48 Fun Facts About Protestantism

To what did Luther famously nail his Ninety-five Theses?

A church door: historians still debate whether Luther posted them at all, but he did send copies to the Archbishop of Mainz, who forwarded them to Rome.

The first people to be called Protestants issued a protest against the edict of which 1529 assembly?

Diet of Speyer: its Catholic majority revoked a 1526 ruling that let each prince decide how to treat Luther's followers, so the reforming rulers lodged a formal protest.

Martin Luther later said a 1505 thunderstorm made him abandon his university studies in which subject?

Law: he vowed to become a monk if he survived, and his father, who had wanted a lawyer for a son, was furious.

Before his break with Rome, Luther belonged to which religious order?

Augustinian: Johann von Staupitz, his superior in the order, pushed the brooding young monk to earn a doctorate and teach theology at Wittenberg.

Luther's Ninety-five Theses attacked which church practice?

Sale of indulgences: the friar Johann Tetzel was selling them in towns near Wittenberg to help pay for rebuilding St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

Which pope excommunicated Luther in January 1521?

Leo X: when the pope's 1520 bull gave Luther time to recant, Luther publicly burned it at Wittenberg, and the excommunication followed weeks later.

At which 1521 assembly did Emperor Charles V condemn Luther as an outlaw?

Diet of Worms: Luther refused to recant there, by tradition saying 'Here I stand', and the emperor's edict ordered his writings to be burned.

In which castle did Luther hide and translate the New Testament into German?

Wartburg: Luther lived there incognito as a knight called Junker Jörg, growing out his hair and a beard while he worked on the translation.

Luther's wife Katharina von Bora had been what before their marriage?

A nun: in 1523 Luther arranged for a herring merchant to smuggle her and other nuns out of their convent, which was a crime at the time.

Which Catholic theologian debated Martin Luther and Andreas Karlstadt at Leipzig in 1519?

Johann Eck: a year after the Leipzig debate he went to Rome and helped compose the papal bull that threatened Luther with excommunication.

Who was the principal author of the 1530 Augsburg Confession?

Philipp Melanchthon: when the emperor's theologians rejected much of it in a Confutation, he answered with a long defence, the Apology of the Augsburg Confession.

Which English Nonconformist preacher wrote the allegory 'The Pilgrim's Progress'?

John Bunyan: a tinker by trade, he spent 12 years in jail because he refused to promise that he would stop preaching.

Which event at a Zurich printer's workshop in 1522 is considered the start of the Swiss Reformation?

The Affair of the Sausages: the printer Christoph Froschauer served sausages to guests during Lent and was arrested.

At the 1529 Marburg Colloquy, Luther and the Swiss reformers could not agree on what?

The Real Presence: Philip of Hesse called the meeting to build a Protestant alliance, but Luther took 'This is my body' literally while the Swiss saw a symbolic rite.

Which reformer died on the battlefield in 1531 when Catholic cantons attacked Zurich?

Huldrych Zwingli: Zurich and Bern had cut off grain and salt to five Catholic cantons, and that food embargo drove them to declare war.

John Calvin led the Reformation in which city?

Geneva: its council expelled Calvin in 1538, but he returned in 1541 expecting to stay six months, and stayed for the rest of his life.

Which Czech reformer was burned at the stake in 1415, a century before Luther's protest?

Jan Hus: he travelled to the Council of Constance under the emperor's promise of safe conduct, but was declared a heretic and burned anyway.

What is the title of Calvin's seminal work of theology?

Institutes of the Christian Religion: Calvin wrote its first edition partly as a defence of persecuted French Protestants, addressed to the king of France.

Which Spaniard was burned at the stake in 1553 after Calvin denounced his view of the Trinity?

Michael Servetus: he had already escaped a Catholic heresy trial in France, whose judges had to settle for burning him in effigy.

Which Methodist minister founded the Salvation Army after starting a mission in London's East End?

William Booth: his mission fed and housed the poor, and in 1878 he renamed it and organised it on military lines, with himself as general.

Presbyterianism takes its name from what?

Government by elders: when Charles I tried to force English-style worship and church rule on Scotland, many Scots signed the 1638 National Covenant against it.

Which Scottish reformer spent 1547 to 1549 as a prisoner rowing in French galleys?

John Knox: he had joined the Protestant garrison holding St Andrews Castle after Cardinal Beaton's murder, and was captured when French forces took it.

Which archbishop declared Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon void in 1533?

Thomas Cranmer: under Mary I he signed recantations of his Protestant faith, but on the day he was burned he publicly took them back.

The first Book of Common Prayer was published in 1549 under which king?

