the fundamental ideas of the apostles—which were, of course, expressed in the Bible.

This radical new understanding of the church in effect envisaged the church as a community that gathers around the preaching of the word of God and celebrates and proclaims the gospel through the sacraments. Where the gospel is truly preached, there a church will gather. Protestant theologians, sensitive to the charge that this new approach represented a distortion of a proper theology of the church, pointed to a classic statement of the first-century Christian writer Ignatius of Antioch: “Wherever Christ is, there is also the church (ubi Christus ibi ecclesia).” Gathering together in the name of Christ ensures his presence—and with that presence, a church comes into being.

Although this distinctive and characteristic Protestant doctrine of the church dates from the early 1500s, its full significance only became clear in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With no universally accepted authority structure within Protestantism, enterprising individuals, often fired up by a vision of a specific form of ministry, could start their own congregations, or even their own denominations. It is certainly true that many Protestant churches moved quickly to establish authority structures that embodied their specific visions of Protestantism, thus exercising control over their ministers and members. But the very nature of Protestantism is such that these can only hope to define specific forms of Protestantism, not Protestantism itself. Individuals might break away from parent churches or start new churches altogether.

Sometimes a movement’s strength is also its weakness, and vice versa. This distinctive aspect of Protestant identity holds the key to understanding the proliferation of churches, the fragmentation of denominations, and the inflation of church networks that is so characteristic of modern Protestantism. Many would see this as a weakness. There might well be one universal church to which all Christians belong—but there are countless local churches, each embodying a distinctive idea of what it means to be a Christian.

The outcome of this doctrine was inevitable: a consumerist mentality developed as Protestants felt able to pick and choose the local church that suited their needs, beliefs, and aspirations. And if they didn’t find one that was just right, they could establish their own. Catholic critics of Protestantism often point to its innate tendency toward schism, which they regard as showing a lack of concern for the fundamental unity of the church. While this congregational inflation is unquestionably problematic, it has two strengths, both of which are of decisive importance for the future of Protestantism.

First, it allows Protestantism to deal with rapid social and cultural change, which otherwise often leaves churches locked into the realities of a bygone age. Entrepreneurial pastors and preachers can easily recast a vision of the gospel, adapting it to the new situation—in much the same way as older visions were adapted to their situations—and thus preventing Protestantism from becoming trapped in a time warp. Willow Creek Community Church, located just outside of Chicago, is an excellent example of this kind of adaptation that was made possible and legitimate by the fluid Protestant understanding of the church. More particularly, this adaptability enables Protestants to respond to perceived needs for specialist ministries to specific groups through the formation of voluntary societies, which often come to exercise a para-church role.

Second, Protestant congregational variety enables Protestant churches to deal with situations in which the denominational leadership is seen to be radically out of touch with its membership—typically, by pursuing theological agendas or cultural trends that are not accepted by the majority of their congregations. It does not matter whether these agendas are right-wing or left-wing, conservative or liberal. Protestantism empowers the congregation, first, to protest against their leaders; second, to remove them; and third, to form another congregation elsewhere, while still remaining a Christian church. While some Protestant denominations attempt to shield themselves against such accountability to their membership, these fundamental rights remain, in principle, as part of the movement’s core identity. One can leave one denomination and join another—while still remaining a Protestant.

It is not unfair to suggest that the Protestant vision of the church unleashes a Darwinian process of competition and survival in which maladapted churches are gradually eliminated and what survives is better suited to the needs and opportunities of the day. Using an essentially economic model, Laurence Iannaccone and Rodney Stark argue that the European state churches have created a religious monopoly, leading to a radical restriction of religious options for its people. In marked contrast, the United States offers an open market of religious options, with none either sanctioned or restricted by the state.¹⁵ Commitment to organized religion is higher in countries such as the United States because religious pluralism encourages market responsiveness to the religious consumer. In Europe, they argue, the institutional churches have seen little purpose in identifying and meeting the needs of their parishioners.

If Iannaccone and Stark are right, Protestantism flourishes in the United States on account of open competition, which forces churches to take the needs and aspirations of their members seriously. In contrast, the privileged position of state churches in Europe has often led to the entrenchment of outdated approaches and attitudes, and above all a neglect of the religious consumer by leaders who are often wedded to the convenient certainties of the past. In America, competition encourages religious entrepreneurship and vitality. As Steve Bruce, professor of sociology at the University of Aberdeen, points out: “Free-market capitalism explains why Americans are rich; free-market religion explains why Americans are church-going.”¹⁶

Yet Protestants found themselves in disagreement about the church in the sixteenth century, and they remain in disagreement today. One particularly significant disagreement that pitted mainline reformers against their radical counterparts concerned whether the church was a “mixed body” or a “pure body.” This controversy was also a replay of an earlier controversy involving Augustine of Hippo. In the fourth century, the Donatist movement began to raise fundamental questions about the identity of the church.¹⁷ Following a series of lapses on the part of Christian leaders in North Africa in response to Roman persecutions, questions began to be raised about the qualities required of Christian leaders and their congregations. The fourth-century Donatist movement—so named after Donatus, one of its early leaders—took a rigorist position, arguing that the church had every right to expect moral and doctrinal purity on the part of its members.¹⁸ The church was to be conceived as a “pure body.”

