The Reformation

The sixteenth-century revolt that split Western Christianity in two — begun as a quarrel over the sale of forgiveness, carried across a continent by a new machine, fractured into rival churches over the meaning of a shared meal, and ending in a hundred years of war and a Christendom shattered into confessions — told with care for what happened, what the reformers claimed, and what remains a matter of faith.

The door at Wittenberg

On the thirty-first of October, 1517 — so the tradition holds — an Augustinian friar and professor named Martin Luther walked to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg and nailed to it a sheet of ninety-five propositions, in Latin, for academic debate. Whether he actually hammered them to the door is genuinely uncertain; some historians think the dramatic scene a later legend, and that he simply mailed them to his bishop. What is not in doubt is what the Ninety-Five Theses attacked: the sale of indulgences — papal certificates that promised to shorten a soul's time in purgatory, hawked across Germany by the friar Johann Tetzel with the jingle, "as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs." Luther meant to start a scholarly argument. He started the fracture of the Latin Church.

What the Reformation was

The Protestant Reformation was the movement that, over the sixteenth century, broke the thousand-year unity of Western Christianity under the pope and founded the rival family of Protestant churches. It began as a protest against specific corruptions — indulgences, clerical wealth, the abuses of Rome — but it swiftly became something far larger: a wholesale challenge to the authority of the pope, the priesthood, and the traditions of the Church, in the name of a Christianity refounded on the Bible and on faith alone.

Luther: from the tower to Worms

Behind the Theses lay a personal crisis. Luther, tormented by the fear that he could never satisfy a righteous God, found release in a reading of Paul (Romans 1:17): the "righteousness of God" was not a standard that damned him but a gift that saved him — humans are justified by faith, not by their works. From that insight the whole theology unfolded. Rome moved against him: the bull Exsurge Domine (1520) threatened excommunication, and Luther burned it publicly. Summoned before the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms in April 1521 and ordered to recant, he refused unless convinced by Scripture and plain reason — "Here I stand, I can do no other," the tradition has him say — and was declared an outlaw by the Edict of Worms. Hidden at the Wartburg castle, he translated the New Testament into German (1522), a book that would reshape the German language itself.

The movement's shadow appeared quickly. When the German Peasants' War (1524–25) rose partly in the name of Gospel freedom, Luther, horrified by the disorder, wrote Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants, urging the princes to slaughter the rebels; perhaps 100,000 peasants died. And late in life Luther wrote viciously against the Jews (On the Jews and Their Lies, 1543) — a text later seized upon by the Nazis. The reformer who freed conscience against Rome also blessed the sword against the poor and poured out venom against a people; the honest record holds both.

The morning stars

Luther was not the first to protest, only the first the printing press could not silence. More than a century before Wittenberg, the Oxford theologian John Wycliffe (c. 1328–1384) had attacked indulgences, the wealth of the clergy, and the authority of the pope, insisting on the supremacy of Scripture and setting his followers, the Lollards, to make the first complete English Bible. Condemned after his death, his bones were dug up and burned in 1428. His ideas passed to Bohemia and the Prague preacher Jan Hus (c. 1369–1415), who took up the same causes — vernacular Scripture, communion in both kinds, a Church of the elect rather than of offices — and was summoned to the Council of Constance under a safe-conduct that was not honored. Condemned as a heretic, he was burned at the stake on 6 July 1415, singing as the flames rose; his death lit the Hussite wars and left a Bohemian church that never fully returned to Rome. Older still were the Waldensians, a poverty movement of preachers begun in twelfth-century Lyon and driven underground for three centuries, who lived to join the Reformation when it came. When a cardinal at Leipzig accused Luther of reviving the heresy of Hus, Luther is said to have answered that he was indeed a Hussite — the reformers knew they stood on older graves.

The spark and the machine

Luther's protest would likely have died as a local dispute, as earlier ones had, but for a new technology. The printing press, barely seventy years old, seized on the Theses: within weeks they were translated into German and printed and reprinted across the empire, and Luther's later pamphlets sold in the hundreds of thousands. For the first time a religious rebel could reach a whole society over the heads of the authorities. The Reformation was the first mass movement of the age of print — and it made the book, not the priest, the center of the faith.

