Why do we need to rediscover the Reformation? Did we lose it somewhere? Surely all the celebrations of the 500th anniversary in 2017 indicate that the Reformation still has a significant influence on the church today. There seems no doubt that Protestant groups continue to think of the Reformation as the root from which they have all grown and which still gives some unity to the movement, despite all the obvious differences.
The origins of this book lie in a set of anniversary-year seminars delivered at Spring Harvest 2017 under the title “Rediscovering the Reformation”, which looked at this landmark period in the history of the church. In preparing for these I began to realize that what the church was celebrating was as much a modern reconstruction of the Reformation as anything related to the events that took place. This was confirmed by the second source for this book, which was my research into reformation thought on the topics of sin, grace, and free will for another work that has just been published.1 For that book, I read through the theological works of some of the major reformers – Luther, Zwingli, Calvin – as well as the Catholic reforming Council of Trent. As I came to appreciate the breadth of their own writings, freed from later selections and interpretations, I realized that common approaches to reformers’ lives and thoughts in the anniversary celebrations and generic studies were far removed from the debates and work of the first half of the sixteenth century.
A prime example of this is what have become known as the five solae applied to the Reformation: faith alone, grace alone, Scripture alone, glory to God alone, Christ alone. Each of these, rightly understood, is a great truth of Christianity and a useful approach to the Christian faith. Whether and how they were used in the early sixteenth century, however, differed greatly from how I have heard them applied today.
“Faith alone” was certainly taught, by Martin Luther in particular, and the phrase itself was the most used of the five during the Reformation. Today, though, there seems to be confusion between this and “belief alone”, as if faith and belief were synonymous, which they certainly were not in Luther’s work. Faith is the core orientation of the whole of a person, whereas belief is primarily a rational engagement with God’s revelation. Faith alone can also be confused with grace alone, another slogan used in the Reformation, yet grace is God’s activity in salvation whereas faith is part of the divinely inspired human response. Grace also has huge dynamics in the reformers’ writings because of their context as those integrated into the history of Christian thought, and thus sacramental grace plays an important role, as do the nature and role of the Spirit in grace, where too often we speak and sing of grace solely in relation to Christ.
“Scripture alone” is an interesting phrase that does reflect the reformers’ desire to place the church back under the authority of the Bible, yet can be misunderstood to imply that “all we need is the Bible”. As we will see, the Bible was still the preserve of the church and its correct interpretation was viewed as a key part of the work of the Holy Spirit. The idea of individual Christians reading as authorities on their own to discover meanings in Scripture was not the vision of the reformers. One of the most notable aspects of reading Luther, Calvin, et al. directly, rather than studies of the Reformation, is the number of quotations from church history that are used as part of their interpretation of Scripture and expression of the Christian faith. This was not a movement that simply started again with the Bible, but rather reflected a desire to return the church to what it should be.
It is rather strange to link “glory to God alone” (in Latin, soli Deo Gloria) with the Protestant reformers, since in the sixteenth century this term was used in far more Catholic documents than Protestant ones – though the reformers had nothing to say against the idea, of course, and did use it themselves. “Christ alone” is another phrase that is right when correctly applied, but which does carry dangers. Protestant reformers elevated Christ above the role of humans (and the saints) in salvation, against an emphasis on human-initiated work. This had been the subject of a lengthy debate within Catholicism, and there was certainly no unified approach to it in Catholic thought. The greatest voice in favour of the human role was Desiderius Erasmus, a philosopher who wanted to reform the church rather than the standard voice on this issue, and it was his work that Luther in particular wrote against in focusing on the work of God in Christ. But the Protestant reformers did not elevate Christ above Father and Spirit in salvation – perhaps “God alone” would be a better term, as the right roles of all three are necessary. This may guard against language such as “all I need for salvation is Christ”, a concept that would have shocked reforming thinkers.
