the reformers reached their position only after serious and earnest heart-searching. They were some of the most conscientious revolutionaries ever to rebel against authority.43
Five hundred years later, the Reformation’s historical and religious importance cannot be exaggerated. “No other movement of religious protest or reform since antiquity has been so widespread or lasting in its effects, so deep and searching in its criticism of received wisdom, so destructive in what it abolished or so fertile in what it created.”44 The late Catholic historian John Bossy questioned the use of Reformation in the singular while recognizing he had no better alternative. He wrote, “Yet it seems worth trying to use [Reformation] as sparingly as possible, not simply because it goes along too easily with the notion that a bad form of Christianity was being replaced by a good one, but because it sits awkwardly across the subject without directing anyone’s attention anywhere in particular.”45 Cameron asserts that although there were reformations throughout Europe in Catholic nations, Reformation in the singular is reserved “for a particular process of change, integrating cultural, political, and theological factors in a way never seen before and rarely since.”46 Walker recognizes that the “defensive action to the Protestant threat is appropriately called the Counter-Reformation” and also that “one may properly speak of an indigenous Catholic Reformation of the sixteenth century.”47 Yet the localized attempts at “spiritual renewal would not have won the support of popes and prelates—would not have been ‘institutionalized,’ so to speak,—were it not for the profound shock administered to the church at large by the Protestant Reformation.”48
The Protestant Reformers clearly believed that the Roman Catholic Church had departed from the truth of Scripture. Protestants generally consider the term Counter-Reformation a better descriptor of the Council of Trent (1545–1563) whose decrees “were clear and definite in their rejection of Protestant beliefs.”49 The Catholic Church may have experienced reforms, renewals or reformations in areas of practice, piety, and missionary zeal, but did not experience Reformation in the weighty sense of the word which describes the reestablishment of apostolic doctrine. Alister McGrath explains Luther’s theological priority:
For Luther, the reformation of morals and the renewal of spirituality, although of importance in themselves, were of secondary significance in relation to the reformation of Christian doctrine. Well aware of the frailty of human nature, Luther criticized both Wycliffe and Hus for confining their attacks on the papacy to its moral shortcomings, where they should have attacked the theology on which the papacy was ultimately based. For Luther, a reformation of morals was secondary to a reformation of doctrine.50
Luther became a priest in the Catholic Church in 1507 and received his doctorate in theology from the University of Wittenberg in 1512.51 Early on Luther accepted the Church’s teaching that God gives grace to those who do their best. According to Gerald Bray,
It took a spiritual crisis in his own life to shake Luther out of this way of thinking. He did his best but discovered that it was not good enough. . . . After much searching, he found the answer in the words of the prophet Habakkuk, quoted by the apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans: “The just shall live by faith” (Rom 1:17; cf. Hab 2:4). The scales dropped from his eyes as he realized that it is by grace that we are saved through faith and not by our works, however meritorious they are in themselves. The foundations of the old system were shaken to the root, and the result was the Protestant Reformation.52
On October 31, 1517, Luther nailed his famous ninety-five theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg and was ordered by the Church to recant his error. Benedict describes Luther’s resistance:
He dug in and soon was calling for a reduction in the sacraments from seven to three (later two) and the abolition of the monastic orders, while denouncing the Church of Rome as hopelessly corrupt. Although excommunicated by the pope and condemned by the Imperial diet of Worms, he was protected by the Elector of Saxony. Thanks to the printing press, Luther’s example and ideas galvanized widespread agitation for change in the structure of the Church across the German-speaking world. Parisian booksellers also began to sell his writings to eager customers as early as 1519. The Sorbonne condemned Luther’s teaching in 1521, and secular laws soon made possession of his writings a crime.53
Luther translated the Greek New Testament into German in 1522 and the Hebrew Old Testament into German in 1534, the latter considered a foundational work for modern German. He is credited with establishing five fundamental principles or solae: sola scriptura, sola fide, sola gratia, solus Christus, and soli Deo Gloria. These scriptural truths set his teaching apart from the teaching of the Church and announced an inevitable rupture.54 Luther’s influence in France would soon be eclipsed by that of Calvin, yet “between 1528 and the 1540s, Luther was by far the most widely translated foreign theologian in this period.”55 Questions have been raised about the Reformation’s necessity or inevitability. “Such questions cannot be answered with any degree of confidence. The fact remains, however, that Luther himself regarded the Reformation as having begun over, and to have chiefly concerned, the correct understanding of the Christian doctrine of justification.”56
Calvin was born in Noyon, France in the region of Picardy. He received a classical education through which he acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of authors from antiquity and from the patristic period. He later studied law until the death of his father in 1531.57 In 1533 he converted to Protestantism and in 1536 wrote the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, “which evolved through subsequent revisions into the most forceful and successful exposition of Reformed Protestantism of the sixteenth century.”58 He established himself in Geneva in 1541 and began calling upon believers living in places with no Protestant church to separate from the Catholic Church and if necessary relocate to a place where they could worship freely:
As growing numbers of French evangelicals heard this call and fled to Geneva, the number of Genevan presses multiplied, and clandestine networks were established for distributing their products throughout France. . . . No less than 178 French-language editions of one or another of Calvin’s treatises, sermons, and commentaries appeared during his lifetime. His sharp critique of Catholic theology and worship and uncompromising call for separation from it increasingly dominated evangelical propaganda.59
The Reformers proclaimed the divine authority of the Scriptures and encouraged personal Bible reading. Consequently, there was no longer one authoritative voice and interpreter of the Holy Scriptures. As people began reading the Christian Scriptures for themselves the divide between ecclesiastical authority and the faithful grew. Andrew Fix writes,
For centuries the Catholic church had maintained that the only criterion of truth for a religious proposition was the authority of church tradition, pope, and councils. Luther proposed a radical new standard for religious truth at the Diet of Worms in 1521 when he maintained that whatever his conscience was compelled to believe when he read Scripture was religious truth.60
Baubérot asserts that in France in the early 1500s the piety, theology, and practices of the Church were not in crisis. He describes pre-Reformation times as a vast market of salvation and quest for personal salvation, which led a host of men and women to choose the religious life, the way of Christian perfection governed by perpetual vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.61 At least initially, the new ideas which came from Germany found favorable soil in diverse intellectual and religious milieu.62 As Trueman and Kim observe, “France, with a strong monarchy, a vibrant intellectual culture at the University of Paris, and indeed, an interest in exerting independence from the Roman church, looked in the early sixteenth century like fruitful soil for Protestant reform.”63 There were also attempts at reform from within the Church which targeted the clergy and religious life. Those who called for reform denounced the abuses of the clergy at all levels of the hierarchical ladder, from the absentee bishops accumulating undeserved privileges, to the ignorant and concubinary village priests, and to the lazy and drunken monks.64 Jonathan Bloch considers it an error to imagine that Christianity in France was united and strong at the dawn of the Reformation and maintains that pagan elements were present in the various expressions of Catholicism. He explains that this situation permitted Protestantism