Augustine took the view that human frailty was such that the church could not achieve such a goal in practice. He cited one of Jesus of Nazareth’s parables to make his point. A farmer woke up one morning to find weeds growing in his field of wheat. Being unwilling to pull out the weeds, which would have damaged the wheat growing alongside them, he decided to wait until the harvest and then separate the wheat and the weeds (Matthew 13:24–30). For Augustine, that parable referred to the church: it was a “mixed body” of wheat and weeds, saints and sinners. Separation could wait until the final judgment.

The same controversy flared up during the early years of Protestantism. Luther and Calvin adopted Augustine’s model of the church as a “mixed body.” In his characteristically racy manner, Luther spiced up Augustine’s imagery. Where Augustine spoke of “weeds among the wheat,” Luther spoke of “mouse-droppings among the peppercorns.” This intriguing image underlies an understanding of the church adapted to the realities of European politics of the sixteenth century, just as Augustine accounted for the Roman imperial situation of the late fourth century. The political realities of the western European situation in the sixteenth century called for state churches in some shape or form, especially as the phenomenon of confessionalization began to take root in the 1560s. A theory of the church that could not accommodate the requirement that a church engage positively yet critically with the state would have created serious difficulties for such a vision of Protestant Christendom.

Anabaptists and other radicals, however, held that this doctrine of the church represented a compromise with power and a loss of the defining vision of the gospel. Many Anabaptists saw the conversion of Constantine, who went on to become the first Christian Roman emperor, as a disaster. Christianity was disfigured and damaged by its collusion with power and status. When it became the official religion of the Roman Empire, it lost its cutting edge and moral underpinnings.

Adopting something very similar to a Donatist understanding of the church, many Anabaptists insisted that the church should have no dealings with the corruption of political life. The swearing of oaths, the use of coercive force, the taking of life, and the authority of the magistrate were all sinful, worldly intrusions into the Christian life. The church should be separate from such pollution, untainted by the compromises of the world. The pacifism that was characteristic of Swiss humanism in the 1510s and 1520s came to be an integral element of Anabaptist thought, grounded in the New Testament’s witness to Jesus of Nazareth. The clearest statement of the general Anabaptist attitude toward secular authority may be found in the “Schleitheim Confession” (1527), which taught that coercion has its place “outside the perfection of Christ”; inside the community of faith, physical force has no place. Christians should therefore not hold public office, since doing so would involve collusion with power and violence.

The Anabaptist concern for the doctrinal and moral purity of the church led to a corresponding emphasis on the importance of discipline within the church. Anabaptism maintained discipline in its communities through “the ban”—a means by which church members could be excluded from Anabaptist congregations. This means of discipline was regarded as essential to the identity of a true church. Part of the Anabaptist case for radical separation from the mainstream churches (a practice that continues to this day among Amish communities in the United States) was the perceived failure of those churches to maintain proper discipline within their ranks.

These concerns were developed during the seventeenth century within Puritanism, in both England and North America. Richard Baxter laid considerable emphasis upon the importance of doctrinal and moral purity within the church and had no hesitation about devising disciplinary procedures to ensure that such purity was maintained.¹⁹

Underlying both the Anabaptist and Puritan vision of Protestantism was an idea that would come of age in a later era—the notion of the church primarily as a “fellowship of believers.” Turning their backs on traditional hierarchical models of the church, both movements moved toward more participative, democratic models of church government in which individual congregations had the right to determine their own identity and future. Not only did this trend anticipate—some argue that it was an important factor in causing—the emergence of democracy at the political level, as in the American Revolution, but it bypassed the traditionally conservative ecclesiastical hierarchies, which were often locked into older ways of thinking and acting.

In the twentieth century, this approach began to accelerate, initially within North American Protestantism. The “congregationalization” of American Protestantism after the Second World War allowed entrepreneurial church leaders to develop new models of the church that were unimpeded by the restraining hand of an episcopacy or denominational hierarchy. As we shall see later, this proved to be a decisive factor in the reshaping of Protestantism at this time.

