Preface: How Did Protestantism Come About?

1) Luther, England, and the Map of Christianity

In 1517, Martin Luther circulated his Ninety-five Theses, publicly challenging the authority of the Catholic Church, and the Reformation began. The Protestant movement that followed rested on two principles: justification by faith (sola fide) and scripture alone (sola scriptura). It denied that the church stood between the believer and salvation and held that the final authority in matters of faith lay only in the Bible and in personal conscience.

England followed quickly, but its Reformation was, from the start, political first and religious only halfway. In 1534, Henry VIII broke with Rome and, through the Act of Supremacy, made himself head of the Church of England. The new church absorbed some Protestant doctrine, but in structure, ritual, and government by bishops it kept much of the Catholic framework.

Before turning to the Puritans, it helps to be clear about how Christianity, Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Protestantism relate. "Christianity" is the umbrella term for every tradition that recognizes Jesus as the Christ, affirms his crucifixion and resurrection, and takes the Bible as the core of faith. It is not one church but a family of faiths centered on Jesus. Over time, different institutions and structures of authority formed around the same figure, producing the major branches: Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Protestantism. What divided them was never whether to believe in Jesus. It was who had the right to interpret the faith and govern the church.

Catholicism and Orthodoxy both claim to carry on the original tradition of early Christianity, and both emphasize sacraments, tradition, and an ordained clergy. They split over authority. Catholicism is centered in Rome. It holds that the pope has supreme jurisdiction over the universal church, and that the church itself, through its historical tradition and its councils, forms part of the authority of faith. Orthodoxy rejects papal supremacy and holds that self-governing regional churches guard the tradition together. In doctrine the two are very close. On the question of who has the final say, they cannot be reconciled.

Protestantism rejected the premise the two shared: that the church itself is the authority. Luther and the reformers who followed him held that salvation does not depend on church rituals or clerical mediation but on the individual's relationship of faith with God. That principle, one step after another, denied the pope's authority, reduced the sacraments' role as channels of grace, and freed the interpretation of scripture from church control. Protestantism is therefore not one church but a family of denominations that share these principles.

The basic difference between Catholicism and Protestantism is not style of worship but the source of authority. Catholicism holds that scripture, church tradition, and the church's teaching authority together make up the system of truth, and that the church is the means through which salvation is given. Protestantism holds that scripture alone has final authority, and that the church is a gathering of believers. The first emphasizes hierarchy, ritual, and continuity with the past. The second emphasizes conscience, preaching, and flattening the hierarchy. The difference shaped how each understood politics, social order, and individual responsibility.

This is why the Church of England is called semi-Protestant: it conceded Protestant theology on paper but kept the Catholic skeleton in its institutions and worship. England's break with Rome was driven mainly by politics. It rejected papal authority, brought in an English Bible under Henry and English-language worship under his son Edward VI, and absorbed some Protestant doctrine. But it kept bishops, the parish system, state control over church appointments, and much of the traditional liturgy and prayer. The compromise served the state well. To the Puritans it looked like a betrayal of principle: authority had only passed from the pope to the crown, instead of being returned to scripture and faith.

2) "If Both Church and State Call You a Heretic, How Do You Prove You Are Not?"

The Puritans' real intellectual source was John Calvin, not Luther.

Calvin was born in 1509 in Noyon, a small cathedral town in northern France, in a thoroughly Catholic world. His family was comfortable. His father, Gérard Cauvin, worked as a notary and administrator for the bishop and cathedral chapter of Noyon, so the church Calvin knew as a child was not a mysterious community of faith but an institution tied up with power and advancement. His father first intended him for a career in the church, then changed course and sent him into law, the standard route for a bright young man to become part of the establishment.

His education was conventional and elite. In Paris he studied Latin, rhetoric, and classical literature in the humanist manner. Then he went to Orléans and Bourges to study Roman law, receiving the most rigorous legal training available in Europe: close reading of texts, logical deduction, questions of where authority comes from and what makes an institution legitimate. That training shaped how he thought for the rest of his life: cool, structured, and acutely sensitive to ambiguity and to abuses of authority. At this point he was headed for a career as a lawyer or a learned official inside the system, not as a religious reformer.

