The 16th century was a pivotal time of change throughout Europe, and the coming together of various factors created the Protestant Reformation. It was a time of rapid urbanization and the early Reformation was largely a city affair. Protestants also benefited from the invention of the moveable type printing press. It is estimated that 6 million books were printed between 1450 and 1500, more than had been produced in the previous 1,000 years. Between 1517 and 1520 about 300,000 copies of books and tracts by Martin Luther alone were printed. During this time, there was also the growth of the middle class and the first stirrings of nationalism. All these changes and the discovery of the New World created change and opportunities for new religious movements.
Several reform movements preceded the Protestant Reformation and influenced it. The Gregorian Reform of the 11th century undertook many of the institutional and moral reforms that concerned Luther, primarily the buying and selling of Church offices. In Luther's own day the great Dutch churchman Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) made some of the same scathing attacks on Catholic Church practices and Martin Luther objected to the opulent court life in Rome sustained in part by sale of indulgences- the elimination of previous sins by donating money to the Vatican. It, along with the selling of false relics, has never been addressed or condemned by the Catholic Church. However. unlike Luther, Erasmus never advocated views leading to excommunication.
Luther's theology was also preceded in many ways by John Wycliffe (1330-1384). In the 1380s, Wycliffe, a professor at Oxford, translated the Bible from Latin into English. He did this because he felt that the Bible held authority over the Church, not vice versa. In particular, he argued, when one reads the Bible one sees that the early Church is poor, rather than being a grand and wealthy institutional as it had become in the Middle Ages. Wycliffe argued for a return to an early Church model. After Wycliffe died, he was condemned as a heretic, his books burned, and his remains dug up, crushed, and thrown in the Swift River.
One reason that the reform movement began and became a mass movement was the influence of Renaissance humanism. The Renaissance was a cultural and intellectual movement during the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries in Europe and it placed a high value on the classical art and philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome. Humanism is a movement within the Renaissance that turned from what they saw as elaborate and detailed medieval speculation and focused on classical texts in their original languages as a means to educate moral people dedicated to civic virtue. The Latin motto of humanism was "ad fontes" (back to the sources). Many theologians of that time were trained as humanists. Thus, Renaissance humanism influenced some people to trust the Bible as a source of renewal for the Church, and to place it above the Church as an authority.
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One major consequence of all of this was that theologians such as Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin did not think that one could know anything about God by looking at the world. Although God created the world, human minds did not have access to divine essences in the world that would teach them about God. The only genuine knowledge of God came from what God chose to reveal in scripture. Scripture tells humans that they were created by God, had become sinners and thus alienated from God, and could be reconciled through God's forgiveness. In the end, that created an environment in which many in Europe were ready to follow the reformers who claimed that the sole authority for what to believe was the Bible.
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The Bible, consisting of 66 "books" is scripture for Protestant churches. The canon of the Protestant Bible is not quite the same as the Roman Catholic Bible. There were several books that Roman Catholics included in the Old Testament that Luther and others felt did not have canonical authority and had been added in error by the Catholic Church. These are mostly late Jewish texts.Instead, the reformers used a list of Hebrew texts that ancient rabbis considered canonical. Books considered canonical by Catholics but not Protestants are gathered in the Apocrypha (aka: disputed books).
While the centrality of the Bible is crucial for most Christians everywhere, several factors make it particularly essential for Protestants. First, Protestant theologians were influenced by the medieval theologians and their belief that, in our fallen state, God was completely unknowable except insofar as God chose to reveal certain things to humans. The revealed word of God is contained in scripture. Therefore, one Protestant principle is sola scriptura- meaning, scripture alone as the supreme authority for faith and practice.
Second, there was no human work that could save you, or move God to save you. Your only hope for salvation was the free gift of God's grace, a principle called sola gratia. The promise of this grace is given in scripture. This grace is accessed only through faith, thus the Protestant principle of justification by faith alone, called sola fide. These principles–by scripture alone, by grace alone, by faith alone—led Luther and the other reformers to grant scripture final authority over other sources of authority, including the Church and human reason. They did not discount other voices but they simply elevated that of scripture so that scripture became the final and ultimate truth. As a result, Church tradition could be criticized on the basis of its agreement with the higher authority of the scripture. The Roman Catholic Church had argued that the tradition of the Church embodied scriptural truth, and thus any perceived discrepancy in theory or practice between what the Bible said and what the Church said could be explained by the Church's authority and its interpretations. However, Luther argued that correct interpretation of scripture rests not with the Church but "in the heart of the pious believer," who is, of course, a member of the Church.
Some Protestant churches have produced creeds, or formal statements of Christian belief, that function as a guide to correct interpretation of scripture for that denomination. Some denominations declare themselves to be without a creed (non-creedal) and reject the creation of formal statements of faith> They claimed instead to rely on their direct encounters with the Bible. Most of these stem in some way from the Anabaptists. Non-creedal churches include Baptists, Churches of Christ, and Mennonites. Many "non-denominational" churches, often growing out of the Pentecostal movement, are also non-creedal. Among these non-creedal traditions, most have found it necessary, however, to formulate what they call "confessions" or more recently, "statements of faith." These traditions make a distinction between "creeds," which they view as being incapable of being reformed or changed by the teaching of scripture, and "confessions," which, at least in principle for them, are capable of being revised if found to be inconsistent with scripture and, therefore, do not threaten the supreme authority of the Bible.
