The Protestant Heritage

Justification by grace through faith

The belief that humans are justified before God by grace through faith separated the first Protestant reformers from the Roman Catholicism of their day. And despite the subtle differences that arose in the various Protestant church bodies, devotion to this teaching has been central to Protestantism throughout its history.

In the 16th century concern for “justification” (the act through which God grants a sinner grace or makes a sinner righteous) was related to the desire, often expressed in language drawn from the courts of law, of finding oneself on good terms with God. Aware of its shortcomings, its ignorance, its sin, and its guilt, humankind saw itself standing before a bar of justice presided over by God. Without help, individuals could expect nothing but God’s wrath and condemnation. This meant that they would perish everlastingly, and their present life would be full of torment. Yet the Bible also presented humankind with a picture of a loving and gracious God, who desires happiness for all. The question then was how could individuals be sure that God would reveal his gracious, and not his wrathful, side? How could they have the confidence that they were included in the positive loving action of God?

The teaching of the Reformers becomes most intelligible when contrasted with Roman Catholic doctrine (e.g., sin, grace, atonement) as the Reformers understood it. In the Protestant view, late medieval Catholic teaching held that individuals were returned to God only when so much grace had been infused into their souls that they merited God’s favour. God could not accept someone who was unacceptable, but he could impart something that would make humans acceptable. This something was grace, and its flow depended upon the merits of God’s perfect Son, the man Jesus Christ. The church, according to medieval Catholicism, in a sense controlled the flow through its sacramental system and its hierarchy.

To the Reformers the Roman Catholic sacramental system seemed to be part of an ongoing transaction between humankind and God. Catholics would attend the mass, bring offerings, show sorrow, do penance—which might involve self-punishment or compensatory good works—until God became gracious; the church and its clergy mediated the transaction. The Reformers believed that such an arrangement could easily be misused and was without scriptural foundation. It was this vision of Catholicism that helped inspire the Protestant leadership to rebel and to define justification in other terms.

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The terms for this Protestant teaching came from the Bible, especially from the New Testament and even more so from the writings of St. Paul. In St. Paul the Reformers saw a religious hero and thinker who had experienced a spiritual quest similar to their own. His conversion signified a radical turning and a free acceptance of God’s favour “in Christ.” This meant that in faith a person could be so identified with Jesus Christ that when God looked at him, he saw instead the merit that Christ had won through his self-sacrifice on the cross. God looked at the sinner and saw his perfect Son, not the sinner. He could, therefore, declare the person righteous, or “justify” him, even though the person was still a sinner.

According to this interpretation of Paul’s teaching, grace was not infused in the sinner to the point that he or she became acceptable and pleasing to God; instead, while the individual remained a sinner, God accepted him favourably and justified him. Christ’s death on the cross was then the only “transaction” that mattered between God and humanity. The sacraments reinforced this relationship and brought new grace, but no pretense was made that the human subject had achieved satisfaction before God or had earned enough merit to inspire God to act.

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In the Reformers’ view the new situation provided freedom. Whereas Catholics were bound to strive to achieve enough good works to please God, the Reformers taught that believers stood before God completely freed of this duty and from the enslaving pride that went with the notion that the believers had achieved or at least had substantially cooperated in their own salvation. This left the Reformers with a serious question, one to which their Roman Catholic opponents regularly referred. What had happened in this teaching of justification and freedom to the biblical emphasis on good works? Jesus himself, in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), was constantly preoccupied with the effort of making people better, of having them bring forth “good fruit.” Even Paul shared such concerns. Had the Protestant movement slighted these concerns in its desire to free human beings from the necessity of merits and good works?

The literature of Protestantism is rich in its answers to such questions. The Reformers were virtually unanimous: good works could not bring one salvation, yet they inevitably flowed from the forgiven heart and were always the consequence of the justified person’s life. The law of God was not a path human beings walked as a sort of obstacle course or road map to God but rather a means to measure human shortcomings and judge them. A gracious God acting through his Gospel brought human beings back to him.