Therefore, while each of the solae is related to reforming thought, and some of them were used extensively by reformers, the emphasis placed on them in the sixteenth century is often not the one that accompanies their usage today. This does not necessarily mean that later applications are incorrect, but, if we want to understand the significance of the Reformation for the church in what it was at the time and what reformers were trying to do, we need to hold our current understanding lightly and be willing to recognize that the original Protestants may not have thought of the faith in the same way we do today. The goal of any such study for me is an enriching of my faith as it is challenged and expanded by learning from brothers and sisters from the past and those living in different contexts in the world today.
What stands out from the writings of the various reforming groups is that they were primarily desirous of reforming the church rather than rebooting it. The major thinkers were incredibly well schooled in church thought through the centuries and drew heavily on earlier writers who communicated a biblical faith well, as well as upholding the great creeds as examples of faith statements that reflected a scriptural understanding of God and his work in salvation. They feared what has been termed the “Radical Reformation” as being possibly worse than Catholicism in prioritizing humanity in the understanding and expression of Christian thought.
The result of this is that the context of their thought is not just the situation of the church in the early sixteenth century, or even in the late medieval period, when some of the corruptions in faith and practice began to be clearly evident in parts of the church. The proposed reforms were intended to help the church be what it should be, what at times it had been, and there was no desire to go back to a church that struggled with the person and nature of Christ or the concept of the Spirit, which was the situation as it emerged from New Testament times and in the first few centuries.
Here is the core of the problem that was present in the anniversary celebrations and in much thought about the Reformation: a lack of awareness of the full context of thought that was present in the discussions about faith and practice. There seems to be a rhetoric that holds that Protestantism comes from the reformers, and the reformers’ ideas came from the Bible. Such a view does no justice to the projects that were undertaken to reform the church, and indeed such an approach to Scripture apart from tradition was rejected by the major figures.
There are theology degrees in which the only part of Christian history studied is the Reformation, and where the first sessions may look only at its immediate causes in the late medieval period. I do not know how any student is supposed to understand what Luther, Calvin, or any other major figure wrote without having a thorough grounding in the Church Fathers, particularly Augustine, or in the major figures of the early medieval period, primarily Lombard and Aquinas, since it is in the web of all this tradition that their thought develops and is defined. The result can only be a sense of rebooting the church, since too little is known of the church that existed in various forms through its history to discern what the reformers were aiming at.
Another aspect that does not often come across well in popular conceptions of the sixteenth century involves the divisions that were present between protesting groups, with the concept of “the Reformation” perhaps indicating too united a movement. To redress this, it will be necessary to look briefly at some of the clearer streams of reforming thought at this time, some of which sought to reform with a lower-case “r”, while others wanted reform with a capital “R”. The different movements sprang up largely independently, often at the same time in different parts of Europe. There is little that can be found to unite them, certainly in regard to their theology. In fact, the harshest statements of the time were often made by reformers about other reformers and reforming groups.
The dissension most commonly agreed on was over the authority of the pope, which only the Catholic reformers sought to uphold. Even the doctrine of transubstantiation (that in Communion, the bread and the wine actually become the body and the blood of Christ), while a major factor in creating some unity in opposition to this idea, did not lead to unity behind a single alternative understanding of the Lord’s Supper. Rather, this was one area where the various reforming groups were most divided and even here there was an exception within Protestantism that for a time upheld the doctrine: the early stages of the reformed Church of England, which upheld transubstantiation in the Six Articles that were published in 1539.
Where the Protestant reformers joined together was in challenging the authority of the papacy and the church in matters of faith. By the beginning of the sixteenth century the papacy had a questionable enough history to allow people to speak out against the leader of the church in the West. This might not sound radical to modern ears, so ready are we to criticize our leaders, but it shows the massive movement that Western society had undergone in the later medieval period.
