What is Protestantism?

  Protestantism first and foremost is the rejection of God's life and governance, centered on the sacrifice of the Mass, which is the very form in which God-made-flesh is made present in this world. Protestantism is a reversion from Christianity towards the form of belief into which the faith of Israel had degenerated during the period of Christ's earthly life. It is a way of holding to the "forms of faith, though denying its substance". Without the sbustance of faith, Protestants rely first on the holy scriptures, but of course actually rely on the anti-Catholic interpretations that would prevent the scriptures from obliging them to return to the Church. All of Protestant scholarship for its half-millennium of life is devoted to evasion of the central issue of the heresy to which they are so attached, and which came to define life for so many. In culture, it has to take the form of a sort of permanent revolution, as each successive stage of Protestantism must be abandoned & its former lights attacked as insufficient Christians who failed to arrive at the purity of the gospel. In our times, in our advertising culture, this has to be accompanied by persistent re-branding. In my life, I've the particular variety I know best go from "Jesus people" (in the '70s), to "evangelicals" (in the '80s and '90s) and now to "emergent Christianity" in the latter years of this decade. Protestantism is constant vacillation between rapid propagation and acceptance of motives & behaviors which have no root at all in Christ, but which have to be attributed to Him and to spiritual growth, and utter brutal stagnation. The heroic leader of two years ago becomes the villain of the present hour; those liberal Protestants who regarded the Archbishop of Canterbury as a strong voice againts Roman incursion now revile him because he maintains that his church can only recognize male-female marriages, not same-sex unions as marriage, and he's attempting to use what remains of his position to shore up this bastion. Protestantism is also egocentrism, because without any real roots, they have to assemble fragments of traditions and wear them as decorations advertising their own identity. They attach this identity to profession of Christ, but it isn't Christ who is important, but their own vision of Christ which matters. Hence they can only ever assemble with people of similar tastes.

   These are a few of the things that define Protestantism, which underlie the innumerable, the endless self-definitions of its leaders, professors, officials, and pastors.