The Protestant Deformation

Secularized Protestantism is celebrating its own funeral by rejecting its doctrinal heritage, says the author, himself a Protestant clergyman

Before the Great Ecumenical Movement, Protestant historians used to speak of the first few Christian centuries as the age of the formation of the Church. The Middle Ages then became the age of the deformation of the Church, to which a necessary remedy was prescribed: the Protestant Reformation. But if Luther and Calvin considered (not without cause, as the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation showed) the Christianity of the medieval church deformed, it is questionable whether they would consider the religion of their “Protestant” successors in the mid-twentieth century Christianity at all.

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Harold O. J. Brown

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Secularized Protestantism is celebrating its own funeral by rejecting its doctrinal heritage, says the author, himself a Protestant clergyman

Before the Great Ecumenical Movement, Protestant historians used to speak of the first few Christian centuries as the age of the formation of the Church. The Middle Ages then became the age of the deformation of the Church, to which a necessary remedy was prescribed: the Protestant Reformation. But if Luther and Calvin considered (not without cause, as the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation showed) the Christianity of the medieval church deformed, it is questionable whether they would consider the religion of their “Protestant” successors in the mid-twentieth century Christianity at all.