Church History — Unit 7: The Reformation

On October 31, 1517, an obscure German monk named Martin Luther circulated ninety-five academic propositions for debate, traditionally associated with posting them on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. He was inviting a scholarly debate on indulgences. He was not trying to start a Reformation. Within three years his theses had been printed across Europe. Within four years he had been excommunicated by the pope and outlawed by the emperor. Within a decade a substantial and growing part of Germany had broken with Rome.

The sixteenth century is the third of the four great centuries of Christian preaching. Unit 6 ended with every condition for that century already in place: a discredited papacy, the forerunners' vocabulary lying in wait, Erasmus's Greek New Testament freshly printed, Gutenberg's press ready to multiply books, and a Europe of laypeople hungry for Scripture in their own language. The sixteenth century added the courage of a small handful of men who carried the forerunners' work through the storm. Luther in Germany. Zwingli and Bullinger in Zurich. Calvin in Geneva. Knox in Scotland. Tyndale, Cranmer, and Latimer in England. The Anabaptist preachers in the Swiss towns and the Low Countries. By 1600 the religious map of Europe had been redrawn permanently.

Seven landmarks frame the unit. Luther's tower experience and the Ninety-Five Theses. The Diet of Worms and "Here I stand." Zwingli, Marburg, and the Reformed wing. The Anabaptists, the radical wing of the Reformation, many of whose communities suffered severe persecution from both Catholic and Protestant authorities. Calvin and Geneva. The English Reformation from Tyndale to Knox. The Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent. And underneath all of it, the recovery of the gospel of grace and the recovery of biblical preaching.

Martin Luther was born in 1483 in Eisleben. His father wanted him to be a lawyer. In July 1505 a lightning bolt nearly killed him on the road to Erfurt. Terrified, he cried, "Saint Anne, help me! I will become a monk!" Two weeks later he entered the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt against his father's furious protests.

Luther was a model monk and a tortured one. He fasted to the edge of starvation, kept vigils that broke his health, confessed sins so meticulously that his confessor told him to come back when he had committed a real sin. The medieval system promised peace to those who confessed all their sins and did sufficient penance. Luther could finish neither step. "I did not love God," he later wrote. "I hated Him."

Johann von Staupitz sent him to Wittenberg to teach Bible. Lecturing through the Psalms, Romans, and Galatians from 1513–1517, Luther began to read with new attention. The phrase that broke him open was Romans 1:17: "the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith… the just shall live by faith." He had read "the righteousness of God" as the standard that condemned him. Then, around 1515 in his study in the tower of the Black Cloister, the meaning shifted. The righteousness of God is not the standard God uses against us. It is the gift God gives to those who trust His Son. The righteousness of God is the righteousness from God, freely credited to the sinner who believes. Luther's own words: "I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. There a totally other face of the entire Scripture showed itself to me." Justification by faith alone was personal experience for Luther before it was theology.

The trigger that turned his private discovery public was a Dominican friar named Johann Tetzel selling indulgences in the next territory to fund Saint Peter's in Rome. Tetzel's pitch: "As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs." Luther's parishioners were buying. On October 31, 1517, the eve of All Saints', Luther circulated his Ninety-Five Theses, traditionally associated with posting them on the Castle Church door. They were ninety-five Latin propositions arguing that indulgences could not forgive sin and that true repentance was a lifelong turning of the heart. Thesis 1: "When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, 'Repent,' He willed that the entire life of believers be one of repentance." The printers got hold of them. By spring 1518 they were in German across Europe. The pope summoned Luther to recant. Luther refused. In June 1520 Pope Leo X issued the bull Exsurge Domine demanding retraction of forty-one errors. On December 10, 1520, Luther burned the bull publicly at Wittenberg. There was no going back.

In April 1521 the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, only twenty years old and a devout Catholic, summoned Luther to the imperial Diet at Worms under imperial safe-conduct — the same kind of guarantee Hus had been given a hundred and six years earlier and that had not saved Hus. Luther's friends begged him not to go. Luther reportedly said he would go to Worms "if there were as many devils there as tiles on the rooftops."

