The Structures of Faith

In the words of Jean Monnet, who had so much to do with achieving European unity in the twentieth century, “Rien n’est possible sans les hommes, rien n’est durable sans les institutions.”¹ Monnet’s point is simple: individuals make things happen, but for those things to survive, institutions are required. No movement can exist without structures. As Protestantism emerged and consolidated itself in the 1520s, the question of how its core ideas could be sustained in the longer term became increasingly pressing. At first, this matter was not seen as critical; as time passed, however, it could not be ignored.

Many of the first generation of Protestants believed that their separation from the Catholic church was temporary. It was only a matter of time before that church would concede the need for reform and those who had been forced to leave could return. This rather pleasing aspiration was certainly plausible throughout much of the 1520s and 1530s. In the 1540s, however, it became clear that separation and alienation were likely to be permanent. The failure of the Colloquy of Regensburg (1541), which had brought together like-minded senior Catholics and Protestants to explore possibilities of rapprochement, was an important straw in the wind.² More significantly, the Council of Trent—the foundation of the Catholic Reformation—sent out signals at a very early stage that it was not concerned with seeking reconciliation with Protestantism but rather with offering a robust restatement of the Catholic position, coupled with explicit criticism of Protestant views, particularly those on the relation of the Bible and tradition and the doctrine of justification by faith.³ The countering of the Protestant Reformation would be an explicit part of the renewal of Catholicism. The Catholic Reformation would thus also be a Counter-Reformation.

From the late 1540s, institutional questions assumed a new priority within Protestantism. By this stage, however, Luther was dead and his mantle had passed to his successors. The fixing of denominational structures would be a task for the second generation of Protestants. The first generation had hoped this would never be necessary, believing that provisional interim arrangements would suffice until reunion took place. By 1550 it was evident that a reunion would never take place.

PROTESTANT DENOMINATIONAL STRUCTURES

In this chapter, we consider the emergence of the structures of Protestantism, from the time of its origins to the more recent period. The essential point that emerges from any historical analysis of the emergence of these structures is that they are remarkably fluid. While older Protestant groups, particularly those that trace their origins back to the sixteenth century, have often found themselves trapped within inflexible institutional structures, more recent groupings have developed leaner, more efficient, and above all more responsive structures.

The three traditional types of Protestant church organization may be designated as episcopal, presbyterian, and congregational. Each of these was developed within a European context and has subsequently been transplanted to American, African, and Asian contexts—not always with total success—as Protestantism has expanded. One of the challenges faced by Protestantism in the twentieth century was rethinking these European prototypes for church order, most of which emerged during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Many Protestant churches cannot easily be assigned to any of these three broad categories. For example, Methodism embraces a family of denominations that possess a rich variety of traditions. Some—such as the United Methodist Church—can be regarded as essentially episcopal; others, however, place greater emphasis on the autonomy of the local congregation. Even denominations that appear committed to one specific model often display a far greater variation than might be expected. Anglicanism, for example, is rightly regarded as an episcopal form of Protestantism. Yet in practice, many evangelical Anglicans adopt a congregationalist approach to church order, regarding bishops as possessing a purely symbolic function rather than exercising genuine authority or leadership. Nevertheless, despite being so obviously porous, these three categories are helpful in exploring the shaping of Protestantism and understanding its distinctive forms.

In the 1520s, the first evangelical groups began to emerge in Germany and Switzerland. While reforming factions, such as the Waldensians, had existed throughout the Middle Ages, these tended to be movements existing within the church—not always with its permission and blessing. These pressure groups acted as lobbyists, advocating reform and redirection. On occasion, they posed such a threat to vested interests within the church that they were designated as heretical, even though their religious views often fitted comfortably within the ample theological girth of the medieval church. The real threat lay in the challenge they posed to papal authority.

The emergence of Lutheran and Zwinglian factions as distinct ecclesial groups changed things significantly. Not only were Protestants placed under some external pressure by their critics to justify such acts of schism, which seemed to deny them access to any of the benefits of the Christian faith, but they also experienced internal pressure from their supporters to clarify how these communities were to be structured and organized.

The simplest option emerged in England during the 1530s. Henry VIII’s reformation of the English church involved the relatively simple measure of replacing the authority of the pope with that of the monarch, making as few doctrinal adjustments as possible, and leaving ecclesiastical structures unchanged. Even after the major changes wrought during the reigns of Edward VI, Mary Tudor, and Elizabeth I, much the same self-understanding of the English church remained: it retained its traditional Catholic structures—such as dioceses, provinces, archbishops, bishops, archdeacons, priests, and deacons—but these enfolded an essentially Protestant understanding of the Christian faith.

As British influence increased in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, colonial churches were established throughout its empire; based on English models, these churches defined their identity through an episcopal church structure and the doctrinal and liturgical formulations of the Book of Common Prayer (1662). The adoption of the name Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America (PECUSA) was intended to emphasize the distinctive feature of this version of Protestantism—its episcopal form of church government.⁴ The use of the King James Bible (1611) for the public reading of scripture reinforced this sense of a distinct global Protestant church communion. This sense of shared identity was further strengthened when the archbishop of Canterbury agreed to summon all 144 Anglican bishops to a “national synod of the bishops of the Anglican Church at home and abroad” to meet under his leadership at Lambeth Palace in London in 1867.

The episcopal model is primarily used by those Protestant denominational families that have the closest historical roots to the medieval church and that saw reformation as applying primarily to doctrine and liturgy and only secondarily to church structures. This form of church government sits uneasily with some core Protestant principles, especially the “priesthood of all believers.” Many Protestants in episcopal denominations argue that the structure locates an excessive amount of power in the person of the bishop, opening the way to the reemergence of the medieval “prince-bishop.”

Luther’s reformation of church structures, though more radical than its English counterpart, was conservative by broader European standards.⁵ It seems that Luther did not deem it necessary to be unduly specific in matters of church structure or organizations. Luther regarded the organization of the church as a matter determined by historical contingency, with no need for theological prescription. For Luther, the church was not about institutional structures but about the “sheep who hear the voice of their shepherd.”

Luther’s successors could thus see themselves as free to develop church structures that would be best adapted to their situations. Luther himself did not envisage retaining bishops. Elsewhere in Europe, however, most Lutheran churches were episcopal—that is, governed by bishops.⁶ In North America and elsewhere, Lutherans would adopt congregational and synodical forms of government, in which local churches link together for common purposes. In the United States, Lutherans gradually coalesced into three distinct bodies: the Lutheran Church in America, the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, and the American Lutheran Church. The American Lutheran Church, the Lutheran Church in America, and a third group, the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches, united in 1987 to form the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. The Lutheran World Federation, founded in 1947, aims to provide a forum in which the world’s diverse Lutheran bodies can discuss issues of mutual concern.

We see here the emergence of the notion of a “denominational family”—a group of churches that arose from a common Protestant origin through schism, division, or geographical separation. These churches within the same denominational family generally form alliances, confederations, and other joint groups for consultation and the sharing of resources. A good example is the Geneva-based World Alliance of Reformed Churches, a fellowship of 75 million Reformed Christians in 218 churches in 107 countries. Other examples include the Baptist World Alliance, the World Lutheran Federation, and the World Methodist Council. These bodies seek to sustain a distinctly denominational vision of Protestantism while allowing their member churches to remain flexible in actualizing that vision in their local situation.

