Protestantism: the 1517 Reformation, the five solas, the major branches and more than a century in Vietnam

IA quick read in five sentences

One. Protestantism is one of the three great blocks of Christianity, alongside Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity. It professes one God in the Holy Trinity and believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God made man. Two. This block came out of the Reformation that began on 31 October 1517 in Wittenberg, when the monk and professor of theology Martin Luther made public his ninety-five theses. Three. What is distinctive about Protestantism is packed into the five solas, five statements of "only", together with the priesthood of all believers, meaning that there is no necessary class of intermediaries between human beings and God. Four. Most branches keep two sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper, unlike the seven of Catholicism, and their churches take the pulpit rather than the altar as their centre. Five. In Vietnam, the religion has been present since 1911 in Đà Nẵng, and today has more than one million two hundred thousand followers in eleven recognised organisations.

This page follows fifteen sections. The library's way of writing is to report, not to adjudicate. What the Protestant churches teach is written in one voice, what historians can verify is written in another, and the two are placed side by side for you to compare. On the sixteenth-century separation in particular, the library records the events and the arguments of each side, without attributing motives to anyone. Wherever two sources disagree, both are written into the text with the name of the source.

IIEurope before 1517

A great event rarely erupts out of nothing. Before Luther wrote his first thesis, Europe already had several conditions in place, and without any one of them the story might well have ended in a university meeting room.

Listing these conditions is not meant to say that the Church of that time was corrupt and therefore bound to break apart. Catholicism itself had movements of reform from within, both before and after 1517, and the great renewal of that block was the Council of Trent, which met in three periods from 1545 to 1563. The library records only that in the same period, Western Europe went down two paths.

IIIMartin Luther and 31 October 1517

Martin Luther was born on 10 November 1483 in Eisleben and died on 18 February 1546, also in Eisleben. He entered the Augustinian order, was ordained a priest, earned a doctorate in theology and taught the Bible at the University of Wittenberg. In other words, the man who set off the Reformation was not an outsider, but a monk and a professor of that very Church.

The ninety-five theses bear the title Disputatio pro declaratione virtutis indulgentiarum, a disputation on the power of indulgences, written in Latin in the standard form of a university disputation. Most of the theses discuss how far indulgences are effective, what the indulgence preachers claimed beyond what was warranted, and how the money collected was used. The opening thesis says that the whole life of the believer should be one of repentance.

In April 1521, Luther was summoned to the imperial Diet at Worms and asked to recant his writings. He refused, with words that all the records contain: his conscience was bound by the Word of God, so he could not and would not recant. The more famous line, Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders, "here I stand, I can do no other", is another point of debate, because some contemporary records contain it and others do not. After Worms, Luther was placed under the imperial ban, and the Elector of Saxony had him taken into hiding at Wartburg Castle, where he translated the New Testament into German in about eleven weeks.

IVFive hundred years on a timeline

Three kinds of event recur across those five hundred years. The first is the confessions of faith, documents that a body of churches writes to state clearly what it believes. The second is the translations of the Bible into the languages of the people. The third is the birth of new branches. Some dates below are conventional, meaning that later generations chose one day to mark a whole long process.