Lutheran Churches rely on several creeds gathered in the Book of Concord to guide and set limits around correct interpretation of scripture. There is no single, agreed-upon book of creeds or confessions for Reformed Christians, but the more widely recognized ones include The Westminster Confession, as well as The Scots Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Second Helvetic Confession.
Historically, Anglicans (and Episcopalians), have relied on the Thirty-nine Articles. In recent decades, more liberal voices within these churches have moved this document to a peripheral and largely historical role, while conservatives continue to view it as a valid statement of belief.
Methodists use a slightly revised version of the Thirty-nine Articles, called the Articles of Religion. In addition they take their orientation from the sermons of John Wesley, and his Explanatory Notes on the New Testament.
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Contemporary Protestant Christianity in Europe is largely characterized by nominal affiliation. That is, in many nations nearly half of the population never attends any religious services unless they involve a major life event like a wedding or a funeral. While that statistic is largely acknowledged, it is less commonly recognized that even in the most secular countries, there are thriving Protestant communities, and there is a growing number of ethnic minority Protestant congregations. There are large black church communities in the U.K. and great numbers have been converting to Pentecostalism.
In the United States, there are some similar trends, though the situation is more complex. In the waning years of the 19th century, biblical criticism began to erode Christian confidence in the authority of the Bible. Many European and American scholars abandoned or radically reinterpreted many of the traditional Christian doctrines. The onset of World War I and the Great Depression exacerbated this trend and redirected a great deal of Christian focus to the social and economic needs of people rather than their beliefs.
Liberal theological positions became increasingly embedded in North American mainline seminaries, as they had in many European academic circles. The American Protestant church, however, experienced an organized resistance to this theological trend in the rise of fundamentalism in the early 20th century. The term "fundamentalism" is derived from a 12-volume set of essays published between 1910-1915 called The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth. Those who advocated for biblical inerrancy, scriptural authority, and the historical veracity of the core Christian dogma became known as fundamentalists. They opposed the modernists, who had largely embraced the rational, scientific, and cultural arguments of the day, and had found new ways to interpret Christian doctrine accordingly. The fundamentalists' essential posture of resistance became epitomized in the 1925 Scopes Trial regarding the teaching of evolution in the public schools. Though the fundamentalists won the trial, they lost face in the public arena, and were largely mocked for their anti-scientific views.
Besides the rise of fundamentalism, the American Protestant community witnessed another movement that also rejected the rationalism of the modernist movement, the rise of Pentecostalism. William Seymour (1870-1922) initiated the Pentecostal renewal movement in his Los Angeles church in 1906. Drawing on earlier holiness traditions, Seymour preached the baptism of the Holy Spirit and a new power in Christian living.The fastest growing Christian denominations in the world today are Pentecostal movements in Latin America, India, Africa, and China.
As the 20th century proceeded, many conservative Christians rejected the increasing isolationism of some fundamentalist approaches and felt they could welcome scientific advances and engage contemporary culture while simultaneously advocating historic Christian belief and doctrine. World War II, the public evangelistic campaigns of Billy Graham (born: 1918), the development of specifically conservative but not fundamentalist organizations, and the rise of key conservative journals all contributed to a new wave of evangelicalism that largely abandoned the narrower and more confrontational ethos of fundamentalism while retaining the same basic theological core. By the mid-20th century and the end of World War II, these evangelicals began to emerge as conservative Christians who accommodated science, entered into conservative politics, worked across denominational lines, and influenced culture. More than 30,000,000 Protestant Christians today identify as Evangelicals. They exist within a wide variety of mainline Protestant denominations and as non-denominational churches.
The mainline Protestant churches in America are experiencing both membership loss and new areas of growth. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the largest North American Presbyterian denomination, began losing members in 1966, and has lost at least 1 percent of its membership every year since then. In 2005 it lost over 2 percent, the largest drop since 1975, leaving it with 2,313,662 members. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America dropped from 5.2 million members in 1990 to 4.8 million in 2005. At the same time, denominations that had earlier experienced schism have experienced ecumenical cooperation and sometimes merger. They are finding renewal in areas of social justice, sexual equality, and political activism.
The "emerging church," a late 20th-century movement, has roots in both mainline and evangelical circles. While the movement is not well defined, it tends to refer to churches begun by young pastors in urban settings. These churches are often traditional in terms of theology but progressive in style of ministry and on social issues. Emerging churches are comfortable experimenting with a wide variety of Christian traditions and practices, and attempt to engage the larger context of progressive Christianity with creative reform, reconstructing the faith in ways that they hope will appeal to changing expectations of the 21st century.
This ecumenical attitude stems from a post-World War II willingness to cooperate in common endeavors. In 1950 in the U.S., the National Council of Churches was founded. Made up of thirty-five Christian denominations (but not the Catholic Church), they sponsored the revised New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. They also provide money for development and disaster relief around the world. A similar organization, the World Council of Churches (also without the Catholic Church), operates on the international level. It was founded in the wake of World War II in Amsterdam. It is now headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.