John Calvin was responsible for the most significant development in sixteenth-century Protestant thinking on the structures of the church. Whereas most earlier Protestant writers had assumed that the New Testament did not lay down any specific form of church structure, giving each church a significant degree of freedom to reform or redevelop existing historical models, Calvin insisted that a highly specific form of ministry was stipulated by scripture—and should therefore be embodied at Geneva.

Calvin identified a fourfold structure of pastors, teachers, elders, and deacons in the New Testament. Pastors were called to preach and teach, to administer the sacraments, and to visit the sick.⁷ The teachers (or “doctors”) were to instruct their congregations in those things that were necessary to salvation. The elders (or “presbyters”), who were to be elected within the congregation, were to ensure good order within the church.⁸ (The importance attached to the role of the elder [presbyteros in Greek] in church government lies behind the use of the word “presbyterian” to describe this distinctive approach.) Finally, the deacons were called to care for the sick and support the poor.⁹

As a result, Calvin’s reformation possessed a distinctive church structure that proved well adapted to the situation of Geneva itself, and—although this cannot have been in Calvin’s mind at the time—to the new challenges and opportunities that subsequently arose in the New World. Even by the time of Calvin’s death in 1564, Calvinism had become established as the most formidable alternative to Roman Catholicism in western Europe, assisted to no small extent by Calvin’s brilliance in recognizing the importance of ecclesiastical organization and structuring to the survival of a movement. His successors recognized the importance of applying this idea to his religious thought as well, that is, to supplement Calvinist ecclesiastical institutions with equally resilient intellectual structures.

The presbyterian system of church government has proved highly influential in modern-day North America and Korea, while its impact on European Protestantism has been much less marked. Many Presbyterians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries held that they were restoring the original form of church government, but this position would not be vigorously defended by many Presbyterians today. While insisting that Presbyterianism is a biblically warranted form of church government, most writers within this tradition accept that patterns of church order have undergone historical development and that a variety of valid church orders may be recognized.

Presbyterianism now designates a congregational family, not a single denomination. In the United States, the largest such group is presently the Presbyterian Church (USA), headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky. This congregation was formed in 1983 as a result of a reunion between the predominantly southern Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS) and the predominantly northern United Presbyterian Church in the USA (UPCUSA). Other Presbyterian denominations in the United States currently include the Presbyterian Church in America, the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, and the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church.

Yet many regarded presbyterianism as giving too much power to the pastor. Such disagreements emerged forcefully during the period of the Westminster Assembly, when even John Milton was led to set to one side his “calm and pleasing solitariness” in order to become a voice in the “troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes” then taking place. For Milton, the new ascendant presbyterianism simply replicated the authoritarianism of the old episcopal structures. “The episcopal arts begin to bud again,” he grimly remarked. For such reasons, many preferred an alternative that they regarded as entirely consistent with the Reformed tradition and well grounded in the New Testament—congregationalism.

The essence of the congregational model is that of local, autonomous congregations that are not under any centralized control. For congregationalists, the New Testament era knew only individual congregations that were not subject to episcopal or presbyterial control. The idea emerged toward the end of the sixteenth century. It can be seen in Robert Browne’s 1582 treatise Reformation Without Tarrying for Any, which affirms the principle of the gathered church, its independence from bishops and magistrates, and its right to ordain its own ministers. By locating power within the church firmly in its membership, the doctrine of the “priesthood of all believers” can be upheld. Ministers, while called to lead, are fundamentally understood to act in a ministerial, not magisterial, role. Congregationalists are generally reluctant to demand assent to specified confessions of faith, believing that such a requirement undermines the independence of the local congregation.

Although congregationalism had its origins in England, it has been most significant in the religious life of the United States.¹⁰ The Puritan congregations in the Massachusetts Bay area in the early seventeenth century generally adopted a congregationalist church polity because they were anxious to avoid the problems with authority they had experienced in England. The most significant manifestation of a congregational polity today, however, is found in the Southern Baptist Convention, which represents a voluntary association of individual Baptist congregations, each retaining its own identity and sovereignty. So influential has this group become within American Protestantism that many outsiders fail to appreciate that the term “Baptist” designates a much broader range of options, both religiously and politically.¹¹

From its foundation in 1845 until 1925, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) avoided adopting any centralized belief system. In 1846 William B. Johnson, the first president of the SBC, published The Gospel Developed Through the Government and Order of the Churches of Jesus Christ, in which he argued that Baptists, because they are governed by the Bible, do not need creeds or confessions. “Why not,” Johnson asked, “use the Bible as the standard? Can man present God’s system in a selection and compilation of some of its parts, better than God has himself done it, as a whole in his own book?” This strong statement of the autonomy of each local congregation under the Bible remains central to the SBC today. However, that position has been supplemented by statements that some Baptists believe might represent “creeds” or “confessions” and thus undermine their congregationalist ethos.

In 1925 the SBC produced its “Statement of the Baptist Faith and Message.” Although the SBC was emphatic that this document was descriptive and not prescriptive, to some it represented a centralizing trend that corroded the SBC’s fundamental commitment to congregational sovereignty.¹² To most Baptists, however, the statement—which has since been modified on a regular basis, to respond to new developments within the church and society—is not a document that imposes a centralized authority but one that offers guidance. In setting out its 2000 revision, the SBC reaffirmed that “Baptists cherish and defend religious liberty, and deny the right of any secular or religious authority to impose a confession of faith upon a church or body of churches. We honor the principles of soul competency and the priesthood of believers, affirming together both our liberty in Christ and our accountability to each other under the Word of God.”

The emergence of Pentecostalism in the twentieth century has reopened the question of Protestant structures. For many Pentecostals, structures are an impediment to the movement and action of the Holy Spirit. Excessively rigid and unresponsive structures might hinder or even “quench” the work of the Spirit, on which the worship and mission of the church ultimately depend. Whereas Catholics tend to discuss their identity in terms of ecclesiology, and classic Protestants in terms of their doctrine of the “Word of God,” Pentecostals tend to identify themselves primarily (some possibly exclusively) in terms of their doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Everything else—including both the practicalities and theories of church structures—are seen as secondary to a right understanding of how the Holy Spirit operates and is experienced. Where Protestants and Catholics tend to develop ecclesiologies based on Ignatius of Antioch’s maxim “Wherever Christ is, there is also the Church,” Pentecostals tend to be guided by a maxim of Irenaeus of Lyons: “Where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church, and all grace.”¹³

THE REUNIFICATION OF PROTESTANTISM?

This brief analysis of some of the major constituent elements of modern Protestantism raises an important question: might the denominations representing these elements settle their differences someday and form one large Protestant mega-church? The vision of a reunited Protestantism has captivated the imaginations of many Protestants, especially when the movement has felt itself to be under threat and in need of reaffirming its unity. Two threats in particular have brought home the importance of collaboration between the divergent Protestant groups.

In the West, the rise of secularism since the 1960s has brought home the need for Protestant unity in the face of this new threat. Secularism takes various forms: in the United Kingdom, secularism is basically an aspiration toward the elimination of any religious influence on public institutions; in the United States that aspiration takes the form of eliminating any religious presence in public institutions. In the face of this threat, increased collaboration between Protestants is to be expected. As we have constantly stressed in this work, “the other” is no longer Roman Catholicism but secularism. The threat of Catholicism once drew Protestants together; now the threat that predominantly catalyzes such collaboration and sets intra-Protestant differences in their proper perspective is the one coming from those opposed to religion.

