Protestants understood themselves to be reforming an imperfect thing, not resurrecting a dead thing or creating a new thing. On this basis they resisted terms like new or novelty to describe their historical position. The Reformed theologian Francis Turretin put it like this: “It is one thing to purge an ancient doctrine of its corruption and recall men to it; another to devise a new doctrine not as yet delivered and propose it for belief. The former, not the latter, was done by the Reformers.”
