Dictionary:
ref·or·ma·tion (rĕf'ər-mā'shən)  |
| Business Dictionary: Reformation |
Equitable remedy consisting of a revision of a contract by the court, in cases where the written terms of the contract do not express what was actually agreed upon. Thus, reformation is generally only decreed upon a clear and convincing showing of mutual mistake (see Mistake); if only one party was mistaken, reformation is not appropriate unless the mistake of one party resulted from the other party's Fraud.
| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Reformation |
For more information on Reformation, visit Britannica.com.
| British History: Reformation |
Although ‘reform’ means many things, ‘the Reformation’ always denotes the 16th-cent. division of Latin Christendom into protestant and catholic. Protestantism rejected the catholic belief that salvation comes through grace received in the sacraments; it restricted the church's role to one of proclaiming the unmerited gift of divine forgiveness. The Church of England, established by statute in 1559, was unambiguously protestant. The church in England c. 1500 was devoutly catholic and loyally papalist. Many parish churches were extravagantly rebuilt, and lavished with vessels and ornaments. Kings and popes usually got on well. The fame of the German Reformation leader Martin Luther (1483-1546) caught the imagination of some English followers in the 1520s. Churchmen including Thomas Bilney (c. 1495-1531), Robert Barnes (d. 1540), and the Bible translator and controversialist William Tyndale (c. 1494-1536) reinterpreted the Reformation message. However, their support was confined to young university students and those with foreign connections.
Henry VIII's failure to secure papal annulment of his first marriage led to the break with the papacy during 1532-6. This policy required theoretical justification if the king was to carry such a profoundly catholic nation into schism. Thomas Cromwell recruited a number of young humanist writers, whose propaganda pieces criticized both the papacy and some aspects of the old cults, such as papal indulgences. Nevertheless, these moves were not avowedly ‘protestant’: Henry VIII detested Luther. Though Thomas Cromwell's commissioners who toured the doomed monasteries in 1535-6 mocked spurious relics and hunted dissolute monks, the ensuing abolition of the monastic order had no declared religious rationale.
All ambiguity was swept away in the next reign. Revision of the mass-book began almost at once, leading in 1549 to the publication of Cranmer's first Book of Common Prayer. Meanwhile royal commissioners ruthlessly stripped parish churches of most of the ornaments and furniture associated with the old cult. Distinguished continental reformers such as Martin Bucer and Pier Martire Vermigli settled in the universities and influenced further changes in worship. In 1552 a revision of the Prayer Book simplified the apparatus of worship to the barest protestant essentials.
Mary I inherited religious legislation, in her eyes ultra vires and void, which took some eighteen months to reverse. Nevertheless, priests and laity restored the mass at the mere breath of royal suggestion. Once owners of monastic lands were assured of their titles, papal authority was received back with some enthusiasm. The impact of the campaign which burned c. 280 heretics between 1555 and 1558 was greater in hindsight (helped by Foxe's martyrology) than at the time. Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn and legatee of the schism, found the catholic hierarchy much more stubborn than in 1531-3. Re-establishment of the royal supremacy and abolition of the mass required an almost clean sweep of the episcopate. Even the Thirty-Nine Articles approved by convocation in 1563 were altered by the queen herself, probably to placate conservatives.
The new bishops chosen by Elizabeth from leading reformed clergy in 1559, and most protestant zealots, assumed that the concessions made to tradition were temporary sops. To their increasing horror and bewilderment, they found that the queen obstinately refused to strip away the veneer of ritual. She feared that combative protestant preaching still risked alienating parts of the kingdom and sparking a religious war: the restoration of the mass during the northern earls' revolt of 1569, and her excommunication by the pope in 1570, lent these fears substance. In the ‘puritan’ controversies of the 1570s Elizabeth nurtured a faction of clerics led by John Whitgift (archbishop of Canterbury 1583-1604) which believed with equal zeal in protestant dogma, episcopal church government, and traditionalist ceremonial. So was the peculiar hybrid ‘Anglican’ church, founded both on Foxe's Martyrs and on Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, brought to birth by the end of the 16th cent.