• mid-15th centuryMovable-type printing in Mainz
  Gutenberg brought movable-type printing into use. This was the material condition that turned a university disputation into a Europe-wide event within a few weeks.
• 31 October 1517The ninety-five theses
  Martin Luther made public his disputation on indulgences in Wittenberg. This day later became Reformation Day, a feast day for most Protestant churches.
• 1519Zwingli preaches in Zurich
  Huldrych Zwingli took up the preaching post at the Grossmünster and preached through the books of the Bible one after another. The beginning of the Swiss Reformed branch, independent of Luther.
• 1521The Diet of Worms
  Luther refused to recant his writings, was excommunicated and placed under the imperial ban, and was then taken into hiding at Wartburg Castle.
• 1522The German New Testament
  Luther's translation of the New Testament came out in September and sold out very quickly. His complete German Bible was printed in 1534.
• 21 January 1525The first adult baptism
  In Zurich, a small group baptised one another on the basis of a personal confession of faith, with Conrad Grebel baptising George Blaurock. The founding date of the Anabaptist movement.
• 1530The Augsburg Confession
  A document drafted by Melanchthon and presented to the imperial Diet at Augsburg. It remains the foundational confession of the Lutheran churches today.
• 1536Calvin's Institutes
  Jean Calvin published the Institutio Christianae Religionis, the work that systematised Reformed theology, and then bound his life to the city of Geneva.
• 1534The Act of Supremacy in England
  The English Parliament made the king the supreme head of the Church of England. The legal starting point of Anglicanism, a path quite different from that of Luther or Calvin.
• 1609The first Baptist church
  John Smyth formed a congregation in Amsterdam on the principle of baptising only those who confess faith for themselves. Three years later Thomas Helwys brought this branch to London.
• 1738The beginning of the Methodist movement
  John Wesley described an experience that changed his faith on 24 May in Aldersgate Street, London. The movement became a separate church after his death in 1791.
• 1906The Azusa Street Revival
  From a chapel in Los Angeles, the Pentecostal movement spread across the world and became the fastest-growing branch of the twentieth century.
• 1911Protestantism reaches Đà Nẵng
  Missionaries of the Christian and Missionary Alliance set up the first mission station in Tourane, today Đà Nẵng.

VCore teachings

Because Protestantism is plural, there is no single catechism for the whole block. Each tradition has its own confession: the Lutheran churches have the Augsburg Confession of 1530, the Reformed churches have the Heidelberg Catechism of 1563 and the Westminster Confession of Faith of 1646, and the Church of England has the Thirty-Nine Articles. Even so, there is a common core that almost every branch accepts.

First, what is shared with all of Christianity

Most of what Protestants believe, Catholics and Orthodox Christians believe as well, and this is often overlooked. The mainline Protestant churches accept the Nicene Creed, formed at the two councils of 325 and 381. They profess one God in three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, believe that Jesus Christ is both true God and true man, and believe that he was crucified, rose on the third day and will come again. Where Protestantism differs from Catholicism is in authority, in how human beings are saved and in how the church is organised.

The five solas

Sola in Latin means alone, only. A note on origins is needed: the sixteenth-century Reformers used each phrase separately, and gathering exactly these five into a named set is a summary made by later generations. The content is old, but the five-part frame is new.

The priesthood of all believers

This is the idea that changed the whole shape of the church, and it is what Vietnamese readers used to a hierarchy find strangest. Drawing on the First Letter of Peter, chapter 2, verse 9, which speaks of a priestly people, the Reformers held that every baptised believer can come directly to God, without needing an ordained intermediary. The consequences reach a long way. One, the pastor is not a separate sacred rank but an office in the church, called by the church and able to leave that office. Two, pastors marry like anyone else, and Luther himself married Katharina von Bora in 1525. Three, there is no private confession to an ordained person as a required sacrament. Four, lay members sit on the decision-making bodies of the church.

Names and vocabulary

Many misunderstandings between Vietnamese people on the two sides are really just misunderstandings about words. Vietnamese Protestants call God Đức Chúa Trời, the Holy Spirit Đức Thánh Linh, the shepherd of the flock mục sư (pastor), and the gathering giờ thờ phượng (the hour of worship). Vietnamese Catholics say, respectively, Thiên Chúa, Chúa Thánh Thần, linh mục (priest) and Thánh Lễ (Mass). Proper names also follow different transliterations: Protestants write Giê-xu, Phao-lô, Phi-e-rơ, while Catholics write Giêsu, Phaolô, Phêrô, for Jesus, Paul and Peter. The name Tin Lành itself is the Vietnamese translation of the word Gospel, literally good news.

VIThe sixty-six books of the Bible and the role of the printing press

If one object had to be chosen to stand for the whole Protestant block, it would be the Bible in each person's hands. Not a book placed on the altar for the ordained to read, but a cheap printed book, in one's mother tongue, that could be taken home. In the sixteenth century this was a very great change, and it was possible only because translation and the printing press went together.

