After the Reformation: How Protestant Beliefs Divided Over the Supper, Grace, the Spirit, Church Order and Scripture

Luther held to a real, bodily presence of Christ in, with and under the bread and wine against Zwingli, and their failure to agree at the Marburg Colloquy of 1529 permanently divided the Reformation. He also refused to explain the presence by a change of substance.

The Synod of Dort answered the Remonstrants in 1619 with five doctrines, later remembered as TULIP. They are best read as point by point rebuttals, since Calvin himself never listed them.

This is the other side of Dort. The Remonstrants set out five articles in 1610 holding that Christ died for all and that election rests on foreseen faith, with prevenient grace restoring the freedom that sin destroyed.

Wesley carried the Arminian line into Methodism with his teaching of perfect love rather than flawless behaviour. Reformed theology rejects it, holding that sin remains in the believer until death.

The American holiness movement made a second work of grace distinct, and Pentecostalism inherited that pattern after the Azusa Street revival of 1906. Classical Pentecostals hold that speaking in tongues is the initial evidence, which charismatics in other denominations do not require.

Continuationists hold that prophecy, healing and tongues were never withdrawn, and the charismatic renewal spread this from the 1960s into Catholic, Anglican and mainline congregations. Cessationists answer that the gifts ended with the completion of the canon.

Elizabeth I's settlement produced the Thirty-nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer so that Protestants and traditionalists could both use them. Anglicans still dispute what the middle is between, which is why Anglo-Catholic, evangelical and liberal wings coexist.

Government by bishops as successors of the apostles is the earliest attested form, with a single bishop in each city by the early second century. Rome declared Anglican ordinations null in 1896, a judgement Anglicans dispute.

Calvin at Geneva and Knox in Scotland developed rule by elders in session, presbytery and general assembly, later codified in the Westminster standards of the 1640s. Authority is connectional, since a presbytery may overrule a congregation.

Authority here rests in the gathered local church, which calls its own ministers and answers to no bishop or synod. English Separatists worked it out, the Puritans carried it to New England, and it is the normal government of Baptist and most nondenominational churches.

George Fox taught in the 1650s that Christ has come to teach his people himself, so that God speaks to each person without priest, sacrament or creed. Friends took early positions on oaths, slavery and women preaching, and were imprisoned for them.

Quakers practise no water baptism and no bread and wine, because the reality the signs point to is immediate and inward. This is the far end of the Supper debate that opened the trail, and it sits with their silent unprogrammed meeting.

Inerrancy is a modern formulation, sharpened in nineteenth-century Princeton theology and American fundamentalism and codified in the Chicago Statement of 1978. Many Catholic, Orthodox and mainline scholars hold only the weaker claim of infallibility in matters of faith and salvation.