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Reformation |
Background
The preparation for the movement was long. Opponents of orthodox views had asserted themselves over centuries, and in the 14th cent. John Wyclif had led a dissident movement. His ideas were amplified later by John Huss in Bohemia, who was burned (1415) at the stake by order of the Council of Constance. After his death his followers in Bohemia upheld his cause in the long and bitterly fought Hussite Wars. These dwindled into compromise, but Huss's challenge to the orthodox view of the Eucharist and the revolutionary effect of the wars did not disappear.
New forces fanned discontent with the church and the medieval order of society. There had long been outcries against abuses in the church, especially the blatant worldliness of some of the clergy, the emphasis on money, and the oppressiveness, not only intellectual but economic, of members of the church hierarchy. In the 15th cent. the conciliar movement (i.e., the attempt to establish the superiority of the ecumenical council over the pope) heralded the growing internal church dissent. Although the movement failed, the number of those wishing reform nevertheless grew steadily.
The desire for change was increased by the appearance of humanism and the spirit of the Renaissance. Study of the ancient Greek and Hebrew texts concentrated attention on the Bible and evoked a new critical spirit, exemplified in such men as Lorenzo Valla and Johann Reuchlin. The Renaissance also tended to develop an emphasis on the individual. The later humanists were outspoken in their attacks on the abuses in the church; Desiderius Erasmus was, perhaps, the most prominent, but there were many others, including the humanists at Oxford. The intimate connection between the new learning and the Reformation itself is shown in the pursuits of men who were to be prominent in the Reformation in central Europe; Ulrich von Hutten and Philip Melanchthon were outstanding figures in humanism, and Huldreich Zwingli arrived at opposition to the church mainly through the study of Greek and Hebrew. The very founding of the Univ. of Wittenberg, which was to be the center of revolt, was part of the urge to humanism.
The introduction of printing in Western Europe allowed more widespread dissemination of criticism. Printing was to hasten the Reformation, and the Reformation in turn was to spread printing further. In secular matters the opposition between church and state was centuries old, but it had begun to take a new turn with the building of strong nations. In Germany this opposition to the power of the church was coupled in the minds of many princes with opposition to that other supranational body, the Holy Roman Empire, and the princes were to play a decisive part in the ecclesiastical rebellion.
The rise of the cities and of the power of merchants and the middle class generally not only upset the old medieval order of things but created much discontent with the scholastic views on finance and economic affairs that fettered the enterprise of the men in search of wealth. The economy of Europe was expanding and forcing cracks in the more or less rigid walls of the system. Scholars of the 20th cent. have put a great deal of emphasis on the connection between the new modes of religious thought and economic change (i.e., the connection between Protestantism and capitalism) as a major force in the Reformation. There were, however, many influences at work, and the field was well prepared by 1517. Nevertheless, it was with suddenness and surprise that the Reformation began.
The Influence of Martin Luther
Martin Luther, a professor of theology at the Univ. of Wittenberg, had been stirred to action by the campaign for dispensing indulgences being launched under Johann Tetzel in Germany. He protested. On Oct. 31, 1517, he posted on the door of the castle church at Wittenberg his 95 theses, inviting debate on matters of practice and doctrine. Luther's action was not as yet a revolt against the church but a movement for reform within. It was, however, much more than an objection to the money-grabbing and secular policies of the clergy. Luther had already become convinced that in certain matters of doctrine the purity of the ancient church had been perverted by self-seeking popes and clergy.