A similar increase in cooperation among Protestants is occurring in the developing world, where there has also been a fundamental change in the identity of the “other” that is posing a common threat. Once it was Catholicism; now it is Islam, especially in its militant fundamentalist forms. Benjamin Franklin’s famous quip at the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, has become a harsh reality for many Protestants: “We must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”

These pressures might be expected to encourage denominational mergers. In fact, they have not, owing in part to widespread dissatisfaction in most parts of Protestantism with the most ambitious such ecumenical project to date—the World Council of Churches, headquartered in Geneva. The first assembly of the World Council of Churches, held in August 1948 in Amsterdam, was seen as a beacon of hope for postwar Europe.¹⁴ Its founders had no doubt that a landmark had been achieved in the history of Protestantism. The main Protestant churches had covenanted to work together and to stay together.

Yet when the time came to mark the World Council of Churches’ golden jubilee in 1998, nobody felt there was all that much to celebrate. The group seemed to have lost its way, having fallen victim to institutional navel-gazing and become preoccupied with its closed circles of meetings, committees, reports, and publications. However noble its intentions, the organization had become bogged down in internal debates and ceased to play a credible role in bringing Protestants together. The beautiful princess had become a Cinderella. Yet this does not mean that Protestants have lost interest in each other or in working to deepen their unity. A different style of ecumenism has triumphed instead.

The new style of ecumenism that has swept through Protestantism since about 1990 is based on the grass roots of the movement, not its institutions. The World Council of Churches wanted “visible unity”—that is, either the uniting of denominations in a single global church or at least a reduction in the number of denominations through mergers.¹⁵ With the passing of time, it has become clear that this vision was quite unrealistic and failed to take seriously the realities of church life. What ordinary Protestants wanted was better working relationships with their fellow Christians of other denominations. They did not want their denomination to be swallowed up by someone else, nor did they want to take anyone else over. They just wanted to understand and get on with each other at both the individual and institutional levels.

In the United States, this grassroots ecumenism went further than anyone had expected. The election of Bill Clinton as president in 1992 was seen by many Americans as marking the rise of secularism and hostility toward Christianity in the public arena. Though this turned out to be a misjudgment, the threat seemed real enough at the time. It persuaded some senior evangelical Protestants and Catholics that the time had come to do some serious talking.

It was an astonishing development. Could there be two more different groups? Yet there was enough shared ground to make this a positive and significant discussion. Both groups were conservative theologically. They certainly disagreed on a number of matters—such as the authority of the pope and whether there is a place called purgatory (and whether it matters). But they also shared certain core Christian beliefs, over and against a secular culture and a liberal bias in the mainline Protestant denominations.

What else, the leaders of this movement argued, could they do? They could refuse to have anything to do with each other on account of the continuing doctrinal disagreements associated with the agenda of the Reformation. Yet should feuds between Christians be allowed to help secularism win? A divided Christianity was simply a weakened Christianity. In the end, they agreed to collaborate with each other on a limited range of issues, while acknowledging that differences remained on others. The document “Evangelicals and Catholics Together” (1994) created a minor sensation. Many evangelicals and Roman Catholics were puzzled, and some outraged, that such discussions should be taking place at all. After all, the agenda of the Reformation remained and had not been resolved. So how could such collaboration be taking place?¹⁶

Since then, there has been a growing groundswell of support for collaboration between Roman Catholics and evangelicals while at the same time recognizing the doctrinal differences that remain between the two groups. In 1995 discussions began to bring Orthodox Christians into the collaborative networks that were being set up. It remains to be seen where this grassroots ecumenism leads in the future.

Protestants now find it easier to collaborate with each other than ever before, both in the West and in the developing world, as they huddle together for fellowship and mutual support in the face of real threats. Since neither secularism nor Islam seem likely to disappear in the foreseeable future, Protestantism can be expected to shrug off some of its historic debates and differences, in the interest of mutual survival.

THE STYLES OF PROTESTANT WORSHIP

For most people, Protestantism is encountered primarily through the regular acts of worship of its churches. Protestantism is most regularly experienced and encountered as a living reality through its Sunday worship and its marriages, baptisms, and funerals. Any account of how Protestantism manifests itself must therefore include description and analysis of Protestant worship.

Yet this is not the easiest of tasks, mainly because of the astonishing variety of forms of worship now encountered within Protestant worship. This diversity is evident even within Protestant denominations, such as Anglicanism. Anglican congregations that worship in the Anglo-Catholic tradition, influenced by the Oxford Movement of the nineteenth century, generally have the eucharist (often referred to as the “mass”) at the heart of their worship. The eucharist is typically celebrated with elaborate rituals and settings reminiscent of Catholicism prior to the Second Vatican Council, by priests who are often sumptuously attired in stoles and chasubles. The order of worship follows a fixed liturgy, with set prayers for each Sunday and seasonal variations for Advent, Christmas, and so forth.

Anglican congregations that worship in the evangelical tradition, in marked contrast, tend to focus on the reading and preaching of the word of God, and their ministers (note the terminology) either wear the clerical robes specified during the Elizabethan era or abandon robes altogether in favor of suits. The eucharist (usually referred to as the “Lord’s Supper”) is generally seen as an occasional event that serves as a reminder of the death of Christ. The worship is often informal, without any set liturgy.

While there is an astonishing diversity of worship forms within classical Protestantism, three features almost invariably lie at their heart: the use of the vernacular, the public reading of scripture, and a sermon or homily based on that text.¹⁷ These features may be characteristic of Protestantism; however, they are no longer distinctive. Since the Second Vatican Council, the structure of Catholic worship has become much more similar to that of its Protestant counterparts, especially Lutherans and Anglicans. The mass is no longer said in Latin, scripture is more extensively read, and sermons are more biblical.

There are, of course, significant differences within Protestantism over all these matters, particularly since the emergence of Pentecostalism, with its highly distinctive, nontraditional worship styles. Some Protestant congregations follow a lectionary, which allocates set biblical readings for each Sunday of the year; others choose to work through specific books of the Bible, generally chosen by the clergy—the practice developed by Calvin and known as lectio continua.

Some historical controversies may help illuminate some Protestant concerns about worship. Without doubt, the most contentious issue to divide Protestantism was whether prayer and worship should be extempore and informal or follow a set form. This debate lay behind the famous “Troubles of Frankfurt” of 1554. During the troubled reign of Mary Tudor, many English Protestants fled to the safety of European cities, including Frankfurt. They began to meet regularly for worship. But how were they to worship?

A major disagreement erupted over whether the congregation should use the 1552 prayer book, drawn up by Thomas Cranmer during the reign of Edward VI. John Knox, then serving as one of the pastors of the church, refused to use the prayer book and wrote to Calvin for advice.¹⁸ From that letter, it is possible to work out the points of contention: the minister being required to wear a surplice; the use of appointed lessons, prescribed prayers, and fasts; the inclusion of high feasts and holidays; and the use of the sign of the cross in baptism. Some English Protestants, including Richard Cox, wanted “Protestantism with an English face”; others, including Knox and William Whittingham (who was later responsible for the Geneva Bible), believed that the prayer book both limited Protestant freedom to worship and included practices of highly questionable provenance. Knox hinted darkly that it appeared to include some material that was little more than superstitious.

