A monk nailed a list of grievances to a door, and within a lifetime the unity of Western Christianity was gone for good.
The Spark
On the traditional date of 31 October 1517, an Augustinian friar and professor of biblical theology at Wittenberg named Martin Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses — a set of scholarly propositions objecting to the sale of indulgences, the church's practice of remitting temporal punishment for sin in exchange for money. Luther did not set out to found a new church. He was protesting a specific abuse in the name of a specific insight: that a person is justified before God by faith in Christ, freely, and not by any transaction the church could sell. But the question of indulgences opened onto the deeper question of authority — who has the power to bind and loose, the Pope or the Word of God? — and once that was asked out loud, it could not be un-asked.
Why It Caught
The Reformation succeeded where earlier reform movements had been crushed because the ground was prepared. The printing press, barely two generations old, turned Luther's tracts into the first mass-media event in European history; his German pamphlets sold in the hundreds of thousands and his vernacular Bible put scripture in the hands of anyone who could read. Politically, the German princes had their own reasons to resent a Rome that drained their lands of money and answered to an emperor they distrusted; many protected Luther as much for autonomy as for theology. A rising merchant class, a swell of anticlerical resentment at clerical wealth and corruption, and the humanist call to return ad fontes, back to the sources, all converged. Luther supplied the theological match; the age supplied the tinder.
The Magisterial Reformation
The mainstream of the movement is called the magisterial Reformation because it worked with the magistrates — it kept the alliance of church and civil authority and sought to reform the existing territorial churches rather than abandon the idea of a state church altogether. Its three great fountainheads were Luther in Germany, whose emphasis fell on justification by faith and the real presence of Christ in the Supper; John Calvin in Geneva, whose systematic Institutes and stress on the sovereignty of God became the seedbed of the entire Reformed tradition; and Huldrych Zwingli in Zürich, who pushed furthest in stripping worship of images and reading the Lord's Supper as memorial rather than presence. Luther and Zwingli famously failed to agree on the Eucharist at the Marburg Colloquy of 1529, an early sign that the movement would divide as readily as it had united.
The Radical Reformation
Beyond the magisterial reformers stood the radical Reformation — those who judged that Luther and Calvin had not gone far enough and who rejected the whole apparatus of a state church. The Anabaptists ("re-baptizers") insisted that baptism belonged only to confessing adult believers, not to infants, and that the true church was a voluntary community separated from the coercive power of the state. Persecuted savagely by Catholics and magisterial Protestants alike, they nonetheless seeded the later Mennonite, Amish, and Baptist streams and bequeathed to the modern world the radical idea of the separation of church and state.
The English Reformation
England took its own path. There the break with Rome began less as a theological revolt than a dynastic and political one, when Henry VIII, denied an annulment, declared himself supreme head of the Church of England in 1534. What began as a matter of jurisdiction gradually acquired a Protestant theology under Edward VI and, after the Catholic reign of Mary, settled into the durable via media of the Elizabethan Settlement — a church Catholic in structure and much of its worship yet Protestant in doctrine. From it descend the whole Anglican and Episcopal communion and, by reaction, the Puritan and Nonconformist streams that carried a sterner Reformed vision to the New World.
Rome's Answer
Catholicism did not stand still. The Council of Trent (1545–1563) mounted the Counter-Reformation: it reaffirmed the seven sacraments, the authority of tradition alongside scripture, the doctrine of justification by grace and cooperation, and it reformed the abuses — including the indulgence traffic — that had given Luther his opening. Trent hardened the confessional divide into permanence. After it, there was no going back: Western Christianity was two, and would soon be many.
Related
- Protestantism — Collection index
- The Five Solas — The theology the Reformation crystallized
- Key Reformers & Figures — The people who led it
- Calvinism — The Reformed stream that flowed from Geneva
- Catholicism — The tradition it broke from
- Christianity — The wider story
- Protestant Denominations — The families it produced