His disagreement with the church on matters of doctrine soon became apparent. In 1519 Luther in a dispute with Johann Eck openly espoused doctrines that were implicit in his theses, and he denied the authority of the church in religious matters. In 1520 the pope issued a bull of excommunication against Luther, and the Holy Roman emperor, Charles V, thundered against the rebel. Luther defied them, publicly burned the bull of excommunication, and issued vigorous pamphlets assailing the papacy and the doctrine of the sacraments. The breach was thus made in 1521, and the meeting of the Diet of Worms (see Worms, Diet of) not only failed to produce a compromise but forced many doubters into the camp of the rebels. Luther was declared an outlaw, but the threat was empty; under the protection of the powerful Frederick III, elector of Saxony, he was spirited off to the safety of the Wartburg.
Economic, Spiritual, and Political Motives
The revolt was spreading with incredible speed over central and N Germany and almost immediately extended beyond the German borders. All the elements of discontent and rebellion coalesced. The learned, such as Luther himself, Melanchthon, and Martin Bucer, saw the opportunity to express and expand their own views. The nobles were enabled to cast off allegiance to the Holy Roman emperor and to enrich themselves by seizing the immense landed estates of the church. Too much can be—and has been—made out of this economic motive, however, for many of the princes belonged to the intellectual group that had been stirred to critical rejection of church doctrines, and they were perhaps better aware than the common people of the venality and money-mindedness of many of the clergy. Many of the pious, increased in number by a spontaneous religious revival in the late 15th cent., drank the doctrine of a new spirituality with pleasure, for Luther's doctrine of justification (i.e., salvation) by faith alone and not by sacraments, good works, and the mediation of the church placed humans in open and direct communication with God. The new insistence on reading the word of God in the Bible placed a greater responsibility on the individual.
Those who were feeling the first and welcome experience of nationalism were anxious to shake off the hand of Rome. Absolutist rulers, particularly in Scandinavia, welcomed the opportunity to end the interference of the church in state affairs; by creating national churches they were able to escape outside influence. Merchants and capitalists found the air of individual freedom exhilarating. The peasants, chafing under the old restrictions of feudalism, lifted up their heads in hope that the new dispensation would take away their burdens.
Ferment, Division, and Warfare
In Zürich, Switzerland, Huldreich Zwingli had developed his own brand of dissent. In 1529 in the Colloquy of Marburg, Luther and Melanchthon on the one side and Zwingli and Johannes Oecolampadius on the other discussed the nature of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper (the Protestant form of the Catholic Eucharist) but failed to come to an agreement. The fundamental principle that every man could arrive at truth by study of the Bible also led many to more radical conclusions than those that Luther adopted. The preacher known as Carlstadt (from the place of his birth) argued for a more thoroughgoing dismissal of old practices and doctrines in Wittenberg itself and caused Luther to emerge from his retirement to halt the progress of radicalism. The Peasants' War (1524–25) showed plainly the rifts within the ranks of the rebels, and Luther, forced to choose between the revolutionary peasants and their opponents, the princes, chose the princes and orderly governance. The lower classes then in large measure followed more revolutionary social leaders, such as the communistic Thomas Münzer and John of Leiden. After their revolution had been brutally put down and the leaders tortured and executed, many of the revolutionary peasants returned to Roman Catholicism, but many continued to foster more radical sects, such as the Anabaptists.
In general the princes were able to dictate what religion should prevail in their territories, and they opposed vigorously the attempt of the Holy Roman emperor to force them back into the old church. The Knights' War (1522–23), led by Franz von Sickingen against the ecclesiastical princes, ended in failure, but the determination of Charles V to extirpate Lutheranism ultimately ended in even more abject failure. The imperial Diet of Speyer in 1526 found no answer to the division of the empire, and when a new Diet of Speyer in 1529 ordered that the emperor's ruling against the heretics should be enforced, the Lutheran princes issued a defiant protest (from which the term Protestant is derived). The Diet of Augsburg in 1530 was equally fruitless in producing a compromise between Catholic and Lutheran princes, but it did produce the Confession of Augsburg (see creed), which was drafted by Melanchthon and became the official statement of Lutheran faith.