The Reformers believed that God viewed human beings in two ways. The justified person, in God’s eyes, was so identified with Jesus Christ that he or she shared Christ’s perfection. The same person, when seen by God apart from Christ’s sacrificial work, remained a sinner. The difference came through God’s gracious initiative; nothing that a person did started the process of his or her justification. To many in subsequent generations, this was a pessimistic and gloomy view of human potential. The will was bound; apart from God’s loving activity, no good works would satisfy God. Indeed, the phrase total depravity was sometimes used to demonstrate the extent of sin and to describe the debased condition of humanity. Even good works, piety, and religiousness were without value apart from justification by grace through faith. On the other hand, the justified sinner could be described in the most lavish terms as one who could be “as Christ” or even sometimes “a Christ.”

Those who have heard this Protestant teaching outlined through the centuries have regularly seen the difficulties it raises insofar as the portrait of God’s character is concerned. Protestants never came up with logically satisfying answers to the resultant questions, though in general they were convinced that their teaching was supported by the Bible. A central question was begged: If everything depended upon God’s initiative and yet the majority of people are not saved, does this not mean that God is responsible for creating humans only to have them suffer and is he not guilty of the worst kind of cruelty by being the sole agent of human damnation?

Protestant leaders answered this question in several different ways. Some said that whenever people were saved, it was to God’s credit; whenever they were lost, it was their own fault because they refused to hear the Word and accept the gift of grace. Others, especially Calvinists, emphasizing God’s sovereignty and initiative, taught “double predestination,” which asserted that God predestined some people to be saved and others to be damned. Some theologians argued that God predestined humans before the fall of Adam, and others saw it as a new act of God consequent upon man’s fall. Non-Calvinist churches were usually less systematic and less logical in their soteriology (the theology of salvation), teaching “single predestination.” They shared the Calvinists’ affirmation of God’s total responsibility for human salvation, but they tended to be silent or to relegate to the area of mystery the issue of how God could be responsible for salvation but not damnation. In general, Protestants believed they were more successful at preserving the teaching of God’s sovereignty and human helplessness than they were at making his character attractive to all. To overcome this problem they stressed God’s love of humanity in sending his own Son, Jesus Christ, to suffer on its behalf.

The “priesthood of all believers”

If the teaching of justification had important consequences for the doctrines of God and of humanity in Protestantism, it had equally important consequences for the Protestant understanding of the church and the relationship between clergy and laity. The medieval system (both sacramental and sacerdotal) in effect made priests the mediators between God and humankind. The Protestant teaching of justification broke this down, and Protestant leaders taught that all believers have a share in spreading the word of grace and the acts of forgiveness. The result was an emphasis on the “priesthood of all believers.”

The Reformers based their teaching on the free-flowing sense of authority that existed between Christ and his Apostles, who were pictured in the Gospels as unencumbered by an elaborate clerical church order. The Reformers also called on all people to take responsibility for one another’s salvation and believed that any Christian could represent the needs of all others before God. Originally the priesthood of all believers was an enlargement of the view that all Christians could intercede for one another through prayer. It came to refer, however, to the Protestant view of the equality of status between clergy and laity and to the calling of all Christians to be agents of God’s Word and grace.

The affirmation of the priesthood of all believers had widespread societal implications because it limited the privileges of the clergy and enlarged the scope of lay activity. All believers were called to their “vocations,” and those of the clergy were not considered more meritorious than those of the laity. Monastic vocations were almost entirely swept away, rarely to return in Protestant history. Although they reduced the status of ministers, most Protestants kept a rite of ordination (though some Anabaptists dispensed with all acts that seemed to imply separation between a ministry of ordained persons and laymen) but did not regularly view it as a vehicle of grace or sacrament. In part the ministry was kept for pragmatic reasons; the clergy were to study and preach the Word, administer the sacraments, and care for the health of the church. A set-aside ministry was also derived from biblical precedent in the Acts of the Apostles and early Christian letters.

Protestants, while acknowledging their belief in the equality of the laity and clergy in the priesthood of all believers, have not always been successful in defining the laity’s role. In most cases laypersons were not to preach in public and were not to administer the sacraments. Protestants have made educational requirements, especially study of the Bible, a basis for ordained ministry, often at the expense of a full lay involvement. Yet their views did greatly enhance the role of the laity in religious life, especially when contrasted to the situation in medieval Catholicism.