There are two important factors in this shift. The first concerns how people were tied into the church, with the bishop of Rome at its head. Since the fall of the Western Roman empire in the fifth century and the descent into the dark times of early medieval Europe with its small, fragile, agrarian states, the church had fulfilled two key roles: the guardianship of people’s eternal destiny, which often dominated over earthly identity, with life expectancy generally short and few opportunities for social mobility; and the source of meaning, purpose, and knowledge, given that only churchmen were involved in considering these areas for many centuries. Together these meant that challenging the church on any topic was for a long time both difficult, in creating an opposing case, and dangerous, with the threat of excommunication that would consign a person to eternal damnation. The fact that people were able to break with Rome by the early sixteenth century shows that something had happened in society.
The source of meaning for people had changed from the church to society, in which the church was still an important voice, but now one of many. The major beginnings of this can be seen in the thirteenth century with the introduction to Western Europe of Aristotelian as well as Jewish and Arabian thought, which provided alternative authorities in many areas of life. Once the church’s monopoly on knowledge and meaning was broken, the way was open for people to find truth, even religious truth, outside its boundaries. This does not mean that the church as a whole was the subject of attack, but that perceived errors in teaching and especially in morals were challenged, with an increasingly urban, educated, middle-class population unwilling to follow the church as readily as previous generations.
When attacks were made on the conduct in office of priests, monks, and even bishops, the implications were not critical for the nature and authority of the church, and there were reforming periods that bore such critiques in mind. Much more serious were attacks on the popes, because these undermined fundamental notions of Western Christianity, and we will pick up on this in later chapters. Sadly, by the early sixteenth century, the office of the bishop of Rome had become rather too easy to attack. This was partly owing to developments early in the medieval period, partly because of well-known incidents. This is the second factor that allowed for criticism of the church and the possibility of people “breaking” with the church.
We will explore the nature of the church in greater detail later on, but it is important at this stage to highlight this central concern about the papacy and its ability to exercise doctrinal authority that united all the reforming groups, except of course the reform that took place within the Catholic Church. There may not have been a single Reformation, but there was a common protest. An important point to note, however, is that this protest had a strong focus on authority and method rather than being purely about content or doctrine. Each of the reforming groups had issues with certain areas of Christian belief, but the protesting groups did not agree on the areas that they wanted to be corrected. The core faith expressed in the historic creeds was not challenged, although the communication of these, particularly as regards justification, was clearly a problem, as we will see later.
PURPOSE AND METHOD
So what will this book try to bring to the church’s understanding as we “Rediscover the Reformation”? The first aim is to help any Christian to appreciate the developing ideas of the church in certain areas through its first 1,500 years, a period that Protestant churches tend rather to ignore, yet one containing much thought and practice that is rich, faithful, and beautiful. The second is to situate the thoughts of various relevant reforming voices in their rightful context to see what reforms were proposed and why, and how the different reformers viewed the need for reform. One point to make here is that I will try my utmost to present the teaching of different individuals and groups rather than just my own views or assessments.
Given the length of this book, one result of this approach is that a lot of history of thought is crammed into fewer words than one might like. It should therefore be viewed as a first stage for those really wanting to wrestle with the concepts being addressed, highlighting the thinkers and principles that we need to be aware of behind the ideas that the writers of the Reformation period were communicating. For those just wanting to dip their toes into Christian history, this book should help them understand that the Reformation was in fact a series of proposed reforms to the existing church rather than a brand new movement to reinvent Christianity from starting principles.
An additional motivation behind the book comes from the Spring Harvest theme of 2017, which sought unity in the church. If there is only one church, as Christ had only one body, then what we are studying in the history of Christian thought and practice are the ideas and lives of our brothers and sisters from different contexts with different thought patterns and different strengths and weaknesses. While the church has been all too keen to find weaknesses in others and to condemn them, surely it is preferable to admit that none of us has everything sorted and understood, and thus to listen humbly to each other to seek understanding, recognizing that this will not necessarily mean agreement on all issues, in order to enrich our understanding of our God, our faith, and the lives we are called to live.
