Reddit reviews Christianity's Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution-A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First
We found 5 Reddit comments about Christianity's Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution-A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
1.) There is every type of Baptist from conservative to progressive.
2.) Differences among denominations can range from views on church polity (governance, who makes the decisions?) to baptism, the eucharist, or issues like ordination (do they ordain women? Non-celibate gay folk?)
3.) What's going to confuse you MORE is that denominations like the United Methodist Church have some more moderate/ conservative and more liberal members/ congregations. Your college group may be more progressive but a Methodist in another area may be a bit more conservative--though there are things which unite them. As far as ordination issues go, all Methodists ordain women. For Methodists, there are governing documents for churches beyond the ecumenical creeds like the "Book of Discipline" but some churches dissent from that.
4. Evangelical refers to a type/ outlook of theology. Roger E. Olson (a professor at Truett/ Baylor) has written "How to be Evangelical without being conservative?". Evangelicals are generally more "low church" in style --a bit less hierarchical in structure.
David Bebbington, a historian, identified these 4 defining features of Evangelicalism which I think are relatively accurate:
Other sub groups of Protestantism may be known for their demographics or practices. For example, the Episcopal church may be prominent in older city center while other denominations moved toward the frontier. Methodists had a big revival in the 2nd great awakening. Disciples of Christ/ Church of Christ/ Independent Christian churches came out of a frontier revival as well. Pentecostals are associated with Azusa Street Mission revivals in ~1901. Big social movements had an affect on what Protestant churches/ faiths spread.
Scotland's national church is Presbyterian. There are many German and Swedish Lutherans. There's quite a bit of Anabaptists from the "low countries". Each of these have a cultural heritage (and there are more nuanced--German Baptist communities in Texas, etc), and a theological outlook. For example, Mennonites are known for pacifism and taking the sermon on the mount very seriously/ "literally" but also have more conservative branches (women and men sit separately in church) and more liberal branches.
Honestly, I would read Alister McGrath's"Christianity's Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution--A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First" it's what got me interested in the history of Protestantism.
>That is what it
meansmeant to be Protestant.The term Protestant today can apply to an incredibly and almost unfathomable variety of Christian expressions, from High Church Anglicans to Osteen-like megachurches. I dare say that most Protestants today have never even heard of the Diet of Speyer.
In Christianity's Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution--A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First Alister McGrath points out that giving a solid and succinct definition of the word "Protestant" is a practically impossible task.
Christianity's Dangerous Idea is an excellent and unbiased examination of the causes and effects of the Protestant Reformation.
I am partial to Alastair McGrath's Christianity's Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution: A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First
Rev. McGrath, as an Anglican theologian of a more reformed persuasion, capably discusses Anglicanism and the broader protestant movement.
It's a complex subject, but I'll generalize the developments:
The 2nd Temple era canon of the Old Testament is generally believed to have been similar to the modern Jewish canon, plus or minus a couple books accepted by modern Jews and rejected by Pharisaic Judaism. The Septuagint (Greek translation of the Tanakh) was widely used by Diaspora Jews, as many didn't even speak Hebrew anymore. However, our oldest codices of the Septuagint are from the 4th century AD and vary in the extent of their inclusion of the OT apocrypha, so we don't have a good idea of what pre-70 AD Diaspora Jews thought of as "canonical." We do know that guys like Philo never quoted from them, and we have statements from guys like Josephus along the lines of "our books are 22 in number, and no more." Most of the Christian church fathers who learned Hebrew and were familiar with the subject were of the opinion that the books were okay to read in church, but not to form doctrine from. Here's a discussion on the OT canon's development.
The New Testament canon is formed mainly from books or letters written by either the apostles or their disciples. There's a couple exceptions to this, like Hebrews (we don't know who wrote that), but in general all but a couple of the 27 NT books were generally accepted by early Christians as authentic apostolic documents. This is a pretty decent article on the NT canon from the same place as the last link.
>How did we go from that ----> Martin Luthers Sola Scriptura, bible is inerrable, literal, and what most churches focus solely on?
This is an incredibly complex subject that I don't think I can do justice to in a reddit comment. I recommend Alister McGrath's book for a treatment on the intellectual history of the Protestant Reformation. He discusses most of the historical and scholarly developments that created the intellectual atmosphere of the early 16th century that lead to some of those ideas.