The new doctrine of the priesthood of all believers inspired the Reformers to reconsider the definition of the church and its members. In some ways borrowing from but also breaking with the medieval view, Reformers examined the issue of the visible and invisible church. For German Reformer Martin Luther, the church was always visible because it was made up of people. On the other hand, he recognized that the true church was invisible since one could not examine the heart of others to determine exactly who were the true believers and who were the faithless. Similarly, other Reformers, among them French theologian John Calvin, employed the distinction between a visible church and an invisible one, the latter referring to the people who were saved, even if they were in churches where full doctrinal purity had not been achieved. People see the visible, humanly organized church of Christ, but they cannot simply identify this with the Bible’s one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, which is properly discerned only by God and hence invisible to humans. The Reformers, perhaps borrowing from St. Augustine, believed that the visible church contained a mixture of members of the invisible church, on the one hand, and hypocrites, or false believers, on the other.

Authority of the Word

The new doctrines on faith and the priesthood of all believers rejected Roman Catholic teaching on salvation and the priesthood and undermined the traditional system of authority. Consequently, Protestants were forced to fill a vacuum of their own making. A pluralistic movement from the first, Protestantism was rarely characterized by a love of anarchy or indiscipline, and the Reformers sought to establish the locale and extent of authority in the church and the believer’s life. Almost unanimously they saw final authority to reside in the Word of God, which they simply equated with the Bible. The need of the Protestant movement to redefine authority enhanced its view of Scripture just as, one might argue, the rediscovery of scriptural teaching was seen to be the primary impetus behind the Protestant movement.

Later generations of Protestant thinkers sometimes resorted to scholastic philosophical definitions similar to those of medieval theologians; in such definitions justification became the material (or substantive) principle of the Reformation, while the matter of scriptural authority became the equally important formal (or structural) principle. Debate about the nature of the Word of God or the Bible was also a topic of much debate among Protestant thinkers. Protestants often have wrongly portrayed medieval Catholicism as being a nonbiblical or even an antibiblical faith. The expense of reproducing manuscripts led many libraries to chain books to the wall, and the Bible chained to the wall entered Protestant mythology as a symbol of the denial of lay access to the Bible in Roman Catholicism. In many circles Protestantism has been celebrated as a religion of the “open Bible,” in opposition to the closed book of Catholicism.

Mythology aside, Protestants without exception concentrated on biblical teaching, actively translated the Bible into the vernacular, and disseminated it as widely as possible—aided by the invention of movable type in the mid-15th century and the resultant progress in printing technology. While the Bible was ordinarily read in the churches and interpretation was shaped by the old and new traditions of these churches (Anglicans read the Bible’s teachings on apostolic succession differently from the way Anabaptists did, for example), Protestants exalted “the right of private judgment.”

Protestants agreed that the Word of God was authoritative in matters of faith and that the Bible had unique status, but they did not agree on all interpretations of the Scripture, nor did they unite in a single doctrine of scriptural authority. Protestant mystics and the Quakers stressed an immediate experience of God and thus qualified the importance of the Bible in shaping Christian life. But even among Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, and Anglicans there were differences of opinion about the Bible.

During the period of Protestant orthodoxy, especially in the 16th and 17th centuries, theologians developed the notion of the verbal inspiration (or inerrancy) of the Bible. This notion held that in fact every word of the Bible was divinely inspired and was thus the authority for one’s faith. Protestant orthodoxy countered the Catholic notion of an infallible church with that of an infallible Bible. During the European Enlightenment, the notion of a verbally inspired Bible was widely abandoned in the face of historical and philological criticism. In the 19th century, the fundamentalist movement, especially in North America, reiterated the view of Protestant orthodoxy.

The elevation of the Bible as the authority in matters of faith led to the downgrading of other church authorities. The hierarchy, and especially the pope, were hardest hit, and papal authority was denied in almost every sector of Protestantism. The conservative reformers replaced papal authority with increased devotion to the Fathers (doctrinal teachers and interpreters) of the early church, who were sometimes cited in the confessional writings of the various Protestant bodies. The Church Fathers, particularly St. Augustine, were revered as guides rather than as final authorities. Similarly, a critical attitude toward councils of the church came to prevail. Many Reformers noted that previous councils had erred or contradicted other councils. At the same time, however, many Protestant churches adopted the formulas and creedal statements of the ecumenical councils and incorporated them into their own official body of teaching. Those concerned with the Trinity or the person and work of Jesus Christ were particularly highly regarded.

