What was the Reformation?

Question 13001.

The Protestant Reformation was the sixteenth-century movement that recovered the gospel of justification by faith and, in the process, broke Western Christendom apart. That sentence contains both the glory and the tragedy of it, and any honest account has to hold the two together.

I am a Baptist, which means my own spiritual ancestors were persecuted by both sides. That gives me a slightly odd vantage point, grateful for what was recovered and unwilling to romanticise the men who recovered it.

What the Protestant Reformation actually was

It is easy to describe the Protestant Reformation as a protest against corruption, and corruption there certainly was. But indulgence selling, immoral clergy and papal politics had been complained about for centuries without producing anything like this. What made the sixteenth century different was a theological discovery rather than a moral complaint.

The discovery was about how a sinner is put right with God. Luther had been taught that the righteousness of God was the standard by which God judges, and he hated the phrase because he knew he could not meet it. Reading Romans, and Romans 1:16-17 in particular, he came to see that it is a righteousness God gives rather than demands, received by faith, and he said afterwards that he felt himself reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise.

Everything else follows from that. If righteousness is received by faith, then the machinery of merit, penance, purgatory and priestly mediation is not simply corrupt, it is unnecessary. The Protestant Reformation was a rediscovery of the gospel, and its consequences ran through worship, church government, education and politics because the gospel touches all of them.

The world before 1517

It helps to picture what an ordinary believer faced. The Bible was in Latin, which most people could not read, and translating it into the vernacular could get you killed. Wycliffe’s followers in England and Hus in Bohemia had already tried, and Hus was burned at Constance in 1415 having been promised safe conduct.

Worship was conducted in a language the congregation did not understand. Salvation was mediated through a sacramental system administered by the clergy. And a great many people lived in genuine terror of purgatory, which is the context for the indulgence trade that finally lit the fuse.

Two other factors matter. The printing press had arrived, which meant an idea could now spread across Europe in weeks rather than decades. And Renaissance scholarship had produced Erasmus’ Greek New Testament in 1516, putting the original text into the hands of men who could read it. The Protestant Reformation would have been impossible without both.

Luther and the indulgences

Johann Tetzel was selling indulgences in Germany to fund the rebuilding of St Peter’s in Rome, with a sales pitch promising release of souls from purgatory. On 31 October 1517 Martin Luther, a monk and university lecturer, posted ninety-five theses for academic debate on the church door at Wittenberg, which functioned as the university noticeboard.

He was not attempting to start the Protestant Reformation. He was a loyal Catholic raising a scholarly objection, and the theses are moderate by later standards. But they were printed, translated and distributed across Germany within weeks, and he found himself the leader of a movement he had not planned.

The confrontation escalated through the Leipzig debate, where Luther conceded that councils could err, to the papal bull threatening excommunication, which he burned, to the Diet of Worms in 1521. There he refused to recant unless convinced by Scripture and plain reason, saying that his conscience was captive to the Word of God. The Greek word behind the righteousness he had wrestled with, dikaiosune, can mean both the justice God possesses and the standing He confers, and the whole controversy turned on which sense Paul intended. My answer on Martin Luther covers the man himself in more detail.

The five convictions at its heart

The Protestant Reformation is usually summarised in five Latin phrases, though the list was compiled later. Scripture alone is the final authority, over councils, popes and tradition. Grace alone is the source of salvation, with nothing contributed by the sinner. Faith alone is the instrument by which it is received.

Christ alone is the mediator, which removes the priesthood as a necessary intermediary and dismantles the sacrificial understanding of the mass. And glory to God alone is the purpose of the whole, which cuts against any system in which the church accumulates credit for itself.

Paul’s statement that a person is justified by faith apart from works of the law, Romans 3:28, is the load-bearing text, together with the declaration that by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God, Ephesians 2:8-9. I have written on this in my answer on the Five Solas.

How it spread

Zwingli was preaching reform in Zurich by 1519, apparently independently, and pushed further than Luther on the Lord’s Supper, which the two of them argued about at Marburg without resolution. That disagreement fractured the Protestant Reformation early and permanently.

