The Reformation

The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century—the beginnings of which are usually associated with the work of Martin Luther (1483–1546)—was really a collection of reformations across Europe. Various reformations of the church, theology, public worship, and even the broader society took place in nations including Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Scotland, and England. Originally intended to reform the Western church from within, the Reformation led to a self-conscious effort to abandon the trappings of Roman Catholicism so that a true church might continue, since the Roman Catholic church had rejected vital theological reforms. Today, the theological principles of the Reformation may be summarized by the five solas—namely, that sinners are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, under the authority of God’s Word alone, and all to the glory of God alone.

Several different events and trajectories of thought made the Protestant Reformation possible. First, plagues, heightened superstition, the discovery of the New World, the spread of Islam, and severe famine encouraged people to ask questions regarding ecclesiastical authority and the traditional understanding of the relationship between secular monarchs and the papacy.

Second, the state of the Western church was in disarray. Not long before the Reformation, power struggles related to the papacy (including a period when several popes vied for office at the same time), clerical simony and nepotism, and the moral corruption of priests and bishops undermined public confidence in church leaders. Leading into the Reformation era, the Western church had also been increasing demands on its members across Europe. Popes and other leaders taught that a right relationship with God required more prayers to the saints, more pilgrimages to the Vatican and to other “holy sites,” more giving of funds, more devotion to relics, and other works. The laity began to feel the weight of these unbiblical practices and were open to questioning their necessity.

Third, during the nearly two centuries preceding the Reformation, an increasing number of cries for reformation went unheeded. Particularly important advocates for reform were John Wycliffe (c. 1330–84) and Jan Hus (c. 1372–1415), who both protested the clerical moral corruption of their day and emphasized the primacy of Scripture and preaching. The followers of these men and other early reformers who died or were put to death by the church did not forget the calls for reform, and the church’s unwillingness to listen in humility alerted others more and more to the need for change.

Fourth, increased learning made it clear that many of the established traditions of the Western church, under the leadership of the pope, were not actually taught by Jesus and the Apostles. With the growing threat of Islam in the East and the fall of Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey) to the Muslims in 1453, many Eastern Christians fled to Western Europe, carrying ancient documents and manuscripts. This, together with a heightened appreciation for the arts, literature, and antiquity, sparked the Renaissance and drove many thinkers to investigate the historical roots of the Christian faith. Renaissance humanism, represented by key figures such as Lorenzo Valla (c. 1407–57) and Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), championed a return to the original sources of the church and Western civilization. Instead of relying on the Latin translation of the Bible known as the Vulgate, theologians and scholars began looking to the original Greek and Hebrew manuscripts of Scripture and reading the church fathers directly. As individuals conducted their study, they increasingly realized that doctrines such as purgatory, transubstantiation, indulgences, the treasury of merit, supreme papal authority, and the propriety of seven sacraments were medieval accretions that lacked biblical warrant.

Finally, the arrival of Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press in the 1440s meant that pamphlets and books could be printed and distributed more rapidly and inexpensively than ever before. This meant that new discoveries and arguments against the unbiblical traditions of the papacy could spread widely and were more difficult to suppress. Protests could no longer be snuffed out or easily limited to specific areas, and many others could hear of them and support them.

These developments made Europe ready for the spark that would ignite the Protestant Reformation. That spark came on October 31, 1517, when Martin Luther—an Augustinian monk and theology professor at the University of Wittenberg, Germany—posted his Ninety-Five Theses to the Castle Church door in Wittenberg. These theses protested Rome’s abuses of power, its understanding of penance, and especially the practice of selling indulgences. Twelve years earlier, in 1505, Luther had entered the monastery through a “bargain” with God for divine safety in a thunderstorm. His orders took him on a pilgrimage to Rome in 1511, where he witnessed firsthand Rome’s moral corruption.

Things began to come to a head when the church commissioned a Dominican friar named Johannes Tetzel (c. 1465–1519) to sell indulgences in Germany to raise money for the rebuilding of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. According to the Roman church’s practice, obtaining an indulgence would reduce the amount of time the purchaser would spend in purgatory. Luther raised serious objections to the sale of indulgences in his theses. Within two weeks of the posting of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, they had been translated (from Latin), printed, and disseminated across Germany; and within two months, across Europe.

Over time, the Reformation principles of the five solas developed in Luther’s writings and teaching and in those of other leading Reformers including Huldrych Zwingli of Switzerland (1484–1531), William Tyndale of England (1494–1536), John Knox of Scotland (1514–72), and John Calvin of France (and later Geneva, Switzerland). Through the work of Zwingli, Knox, Calvin, and others, the Reformed tradition would take on its own particular emphases such as TULIP, the spiritual presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper, and the regulative principle of worship—and it would differentiate itself from Lutheranism as a separate branch of the Protestant Reformation.

Because sixteenth-century Europe did not know the “separation of church and state” that is practiced in Western countries today, the degree to which a particular nation would embrace Protestantism depended largely on what the local monarch believed. Thus, we often speak of the Magisterial Reformation, or that Reformation supported by the civil magistrate. The Reformation in England, Switzerland, Germany, and elsewhere succeeded in part because of the support of princes and kings in those lands. Nations where the rulers supported the papacy remained Roman Catholic, and the Roman Catholic Church eventually responded with its own Counter-Reformation, chiefly expressed at the Council of Trent (1545–63), making the breach between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism irreparable. The Radical Reformation is the name usually given to other reform movements during the Reformation era that wanted change but did not embrace all of the theological principles of the Magisterial Reformation.

The Reformation was truly a watershed moment in the history of Christianity—a recovery of the gospel of Jesus Christ, a reclaiming of worship according to Scripture, and an exaltation of the sovereign grace of God who saves sinners through the life, death, and resurrection of His Son.