The book has been arranged by theme, with four major studies and one additional area that will be considered. The four core themes are the nature of the church, the approach to Scripture, grace as the divine agent in salvation, and then faith, belief, and works as the human response to salvation. In each of these, the relevant history of the church will be outlined before we look at various proposed reforms from different groups and individuals in the sixteenth century. The final study looks at persecution, again noting its roots in the history of the church before considering two accounts from the English church at the time of the Reformation. The focus in the Reformation period is on the first stages, roughly up until 1560, rather than on later developments as the early movements began to bed in in different contexts.
One result of this approach is that the various protesting voices can be differentiated from each other, which I hope will weaken the idea of a single Reformation that would pit the Protestants against the Catholics. The fact is that there were significant differences between reforming groups, most obviously between the best-known reformers and the radical reformers. As well as these differences within the protests of the sixteenth century, this book also highlights some major departures from early Protestant thought in churches today that come under the umbrella of modern Protestantism. The clearest example of this would be the major reformers’ strong support for infant baptism, when there are many Protestant churches today that do not continue that practice.
The decision to approach each of the studies through the history of thought will mean that there is some repetition of historical factors in different chapters. All being well, this will not be too frustrating for the reader, as it is necessary if we are going to examine the precise role of these factors in each instance. It is also hoped that the repetition will reinforce both knowledge and understanding of key stages of the church’s development.
Before we move on to the major themes, it seems sensible to do a brief survey of the major individuals and groups that were proposing reforms during the first forty to fifty years after Luther composed the 95 Theses. This will help the reader to understand the character of the precise voice that will then speak into the various aspects of Christian faith and practice that will be presented through the history of the church and into the reforming period.
THE REFORMATIONS
While there may not have been a single, united “Reformation”, there were a number of reformations active in the first half of the sixteenth century that we need to survey before we look at their relationship to church and Scripture. Scholars of the Reformation period will each have their own opinion on how many groups they would identify and on what basis. I see five major reformations and one important but disconnected movement, which will now be introduced in historical order. The purpose of this is to emphasize aspects that will be elaborated on in later chapters rather than seeking to cover all the aspects of each reformation.
Luther
Where else could we start? The publication of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses (probably not nailed to the doors of Wittenberg Church, although that makes a better story) was the event that marked the beginning of the sixteenth-century reformations. We will leave the discussion of these, indulgences, faith, and grace to the relevant chapter later in the book and concentrate here on the wider nature of Luther’s reforms. One of the first things that readers new to Luther’s writings generally comment on is how Catholic he sounds, and for one very good reason: he was very Catholic in most of his thought. Luther was inspired by his reading of the apostle Paul and Augustine of Hippo, the father of Catholic theology, and in many of the points that he raised against the church of his time Luther was calling the Catholic Church back to its roots. Again, we must always bear in mind that most of the dissenting voices in the early sixteenth century were for a reform, not a restart, of the church.
The more I study it, the more Luther’s Reformation fascinates me. I had imbibed a notion that Luther stood on one side and the Catholic Church on the other, and that the resulting split was therefore inevitable. There are many errors in this idea. Luther gradually developed ideas that disagreed with the church of his time, initially seeking reform from within the church through disputation. Even as late as 1541 there was a major initiative to bring the two sides together at Regensburg.
Luther’s reforms were comparatively limited in their extent, but were focused on core areas of the faith, and there was little in his theology that was not already present in some Catholic thinkers and writers. He was against those additions and extensions to theology that had greatly affected the believer’s approach to God through Christ and Spirit. The purpose of translating the Bible and making the faith more accessible was not to bring down the church but to purify it. Initially, Luther believed that this could be done under papal authority, although this soon changed and he realized that the church he was looking for required a change in the nature of its leadership.
While Luther did take on the Catholic Church where he perceived errors in its method and theology, he applied the same vigour to critiquing other reforming thinkers whom he saw as equally dangerous to the people of Europe. Luther’s own Reformation in Wittenberg was taken over by Andreas von Karlstadt, who gradually departed from many of Luther’s teachings and ended up being expelled on Luther’s orders. There were other more extreme views being expressed that incurred Luther’s great written wrath. Luther fell out with Zwingli over the matter of the Lord’s Supper, with the former condemning again not only the theology that was taught but – more importantly – the method of reading Scripture that was used as the basis for that theology.