In its place, Knox proposed a form of common worship to be used by the English congregation at Geneva. This was adopted, with some modifications, when Knox moved to Scotland. Although this form of worship is often referred to as a “liturgy,” it is more a directory, stipulating the overall shape that worship should take. The order of worship for the weekly service on the Lord’s day was determined to be: an opening congregational prayer for confession of sin; the congregational singing of a psalm; a prayer before the sermon; the sermon itself, along with the biblical passage on which it was based; a prayer for the church; the congregational singing of a second psalm; and the minister pronouncing a blessing (taken from scripture) upon the congregation.

So what role did the laity play in worship? In recent years, growing attention has been paid to the practice in early Protestant churches of involving the laity in worship through “prophesying.”¹⁹ This is generally interpreted as an attempt to involve the laity in public worship so as to affirm the doctrine of the “priesthood of all believers” in the face of the rise of a new professional class of preachers and ministers, which seemed to pose a threat to the fundamental principles of Protestantism. Although lay involvement appears to have been common in some churches during the 1550s, in the end these “prophesyings” were brought to an end because they were regarded as disruptive and unhelpful. They have reemerged, however, in recent years in Pentecostalism, which is committed to the all-important notion of the “prophethood of all believers.”

We have already hinted at the importance of preaching for Protestant worship. Since it plays such an important role in maintaining Protestant identity, it merits much more detailed discussion.

PREACHING IN THE PROTESTANT TRADITION

Christianity has always valued preaching as an important means of teaching congregations, offering them guidance on practical issues, and encouraging them to remain faithful. The sermon served an important devotional role during the Middle Ages, particularly in a monastic context.²⁰ But sermons were not limited to the monastic world. A homily would be (or was meant to be) preached in each parish church at Sunday mass. These sermons were often based on biblical passages, but a tension can be discerned, particularly in England—namely, the desire to get across a particular, authorized interpretation of a biblical passage or narrative, without allowing the laity to get hold of the full biblical text itself.²¹

The rise of biblical humanism in the 1520s saw increased attention being paid to the sermon as a means by which the wisdom of the Bible could be conveyed to the people eloquently and accurately.²² Erasmus of Rotterdam played a major role in encouraging this development, which was designed to increase lay access to the Bible—a program that Erasmus had set out in his Handbook of the Christian Soldier. Yet the rise of Protestantism gave a new status to the sermon, with important consequences for the shaping of the movement. While a number of factors contributed to this development, two are of particular importance.

In the first phase of Protestant history, the justification for the breach with the medieval church was of paramount importance. Congregations needed to be reassured that this schism was justified and that the salvation of their souls was not imperiled by the breach with Rome. Although the essence of Protestantism was arguably the recovery of Christian authenticity (both in life and thought), the ideological agendas of its first period led early Protestant preachers to portray Catholicism as “the other,” or “the enemy.” Not surprisingly, the popular conviction arose that the essence of Protestantism was anti-Catholicism, whereas in fact anti-Catholicism was merely a situationally specific expression of Protestant identity, not that identity itself.

A second reason for the growing importance of the sermon was the emerging belief that it was, in some sense of the term, the “Word of God.” The sermon was the means by which God spoke to his people. This idea, which emerged at a very early stage in Protestantism, is often linked to Heinrich Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor as the religious leader of Protestant Zurich. For Bullinger, “the preaching of the word of God is the Word of God.”²³ Although this idea can be discerned within both early Lutheranism and early Anglicanism, it is particularly associated with the Reformed tradition within Protestantism. As the office of the preacher came to be regarded with especial importance, a number of other significant developments would shape the form that Protestantism took.

The most significant of these changes concerned church architecture. Initially, Protestantism took over existing church buildings, adapting them to its basic principles and beliefs. The modifications introduced by Protestants are very revealing. The interiors of the churches of the United Provinces, as painted by Emmanuel de Witte, Hendrick van Vliet, Gerrit Beckheyde, and Gerrit Houckgeest, make it clear that the pulpit was the central focus of the building, reflecting the new importance of preaching.

The greatest ecclesiastical structure in Geneva is St. Peter’s Cathedral, which dominates the old city and dates back to 1160. The interior of the building was totally reordered in the late 1530s, in line with Calvin’s vision of reform. The altar was removed, and a pulpit, raised high above the congregation, was installed. All frescoes, statues, and any other forms of religious imagery were removed. The focus of the building was once the altar; now it was the pulpit. A substantial shift in theology underlies this tactile transition. God was now to be encountered indirectly, through the preaching of the word, not substantially or mystically through the sacrament of the bread and wine. The clergy were now to be regarded as authoritative spokesmen for a distant God rather than as a wonder-working priesthood who ensured the direct presence of God within the everyday material world.

The layout of St. Peter’s reflects the reordering of an existing building. What happened when a building was specially commissioned, purposely built to meet the agenda of Protestantism? The first such building is thought to be the chapel of the castle of Hartenfels in Germany, which was formally inaugurated by a sermon preached by Luther on August 5, 1544.²⁴ The chapel takes the form of a simple rectangle with four bays, surrounded by a two-story stone gallery. The focal point of the chapel is the elevated pulpit, decorated with biblical scenes. In his sermon, Luther declared that “the purpose of this new building” was “that nothing else may ever happen in it except that our dear Lord himself may speak to us through his Holy Word, and we respond to him through prayer and praise.”

Reformed Protestantism displaced all forms of secular and ecclesiastical authority with an appeal to the word of God—to the Bible. Yet the Bible required authoritative interpretation and application to the situations faced by believers. Protestantism placed the preacher as the intermediary between God and the congregation, charged with the sacred task of interpretation and application of the Bible. Armed with a theology that insisted that obedient and faithful preaching was an authorized channel of divine communication and instruction, the preacher was clearly placed in a position of some authority and power within the community of faith. So how could abuse be avoided?

The classic response was simple: what preachers say must be controlled. This concern about limiting the freedom of the preacher was evident in England during both the Edwardian and Elizabethan eras. The Book of Homilies set out prefabricated, centrally approved sermons that preachers were required to deliver. The Puritans were incensed; they regarded this practice as a human distortion of the word of God and sought to establish “lectureships” that would allow them to preach what they believed the biblical text said, rather than what the authorities wished them to believe.²⁵

The real question, however, was deciding who could be said to be authorized to preach. State churches retained a tight control over those who were permitted to preach, fearful of the threat of sedition, unrest, or scandal. The issue was important in other contexts as well. During the period of the Puritan Commonwealth, the Westminster Assembly accepted the need for a “directory for preaching.” While insisting that it was Christ who called preachers and endowed them with the gift of his Spirit, the Westminster Larger Catechism stipulated that only those who were “duly approved and called to that office” could be permitted to preach in public. Preachers were to be “ordained”—that is to say, authorized. The fifth commandment—“You shall honor your Father and Mother”—was interpreted by the Westminster Assembly to extend beyond physical parents and to refer particularly to those who, “by God’s ordinance, are over us in place of authority” (q. 124). The preacher was thus firmly embedded in the authority structures of Puritanism.