Canon law, the inherited body of legal materials that regulated faith and morals, also suffered because of the high regard for the Bible. In most Protestant circles it was difficult to make legislation binding upon conscience unless it was based on clearly affirmed biblical legal teaching; more important, the accent on the Gospel of grace led most Protestants to undervalue the whole role of law in the life of the church. At the same time, new church orders soon developed, and Protestants often acted as legalistically as did the Roman Catholics, whom they were repudiating. Most Protestant bodies, notably the Anglicans, developed their own versions of canon law or rules of church order and discipline.

Emphasis on the sacraments

Although they were united in their rejection of Roman Catholic teaching, the 16th-century Reformers were divided in their interpretation of the sacraments. In place of the sacramental system of the Roman Catholic church, the Reformers proposed a system that limited sacramental teaching to those acts clearly commanded by Christ in the Scriptures. Most Protestants also agreed on the fundamental definition of a sacrament as an act, established by God and instituted by Christ, that imparted grace and the new life and that combined the Word of God and some visible means (like bread, wine, and water). Therefore, five of the seven Roman Catholic sacraments failed to meet this definition: marriage, ordination, confirmation, penance (now called repentance), and extreme unction (now called anointing of the sick). Although Protestants did not abolish all these rites, their churches did deny that all were sacraments. Thus the Protestant teaching on marriage was normally as “high” as Catholic doctrine and may be considered quasi-sacramental. But it was seen chiefly as a civil act blessed by the church, and it did not convey grace to the participants.

Though Protestants—with a few exceptions—had little difficulty limiting the number of sacraments and perpetuating a high regard for them, they were far apart in their understanding of what went on in sacramental acts. Basically three views were debated. To the “right” was the Lutheran view, which critics considered quite close to Roman Catholicism. Luther had something of a medieval worldview in which symbols of the material world signified another invisible, divine order. This attitude allowed him to make much of the material objects in the sacraments. When he connected them with biblical language, he was able to say of bread and wine that these are the body and blood of Christ, and of baptism that it effected a change in the believer’s status before God.

At the “left” was the view of the Anabaptists, who viewed the acts, which they called “ordinaries,” as purely memorial remembrances of Jesus’ death and resurrection, public symbols of commitment to Jesus. The mediating view was that of Huldrych Zwingli and other Swiss Reformers, who accented the spiritual side and downgraded the material. They shared a view of matter and spirit in which the symbols were opaque, disengaged from an invisible “other order.” Such teaching meant that what mattered most in the sacraments was the following of Christ’s commands, the reminiscence of his participation in the world of his disciples, and the spiritual reality brought to the acts of believers. For Zwingli the bread and the wine were symbols that merely represented the body and blood of Christ, and baptism was more a sign of a Covenant with God than a vehicle of grace. The views of other Protestants, including Calvinists and Anglicans, were somewhere between the extremes of right and left. All Reformers, however, rejected the Roman Catholic teaching called “transubstantiation,” which held that the actual “substance” of the bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper was turned into the body and blood of Christ while the “accidents” (appearance) of bread and wine remained. But they did not agree on the alternatives to that teaching, and debate over the sacrament of the bread and the wine contributed as much as any other theological factor to internal Protestant division.

The community of the baptized and the political community

Reformers were equally varied in their attitudes toward civil authority. Luther expressed, at least in theory, a most radical view of the separation of civil and religious realms through his doctrine of “the two kingdoms.” He could reduce his teaching virtually to an aphorism: God’s Gospel ruled in the churchly realm and his law ruled in the civil society. To rule the church by the law or the civil realm by the Gospel would bring legalism to the sphere of grace and sentimentalism into the orbit of justice, thus dethroning God and enthroning Satan. In practice, however, the Lutheran Reformation worked to keep its ties to the civil order and was the established religion wherever it predominated in Germany and Scandinavia. In many territories princes actually took on the superintending roles that bishops had exercised in Roman Catholicism. In practice, therefore, there was little disengagement of the two realms.