THE SACRAMENTS

The great tumult of the early sixteenth century that gave birth to Protestantism was not simply about how ideas are developed or what those ideas might be. It concerned actions—the way in which the Christian faith was manifested through the worship of the church in a series of rites that were held to be of particular importance to affirming the identity of the Christian faith, the place of the church in the scheme of salvation, and the deepening of faith and commitment on the part of the individual Christian. These rites are traditionally known as “sacraments.”²⁰

The word “sacrament” needs an explanation. The word comes from the Latin term sacramentum, meaning “something that is consecrated.” The word was regularly used in the church to refer to a series of rites or ordinances that were regarded as having special spiritual qualities, such as the ability to convey the grace of God. In secular Roman use, the term had come to mean “a sacred oath” sworn by soldiers and state officials. The word “sacrament” is not found in the Bible, although most Protestants were content to retain the term while reinterpreting it in ways they regarded as consistent with the Bible.

So what is a sacrament? That is precisely the question raised during the Reformation, which witnessed a major debate over how a sacrament was to be defined. During the Middle Ages, Catholicism set out a comprehensive view of the ministry of the church that recognized seven sacraments: the mass, baptism, confirmation, ordination, marriage, penance, and unction (anointing with oil). These played a significant role in how the church was experienced by ordinary people—in other words, in how the church manifested itself.

To reform the sacraments was thus to make obvious changes to the life of the church and community. For most laypersons, the main point of contact with the church was through church services on Sundays. The pulpit was one of the most important public platforms of the medieval period for this very reason—hence the desire of both reformers and city councils to control what was said from the pulpit. Yet the church’s impact on the people transcended preaching; by far the most important experience for laypersons was the rite or sacrament universally known as “the mass.”

By the end of the 1520s, two fundamental changes to existing understandings of sacraments had emerged within Protestantism and achieved widespread consensus throughout the movement.

Martin Luther argued that a sacrament is essentially an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace. The core component of a sacrament is a physical sign that points to a promise on God’s part—such as forgiveness of sins, or the hope of eternal life. Yet while all sacraments might be signs, not all signs are sacraments. In his Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), Luther argued that a sign can only be regarded as a sacrament if there was an explicit command from Jesus of Nazareth that his followers undertake such an action. Applying this criterion, Luther declared that there were only two sacraments of the Christian gospel—the mass and baptism.

Luther’s defense of the principle of “communion in both kinds”—that is, the laity being allowed to receive both bread and wine—is based on his theology of how signs work. The bread and the wine, he argued, are signs of God’s grace and forgiveness. To deny the laity access to a sign is tantamount to denying them the greater reality to which the sign points. In addition to lacking biblical warrant, the practice of “communion in one kind” appeared to imply that the laity are excluded from at least some aspect of God’s promises of grace and are thus to be regarded as second-class Christians. Since Luther’s doctrine of the “priesthood of all believers” affirmed the equal spiritual dignity and value of all Christians, this medieval practice was to be rejected as unacceptable.

Yet while consensus was achieved on these two highly significant matters, Protestantism found itself unable to agree on a wide range of additional issues, some of which became so controversial that they occasionally caused, and regularly contributed to, divisions between denominations. Once more, the divisions primarily concerned the interpretation and application of the Bible to the social contexts in which Protestantism found itself.

First, Protestants were agreed that Christians should meet regularly to share bread and wine, as Jesus of Nazareth had commanded, but what was this practice to be called? Luther was prepared to retain the older term “mass” (the Latin term missa literally means “a service”), regarding it as unproblematic if properly explained. Most Protestants, however, held that the word “mass” carried baggage with it from medieval Catholicism and was best discontinued. The New Testament did not prescribe any specific terms for such gatherings, tending to use simple terms like “breaking bread,” so there was no obvious alternative. A number of terms were explored, including the Lord’s Supper, communion (or Holy Communion), eucharist (from the Greek verb eucharistein, “to give thanks”), and remembrance. A less significant disagreement emerged over the word “sacrament,” which some found to be too heavily freighted with Catholic assumptions to be acceptable; the term “ordinance” was proposed as an alternative.

Second, a major debate erupted during the 1520s—and continues unresolved to this day—over how the bread and wine relate to the spiritual realities they represent. Luther held that the bread and the wine are the body and blood of Christ; Zwingli held that they are symbolic representations.²¹ Other Protestant writers took intermediary positions—for example, Theodore Beza proposed the notion of an “efficacious sign.” The serious dispute between Luther and Zwingli raised serious questions about the clarity of scripture: how could the Bible be “clear” when such totally different understandings were defended by leading Protestants on the basis of the same biblical texts?

Third, Protestants found themselves unable to agree on how often Christians should gather to break bread and drink wine. The New Testament gave no explicit ruling on the matter. The history of the early church strongly suggested that this gathering had rapidly become the main worship event of the church, taking place every Sunday. Luther retained this practice; Zwingli suggested that it was such a solemn event that it should be commemorated three or four times a year. Once more, Protestant writers have positioned themselves at various points on a spectrum of possibilities. The Church of England followed Zwingli’s pattern until the nineteenth century, when the rise of the High Church “Oxford Movement” laid the foundations for reverting to the more ancient Christian practice of weekly celebration.