The Westminster Assembly also set out a specific theology of preaching that emphasized its unique character and its special place in the Christian life. How, asked the Westminster Larger Catechism, was the “word made effectual to salvation”? While reading the Bible was helpful, the Catechism emphasized that preaching was the supreme means by which the Holy Spirit enlightens, convinces, and humbles sinners (q. 155). To help audiences gain the most from such sermons, the Catechism also recommended that they “attend upon it with diligence, preparation, and prayer” and “receive the truth” that it conveyed (q. 160).

So how is a sermon to be structured? Does its efficacy depend on following a set formula—and if so, who has the right to determine it? This question has been debated and discussed throughout Christian history. A particularly influential model of preaching was set out in the thirteenth century by Robert of Basevorn, based on the sermons of Jesus, Saint Paul, Augustine of Hippo, Gregory the Great, and Bernard of Clairvaux.²⁶ Robert recommended using various forms of ornamentation to hold the audience’s interest, including vocal modulation, humor, and gestures. The debate flared up in the early years of Protestantism as controversy raged over whether the Bible itself defined a specific pattern of preaching. The debate, though lengthy, was inconclusive. Should a “plain style” of preaching be used, so that nothing distracted the listener from the simple truths that were being proclaimed and applied? Or might an “ornamented style” be used, to hold the interest of the audience? The difference is easily appreciated by comparing seventeenth-century Anglican and Puritan sermons.

An Anglican sermon—as preached, for example, by that prince of the pulpit, Lancelot Andrewes—would often open with the statement of a theme, generally linked to a biblical verse. The preacher would then launch into an exploration of the wording and imagery of the text, using each as the starting point for a remarkable piece of verbal or conceptual embroidery, weaving together a rich web of allusions and associations. Although the text was the ultimate foundation of all that was said, it was often used as little more than the occasion for the preacher’s rhetorical flourishes and elaborate ornamentations. Eventually, the sermon would come to its triumphant conclusion, having steadily gained verbal and conceptual momentum as it proceeded.

A Puritan sermon—as exemplified by William Perkins, who did much to shape this genre—tended to consist of three essential components: doctrine, reason, and use.²⁷ The sermon would open with a reading of the text, followed by brief comments that restated its verbal imagery in more prosaic terms, set the context of the passage, and explained difficult terms. The sermon would then turn to the first of its three points, setting out the basic doctrine contained in the text. The preacher would use the same flat tone of voice throughout, trusting in the power of his message rather than relying upon any rhetorical skills. Having explained the doctrine, he would move on to consider its proofs, usually set out as numbered points, before finally turning to apply the doctrine to his audience. That being done, the sermon would end.

Substantially the same debates about sermons remain significant within Protestantism to this day. In the Victorian age—regarded by many as the golden age of Protestant preaching—these debates were supplemented by an additional controversy: should sermons be read from a full text or delivered extempore?²⁸ One side argued that written sermons were generally better organized and more logically sound than extemporaneous ones; the other side recognized that written sermons were often less powerful than those delivered without the impediment of a full text. Those committed to preaching without notes argued that passion was more important than precision and that extemporaneous sermons had “more life, vigor, and power” than those that had been committed to writing and were merely being read aloud in church.

From what has been said, it will be clear that the preacher has played a major role in maintaining and developing the ethos and identity of Protestant groupings. Anglican, Lutheran, Calvinist, Methodist, and Baptist churches have all seen preaching as playing a determinative role, often exceeding the influence of authorized denominational officials or directives. Preachers are the “guardians” of the various Protestant traditions, acting as centers of nucleation, purification, and growth for what is perceived to be reliable, relevant, persuasive, and powerful statements of their positions.

It is no accident that probably the most influential Baptist of the nineteenth century was Charles Haddon Spurgeon and that the most influential British evangelicals of the twentieth century were Martyn Lloyd-Jones and John Stott. All three were highly effective preachers who extended their influence through their published sermons and related works. Each was based at a large London church—the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Westminster Chapel, and All Souls’ Church in Langham Place, respectively—that rose to prominence through their preaching. Each continues to be regarded as an authority within his constituency, and occasionally beyond it.

PROTESTANT VIEWS ON MUSIC IN WORSHIP

Modern Protestant worship makes extensive use of music, especially hymns, choruses, and worship songs. Indeed, Protestants have become so used to singing hymns as part of their worship that many have no idea that this practice was late to develop and was accompanied by much controversy. In this section, we explore how the place of hymns in worship was significantly affected by characteristically Protestant debates about how to understand and apply the Bible.

Luther saw no difficulty with using music in the public worship of the church.²⁹ “Next to the Word of God, music deserves the highest praise,” he wrote. “I do not believe that all the arts should be removed or forbidden on account of the Gospel, as some fanatics suggest. On the contrary, I would gladly see all arts, especially music, in the service of Him Who has given and created them.” Himself a skilled musician, Luther urged others within the reforming movement to write hymns based upon the Psalms in order that the whole of Christendom might be enlightened and inspired.³⁰ Luther’s best-known hymn is a paraphrase of Psalm 46, which opens with the words “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” Luther’s work, set to a tune of his own composing, became a landmark in Christian hymnody: “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”³¹

This work is important in another respect: it represents an example of Luther’s most significant liturgical innovation—the “chorale.” This was a piece of German-language verse written in stanza form, generally set to music similar to popular German secular songs of the period, and sung by the whole congregation during church services. The first such collection appeared in 1524 as the Little Book of Spiritual Songs, which includes “A Mighty Fortress.” Like John Wesley after him, Luther had no difficulty with appropriating well-known songs and changing the words to suit his religious needs. Thus, the popular ballad “I Must Leave You, Innsbrück” became “I Must Leave You, O World.” The chorale tradition was raised to new heights in later Lutheranism by Johann Sebastian Bach.

Whereas Lutheranism developed a rich tradition of vernacular hymns in the sixteenth century—some written by Luther himself—the emerging Anglican and Reformed traditions took the view that God had provided his people with a perfectly adequate set of inspired hymns in the Bible, especially in the Psalms.³² English Protestantism, following the Reformed rather than Lutheran model, dismissed the idea of worship hymns as implying that God’s work was incomplete or inadequate. Worship might therefore include a psalmody, but not a hymnody. Furthermore, early English psalmody was almost exclusively vocal. Most Reformed clergy believed that instruments were appropriate only for secular music, not for public worship. The Psalms were therefore sung without accompaniment—not unlike the plainchant of medieval monasteries.³³

Wherever possible, the Church of England directed that the words of the Psalms would be chanted, not paraphrased, despite the metrical difficulties thus created for singing. This nonmetrical approach preserved the integrity of the actual words of scripture and required no alteration of the biblical text—always a theologically sensitive issue in the Reformed tradition. In the forms of Anglican chant that developed to meet this theological sensitivity, the first portion of a line was sung on a sustained pitch with harmonic support, with the final syllables resolving in a short series of chords. This form of chant had the advantage of preserving the Hebrew parallelism of the psalms, but was clearly better suited for choirs than for congregational singing.³⁴

Nevertheless, the fundamental Protestant desire to involve all believers in the worship of the church soon led to the development of paraphrased Psalms that could be sung by congregations to easily learned tunes.³⁵ The Psalm text was now retranslated, not in order to achieve total verbal accuracy but to render it in a poetic meter so that it could be sung to tunes. The simplicity of these metered tunes made it easier to sing and remember the Psalms—one of the key goals of Protestants.