The conflict in the empire led the Protestant princes to form a defensive union against the emperor in the Schmalkaldic League, in which the chief figures were Philip of Hesse and John Frederick I of Saxony. The league was put down in the Schmalkaldic War (1546–47), which did not, however, in the least solve the problem. Emperor Charles V, in an effort to prolong the uneasy peace, proposed to the Protestants that there be an interim agreement against change until a general church council could legislate on the dispute. This was the so-called Augsburg Interim (1548), which did not take effect because it was rejected by the Protestant princes. The confusion that political considerations brought to the religious issue is perhaps best seen in the career of Maurice, duke of Saxony, who fought first on one side, then on the other.
A sort of peace of exhaustion and compromise was reached in the Peace of Augsburg (1555; see Augsburg, Peace of). The settlement was at best uneasy and was not to endure except in principle. The conflict was merged with many other issues in the later Thirty Years War (1618–48).
Calvin and the Spread of Protestantism
The message of the Reformation spread quickly throughout Europe (except Russia). The Scandinavian countries became firmly Protestant under Gustavus I of Sweden and Frederick I of Denmark and Norway; later attempts to win them back to Catholicism failed. Geneva had become in 1536 the headquarters of John Calvin, who is considered by many the greatest theologian of Protestantism. His Institutes of the Christian Religion, published at Basel in 1536, marked a new era in thought. He differed from Luther principally in the doctrine of predestination (the foregone choosing by God of the elect to be saved), in the austerity of the life of the godly, and in the emphasis on theocratic government (see Calvinism). His influence was immediate and enormous. France, which had hardly been touched by Lutheranism, was fired by Calvinist doctrine, and the Protestant minority, called the Huguenots, waged fierce battle against the Catholic majority in the Wars of Religion until toleration was won when the Huguenot leader Henry of Navarre turned Catholic, became King Henry IV, and issued (1598) the Edict of Nantes.
Calvinism superseded Lutheranism in the Netherlands, where the religious revolt was coupled with revulsion at the policies of Charles V and his successor, Philip II of Spain. Through bloody wars independence and Calvinism gained the upper hand in the N Low Countries. Calvinism conquered Scotland, too, through the victory of John Knox in his long duel with Mary Queen of Scots. It spread also to Hungary and Poland and took root in parts of Germany.
It proved quite impossible to reconcile the finely wrought theology of Calvinism with Lutheran doctrines, for Lutheranism rejected predestination and clung to part of the sacramental system (see Lord's Supper). Calvinist thought did greatly influence the course of the Reformation in the British Isles and the present United States. There was also a conflict of Lutheranism and Calvinism with the more radical and emotional groups, and the enthusiasm of preachers who interpreted Scripture in their own way met with a cool reception among the Calvinists.
The divisions within Protestantism were from the beginning sharp, and attempts to reconcile Calvinist, Lutheran, and other doctrine had only partial success. Moreover, in England the Reformation went its own course. It was there much more closely connected with the conflict of church and state than was the Reformation on the Continent. The conflict of King Henry VIII with Rome led to the Act of Supremacy (1534), which firmly rejected papal control and created a national church (see England, Church of). Currents of Calvinistic thought were, however, strong in England. The Reformation was begun with the creation of a state church and the dissolution of the monasteries. It was given Calvinist touches under Edward VI, suffered a complete reversal under Mary I, and reached a sort of balance under Elizabeth I with some persecution of both Catholics and Calvinists. The process was to work itself out slowly later in the English civil war, just as the fierce hatreds between Protestant and Protestant as well as between Catholic and Protestant were to be worked out later on the Continent.
The burning of Servetus was a sample of the internal strife within Protestantism itself. The divisions within the churches of the Reformation also served to forward the Counter Reformation within the Roman Catholic Church, which rewon Poland, Hungary, most of Bohemia, and part of Germany. The end of the Thirty Years War in the Peace of Westphalia (see Westphalia, Peace of) in 1648 brought some stabilization, but the force of the Reformation did not end then. It has continued to exert influence to the present day, with its emphasis on personal responsibility and individual freedom, its refusal to take authority for granted, and its ultimate influence in breaking the hold of the church on life and consequent secularization of life and attitudes.
