The Reformation
What It Was
The Reformation (16th century) was not the invention of a new church but an appeal to an old authority: Scripture over accumulated tradition, and salvation by grace through faith over a system of merit, indulgences, and mediated access to God. Protestants understood it as recovery — of what Augustine taught and Paul wrote.
Why It Caught Fire
Several fuses converged:
- Spiritual — widespread anxiety about salvation, fed by a machinery of penance and purgatory, epitomised by indulgence-seller Tetzel's jingle: "When a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs."
- Textual — Erasmus's Greek New Testament (1516) let scholars read what the apostles actually wrote.
- Technological — the printing press. Luther's theses spread across Europe in weeks; the Reformation was history's first mass-media movement — a lesson for anyone doing ministry in a new medium today.
The Streams
- Lutheran — Luther and Melanchthon in Germany and Scandinavia; justification by faith at the centre.
- Reformed — Zwingli in Zurich, then John Calvin in Geneva, whose Institutes systematised Protestant theology; Knox carried it to Scotland.
- English — Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer and Tyndale's Bible (Tyndale was strangled and burned for translating it; within a century his phrasing filled the King James Version).
- Radical — Anabaptists pressing believer's baptism and free churches, persecuted by nearly everyone.
The Five Solas
The movement's confession in shorthand: sola Scriptura (Scripture the final authority), sola gratia (grace alone), sola fide (faith alone), solus Christus (Christ the only mediator), soli Deo gloria (glory to God alone).
Kingdom Connection
Beneath the debates ran one question: how does a person come under the saving rule of God? The Reformation's answer — directly, by grace, through faith in Christ, with Scripture open in your own language — re-centred the Kingdom on the King, and put His word in the people's hands.