Edward VI: within three years it was replaced by a far more Protestant 1552 revision.

Which statement of Church of England doctrine was finalised in 1571?

Thirty-nine Articles: Oxford made its students sign them, so for centuries anyone who rejected the Church of England's doctrine was barred.

Which South African churchman won the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize for opposing apartheid?

Desmond Tutu: after apartheid ended, he chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which could grant amnesty to abusers who confessed in full.

William Tyndale reportedly vowed that one day which humble worker would know more Scripture than a learned cleric?

A ploughboy: when the Bishop of London refused to back his translation, Tyndale left England, and his New Testament was printed abroad and smuggled home.

Which pastor and theologian was hanged by the Nazis in April 1945 for his part in the resistance?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: he had accepted an invitation to teach in New York in 1939, but returned to Germany within weeks to share its ordeal.

The King James Bible grew out of a 1604 conference at which royal palace?

Hampton Court: James backed a new translation there partly because the marginal notes in a popular rival Bible questioned the authority of kings.

Which Lutheran composer spent his last 27 years as cantor of Leipzig's St Thomas Church?

Johann Sebastian Bach: Leipzig offered the post first to Telemann and then to Christoph Graupner, and turned to Bach only when both stayed put.

The St Bartholomew's Day massacre of Huguenots began days after which event in Paris?

A royal wedding: many Huguenot nobles were in Paris for it, and the killing began with their military leader, Admiral Coligny.

Which king signed the Edict of Nantes granting Huguenots rights in 1598?

Henry IV: he had been a Protestant himself before turning Catholic in 1593, a move widely seen as securing the crown, and Louis XIV later revoked the edict.

Parliament called the Westminster Assembly during which conflict?

English Civil War: the Assembly's Confession was meant for the Church of England, but the 1660 Restoration made that church episcopal again.

Many Mayflower Pilgrims had lived in exile in which country?

Netherlands: they had settled in Leiden, and hard living and fear that their children were becoming Dutch were among their reasons for leaving.

In 1534 radical Anabaptists seized which German city, proclaiming it the New Jerusalem?

Münster: after the city fell, its leaders were executed and their bodies displayed in iron cages hung from St. Lambert's Church tower.

Which former Catholic priest from Friesland led peaceful Anabaptists?

Menno Simons: men who sheltered him were executed, but he was never caught and died in Holstein.

What do the Amish call the teenage years before choosing baptism?

Rumspringa: because the youths are not yet baptised, they are not under the church's authority, though many still keep to traditional Amish ways.

George Fox wrote that a judge nicknamed his followers Quakers after Fox told him to tremble at what?

The word of the Lord: Fox was jailed for blasphemy at Derby in 1650, though 'Quaker' was already an insult for foreign sects that shook in worship.

Baptists are distinguished by baptising only believers by what method?

Total immersion: the first Baptists poured water, and immersion took hold only decades later, in the 1640s.

The Southern Baptist Convention split from northern Baptists in 1845 over what issue?

Slavery: 150 years later, in 1995, the convention passed a resolution apologising for its forebears' defence of slavery and for its record on race.

Methodism derives from the teachings of which Anglican cleric?

John Wesley: he never left the Church of England, remaining an Anglican cleric until his death even as his movement drifted away from it.

In 1738, Methodism's founder felt his heart 'strangely warmed' at a meeting in which London street?

Aldersgate: someone was reading from Luther's preface to Romans at the time, and Methodists still mark 24 May as Aldersgate Day.

Who preached 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God' at Enfield, Connecticut, in 1741?

Jonathan Edwards: weeks after becoming president of the College of New Jersey, now Princeton, he died from a smallpox inoculation.

What is the technical term for the speaking in tongues prized in Pentecostal worship?

Glossolalia: early Pentecostal leader Charles Parham believed the tongues were real foreign languages, so missionaries would not need to learn them.

The Azusa Street Revival that launched global Pentecostalism began in 1906 in which city?

Los Angeles: black and white worshippers mixed there at the height of Jim Crow, but the movement it launched later divided along racial lines.

In Acts, what did some onlookers accuse the apostles of being at Pentecost?

Drunk: Peter replied that they could not be, since it was only nine in the morning, and quoted the prophet Joel.

Which sociologist argued, in essays published in 1904 and 1905, that Protestant values helped give rise to modern capitalism?

Max Weber: he argued that the Calvinist belief that God had already chosen the saved drove believers to seek signs of grace in disciplined work.

Which of the solae did Luther champion by adding 'alone' to Romans 3:28?

Sola fide: Catholic critics protested that the word isn't in Paul's text, and he defended the addition in his 1530 Open Letter on Translating.