Other lesser debates concerning this sacrament may be noted in passing. Given that a sermon was invariably preached on these occasions, a debate arose over the relative importance of the sermon and the sacrament. Which took priority? Luther integrated the two superbly, speaking of the “ministry of the word” and the “ministry of the sacrament”; others, however, took different views. Another debate arose over concerns about whether the administration of wine to the laity might encourage alcohol addiction. Many Protestant groups thus stipulate that the “juice of the grape,” not wine, should be administered at communion services. A further debate concerned whether there should be a common cup from which all would drink or whether the wine (or grape juice) should be administered in a separate vessel for each communicant. And should communion be open to all (a policy sometimes known as the “open table) or limited to those who had been properly instructed and admitted to full membership in their churches?

A further major debate developed within early Protestantism concerning the sacrament of baptism. Should infants be baptized? The historical evidence indicates that the church began baptizing the infants of Christian parents at a very early stage. The practice is not explicitly mentioned in the New Testament, although it is possible that references to the baptism of “households” (Acts 16:15, 33; 1 Corinthians 1:16) might include children. The mainline reformers regarded infant baptism as a thoroughly authentic Christian practice and commended and practiced it. They did so, however, for different reasons. Luther regarded infant baptism as the means by which God brought about faith in individuals. For Luther, baptism was the cause of faith. Zwingli, on the other hand, saw it as a sign of the covenant between God and the church. Anabaptism regarded the practice as completely without biblical warrant. At no point, they argued, did the New Testament instruct Christians to baptize infants. Baptism was to be restricted to believing adults who were capable of making a confession of faith.

These differences led to a clear divergence within Protestantism on this matter, with important implications for the life of the church. The Church of England, for example, baptizes infants by the sprinkling of water. Since the infant cannot make promises of faith, “godparents” are selected to ensure that the infant grows up within the Christian faith, until they are ready to confess that faith for themselves. At this point, they are admitted to full membership in the church through confirmation.

Baptists, following their Anabaptist forebears, reject infant baptism. James Robinson Graves (1820–93), probably the most significant intellectual force in the early period of the Southern Baptist Convention, argued that only confessing believers should be baptized and that this baptism should take the form of total immersion.

A wide variety of attitudes toward the sacraments can be seen within Protestantism, and it is very difficult to see how any of these can be regarded as “definitive” for the movement. Lutheranism and sections of Anglicanism give particular emphasis to the importance of sacraments, stressing the interconnectedness of the ministries of the word and sacrament. Luther refused to accept any notion of either baptism or the Lord’s Supper that saw them simply as external signs; to him, any such teaching was a gross distortion of the biblical witness. Luther’s views, however, were regarded as dangerously close to those of Catholicism by many of his contemporaries within the Swiss wing of the Reformation, and in later Protestantism. The radical divergence within Protestantism on this point can be seen from the famous declaration of the great Victorian Baptist preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon that the idea of baptismal regeneration was a “deceitful invention of Anti-Christ.”

The dominant—but not exclusive, nor even characteristic—tendency within Protestantism has been to see the sacraments as signs that point to the greater spiritual realities that lie beyond them but are not actually contained in them. This view can be seen as part of the tendency to “desacralize” the world, which writers such as Max Weber came to see as characteristic of Protestantism. Nature in itself cannot be seen as sacred; at best, it can point beyond itself to the realm of the divine or transcendent. Nature has been “disenchanted”; it can only play a symbolical role in reminding people of sacred realities or act as a signpost to where those realities may be found and encountered.

This position is seen at its most consistent in the theology of Huldrych Zwingli, who had a considerable impact on many sections of Protestantism. Zwingli’s theology presupposes a fundamental separation of secular reality and sacred significance—a development that Charles Taylor has described as the “great disembedding.”²² Zwingli subtly converted the sacraments from manifestations and disclosures of the sacred to communal signs of corporate allegiance. The idea of a “sacral society” was reinterpreted as membership in a covenantal community, and the sacraments as pledges toward that community.

Zwingli therefore tended to use political or social analogies for the sacraments, stressing in particular their role in fostering social cohesion and a sense of belonging to the community. A disconnection between the “spiritual” and the “secular” was presupposed from the outset. Whereas Luther saw the sacraments as proclaiming and confirming the commitment of God to believers, Zwingli tended to accentuate a somewhat different aspect of the sacraments—namely, the fostering of social cohesion and the confirmation of mutual loyalty within the community.

This trend is important because it points to one of the most significant, yet inadequately understood, aspects of the style of Protestantism that emerged from Zwingli’s Zurich, and later from Calvin’s Geneva—namely, a way of conceiving the world, the state, and religion that assumes that the “spiritual” or “sacred” cannot be directly encountered but are known indirectly, primarily in a logocentric manner, through personal reading of the Bible and the hearing of sermons on its themes.

