'Protestant': The Making of a Religious Label

In sixteenth-century England, ‘Protestant’ was a foreign word. It originated in the Holy Roman Empire (Germany) when six territorial princes issued a defiant ‘protestation’ against Emperor Charles V’s reinstatement of the repressive religious regime of the 1521 German parliament [1]. The princes were Lutherans - that is, followers of the Church reformer Martin Luther’s movement. They viewed themselves as separatists to the traditional Church in the West. Settling in England during Henry VIII’s reign, ‘Protestant’ referred to the broader pro-Lutheran movement that the German princes represented.

By today's standards, ‘Protestant’ as a historical category is problematic. Alec Ryrie, a historian, shows how the term grew out of rival Christian groups and their polemical writings. 'Protestant' developed into an ‘accidental word’ which, for utility’s sake, described a large body of religious opponents to traditional Christianity [2]. Consequently, the term helped demarcate who was who during the rise of the Reformations.

Protestants? Latimer preaching before Edward VI at Paul's Cross, 1548 by Ernest Board 1910
© Parliamentary Art Collection

Ryrie argues that the word remains useful for historians. Still, he says, ‘Protestant’ accurately describes a body of non-papal Christians who have enough similar qualities for it to be meaningful [3]. In short, for the modern reader, ‘Protestant’ is still useful.

Yet there is also a downside. In using this term, historians need to be aware that Protestantism’s definition ‘becomes unstable’ if we choose to look at it theologically rather than historically [4]. Ryrie criticises the German confessionalisation thesis for its treatment of Lutheranism and Calvinism as ‘parallel cases’ in the early modern world. The thesis also inadequately accounts for religious radicalism in Europe, ignoring the fact that not all ‘Protestants’ favour simple categorisation [5]. His criticisms are insightful.

First, Ryrie accounts for the differences between Orthodox Lutheranism and Reformed Calvinism as Protestant traditions. Lutheranism is a confession, in the proper sense of the word, whilst Calvinism is not. Lutherans defined their faith in the Augsburg Confession (1530) which the religious peace of Augsburg (1555) legally recognised within the Holy Roman Empire. By bringing an end to the Schmalkadic Wars between Charles V and his states, the peace made the Empire into a bi-confessional entity, defining Catholic and Protestant confessional states by the cuius regio, eius religio principle (i.e. the faith of the ruler defines the faith of the people). Ryrie calls the Augsburg Confession a ‘grounding document’, setting the parameters for Lutheranism forevermore. Hence, ‘Protestant’ refers to a well-defined Christian tradition in early modern Germany.

Calvinism, on the other hand, ‘was open-ended, discursive, and profoundly unstable’ because it had no formal creed [6]. Ryrie states: ‘Calvinism, then, should be seen not as a “united” confession in any strict sense, but as an ecumenical movement for Protestant unity’ [7]. Nevertheless, confessional divides varied across post-Reformation Europe in part because of Calvinism’s liberal theology. Although it had core features (such as an uncompromising eschatology on the theory of predestination), Calvinists had no formal confession to anchor their faith by.

Second, religious radicalism and heterodoxy was a minority flourish in post-Reformation Europe, but important because it confuses ‘Protestant’ as a sweeping and all-encompassing label. Radicals had a Protestant background. Their relationship with magisterial Protestantism (i.e. Lutheranism, Calvinism) is crucial because radicals went beyond established confessional traditions in both the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We define radicals by this interpretive schema. A post-Reformation background is core to all radical values.

In recognising religious radicalism, Ryrie critiques the model of sola scriptura. Historians use this term, which refers to Christian traditions that view scripture as the sole source of religious authority, to unite all Protestant traditions under one banner. Ryrie states that, quite contrarily, views on the Bible differed. Sola scriptura is a flawed label because Reformers had different ideas about what the Bible meant – particularly, on which Biblical books mattered most.

Luther, for instance, called the Bible ‘the swaddling cloths and the manger in which Christ lies’, meaning that its contents were incremental, whereas faith in Christ was what really mattered [8]. In such a view, the Bible’s contents, Ryrie says, are ‘almost insignificant’ [9]. Quakers are another great example. They were radicals who went beyond the Bible’s authority, arguing that the spirit’s ‘inner light’ (or immediacy of Christ’s teaching within everyone’s souls) came before the Bible in terms of divine authority. In such cases, these religious traditions view the Bible in different ways which the sola scriptura model fails to account for.

All in all, Ryrie concludes, Protestantism is a useful historical term that encompasses the many belief systems that the rise of the Reformations gave birth to. However, historians need to investigate the finer details of these systems and evaluate them against the meanings that their label (‘Protestant’) implies. This label, Ryrie says, means ‘a religion within which the Bible appears to be self-authenticating’ [10]. To conclude, the remainder ‘bear an unmistakable family resemblance. The best word we have for that family is “Protestant”’ [11].

Notes:

[1] Peter Marshall, ‘The Naming of Protestant England’ Past & Present, no. 214 (2012), p. 91.

[2] Alec Ryrie, ‘“Protestantism” as a Historical Category’ Transaction of the Royal Historical Society, 26 (2016), p. 61.

[3] ibid., p. 62.

[4] ibid.

[5] ibid., p. 65.

[6] ibid., p. 67.

[7] ibid.

[8] ibid., p. 74.

[9] ibid.

[10] ibid., p. 77.

[11] ibid.