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Proto-Protestantism, also called pre-Protestantism, refers to individuals and movements that propagated various ideas later associated with Protestantism before 1517, which historians usually regard as the starting year for the Reformation era. The relationship between medieval sects and Protestantism is an issue that has been debated by historians.[3]
Successionism is the further idea that these proto-Protestants are evidence of a continuous hidden church of true believers, despite their manifest differences in belief.
Before Martin Luther and John Calvin, some leaders tried to reform Christianity. The main forerunners of the Protestant Reformation were Peter Waldo, John Wycliffe and Jan Hus.[4] Martin Luther himself saw it important to have forerunners of his views, and thus he praised people like Girolamo Savonarola, Lorenzo Valla, Wessel Gansfort and other groups as prefiguring some of his views.[5][6][7][8][9]
Pre-reformation movements that have been argued, with differing degrees of anachronism and accuracy, as having individual ideas later espoused by some Protestant groups include:
John Foxe (c. 1563) was the first English Protestant author to defend Protestantism from charges of novelty by claiming, in S.J. Barnett's words, "the continuity of a proto-Protestant piety since apostolic times": in England's case this included a national first-century conversion to Christianity from a visiting Joseph of Arimathea.[71] This has no historical basis.
According to Brethren missionary Edmund Hamer Broadbent in The Pilgrim Church (1531), over much of the Christian era, many Christian sects, cults and movements foreshadowed the teachings of what later became the Non-conformist Protestant movements.[72]
Baptist successionism postulates an unbroken lineage of churches which have held beliefs similar to those of current Baptists. Groups often included in this lineage include the Montanists, Novationists, Donatists, Paulicians, Albigenses, Waldenses, Petrobrusians, Arnoldists, Henricians, Hussites (partly), Lollards (partly) and Anabaptists. Baptist successionism proposes that groups such as Bogomils or Paulicians were Baptist in doctrine instead of Gnostic.[73]
The idea of proto-protestants has been criticized as a diverse category whose only commonality is a perceived anti-Catholicism rather than any adherence to the Five Solae; the idea of successionism (or the hidden church) has further been criticized as lacking historical evidence, linking unrelated groups (e.g. the Manichaean Bogomil "Cathars", the Albigensian "Cathars", the semi-monastic Beguine movement, the antipapal fraticelli friars, the Trinitarian and eucharistic Waldenses,and the Lollards) and as fabricated to serve a polemical need.[71]
For the Catholic denial of the antiquity of the Waldensians and assertion of Petrine apostolicity, "the ideal parry to Rome would have been to identify apostolic origins for the Waldenses, but the evidence for such a claim was thin to nonexistent, a factor often necessarily limiting arguments in favor of apostolic origins to rather vague assertions."
— S.J.Barnett[71]