protestant

“It is not perhaps too much to say, that a more harmonious, a more decorous, a more loyal, a more Protestant, a more Christian meeting, never took place within the walls of our ancient city.”

“To make this perfectly clear, we shall contrast a few of the most Protestant with a few of the most Roman Catholic counties.”

“Who or what is a Catholic? This Greek word has become one of the chief battlegrounds in western Latin Christianity […] ’Catholic’ is clearly a word which a lot of people want to possess. By contrast, it is remarkable how many religious labels started life as a sneer: the Reformation was full of angry words. ‘Calvinist’ was at first a term of abuse to describe those who believed more or less what John Calvin believed; the nickname gradually forced out the rival contemptuous term ‘Picard’, which referred to Calvin’s birthplace in Noyon in Picardy. No Anabaptists ever described themselves as Anabaptist, since ‘Anabaptist’ means ‘rebaptizer’, and these radical folk believed that their adult baptism was the only authentic Christian initiation, with infant baptism signifying nothing. Even that slippery term ‘Anglican’ appears to have been first spoken with disapproval by King James VI of Scotland, when in 1598 he was trying to convince the Church of Scotland how unenthusiastic he was for the Church of England. One of the most curious usages is the growth of the word ‘Protestant’. It originally related to a specific occasion, in 1529, when at the Holy Roman Empire’s Diet (imperial assembly) held in the city of Speyer, the group of princes and cities who supported the programmes of reformation promoted by Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli found themselves in a voting minority: to keep their solidarity, they issued a ‘Protestatio’, affirming the reforming beliefs that they shared. The label ‘Protestant’ thereafter was part of German or imperial politics for decades, and did not have a wider reference than that. When the coronation of little King Edward VI was being organized in London in 1547, the planners putting in order the procession of dignitaries through the city appointed a place for ‘the Protestants’, by whom they meant the diplomatic representatives of these reforming Germans who were staying in the capital. Only rather later did the word gain a broader reference. It is therefore problematic to use ‘Protestant’ as a simple description for sympathizers with reform in the first half of the sixteenth century, and the reader will find that often in this book I use a different word, ‘evangelical’. That word has the advantage that it was widely used and recognized at the time, and it also encapsulates what was most important to this collection of activists: the good news of the Gospel, in Latinized Greek, the evangelium. Reformation disputes were passionate about words because words were myriad refractions of a God one of whose names was Word: a God encountered in a library of books itself simply called ‘Book’ – the Bible. It is impossible to understand modern Europe without understanding these sixteenth-century upheavals in Latin Christianity. They represented the greatest fault-line to appear in Christian culture since the Latin and Greek halves of the Roman empire went their separate ways a thousand years before; they produced a house divided. The fault-line is the business of this book.”

“To unite the whole people of Ireland; to abolish the memory of all past dissensions; and to substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic, and Dissenter—these were my means.”

“MR. SEXTON said, he had always understood that the difference between Protestants and Presbyterians was not a difference of creed, but as to episcopacy and practice.”