Bibliography
See T. M. Lindsay, History of the Reformation (2 vol., 1906–7; repr. 1971); E. M. Hulme, The Renaissance, the Protestant Revolution, and the Catholic Reformation in Modern Europe (rev. ed. 1917); P. Smith, The Age of the Reformation (1920, repr. 1962); A. Hyma, The Christian Renaissance (1924); R. H. Murray, The Political Consequences of the Reformation (1926, repr. 1960); R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926); M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (tr. 1930); C. Hopf, Martin Bucer and the English Reformation (1946); R. H. Bainton, The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century (1952, repr. 1965) and Studies on the Reformation (1963); G. G. Coulton, Art and the Reformation (rev. ed. 1958); H. S. Lucas, The Renaissance and the Reformation (2d ed. 1960); H. J. Grimm, The Reformation Era, 1500–1650 (rev. ed. 1965); G. R. Elton, Reformation Europe, 1517–1559 (1966); A. G. Dickens, Reformation and Society in 16th-Century Europe (1966), The English Reformation (1967), and The Reformation in Historical Thought (1985); N. Sykes, The Crisis of the Reformation (1967); H. J. Hillerbrand, The World of the Reformation (1973); L. W. Spitz, The Protestant Reformation, 1517–1559 (1984); D. MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (2004); P. Collinson, The Reformation (2004).
| History 1450-1789: Protestant Reformation |
The term Reformation refers in general to the major religious changes that swept across Europe during the 1500s, transforming worship, politics, society, and basic cultural patterns. One key dimension was the Protestant Reformation, the movement that began in 1517 with Martin Luther's critique of doctrinal principles and church actions in Germany and that led to the establishment of new official churches—the Lutheran, the Reformed or Calvinist, and the Anglican. These were separate from the Latin Catholic Church in organization and different from it in theology. Many other dissident groups and individuals, collectively known as the Radical Reformation, also emerged during the turmoil of the 1520s and 1530s, building communities despite frequent persecution. Ongoing efforts to reform the old church took on new urgency in response to these challenges, leading to a distinct Catholic Reformation. The Protestant Reformation affected patterns of change in Europe through Protestant theology's shifting theological emphases, through Protestant piety's emphasis on reading and knowledge, and through new alignments between organized churches and politics.
Because of the complex course and multiple outcomes of the Reformation movements, historians today speak of multiple Reformations during the first two-thirds of the 1500s—the Protestant, the Radical, and the Catholic; the urban, the peasants', and the princely; or the German, French, and British. The Protestant Reformation was embedded in larger processes that included the emergence of national states, new encounters with the outside world, and deep socioeconomic shifts. The breakdown of religious unity and the establishment of multiple churches in this era highlights the central role that religion played in early modern European self-understanding. Doctrinal and ceremonial changes had consequences for every aspect of society, from family life and gender roles to art and philosophy. As we learn more about different historical actors and their varying goals, we can no longer view the Reformation as a single conflict between Luther and the popes or as a single movement, positive or negative. Rather, we must approach the Reformation by looking carefully at the spiritual aspirations, the cultural frameworks, and the material circumstances of the people whose lives it transformed.
The idea of reformation had a long history in Western thought before 1500, with two main meanings: to modify in general (to reform) and to improve something by returning it to its original state (to re-form, or restore). St. Augustine's statement that "man is not able to reform himself as he is able to deform himself" durably connected reformation with individual conversion and divine grace, although during the Middle Ages the word could refer to any systematic change. Because the term implied renewal or even rebirth, it could also be associated with the renaissance of classical learning. By the late 1300s, the "reformation" of monasteries became a central goal of the Observant movements that sought to restore the principles of their orders' founders, and by the 1400s, calls for a "reformation in head and members" of the entire church had become loud.