Calvin made less of a theoretical effort to separate civil and religious realms. Under his plan Geneva was to be a community in which the saints would rule. God’s covenanted community was to be based on his law, as revealed in the Scripture. Consequently, no detail of civil or community life was too remote, too secular, or too petty to be excluded from ecclesiastical supervision or regulation. Anglicans did not separate the civil and religious realms; in England the church was given the mandate to press matters of conscience upon the sovereign and other civil authorities. These Protestant views were countered by Anabaptist Reformers, who advocated a radical separation of the church from civil spheres.

Forced to find ways to propagate and sustain their churches through time, Reformers created new structures to parallel most of those that had been repudiated along with Roman Catholicism. Lacking papal authority, canon law, an “international” connection with civil authority (as there had been in the old Holy Roman Empire), the binding power of church councils, or a single philosophy, the Reformers came up with alternatives for most of these, though their new systems were more varied than the at least nominally homogeneous Catholic skein.

Most notable among the structural necessities was the formulation of “confessions,” or creeds, by which the Reformers could define their positions for the benefit of both their adherents and their opponents. Beginning with the Lutheran Augsburg Confession (1530), Protestant leaders met frequently to write creedal statements. Reformed documents such as the Second Helvetic Confession (1566) and the Westminster Confession (1646), Anglican affirmations such as the Thirty-nine Articles (1563), and Anabaptist confessions such as that of Dordrecht (1632) gave further evidence of the Protestant impulse to define their positions.

Such confessions appealed to theologians and those who would impose them as doctrinal standards, but they did not warm believers’ hearts. Thus, Protestant leaders also addressed the affective side of church life in order to hold the attention of the people and to give them the opportunity to express their faith in God. The chief instruments in achieving these aims were liturgies and hymns. The inherited liturgies included much of the Roman Catholic sacramental teaching and thus had to be purged. Conservative Reformers retained the shell of these formulas for worship, though they took great pains to bring these formulas into the tradition of evangelical teaching. Since worship is perhaps the chief public expression of gathered Christians, all Reformers had to give attention to its detail.

Luther initiated the process in 1523 with his Formula Missae (“Formula of the Mass”), a service that retained the Latin language; but he soon devised (in 1526) a Deutsche Messe (“German Mass”), a vernacular worship service. At about the same time, Zwingli produced a worship service with liturgies for the Word and the Lord’s Supper in 1525 that was followed by Martin Bucer’s work on Psalms and church practice in 1539 and Calvin’s Form of Church Prayers in 1542 and 1545. The Anglicans were preserving stately forms of worship that would be used in subsequent centuries, chiefly The Book of Common Prayer of 1549 and 1552. In Scotland John Knox helped formulate Presbyterian worship in The Forms of Prayers in 1556.

While Protestant rites were less ceremonial than the Roman Catholic liturgies they replaced, almost everywhere they retained a more or less formal character. They differed from Catholicism chiefly in their emphasis on the act of preaching the Word of God. Preaching was viewed as the means of grace whereby individuals were encouraged to repent and accept the grace of God through faith in Christ, just as the sermon was used to shape the community and give guidance. For some this accent on preaching meant a downgrading of the Lord’s Supper; for others there was to be a parity, with the sacrament providing another means of conveying grace. Communion “in both kinds” (reception of both bread and wine) prevailed (whereas in the Catholicism of the era of the Reformers the cup was withheld from the laity), and, except in Anabaptist circles, the Catholic practice of infant baptism was retained. The Protestants first held worship services in existing Roman Catholic churches, academic or civil halls, or homes; but as time passed, they began to build new churches.

Hymnody played a major role in giving voice to Reformation sentiment, never more successfully than in Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” which came to be called “the battle hymn of the Reformation.” The Genevan Reformation and the Presbyterian churches preferred simple hymnody in the form of rephrased and parsed psalms, such as those found in the Genevan Psalter of 1562. Attention to sung versions of Scripture also prevailed in early Anglicanism, primarily because of the failure of Anglican Reformers to devote themselves to the propagation of their movement through song. The great tradition of English Protestant hymn writing developed later, in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Liturgies and hymns appealed to the heart and soul, but Protestant theologians also addressed the mind through an impressive outpouring of works in systematic theology and dogmatics. Calvin was the supreme systematizer of first- and second-generation Protestantism, and his Institutes of the Christian Religion (first published in 1536) is a classic of Christian doctrinal literature. Although a good theologian, Luther was considerably less systematic, and his theological work usually grew out of comments on issues that agitated him or inspired or disturbed his movement at any moment. His colleague Philipp Melanchthon, in the Loci Communes of 1521, was much more concerned with systematic discipline.