Sixty-six books, and the gap with Catholicism

Bringing the Bible into the people's language

Before the Reformation, the standard text in the West was the Latin Vulgate, which the unschooled could not read. The principle of Scripture alone only makes sense if ordinary people can read Scripture, so translation became a necessity.

Luther translated the New Testament at the Wartburg and had it printed in September 1522, and the complete German Bible came out in 1534. He translated according to how Germans actually spoke rather than clinging to each word, and many scholars regard his version as one of the foundations of modern written German. In England, William Tyndale translated the New Testament from the original Greek and had it printed in 1526. He was executed in 1536, and much of his wording later passed directly into the King James Version of 1611.

The Bible in Vietnamese

The first complete Bible in Vietnamese is closely tied to the Protestant churches and was the work of many people. According to material from Thư viện Tin Lành (the Protestant Library), the translation team included William Cadman and his wife Grace Hazenberg Cadman, the missionary John Olsen, the writer Phan Khôi and Trần Văn Dõng, under the sponsorship of the British and Foreign Bible Society. Phan Khôi's share is reckoned at about 342 pages out of a total of 1,397.

On the dating, two accounts circulate side by side, and the library records both. That material states that the translation was completed in 1924, first printed in 1925 in Shanghai, and printed in Hà Nội in 1926. Meanwhile, the name still in common use in the churches today is Bản Truyền Thống 1926 (the Traditional Version of 1926).

VIIWorship, baptism and the Lord's Supper

Someone used to Catholic Mass who walks into a Protestant service will notice a difference at once. Here there is no common liturgical form for the whole block. Each church sets its own order of service, and what stands at the centre of the service is the sermon, usually long and usually following a particular passage of Scripture. Around the sermon come singing by the whole congregation, not just the choir, prayers that are sometimes written in advance and sometimes spontaneous, the reading of Scripture aloud, the offering, and a closing benediction. Luther wrote hymns in German for the people to sing, the best known being Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, while the Reformed tradition is known for singing the Psalms.

Two sacraments instead of seven

This is one of the most visible differences from Catholicism. Most Protestant branches keep two, baptism and the Lord's Supper, arguing that only these two carry an explicit command from Jesus himself in the Gospels. The other five of the seven Catholic sacraments are still practised, but classed as rites of the church: weddings, funerals, ordinations, the dedication of children, prayer for the sick, private confession. Many Vietnamese-language Protestant churches call the two thánh lễ (holy rites), and some branches call them lễ nghi (ordinances) to avoid implying that the rite confers grace by itself.

Baptism for whom

This is the oldest dividing line within Protestantism. The Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican and Methodist churches baptise infants, usually by pouring water on the head, arguing that baptism is the sign of a covenant God establishes before the human being responds. The Anabaptist, Baptist, Pentecostal churches and many independent churches baptise only those old enough to confess faith for themselves, usually by immersing the whole person in water. The very word Anabaptist means one who baptises again, a name given by their opponents.

The Lord's Supper, and four understandings

In frequency, practice varies widely. Some Lutheran and Anglican churches celebrate it every week, while some Reformed and Baptist churches celebrate it once a month or once a quarter. As for the calendar, almost every branch keeps Christmas, Holy Week and Easter, while Reformation Day on 31 October belongs to this block alone. Advent and Lent are kept by the Lutheran and Anglican churches, while many other churches do not follow a liturgical calendar.

VIIIThe major branches

The table below lists the major branches in the order in which they appeared, and it should be read with one caution: these are families of churches, not organisations. Within the Baptist family there are dozens of conventions that do not belong to one another, and within the Pentecostal family there are even more. And there are churches that fit neatly into no box, especially the layer of independent churches founded in the twentieth century.

The two Reformed lines need to be set apart a little further, since the table joins them for brevity. Huldrych Zwingli began his work in Zurich in 1519, a full generation before Calvin, and died in battle in 1531 in the conflict at Kappel. Jean Calvin was French, published the Institutio Christianae Religionis in 1536 at just twenty-seven, and then bound most of his life to the city of Geneva. The two differed most clearly in their understanding of the Lord's Supper.