The turn came in Paris in the early 1530s. Reformist ideas were spreading quietly among French intellectuals, but the French crown was bound tightly to the Catholic Church and had no tolerance for them. The guardian of orthodoxy was the Sorbonne, as the University of Paris's Faculty of Theology was known. Robert de Sorbon had founded the college in the thirteenth century to house poor theology students, but it grew into the body that ruled on orthodoxy. By the Reformation, "the opinion of the Sorbonne" meant, for practical purposes, the Catholic position. It censored books, judged preaching, and advised the crown on religious questions. The king needed its theological endorsement, and it needed the king to enforce its rulings against heretics. It was a central node in the alliance of church and state.

On November 1, 1533, All Saints' Day, Nicolas Cop, newly elected rector of the University of Paris and a friend of Calvin's, gave the customary inaugural address at the church of the Mathurins. He argued that what makes a person a true Christian is not how many rituals they observe or good works they perform, but whether they truly receive the Gospel. The language was mild. The substance went straight to the core claim of the Reformation, justification by faith. In Catholic teaching, faith is completed through the church, the sacraments, and good works. Here, faith itself was sufficient. Just as provocative was what the speech left out. It said little about church tradition, papal authority, or the clergy, and instead quoted scripture again and again, as if scripture alone were enough to guide believers to the truth. It was delivered in Latin, from a university platform, but its logic was very close to sola scriptura. It also carried the humanists' mockery of scholastic theologians, obsessed with formal disputation and blind to the spirit of Christ. That kind of criticism was common in Renaissance humanism, but in France in 1533 it sounded exactly like Lutheranism. When academic criticism turns on the authority of the church itself, it stops being academic.

Coming from the head of the university, in the institution that stood for Catholic orthodoxy, the address was taken as a public declaration of position. It provoked a political response, not a theological debate. Within two days charges of heresy were filed against Cop, and he fled, eventually reaching Basel. Those around him, Calvin among them, became targets. Calvin was no anonymous student. He was elite-educated, a close friend of Cop's, and seen as an intellectual asset of the reform party. Whether he helped write the speech has long been debated, and a surviving copy is partly in his handwriting. Suspicion was enough. Calvin left Paris in a hurry. A year later, after the Affair of the Placards in October 1534, when anti-Catholic posters appeared overnight in Paris and even on the door of the king's bedchamber, King Francis I turned to open persecution, and Protestants were burned in Paris. Early in 1535 Calvin left France for Basel.

Calvin was never formally tried or convicted in France. He chose exile before the purge reached him. In sixteenth-century France, once an accusation of heresy entered the courts, the likely outcome was prison, confiscation, or death. For a young lawyer, staying meant the end of both career and life. So, pushed out of the system, Calvin was forced into theology. He had to answer, for himself and for France's Protestants, an urgent question: if both the church and the state declare you a heretic, how do you prove you are not? It was not a spiritual question but a question of legitimacy. His answer was the Institutes of the Christian Religion, published in Basel in March 1536. The first edition was prefaced with an open letter to Francis I defending French Protestants against the charge of sedition. It was not written for ordinary believers. It was a rigorously reasoned, systematic defense of the faith, almost a Protestant constitution, giving the new faith a logical structure, a source of authority, and a workable social form, built the way a lawyer would build a case.

Calvinism became the foundation of Puritanism not because it comforted people but for the opposite reason: it was severe, and it was stable. It offered not emotional consolation but a worldview that could run for generations, closing the loop between faith, morality, and social order. Calvin could turn abstract doctrines like predestination and the sovereignty of God into a system that could be practiced, governed, and sustained because he did theology the way a lawyer works. He did not abandon law. He carried its method into theology.

First, his starting point was not personal experience or religious fervor but the question of authority. As a trained lawyer, Calvin knew that any system must first answer where final authority lies. His answer was that it belongs to God alone. From that he built a clear chain: God's will is the ultimate source, scripture is the authoritative record of God's revelation, and the church and tradition can only interpret and carry out that will. They can never become sources of authority themselves. The position recurs throughout the Institutes, and its direct consequence is the denial that the pope or the church can legislate matters of faith.

Second, on predestination, Calvin drew a sharply rational distinction between cause and effect. Whether a person is saved can be explained only by God's decision in eternity, not by human action, choice, or religious practice. The cause of salvation lies only in God's will; human conduct can only be its effect in time. This cut off, logically and completely, the possibility that conduct leads to salvation, and it made the idea of obtaining salvation through rituals, good works, or moral performance theoretically untenable.

Third, his critique of the church was not a moral denunciation but an analysis of structural consequences. If any share of the power to save is handed to human action or church procedure, he argued, salvation will inevitably be institutionalized and monopolized and will turn into a resource to be managed and distributed. Under that structure, morality stops being a response to God and turns into performance and exchange, not because individuals are necessarily corrupt, but because the institution rewards that outcome. In this sense his critique reads less like an anticlerical manifesto than a risk analysis of a system.