In the 17th century, Protestant theologians interpreted the confessional statements of the earlier century with an almost fanatic attention to detail. Huge theological works appeared in great number, often characterized by the type of scholastic philosophy that had prevailed in the late medieval period. Leaders of Lutheran orthodoxy were Martin Chemnitz (1522–86) and Johann Gerhard (1582–1637); Reformed orthodoxy was marked by the scholarship of Theodore Beza (1519–1605) and William Perkins (1558–1602). The ponderous and lifeless writings of lesser orthodox theologians were often expressions of internecine Protestant warfare. Debates raged over the sacraments, over the two natures of Christ, over the relationship of ecclesiastical and civil realms, and over the part humans played in salvation. These debates seldom led to concord, and despite occasional irenic figures, such as Georg Calixtus (1586–1656) or Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), Protestantism remained divided until the ecumenical movement in the 20th century produced new amity and common purpose.

The gathered church

The radical Reformers were opposed to mainline Protestantism’s contention that there had been ecclesiastical continuity with the church of Christ in every age. Although mainstream Protestants vehemently rejected what they regarded to be false teaching in the medieval church, they believed that God had maintained a succession of believers during the period after the “fall” of the church in the reign of the Roman emperor Constantine (d. 337), a view that was integral to their doctrine of the church. Just as emphatic was the rejection of this view in radical circles. Some radicals accepted a kind of continuity from the 1st century to the 16th, but the only evidence of true faith that they identified was among the medieval movements that had separated themselves from official Roman Catholicism or that were condemned and persecuted by Catholics. Among these were the Waldensians (a religious movement espousing voluntary poverty and lay preaching that accepted mainline Protestantism in the 16th century), the Albigensians, also called Cathars (a sect espousing dualism and asceticism), and some forms of Spiritual Franciscanism (a branch of the Franciscan order that claimed to be the true followers of St. Francis’s rule of poverty). Just as often, however, radicals taught that the true church had died not long after Christ and had to be restored from the ground up.

This repudiation of continuity was paralleled by rejection of the tie between the civil and ecclesiastical realms. The bond between these two, forged in the era of Constantine, was viewed by the radical Reformers as the cause of the church’s fall. From that experience, it was argued, the church should have learned to avoid domination by the political authority and to exclude those who had not made an explicit personal affirmation of faith. The church, they held, was to be “the believer’s church,” made up of assenting and consenting people who chose to accept God’s Covenant. This teaching rejected the belief that baptism of infants, who of course could not make personal decisions, conferred church membership.

The keystone of the concept of the believer’s church is that people voluntarily choose to be members. No one can be coerced into membership nor can one become a member automatically, as it were, through a sacramental act. It was on this ground that almost all radical Reformers condemned infant baptism. Moreover, the importance of voluntarism further stressed the will of the believer in matters of faith. It also emphasized the necessity of the active participation of all believers in determining the church’s destiny and in the establishment of local church governance.

The radical Reformation almost always restored the sense of an apostolate (missionary outreach), whereas some earlier Reformers neglected the importance of missionary activity, and some had even excluded it from the contemporary church’s mandate. Anabaptists, spiritualists, and “free” church (nonstate) advocates tended to be missionary, even if this meant a kind of subversion of established Protestant churches, filled as these were—in the radicals’ eyes—with unbelievers or inadequate believers.

