Six princes of the Holy Roman Empire and rulers of fourteen Imperial Free Cities, who issued a protest (or dissent) against the edict of the Diet of Speyer (1529), were the first individuals to be called Protestants. The edict reversed c… 展开

Many experts have proposed criteria to determine whether a Christian denomination should be considered part of Protestantism. A common consensus approved by most of them is that if a Christian denomi… 展开

Many of the individual ideas that were taken up by various reformers had historical pre-cursors; however, calling them proto-reformers is controversial, as often their theology also had components that are not associated with l… 展开

Unlike mainstream Lutheran, Calvinist and Zwinglian movements, the Radical Reformation, which had no state sponsorship, generally abandoned the idea of the "Church visible" as distinct from the "Church invisible… 展开