IXAnglicanism, the hardest case to classify

This library places Canterbury Cathedral and Westminster Abbey under Protestantism. That choice needs to be explained at once, because it is a choice made for tidiness, not a verdict, and most Anglicans themselves would not describe themselves in exactly that way.

Historically, Anglicanism is indeed a product of the sixteenth century. It broke from the authority of Rome through the Act of Supremacy of 1534 and took shape through the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559, with the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer. Classifications of world religions usually place Anglicanism within the Protestant block, and Pew Research Center states plainly that its Protestant figure includes Anglicans.

But in its self-understanding, Anglicanism stands somewhere else. A familiar phrase among Anglicans is both Catholic and Reformed, and they present this not as a half-hearted compromise but as a deliberate position, commonly called by the Latin via media, the middle way. They keep bishops in the line of apostolic succession and keep the liturgy, while accepting Scripture as the final authority and accepting the priesthood of all believers.

XStructure, or why there is no single head

The most common question a Vietnamese person asks on hearing about Protestantism is who heads it. The honest answer: no one, and that is not a shortcoming but a direct consequence of the teaching. If Scripture is the final standard and every believer can come directly to God, there is no room for a single living authority standing over the whole block. Instead, Protestant churches are organised in three ways.

As for ministers, every branch has pastors, people trained and ordained to preach and to care for the church. Pastors marry like anyone else, and in many branches today there are also women pastors, though on this point the branches do not agree. A notable common feature is that lay members take part in decisions, through church boards, boards of deacons or general assemblies.

So is there any organisation that links the churches together? There is, but these bodies are forums, not superiors. The World Council of Churches, founded in 1948 in Amsterdam, gathers hundreds of Protestant and Orthodox churches. The Lutheran World Federation, the Anglican Communion, the World Communion of Reformed Churches and the Baptist World Alliance each gather one family of churches. None of them can give orders to its member churches, and a church may withdraw at any time.

XIProtestant churches and the empty cross

Standing in the middle of a Protestant church, the first thing that strikes the eye is the emptiness. No statues of saints along both sides, no dense array of paintings, no tabernacle, no rows of candles before side altars. Many churches have whitewashed walls and clear glass windows that let the light fall straight in. Someone unfamiliar with this may easily think the congregation lacked money or had not finished building. In fact this is a theological intention dating from the sixteenth century.

One caution is needed when visiting the places in this library. Canterbury Cathedral, founded in 597, and Westminster Abbey, with roots going back to around 960, were both built when England still belonged to the Church of Rome, so the Gothic architecture, the tombs and the reliefs there are a pre-Reformation heritage that Anglicanism kept, not the model of a newly built Protestant church. By contrast, the Westerkerk in Amsterdam, built between 1620 and 1631 to a design by Hendrick de Keyser, was designed from the outset for a Reformed congregation.

XIINumber of adherents, and why the figures differ so widely

With Protestantism, the difficulty of counting lies not in a lack of data but in the lack of agreement on whom to count. In the same year, two reputable research organisations can give two figures that differ by more than two hundred million people, simply because they draw the boundaries differently.

Four things that skew the count

A few conclusions. First, the most accurate figure the library can give is a range: from about six hundred million to more than one billion, depending on whether the independent churches are included. Second, by church family, Protestantism is the second largest block of Christianity after Catholicism, but this block has no single organisation that could be set beside the other for comparison. Third, the strongest growth over the past century has been in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and East Asia, no longer in Europe.

XIIIProtestantism in Vietnam

Compared with Catholicism, which has been present on Vietnamese soil since the sixteenth century, Protestantism arrived about four hundred years later. The starting date used both by scholars and by the churches themselves is 1911, and the cradle is Đà Nẵng.

