The End of Protestantism

In a sermon on “Catholic Unity,” delivered in 1844, John Williamson Nevin announced the end of “Protestantism”—of the knee-jerk anti-Catholicism that, he said, did as much damage to the Reformation as the errors it opposed.

“It is not enough now,” he declared, “simply to cry out against popery and puseyism, as a return to exploded errors. The truth as it wrought mightily in the souls of the reformers, must be understood as well as felt. There is an opposition to the errors of Rome and Oxford, sometimes displayed in our own country, which may be said to wrong the cause it affects to defend almost as seriously as this is done by these errors themselves.”

The effect of this sort of “Protestantism” is to de-church the church: “In its blind zeal, and shallow knowledge, it sinks the Church to the level of a temperance society, strips the ministry of its divine commission and so of its divine authority, reduces the sacraments to mere signs, turns all that is mystical into the most trivial worldly sense, and so exalts what is individual above what is general and catholic, as in fact to throw open the door to the most rampant sectarian license, in the name of the gospel, that any may choose to demand.”

Nevin was convinced that “opposition to Oxford and Rome in this form, can never prevail.” The Reformation could persist and deepen, not “by holding fast stubbornly to the forms in which the faith of the Reformation was originally expressed, but by entering with free and profound insight into that faith itself.”

What will answer Rome and high church Anglicanism, Nevin said, was not low-church evangelicalism. Rather, “what is wanted is a republication of the principles of the Reformation, not in the letter merely that killeth, but in the living spirit of the men, who wielded them with such vast effect in the Sixteenth Century.” Protestantism dead, in order to be reborn.

To that end, he concluded, “the Churches in question should feel themselves engaged to narrow as much as possible the measure of their separation, and strengthen the consciousness of their unity.”

(Nevin’s sermon is published in The Anxious Bench.)