When evangelical thinkers in the early 1500s called for radical changes in the church, they too described their project as a "reformation," as did those who sought to improve the church from within. Most sixteenth-century reformers hoped that a single purified church would be the outcome, while others saw religious division as a sign of the imminent Apocalypse. Only after 1600, when it became clear that the division among western European Christians was permanent, did the term "Reformation" become the name for the movements that created the division as well as for the period during which the division took place.
Antecedents of the Reformation
Scholars have pointed to several developments during the 1400s as possible forerunners of the Protestant Reformation. Developments in formal theology, in broader cultural life, and in different European regions all confirm the continuity between the Reformation and earlier historical processes. For example, disputes among academic theologians raised issues similar to those later addressed by Luther and other Reformation thinkers. Late medieval followers of St. Thomas Aquinas's via antiqua ('old path') argued against adherents of the via moderna ('new path') developed by William of Ockham (1280–1349), while mystical thinkers sought to bypass the confining procedures of Scholastic theology entirely. Particularly in the 1400s, learned churchmen disagreed about such fundamental issues as God's sovereignty, the place of human effort in gaining salvation, and the effects of sin and grace on the human soul. With the growth of universities and the spread of printed books around 1500, many more thinkers became aware of these debates about the fundamentals of Christian faith, setting the stage for Reformation controversies.
Other scholars point to the Renaissance and particularly to humanist philology as preparing the ground for religious turmoil. Although few historians today see the Renaissance as the birth of modern individualism, the recovery of Greek and Latin texts on philosophy and philology during the 1400s did spur intellectuals to look at the writings of the church fathers and the Bible in new ways. Even when motivated by orthodox zeal, careful printed editions and new translations of sacred texts raised new questions about the way the church interpreted its mission. Italian humanists such as Lorenzo Valla led the way in applying the new philology to sacred texts, but the humanist with the greatest impact in northern Europe was Erasmus of Rotterdam. In addition to editing both classical literature and the church fathers, Erasmus in 1516 issued the first printed edition of the New Testament in Greek, together with a new Latin translation that changed the meaning of several key passages. Erasmus was also a best-selling author of Latin textbooks—such as Encomium Moriae (1511; English translation, In Praise of Folly, published 1549)—that savagely mocked popular superstitions and greedy clergymen.
Finally, the Protestant Reformation shared important features with the Hussite movement that swept through Bohemia in the early 1400s. The teachings of Jan Hus contained several ideas that Luther later engaged: an emphasis on God's grace over human works in salvation, a harsh critique of the papacy, and a call for lay Bible reading in local vernaculars. Moreover, Hus's ideas gained support in Bohemia from a coalition of burghers, nobles, and peasants who combined Czech resentment of German dominance with aspirations for a just Christian society. Anger about the special privileges that priests enjoyed and about the fiscal impact of an international church on local societies heightened anticlerical feelings across Europe at this time. Luther's recognition that he shared Hus's ideas accelerated his break with the papacy, and Protestant propaganda later named Hus among its martyrs. Although the Hussite movement was limited to Bohemia after Hus's execution for heresy in 1415, it revealed how potent the combination of anti-clericalism, lay enthusiasm for new ideas, and effective preaching could be.
Early Protestant Movements in Germany
All across Europe after 1500, reformist clerics sought to reform church organization, to purify religious practice, and to intensify individual piety. In Italy educated priests such as Gasparo Contarini combined prayer and study while organizing groups to improve church services for the laity. In France a group around Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples also called for an evangelical renewal of the church. They, like John Colet in England, turned to the Epistles of St. Paul in their efforts to better understand God's will, as would Luther. Among all these groups, humanist ideas and connections played an important role. Evangelical ideas were therefore widespread in Europe, yet the course of reform differed enormously from place to place. To understand this variation, argues historian Euan Cameron, we must analyze the different coalitions that formed and sometimes dissolved around evangelical ideas.
