What happened at the Reformation?

Question 13004.

The Protestant Reformation is one of those events everybody has heard of and very few of us could actually describe. Mention it at a church coffee morning and you will get Luther, a hammer, a door, and then a rather polite silence while somebody refills the teapot.

So let me tell you what happened, and why I think it still shapes the way you read your Bible on a wet Tuesday evening. This is not antiquarian curiosity. The Protestant Reformation put a Bible in your language into your hands and a gospel of grace into your ears, and five hundred years ago both of those were in serious doubt.

Why the Protestant Reformation still matters

I have met Christians who treat the Protestant Reformation as a European family quarrel that need not detain us. I understand the instinct. Sixteenth century politics is a thicket, and the personalities involved were not always attractive. But strip away the princes and the plague and you are left with a single question that will not go away: how is a sinner put right with God?

That question is not historical. It is the question every conscience asks at three in the morning. The men and women of the Protestant Reformation asked it out loud, in print, and at considerable personal cost, and the answer they found in Scripture is the answer I preach every Sunday.

If you want the wider background before the detail, I have set out the shape of the whole movement in what the Reformation was. Here I want to walk through the events themselves.

The church before the storm broke

By 1500 the Western church was enormously powerful and spiritually exhausted. The Bible existed in Latin, a language ordinary people could not read, and preaching in many parishes had shrivelled to a few minutes of moral advice. Salvation was understood as a lifelong process managed by the church through its sacraments, with purgatory waiting at the end to finish what grace had not completed.

Into that system came the sale of indulgences, documents that promised the remission of temporal punishment for sin in exchange for a payment. The theology behind them was more careful than the salesmen were, but the effect on ordinary people was devastating. Grace had a price list.

There had been protests before. John Wycliffe in England and Jan Hus in Bohemia had said much of what the Protestant Reformation would later say, and Hus was burned for it in 1415. The difference in 1517 was the printing press, which turned a local academic dispute into a continental fire within weeks.

Luther and the ninety-five theses

On the last day of October 1517, an Augustinian monk and university lecturer named Martin Luther published ninety-five theses for academic debate concerning indulgences. Whether he actually nailed them to the castle church door in Wittenberg is disputed by historians and honestly does not matter very much. What matters is that within a fortnight they were being read across Germany.

Luther was not trying to start the Protestant Reformation. He was a troubled monk who had discovered, while lecturing on Romans, that the righteousness of God in Romans 1:17 was not a standard God demands but a righteousness God gives. He described that discovery as the gates of paradise opening. Everything else followed from it.

The response from Rome hardened quickly. By 1521 Luther stood before the Emperor at the Diet of Worms and refused to recant unless he was convinced by Scripture and plain reason. Whatever else the Protestant Reformation produced, it produced that moment, and I still find it moving. You can read more about the man himself in the account of Calvin’s very different career, which shows how varied the movement quickly became.

What the Reformers actually recovered

The Protestant Reformation is often summarised by the five solas, and I have treated those in detail in the article on the five solas. In brief, the Reformers insisted that Scripture alone carries final authority, that we are justified by grace alone through faith alone, that Jesus alone is the mediator, and that God alone receives the glory.

Behind the Latin slogans lay a recovered doctrine of justification. To justify, from the Greek dikaioo, is a courtroom word. It does not mean God makes you gradually good enough. It means God declares you righteous on the basis of what Jesus has done, received by faith, and the verdict is announced now rather than at the end of a long process.

That single shift changed everything downstream. If the verdict is already given, then assurance is possible. If assurance is possible, then Christian obedience becomes gratitude rather than anxiety. The Protestant Reformation did not invent a new gospel. It dusted off the old one.

The Bible in the language of the people

Alongside the doctrine came the translations. Luther gave the Germans a New Testament in 1522 and the whole Bible by 1534. William Tyndale, working in exile and eventually strangled and burned for his trouble, gave the English a New Testament whose phrasing still echoes through our translations today.