In his draft ecclesiastical ordinances of 1537, John Calvin proposed that the liturgy could be appropriately enriched by the congregational singing of Psalms. During his period in Strasbourg (1538–41), Calvin managed to find about a dozen Psalms translated into French and versified by Clément Marot. These “metrical Psalms” rapidly became the norm for Reformed Protestantism. The Geneva Psalter (1542) included thirty metrical Psalms by Marot, with accompanying musical settings by Louis Bourgeois.³⁶ Because each Psalm had its own distinct melody, a close correlation could be established between each text and its corresponding tune, which was composed with the specific structure of that Psalm in mind. The Psalter was gradually expanded as additional metrical Psalms were added after Marot’s death in 1544, by which time he had managed to versify only fifty-two of the Psalms. The remainder of the work was completed by Theodore Beza between 1551 and 1562.

In England, John Day produced a Book of Psalms (1562), based on Psalm texts translated by Thomas Sternhold, John Hopkins, and others, with tunes drawn from both the Geneva Psalter and familiar English sources, including popular ballads.³⁷ Day’s Psalms remained in general use for more than 250 years and is thought to have gone through more than five hundred editions. It later came to be known as the Old Version when Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady brought out their New Version of the Psalms (1696). Such was its influence that three of its most common settings—common meter (8.6.8.6), short meter (6.6.8.6) and long meter (8.8.8.8)—became standard, exercising a significant influence on the development of later English hymnody.

Some of these paraphrases became landmarks in their own right. William Kethe (died 1594) wrote a paraphrase of Psalm 100 that was included in Day’s Psalms and remains widely sung in Christian churches throughout the world:

All people that on earth do dwell,

sing to the Lord with cheerful voice:

Him serve with fear, his praise forth tell,

come ye before him and rejoice.

Yet perhaps the most famous paraphrase of all is found in the Scottish Psalter of 1650, authorized for general use by the Church of Scotland. This collection of paraphrases of all 150 Psalms includes the familiar version of Psalm 23.

The Lord’s my shepherd, I’ll not want.

He makes me down to lie

In pastures green: he leadeth me

the quiet waters by.

This paraphrase is often sung to the tune “Crimond,” which was composed around 1870 by Jessie Seymour Irvine (1836–87). Happily, the editors’ introduction to the Psalm, which somewhat cryptically invites congregations to “be as a daughter of the horse-leech” in their devotion to God, has long since been forgotten.

The work of Isaac Watts (1674–1748) marks a watershed in the development of English worship.³⁸ Watts, a Congregationalist divine, believed that contemporary worship was in serious need of enrichment.

“The singing of God’s praise is the part of worship most clearly related to heaven,” he remarked, “but its performance among us is the worst on earth.” The problem was not entirely difficult to locate: the Anglican and Reformed use of paraphrases was, in his view, excessively restricted and ill suited to congregational singing. In his Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament (1719), Watts broke with the long-standing tradition of “close-fitting” paraphrases and produced hymns that were still paraphrases of the biblical Psalms, but much more attuned to the poetic possibilities of the English language. Watts also had theological difficulties with the prevailing approach to the Psalms, which he believed did not do justice to the New Testament theme of Christ as the fulfillment of Israel’s hopes. For Watts, it was both necessary and appropriate to incorporate elements of the Christian gospel into his Psalm paraphrases.

Watts’s genius is best appreciated by comparing his rendering of Psalm 90 with that of the prevailing “gold standard”—the Scottish Psalter (1650):

Scottish Psalter

Lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place,

in generations all.

Before thou ever hadst brought forth,

the mountains great or small.

Watts

O God, our help in ages past,

Our hope in years to come.

Our shelter from the stormy blast,

And our eternal home.

Yet Watts was not content merely to paraphrase the Psalms. In a marked break with the English Protestant tradition of his day, he composed hymns that focused on great theological themes, including the death of Christ. Though saturated in the ideas and phraseology of the Bible, the hymns were not literally biblical, nor could they be described as mere paraphrases. They were independent compositions, written in order to be sung, to be memorable, and above all to be spiritually effective.

Watts’s breakthrough was generally ignored by Anglicans and Presbyterians, though taken up with increasing enthusiasm by Congregationalists. Yet his greatest achievement was arguably to lay the groundwork for perhaps the most significant development in English hymnody—the work of John and Charles Wesley, who recognized the role that hymns could play in fostering personal devotion and theological understanding. The evangelical revival of the eighteenth century saw the hymn transformed into an engine of devotion, renewal, and understanding, appealing to the heart and the mind.

John Wesley (1703–91) had no hesitation in using secular models for his hymns; these models, he believed, enabled his hymns to relate better to his audience. An excellent example can be found in his hymnodic parody of the “Song of Venus,” one of the great odes from John Dryden’s patriotic drama King Arthur (1691):

Fairest Isle, all isles excelling,

Seat of pleasures, and of loves;

Venus here will choose her dwelling,

And forsake her Cyprian groves.

Exploiting the powerful language and imagery of the ode, Wesley converted it into one of his best-known hymns:

Love divine, all loves excelling,

joy of heaven, to earth come down,

fix in us thy humble dwelling,

all thy faithful mercies crown!

Yet one of Wesley’s most significant achievements was to make the hymn an instrument of theological education. Recognizing that a good hymn was memorable as well as inspirational, he developed their potential as catechetical aids, combining finely polished phrases with highly accessible theology. His brother Charles Wesley (1707–88) produced a collection of “Hymns on the Lord’s Supper” that served as both devotional aids and theological explanations of their themes.

The success of the Wesleys was such that the potential of the hymn could no longer be ignored. From the end of the eighteenth century onward, hymnody became widely accepted in Anglican and Presbyterian circles, as both an enrichment to worship and an aid to Christian education. A series of landmark publications ensured that Christian worship would be provided with a rich range of resources. The most famous of these in its time was Hymns Ancient and Modern (1861), the result of a conversation between two clergymen during a journey on the old Great Western Railway.

In Germany, theological divisions within Protestantism over the role of church music caused no small problems for professional musicians, not least of whom was Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750). As Bach’s career led him throughout Germany, the musical implications of German confessionalization became increasingly clear. Cuius regio, eius religio—and confessional differences entailed radically different attitudes toward music. Himself a devout Lutheran, Bach saw his task as setting the Bible to music in such a way that its meaning and power might be fully appreciated by congregations.³⁹

By this time, Lutheranism had developed a rich musical tradition, which Bach augmented, particularly through his cantatas and passions. Bach’s last and greatest appointment was as organist and choirmaster at the Lutheran Thomaskirche in Leipzig. His major works that date from this period include the Magnificat in D, the St. John Passion, the St. Matthew Passion, the B-Minor Mass, and the Christmas Oratorio. But not all of Bach’s appointments were in Lutheran contexts.

From 1717 to 1723, Bach served at the Reformed court of Anhalt-Köthen. Though the court was strongly supportive of music, their Reformed outlook was inconsistent with the use of music in public worship. Bach thus found himself focusing on secular works during this period and was unable to express his musical talents liturgically. Undeterred, Bach wrote the six Brandenburg Concertos for the Margrave Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg and the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier. It proved to be an enormously productive period of his life, even if he was not able to exercise his art in his own favored context—congregational worship.

