Protestant Reformation - II
General Information
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The Reformation of the 16th century was a movement within Western
Christendom to purge the church of medieval abuses and to restore
the doctrines and practices that the reformers believed conformed
with the Bible and the New Testament model of the church. This
led to a breach between the Roman Catholic Church and the reformers
whose beliefs and practices came to be called Protestantism.
Causes
The causal factors involved in the Reformation were complex and
interdependent. Precursors of the Reformation proper included the
movements founded by John Wycliffe (the Lollards) and John Huss
(the Hussites) during the 14th and 15th centuries. These reform
groups, however, were localized (in England and Bohemia) and were
largely suppressed. Changes in the intellectual and political climate
were among the factors that made the reform movement of the 16th
century much more formidable.
The cultural Renaissance that occurred during the preceding century
and a half was a necessary preliminary, because it raised the level
of education, reemphasized the ancient classics, contributed to
thought and learning, and offered Humanism and rhetoric as an
alternative to Scholasticism. Especially through its emphasis on
the biblical languages and close attention to the literary texts,
the Renaissance made possible the biblical exegesis that led to
Martin Luther's doctrinal reinterpretation. Moreover, Christian
humanists like Desiderius Erasmus criticized ecclesiastical abuses
and promoted the study of both the Bible and the church fathers.
The invention of printing by Johann Gutenberg provided a powerful
instrument for the spread of learning and Reformation ideas.
That grave ills were spreading through the church was already
evident at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, at which Pope Innocent
III called for reform. The papacy itself was weakened by its move
from Rome to Avignon (1309-77), by the Great Schism of the papacy,
which lasted four decades thereafter, and by the doctrine that
supreme authority in the church belonged to general councils
(Conciliarism). The Renaissance popes were notoriously worldly.
Abuses such as simony, nepotism, and financial excesses increased.
The church was riddled with venality and immorality. The sale of
Indulgences was a particularly unfortunate practice because it
impinged upon true spiritual repentance and improvement of life.
At the same time a genuine upsurge of popular religiosity manifested
itself and increased the disparity between the people's expectations
and the church's ability to satisfy spiritual needs. Some turned
to mysticism and inward religion, but the great mass of people
were restless and dissatisfied.
A significant political change occurred during the later Middle Ages
as well. The Holy Roman Empire, which had lost cohesion partly as a
result of its struggle with the papacy in the Investiture Controversy,
was weakened by the growth of virtually independent territorial
princedoms and free imperial cities. Externally the empire was
weakened by the gradual evolution of the nation-states of modern
western Europe. The monarchies in France, England, and, later, Spain
were developing dynastic strength and unity that enabled them largely
to control the church within their borders.
Economically, the rise of commerce and the shift to a moneyed economy
had the effect of creating a stronger middle class in a more urban
society. The church met financial difficulty during this time because
it had become involved in the manorial economy, possessed landed
wealth, and had trouble meeting its extensive administrative,
diplomatic, and judicial obligations.
Development
Luther
The Reformation began in Germany on Oct. 31, 1517, when Martin Luther,
an Augustinian university professor at Wittenberg, posted 95 theses
inviting debate over the legitimacy of the sale of indulgences.
The papacy viewed this as a gesture of rebellion and proceeded to
take steps against Luther as a heretic. The German humanists
supported Luther's cause during the early years. The reformer's
three famous treatises of 1520, An Open Letter to the Christian
Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian
Estate, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, and On the Freedom
of a Christian, also won him powerful popular support. He was
excommunicated in 1521, but in April of that year at the Diet at
Worms he stood before Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and the German
princes and refused to recant unless proven wrong by the Bible or by
clear reason. He believed that salvation was a free gift to persons
through the forgiveness of sins by God's grace alone and received
by them through faith in Christ.
Luther was protected by Frederick III, elector of Saxony, and
other German princes--partly out of intellectual and religious
conviction, partly out of the desire to seize church property, and
partly to assert independence of imperial control--gave their support
to the reformers. In 1530 many princes and cities signed the Augsburg
Confession presented at the Diet of Augsburg as an expression of the
evangelical faith. After years of conflict the settlement reached
in the Peace of Augsburg (1555) provided that each German prince
would determine the religious affiliation (Roman Catholic or Lutheran)
of the territory he ruled. Lutheranism also became the established
religion of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. Apart from the
role of the princes, however, the Reformation spread rapidly as a
popular movement. It penetrated Poland, Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary,
and Transylvania.
Zwingli
The Reformation in Switzerland initially developed in Zurich under
the leadership of the priest Ulrich Zwingli. Zwingli had been
influenced by Erasmus and by Christian humanism. He arrived at
an evangelical understanding of Christianity from his study of
the Bible and from contacts with Lutherans. On Jan. 1, 1519, he
began a 6-year series of sermons on the New Testament that moved
the city council and the people of Zurich toward reform. The
favorable response to The Sixty-Seven Articles, which he prepared
for public disputation with a papal representative in 1523, proved
the popularity of his program. He called for the abolition of the
Mass (and its replacement by a symbolic Lord's Supper), independence
from episcopal control, and a reform of the city-state in which both
priests and Christian magistrates would conform to the will of God.
