# The summarized history of the Christian church 9: The Protestant Renaissance

The Protestant/Radical Reformation opened the floodgates for new ideas, and there were a few value systems that emerged within Protestant denominations:

- Restorationism/Restitutionism/Christian Primitivism - the Christian Church should be restored back to the way the early Church did things.
- Lesser Magistrate Doctrine - the lower-ranking ruler has the right and responsibility under certain [ethical situations](morality.md) to resist a higher-ranking ruler.

In 1527, the **Hutterites** (a type of Anabaptist) created the Schleitheim Confession, probably written by Michael Sattler. It had 7 articles, written during a time of extreme persecution, and forces a [culture](people-culture.md) that's relatively ascetic and not very [influential](power-influence.md):

1. Baptism should only be for people who consciously believe in Christ and repent, and specifically denounces infant baptism.
2. A Christian should be privately admonished twice, but the third time openly disciplined and excommunicated, and always before breaking bread to preserve the unity and purity of the Body of Christ.
3. Only people baptized in the Body of Christ are members of the Body, and only they can take part in Communion.
4. The Christian community should never associate with people who are rebellious against God, which includes [organizations](groups-large.md), works, church services, meetings, and civil affairs.
5. All [church leaders](mgmt-church.md) must have a good reputation, as described in Scripture, and are responsible for teaching, publicly reading Scripture, discipline, applying bans, leading in prayer, and performing sacraments. The church must support them, but they must also be disciplined if they sin.
6. A Christian must *never* be violent, which also means they must never run a government, since a government official is required to sometimes administer violence.
7. A Christian must never swear on an oath or make a [contract](people-contracts.md), and must instead be completely honest.

Starting in 1536, John Calvin mixed his ideas into the dialogue. Calvinism stood *strongly* against any assertion of the Church's inherent authority, and it developed into the **Reformed** denomination. As a value system, it's theologically *very* broad, but the denomination is culturally frozen around 1550.

- The **Presbyterians** (directly affiliated with the **Church of Scotland**) started in the 1560s as Scots who were *heavily* influenced by John Calvin's Reformed values. They have had many transformations throughout the centuries.

All throughout the 1500s, the Anabaptists were *relentlessly* persecuted, sometimes by *both* the Protestants and Catholics. The **Mennonites** were some of the most successful Anabaptists, and many of them escaped by fleeing Europe (many of them settling in the New World) and culturally froze against most [technology](technology.md) made after that time.

Some people tried to create a middle road between the two opposing views, and that hybrid became **Anglican/Episcopal**. Their value system was *very* conflicted (since it was a hybrid of two generally distinct cultures), and got worse over the centuries as the political unrest in the colonies forced Christians to choose sides.

The **Puritans** were a vaguely defined but highly influential group who worked for a few centuries to remove the Church of England's Catholic influence. However, their purposes changed dramatically once they settled in New England's colonies, and they were all called some other denomination by 1700.

Roman Catholic Ecumenical Council #19 in 1545-1549 - The Council of Trent, feat. Popes Paul III, Julius III, Pius IV and Emperors Charles V and Ferdinand I w/ 5 cardinal legates, 3 patriarchs, 33 archbishops, 235 bishops, 7 abbots, 7 generals of monastic orders, and 160 doctors of divinity

- Reaffirmed teachings on almost everything Protestants had problems with:
  - The role of the [Bible](theology-bible.md) *and* [Tradition](spiritual-exercises.md)
  - [Sin](theology-sins.md) and grace, including how venial sins worked ("lesser" sins)
  - Justification by faith, but not "[faith alone](theology-solae.md)"
  - Transubstantiation is *not* Aristotelian pseudo-[philosophy](philosophy.md) and the Mass *is* a sacrifice
  - Clarifications about purgatory and the importance of indulgences connected with it
  - The pope's 100% legitimate jurisdiction
- Affirmed the authority of the Deuterocanon (the "Apocrypha" from Protestants, a collection of ancient Jewish writings written between 300 and 30 BC that Hebrews hadn't considered Scripture)
- Initiated the Counter-Reformation, which created dramatic reforms of how church was conducted
- Ordered establishing seminaries to train future priests
- By Pope Gregory XIII's request, corrected errors to the Julian calendar that made scheduling Easter every year easier (the Gregorian calendar we still use today)

The discussion of sin was a key part of the Reformation. Catholics at Trent said that righteousness was imported to people when they became Christians, while Luther and the Protestants asserted that righteousness was imported ("imputed"). For Protestants, then, holiness becomes a separate work entirely, and also implies that saints can't exist (since everyone is still a sinner) and purgatory doesn't make sense (since we'd *all* go there after dying).

Around 1604, King James saw some issues with the precision of the current English translations (most notably because he wanted to know what the Bible said about divorce), so he paid to have the Bible translated more reliably, which created the King James Version.

Certain [leftist ideals](politics-leftism.md) mixed into Christian doctrine as early as the 1620s that emphasized completely removing the clergy and strongly emphasizing Bible study, all for the purpose of bringing about God's Millennial Kingdom. That group became known as the **Seekers**, and they had a few other odd ideas, like mortalism (that upon death the soul sleeps until Jesus returns) and rejecting the Trinity.

After the English Civil War from 1642-1651, many dissenting Christian groups emerged, such as the **Quakers** (who drew from many of the Seekers) and **Congregationalists**. For the time, many of them established a *very* emotional and romanticized spiritual tradition relative to the views of the time (though still very buttoned-down by today's standards).

In 1693, Jakob Ammann tried to reform the Mennonite community to include shunning, hold communion more often, and other differences (such as less gaudy colors in clothing). This didn't work out, so Ammann's followers became the **Amish**.

The First Great Awakening was a movement in the 1730s and 1740s. It created a clear dividing line, and many of the existing denominations believed it was supporting fanaticism. It drew in relatively [uneducated](education.md) but *very* enthusiastic teachers, and started the **Evangelical** movement (an emphasis on [evangelism](spiritual-exercises-evangelism.md) efforts toward non-believers). The original denominations before this movement culturally froze in the mid-1700's.

- It played a major role in women's' lives, where they started focusing more on discussing their [feelings](mind-feelings.md) with each other, as well as becoming more independent in their [decisions](mind-decisions.md).
- The ideas of the First Great Awakening were highly influential in starting the abolitionist movement (getting rid of the institution of [slavery](people-slavery.md)).

The **Methodists** started largely from John Wesley in the mid-1730's as a derivative of the Anglicans.