The Protestant Sprit
“The Long Search”, Ronald Eyre (1977)

"The most thrilling thing me for is the discovery that the word ‘Protestant’ has an under layer of meaning, which was always there, but is rarely revealed.  I summarize it as I understand it.

Every idea, every statement, every institution has a tendency to harden up and go dead.  And every human being has a tendency to choose that moment, the death moment, to take the stiffening idea and worship it, whether it’s the idea of the holiness of a man, or the infallibility of a Bible.

In other words, everyman, whether he likes it or not, has the makings of an idolater.  Now it’s possible that in the 16th century the reformers had to attack what they saw as the rigidity in the church they belong to.  And at that moment it may have been right to call them Protestant.

But what happens to the protesters when they in their turn go rigid and create institutions and formulations and cramping dogma?  By rights they forfeit their Protestant label and it’s passed on like a trophy to the next challenger whenever he presents himself, for, say the people who think along these lines, Protestantism is an impulse to keep things moving.  And anyone who builds a shrine around an impulse and claims to have kept it still and courted is deluding himself".