For the first thousand years of its existence, the Christian Church lived up to the promise made in the Apostles’ Creed, its statement of faith, to be “one, holy, catholic and apostolic.” Throughout this time, however, there were ongoing tensions between various parts of the Church about doctrine and organization. In the eleventh century came the break between Western and Eastern (Orthodox) Christians. And then, at the start of the sixteenth century, Martin Luther, a German monk, precipitated the Reformation, which has left division in its wake to this day.
By the late fifteenth century, the papacy appeared to be more powerful than ever. The show of wealth, the commissioning of great works of art and the flamboyant lifestyles of some popes suggested an institution in rude health. Beneath this façade, however, Christianity was in moral and spiritual decline. Despairing of the conduct of popes—Alexander VI (1492–1503), for example, was installed while his children from various illicit liaisons looked on unabashed—a series of often small local reform movements began working for spiritual renewal and a return to high moral ideals in the theory and practice of the Church. One such was the Oratory of Divine Love, a charitable institute founded in 1497 in Genoa by Ettore Vernazza, which also became active in Rome, Naples and Bologna. None reached a level where it could effectively challenge the papacy.
Martin Luther When Martin Luther publicly questioned the corruption in the Church in the early years of the sixteenth century, he found he was speaking for many disillusioned believers. There was a theological basis to his rebellion, as laid out in the Ninety-Five Theses he famously nailed to the door of a church in Wittenberg in Germany in 1517. He rejected the notion, central to Catholic Christianity then as now, that by doing good deeds you were contributing toward earning yourself a place in heaven after death. Salvation came, he believed, through faith in God. It was not an individual’s holiness that counted. It was God’s love.
The vernacular Bible
For Luther, the ultimate source of Christian authority was not the say-so of the Pope, or the traditional practice of the Church, but the Bible. In 1521, as the battle raged between the German princes who defended him and the papacy that wanted to silence him, Luther set himself the task of translating the New Testament into German. There had been earlier efforts to make the Bible available in the vernacular—local language—rather than Church Latin. Where Luther’s effort stood out was in his scholarship—he returned to the original Greek version to rediscover the Bible’s true meaning—and his use of the sort of German spoken by ordinary men and women. He wanted to make the Bible accessible to all. He published his New Testament in 1522, and a full German Bible in 1534. Elsewhere, a Dutch Bible (1526), a French Bible (1528) and a Zurich Bible (1531) were published. These efforts inspired others, and in 1611, the King James’ Bible, a translation into English, appeared.
Luther’s attack benefited from his skill as a speaker, and from his use of advances in printing techniques to produce books and leaflets to get his message across. He was also helped by Rome’s tendency to dismiss him as irrelevant rather than appreciating the fact that he was a formidable opponent who was gaining support. When he was taken up by German princes keen to loosen the papacy’s grip on their lands, he realized that he had found powerful political sponsors who enabled him to escape arrest and punishment by the Church, and condemnation by the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, at the Diet of Worms in 1521.
“The invention of printing and the Reformation are and remain the two outstanding services of central Europe to the cause of humanity.”
Thomas Mann, 1924
As a result, Luther grew in boldness. He rejected five of the seven sacraments that the Church taught, attacked the authority of the Pope and advocated church services in the local language rather than Latin. The breach grew wider. At a gathering in Regentsburg in 1541, there had been hopes of reconciliation, but Luther’s demand for married clergy and local independence from the Pope proved too much.
Zwingli and Calvin
Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531) reacted in much the same way to the moral and spiritual decline in Roman Christianity as Luther, but he did so in the very different political context of the city-state of Zurich, within the all but independent Swiss Federation. He first made his mark in 1522 by condemning the traditional practice of fasting in Lent, the Church season that precedes Easter. He then attacked clerical corruption, advocated married priests and rejected the use of images in worship—he wanted churches to be as simple as possible. He preferred the authority of the Bible to that of popes, rejected the sacraments and hoped for a government guided by God’s hand. Zwinglism, while influential, has not survived as a distinct movement anywhere outside Switzerland. By contrast, the Frenchman John Calvin (1509–64) is credited with a founding role in modern Presbyterianism. He was based in Geneva, and broke from Rome in 1530, reforming the liturgy, extolling the virtues of the individual’s relationship with God, and establishing a new structure for Church governance to replace the authoritarianism of the papacy.
The Church of England By this time, Luther’s ideas had spread across Europe and inspired others, including Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin in Switzerland. In England, Henry VIII (1491–1547) embraced the new Protestant spirit to resolve a dispute with the papacy over divorcing his first wife, who had failed to provide him with a male heir. Subsequent English monarchs swung between extreme Protestantism (Edward VI, 1537–53) and aggressive Catholicism (Mary I, 1516–58) until Henry’s second daughter, Elizabeth (1533–1603) built a consensus that eventually resulted in a moderate form of Protestantism, the Church of England.
“The Church of England, that fine flower of our Island genius for compromise.”
Robert Bolt, 1960
Counter-reformation Following the Reformation, the Catholic Church knew that it had to make some changes in order to enable it to survive and regroup. The exact nature of the fightback was decided at the Council of Trent, which met, at intervals, between 1545 and 1563. It re-examined controversial doctrine, insisted on priestly celibacy, upheld the seven sacraments and endorsed the supreme authority of the Pope, but accepted that some of the old abuses had to be stopped. Catholicism was restored in some lands where it had lost influence—France, Poland, the southern Netherlands and parts of Germany—but religious division was ever after part of the face of Europe.
the condensed idea
Roman abuses prompted a revolt
| timeline | |
|---|---|
| c.1490s | Reform-minded brotherhoods founded |
| 1517 | Luther nails Ninety-Five Theses to church door |
| 1532 | Henry VIII breaks with Rome |
| 1541 | Luther rejects compromise at Regentsburg |
| 1545 | Council of Trent |