AHC: More successful Protestant Reformation in Europe

JJohnson

Banned
The challenge being:
*Germany in its eventual 1871 borders, is majority Protestant, even in the South.
*"German Austria" is majority Protestant
*France has at least 1/4 Protestant population
*Poland is majority Protestant
*Czech Republic is majority Protestant
 

JJohnson

Banned
I'm not sure of any PoD, just the conditions that the Protestant Reformation happens, with the qualities of:
*priests can marry
*no Mary worship or saint worship
*no indulgences
*no monks/nuns
*no Apocrypha, purgatory, pagan-influenced practices (but keeping Christmas traditions like most Protestants do), etc.
*use the common language of the people
*all the current items in Protestantism (5 solae)

So, the same Protestantism, it just spreads more. Maybe the Hussites are more successful in the Czech areas, or still fail but move to southern German lands and help influence them to break away from the Catholic church?
 
I am glad you bring the Hussites up :) You might wish to follow the timeline I´ve just been starting on them (but I haven`t reached the PoD yet); see my signature.

With a Hussite-wank (which I hope I can keep myself from writing), a lot of the above could be achieved, but:
1.) not necessarily the Five Solae, or even just the Three Solae;
2.) and you ought to be aware that a strong Early Radical Reformation is going to mess with Europe`s map big time.

I have loads of ideas for wanking the Hussites. Since I try not to include all of them in my timeline, I´ll just post them:
Prevent Lipany
Hussites fighting for Svitrigaila and securing him the throne of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in exchange for Hussite-friendly parts of Poland
Hussites in Southern Hungary (Szeremseg) and the Buday Nagy Antal revolt holding out longer until Sigismund and then Albert dies and Hungary is in the middle of a succession crisis
Friedrich Reiser inciting a peasant revolt in the arch-bishopric of Würzburg in the late 1430s which spreads to Swabia, Alsatia, Vorarlberg and other Habsburg-influenced or -owned lands (possibly linked with a Swiss-wank)
Burgundy turning (moderately) Hussite and separating itself more from France, then England siding with moderately Hussite Burgundy once again because of the 100 Years War
Hussite collusion with the Ottomans to eliminate the threat of Hungary
...
 
*no Apocrypha, purgatory, pagan-influenced practices (but keeping Christmas traditions like most Protestants do), etc.
In retrospect, I am surprised the Deuterocanon was dumped by the Protestants wholesale. It really does not contain contrary doctrines to Protestantism. Honestly, I think that the Renaissance hard-on for original languages meant that the Deuterocanon was seen as chopped liver. To quote myself:

Many men during the Renaissance adhered to Jerome’s position in his introduction to First Kings that books not found in Hebrew were not originally Scriptures. John Wycliff, in his translation of the Bible, copiously follows Jerome’s thought and notes, differentiating between the Greek and Hebrew texts of Esther for that reason. Luther in making his translation of the Bible, and the Protestant Confessions which named the books of Scripture, were products of Renaissance Humanist thought in which the study of Greek and Hebrew had new life breathed into them.
https://christianreformedtheology.com/2016/04/16/catholic-myths-about-the-deuterocanon/

And again;

Now, space does not allow me to go into detail here, but the Protestant Canon is mainly the result of a fundamental misunderstanding of how one determines manuscript accuracy during the Renaissance. These Renaissance men reasoned that the contemporary manuscripts of the day in the “original languages” were markedly more accurate than the Greek and Latin translations common to the day, because, heck, they were in the original languages! There is certainly a logic to it–the original ideas of the writers of Scripture can be obscured, if not lost in translation. Further, passages and even whole books alien to the people who still speak those languages must have never been recognized by them, right?!?

When we put this armchair scholar sort of reasoning aside, we can see that the methodological error of the Renaissance writers stems from the fact that they were not nearly as well trained in archaeology and textual criticism as scholars are today. Concerning archaeology, for example, manuscript discoveries have shown that the Septuagint accords much more closely to the earliest Hebrew Manuscripts than the Masoretic Text.

As for textual criticism, scholars now have a much more in-depth way of searching for original renderings of manuscripts. Serious scholars don’t simply stop at the Masoretic Text like the Renaissance men and declare that this is what the Hebrew must have always said. In fact, they make judgments based upon several factors.

For one, they look at the age of manuscripts and try to find out when ancient textual variants arose, the most ancient renderings perhaps being the most accurate. Further, they look at early quotations in the church fathers and from the many translations that exist (Greek, Arabic, Syriac, Vulgate, Old Latin, etcetera). This further helps us trace the history of not only textual variants preserved in each ancient tradition, but also decipher the meanings of words across languages instead of slavishly trusting a medieval Jew’s rendering of a certain word.

In fact, the Masoretic Text might not even be the best place to look for what the Scripture of the ancient Jews looked like. Many scholars actually will look at the Vulgate because the Vulgate preserves, in Latin, an earlier textual Hebrew tradition than the medieval Masoretic Text does.

So, the modern Biblical scholar is much more well rounded in his approach to manuscripts than the Renaissance scholar was. After all, the Renaissance scholar was making it up as he goes because the professional discipline of history did not exist. Today, we have had centuries to see if certain methodologies actually bear themselves out in manuscript discoveries, which gives us greater confidence in scholarly conclusions. This is especially important given the fact that as early as the 2nd century AD (Justin Martyr in Dialogue with Trypho), we had reports of the Jews corrupting Christological passages of the Scripture. Hence, being that we know that corrupt traditions existed as early as the 2nd century, it is incumbent upon us to study textual variants and come to an understanding, assessing for probability, which variants are the most accurate.

So, in retrospect, the Renaissance man’s desire to “go back to the basics” by slavishly relying upon the original languages was really not all that strong of a position, intellectually. In many ways, we persist in Renaissance-era error when we do not at least consider the Deuterocanon on its merits and simply discount it because “the Jews do.”
https://christianreformedtheology.com/2016/02/04/protestant-myths-about-the-deuterocanon/
 
One thing about a Hussite-based reformation, though:
There is no guarantee at all that Northern Germany and Scandinavia go reformist... If the thing spreads across Southern Germany, the Alps, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Transilvania etc. and maybe also to the Netherlands and to England, where there were quite a few Lollards around anyway, the North may want to distance itself from it (because the Hansa and Denmark were not getting along very well with the Slavic kingdoms, with the Dutch and with England, for example).
 
I'm not sure of any PoD, just the conditions that the Protestant Reformation happens, with the qualities of:
*priests can marry
*no Mary worship or saint worship
*no indulgences
*no monks/nuns
*no Apocrypha, purgatory, pagan-influenced practices (but keeping Christmas traditions like most Protestants do), etc.
*use the common language of the people
*all the current items in Protestantism (5 solae)

So, the same Protestantism, it just spreads more. Maybe the Hussites are more successful in the Czech areas, or still fail but move to southern German lands and help influence them to break away from the Catholic church?

Question: do you consider Scandinavian practices to be pagan-influenced? On the one hand, people here were solidly Evangelical Lutheran, until they all stopped going to church. On the other hand, Scandinavia is much more explicit about its pagan heritage. The nominal address of where I work is the intersection of Odin Street and Valhalla Road. The word for Christmas is Jul (cf. Yule).
 
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