History Lesson: Positively Protestant

Ancient Evangelical Future ^ | March 2, 2008 | David Neff

[Alex Murphy]

Last summer, I received an essay from a friend—a leading Evangelical intellectual—who said that the label Protestant should fade out in favor of the label Evangelical because, in part, Protestant was “negative.”

In many people’s minds, it certainly is. It sounds like it is about dissent and disagreement. It evokes images of picketers carrying poorly made signs back and forth in front of a factory. Indeed, it sounds disagreeable.

More recently, another friend published an engaging account of his exploration of Catholicism. The book is Jon Sweeney's Almost Catholic, and you can read an excellent review of it on my wife LaVonne’s blog.

The book is a good read, but its argument rests in part on his contrast between the “universal” character of Catholic faith and the negative Protestant alternative:

To be Protestant is to define yourself as protesting against certain forms of religion. ... there is little need for Protestants anymore. What are we still protesting? The Reformation of the sixteenth century was a European event.

So many seem to think that the essence of being Protestant is to conscientiously object to what is or was Roman Catholic. A little history and a little linguistic research shows Protestant to be a much more positive word, referring to what the original Protestants stood for rather than what they stood against.

* * *

Sweeney rightly ties Protestant to the Second Diet of Speyer (1529), and the response of the German evangelical princes to its decision to restrict their freedom. But he misleadingly labels Protestant “a political moniker,” when the cultural context thoroughly mixed religion and politics. The word religion certainly existed, but it remained for the Enlightenment to create it as a distinct category of thought and experience. Sixteenth-century people were more likely to think in concrete terms of the overlapping authorities of king and pope, bishop and prince, priest and magistrate. Neither religion nor politics was an abstract category for them.

What do the major historians of Protestantism say? Like almost all their colleagues, John Dillenberger and Claude Welch link the origin of the word Protestant to the ‘Protestation’ of the German evangelical estates in the second Diet of Speyer. But they see in that term “the duality of protest and affirmative witness.” That protest, they write, was

from the standpoint of affirmed faith. Few churches ever adopted the name “Protestant.” The most commonly adopted designations were rather “evangelical” and “reformed.” ... [W]hen the word Protestant came into currency in England (in Elizabethan times), its accepted significance was not “objection” but “avowal” or “witness” or “confession” (as the Latin protestari meant also “to profess”).

That meaning lasted for another century, say Dillenberger and Welch, and it referred to the Church of England’s

making its profession of the faith in the Thirty-nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer. Only later did the word “protest” come to have a primarily negative significance, and the term “Protestant” come to refer to non-Roman churches in general.

* * *

Writing about the second Diet of Speyer, the esteemed Luther biographer Roland Bainton called the word Protestant

unfortunate as a name because it implies that Protestantism was mainly an objection. The dissenters in their own statement affirmed that “they must protest and testify publicly before God that they could do nothing contrary to His word.” The emphasis was less on protest than on witness.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, professor of the history of the church at Oxford University, traces the history of the term. From 1529 until 1547, Protestant was limited to the sphere of German politico-religious life, identifying those princes who followed Luther or Zwingli and who in 1529 “issued a protestatio, affirming the reforming beliefs that they shared.” The term entered English in 1547, when the officials who were organizing the coronation of Edward VI listed “in order the procession of dignitaries through [London].” There, in that list, was a place for “‘the Protestants,’ by whom they meant the diplomatic representatives of [the] reforming Germans.”

* * *

When Edward VI was crowned, the word still had a positive connotation. On the CultureVulture blog for the Guardian, Sean Clarke notes that it was 60 years from the introduction of Protestant in English until its first use in the extended sense of "object, dissent, or disapprove.” That (according to the Collins Etymological Dictionary) was first recorded in English in 1608. The Online Etymological Dictionary places the first use of protest to mean “statement of disapproval” in the year 1751—another century and a half. Through much of that history and well after, protest continued to mean “avow,” “affirm,” “witness,” or “solemnly proclaim.”

Poor, misunderstood protest has had a history something like that of another word—apology. That word has gone from its positive, head-held-high sense of “a formal justification or defense” (as in “the essay was an apology for capitalism”) to something tinged with shame and remorse (“a statement of regret or request for pardon”).

We need to recover the positive sense of protestant. It denotes things that we stand for: the authority of Scripture, salvation by grace through faith in Christ alone. It’s a matter of principle. And because it is about standing for truth, Catholics can be protestants too.

* * *

Works cited

Roland H. Bainton, The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century (Enlarged Edition, Beacon, 1985)
John Dillenberger and Claude Welch, Protestant Christianity Interpreted Through Its Development (Scribner’s, 1954)
Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (Viking, 2003).

