(4) Protestantism: Notable Groups, Organizations, and Movements (inc. Denominations)

1100s - Waldensians (All Facts)

• Movement founded by Peter Waldo also called the “poor men of Lyons,” which

  • was founded in Lyons in southern France

  • pleased the poor, which received bread and soup from him and other wealthy converts to Christianity

  • made the Church fear for its authority, and alarmed local Church leaders

• Its members

  • live the life of the early Christians, giving up all possessions in order to help the poor

  • consider that all believers should have the same rights as priests, and feel that the pope and other churchmen have lost touch with the real needs of the poor

  • took literally Jesus’s teaching that one should “go sell what one has and give it to the poor”

  • rejected the license of the official Church

  • elected their own priests

  • adopted a simple way of life

• Movement which was condemned as heretical in the 1184 Synod of Verona by Pope Lucius III

1380s - 1500s - Lollardy / Lollards / Lollardy Movement (All Facts)

• Proto-Protestant Christian religious movement in England (initially) led by John Wycliffe and informed by his teachings

• They emphasized the importance of ordinary people reading the Bible for themselves

• Their principal tenets were condemned in the Blackfriars Council of 1382, which took steps to stamp out heresy within the University of Oxford, so threatening the University’s independence

  • When this occurred, many of Wycliffe’s followers submitted and the University of Oxford dismissed Wycliffe for heresy

• Movement which was a reaction to the Western Schism, in which the English government at the time was, for its own reasons, willing to criticize the temporal power of the papacy; which was already being threatened by the Western Schism

1400s - Hussites (All Facts)

• Followers of Jan Hus

• They believed that the laity should receive both the wine and bread in communion instead of bread alone

• They led their namesake wars / revolution against King Wenceslas IV of Bohemia and his stringent Catholic policies and against Emperor Sigismund of the Holy Roman Empire

1500s - Calvinists (All Facts)

• Followers of John Calvin

• They spread from Heidelberg to Rhineland and from Westphalia to Nassau

• They remained a larger threat than German Catholics to German Lutherans

Huguenots (All Facts)

• Term used to refer to French Calvinists

1526 - League of Torgau (All Facts)

• Alliance of Protestant German princes, including Philip of Hesse and John of Saxony, which was formed to oppose the Catholic League of Dessau

• It was eventually joined by most of the Protestant states in the Holy Roman Empire

1527 / 1533 - Anabaptists / Anabaptism (All Facts)

• Protestant Denomination which

  • believed (believes) in

    • believer’s baptism (credobaptism), or that baptism is valid only when candidates freely confess their faith in Christ and request to be baptized

      • It is thus opposed to the baptism of infants, who are not able to make a conscious decision to be baptized

      • They thus insisted that only true adult believers should be baptized

  • renounced popish worship and political affairs

  • did not bear arms

  • practiced polygamy (and used Old Testament scripture to justify their practice)

  • seized property (especially in their rebellion at Munster)

  • proclaimed world rebellion

  • killed anyone that was unbaptized (especially in their rebellion at Munster)

• Protestant Denomination which

  • began among the disciples of Ulrich Zwingli in Zurich in Switzerland after he had debated the validity of infant baptism

  • also owed itself to the ideas of Thomas Müntzer and Andreas Karlstadt

  • was first led in Switzerland by

    • Conrad Grebel

    • Balthasar Hubmaier

    • Felix Mantz

    • the peasantry around Zurich, where they effectively withdrew into communities of saints

• Protestant Denomination which

  • spread quickly to Holland (the Netherlands)

  • then took power in Germany, where they invaded and took control of Munster and formed their own government there six years after their founding in Switzerland

  • was first led in Germany by

    • Bernard Rotthman (German)

    • Jan Matthys (Dutch)

    • John of Leiden (Dutch)

  • rebelled against the Holy Roman Empire in their namesake Munster Rebellion in which

    • they gradually took over the town council of Munster

    • they tried to install their own government there in Munster

    • they made apparent their revolutionary tendencies

    • they were all forced into hiding or massacred by the holy Roman Empire as a result

1531 - 1547 / 1555 - Schmalkaldic League (All Facts)

• Military alliance of 8 Protestant (Lutheran) principalities and 11 cities within the Holy Roman Empire to defend the Protestant Reformation and Lutheran Church

• Military alliance named after the little namesake town which symbolically stood on the borders of the Holy Roman states of Hesse and Saxony, the league two’s most powerful principalities and in which the alliance was formed

• Military alliance of various principalities and cities alike including

  • Hesse

  • Saxony

  • Brunswick

  • Luneburg

  • Strasbourg

  • Lubeck

  • Magdeburg

  • Bremen

  • Ulm

• Military alliance, which upon formation affirmed that, “on all occasions that any of us is attacked for the Word of God and the doctrine of the gospel or for any other thing connected therewith, al the others will come to his aid at once”

• Military alliance that was

  • primarily religious in nature, the key factor being the result of the (Second) Diet of Augsburg

  • secondarily political in nature, as the German Princes had their own political reasons for wanting to resist the power of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V as it would help them to do so

• By 1531, Bavaria, despite being Catholic, joined the namesake alliance

1534 - Church of England (All Facts)

• Founded by King Henry VIII

1550s / 1563 - 1600s - Brownists (All Facts)

• English Separatists founded by the namesake man

• They were not tolerated by England

1560s - Mennonites (All Facts)

1563 - Separatists (All Facts)

• Dissident group from the Church of England following England’s adoption of the 39 Articles

• They rejected the Church of England entirely

1563 - Puritans (All Facts)

• Dissident group from the Church of England following England’s adoption of the 39 Articles

• The namesake group derived its name from being stigmatized by those outside their group for wanting to purify the Church of England even further

