Protestantism is a movement. Neither the stature of Luther, nor the political power of Protestant princes could hold the reformers together in a single church. ‘Twas ever thus. Nowhere is this view of Protestantism more apparent than in the American experiment, in which protest and reform remained at the center.
One of the challenges of American Protestantism is to see the whole movement all at once. And yet that is the point of this newsletter. Growing up Pentecostal, my entrance into the big tent of Protestantism was through reading Louis Berkhof, Karl Barth, and Reinhold Niebuhr in college. Little did I realize that these thinkers opened the door to the neo-Calvinism that dominated the evangelical world, as well as the neo-orthodoxy and Christian realism in the mainline. My seminary training took me further down the neo-Calvinism road, while my doctoral work opened the Barthian world of England and Europe. It was an introduction to the Protestant mind that informed Protestantism in the mid-twentieth century. I hope to capture that mind—particularly its distinctive American hue—in this newsletter.
Read Full Article »