The emergence of separate Protestant churches could not have taken place without the movement's early breakthrough in the Holy Roman Empire, where Martin Luther was the critical figure. Luther's doctrinal views took shape during the 1510s, but the Protestant Reformation as a movement began with the response that he evoked among German clergy, nobles, and common people in the 1520s. This response grew rapidly because of the force of Luther's writing and because evangelical texts were printed not just in Latin but also in pithy German summaries and in illustrated versions. Moreover, criticism of the Roman church was already widespread in Germany, as were lively popular piety and interest in correct religious practice. Many early adherents saw Luther as a German champion against a corrupt Roman hierarchy and its financial abuses, and approved of his attacks on the special status of the clergy; others found spiritual consolation in his understanding of salvation, thought that his calls for "spiritual freedom" would bring about a just world with lighter burdens, or shared his belief in an imminent Apocalypse. Luther's precise theological arguments about justification and grace, meanwhile, mostly influenced engaged clerics and other spiritually focused individuals.
After 1519 another evangelical center emerged in Zurich, where Huldrych Zwingli began preaching sermons that combined humanist critiques of the church and its ceremonies with theological ideas similar to Luther's. Zwingli's ideas quickly became popular in south German cities and in parts of the Swiss Confederation. Although the southern movement remained separate from Luther's, ultimately giving rise to the Reformed and Calvinist churches, both spread evangelical ideas throughout German society. The earliest representatives of the Radical Reformation also emerged during the early 1520s from the circles around Luther and Zwingli; while they joined Luther and Zwingli in attacking the existing church, they often called for radical reform of society and eventually diverged on key doctrinal issues as well.
Political and social tensions converged with new religious ideas to produce a mass movement in the empire, partly because many German and Swiss towns and even villages enjoyed considerable autonomy. During the decisive years between 1518 and 1521, moreover, political circumstances in Germany delayed action against Luther. Luther had powerful supporters among both churchmen and lay leaders, including his lord Frederick the Wise of Saxony, whereas the death of Emperor Maximilian and the struggle to elect his successor Charles V preoccupied the imperial authorities. By the time Luther was excommunicated in 1520 and banned by the empire in 1521, he had already become a national hero. The early Reformation coalitions in Germany thus included clergy, some nobles, and many townspeople and peasants.
After Luther refused to recant at the Diet of Worms in 1521, ordinary people in many German towns called for "preaching the pure Gospel." They enjoyed support from committed members of the local elites—often younger men with humanist educations. Through the 1520s, many German cities edged cautiously toward open rejection of Rome, and by 1530, a substantial majority had joined the Lutheran or Zwinglian "Reformation in the cities." It is striking how radically new converts during these years rejected practices such as the veneration of images, in which they had often participated right up to the introduction of evangelical ideas. Adopting the Reformation brought about sharp changes in daily ritual that everyone could see.
The German peasants also hoped that "Godly law" would help liberate them from their burdens. In 1525 during the German Peasants' War, many of them refused to pay dues, sacked monasteries and castles, and gathered into huge armed bands. Hundreds of peasant communes formulated demands that were ultimately distilled into the Twelve Articles of the Swabian Peasantry. These demanded the "pure Gospel," local election of priests, an end to serfdom, and free access to commons and forests. Specific Bible verses justified each of the articles, thus linking spiritual renewal to social change. Although poorer townspeople joined the movement in some areas, the German nobility brutally suppressed the uprising. Luther too condemned the peasants, although he had initially recognized the justice of some of their demands. The defeat of the "common man" in 1525 shifted Reformation coalitions in Germany toward urban elites and the territorial nobility, decisively shaping later developments.