[Alex Murphy]

...When the word Protestant came into currency in England (in Elizabethan times), its accepted significance was not “objection” but “avowal” or “witness” or “confession” (as the Latin protestari meant also “to profess”)...

[Lilllabettt]

I guess this is an attempt to add "Protestant" to the reclaimed word list?

I once shared a living room with people who were trying to reclaim "hippie" and "feminist." Their rationale for making the attempt was the successful reclaiming of "queer."

[Petrosius]

You might find the follow post interesting from Fr. John Zuhlsdorf at What Does The Prayer Really Say? posted only yesterday:

Let’s get the famous quote right, please?

I am so tired of people misquoting this famous phrase from Hamlet.

When Hamlet asks his mother Queen Gertrude how she like his play, The Mousetrap, obviously tweeked, she says:

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.  – Hamlet III, ii, 230

Also, let’s try to use it correctly.  

Say it a few times outloud to yourself, to get it into your ears.

Also, that "protest," here, doesn’t mean "object to".  It means "make a strong claim" about something.  We still have that meaning in English "protestation".

What Gertrude means is not that the lady in Hamlet’s play within the play, is objecting to something or denying something.  Rather, that she is making far too enthusiastic positive statements.

And don’t add useless syllables like "protestest" or "methinketh" or other stupidities. 

[Uncle Chip]

We need to recover the positive sense of protestant. It denotes things that we stand for: the authority of Scripture, salvation by grace through faith in Christ alone. It’s a matter of principle. And because it is about standing for truth, Catholics can be protestants too.

Hmmmm -- I'll have to think about that last line.

[BaBaStooey]

It sounds like it is about dissent and disagreement.

That is because it is.

If they feel their protests have merit, then Protestants shouldn't feel bad to be labeled Protestants, just as liberals, if they are proud of the things they believe in, shouldn't feel bad to be labeled liberals.

Of course if Protestants don't feel like protesting any more, they can always come home.

[Alex Murphy]

If they feel their protests have merit, then Protestants shouldn't feel bad to be labeled Protestants

Let me guess - you posted this before reading the article?

[BaBaStooey]

Yes, but that doesn’t mean that I said anything incorrect. If Protestants stand firm to what they believe, then the title isn’t really a bad thing — I am rejecting the notion of Protestants re-terming themselves with another title like “evangelicals” (which is interesting, because didn’t a group of evangelicals recently release some sort of mission statement as to what the term “evangelical” means?). If they hold firm to their beliefs, then the title is fine, even if it means what it means to someone like me. Hence the “liberals” example.

If some Protestants don’t like to feel like they are protesting, then perhaps they don’t feel firm enough in what they believe to truly be protesting. In which case, if they want to end the protest, then by all means, come back if you’d like, I’d welcome all with open arms.

I like to put it this way. My hometown hockey team held a promotion to name the team mascot. The contest was ambushed (and the web site crashed) by moronic fans of Stephen Colbert who fuel the celebrity’s jones for having stuff named after himself. My hometown hockey team thought it was good for business and they embraced it.

My point of contention was that it was a contest designed for children who are fans of the hockey team to name a mascot whose function at games is to entertain the children. Instead, the contest winner is some local adult Colbert fan, and the mascot which should be for the children is named after a celebrity whose TV show comes on at 11:30PM and is, by its rating, designed for mature audiences.

I was pretty upset at my hockey team for doing this, so I decided to protest the decision. I bought the jersey for another team in the league and I wore it to every game, and I cheered for them for that season.

In the end, the money the team made on the Colbert attention was quite a bit — they sold merchandise all over the world — but the attention and carnival atmosphere also had a negative effect on the team. They were favored to win the league at the start of the season (according to The Hockey News, who in all honesty never gets their predictions right, but my team was well-regarded in any respect), and they ended up losing in the first round to a weaker team.

This year, the team decided to forego their business relationship with Colbert. It was at that time that I decided to put the other team’s jersey back into the closet and pull out my hometown team’s jersey again. Protest over.

My point is that at some point, the protest should end, otherwise, you lose sight of what you were protesting in the first place. Roosevelt created government programs to fight the Great Depression. The Depression has been over for generations, yet many of these programs remain in place. They became self-perpetuating behemoths more interested in maintaining their existence than fufilling whatever they were originally designed to accomplish.

If, according to Protestants, the Catholic Church still has problems, then so be it. However, the goal should be to eventually end the protest. It is true that I didn’t read the article fully when I posted, but I do stand by everything I’ve said.

[Between the Lines]

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