Confession

[originally posted on my teaching blog, History Survey, on 6/24/2008]

When talking about Protestantism and Catholicism in European history, we do not talk about different religions. Protestants and Catholics were all Christians, after all, even if their leaders often made war on one another in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Instead we talk about different "confessions." This term stems from the sixteenth century, when reformers drafted confessions of their faith. See, for example, the Augsburg Confession from 1530, an early statement of Lutheran beliefs.

On a related note, historians sometimes use the term "confessionalization" to refer to the gradual process by which the confessions developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The term is useful insofar as it took time to translate the religious disputes and decisions of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations into concrete practices in everyday life.

By the way, do you know why I refer to the "Protestant and Catholic Reformations" instead of the "Reformation and Counter-Reformation"? And do you know where the term "Protestant" comes from?