(BA) Protestant Reformation

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The Reformation, or more precisely, the Protestant Reformation, consisted of a set of movements breaking away from Catholicism starting around 1517. The Reformers believed, to some extent correctly, that Roman Catholicism had drifted in many ways from the practices and doctrines of the earliest Christians, and attempted to use the Bible as a guide to reforming the faith.

For the New Testament, this resulted in the abandonment of the Latin Vulgate as the standard for doctrine and its replacement by Greek manuscripts in the original language of the New Testament. For the Old Testament, this resulted in the abandonment of the Greek Septuagint and the Vulgate, and a renewed study of the Hebrew Masoretic Text, which Protestants borrowed from Jews, and which became the Old Testament of Protestantism. Ironically, in this sense the Protestants moved further from the practice of the earliest Christians, who seem to have mostly used the Septuagint translation as their Old Testament, rather than Hebrew Texts.

Catholicism had a hierarchy of bishops, councils, and a Pope who were treated as the ultimate arbiters on doctrinal questions. As the Protestant movement abandoned trust in the institutions of Catholicism, they moved toward attempting to use the Bible more directly as a source of doctrine. Because the Bible has so many ambiguities, the practical effect of this was that Protestantism has always been splintering into an ever-greater number of sects. Because Protestants did not trust authority and wanted to work directly from the Bible, the Protestant Reformation gave an impetus toward the careful study of the original manuscripts, to the extent that they could be reconstructed.

Ultimately, the work initiated by Protestants would lead toward modern biblical studies, as the cultural context and meaning of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament were gradually understood better in all their polyphonic richness. This critical study, in turn, began to liberalize most Protestant Churches away from their earlier theological commitments. This liberalization or modernization eventually lead to a counter-reaction, as fundamentalist groups began to split away from mainline Protestantism, especially in the United States. In Europe, the modernization process has been carried out more thoroughly.

Protestantism is in steep decline in Europe, and the remaining churches are for the most part far more liberal then their forebears. In the United States, the process is not so far along. Since the rift between mainline and fundamentalist (now "conservative evangelical") churches in the 1920's or thereabouts, the mainline churches have steadily declined in membership.

The fundamentalist churches held their ground and even grew for a while, though the growth was largely made up of people leaving the mainline churches and not through the conversion of the non-religious. The fundamentalists, when they left the mainline denominations, began to set up a variety of alternate educational institutions. At this point, they are moving steadily in a left-ward direction, and the evangelical wing of American Protestantism has begun a sharp demographic decline.

Evangelicalism is still spreading in poorer countries, especially where some form of polytheism, animism or Catholicism is dominant. It has had much less success in predominantly Muslim societies. The general trend in modernity is that as countries become more wealthy, religiosity declines. And almost all countries are becoming richer. The ultimate result of the Reformation is yet to be seen, but the trend at present is toward the disintegration of Protestant churches.