The monk, the lawyer, the priest, the field-preachers, and the evangelist — the handful of people through whom the tradition happened.
The First Generation
Martin Luther (1483–1546) is the man who lit the fuse. An Augustinian friar and biblical scholar at Wittenberg, tormented by the question of how a sinner could ever stand before a righteous God, he found his answer in Paul's letter to the Romans: the righteous shall live by faith. His Ninety-Five Theses of 1517 began the The Reformation; his refusal to recant at Worms in 1521 — "Here I stand, I can do no other" — made the breach permanent; and his German Bible reshaped a language even as it put scripture in ordinary hands.
John Calvin (1509–1564), a French humanist lawyer turned theologian, gave the movement its most systematic mind. From Geneva he wrote the Institutes of the Christian Religion, built a model Reformed church order, and centered everything on the sovereignty of God. His thought became the seedbed of the entire Reformed and Presbyterian world; the vault treats it in full at Calvinism.
Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) led the Reformation in Zürich in parallel with Luther, pushing further in stripping images from worship and reading the Lord's Supper as a memorial rather than a bodily presence — the disagreement over which he and Luther famously failed to resolve at Marburg in 1529. He died in battle defending the Swiss Reformation, and his memorial view flowed into much of later Reformed and Baptist practice.
John Knox (c. 1514–1572) carried the Genevan Reformation home to Scotland. A fiery preacher shaped by exile under Calvin, he led the Scottish Reformation of 1560 and founded the Presbyterian tradition, with its rule by elders, that would spread through the English-speaking world and profoundly mark it — one of the direct ancestors of the Reformed churches.
The Revival Generation
John Wesley (1703–1791), an Anglican priest, ignited the eighteenth-century evangelical revival in England and founded Methodism. Preaching a warmed heart, personal holiness, and a grace offered to all — an Arminian counterweight to Calvinist election — he rode tens of thousands of miles on horseback and built a movement of societies and lay preachers that eventually became a worldwide church. His stress on sanctification shaped the later holiness and evangelical movements.
George Whitefield (1714–1770) was the greatest open-air preacher of the age, an itinerant whose voice reportedly carried to crowds of tens of thousands on both sides of the Atlantic. More Calvinist than his friend Wesley, he was the transatlantic engine of the First Great Awakening, binding the British and American revivals into a single movement.
Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) was its finest mind. A Congregationalist pastor and theologian in colonial New England, thoroughly Reformed, he preached the sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" that became the Awakening's emblem, and wrote works on revival and the religious affections that still anchor the intellectual tradition of Evangelicalism. He is often reckoned America's greatest theologian.
The Modern Voice
Billy Graham (1918–2018) carried the altar-call gospel into the age of mass media. Through stadium crusades, radio, and television across six decades, he preached to more people in person than anyone in history and became the public face of twentieth-century evangelicalism — a figure who counseled presidents while keeping the plain message of personal conversion at the center of every sermon.
Related
- Protestantism — Collection index
- The Reformation — The events these figures drove
- Calvinism — Calvin, Knox, and the Reformed line, in depth
- Evangelicalism — Wesley, Whitefield, Edwards, Graham
- The Five Solas — What they taught
- Christianity — The wider tradition
- Catholicism — The church the first generation broke from