As a result, there is a certain chaos to a study of Luther’s Reformation in respect of its development and relationship with other individuals and groups. Luther’s views on a number of matters change, and as a result his critiques of others change. The safety net behind all this was the political support that Luther received from Elector Frederick, who hid him away in the castle at Wartburg for a couple of years to protect him from opposition – this proved to be a vital time early in the Reformation for Luther to work on his writing, including his translation of the New Testament.
It is therefore very difficult to nail down Luther’s Reformation and say that it was this or that. The extent of his written output is quite extraordinary and the set entitled Luther’s Works is still seeing new volumes published, having reached number 88. He wrote biblical commentaries, sermons, theological works, articles for disputation, works on political theology. For those who love a bit of chaos Luther is a great subject for study, but throughout all his work one sees a passion for God and the gospel whether or not one agrees with his content or his style at every point.
Ulrich Zwingli
Zwingli has a very different approach to reforming the church from that of Martin Luther. Where Luther moves slowly through various realizations that the church of which he is a part has faults, Zwingli is critical earlier in his life and ministry, as his humanist education and the more independent Swiss context free him from some of the constraints that Luther only slowly breaks out of. In particular, Zwingli asserts the authority of the Bible above the traditional interpretations early in his preaching career, something for which he is notable, and the result is a more radical reform proposed from the beginning of the changes in Zurich.
Zwingli’s reform was consistent in its message and approach, focusing on the authority of Scripture and the sovereignty of God. The challenge from the Catholic Church was not great in Zurich – the council of the city had appointed Zwingli to high ecclesial office knowing his different approach to Scripture and tradition, and the reforming agenda gradually led to a separation from the authority of Rome – and although there was some division created by Anabaptist groups, Zwingli’s victories over these in debate created a clear leadership and direction for the reformation in the city.
That there was no significant spread of Zwingli’s Reformation across Europe may firstly be accounted for by other more prominent factions voicing the protest: the more obvious appeal of Luther as the flag-bearer of Protestantism, the radical reformers’ spirituality, and later Calvin’s great theological/ecclesial/social project that drew in Protestants from around Europe. Secondly, Zwingli’s own demise must be considered a factor, as he fell in a military engagement with invading Catholic forces. With the loss of its figurehead, the reformation that had been accomplished in Zurich continued along its own path, allowed to do so by the Catholic powers, but, compared with other groups, it lacked the power to spread its message.
The Radical Reformation
This is not a term used in the sixteenth century, but it has become a standard designation for a range of protesting groups, particularly in the early decades of the Reformation, that sought a clearer split between the state and the church than was advocated by Luther, Zwingli, or Calvin. At the time, the most common word used to describe these was “Anabaptist”, since rebaptism (the meaning of the word) was a common teaching against the sacraments of the Catholic Church, but this would not cover all of the groups who were considered radical. Other terms such as “fanatics” and “spiritualists” were also applied, both by Catholics and by other major reformers.
Today the first person associated with Anabaptism in the early years of the Reformation is Menno Simons, and worthily so. We have more of Simons’ writings than of any other early leaders, and his legacy is clearer to see in the groups that developed and continue, some bearing his name. Simons was certainly on the extreme moderate wing of the Anabaptist movement, but does not seem to have made a great impact on other reformers, who focused on other parts of the movement. Simons worked primarily in Holland and north Germany, being persecuted by political powers on several occasions for the disruption to religion that he and the Anabaptist groups brought, and he spent much of his time helping Anabaptists develop a true, biblical faith and appropriate Christian lives and worship.
