by pastors in the United Church of Christ (one of the most progressive Protestant denominations in the world) when they introduce the reading of the Bible in Sunday worship with the words “God is still speaking.”
For Protestants, reading the Bible is a spiritual discipline undertaken for the purpose of keeping one’s vision of the gospel fresh and vibrant. Protestants want people to read the Bible for themselves and therefore the translation of the Bible has been a major priority. Largely due to Protestant efforts, the Bible has now been fully translated into more than 650 languages and has been partly translated into 2,000 more. But it is not just the ability to read the Bible that matters for Protestants; they also put great emphasis on the “right of private interpretation,” the right of individuals to read the Bible and decipher its meaning for themselves. This was and still is a revolutionary concept, and in recent years Christians around the world have invoked this Protestant principle of interpretation to support and defend many different readings of the Bible.
While Protestants strongly affirm the right of individuals to interpret the Bible for themselves, they do not believe all interpretations of the Bible are equally valid. Like everyone else, Protestants have opinions, and they believe that some interpretations (and their corresponding theologies) are decidedly better than others. In fact, most of the major divisions that exist within Protestantism can be viewed as groups who share a specific interpretation of the Bible. Baptists read the Bible one way, Presbyterians emphasize something else, Lutherans have yet another take on what the Bible means, and so forth. But in almost all these churches, even the most doctrinaire, some room is left for individuals to interpret the Bible for themselves.
At the level of the congregation, most Protestants view their pastor as the chief interpreter of the Bible for their group, and most Protestant pastors view preaching as their most important responsibility. Protestant denominations generally require their pastors to be trained at an approved seminary, and seminary education has typically included proficiency in Greek and Hebrew so the Bible can be read in its original languages. The bookshelves of Protestant ministers are often filled with scholarly biblical commentaries and thick theological treatises. All this knowledge and training gets funneled into the sermon, where the pastor explains the Bible’s message and its applicability for today. The architectural placement of the pulpit in Protestant churches – usually front and center – reinforces the importance of the sermon in Protestant worship (see Figure 3.2). Here again, however, individuals reserve the right to read and interpret the Bible for themselves. Protestant laypeople listen to their pastors, but if they disagree with what their pastors say they usually feel quite free to ignore or challenge them.
While there is a great deal of interpretive freedom within the Protestant tradition, almost all Protestant churches affirm five distinctively Protestant beliefs. First, Protestants affirm that salvation comes from God alone and that human effort cannot change an individual’s standing with God. Second, Protestants affirm that faith or trust in God is the core of religious life. Third, Protestants see the church as a fellowship of believers rather than as the dispenser of God’s grace. Fourth, Protestants believe in the “priesthood of all believers” and assume there is no difference in the spiritual status of ordained ministers and laypeople (even if they acknowledge functional differences). Finally, Protestants believe that every person and every human institution, including the church, is flawed and fallible and perpetually in need of correction. Perfection will only be attained in heaven.
Figure 3.2 Interior of Reformed Church (Sibiu, Romania) illustrating the architectural centrality of the pulpit.
Photo by author.
The idea of “vocation” is another key emphasis within Protestant spirituality. To have a vocation is to be called by God to a specific kind of work in the world. This work can take many different forms. Some vocations are explicitly religious, like becoming a pastor, but other vocations can look quite “secular,” at least on the surface. Protestants believe that God can call people to become artists, teachers, police officers, stay‐at‐home parents, accountants, or politicians in addition to calling some people to be pastors. What makes this work a vocation, rather than simply being a job, is doing it in God’s name and out of a religious sense of service to others. This is a very different understanding of vocation than is common within the Catholic tradition. Catholics generally apply the term vocation only to becoming a priest or a religious sister or brother. By contrast, Protestants believe that everyone can have a vocation or calling from God regardless of the kind of work they do.
From the beginning of the movement, Protestant spirituality has included the singing of hymns. Sometimes hymns were written for the purpose of educating Protestant laypeople – a way of communicating Protestant doctrine memorably and understandably – and worship leaders in some Protestant churches tell their congregants to “think about the words you are singing.” Other Protestant hymns are testimonies of personal experience. No hymn illustrates this more than Amazing Grace, which was written by John Newton (1725–1807), a former slave trader who later became an Anglican priest. The emotions of Newton’s own dramatic conversion experience saturate the lyrics: “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.” Hymn singing gives Protestants, who are often more idea‐centered than emotional, an outlet for expressing their religious feelings, and no one provided more hymns for Protestant Christians than Fanny Crosby (see Voices of World Christianity 3.1).
Hymn singing as a Protestant practice peaked in Europe and North America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when pianos became common in homes and churches. Starting in the 1960s and 1970s, guitars (and later drums) began to be used more frequently, and this was accompanied by a shift away from classical hymns to newer “praise songs” led by a “worship band” with the lyrics of the song projected onto a screen at the front of the church. The popularity of praise songs, which are now used by Protestants worldwide, has not been uncontested. Some Protestant churches have refused to make the shift and still use only classic hymns in their services. Other congregations now mix styles of music or hold separate “traditional” (hymn singing) and “contemporary” (praise song) worship services to accommodate different musical tastes. The region of the world where Protestant singing has probably had (and continues to have) the biggest impact is Africa. In the early twentieth century, the hymns of Ntsikana, a Xhosa prophet from southern Africa, helped Africans to see that they could remain genuinely African even if they became Christians. In more recent years in South Sudan, new hymns, many of them written by women, played a crucial role in the mass conversion of the Dinka people to Christianity.
Salvation
The Protestant vision of salvation is simultaneously intimate and austere. It is intimate because salvation focuses on the personal relationship between the believer and God. It is austere because the individual has to face God in stunning isolation. Within Protestantism, Jesus is frequently portrayed as the friend of sinners, who is ready and willing to embrace all who turn to him. Salvation is a joyful homecoming. One by one, individual by individual, God redeems humanity, freeing people from the burden of their sins and befriending each one in turn. The only requirement is faith. The gift of salvation is free, with no cost beyond placing one’s full trust and confidence in God (see Voices of World Christianity 3.2). Protestants have also, however, said that each person has to face God alone. The saints of the past cannot intervene, and Mary cannot mediate. Anxiety can be further heightened by Protestantism’s bleak assessment of the unredeemed condition of humankind. People are declared to be “lost,” they are “worms in the dust,” they