On April 17 Luther stood before the emperor with his books on a table. He was asked: were these his books, and would he retract? He acknowledged the books and asked a day to consider. On April 18 he returned. He spoke first in Latin, then in German, asking for proof from Scripture or clear reason where he was wrong. "Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason — for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves — I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted, and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, since to act against conscience is neither safe nor right." Then, according to the earliest tradition: "Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen."

Charles declared Luther an outlaw under the Edict of Worms. Frederick the Wise of Saxony, Luther's prince, arranged a fake kidnapping in the forest on the way home; Luther was taken to Wartburg Castle and hidden for ten months under the name "Junker Jörg" (Knight George). During those ten months Luther translated the New Testament from Erasmus's Greek into German. The result, the September Testament of 1522, would do for German what Tyndale's New Testament four years later did for English: give an entire nation Scripture in its mother tongue. The Reformation, which began as an academic dispute over indulgences, was now an unstoppable movement to put the Bible in the hands of ordinary believers.

While Luther preached in Wittenberg, a parallel reformation broke out in Switzerland under Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531). A Catholic priest in Zurich deeply influenced by Erasmus, Zwingli began in 1519 to preach systematically through the Gospel of Matthew, verse by verse, the way Chrysostom had preached in the fourth century. The Zurich council voted in 1523 that all preaching would be from Scripture only. The Mass was abolished in Zurich in 1525 and replaced with a simple Lord's Supper.

Zwingli's reformation differed from Luther's. Where Luther kept what Scripture did not forbid, Zwingli removed what Scripture did not command. Where Luther kept images and crucifixes, Zwingli stripped them. Most critically, the two disagreed about the Lord's Supper. Luther held Christ's body and blood truly present "in, with, and under" the bread and wine. Zwingli held the Supper a memorial — signs that recall Christ's death, with Christ present spiritually but not bodily.

In 1529 Philip of Hesse summoned Luther and Zwingli to Marburg, hoping to unite the two Reformations. They agreed on fourteen of fifteen articles. They could not agree on the Supper. Luther took chalk, wrote on the table "Hoc est corpus meum" — "This is my body" — covered the words with a cloth, and would not bend on what he believed Christ's words plainly said. Zwingli wept. The two parted. Two years later Zwingli was killed in battle at Kappel defending Zurich against Catholic cantons. He was forty-seven. Heinrich Bullinger, his able young successor, carried Zurich for another forty-four years and made it one of the most important Reformed cities in Europe. The Marburg failure produced two distinct traditions — Lutheran and Reformed — that have remained separate ever since. The Reformed branch is the one we will follow into Calvin's Geneva.

John Calvin (1509–1564) was twenty-six years younger than Luther, French rather than German, a humanist scholar trained in law rather than monasticism. Where Luther had been driven to the gospel by personal terror, Calvin came to it by what he called "a sudden conversion to teachableness" around 1533. Where Luther had no plan for what came next after he broke with Rome, Calvin produced the most influential systematic theology of the Reformation: the Institutes of the Christian Religion, first published in 1536 when he was twenty-six and revised across the rest of his life until the final 1559 edition.

Calvin had intended a quiet scholar's life. In July 1536, traveling through Geneva, he stopped overnight. The fiery Reformer Guillaume Farel, who had recently led Geneva to break with Rome, came to his inn and demanded that Calvin stay. Calvin refused. Farel pronounced God's curse on him if he refused for the sake of his own studies what God was calling him to do. Calvin, terrified, agreed to stay. He would labor in Geneva for nearly thirty years.