This was the practical engine of the Protestant Reformation. Doctrine argued in universities could be contained. A ploughboy reading Paul in his own tongue could not. The Reformers believed that Scripture is clear enough in its central message for an ordinary believer to grasp, a conviction I hold and defend in the discussion of biblical inerrancy.

Preaching changed accordingly. The pulpit moved to the centre of the building and the sermon lengthened from a few minutes to an hour of consecutive exposition. Whatever you make of the length, the instinct was right. If God has spoken, the church should spend its time listening.

How the movement spread and splintered

From Germany the Protestant Reformation reached Zurich under Huldrych Zwingli, Geneva under John Calvin, Scotland under John Knox, and England by a more tangled political route involving a king with an urgent domestic problem. Each national church took its own shape, and the differences were real.

Disagreement broke out almost immediately, most sharply over the Lord’s Supper. Luther and Zwingli met at Marburg in 1529, agreed on fourteen articles out of fifteen, and parted company over the fifteenth. It is a sobering picture of how quickly good men divide.

Then there were the Anabaptists, who argued that the Protestant Reformation had stopped halfway. If Scripture alone is our authority, they said, then infant baptism must go, the church must be a gathered company of believers, and the magistrate has no business governing conscience. They were persecuted by Catholics and Protestants alike, and as a Baptist I owe them a debt I do not forget.

What the Reformers left unfinished

I am not a romantic about this period. The Protestant Reformation left plenty of unfinished business. State churches persisted, and with them the assumption that a nation could be Christian by law rather than by new birth. Luther’s later writings about the Jewish people are indefensible and were put to appalling use in the twentieth century.

The Reformers also carried over a way of reading prophecy that flattened the distinction between Israel and the church, and much of what I hold about God’s continuing purposes for Israel had to be recovered later. Being right about justification does not make a man right about everything.

So I take the Protestant Reformation as a recovery rather than a golden age. The standard is not Wittenberg or Geneva. The standard is Scripture, which is exactly what the Reformers said in the first place, and it would be an odd tribute to them to turn their movement into a tradition beyond question.

Rome’s reply and the shape of Europe after 1517

Rome did not stand still. The Council of Trent met over eighteen years from 1545 and answered the Protestant Reformation point by point, reaffirming tradition alongside Scripture, defining justification as a process involving infused grace, and pronouncing anathemas on those who taught that faith alone justifies. Whatever else Trent achieved, it made the division formal and durable.

Alongside Trent came genuine renewal of a different kind, new orders, better trained clergy, and the founding of the Society of Jesus under Ignatius Loyola in 1540. The Jesuits were disciplined, learned and effective, and they reversed Protestant gains across large parts of central Europe. Anyone who imagines the Protestant Reformation simply swept the board has not read the map of Europe in 1650.

Then came the wars. The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 tried to settle matters by letting each prince determine the religion of his territory, an arrangement that treated faith as a possession of the state. The Thirty Years War from 1618 killed a devastating share of the German population. This is the part of the story I refuse to romanticise, because the Reformers were right about grace and badly wrong about the sword. Paul told the Corinthians that the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, 2 Corinthians 10:4, and it took the Anabaptists and later the Baptists to say so out loud at real cost. The Greek word for church, ekklesia, describes a called out assembly, not a state department.

So, now what?

Read the sources yourself. Luther’s preface to Romans is short, free, and will do more for your soul than another article about him. Tyndale’s prose is startling once you realise how much of your Bible he wrote.

Then ask the question the Protestant Reformation was really about. If you died tonight and God asked why He should receive you, what would you say? If the answer involves anything you have done, contributed or maintained, you have quietly slipped back to 1516.

And hold your own tradition loosely enough to be corrected by Scripture. That is the actual legacy. Not a set of statues, but a church willing to be reformed again when the Word requires it. Where might that apply to you this week?

For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”

Romans 1:17, ESV