A more complex situation had arisen earlier, when Bach was appointed organist at Mühlhausen in 1707. Here religious tensions were seething between orthodox Lutheranism and Pietism. Pietism emphasized musical simplicity and had no place for anything other than unadorned motets and musically simple hymns—the musical equivalent of the “plain style” of preaching so favored by English Puritanism. In particular, Pietists were implacably opposed to the cantata, which they regarded as modeled on opera, the most secular of all secular models. For the Pietists, the cantata represented the secularization, even desecration, of sacred music. Unsurprisingly, Bach stayed a mere nine months in Mühlhausen before moving on to more congenial surroundings.

Since then, church music has become increasingly important throughout Protestantism. Its origins have come to mean less than how it enhances worship or reaches out to society at large. The increased acceptance of pipe organs in church enhanced the musical quality of congregational worship, until such forms of worship were regarded as the norm by the beginning of the twentieth century. Once more, this was not without controversy. The installation of an organ in 1828 at Brunswick Methodist Chapel in Leeds caused significant division within the denomination. The fact that the inaugural recital was given by Samuel Sebastian Wesley, one of the most renowned organists of the day and the grandson of Charles Wesley, one of the founders of Methodism, did nothing to abate the storm that ensued.

American Protestantism was slower than its English counterpart to realize the importance of hymnody.⁴⁰ Early American Puritan efforts at biblical paraphrasing, though suitable for congregational singing, were not entirely felicitous. Cotton Mather (1663–1728), who was involved in the infamous Salem witch trials, attempted to paraphrase the Psalmist’s urging of all creatures of the seas to praise their creator in a hopelessly pedestrian way that nowadays evokes more amusement than reverence:

Ye monsters of the bubbling deep,

Your Maker’s praises spout;

Up from the sands ye codlings peep,

And wag your tails about.

It certainly rhymes. But it’s not exactly inspirational. Nevertheless, by the nineteenth century American Protestantism had caught up with its European counterparts and had managed to better them at points. The famous Christmas carol “O Little Town of Bethlehem” was penned in 1868 by Phillips Brooks (1835–1903), an Episcopalian rector in Philadelphia, following a visit to the Holy Land.

American Protestantism produced new genres of religious music for use in worship that were without real parallel in Europe. One of the most remarkable of these was the African American tradition of hymnody, which brought a new dimension to worship.⁴¹ Music now addressed the suffering, deprivation, and hopelessness of life, offering solace. Words and music stressed the consolation brought by the gospel to the marginalized and oppressed:

There is a balm in Gilead,

To make the wounded whole;

There is a balm in Gilead,

To heal the sin-sick soul.

The African American “spiritual” came into its own after the Civil War, when it began to attract wider attention within the Protestant community.

Equally significantly, the revivalist tradition within American Protestantism realized the importance of hymnody in worship as a means of reaching out beyond the Christian community. Revivalist services used the congregational singing of hymns, psalms, and spirituals to create an awareness of the presence of God and the potential of transformation through the gospel. Dwight L. Moody and Ira David Sankey pioneered the “gospel song”—which could be sung to or sung by the congregation—as a means of teaching and evangelism. Perhaps the most famous of these gospel songs was penned by Robert Lowry (1826–99) in 1864, while he was a pastor in Brooklyn, New York.

Shall we gather at the river,

Where bright angel-feet have trod,

With its crystal tide forever

Flowing by the throne of God?

Chorus:

Yes, we’ll gather at the river,

The beautiful, the beautiful river;

Gather with the saints at the river

That flows by the throne of God.

Gospel songs were more accessible than the more theologically and musically sophisticated hymns then being written within mainline Protestantism. Revivalism recognized that popular hymnody had the potential to connect with a wide audience, both churched and unchurched.⁴² The use of the chorus came to be excoriated as excessively popularist by the more sophisticated within Protestant communities. Yet the chorus proved to be a powerful way of affirming the involvement of everyone in worship, reasserting the principle of the “priesthood of all believers,” and, perhaps most importantly, proclaiming the availability of the gospel to all.

This kind of accessible worship song became more and more popular during the twentieth century as the great hymns of the Victorian era began to appear tired and dated. Writers such as Graham Kendrick (born 1950) have pioneered new styles of worship songs that appeal directly to the emotions and imagination and are well adapted to the cultural changes of the age. The rise of the charismatic movement has been accompanied by an intuitive—if not necessarily theologically reflective—awareness of the power of music to assist both worship and devotion, and worship songs have been written for this form of worship.⁴³ These often lack the theological depth and verbal richness of the hymns of a writer such as John Wesley; nevertheless, they are widely experienced as heightening the congregation’s awareness of God in their midst.⁴⁴

The essential point is that Protestantism came into being with a profoundly ambivalent attitude toward music but would later come to embrace it wholeheartedly. The two most significant strands of Protestantism in the 1540s—Lutheranism and the Reformed tradition—had quite different attitudes to the place of music in worship, but as time passed, and the merits of music became increasingly clear, Protestantism as a whole moved decisively and, it seems, irreversibly toward uses of music that some of its sixteenth-century forebears would have regarded as little more than paganism.

This change in attitude toward music is a classic example of the malleability of Protestantism. Where multiple interpretations or applications of the Bible are possible, the outcomes are often determined mainly by pragmatic considerations. The sheer utility of hymns, gospel songs, and other forms of music in worship swamped the remaining theological anxieties. Although it is still possible to encounter small traditionalist congregations that tenaciously and defiantly hold fast to early seventeenth-century Puritan forms of worship, these are now rare. The entrepreneurial activities of innovators such as Isaac Watts, John Wesley, and their modern successors have transformed Protestant worship and will continue to do so in the future. Given the nature of Protestantism, it seems certain that its forms of worship will continue to adapt to both the tastes of the moment and the needs of the church.

WORSHIP AND THE VISUAL IN PROTESTANTISM

The medieval Catholic church had a strong sense of the importance of the visual in church life, in relation to both worship and Christian education. Gospel scenes were often painted on church walls to act as visual aids for the illiterate. Altarpieces that provided vivid depictions of the crucifixion enabled worshipers to appreciate the suffering of Christ and the benefits resulting from his death. These were supplemented by panel paintings, decorated pulpits, and pictorial epitaphs, all of which represented the core Catholic understanding of the creation, salvation, and future judgment of the world in a powerful visual manner that captured the imagination.

Early Protestantism was divided over how to use the visual in relation to worship.⁴⁵ The emerging Reformed tradition took the view that all images were prohibited by the Bible. Images distracted from the preaching and could easily become objects of worship in themselves. The iconoclasm of this wing of the Reformation was conceptual as much as physical: it was not merely that Reformed churches rejected physical religious images and statues, but that they rejected the very idea that images could serve a fundamental theological role—an idea deeply embedded within Catholicism—as a return to paganism.

Reformed Protestantism had no difficulty with the verbal images of scripture. These, however, were logocentric: they used the word of God as a means to govern and control the human imagination. Images such as God as shepherd (Psalm 23:1) were developed and amplified by the written and spoken word, always under the authority and control of the Bible. Puritan preachers in particular were anxious about what would happen if the untutored imagination of the laity were to encounter visual representations of the divine. Such encounters, they believed, would inevitably lead to idolatry (through confusing the image and its referent) or heterodoxy (through misinterpreting the image).