Calvin arrived in Geneva in the 1530s and gave the movement its most systematic expression, organising a city and training preachers who carried the message into France, Scotland and the Netherlands. John Knox brought it to Scotland with characteristic force. My answer on John Calvin treats him separately.

Everywhere it went it produced Bibles in the common tongue, congregational singing, preaching in the vernacular and, remarkably quickly, schools. Literacy in Protestant regions rose sharply for the simple reason that people were expected to read the Bible for themselves.

The English Reformation was different

England’s version began politically rather than theologically. Henry VIII wanted his marriage annulled, the pope refused, and the king made himself supreme head of the church in England. That is not a promising origin story, and it explains a good deal about the settlement that followed.

The theology arrived through other men. Tyndale translated the New Testament into English and was strangled and burned for it in 1536, praying that God would open the king of England’s eyes. Within four years an English Bible was placed in every parish church, largely based on his work. Cranmer gave the church its prayer book and was burned under Mary in 1556, thrusting into the flames first the hand that had signed his recantation.

The result was a compromise that satisfied nobody entirely, Protestant in doctrine and considerably less so in government and ceremony. Everything that follows in English church history, including Puritanism, Separatism and eventually the Baptists, grows out of the unfinished business of the English Protestant Reformation.

The Radical Reformation and where Baptists come in

Alongside the magisterial reformers, who worked with the civil authorities, ran a movement that went further. The Anabaptists concluded that if Scripture alone is the authority, then infant baptism has no warrant and the church should consist of believers only, gathered voluntarily and separate from the state.

They were persecuted savagely by Catholics and Protestants alike, drowned in mockery of their baptism, and the excesses at Munster gave their enemies a convenient reason to condemn them all. Their central insight was right, and the Protestant Reformation largely refused to hear it.

English Baptists emerged in the early seventeenth century from Separatist congregations rather than directly from the Continental Anabaptists, but the convictions are recognisably the same. A gathered church, believer’s baptism, congregational government and freedom of conscience. That last conviction, which Thomas Helwys articulated at the cost of his life, is arguably the Protestant Reformation’s most valuable long-term fruit and it came from its least respectable wing.

What the Protestant Reformation got right

It recovered the gospel. That alone justifies everything else, and it is worth pausing on because we now take it for granted. Justification by faith alone, received directly from Jesus without priestly mediation, is the difference between assurance and terror, and millions of ordinary people gained it.

It put Scripture into the hands of ordinary believers, in their own language, with the expectation that they would read and understand it. It restored preaching to the centre of worship. It dignified ordinary work by abolishing the distinction between sacred and secular callings, so that a cobbler could serve God at his bench as truly as a monk at his prayers.

And it insisted that the church is always to be reformed by the Word rather than settled for ever by tradition, which is a principle that keeps applying long after 1517.

What it left unfinished, and what it got wrong

It did not follow its own logic on the church. Having established Scripture alone as the authority, the magisterial reformers retained infant baptism and a territorial church coextensive with the state, which is difficult to derive from the New Testament by any route.

It kept the sword. Luther’s writings against the peasants and later against the Jews are genuinely appalling, Zwingli’s Zurich drowned Anabaptists, and Calvin’s Geneva burned Servetus. A movement founded on liberty of conscience before God spent a good deal of energy suppressing consciences that differed. Christians should say so plainly rather than making excuses for their heroes.

It also retained a good deal of allegorical reading, particularly in prophecy, where Israel’s promises continued to be absorbed into the church. The recovery of a consistently literal reading of Scripture, and with it the distinction between Israel and the church, had to wait several centuries more.

The counter-argument Rome made

Fairness requires that Rome’s response be stated properly rather than caricatured. The Council of Trent, meeting from 1545, did not simply dig in. It reformed genuine abuses, tightened clerical discipline and produced a considered theological answer to the Protestant Reformation.