  • They opposed the church rituals of the Church of England

• In 1620, 35 of them banded together and set sail in the “Mayflower” for the colony of Virginia, jubilant at the prospect of practicing their brand of worship in the New World without harassment

• They gathered together in the “Mayflower” ship’s main cabin and prepared a social contract designed to bolster unity, meant to placate settlers angered by their arrival on land which had not been granted to them by charter, this “Mayflower” Compact established a civil body politic for their new colony that setup “just and equal laws” based on church covenants

• They were somewhat tolerated by England at the time of their founding

1563 - (English) Presbyterians (All Facts)

• Dissident group from the Church of England following England’s adoption of the 39 Articles

• They had synods instead of bishops

• They were somewhat tolerated by England at the time of their founding

1571 - 1930 - Dutch Reformed Church (All Facts)

• The largest Christian denomination in the Netherlands from the onset of the Protestant Reformation until the latter namesake date

Arminians / Arminianism (All Facts)

• Dutch anti-Calvinists who followed the namesake theologian and drew up their “Remonstrances” against the states (provinces) of Holland

  • This called for religious independence for the Dutch provinces

• They fiercely defended and supported human free will, conditional predestination, and resistible grace

• They believed that God had not wanted Adam to fall from grace

• They were eventually banished from the Netherlands during the reign of Maurice of Nassau

Gomarists / Gomarism (All Facts)

• Dutch Calvinists who followed the namesake theologian and drew up their “Counter-Remonstrances” against the Arminians

• They fiercely defended strict Calvinist predestination and supralapsarianism against the teachings of Jacobus Arminius

• They believed predestination was absolute, not conditional

1600s - Jansenists / Jansenism (All Facts)

• Catholic Theological Movement based on the teachings in Augustinus, the work of the namesake Dutch Catholic Theologian, which, in turn, was based on the teachings of St. Augustine

• The Roman Catholic Church considered it a puritanical movement calling for moral and doctrinal reform, as it inevitably angered the Papacy and Roman Catholic authorities

• Religious Movement and Sect which gained prominence in France under Kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV, particularly at the convent of Port Royal in Nova Scotia in New France with its Catholic sisters / nuns, whom believed in the teachings of St. Augustine, as exposited by Cornelius Jansen in his book “Augustinus,” stressing “original sin” and “irresistible grace”

• Its nuns defied both King Louis XIV and the Pope by refusing to accept the “Formulaire” under which they were to renounce their beliefs

  • Even amongst those nuns who signed the paper, they demanded an extra clause stating the distinction between what they accepted as law and what they actually believed

1606 - Baptists (All Facts)

• Separatists who rejected the Church of England and rejected (orthodox) Calvinism

• Founded and led by John Smith

• They believed in rejecting infant baptism in favor of adult baptism because

  • Baptism is not simply “washing in water” but also “baptism of the Spirit, the confession of the mouth”

  • Infants cannot possibly appreciate the importance of Baptism

  • Adult Baptism thus is a more fitting ceremony

• They also

  • refused to read the Holy Bible in anything but the original Hebrew or Greek

  • rejected Calvinist doctrines of predestination and original sin

• They

  • caused great controversy

  • faced continuous persecution in England

  • emigrated to Amsterdam in the Netherlands as a result of the persecution they faced

1608 - 1621 - Protestant Union / Evangelical Union of Lutherans and Calvinists (All Facts)

• Union formed between the Lutheran and Calvinist Protestant German Princes at Anhausen

• Union which armed themselves against Catholic aggression following the Habsburg subjugation of the German city Donauworth, where the monk’s there, whose monastery had survived the Protestant Reformation, had been in conflict with the city’s burghers

  • While the affair was minor, it was worrying enough to infuriate the Protestant estates which regarded the action as a breach of the Peace of Augsburg

  • They protested, and walked-out at the imperial Diet of Raisbon (Regendburg)

• Union whose membership was confined to six princes, but that historic rifts between Lutherans and Calvinists was hard to hide even in the union of “peace-loving estates”

• Union formed and organized by Elector Frederick IV of Palatine

• Its formation precipitated the Thirty Years’ War

• It was dissolved three years into the Thirty Years’ War

1648 / 1652 - Quakers / Society of Friends (All Facts)

• Religious Organization / Movement founded by George Fox

  • Founded during England’s “Puritan Revolution”

• Organization / Movement whose biblical basis was John 15:14

• They taught that the essence of Christianity was the “inward light” in every man that did not need a minister, liturgy, or sacraments

• They were pacifist

1649 - Diggers (All Facts)

• Founded by Gerard Winstanley

  • They split off from the previously established group known as the Levellers, calling themselves “the True Levellers”

  • They were active during the English Civil War

• Organization / Movement whose biblical basis was Acts 4:32

• Organization / Movement which

  • denounced property as a tool of slavery

  • proposed a total transformation of society

  • was essentially comprised of poor men who were agrarian socialists ((it) was an agrarian communistic group)

  • appealed to the poor and starving in England to join them

  • declared that the land of England belonged to the people and that it was stolen by the squires

  • believed that religious ideas had diverted man from asserting his political rights in the world

• Organization / Movement which

  • carried spades and appeared on St. George’s Hill, Walton-on-Thames one day and set about digging up the waste land, hence their name, having sowed it with corn, parsnips, and carrots

    • its ringleaders were promptly arrested after local property-owners became alarmed and called for Thomas Fairfax and his (New Model Army) troops

  • had its ringleaders arrested by the English government but whom refused to take off their hats for Thomas Fairfax

1640s - Ranters (All Facts)

• Movement with no organization or leader but a dissenting group of English commoners who were said to go in for hard drinking and whoring in the name of the Holy Spirit and equality; they were active during the English Civil War