I think of us as the weird middle child of Christianity, no one understands us and everybody hates us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRzhflMkGLg
HERE'S THE DEAL.....
When I was an undergrad... in my senior year.... I suddenly realized that I lacked 4 credits in core requirements. I could fulfill that with a course in history, and since I like history, I thought that's what I'd do. But I did not want to take yet another general World History or US History class, but there was an upper division class that interested me, and I got the prof's okay to take it. It was called "Revolution."
In this class, we studied many revolutions in history - some you'd never heard of, some you've studied (the Russian ones, the French Revolution, our American Revolution). An interesting aspect is that Revolution nearly always goes "full circle", they tend to "overshoot". Those that get somewhere have so much momentum that they keep going. What followed the French Revolution was in many aspects just like that it revolted against, Lenin was arguably worse than Czar Nicholas. What is very rare about the American Revolution is that this did not happen (we have George Washington in large part for this).
I could not help but think of the Reformation. Yeah, it has much of the marks of a Revolution, but it was a conservative one (in some ways, more reactionary). There was a LOT of momentum - and it did threaten the Lutheran Reformation (the peasent revolt is just one example) but we have Luther himself (and many who followed him) for keeping the Reformation from overshooting and going full circle; Luther (like Washington) was able to put the breaks on and preserve good (yeah - Pietism and later Liberalism were terrible mistakes).
But this did not happen elsewhere. Even Calvinism morphed into radical offshoots and reinventions (eg Calvin accepted some aspect of the Sacraments and of Real Presence but these were changed). Anabaptists and Zwingli came along quickly. They are early examples of the Revolution over-shooting, going full circle. IMO, the Anabaptists and Zwingli are in some ways WORSE than the Catholicism Luther rebelled against..... when I see what some "Evangelicals" write about justification, what we see from some Arminianists, IMO the Catholicism of Luther's day looks better. And yes, Luther decried these radicalizations, these "gone full circle" these "overshoots" - but it got much worse after his death.
Lutheranism and Anglicanism (in their traditional, conservative forms) are wonderful examples of good revolution. Ones that did not go full-circle, ones that did not "overshoot" and end up with something worse! Together with ORIGINAL Calvinism, they are often grouped as "First Way Protestantism." But much of what we encounter in the USA today is not of that.
This often places us in an odd position... radical Protestants think we look and sound too Catholic, Catholics think we look and sound too Protestant... but neither seems to understand. Ah.... Lininists and Czarists understood each other because they were pretty much the same thing. When I was young.... and at a different site..... a staffer (who had a doctorate in Reformation history) told me, "in war, the worse place for anyone to be is in the no-man's land, the middle ground; both sides will shoot at you and neither side will protect you."
- Josiah
