What Is Protestantism?

Alec Ryrie portrays what it meant to be an early Protestant in his Being Protestant in Reformation Britain.

As the TLS reviewer points out, this is no longer a fashionable question: “Historians of the early Reformation now prefer to use the term ‘evangelicals,’ in recognition of the fact that the early reformers did not think of themselves as Protestants and often angrily rejected the term when it was applied to them. Nor does the concept of Protestantism add much to our understanding of the doctrinal disputes that divided Lutherans, Calvinists and Anabaptists as much from each other as from the common Catholic enemy.”

Ryrie’s definition of Protestantism is not doctrinal or liturgical, but rather is a form of Christianity characterized by earnestness and, to use their own terms, zeal: “Protestantism, he suggests, was ‘intense, dynamic, restless, progressive.’ It took religion very seriously; it craved authenticity and dreaded hypocrisy; it was marked by a ‘sense of endless struggle’, ‘unceasing selfdiscipline’ and a ‘pervasive intellectual tendency to anatomize and subdivide.’ Above all, it believed in the importance of being earnest.”

Ryrie doesn’t think the caricature of gloomy Calvinism is fair: “He acknowledges that Protestantism could be cruelly demanding, even ‘frankly pathological,’ in the burdens it imposed on its adherents. Yet it could also be deeply passionate in its expressions of ‘rapture,’ ‘ravishment’ and ecstatic union with God. ‘This silent yet lovely language of ardent and fervent desires,’ as one Scottish preacher described it (for some reason the Scots seem to have been particularly susceptible to this type of language), calls to mind not so much the classic Protestant aesthetic of whitewashed church interiors, as the baroque eroticism of St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross.”

The review suggests that Ryrie is really describing Puritanism rather than Protestantism in general, but concludes that “No book has ever brought early modern Protestantism to life so vividly, so eloquently and so movingly.”