Relationships between church and state

Churches of the radical Reformation broke from established structures and called for sharp distinctions between Christian and non-Christian, sacred and secular, religious and worldly life. Radicals, however, were not uninterested in society, but they regarded it from their own eschatological perspective. They were inspired by the belief in the imminent return of Christ or the announcement of the Kingdom or Day of the Lord. Although they recognized that earthly instruments were necessary, the radical Reformers regarded worldly institutions as ephemeral and corrupting. Because such a large number of radicals believed that Christ’s new order was imminent, they generally took a negative view of most human means of facing problems. Many of them advocated a rejection of warfare in favour of pacifist positions that they found expressed in the gospels. The modern “peace church” witnessing by Mennonites, Brethren, and Quakers was born of this impulse. Paradoxically, other radicals (such as Müntzer) approved of violence and warfare as legitimate means for them to help hasten Christ’s new order.

Church discipline

Separation between the church and the world and the tradition of voluntary membership enabled radicals to demand higher standards of church membership and stricter means of church discipline than could their magisterial counterparts. Social control was more feasible in these smaller and well-defined groups than in the established churches, and “the ban,” a form of excommunication, was used to enforce discipline by expelling members from the congregation of believers and the broader community. The ban was not merely punitive; brotherly admonition and discipline were to continue, with the hope that the wayward could be rescued.

Believers’ baptism

One of the most dramatic differences between the reformers was the radicals’ practice of believers’ baptism. The radical Reformers, especially the Anabaptists (whose name means “rebaptizers”), preferred adult baptism because adults could exercise free will and accept baptism. Infant baptism, from their viewpoint, cheapened the standard of church membership and was not designated or foreseen in the New Testament documents that chartered the church. Michael Sattler (c. 1500–27), Menno Simons (1496–1561), and Balthasar Hubmaier (1485–1528) led the opposition to infant baptism. They were determined to follow the example of Jesus, who underwent baptism as an adult. They also aspired to be “buried” (in water) with him, as St. Paul had said baptized people would be. “New birth” would come from this act, and the reborn believers would restore the church.

Doctrine of the ministry

The concept of ministry also changed more drastically in some Protestant groups than in the more established Protestant circles. The mainstream Reformers wanted university-trained theologians as ministers. The fringe Reformation movements held ordination in low esteem and permitted laymen to be ministers: leaders such as Caspar Schwenckfeld (1489–1561) and Konrad Grebel (c. 1498–1526) were probably never ordained. Anabaptists and spiritual reformers, moreover, viewed the minister chiefly as a prophet, not a priest. The minister was an agent of a new order, anticipating Christ’s fulfilled kingdom with no cares about earthly prerogatives or routines.

The suffering of persecution

The alternative Reformation movements were made up of men and women who were prepared to suffer for their faith at the hands of both civil authorities and Catholic and other Protestant ecclesiastical leaders. The story of the rise of Anabaptism is one of persecution, of exiles and fugitives, and of a pilgrim church. Adherents to these alternative forms of Reformation, such as Michael Servetus (an anti-Trinitarian; c. 1511–53), often endured a sort of Protestant Inquisition, in which men and women died for their ideas. Servetus himself is an illustration, being burned at the stake in Geneva in 1553. The accounts of the martyrdom of men and women were recounted in the Martyrs’ Mirror. Characteristic were those who upheld the idea of patterning one’s life after Jesus, the great example who had known neither status nor security and was eventually condemned to death. How could his true followers avoid a similar fate?

Doctrinal variations

Although these Reformers differed on doctrinal matters, they shared a number of views. The radical Reformers, like the mainstream Protestants, held the Bible in high regard. Unlike the mainstream Reformers, however, who understood the Bible in the context of tradition, the radical Reformers stressed personal experiences and new revelation. The radicals also criticized scholastic philosophy and the theology built upon it; therefore they repudiated much of classical theology and Christology. Faustus Socinus (1539–1604) and Servetus, for example, rejected the traditional doctrine of the Trinity. They believed that Trinitarian teaching was unscriptural and that monotheism could best be protected if Christ were not defined as an equal member of the Godhead. Unitarianism affected only a minority of the radical Reformers, but a subtle shift in the definition of the role of Christ was more broadly based. The emphasis on Christ’s priestly work, including his sacrifice for humankind before the altar of God, was displaced by a new regard for his role as a prophet. He had thundered against the powers of religion and civil society and against the rich; so would his followers. He was seen less as a sacrificial agent in a divine-human transaction in death on the cross and more as the supreme exemplar and leader.