A Protestant is a Christian who confesses the Protestant Reformation’s two defining convictions—often summarized as the formal and material principles of the Reformation:
A proto-Protestant, therefore, is a Christian who lived before the Protestant Reformation yet clearly taught, emphasized, or anticipated one or both of these same convictions.
Church history is the providential story of God faithfully preserving His people and His gospel across all ages, never allowing His Church to die or disappear. Protestants reject the common caricature that the true Church vanished after the apostles and was only “revived” in the sixteenth century; rather, they affirm that Christ has always preserved His Church, even amidst periods of institutional corruption or doctrinal distortion.
The early Church is viewed as fundamentally grounded in Scripture, proclaiming salvation by God’s grace through faith in Christ, while the centuries that followed—especially in the medieval period—saw the gradual rise of theological accretions that sometimes obscured—but never extinguished—the gospel.
The Protestant Reformation is therefore understood not as the birth of the Church or the creation of new doctrine, but as a recovery and clarification of apostolic teaching—especially regarding sola Scriptura and sola fide—drawing consciously upon both the Bible and voices from earlier Church history.
In this view, Church history is neither a story of total apostasy nor of uninterrupted purity, but a providential narrative in which God continually reforms His Church by bringing her back to His Word.
No. The Early Church Fathers were not Protestant. But neither were they Roman Catholic. Nor were they Eastern Orthodox. They were part of the early catholic Church—the universal Christian Church before her later divisions. They should therefore be read in their own historical setting, not simply identified with any later tradition.
Sola Scriptura is the teaching that Holy Scripture—the written Word of God—is the Church’s only infallible authority. This does not mean Scripture is the only authority Christians recognize: creeds, councils, and the Church throughout history possess real—yet fallible—authority, and are to be received only insofar as they faithfully echo and expound the teaching of Scripture.
“For I confess to your Charity that I have learned to yield this respect and honour only to the canonical books of Scripture: of these alone do I most firmly believe that the authors were completely free from error.”
- Augustine of Hippo
Sola Fide is the teaching that God justifies sinners by a legal verdict—declaring them righteous solely on the basis of Christ’s righteousness—and that this verdict is received solely through faith in Christ. Faith is not the ground of our acceptance with God; it is the sole instrument by which we receive Christ and His righteousness. In faith, we trust in Christ and what He has done for us rather than in what we do for Him.
Springing from the certainty of salvation that sola fide brings, joyful obedience follows as faith's natural fruit.
“And so we, having been called through his will in Christ Jesus, are not justified through ourselves or through our own wisdom or understanding or piety, or works that we have done in holiness of heart, but through faith, by which the Almighty God has justified all who have existed from the beginning; to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.”
- Clement of Rome
No. These doctrines are not theological novelties of the sixteenth century. They reflect convictions expressed by many Christians well before the Reformation—convictions this website aims to document.
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