The five "solas"

Protestant theology crystallized into a handful of Latin slogans that defined it against Rome:

• Sola scriptura — "Scripture alone": the Bible, not the pope or church tradition, is the sole authority for Christian faith.
• Sola fide — "faith alone": a person is justified, made right with God, by faith and not by good works or the Church's sacraments.
• Sola gratia — "grace alone": salvation is God's unearned gift, not a reward.
• and, behind them, solus Christus and soli Deo gloria — Christ alone as mediator, glory to God alone.

From these flowed the rest: the priesthood of all believers (every Christian has direct access to God, needing no priest); the vernacular Bible, so that all could read it; and the rejection of purgatory, of most of the seven sacraments, of monasticism, clerical celibacy, and the cult of the saints.

The Swiss reformers and the split over the Supper

The movement fractured almost at once. In Switzerland, Huldrych Zwingli at Zürich pushed a more radical break — and reformers who agreed on so much divided bitterly over one question: what happens in the Eucharist? At the Marburg Colloquy of 1529, Luther (who held that Christ is truly present "in, with, and under" the bread) and Zwingli (who took the bread as a memorial symbol) could not agree, and Protestantism split at its own table. Luther would not even grant Zwingli the name of brother.

The Reformed tradition found its systematizer in John Calvin at Geneva, whose Institutes of the Christian Religion built the most rigorous Protestant theology, centered on the sovereignty of God and the austere doctrine of predestination — that God has eternally chosen the saved and the damned. Calvin's Geneva became a disciplined godly city governed in part by a church consistory; its darkest moment was the burning of the anti-Trinitarian Michael Servetus in 1553, condemned by Calvin and the city council alike — a reminder that the reformers, freed from Rome, could persecute in their turn. Calvinism spread to the Dutch, to Scotland (where John Knox built Presbyterianism), and to the English and American Puritans.

England: a reformation of state

In England the break was as much dynastic as theological. Henry VIII, denied a papal annulment, made himself Supreme Head of an English church by the Act of Supremacy (1534) and dissolved the monasteries, seizing their vast wealth. Under his son Edward VI the church turned genuinely Protestant, and Thomas Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer (1549) gave England a vernacular liturgy of lasting beauty. Then Mary I restored Catholicism and burned nearly three hundred Protestants ("Bloody Mary"); her half-sister Elizabeth I settled the matter with the Elizabethan Settlement (1559), a Protestant church retaining bishops and much ceremony — the Anglican via media between Rome and Geneva. The King James Bible (1611) crowned the English Reformation's gift of scripture to the people.

The Radical Reformation

On the movement's edge stood the Radical Reformation, which held that Luther and Calvin had not gone far enough. The Anabaptists rejected infant baptism for adult believers' baptism and often the whole alliance of church and state; their Schleitheim Confession (1527) set out a separatist, pacifist vision, and Menno Simons gave the peaceful mainstream its name (Mennonites). The stream also threw up the apocalyptic preacher Thomas Müntzer and the violent millenarian takeover of Münster (1534–35), which discredited the whole movement in the eyes of its enemies. Persecuted by Catholics and mainline Protestants alike, the radicals nonetheless carried ideas — believers' baptism, the separation of church and state, freedom of conscience, and (among the anti-Trinitarian Socinians) even the questioning of the Trinity — that would outlast their persecutors, in the Mennonites, Amish, Quakers, and Baptists.

Rome's answer

The Catholic Church did not simply lose. The Counter-Reformation (or Catholic Reformation) answered with reform and reaction: the Council of Trent (1545–1563) reaffirmed the disputed doctrines — the authority of tradition alongside scripture, justification by faith and works, the seven sacraments, transubstantiation — while correcting the worst abuses; the new Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), founded by Ignatius of Loyola, became the spearhead of Catholic education and global mission; and the Roman Inquisition and the Index of Forbidden Books enforced the boundary. A Catholic renewal of piety and art — the drama of the Baroque — answered Protestant plainness with splendor. Christendom was now permanently divided into confessions.