Its central objection was that justification by faith alone severs salvation from holiness and licenses a careless life. If a person is declared righteous while remaining a sinner, what motive remains for becoming one? Trent therefore insisted that justification involves the actual making righteous of the person, through grace infused by the sacraments and cooperated with by the will.

The Protestant Reformation’s answer is that justification and sanctification are distinct without being separable. God declares the believer righteous on the basis of what Jesus has done, and He then begins the lifelong work of making him so. Paul spends eleven chapters of Romans on the first and then five on the second, and he anticipates the objection directly when he asks whether we should continue in sin that grace may abound and answers by no means.

That distinction is worth grasping, because the Roman objection has never gone away and it surfaces every time an evangelical is accused of cheap grace. The answer is not to add works to faith but to insist that genuine faith is never alone, which is precisely what James is arguing.

What about the unity that was lost?

There is a cost side to this ledger and I do not want to skip it. Western Christendom fragmented, and the fragmentation has continued ever since. Wars followed, some of them ruinous, and the Thirty Years War killed a substantial proportion of the German population.

Some blame the Protestant Reformation for every division since, which is unfair, since the divisions of the modern church owe more to individualism and to consumer religion than to Luther. But it is honest to admit that once the principle of Scripture alone was granted, disagreement about what Scripture teaches became inevitable, and the reformers had no agreed mechanism for settling it.

My own answer is that unity built on coerced conformity was never unity at all. What Scripture calls for is the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, Ephesians 4:3, which is a unity of those who genuinely believe rather than of those who are legally obliged to attend. That is a harder and better thing, and we still have very little of it.

Why the Protestant Reformation still matters

Because the question it answered is the question every human being has to answer. How can a person be right with God? Every generation drifts back towards some version of contribution, whether sacramental, moral or emotional, and the Protestant Reformation’s answer has to be recovered again each time.

Because the authority question has not gone away either. Tradition, experience, denominational custom and cultural pressure all queue up to sit alongside Scripture, and Scripture alone remains the only stable ground. See my answer on Scripture as our final authority for the detail.

And because it reminds us that God works through ordinary people who were not trying to change history. Luther wanted a debate. Tyndale wanted a ploughboy to know more of Scripture than a priest did. Neither imagined what would follow.

One further thing deserves saying about the ordinary believer’s experience, because the theology can sound abstract. Before the Protestant Reformation, a peasant in Saxony had no way of knowing whether he was right with God, and every mechanism the church offered him produced another obligation rather than an assurance. Afterwards he could be told, on the authority of Scripture, that Christ had done everything necessary and that he could rest.

That is not a footnote to the story. It is the story. And it is why I have very little patience with any teaching, Protestant or otherwise, that quietly puts the burden back on the believer’s shoulders and calls it seriousness.

So, now what?

Do not celebrate the Protestant Reformation as a piece of heritage. Ask whether you actually believe what it recovered, or whether you have quietly reintroduced a system of contribution in which your standing with God rises and falls with your performance last week.

Read the sources rather than the summaries. Luther’s Freedom of a Christian is short and remains one of the most liberating things I have read. And thank God for the English Bible on your shelf, which cost William Tyndale his life and which most of us leave unopened for days at a time.

If your conscience were required to be captive to the Word of God tomorrow, at cost, what would it cost you?

For we hold that one is justified by faith apart from works of the law.

Romans 3:28, ESV

For Further Study

Roland Bainton’s life of Luther remains the most readable introduction and has never been bettered for narrative power. For the theology, Millard Erickson sets the reformers’ doctrine of justification in its wider systematic context, and Lewis Sperry Chafer and Charles Ryrie work through the relationship between grace, faith and the believer’s standing in terms that a dispensationalist will find helpful. J. Dwight Pentecost and Arnold Fruchtenbaum are worth reading on the point at which the reformers stopped short, namely the continuing distinction between Israel and the church, which their inherited allegorical method prevented them from seeing. On the Baptist side, the writings of Thomas Helwys and the early Separatist confessions show where the logic of Scripture alone was carried further than the magisterial reformers were prepared to take it.