While Simons has had the most solid and lasting impact, he was not the first to spring to most people’s minds when they thought about radical reforming groups in the early decades of the Reformation, and his Anabaptist beliefs would have meant that many would have grouped him with the more widely influential people associated with the movement. The first of these groups to be mentioned are the Zwickau prophets, a group from just south of Wittenberg who taught the absolute authority of the Spirit above and even apart from Christ and the church. Some members of this group came to Wittenberg and were sent away (as they had been from Zwickau), but their presence brought this form of Anabaptism to the forefront of the awareness of reforming groups. One individual greatly influenced by the Zwickau prophets was Thomas Müntzer, who continued to spread a similar message as he travelled across Europe.
A second important early voice was that of Andreas von Karlstadt, who had mentored Luther and then been led to a Protestant faith by Luther himself. While Luther was secreted in the Wartburg, Karlstadt took on the leadership of the reformation in Wittenberg, but his views on images and the Lord’s Supper (and later on baptism and church reform) led to Luther returning and sending Karlstadt into exile. For Luther, Karlstadt’s great sin was not recognizing the authority of the Bible in matters of faith, but being willing to change the meaning of Scripture to fit with his theology and spirituality.
There were Anabaptists in Zurich who challenged Zwingli’s reform on the basis that Zwingli’s recognition of the Bible as the sole authority should mean that he would reject infant baptism, as there is no explicit mention of this in Scripture. Zwingli took them to task in a similar manner to Luther, arguing that the practice was strongly implied in Scripture and was the accepted practice of the church from its beginning, and thus the Anabaptists were, in his opinion, placing their own views above Scripture and the church.
The most notable event in the public perception of the radical reformers occurred in Münster in the mid-1530s, when the city was taken over by visionary leaders who claimed their revelations had authority over everything else. On this basis they infamously legalized polygamy and instituted a kind of communist monarchical city-state that attracted many from around Europe who were seeking a heightened spiritual experience, including a number from the churches being guided by Menno Simons.
In Geneva, Calvin was in correspondence with a radical thinker named Michael Servetus. While Servetus denied infant baptism, and therefore could be deemed an “Anabaptist”, his most notorious work was one that denied the Trinity, and it was this that was central to his being put on trial for heresy, with Calvin as his accuser. The sentence of death was no surprise, given the outrage extending far beyond Geneva at his views (the death sentence for heresy shows the severity with which faith issues were considered), and although Calvin asked for Servetus to be beheaded rather than burned (as a lesser punishment), Servetus was burned to death. The incident has been used by some to accuse Calvin of unacceptable severity, but such a view shows no awareness of the culture of the time and Calvin’s role in the affair comes across more as that of a defender of the faith and a moderate voice compared to others involved.
This catalogue of radical reforming groups and figures dominated the perception of the Anabaptist/fanatic movement that arose alongside the more rational protesting voices. The severest critiques of such groups came not from the Catholic Church, which viewed them as an inevitable result of removing control of the faith from the established church, but from major reformers who feared that their movements would be tainted by being grouped together with these “Protestants” or that they would lose followers – as they did – who wished for the heightened experience offered rather than obedience to God and his word.
John Calvin
John Calvin formed his Protestant thought while still in his native France, and with his analytical mind recognized that he was not a papist and decided to consider the teachings of the various reforming groups in developing his own theology. He travelled around several early Protestant lands, ending up staying in Geneva only because of a rather bizarre incident in which the leader of reform in that city, Guillaume Farel, cursed Calvin’s future life and career if he did not stay to implement reform. Calvin gave sufficient credence to these curses to stay and, apart from one period of exile after a disagreement with the city council, remained there until the end of his life.
Calvin’s reformation is often associated with what is known as the Geneva Experiment, a lived-out version of some of his core theology. But the reform that Calvin instituted was both broader and deeper than that embodied in Geneva, and is best encapsulated in the developing Institutes of the Christian Religion that was first published in 1536 and then revised multiple times over the next twenty years.