His influence spread to other Swiss cantons such as Basel,
Saint Gall, and Bern.
Calvin
Through Lutheran tracts and merchant missionaries, the evangelical
movement spread to France, where it won many converts, among whom
was John Calvin. In 1536, Calvin went to Geneva, where a reformation
led by Guillaume Farel was well under way. Calvin was persuaded to
stay in Geneva and helped organize the second major surge of
Protestantism. In his Ordinances of 1541, he gave a new organization
to the church consisting of pastors, doctors, elders, and deacons.
His Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536) had great influence
in France, Scotland (where John Knox carried the Calvinist
reformation), and among the Puritans in England. Geneva became the
center of a great missionary enterprise that reached into France,
where the Huguenots became so powerful that a synod met in Paris
in 1559 to organize a nationwide church of some 2,000 reformed
congregations. As a result of the French Wars of Religion, the
Huguenot party was checked and the French monarchy kept the kingdom
Catholic.
England
Although England had a religious reform movement influenced by
Lutheran ideas, the English Reformation occurred as a direct result
of King Henry VIII's efforts to divorce his first wife, Catherine
of Aragon. The formal break with the papacy was masterminded by
Thomas Cromwell, the king's chief minister. Under Cromwell's
direction Parliament passed the Act in Restraint of Appeals
(to Rome; 1533), followed by the Act of Supremacy (1534) fully
defining the royal headship over the church. As archbishop of
Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer annulled Henry's marriage to Catherine,
allowing the king to marry Anne Boleyn. Although Henry himself
wished to make no doctrinal changes, Cromwell and Cranmer authorized
the translation of the Bible into English, and Cranmer was largely
responsible for the Book of Common Prayer, adopted under Henry's
successor, Edward VI. The gains that Protestantism made under
Edward (r. 1547-53) were lost under his Catholic sister Mary I
(r. 1553-58). The religious settlement (1559) under Elizabeth I,
however, guaranteed the Anglican establishment.
The Radicals
The radicals consisted of a great variety of sectarian groups known
as Anabaptists because of their common opposition to infant baptism.
The Anabaptist leader Thomas Munzer played a leading role in the
Peasants' War (1524-26), which was suppressed with the support
of Luther. In Munster, radical Anabaptists established (1533) a
short-lived theocracy in which property was held communally. This
too was harshly suppressed. The radicals also encompassed evangelical
humanists and spiritualists who developed highly individualistic
religious philosophies.
Results
An obvious result of the Reformation was the division of Western
Christendom into Protestant and Catholic areas. Another result was
the development of national churches; these strengthened the growth
of modern national states, just as, earlier, growing national
consciousness had facilitated the development of the Reformation.
The Catholic Counter-Reformation--including the founding of the
Jesuits by Ignatius Loyola (sanctioned 1540), the Council of Trent
(1545-63), the Inquisition, the Index, and reformed clergy like
Charles Borromeo--gave new life to the old church and was in part
a result of the Reformation movement. Finally, the Reformation
introduced much radical change in thought and in ecclesiastical
and political organization and thus began many of the trends that
are taken to characterize the modern world.
Lewis W. Spitz
Bibliography
Bainton, Roland H., Women of the Reformation (1977)
and Age of the Reformation (1984); Chadwick, Owen, The Reformation
(1964); Cowen, I.B., The Scottish Reformation (1982); Dickens, A G,
The English Reformation (1964) and The German Nation and Martin
Luther (1974); Dickens, A.G., et al., The Reformation in Historical
Thought (1985); Donaldson, Gordon, The Scottish Reformation (1972);
Elton, G.R., Reform and Reformation: England, 1509-1558 (1978);
Grimm, Harold, The Reformation Era, 2d ed. (1973); Hillerbrand,
Hans J., Christendom Divided: The Protestant Reformation (1971),
and, as ed., The Reformation (1978); McNeill, John T., The History
and Character of Calvinism (1954); Olin, John, and Smart, J.D., eds.,
Luther, Erasmus and the Reformation (1970; repr. 1982); Ozment, G R,
The Reformation in the Cities (1975), and When Fathers Ruled (1983);
Smith, Page, The Age of Reformation, 2 vols. (1962); Spitz,
Lewis W., The Renaissance and Reformation Movement (1971), and The
Protestant Reformation (1984).
Also, see:
Protestant Reformation (advanced information)
Canons of Dort
Belgic Confession
Heidelberg Catechism
Helvetic Confession
Westminster Confession of Faith
Augsburg Confession
The individual articles presented here were generally first published
in the early 1980s. This subject presentation was first placed
on the Internet in May 1997.
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