The Reformation

Renewing the church by the Word

The late medieval church knew deep devotion, but also old sicknesses. Church offices could be bought, indulgences remitting the penalties of sin were sold, and most worshippers heard the liturgy in a Latin they did not understand. John Wyclif and Jan Hus had already called for reform, and the humanists had opened the way back to the Bible in its original languages. The Reformation is usually dated from October 1517, when Martin Luther, a professor of Bible at Wittenberg, put forward ninety-five theses for a debate on indulgences Luther, Ninety-five Theses.

The heart of the matter, though, was not indulgences but the gospel. Luther later recalled how, wrestling with Romans 1:17, he came to see that the righteousness of God is not a righteousness we must offer him but a gift received by faith:

For the gospel reveals the righteousness of God that comes by faith from start to finish, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”

Romans 1:17

From this came the Reformation's convictions. Sinners are justified not by works but by grace, through faith, for Christ's sake (see justification). Scripture is the supreme authority, above the church's traditions, popes and councils. Every baptized believer is a priest before God (see the priesthood of all believers). Later generations summed these up as the five solas. The Reformers translated the Bible into the people's languages, led worship in the common tongue, and taught children and adults with catechisms. They did not mean to found a new church: Calvin defended the Reformation as a return to the faith of the ancient church Calvin, Reply to Sadoleto.

Many branches

The movement soon divided into families. The Lutherans set out their faith in the Augsburg Confession (1530). In Switzerland, through Zwingli, Bullinger and Calvin in Geneva, the Reformed churches grew and spread to France, the Netherlands, Scotland and Hungary; at Marburg in 1529 Luther and Zwingli had parted over how Christ is present in the Lord's Supper. In England, after Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1534, Thomas Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer and, under Elizabeth I, the Thirty-Nine Articles shaped the Anglican way. The Anabaptists, who began baptizing believers on confession of faith in Zurich in 1525, formed the ‘Radical Reformation’, breaking with the state churches altogether. The name ‘Protestant’ comes from the protest lodged by evangelical princes and cities at the Diet of Speyer in 1529.

How the Reformation is seen

Evangelicals remember the Reformation as a work of God that recovered the gospel of grace and the authority of Scripture. They also see it, in a phrase that later arose among the Reformed, as a church always to be reformed by the Word: not a finished event but a continuing call. Its foundation is no Reformer, for "no one can lay a foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ" (1 Corinthians 3:11).

The Catholic Church sees the Reformation as a breach of the church's unity. It undertook its own reform at the Council of Trent (1545–1563), which renewed the training and discipline of clergy and defined Catholic teaching, and new orders such as the Jesuits arose. The Second Vatican Council acknowledged that people on both sides were to blame for the divisions Vatican II, Unitatis Redintegratio, and in 1999 Catholics and Lutherans issued a joint declaration on justification Joint Declaration. The Orthodox churches stood outside this Western quarrel.

The Reformation has its shadows. Protestants divided among themselves; Anabaptists were persecuted by Catholics and Protestants alike; and wars in which faith and politics were entangled bloodied Europe until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The story is told in the lesson The story of the Reformation; see also How do Catholics and Protestants differ?