The story of the Reformation

A church that needed reform

The church of the late Middle Ages was full of real devotion, and full of old sickness too. Church offices could be bought, many clergy had little training in Scripture, and ordinary believers worshipped in a Latin they did not understand. Calls for reform were nothing new. In the fourteenth century John Wycliffe in England, and in the fifteenth Jan Hus in Bohemia, appealed to the authority of Scripture against abuses in the church.

Around 1500 the humanist scholars raised a different cry: back to the sources. Read the Bible and the Fathers in their own languages. In 1516 Erasmus published the Greek New Testament Erasmus, Novum Instrumentum, and the printing press carried it across Europe within a few years. Scholars began to set the Latin Bible the Western church had used for centuries beside the Greek. Even Jesus' first preaching looked different. When he said "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near" (Matthew 4:17), the Latin wording had often been heard as ‘do penance’, but the Greek verb, metanoeō (μετανοέω), speaks of a turning of the mind and the whole life.

Luther and the righteousness of God

In October 1517 Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar and professor of Bible at Wittenberg, put forward ninety-five theses for a debate on the power of indulgences Luther, The Ninety-five Theses. The very first thesis says that when our Lord called us to repent, he meant the whole life of believers to be one of repentance. Luther was objecting to preaching that promised relief from punishment in exchange for money, and he meant to start a discussion within the church. Printed and reprinted, the theses were soon read all over Germany.

The deeper change came from Luther's study of the Bible. Years later he recalled how he had struggled with Paul's phrase ‘the righteousness of God’. He had understood it only as the justice by which God punishes sinners, and he could not love a God like that. Then he saw what Paul was saying:

I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, first to the Jew, then to the Greek. 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 1:16-17

Paul is quoting the prophet Habakkuk: "the righteous will live by faith" (Habakkuk 2:4). The righteousness revealed in the gospel is not a standard we must reach before God will accept us. It is God's gift, received by faith. Luther later wrote that when he grasped this he felt born again, as though the gates of paradise had opened Luther, Preface to the Latin Writings. Historians still debate exactly when this happened, but its effect was immense. Matthew Henry, commenting on the same verse, puts the point simply: "Faith is all in all, both in the beginning and progress of Christian life" Matthew Henry. The doctrine itself is taught in the doctrine course's lesson ‘Faith and justification’.

In 1521 Luther stood before the Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms and was told to recant. He answered that unless he was convinced by the testimony of Scripture or by clear reason, he could not, for his conscience was captive to the word of God. The famous words ‘Here I stand’ appear in early printed accounts, but we cannot be sure he said them in exactly that form.

Zurich, Geneva and the Reformed churches

Meanwhile another stream was rising in Switzerland. From 1519 Huldrych Zwingli, preacher at the Great Minster in Zurich, preached through Matthew's Gospel from the beginning, chapter by chapter. Preaching straight through a book of the Bible became a mark of Reformed pulpits. In 1523 he set out sixty-seven articles for a public disputation, confessing Christ as the only head of the church and the only mediator Zwingli, The Sixty-seven Articles.

In 1529 Luther and Zwingli met at Marburg. They agreed on fourteen articles and most of the fifteenth, but parted over how Christ's body is present in the Lord's Supper The Marburg Articles. From then on the Reformation grew as two families, Lutheran and Reformed, close kin who did not always find it easy to live together. After Zwingli was killed in battle in 1531, Heinrich Bullinger led the church of Zurich for more than forty years. His Second Helvetic Confession (1566) was received by Reformed churches far beyond Switzerland The Second Helvetic Confession.

John Calvin, a Frenchman, published the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536 and was persuaded that same year to stay in Geneva. Expelled for a time, he returned in 1541 and served the Genevan church for the rest of his life, revising the Institutes again and again until the final edition of 1559 Calvin, Institutes. Geneva became a refuge and a school for believers fleeing persecution, who went home carrying what they had learned. One of them was John Knox, whose Scots Confession of 1560, written with others, became the standard of the Scottish church The Scots Confession. So the Reformed faith spread: among the Huguenots of France, in the Netherlands, in Hungary and in Scotland, and among the English Puritans, who longed to see the Church of England more thoroughly reformed.

Renewing the one church

The Reformers did not set out to found a new church. They meant to renew the one church of Christ by the word of God. When Cardinal Sadoleto wrote to the people of Geneva in 1539 urging them to return to Rome, Calvin replied that the Reformation had invented nothing new; it was a return to the faith of the ancient church Calvin, Reply to Sadoleto. That is why the Reformed churches confess the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds and read the Fathers with love. The church's foundation is no Reformer, but Christ.

For no one can lay a foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ.

1 Corinthians 3:11

The Catholic Church undertook its own reform. The Council of Trent (1545–1563) tightened the discipline and training of the clergy, called for seminaries, and set out Catholic teaching on justification and the sacraments Council of Trent, Decree on Justification. Catholics regard the Reformation as a painful division of the church's unity. Yet the Second Vatican Council acknowledged that people on both sides were to blame for the separation Second Vatican Council, Unitatis Redintegratio, and today the Catholic Church and many Protestant churches continue in dialogue. What the two traditions share and where they differ is explored in How do Catholics and Protestants differ?.

Division is nothing to boast of. The Reformers quarrelled among themselves, and politics and power were tangled up in their story. A saying traced to the Dutch Reformed churches of the seventeenth century, ‘the church reformed, always being reformed’, reminds the Reformed churches to place themselves first under the word they preach. For how the churches came apart, see Why are there so many churches and denominations?. The confessions the Reformed churches wrote are the subject of the next lesson.

Practice