With a basis in this extensive, systematic theology, Calvin’s reformation is the most stable of those we have looked at so far, and based on a concept of Scripture as God-breathed both in its composition and then in its interpretation. For those coming to it for the first time, Calvin’s work is notable for the extensive use of historical voices to clarify his teaching, generally in support of his positions although sometimes as warnings about errors that can creep in when human reason plays too strong a role.
The strength of Calvin’s reformation was its coherence regarding Christian faith and life, and we must recognize that there were many other important thinkers who were associated with this reformation yet were distinct and powerful in their own right, from some of whom Calvin learned aspects of his thought – Martin Bucer in Strasbourg is one example. Calvin did not lead the Reformation in the sense of being the arbitrator of any disputes, but Geneva did provide a home for people with similar views who had fled persecution, and the Institutes was the most clearly worked-through theological treatise.
Calvin wrote extensively beyond the Institutes, in commentaries on books of the Bible and in theological battles with opponents. What is perhaps most surprising when reading Calvin from this distance is the gap between much of his theology and that of groups that today are associated with the great reformer. One thinks first of his engagement with the tradition of the church and his views on infant baptism in this regard, but beyond this Calvin’s deep ideas on the Holy Spirit and his nuanced understanding of God’s sovereignty also do not always come across well in modern movements. Given the richness of Calvin’s writing, it is a shame that so often rather simplified parodies seem to be all that people know.2
Anglicanism
We need to start with Henry VIII and his wives simply because this is the first thought that jumps into most people’s minds when they consider the Reformation in England. Certainly this was a factor, and it provided a trigger for the Act of Supremacy (1534) by which Henry became head of the church in England. Henry famously desired a son (and Anne Boleyn), and sought to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon to further these desires on the basis that the marriage was illegitimate. That much is familiar to everyone. What may be less familiar is the wider background to the reformation in England both in the medieval period and within Henry’s own lifetime.
If there were one country ripe for reformation in the early sixteenth century, it was England. English society had always been less respectful of authority than mainland Europe, as shown by events like the Magna Carta, and this spilled quickly into the religious sphere with works like Piers Plowman (a harshly sarcastic critique of the church and its leaders) and Wycliffe’s call for the authority of the Bible, and indeed the translation of the Bible that he inspired. The idea of freedom from papal authority was thus not as radical in the English context as elsewhere in Europe.
The English Reformation, when it happened, was a rather curious beast in the early years. Henry himself had famously been granted the title “Defender of the Faith” for his writing against Martin Luther in the early 1520s. He had then appealed to Luther for support in his project to be rid of Catherine of Aragon and had received no encouragement. The man who did help, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, had travelled in Europe and met various reforming groups, being apparently most impressed by those loosely associated with Calvin’s project, given the number of these men who were invited over to teach in Cambridge in the late 1530s.
While Cranmer was vital in securing Henry’s divorce, this did not give him the leadership of the Reformation that developed from the Act of Supremacy, even as Archbishop of Canterbury. The leader was very clearly Henry, an astute theologian who composed many of the key early documents of the Reformation in England. The project in the 1530s and 1540s was an interesting one, given that it was not driven by great theological revelations or particular problems with the existing church (except the pope’s intransigence over Catherine). There was thus no need to reform except where the leaders perceived faults, and no single basis on which to reform, with strong Catholic, Lutheran, and reformed voices all present.
The clearest example of this tentative approach can be found in the Six Articles of 1539, which continued to support the doctrine of transubstantiation, the one doctrine that all other protesting groups were united in rejecting. The task of reforming the church must also be considered in the light of a wider political factor, which was the stability of the Tudor dynasty and the strength of England in relations with other countries. Both of these were at the top of Henry’s overall priorities for his reign, as he was only the second in a new dynasty that had emerged to bring an end to the chaos that had resulted from the Wars of the Roses.
In order to create this stability, Henry needed one major thing from his new religion: that it unite the country in the spiritual sphere to protect it from fragmentation from these sources. This was a common fear of rulers across Europe for the next century at least, and much of the suffering of Christians of different denominations resulted from the desire of rulers to provide unity of faith as a basis for a unity of identity and then action. This principle was vital to the end of the religious wars between Catholics and Lutherans that was accomplished by the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, which included the thought cuius regio, eius religio (“whose kingdom, their religion”), with wider effects for other Protestant groups agreed at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.