Fourth, Calvin did not deny the importance of moral conduct, but he changed its status completely. Good works are not the condition of salvation but the effect of faith and grace at work. Conduct cannot prove that a person is chosen, but a steady, ordered, moral life was seen as the outward evidence that faith was real. Later Puritans developed this into a strict system of moral supervision. They watched conduct not to accumulate merit but to confirm that faith and life were consistent.

Finally, the form of the Institutes itself shows the lawyer at work. It is not a book of sermons or a devotional. It is a systematic argument that starts from first principles, builds its case step by step, answers objections, and was revised again and again to make it more coherent. It grew from six chapters in 1536 to four books and eighty chapters in the final Latin edition of 1559. That is why it could be cited and used in the Reformation's long disputes and became the founding text of the Reformed tradition. It is not written like a legal code, but it has a legal kind of stability.

The radical point of predestination is not that God knows everything in advance. It is that a person's salvation or damnation was decided by God before time began and has no causal connection to that person's conduct, choices, or even their expressions of faith. The church could not dispense salvation through rituals, and individuals could not earn credit through good works. Salvation was removed entirely from the logic of human exchange.

At first glance this looks inhuman. If everything is already decided, why be moral, why be disciplined, why live like one of the chosen? This is where Calvinism is ingenious. It did not abandon conduct. It changed its meaning. Conduct is no longer the means of salvation but the outward sign that salvation may already be there. You do good not in order to be saved, but because you may already have been chosen.

The result was a psychology under constant tension. Believers could never be certain they were among the elect, yet they were expected to live with the order, discipline, and moral intensity of the elect. The effect was not relaxation but endless self-examination, self-management, and self-restraint. The sociologist Max Weber made this the center of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), arguing that this anxiety drove Puritans toward methodical work and discipline. Historians still debate how far his thesis holds, and Calvin himself warned believers against searching their lives for proof of election. But it helps explain the almost obsessive moral discipline of Puritan society: not a belief that conduct could buy salvation, but a fear that one's way of life might reveal that one was not chosen.

Here Calvinism broke completely with Catholicism. Catholicism offered a working mechanism of salvation: through the church, the sacraments, confession, and good works, a person could keep repairing their relationship with God within the institution. Calvinism abolished that mechanism. Once salvation cannot be administered, the institution loses its religious authority. This is the theological root of the Puritans' hostility to church hierarchy. In Calvinist logic, concentrating spiritual authority in a human hierarchy is itself a usurpation of God's power. The rule of bishops was not just a question of organization but of theology, because it implied that some people were closer to God than others. For Calvin, the distance between God and humanity is absolute, and no office, ordination, or bloodline can shorten it. Puritans therefore disliked bishops and spiritual aristocracy and preferred more equal, decentralized church government: some favored rule by elected elders (Presbyterianism), others the self-governing congregation (Congregationalism), which became the model in New England. For the same reason, Puritans were English Calvinists in theology, not Lutherans, whose emphasis on personal religious experience did less to reshape institutions.

The framework was powerful in practice precisely because it offered no certainty. You could not know whether you were saved. You could only live out the possibility through constant discipline, work, and moral effort. Puritans therefore took time management, vocation, family order, and public morality with great seriousness, and were willing to build their theology into the structure of society. Faith was no longer only an inner state. It became an ethic of action that reached into every part of life.

In the late sixteenth century, the Puritans first appeared as a reform party within the Church of England. They did not set out to leave it. They soon split into two tendencies. Moderates stayed in the church, hoping to "purify" it by reforming doctrine, simplifying ritual, and reducing the power of bishops. Others moved toward separation, concluding that the Church of England's structure was beyond repair and that they had to cut ties with it entirely. The divide was not over theological details but over a basic judgment: could one still be faithful to God inside the existing establishment? The crown distrusted both, because in the Church of England, church order was a pillar of royal legitimacy, and any challenge to the church's structure was a challenge to political authority.

Under Elizabeth I and then James I, from the late sixteenth into the early seventeenth century, this tension hardened into systematic repression. Puritan preaching was censored, nonconforming gatherings were banned, and ministers who refused the official rituals were punished. Some Puritans gave up hope of reforming the church in England and chose to leave. The group that sailed to North America on the Mayflower in 1620 is the most famous, but it represented the Separatists, not Puritanism as a whole, and even on the Mayflower they were only about a third of the passengers.

