To that end the Evangelicals gradually entered the world around them. They became involved in liberal arts colleges rather than building Bible schools, engaged in social programs, and criticized conservative Protestantism’s overidentification with militarism and unfettered capitalism. They also acquired considerable if unpredictable political power in the United States and elsewhere.
Evangelicals were also ecumenical; Graham welcomed Catholic and mainstream Protestant leaders on his platforms, and he prayed with many kinds of Christians whom Fundamentalists would shun. Whereas Fundamentalists and Pentecostalists had counterparts in the Third World, Evangelicals tended to form international movements and hold conferences designed to bring Christians of many nations together. While Fundamentalists usually split off into churches of their own, Evangelicals remained connected to mainstream denominations and increasingly moved fully into the mainstream. Nevertheless they always endeavoured to keep alive their doctrinal distinctiveness and their passion for witnessing for Christ. Theological movements within Protestantism
In the 20th century dramatic changes in Protestant theology took shape. This was due partly to general doubts about European liberalism after World War I and particularly to a reaction against the Nazis’ evoking of liberal theology to support some of their views of society.
In both the 19th and 20th centuries, liberal theology was criticized for narrowing Christianity to the limits of what individuals believed themselves to be experiencing or for turning objective truth into subjective feeling. Though no conservative, Kierkegaard was the most extreme of these critics. All conservative theologians opposed the liberals on these grounds, but in the 20th century there was a reaction even within the liberal camp. Beginning in 1918 Karl Barth and Emil Brunner led a reaction against all theologies emphasizing religious experience. This theological movement, called Neoorthodoxy, widely influenced Protestant thinking in Europe and the United States. Barth and his disciples regarded their work as a reassertion of the true sovereignty of Scripture and as a return to the authentic principles of the Reformation. In the United States Reinhold Niebuhr criticized liberal Christian philosophies as they applied to society and to the nature of humanity.
The limitations of the Neoorthodox approach were revealed by the German theologian Rudolf Bultmann of Marburg, who sought to “demythologize” the New Testament by discovering its core truths and thus allowing its significance for faith to be more fully disclosed. Although refugees from Nazi Germany, such as Paul Tillich, interpreted European developments for Americans, the Neoorthodox synthesis did not outlast those who gave voice to it. Consequently, Protestant theology after the mid-1960s was in disarray. Europe lost its hegemony, though certain theologians, among them Wolfhart Pannenberg and Jürgen Moltmann, began to take elements of Neoorthodoxy and combine them into variously described movements, such as “theology of hope,” “political theology,” “theology of revolution,” or Protestant versions of “liberation theology.” Espoused in the Third World by theologians who stressed that God sides with the oppressed and the poor and in the United States by feminist or black theologians who developed new interpretations of biblical and traditional texts, these theologies called into question the alleged patriarchalism, elitism, and racism of earlier academic theology. The ecumenical movement
The ecumenical movement was at first exclusively Protestant (though Eastern Orthodox leaders soon took part). Its origins lay principally in the new speed of transport across the world and the movement of populations that mixed denominations as never before; the world reach of traditional denominations; the variety of religion within the United States and the problems that such a variety created; and the younger churches of Africa and Asia and their contempt for barriers raised by events of European history for which they felt no special concern. There was always a strong link with the missions, and an American Methodist missionary leader, John R. Mott, whose travels did much to transform the various ecumenical endeavours into a single organization, personified the harmony of missionary zeal with desire for Christian unity. The World Missionary Conference at Edinburgh in 1910 marks the beginning of the movement proper, and from it sprang conferences on life and work (led by the Swedish Lutheran archbishop Nathan Söderblom), as well as conferences on faith and order. In the beginning Roman Catholics refused to participate; the Eastern Orthodox participated only through exiles in the Western dispersion; and the Nazi government refused to allow Germans to go far in participating. By the end of World War II in 1945 it was evident that there was a new atmosphere, and the World Council of Churches was formally constituted at the Amsterdam conference in 1948. The entire movement depended for most of its money and for part of its drive on the Americans; but its headquarters was in Geneva, and, under the guidance of its first general secretary, Netherlands Reformed administrator W.A. Visser ’t Hooft, it never lost sight of the fact that the traditional problems of divided Christian Europe had to be met if it was to succeed.
In the years after 1948 the ecumenical movement brought Protestants into an ever-growing dialogue with the Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholics. After John XXIII became pope in 1958, Roman Catholics began to participate in the ecumenical movement. Although the definitions of the second Vatican Council (1962–65) were unacceptable to most Protestants, they had a breadth quite unlike the definitions of the first Vatican Council in 1870 and encouraged those (usually liberal) Protestants who hoped in time to lower this greatest of barriers raised by the 16th century. Since then several Protestant denominations have engaged in ecumenical discussions with Roman Catholicism. In 1999 Lutherans and Catholics signed a “common declaration” on justification, the topic that had been the major theological issue in the Reformation of the 16th century. E. Clifford Nelson Martin E. Marty W. Owen Chadwick
Citation Information
Article Title: Protestantism
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 27 June 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Protestantism
Access Date: August 25, 2019
Additional Reading General works
General works on the history of Protestantism include Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christianity, rev. ed., 2 vol. (1975), with useful bibliographies; and Émile G. Léonard, A History of Protestantism (1965–68; originally published in French in 3 vol., 1961–64). Late Middle Ages and Reformation
Useful introductions to the late medieval and Reformation period are Thomas A. Brady, Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy (eds.), Handbook of European History, 1400–1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation, 2 vol. (1994–95); Hans J. Hillerbrand (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, 4 vol. (1996); Heiko A. Oberman, The Dawn of the Reformation: Essays in Late Medieval and Early Reformation Thought (1986, reissued 1992); Francis Oakley, The Western Church in the Later Middle Ages (1979, reissued 1985); Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform (1250–1550): An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (1980); and Lewis W. Spitz, The Protestant Reformation, 1517–1559 (1985, reissued 1987). Major figures of the Reformation