The following is an excerpt from the first edition of The Protestant Mind, a newsletter from First Things. We invite you to subscribe by clicking here. The Protestant Mind, authored by Dale M. Coulter, will come to your inbox twice a month.
Protestantism is a movement. Neither the stature of Luther, nor the political power of Protestant princes could hold the reformers together in a single church. ‘Twas ever thus. Nowhere is this view of Protestantism more apparent than in the American experiment, in which protest and reform remained at the center.
One of the challenges of American Protestantism is to see the whole movement all at once. And yet that is the point of this newsletter. Growing up Pentecostal, my entrance into the big tent of Protestantism was through reading Louis Berkhof, Karl Barth, and Reinhold Niebuhr in college. Little did I realize that these thinkers opened the door to the neo-Calvinism that dominated the evangelical world, as well as the neo-orthodoxy and Christian realism in the mainline. My seminary training took me further down the neo-Calvinism road, while my doctoral work opened the Barthian world of England and Europe. It was an introduction to the Protestant mind that informed Protestantism in the mid-twentieth century. I hope to capture that mind—particularly its distinctive American hue—in this newsletter.
Christianity as a whole, “but particularly in Protestantism and in America, must be understood as a movement rather than as an institution or series of institutions,” wrote H. Richard Niebuhr. He went on in The Kingdom of God in America to claim that the church is an organic movement, not an organization. Just two decades earlier, the founders of the Assemblies of God had enshrined the claim that “the church is an organism” in the first iteration of their Statement of Fundamental Truths. Two decades after Niebuhr, Harold Ockenga reiterated the same point that the church is an “organism formed of spiritually quickened individuals united to Jesus Christ.”
If Protestantism is a movement, then the church must be a dynamic and living organism rather than an institution.
The European compromise of “whose region, his/her religion” created, in the American Protestant telling, Protestant state churches at the expense of protest and reform. No monarch or parliamentary body should be able to determine the religion of the people. In one irony of American history, the people refused to allow Congress to establish religion, and they then went about establishing religion in the life and culture of the nation. In this important sense, Americans rejected the “magisterial” reformers.
Even the attempt to maintain forms of establishment Christianity in the early republic could not overcome the protesting instinct. American heroes have always been reformers who protested America for the sake of America. Frederick Douglass preferred the “pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ” over “the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.” The current mistrust of institutions stems from this deeper part of the American psyche. Enshrined in the First Amendment, the principle of protest reflected the more fundamental right to freedom of religion in opposition to political authority.
Yet, this principle governing American Protestantism never stopped the drive to create a “righteous empire,” as Martin Marty titled his history of the Protestant experience in America . . .
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