The Institutes are a four-book systematic exposition: God the Creator (Book I), God the Redeemer in Christ (Book II), the way we receive the grace of Christ (Book III), and the external means by which God calls us into Christ — church, sacraments, civil government (Book IV). Calvin's framework recovers Augustine's grace theology in a sustained, ordered, biblically saturated form. The five points sometimes summarized as TULIP were not Calvin's outline — they were drawn up by his theological heirs in 1618–1619 at the Synod of Dort. But the seed is in Calvin, and through Calvin in Augustine, and through Augustine in Paul. Calvin's clearest sentence on the gospel (Institutes III.1.1): "As long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value for us."

Calvin's Geneva became the model Reformation city. Calvin preached six days a week, working through whole books of the Bible verse by verse in the manner of Chrysostom — reviving the thousand-year-old expository tradition. He founded an academy in 1559 that became the training ground for Reformed pastors across Europe. Refugees from Catholic persecution in France, England, Scotland, the Netherlands, and Italy poured into Geneva and were trained there before being sent home as Reformed missionaries. John Knox called Geneva "the most perfect school of Christ that ever was on the earth since the days of the apostles." Calvin's Geneva had real failures: the 1553 execution of the anti-Trinitarian Michael Servetus, burned by the Geneva council with Calvin's approval, is a permanent stain. The same Geneva that taught grace to Europe also embodied the Constantinian assumption (which the Anabaptists were dying to resist) that the magistrate properly enforces religious orthodoxy. Calvin's grace theology and the Anabaptists' ecclesiology were both right, and the modern free-church evangelical inherits both.

The English Reformation began politically when Henry VIII, having failed to obtain a papal annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, broke with Rome in 1534 and declared himself Supreme Head of the Church of England. Henry's motives were dynastic, not theological; he died a Catholic in everything but loyalty to the pope. But the door he opened could not be closed.

William Tyndale (c. 1494–1536) is the father of the English Bible. A brilliant linguist who believed an English plowboy ought to know more of Scripture than the educated clergy did, he fled to the Continent when forbidden to translate in England, worked under the protection of friendly merchants, and produced the first printed English New Testament from Erasmus's Greek in 1526. Copies were smuggled into England in barrels of grain. Thomas More and the English bishops hunted them down and burned them by the thousands. Tyndale kept translating; by 1535 he had translated most of the Old Testament from Hebrew. Betrayed in Antwerp by a paid informer, imprisoned in the castle of Vilvoorde near Brussels, he was strangled at the stake on October 6, 1536, and his body burned. His last recorded words were a prayer: "Lord, open the king of England's eyes." Three years later, by royal decree, an English Bible (largely Tyndale's translation) was placed in every parish church in England. About eighty percent of the language of the King James Version of 1611 is Tyndale's work.

Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556), archbishop of Canterbury under Henry and Edward VI, wrote the Book of Common Prayer (1549, revised 1552), which gave the English-speaking world a liturgy of breathtaking beauty — "we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep," "the peace of God which passeth all understanding," "in the midst of life we are in death." Under Edward VI he guided the English church into a moderate Reformed Protestantism. When Mary Tudor took the throne in 1553, Cranmer was arrested, and after two years of imprisonment signed several recantations of his Protestant teaching. On the day of his execution, March 21, 1556, the regime expected him to recant publicly. Instead Cranmer renounced the recantations he had signed, declared he had betrayed his faith out of fear, and announced that his right hand — which had signed the recantations — would burn first. As the flames rose he held that hand into the fire until it was consumed. The man who had wavered finished standing firm.

Mary Tudor — "Bloody Mary" — burned about three hundred Protestants in five years. The most famous victims were Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, burned together at Oxford on October 16, 1555. Latimer's last words to Ridley have become one of the great martyr lines: "Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man! We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out." The candle burned. When Mary died in 1558 and her Protestant sister Elizabeth I took the throne, the English Reformation was permanent and the executed Protestants were national heroes.

Meanwhile in Scotland, the volcanic preacher John Knox (c. 1514–1572), trained in Calvin's Geneva, returned home and led the Scottish Reformation in a single decade. By 1560 the Scottish Parliament had abolished the Mass, declared the pope to have no jurisdiction in Scotland, and adopted a Reformed Confession of Faith. Knox preached as if every sermon might be his last and famously prayed, "Give me Scotland or I die." Scotland was given. The Presbyterian and Reformed family of churches descends from his work.