A hundred years of war

The split was written in blood. The Peace of Augsburg (1555) tried to hold Germany together with the principle cuius regio, eius religio — the ruler's religion is the region's — but the French Wars of Religion (with the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572), the Dutch Revolt, the English civil wars, and above all the catastrophic Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) turned Europe into a charnel house in the name of doctrine, killing perhaps a third of the German population. The Peace of Westphalia that ended it in 1648 left a continent of confessional states and the first stirrings of an idea born of sheer exhaustion: that the state might have to tolerate more than one faith.

The believer's lens

To the Protestant, the Reformation was not a rebellion but a recovery — the rescue of the Gospel from centuries of accretion, corruption, and priestly control. The believer stood, for the first time, in an unmediated relationship with God: saved by grace through faith alone, reading the Word in his own tongue, needing no priest, no relic, no purchased indulgence. The stripped-bare church and the sung psalm were not losses but purifications, returning worship to the Word. To the Catholic, the same events looked entirely different and equally sacred: the Church that Christ had founded on Peter, guarded through fifteen centuries by the unbroken tradition of the councils and the saints, was being torn apart by a proud monk's private judgment — and Trent's reaffirmation of the sacraments and the apostolic tradition was the faithful defense of the fullness of the faith against a reductive heresy. Both sides believed, sincerely and to the death, that they were preserving the true Christianity against those who would destroy it. This book records those convictions as convictions; it does not adjudicate between them.

The skeptical lens

The historian, standing outside the theology, sees a revolution driven by more than doctrine. Political and economic forces were everywhere entangled with the religious: German princes gained autonomy and monastic wealth by turning Protestant; Henry VIII's "reformation" began as a divorce and a land-grab; the Peace of Augsburg made confession a matter of state power (cuius regio, eius religio). The printing press, urban literacy, rising national feeling, and resentment of a wealthy foreign papacy all conditioned the outcome. Historians of "confessionalization" argue that the rival churches, Catholic and Protestant alike, became instruments of the emerging centralized state, disciplining populations as much as saving souls. And the reformers' own record complicates the story of liberation: Luther's incitement against the peasants and the Jews, Calvin's Geneva and the burning of Servetus, show that freedom from Rome did not mean tolerance. The skeptic neither credits nor denies the theology — that lies beyond evidence — but insists that the Reformation was a total social upheaval, not only a change of belief.

Symbology and sacred encoding

The Reformation was, at its core, a revolution in what counted as sacred — and it moved the holy from the image to the word.

• The supreme sacred object became the printed vernacular Bible. Where medieval faith had been carried in ritual, relic, and image for the illiterate, sola scriptura made the read and preached word the vehicle of grace, and drove a wave of literacy across Protestant lands.
• Against the image came iconoclasm: Reformed Christians, reading the commandment against graven images strictly, stripped and whitewashed their churches, smashed statues and stained glass (the Dutch Beeldenstorm of 1566), and built plain meeting-houses whose bareness was itself a theology — God is met in the Word, not in gilded splendor. The Catholic Baroque answered with the opposite encoding: overwhelming visual splendor as a sign of heaven's glory.
• The medieval four senses of Scripture (Chapter 28) were largely rejected for the plain, literal sense: the text meant what it said, and every plowman could read it for himself.
• A new sacred medium arose in congregational hymn-singing — Luther's own chorales ("A Mighty Fortress Is Our God"), the metrical psalms of the Reformed — encoding doctrine in music the whole people sang, no longer a choir performing on their behalf.

Connections

The Reformation grew directly out of the medieval Catholic church it broke from, and out of the scholasticism of Chapter 28 — its nominalist turn (Ockham) had already loosened the ground, and Luther was trained in it. It drew on the Renaissance humanists' return to original texts (Erasmus's Greek New Testament put the tools in Luther's hands). It runs strikingly parallel to the birth of Sikhism (Chapter 34) in the same century — another vernacular, scripture-and-devotion movement rejecting priestly mediation — and its fracturing over conscience helped set loose the very forces (mass literacy, individual conscience, religious pluralism, and eventual toleration) that shape the modern age and its many new movements (Chapter 35). The old Weberian claim that its work-ethic birthed capitalism is much debated, but that it helped make the modern world is not.

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From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/chapters/ch31.html · a comparative library of the sacred.