It is instructive to consider changing attitudes toward the sacraments within English Protestantism, where the question of their symbolic and ceremonial role came to be of particular importance in the early seventeenth century. While most Elizabethan Protestants were happy to follow continental ideas, especially those of Calvin, their Jacobean and Stuart successors were increasingly aware of the need to symbolize the interaction and interpenetration of the sacred and secular. The poetry of George Herbert can be seen as an attempt to retain an essentially Calvinist theology of the sacraments, while developing its capacity to promote the church’s social and confessional cohesion.²³

This decoupling of the sacred from the quotidian, characteristic of certain types of Protestantism, accelerated the rise of a functionally atheist worldview in which God was not regarded as an active participant in the world.²⁴ It is no accident that two sixteenth-century European centers of Calvinism—Geneva and Edinburgh—had become centers of rationalism two centuries later.

We shall have more to say about this development later. Yet it is important to appreciate here that one of the most fundamental characteristics of Pentecostalism is its insistence that the divine may be encountered in the secular realm. Its astonishing success points to the reversal of this trend and the emergence of a new form of Protestantism characterized by its expectation of the direct experience of the spiritual within the mundane.

PREDESTINATION

From the outset, Protestantism has found itself divided by certain issues—such as the nature of the presence of Christ in the bread and wine. One of the most contentious debates has been centered in the area of theology known as “predestination.”²⁵ The question at issue concerns the way in which God and humanity are involved in salvation. Is salvation something that humanity freely chooses? Or is it something that is chosen for humanity by God? The matter was debated extensively in the fifth, ninth, and fourteenth centuries, and it became a topic of fresh disagreement in the early sixteenth century, when a significant division opened up between the Lutheran and Calvinist wings of the Reformation.

We shall explore the nature of this division shortly. It is important to appreciate, however, that the emergence of this serious disagreement coincided with the rise of confessionalism, which put Lutheranism and Calvinism in competition for the loyalty of princes in many regions of Germany. One of the functions of Christian doctrine is to act as a social demarcator—in other words, to distinguish groups that are otherwise very similar.²⁶ Predestination was propelled to the forefront of debate because it became the litmus test that distinguished Lutheranism and Calvinism—two otherwise very similar movements.

So what were these two differing positions? In general terms, the best way of understanding the differences that were so important at this time is to consider doctrines of predestination as falling into two broad categories:

Although Luther inclined toward the second of these options in his famous debate over free will with Erasmus of Rotterdam in 1525, his successors endorsed the first.²⁷ The “Formula of Concord” sets out this position with admirable clarity:

In his eternal counsel, purpose, and ordinance, God has not only prepared salvation in general, but he has also graciously considered and elected to salvation each and every individual among the elect who are to be saved through Christ…. God wills by his grace, gifts, and effective working to bring them to salvation, and to help, further, strengthen and preserve them to this end.

For Lutheranism, God chooses to save the elect and foresees—but does not cause—the condemnation of those who are not of the elect. Predestination is single in that there is no negative dimension to God’s election. Those who reject the gospel are held to be responsible for their own fate.

Reformed theologians followed the lead of John Calvin, who argued that predestination involves a double decision—a positive decision to election and a negative decision to reprobation. In his brief discussion of the doctrine, Calvin defines predestination as “the eternal decree of God, by which he determined what he wished to make of every man. For he does not create everyone in the same condition, but ordains eternal life for some and eternal damnation for others.” God, in a demonstration of his sovereignty and power, determines the eternal destiny of every individual. Calvin is not introducing a hitherto unknown notion into the sphere of Christian theology; similar ideas were propounded by some late medieval writers, such as Gregory of Rimini and Hugolino of Orvieto, who also taught a doctrine of absolute double predestination—that God allocates some to eternal life and others to eternal condemnation without any reference to their merits or demerits.²⁸ People’s fate rests totally upon the will of God rather than on their individuality.

These viewpoints are radically different and involve significantly divergent readings of core biblical texts. Nor has the force of these disagreements diminished over time. If we leave behind sixteenth-century Europe and consider twentieth-century America, we find the same debate being replayed. Consider this discussion of predestination set out in the “Brief Statement” of the Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod), which was adopted in 1932.²⁹ The statement insists that salvation takes place “by grace alone, for Christ’s sake, and by way of the means of grace.” Here we have a reaffirmation of some of the great slogans of the Reformation—by grace alone, by Christ alone, by faith alone. But what of those who are not saved? On this point, the Lutheran church makes its opposition to the Reformed doctrine of double predestination unequivocally clear:

There is no election of wrath, or predestination to damnation. Scripture plainly reveals the truth that the love of God for the world of lost sinners is universal, that is, that it embraces all people without exception, that Christ has fully reconciled all people unto God, and that God earnestly desires to bring all people to faith, to preserve them therein, and thus to save them, as Scripture testifies, 1 Timothy 2:4: “God will have all to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” No one is lost because God has predestined him or her to eternal damnation.

