Christianity's Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution -- Essay

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Christianity's Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution -- a History Sixteenth Century Twenty-First

With Christianity's Dangerous Idea -- The Protestant Revolution: A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First, author Alister McGrath provides a fairly comprehensive chronicle of Protestantism from its earliest roots to present day conceptions. McGrath is a prominent theologian and priest in the United Kingdom and the author of several books, many of which detail some aspect of Protestantism. In this particular volume, he presents a largely unbiased account of the primary notion that spawned this religion and examines its myriad applications, with varying degrees of success, throughout the ensuing years. This approach is both Christianity's strength and its weakness: with so many different epochs, ideas, and people covered, which McGrath should be rewarded for, he cannot devote any considerable length of time to them.

Although the book is divided into three different sections, they all rotate around the conception that Protestantism was founded by Martin Luther largely on the principle that intermediaries (such as the Catholic Church) are not necessary to understand and interpret both the Bible and its Christian tenets, and that anyone can interpret these teachings and apply them with a relevance to their own lives.

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Or, Protestantism is "the dangerous idea that every individual Christian may go back to… Christ and the Bible…and reformulate, revise, and adapt the historic faith to fit his own culture and setting, to his own understanding" (Battle, no date). McGrath's manual is divided into three sections all of which provide various evidence of this principle. The first details the European beginnings of this movement and the events that spawned them. The second draws various parallels among common Protestant beliefs and the reasons for them, while the final section, which is the most interesting, details contemporary notions and applications of this religion in the Southern Hemisphere.

One extremely positive aspect of this manuscript is that McGrath is able to demonstrate the central notion of his manuscript fairly convincingly. The uniformity and rigid adherence to the Catholic Church, and its various forms of debauchery in the 16th century, spawned the idea that such an entity was not truly needed. To that extent, the author proves that the….....

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"Christianity's Dangerous Idea The Protestant Revolution --", 24 September 2012, Accessed.14 May. 2025,
https://www.aceyourpaper.com/essays/christianity-dangerous-idea-protestant-82250