The reformation of the church in England thus needed to be a unifying force, and one can see, not only in Henry’s reforms but also in the church as it developed under Cranmer after Henry’s death, a breadth or perhaps flexibility to the wording that seeks to allow different approaches to reform to participate. Catholics who continued to uphold papal authority were naturally excluded, but beyond this there was little to disbar Catholics from the new church, while people influenced by other reforming groups were likewise welcome. There would be a similar situation after the restoration of Anglicanism under Elizabeth I, when her “settlement” sought to appease both Catholic and reforming groups, often to the satisfaction of neither party.
Catholic Reformation
This is an important part of the reforming movements in the first fifty years of the Reformation and a major step in the history of the Catholic Church. It was not the first attempt at reform; most notably there had been widespread reforms initiated with some success in the early fifteenth century during a period known as the “Conciliar Papacy”, when councils had gained greater authority and individual popes were slightly less significant in Catholic faith and practice.
Many voices were calling for reform of the church by the early sixteenth century, some of which ultimately rejected the church under Rome and formed Protestant movements, some of which stayed under the authority of Rome and sought to reform the church from within. Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther fell out over whether reform was possible within the church, with Erasmus continuing to believe it was. As regards the major teachings of the Protestant reformers – certainly Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and Cranmer – there was nothing that was new to the Catholic Church, nothing that had not been taught at some point and recognized as true, and little that was not being taught somewhere within the Catholic Church even during the sixteenth century.
It is always slightly dubious to talk about “a” Catholic Church, as it varies greatly in faith and practice in its papal, scholastic, mystical, monastic (of various forms), popular, and political manifestations, as well as through its historical developments both positive and more controversial. In many ways this is the shame of the Council of Trent (1545–63), which clarified the Catholic position in the light of protesting thought: it defined Catholic theology as much as reformed it, and thus to some extent limited the development of Catholic thought in the succeeding period.
My problem is not that Tridentine theology (as that coming out of the Council of Trent is known) is not in line with previous Catholic thought, but that it certainly does not encompass all the richness of this history, while certain aspects are clearly written to oppose Protestant ideas and thus feel more reactive than constructive. There are some beautiful elements, but also clear lines drawn separating Catholics from Protestants and creating sharp divisions in the church that have only recently begun to close, most notably after Vatican II (1962–5), which acknowledged a common faith professed by all Christian denominations despite disagreements over some teachings.
Having said all this, there were major reforms enacted at the Council of Trent, as a simple glance through the documents shows. For most of the sessions that discussed theology and the church, the doctrinal pronouncements are relatively brief, and generally much longer are the reforming statements that come in the second half, seeking to root out immorality in the church, to improve the education of both priests and laity, and to remove corruption in the appointment of people to various offices.
TIME TO BEGIN
The first fifty years of what has become known as “the Reformation” were thus quite complex when it comes to both relations between different groups and the nature of the reforms being proposed. It is of vital importance to recognize that this period cannot be separated out from the rest of church history into some kind of model of Bible-Reformation-Modern Church, or even Bible-Augustine-Reformation-Modern Church, as some would develop the idea, but that the reformations bore in mind all that had gone before, seeking purity of faith, teaching, and life both through the history and in their own context.
I trust that this is sufficient preparation for the first of the main studies that look at aspects of Christianity in various stages of development to allow a better understanding of different reforming perspectives in the early sixteenth century.
NOTES
1 M. Knell, Sin, Grace and Free Will: A Historical Survey of Christian Thought: Volume 2 (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2018) – shameless self-advertising.
2 This would also apply to Luther, although in the Lutheran tradition there is a clearer progression of thought from the root, whereas with Calvin it is often modern movements that spring up and claim a link by using the term “Calvinist”.