Once more, this radical divergence points to the genuine difficulties and uncertainties attending the process of biblical interpretation. This is not a recent development, but an issue that emerged as deeply divisive during the emergent phase of Protestantism. On a naïve, simplistic understanding of the “clarity of scripture,” these two positions cannot both be right: either one is wrong and the other right, or they are both wrong and there exists a third alternative. Yet a more nuanced interpretation of this principle would point to the fundamental truth that both the Lutheran and Reformed communities affirm, despite their differences—namely, that, in the words of the “Brief Statement,” “the eternal election of God not only foresees and foreknows the salvation of the elect, but is also, from the gracious will and pleasure of God in Christ Jesus, a cause which procures, works, helps, and promotes our salvation and what pertains thereto; and upon this our salvation is so founded that the gates of hell cannot prevail against it.”

This historic debate of the sixteenth century was deeply divisive. It is perhaps little wonder that the Anglican “Thirty-nine Articles of Religion” chose to speak of the topic in such Delphic and opaque terms, avoiding taking sides in such a contentious debate. Yet the debate continued still further as a major split developed within the Reformed camp over the matter. The debate is especially associated with Calvinism in the Lowlands and is often referred to as the “Arminian” controversy, after Arminius (1560–1609).

To understand the debate, we must introduce a further set of divisions into Protestant thinking on predestination. Earlier, we explored the importance of the categories of “single” and “double” predestination; now we must consider an additional question. Is predestination about God’s election of a people or election of individuals? At first sight, the question is impossible to answer on its own terms, as the obvious answer is “both.” Did not God call the people of Israel? And then the church? And did not God also call individuals, such as Abraham, the prophets, and Paul? While this may indeed be the case, this distinction is essential to appreciate the difference between Calvinism and Arminianism, and we must therefore explain the two options.

Arminius held that humanity has the capacity to respond to God’s grace or to resist it. God has made salvation possible, as an act of total grace. Yet the decision as to whether to accept that salvation lies with the individual. Calvinism taught that divine grace is irresistible; whoever is elected by God cannot resist the transformative work of grace. Arminius insisted that God offers grace but does not impose it. Christ made salvation possible for all people. It is up to them whether they respond to it or not.³⁰

The Synod of Dort (Dordrecht), meeting in 1618–19 in the Lowlands, set out the definitive Calvinist response to Arminianism. As a result, many Calvinists regarded Arminianism as a heresy. The basic teachings of the Synod of Dort are often referred to as the “Five Points,” and they are often memorized using the acronym TULIP—highly appropriate for English-language Calvinism, given the long-standing association between the Netherlands and tulips.

T

Total depravity of sinful human nature

U

Unconditional election (humans are not predestined on the basis of any foreseen merit, quality, or achievement)

L

Limited atonement (Christ died only for the elect)

I

Irresistible grace (by which the elect are infallibly called and redeemed)

P

Perseverance of the saints (those who are truly predestined by God cannot in any way defect from that calling)

Yet Arminianism reappeared in the English-speaking world, in a new, reinvigorated form, through the preaching of John Wesley. Wesley’s “optimism of grace” proved highly effective when wedded to his theology of evangelism.³¹ God has done everything possible to make salvation possible, as a gracious gift; all people need to do is to respond to it—to accept God’s gift. This theology played an important role in the Second Great Awakening in the United States and probably lies behind the “altar call” practice that became such a distinctive feature of American revivalism.

In this section, we have noted three major positions on the question of predestination within historic and contemporary Protestantism: Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Arminianism. All three remain significant options for Protestants today, and the passage of time has eroded neither the credibility of any one of them nor the tensions they generate within the wider Protestant movement. All affirm central biblical themes—yet in different ways, and with different outcomes.

This could easily lead to tensions, not to mention crude theological vilification, particularly between Calvinists and the followers of John Wesley, who took an Arminian view on this matter. Yet it is possible for Protestants to reflect graciously on these differences, respecting the personal integrity of those who hold different views. The greatest English Calvinist writer of the nineteenth century was the famous Baptist Victorian preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon, who commented thus on his attitude toward John Wesley:

Most atrocious things have been spoken about the character and spiritual condition of John Wesley, the modern prince of Arminians. I can only say concerning him that, while I detest many of the doctrines which he preached, yet for the man himself I have a reverence second to no Wesleyan; and if there were wanted two apostles to be added to the number of the twelve, I do not believe that there could be found two men more fit to be so added than George Whitefield and John Wesley.³²

As the famous “Down-Grade” controversy of the 1890s makes clear, Spurgeon was prepared to dissociate himself from individuals or organizations—such as the Baptist Union—if he believed they were heretical or unorthodox. He did not see this debate as touching upon such matters.