This point was set out with theological precision by the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), which rapidly established itself as normative in matters of Reformed life and thought. This catechism developed the idea that images of God are neither necessary nor helpful for Christian believers. There is an interesting parallel with Islam here, in that both Islam and Reformed theology are concerned that images of God meant to aid in the worship of God could become objects of worship in themselves. The traditional question-and-answer format that follows is characteristic of Protestant catechisms of the age. The discussion is based on the Second Commandment, which is translated in the Geneva Bible (1560) as: “Thou shalt make thee no graven image, neither any similitude of things that are in heaven above, neither that are in the earth beneath, nor that are in the waters under the earth” (Exodus 20:4).

Question 96: What does God require in the next commandment?

Answer: That we should not portray God in any way, nor worship him in any other manner than he has commanded in his Word.

Question 97: So should we not make any use of images?

Answer: God cannot and should not be depicted in any way. As for creatures, although they may indeed be depicted, God forbids making use of or having any likeness of them, in order to worship them or to use them to serve him.

Question 98: But should we allow pictures instead of books in churches, for the benefit of the unlearned?

Answer: No. For we should not presume to be wiser than God, who does not want Christendom to be taught by means of dumb idols, but through the living preaching of his Word.

The Heidelberg Catechism emphasized that knowledge of God and the presence of God are mediated through the word—through the reading of the Bible and preaching. This strongly logocentric understanding of the mediation of the divine held that anything that distracts from attentive listening to the public reading of the Bible and the exposition of its contents is to be removed as a matter of principle.

For instance, the internal walls of Calvinist churches were whitewashed. This practice seems to have served three functions. First, it eliminated distractions. Where pre-Reformation churches were being converted for Protestant use, existing murals or ornamentation were simply blotted out. Second, the use of whitewash symbolized cleansing and purification. This was an important principle in the first phase of Reformed church practice. For Zwingli, whitewashing the pagan art of Catholic churches was a visible sign of their having been cleansed and rededicated to the worship of the true God.⁴⁶ Third, whitewash symbolized light; in much the same way the Reformed churches preferred clear glass in church windows, whitewashed walls were devoid of distracting ornamentation or illustration.

At times, the Reformed attitude toward images verges on iconophobia—a fear that the open, conceptually porous nature of images lacked the closed, conceptual precision of tight theological arguments.⁴⁷ Although the historical context of Calvinism limited its engagement with Orthodoxy, there is no doubt that its fundamental theological trajectory was hostile to the use of icons in worship or personal devotion.⁴⁸

Lutheranism took a fundamentally different approach from the outset. While Luther may have objected to some of the themes depicted in the ornamentation of Catholic churches, he had no problems with the medium itself. Many traditional Catholic images were abandoned, most notably Mary and the saints. In their place, Lukas Cranach the Elder and his school developed altarpieces and other visual forms that affirmed Lutheran themes. Alongside traditional depictions of the crucifixion, we find representations of the dialectic between the law and the gospel. Those who found this polarity difficult to assimilate at the conceptual level could enjoy—and even understand—the idea when expressed visually.⁴⁹ The law is portrayed as barren, leading only to death and condemnation; the gospel, however, brings life and hope.

The subsequent development of Protestant attitudes to the use of the visual arts in church architecture in general, and to worship in particular, shows a pattern not dissimilar to that observed in relation to music. Most Protestants, especially Puritans in both the Old and New Worlds, remained hostile toward any form of visual adornment or ornamentation of churches and to the use of visual aids to worship or devotion.⁵⁰ Yet as time passed theological resistance to the use of such devices began to wane. Stained-glass windows began to appear in Reformed churches. The importance of ecclesiastical architecture in enhancing the experience of worship began to be appreciated. Especially within Lutheranism and Anglicanism, an understanding developed that the beauty of a church interior could be seen as a mirror of the beauty of God.

Yet one point must be made in closing these reflections on the place of the visual in Protestant worship. During my frequent trips to Zurich to research the origins of the Reformation, I have been a regular visitor to the city’s “Great Minster,” which abuts the libraries in which I have conducted much of my research. I have often sat within this spacious building, which dates back to the twelfth century and was totally reordered under Zwingli. Its brilliantly, almost clinically, white interior is austere. The size and location of the great pulpit expresses the theology of Zwingli and his successors: God is known and encountered through a text—the Bible. The forbidding, frigid elegance of the building gently insinuates the inadequacy and illegitimacy of expecting to encounter God in any other place and in any other way.

I admire that simplicity and elegance, and I understand both its historical origins and its symbolism. Yet today, when that history has largely been forgotten and the symbolism has ceased to be meaningful for so many, the building seems instead to point to an absent God, a God who does not speak, a God who cannot be experienced. It is not unlike the poetry of the Anglican priest-poet R. S. Thomas (1913–2000), who found the silence of an empty church to be a disturbing expression of the absence of God.⁵¹

As the English rationalist critic Thomas Hobbes pointed out, this Protestant God might as well not exist, since his supposed existence seems to make very little difference to anything. A permanently absent God is about as much use as a dead God. If the existence of God makes little or no impact upon the experiences of everyday life, the business of living might as well be conducted without reference to him. Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), the great Dutch Protestant lawyer, noted that the end result of all this was a world in which people lived etsi Deus non daretur—“as if God did not exist.”

The problem for this strand of Protestantism is that its alternatives represent God as being accessible, capable of being encountered and experienced in the here and now. For example, seventeenth-century Catholicism offered an imaginative alternative to this aesthetically severe Protestant approach to sacred spaces. Once the Council of Trent had countered the theological threat posed by Protestantism, Catholicism turned its attention to exploiting its aesthetic deficiencies. One of its chief weapons was the development of the Baroque style, which flourished during the period 1600 to 1750.⁵²

Baroque churches were much larger in scale than their predecessors, and their interiors were sumptuously decorated with sculpture and paintings. Baroque church interiors were designed to elicit an immediate, emotional response from congregations and visitors through their dramatic lighting effects, symmetry, dynamic architectural forms, and lavish decoration. The idea was that a church interior should be a visible, tangible embodiment of the glory of God, seamlessly integrated with the preaching and sacramental life of the church. When this style of architecture was integrated with the baroque musical style, the holistic vision of the beauty of God and the gospel thus presented posed a formidable challenge to forms of Protestantism that remained suspicious of any use of music or visual arts in worship.

The challenge to this form of Protestantism was not limited to Catholicism. The rise of Pietism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries posed an internal threat. This Protestant style, in reaction against the indirect, word-centered approach to Christian spirituality, held that the essence of a “living faith” was direct experience of God. This emphasis on the existential certainty of knowing God is expressed in Charles Wesley’s hymn Free Grace, written shortly after his conversion in 1738:

Still the small inward Voice I hear,

That whispers all my Sins forgiv’n;

Still the atoning Blood is near,

That quench’d the Wrath of hostile Heav’n:

I feel the Life his Wounds impart;

I feel my Savior in my Heart.

The weight given to the subjective perception of the living Christ in the believer (“I feel my Savior in my heart”) was a corrective against what was seen in sharp contrast as a somewhat cerebral “book-knowledge” of God. A very similar point must be made concerning Pentecostalism, a more recent form of Protestantism that insists on the immediate accessibility of God through the Holy Spirit. We consider the implications of the dramatic rise of Pentecostalism in the final part of this work.

In this chapter, we have considered the internal aspects of faith, examining how the life of Protestantism has been shaped by its controlling beliefs and values. But what of the society within which Protestantism is located? In what way do its beliefs and values influence culture in general? Our attention now turns to the complex interaction between Protestantism and Western culture.

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