Protestantism: origin and development

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Protestantism was born in the 16th century as a result of an internal rupture in Western Christianity. The first step of the Reformers was not to leave their original church. None of them had the idea to create Protestantism.

The birth of Protestantism occurred in 1520-1521: after unsuccessful attempts to get the monk Luther to admit his "errors", Rome called him (1483-1546) to recant in Leo X's bull Exsurge Domine (June 15, 1520). When the monk refused again (burning the bull), the rebel and his followers were excommunicated (bull Decet romanum pontificem, January 3, 1521).

At the Council of Worms in April 1521, Luther referred to the Word of God and was convinced by the testimony of Scripture alone. He therefore rejected "the authority of popes and councils". The authority of the Bible was thus placed above any ecclesiastical hierarchy, be it a single head (the pope) or a collegial body (the council).

In 1536, Protestantism was given new life with the transition to the Reformation in the city of Geneva, where the ministry of John Calvin (1509-1564), a Frenchman exiled from his homeland, was to be carried out.

His father wanted him to become a priest, so he initially received a humanist education: he studied literature and philosophy at La Marche and Montague Colleges in Paris, and then law in Orleans. Around 1530 he wrote his first work in Latin, a commentary on Seneca's De clementia (published in 1532).

After his father's death, Calvin returned to Paris and, fascinated by theological debates, around 1533 embraced the ideas of the Protestant Reformation initiated by his cousin Olivetan and the scholars Lefebvre d'Etaples, Guillaume Boudet, and Nicolas Cope, then rector of the University of Paris. He took part in the defense of Marguerite of Navarre's book "The Worldview of the Pechersk Woman". Condemned by Parliament, he was forced to leave Paris; before fleeing to Basel in Switzerland in January 1535, he returned to Nouaillon to cancel his ecclesiastical privileges.

In this form the Protestant religion spread, especially in French-speaking Switzerland, France, and the Netherlands. Other later confessions of faith, such as the Helvetic and Scottish Confessions of Faith (1560), La Rochelle (1571), and Westminster (1646), were based on Calvin's theology. The 39 Articles defining the doctrine of the Church of England are also largely inspired by Calvinism. However, Anglicanism, which gave rise to the Episcopal Church in the United States, is a restrained Protestantism that has only partially modified (to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the trend) the ecclesiastical framework borrowed from Catholicism.

Finally, it should be remembered that "to be Protestant" does not mean to "protest" in the modern sense of the term, but to "affirm" in its ancient sense.