Each of the approaches noted here has significant consequences for the shaping of Protestant thought, expectations, and aspirations. One may be singled out for mention—the Calvinist belief that, like Israel, they were a “chosen people” who had been called by God to be a light to the nations. This strong sense of divine calling and commission gave direction and motivation to the Puritans then leaving England to settle in the New World. England was their Egypt, and America their promised land.

THE LAST THINGS

A final theological debate that has been important in shaping contemporary Protestantism concerns the “last things” or “end times,” an area of theology sometimes referred to as “eschatology.” Protestantism shares many of the traditional Christian beliefs about the afterlife, especially the hope of heaven.³³ Many Protestant writers have understood the Christian life in the classical terms of a pilgrimage from their exile in this world to their true destiny and home in the New Jerusalem. The most familiar example of this approach is found in John Bunyan’s famous religious allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress.³⁴ Bunyan established the journey from the “city of destruction” to the “heavenly city” as a framework for making sense of the ambiguities, sorrows, and pains of the Christian life, especially in times of doubt, persecution, and difficulty. His powerful appeal to imagery, coupled with a masterly use of narrative, ensured that the imagery of the New Jerusalem would have a profound and permanent effect on popular Protestant spirituality.

As understandings of the relation between the individual and corporate aspects of faith have changed over the years, and with changes in political and social circumstances as well, Protestant understandings of the nature of heaven have shifted. The “classic” Protestant conception of heaven is probably most clearly stated in the writings of Puritans, such as Richard Baxter, who emphasize that the primary characteristic of heaven is a total and reverential focus on God. In his The Saints’ Everlasting Rest, Baxter argues that the worship of God is the supreme activity of the saints in heaven. Nothing can distract them from the adoration of the God who created and redeemed them and finally brought them to eternal rest in the heavenly places. This concept of heaven remains firmly embedded within Protestantism.

During the nineteenth century, alternative visions of heaven began to emerge, especially in the aftermath of the American Civil War. This war saw unprecedented levels of casualties and caused distress and mourning throughout the nation. A new interest in spiritualism flourished as anguished families sought to reestablish contact with relatives who had died on the field of battle. The new genre of “consolation literature” reconceived heaven primarily as a reencounter with loved ones.³⁵ In The Gates Ajar (1868), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911) rejects the traditional idea of heaven as “harping and praying” and argues that it is about the restoration of life and relationships. Heaven is portrayed in this book as an extended nineteenth-century family in which little children are busy “devouring heavenly gingersnaps” and playing rosewood pianos, while the adults listen to learned discourses from glorified philosophers and the symphonies of Beethoven.

Protestantism’s attitudes to hell reflect, again, the Christian tradition in general. The traditional Christian view of hell as a sulfurous inferno of eternal torment emerged during the Middle Ages, and it continued to be found in many Protestant writings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.³⁶ The most famous exposition of this classic Protestant idea is found in Jonathan Edwards’s sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” preached in Enfield, Connecticut, on July 8, 1741. Edwards is clear about what unrepentant sinners can expect to encounter: “The wrath of God burns against them, their damnation does not slumber; the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them.”

Since the nineteenth century, however, this concept of hell has come under criticism within many sections of Christianity, including Protestantism, as representing a medieval expansion of the biblical material. Many Protestants have expressed puzzlement about the moral purpose of eternal punishment and uneasiness about the traditional answers offered, including the idea that such punishment glorifies God. One response, widely advocated within sections of English Protestantism in the 1880s and now found increasingly within American evangelicalism, is a reappropriation of the patristic idea of “conditional immortality,” which holds that human souls are created with the capacity for immortality, but that this capacity is actualized only through repentance and faith.³⁷

This uneasiness about the idea of hell has had a significant impact on some evangelical approaches to evangelism. One common evangelistic strategy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was to present the gospel as the only way of escaping the horrors and pain of hell. Edwards’s famous sermon ends with a plea to those who have not yet come to faith to “awake and fly from the wrath to come.” Echoes of this approach can be found in the early preaching of Billy Graham, widely regarded as the twentieth century’s most prominent Protestant evangelist. Yet the weakening of the cultural belief in hell—which is generally regarded as having been in decline in the West since the 1960s³⁸—has diminished the power of this approach. In response to this development, many Protestant evangelists now base their appeal primarily upon the love of God or the capacity of the gospel to make sense of life and transform it. It makes little sense, they argue, to have to persuade people of the existence of hell before they can be persuaded of the relevance of the gospel.