Rome did not concede half of Europe to the Reformers without responding. The Catholic response, called the Counter-Reformation, was both reformist (cleaning up genuine corruption) and reactionary (hardening doctrinal lines). Three engines drove it: the Jesuits, the Roman Inquisition, and the Council of Trent.

The Society of Jesus was founded in 1540 by the Spanish soldier-turned-mystic Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556). The Jesuits combined rigorous training, military discipline, total obedience to the pope, and a global missionary vision. Within a generation Jesuit missionaries had reached Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines, India, China, and Japan. Francis Xavier (1506–1552) baptized perhaps thirty thousand converts in southern India and Japan before dying off the coast of China at forty-six. The Jesuits became the elite educators of Catholic Europe and the front-line agents wherever Catholicism recovered ground from Protestantism.

The Council of Trent (1545–1563), summoned over eighteen years in three sessions, defined the Roman Catholic response to the Reformation. Reformist: it required bishops to reside in their dioceses, forbade the sale of church offices, mandated the founding of seminaries to train clergy, tightened discipline on indulgences. Reactionary: it affirmed the equal authority of Scripture and tradition, reaffirmed transubstantiation, declared the Apocrypha canonical Scripture, condemned justification by faith alone, and upheld all seven medieval sacraments. Trent canons were issued with anathemas: "If anyone says that justification is by faith alone… let him be anathema."

By 1600 the religious map of Europe was settled. Northern Germany, Scandinavia, England, Scotland, the Netherlands, much of Switzerland and France — Protestant. Spain, Portugal, Italy, southern Germany, Austria, Poland, Ireland — Catholic. The Anabaptist remnant survived in pockets in the Low Countries, Switzerland, and Moravia. The wars and persecutions over those lines would continue for another century (the Thirty Years' War 1618–1648 alone killed perhaps eight million people), but the doctrinal divisions of 1600 are largely the doctrinal divisions of European Christianity today.

First, the gospel is grace alone, by faith alone, in Christ alone, on the authority of Scripture alone, to the glory of God alone. The five Latin solas — sola gratia, sola fide, solus Christus, sola Scriptura, soli Deo gloria — are not Reformation slogans. They are the gospel summarized.

Second, the Bible in the people's language is non-negotiable. Tyndale died for it. Luther translated for ten months in a castle for it. Calvin preached six days a week to make sure his people heard it.

Third, expository preaching through whole books is the recovered pattern of every great pulpit age. Chrysostom in the fourth century. Calvin in the sixteenth. Spurgeon in the nineteenth (whom we will meet in Unit 9). Take a book. Take six months. Walk your people through it.

Fourth, the suffering remnant is the gospel's permanent companion. Tyndale strangled. Cranmer burning his right hand first. Felix Manz drowned. Hubmaier and his wife killed three days apart. The Reformation pulpit was paid for in fire by Reformers and Anabaptists alike, and the modern evangelical inherits both.

Fifth, when Christians disagree, the conversation must be from Scripture. Luther and Zwingli could not agree at Marburg, and the Protestant world has been split between Lutheran and Reformed ever since. They argued from Scripture and ended in honest disagreement. That is better than agreement built on something other than the Word.

The sixteenth century opened with a door — the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg, with ninety-five Latin theses nailed to it on a cold October afternoon in 1517. It closed eighty-three years later with a Europe permanently changed. Half the continent reading Scripture in its own language. The pulpit restored to the center of Christian worship. Justification by faith alone proclaimed from a thousand reformed pulpits. The forerunners' work fulfilled. Tyndale's prayer answered. The swan Hus had foretold come and gone.

Pass this examination, and we will meet what came after the Reformation in Unit 8: the Puritans, the Wesleys, the Great Awakenings, and the patient German Pietists who taught Wesley how to feel his heart strangely warmed.