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Protestantism
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That Protestantism is the insurrection of Matter against Spirit, of the material against the spiritual order, is susceptible of very satisfactory historical verification. One of the most immediate and efficient causes of Protestantism was the Revival of Greek and Roman Literature. Constantinople was taken by the Turks, and its scholars and the remains of Classical Learning which it had preserved were dispersed over Western Europe. The Classics took possession of the Universities and the Learned, were studied, commented on, appealed to as an authority paramount to that of the Church and Protestantism was born. By means of the Classics, the scholars of the Fifteenth Century were introduced to a world altogether unlike and much superior to that in which they lived-to an order of ideas wholly diverse from those avowed or tolerated by the Church. They were enchanted.
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The term Protestantism was given to the movement after the second Diet of Speyer (1529), an imperial assembly at which the Roman Catholic majority withdrew the tolerance granted to Lutherans at the first diet three years earlier. A protest was signed by six Lutheran princes and the leaders of 14 free cities of Germany, and Lutherans in general became known as Protestants. The term Protestant has gradually been attached to all Christian churches that are not Roman Catholic or part of the Orthodox or other Eastern Christian traditions. As the 1990s began, the world had about 436 million Protestants (including some 73 million Anglicans), constituting at least one-fourth of all Christians.
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If a sociology of Christianity must take account of this fact, a sociology of Protestantism has even more reason to bear it in mind. For Protestantism was born of a doctrinal reform which was effected by doctors of theology. This reform was raised against the omnipotence of practices, of forms of piety, of the elements of sociological morphology. It aspired to reform the visible communities of the church according to a doctrinally determined archetype. It had desired that the line going from Christology through ecclesiology to the organization of the parishes be as direct as possible. The question is not primarily one of knowing if the Reformation was perfectly successful in this enterprise and if "non-theological factors" intervened in the constitution of the church and of the parishes.
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Protestant intuition comes close to what, over 60 years ago, Paul Tillich called "the Protestant principle": "Protestantism has a principle that stands beyond all its realizations. . . . The Protestant principle, in name derived from the protest of the ‘protestants’ against decisions of the Catholic majority, contains the divine and human protest against any absolute claim made for a relative reality, even if this claim is made by a Protestant church. calls this principle "a living, moving, restless power," which cannot be identified with any historical manifestation of the Protestant tradition, not even with the Reformation itself.
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Protestantism encompasses the Christian churches that separated from Rome during the Reformation in the 16th century. This movement was initiated by an Augustinian monk, Martin Luther. The term Protestant was originally applied to followers of Luther, who protested at the Diet of Spires (1529) against the decree that prohibited all further ecclesiastical reforms. Other influential reformers included John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli, and John Knox. Protestantism rejected attempts to tie God's revelation to earthly institutions and strictly adhered to the Word of God as sole authority in matters of faith and practice (sola scriptura). Central in the reformers' understanding of the biblical message is the justification of the sinner by faith alone.
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Protestantism has existed in Haiti since the earliest days of the republic. By the mid-nineteenth century, there were small numbers of Protestant missions, principally Baptist, Methodist, and Episcopalian. Protestant churches, mostly from North America, have sent many foreign missions to Haiti. Almost half of Haiti's Protestants were Baptists; Pentecostals were the second largest group. Many other denominations ... were present, including Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons, and Presbyterians. Widespread Protestant proselytization began in the 1950s.
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Protestantism