While Protestantism follows traditional Christian views at many points concerning the “last things,” it has generally rejected the notion of an “intermediate state,” or purgatory, holding that this traditional Catholic idea is not adequately grounded in the Bible and is in any case made redundant by the doctrine of justification by faith. The believer does not need to be purified by fire, precisely because Christ has already purified the believer through his death—an idea often expressed in popular Protestant spirituality in terms of “being washed in the blood of the Lamb.” The imagery of the believer being able to approach God, enfolded in Christ’s righteousness, is perhaps most familiar from Charles Wesley’s famous hymn “And Can It Be?”

No Condemnation now I dread,

Jesus, and all in Him, is mine.

Alive in Him, my Living Head,

And clothed in Righteousness Divine,

Bold I approach th’ eternal Throne,

And claim the Crown, through Christ my own.

A final area of interest in Protestant eschatology concerns the details of the end times. Christians have always enjoyed speculating about origins and endings, and it is hardly surprising that this area of theology proved to have the capacity to engage the popular imagination.³⁹ Early Protestantism was reluctant to engage with such issues, believing that speculation about when the end of the world might take place was likely to inflame passions and distract people from the more serious business of reforming the church and sorting out the problems of contemporary society. However, the debate flared up again in the nineteenth century, particularly within American Protestantism, and it has continued unabated since then.

Much of the debate has centered on the “millennium,” an idea mentioned in the Book of Revelation, which brings the New Testament canon to its close (Revelation 20:2–5).⁴⁰ The millennium refers to the hope of a restored earthly kingdom lasting for a period of one thousand years and separating the second coming of Christ and the subsequent establishment of a totally new cosmic order. Although some early Christian writers—such as Irenaeus of Lyons—interpreted this passage literally, a consensus developed that it should be understood figuratively. The reference to a period of a thousand years should not be understood as a literal prediction of the chronological duration of an earthly kingdom, but as an allegorical indication of the grandeur of the heavenly kingdom.

One of the most distinctive features of contemporary American conservative Protestantism is its rediscovery of the idea of the millennium, which it has understood in three ways—again, reflecting different approaches to the interpretation of the Bible. The traditional Protestant disinclination to speculate about the end times is now named the “amillennial” approach and is contrasted with two approaches that make much greater use of the notion of the millennium.

The postmillennial viewpoint was particularly influential in American Protestantism during the nineteenth century. It holds that Christ will return at the close of a long period (not necessarily lasting one thousand years) of righteousness and peace, commonly called the millennium. Leading conservative Protestant theologians, such as the Princeton academics Charles B. Hodge (1797–1878) and Benjamin B. Warfield (1851–1921), took the view that God is bringing about his purposes through steady human progress over evil that will progressively lead to a Christianized world. Postmillennialism sees the church as playing a major role in transforming whole social structures before the Second Coming of Christ and endeavoring to bring about a golden age of peace and prosperity with great advances in education, the arts, the sciences, and medicine. During this process, the church will rise in power, influence, and integrity, serving as the standard bearer for the coming kingdom of God on earth. Its credibility was severely damaged by the suffering and damage of the First and Second World Wars, both of which increased the appeal of premillennialism, especially in North America.

The premillennial viewpoint holds that the figure known as “the Antichrist” will appear on earth, ushering in a seven-year period of suffering known as “the Tribulation.” This great period of destruction, war, and disaster will finally be ended by God defeating evil at the battle of Armageddon. After this, Christ will return to earth to rule for a period of a thousand years (the millennium), during which time the forces of evil will finally be subdued and conquered.

Premillennialism offers the strongly pessimistic view that things are deteriorating on earth and will go on doing so until God brings history to an end. This view resonates deeply with the sense of cultural alienation shared by many conservative American Protestants, especially its belief that anti-Christian forces are gaining the upper hand in America, as in the world in general. But since premillennialists see the degeneration of the world as a sign that the end of the world is near, they can view this negative development as a harbinger of something positive.

Beliefs about the end times have had a major impact on American popular Protestantism, as is evident from the huge sales of fiction and nonfiction works reflecting these standpoints. Hal Lindsey’s end-times book The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) was one of the best-selling novels of that decade. More recently, the best-selling “Left Behind” novels, written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, have ensured that premillennial ideology retains a high profile across America. In a similar vein, John Hagee, senior pastor of an evangelical mega-church in San Antonio, Texas, has penned a series of end-time novels, including Devil’s Island (2001), that reflect a fascination with the interconnection between the politics of the Middle East and the end of the world.

The brief engagement with some aspects of Protestant teachings offered in this chapter has touched on some of its most distinctive beliefs, while at the same time noting the diversity within the movement. The movement’s shared commitment to the authority of the Bible does not lead to a common mind on how the Bible is to be interpreted. This is not seen as a particular problem, except for those who mistakenly hold that the principle of the “clarity of scripture” demands total uniformity of interpretation on all matters.

So what is the impact of Protestant attitudes and beliefs on everyday life? What difference do they make? In the following chapter, we consider how these ideas shape Protestant life and worship.

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