In North America, New England was not merely a refuge. It was a testing ground where Puritans could put their social ideals into practice. In 1630, before landing in Massachusetts, John Winthrop told his fellow colonists in a lay sermon that they would be "as a city upon a hill," with the eyes of all people upon them. Centered on the Massachusetts Bay Colony, they tried to build a society bound by religious covenant. The church was the core of society, religious norms formed the basis of law and public morality, and individual conduct was placed under the community's moral watch. The system was coherent, and it was exclusive. The Puritans had little tolerance for heresy or dissent, including from other Protestants. They had fled religious persecution, and in North America they recreated it. That should not be romanticized.

By the second and third generations, the religious intensity faded. As fewer children of church members could testify to a conversion experience, the churches adopted the Half-Way Covenant in 1662, a sign of how far the original fervor had cooled. Puritanism gradually secularized. What remained was not a complete theological system but an ethic stripped of its religious shell: diligence, self-discipline, and temperance; a respect for contracts and public duty; and the belief that the order of the community comes before individual desire. That secularized Puritan ethic deeply shaped New England's political culture, influenced early American republican thought, and supplied the moral backdrop for what later came to be called American exceptionalism.

3) Reading the Institutes of the Christian Religion

When I went looking for the Institutes of the Christian Religion, I found it is not one book. The edition I found comes in three volumes, but the work itself is divided into four "books." Book One concerns the knowledge of God the Creator: God as the creator, preserver, and governor of the universe and everything in it, the premise of every argument that follows. It does not ask whether God exists. It starts from the premise that he is creator, preserver, and ruler of all things, and asks how, on that basis, we should understand humanity and God, and what place the church and the pope have in that relationship.

Book One lays out the nature and purpose of knowing the Creator. This knowledge is not learned in school; it is innate. But humanity's fall was so severe, through ignorance on one side and wickedness on the other, that the knowledge has been corrupted and nearly destroyed. It can no longer lead people to glorify God or bring them happiness. And although this inner knowledge is aided by the whole of creation, which reflects God's perfection like a mirror, people do not benefit from it.

I agree with this. I often feel that the "divinity" of the world was present from the very beginning of all things, that it is with us in our breathing, our actions, our self-awareness. Even from the standpoint of physics, the existence of this universe is extraordinarily improbable. But there is a bias in how we see this, what physicists call the anthropic principle. It is not that we exist because we are special. It is that because we exist, we are able to observe and reflect and ask, "Why do we exist?" The question can only be asked because we are already here. And we are surrounded by this divinity; everything in the world is an answer to our questions. I often say, "The answer is within me," because I believe that the answers to everything I want to ask are already in my heart. If I don't overthink, they surface on their own. Our problem is not that there are no answers but that there are too many, and we can't tell which ones matter.

To give people direction, God gave his written word to those he chose to make himself known to, which is why, Calvin says, we must attend to scripture. In scripture God reveals himself not only as Father but as the creator of heaven and earth, one God in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Because of the fall, neither the knowledge built into our nature nor the beautiful mirror of creation can teach us to glorify him. So Calvin turns to God's revelation in scripture and to the doctrine of the Trinity. Then, so that no one can blame God for faults that are their own, freely and blindly chosen, he describes humanity's original condition at creation: made in the image of God, with free will and an unfallen nature. Having dealt with creation, he turns to God's preservation and government of all things, and closes Book One with the doctrine of providence.

Chapter one asks how we come to know God and ourselves. It opens with the question of what true wisdom is. True wisdom, Calvin says, consists of two parts: knowledge of God and knowledge of ourselves. The two are so closely bound together that it is hard to say which comes first. As soon as anyone looks at themselves, they are led to think of God, in whom "we live, and move, and have our being" (Acts 17:28). The gifts we have are not from ourselves; even our existence depends entirely on God. These blessings, falling on us drop by drop from heaven, are like streams that lead us back to their source.

I don't know how others read this passage, but I often think about the difference between cleverness, wisdom, and deep wisdom. Cleverness seems tied to learning and comprehension. Wisdom seems innate. Deep wisdom, to me, is using wisdom to look inward, measured over time, and extending the understanding of oneself to the understanding of others and of everything in the world. This may be close to Buddhist thinking; I'm not sure, because I haven't studied Buddhism closely. But I am drawn to Tibetan Buddhism and may need to learn more about it later. There are too many subjects I want to study right now.