1911 in Tourane

According to material from the Evangelical Church of Vietnam, on 22 May 1911 the missionary R.A. Jaffray, together with two other missionaries, Paul M. Hosler and G. Lloyd Hughes, left Hong Kong by ship, and on 25 May 1911 the three arrived in Tourane, today Đà Nẵng. They bought two plots of land numbered 66 and 67 to serve as the first mission station of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, known in Vietnamese as Hội Truyền giáo Phúc Âm Liên hiệp and commonly abbreviated CMA. There had been scouting journeys before this. The same source records that Jaffray reached the north by way of Lạng Sơn as early as 1898, but a permanent station came only in 1911.

From scattered churches to one organisation

In 1927, the first general assembly met in Đà Nẵng and set up a common organisation for the existing churches. Its name at the time is often recorded as Hội Tin Lành Đông Pháp (the Evangelical Church of French Indochina), and it later became the Evangelical Church of Vietnam (Hội thánh Tin Lành Việt Nam).

On how the organisation came to be two, the sources differ, and the library records both accounts. Some domestic research documents place the split in the mid-1950s, after the Geneva Accords of 1954. Another account, common in church life, ties the formation of the two organisations named North and South to the period after 1975. What both accounts accept: today these are two separate organisations, each with its own charter, its own executive board and its own general assembly.

The two largest organisations

Eleven recognised organisations

A look at the list above shows the wide spectrum described at the start of this page repeated exactly on Vietnamese soil: there is a branch rooted in the CMA, a Baptist branch with two parallel organisations, a Presbyterian branch, a Mennonite branch, that is, descendants of the Anabaptists, and a Pentecostal branch. The 2023 document of the Ban Tôn giáo Chính phủ records more than 1.2 million Protestants nationwide, more than 2,300 clergy and nearly 900 places of worship.

Among the main places of worship, three are often mentioned. Đà Nẵng Protestant Church is tied to the first church, founded in 1911. Hà Nội Protestant Church on Ngõ Trạm street, which grew from a small chapel built around 1920 and was enlarged many times, is the headquarters of the northern organisation. The headquarters of the General Confederation of the southern organisation is at 155 Trần Hưng Đạo, Cầu Ông Lãnh ward, Hồ Chí Minh City. Beyond these, many mountain provinces of the north and the Central Highlands have networks of congregations and meeting points belonging to many different organisations.

XIVThrough the eyes of feng shui

One more point must be made clear, because it distinguishes Protestantism from Catholicism even in matters of building. Ancient Christian tradition had the custom of orienting churches towards the east, signifying turning towards the risen Christ, and Catholicism kept that custom for a long time. Many Protestant branches, especially the Reformed branches, dropped this custom along with many other rites in the sixteenth century, arguing that the orientation of a building is not among the things Scripture teaches. As a result, the orientation of a Protestant church is largely decided by the plot of land and the street.

What takes the place of choosing an orientation

So when orientation is not chosen, what do builders plan for? The answer is quite practical. One, sightlines: every seat must be able to see the pulpit, so many churches use a nearly square floor plan instead of a long rectangle, and add galleries. Two, acoustics: before loudspeakers, having one person speak so that a thousand could hear clearly was a problem of ceilings, materials and distances. Three, light: clear glass replaced stained glass so that believers could read the Bibles in their hands. All three calculations spring from the same point of teaching: the Word preached stands at the centre.

Read through Vietnamese traditional eyes

If a Protestant church is placed within the frame of traditional feng shui, the following points would catch the attention of practitioners, and it bears repeating that this is the library's interpretation. The bright hall. Many Protestant churches have a wide, open forecourt, what the traditional approach calls the bright hall (minh đường), but that forecourt exists because a large congregation needs a place to gather. Water. The Westerkerk stands right beside the Prinsengracht canal, a configuration a geomancer would call sitting on solid ground and facing water (tọa thực hướng thủy), though the real reason is simpler: seventeenth-century Amsterdam was a city built on canals. Brightness and openness. Clear glass, white walls and high ceilings create the feeling that the traditional approach calls a bright qi field. This is where the two ways of seeing meet, because both value brightness and openness, only for different reasons.

XVCommon misunderstandings

The last section gathers the questions the library hears most often. The three biggest slips all come from the same root: the questioner carries a ready-made picture of a hierarchical church and lays it over a block that was never built that way.

?Quick Questions

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