Second, Calvin says, our own poverty reveals God's infinite riches more clearly. Through our first parents' rebellion we fell into wretched corruption, and that forces us to look up to heaven, not only as the starving look for food, but in fear that teaches humility. Because humanity is beset by every kind of misery and stripped of its original divine adornment, its deformity and incompleteness are laid bare, and in feeling their own misery, everyone gains at least some knowledge of God.

This is classic biblical storytelling. I understand it, and I often feel my own sinfulness so strongly that I want to run to the nearest church, confess, and cry in front of a priest. But finding someone to confess to shouldn't be my reason for believing in Christianity. Recently I watched the latest Knives Out film, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. I have never studied the Bible, and it was the first time I heard the story of the road to Damascus.

For anyone who doesn't know it, the road to Damascus is the story in the Acts of the Apostles of the conversion of Saul, later the apostle Paul. Saul, a Pharisee, was traveling to Damascus to persecute Christians. On the way, a light from heaven struck him to the ground, and he heard a voice calling his name and asking why he was persecuting him. He was blind for three days. In Damascus, a disciple named Ananias restored his sight and baptized him, and the persecutor became a preacher, his identity and mission completely overturned. What matters in the story is not that he saw a vision. It is the collapse of certainty that comes from being called by name and stopped in one's tracks: a man who believed he stood on the side of truth suddenly discovers that he has been using God as a tool, and his entire view of the world is rebuilt, irreversibly.

Watching the film, I suddenly understood something I never had before, the sentence "God is within me." I could feel it. I could feel that this divinity is higher than I am. I'm not sure I believe the story of Jesus, but whether the story is literally true doesn't matter. When we feel our own ignorance, emptiness, poverty, weakness, wickedness, and corruption, we recognize, as Calvin writes, that true wisdom, firm strength, perfect goodness, and pure righteousness are found only in the Lord. Our own incompleteness turns our thoughts to God's perfection. Only when we stop being satisfied with ourselves can we sincerely look up to God. For who would not rather rely on themselves? As long as a person does not know their true condition and is content with their own gifts, unaware of or forgetting their misery, who would not be complacent? So knowledge of ourselves not only prompts us to seek God; it also helps us find him.

Chapter two concerns what it means to know God and what that knowledge is for. For Calvin, truly knowing God is not merely admitting intellectually that a god exists. It includes reverence and love: sensing his greatness and so revering him, and sensing his kindness and so loving him. Calvin criticizes those who speculate about what God is in his essence but do not care what he is toward us. Knowledge of God must be practical: knowing how his attributes bear on our lives. He defines piety as "that reverence joined with love of God which the knowledge of his benefits induces." Unless people first recognize God as the source of every good, and so respond with gratitude and obedience, they will never worship him sincerely. A person who truly knows God as Creator will show willing obedience and complete trust. In hardship, they trust in his protection. In success, they give him the glory.

Here I want to return to Wake Up Dead Man. When the young priest, Father Jud (played by Josh O'Connor), is accused of murder, he at first wants to clear himself. But in the end he doesn't want to pour his energy into solving the case, because every minute spent suspecting people of the worst takes him further from what he should be doing. While he is chasing evidence, a clerk on the other end of a phone call begs him, as a priest, to pray for the clerk's gravely ill mother. In that moment he understands that his duty is not to catch the killer but to keep helping lost people find their way.

Chapter three is titled "The Knowledge of God Has Been Naturally Implanted in the Human Mind." Its core argument is that no one can plead ignorance of God. Calvin holds that God has planted in every human heart a "sense of divinity" (sensus divinitatis). This knowledge is not acquired but innate, which fits what I said earlier. However primitive a culture may be, even among people who live almost like animals, there remains deep down a "seed of religion." This sense cannot be erased. People may suppress it or deny God aloud, but when crisis or death approaches, the dread of God returns.

Religion, then, is not a human invention. Calvin rejects the view, already current in his day, that religion was a trick devised by a few clever men to control the masses. If there were not already a seed of awareness of God in the human heart, no politician or schemer, however persuasive, could have planted religion there. People would rather worship wood or stone than have no god at all. That preference, to worship the wrong thing rather than nothing, shows how deep and ineradicable the longing for God is. This inner knowledge also produces a basic sense of moral responsibility, an awareness that one must answer to God.

Calvin's conclusion to the chapter is that humanity has no excuse. Since God has left a witness in every heart, two things follow. First, atheism is false: those who say they do not believe in God are fighting a fierce battle within themselves, trying to escape him. Second, judgment is just: in the end, before God, no one can defend themselves by saying they did not know there was a God. 🕍