For defenders of the old church, the Peasants' War proved that the evangelical movement was subversive. Luther's supporters among Germany's princes and magistrates also sought to control popular turmoil. They faced the challenge of rebuilding territorial church organization in a way that reflected the new teachings while taking account of social and political pressures. This required both gaining legal recognition for their faith and establishing a clearer definition of what they believed. Luther and his key supporter Philipp Melanchthon drew up a comprehensive statement of Lutheran principles, the Augsburg Confession of 1530, and published new catechisms to instruct the laity. The process of consolidation led to heightened repression against dissenters of all kinds. Fearing that Satan sought to destroy the Gospel by encouraging fanaticism, Luther supported the organization of new hierarchical churches under princely control.
After it became clear that neither church would gain a clear majority among the princes, prelates, and towns in the empire, both sides built up alliances, such as the Schmalkaldic League, which linked princely territorial ambitions with the defense of Lutheran doctrine. In 1546 the emperor sought a military solution in the Schmalkaldic War. The effects of his initial victory quickly evaporated amid political maneuvering, however, creating a deadlock that led to the Religious Peace of Augsburg in 1555. The peace decreed that political rulers within Germany could choose between the Catholic and Lutheran faiths for their entire territories: dissidents had to depart or face official persecution. The dynamic evolution of Reformation coalitions thus left the German-speaking world mixed in religious confession, with decisive power over religion in the hands of territorial rulers. Confessional division had a deep and lasting effect on German identity, churches, and politics.
Protestant Movements Outside Germany
The Protestant Reformation followed diverse paths outside the Holy Roman Empire, generally as a minority movement. The first adherents were often intellectuals who read Luther's Latin writings. With few exceptions, those in charge of both churches and governments remained hostile to the Reformation for at least a generation, rigorously persecuting those who sought to introduce it from Germany. Even where Roman authority was rejected early, as in England, Reformation coalitions appeared later, grew more slowly, and attracted fewer influential patrons than in Germany. Partly because of this delay, the form of Protestantism that had the greatest impact outside Germany was based on John Calvin's views rather than on Luther's.
The historian Heiko Oberman suggests that we view the Reformation outside Germany as a "reformation of the refugees," since so many leading figures had to flee from persecution. Calvin himself was a refugee who left France in 1534 during an early crackdown against French evangelicals. During stays first in Strasbourg and then in Geneva, he developed views that differed in important ways from the Lutheran tradition. Calvin shared Luther's belief in justification by faith but adopted a different interpretation of Communion. Calvin and his followers also wanted churches that were more independent from secular control than the Lutheran territorial churches. After Zwingli died in battle against the Catholic Swiss in 1531, his successor Heinrich Bullinger also sought to clarify the doctrine that separated the Zurich church from Catholics and Lutherans. Discussions among Bullinger, Calvin, and other Reformed theologians produced the Second Helvetic Confession of 1566 and the Heidelberg Catechism of 1562, important models for later Calvinist confessions of faith. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin produced a systematic Reformed guide to doctrine. Calvinism expanded into France after the 1550s and spread through parts of Germany, the Netherlands, and eastern Europe. It also predominated in the theology (but not the organization) of the Anglican Church in England after 1558.
The emergence of new churches and the consolidation of a reformed Catholic Church confronted Europeans after the 1530s with a complex spiritual landscape. To understand how different Reformation coalitions formed, evolved, and sometimes collapsed, we need to consider the social position of early adherents, the political system, the nature of earlier heretical or anti-Roman ideas, and the international pressures each region faced. The Reformation outside Germany generally lacked peasant participation. It was an urban and professional movement whose most important early activists came from the younger clergy. In France the decision of some nobles to protect Reformation thinkers allowed the movement to grow despite harsh persecution. However, noble support also entangled evangelical religion with factional political disputes that led to vicious religious wars after 1560. In northern Europe the attitudes of monarchs were critical: Henry VIII's decision to break with Rome opened the way for the later spread of Protestantism in England, as did Gustav I Vasa's combination of Swedish independence with Lutheran conversion. Elsewhere, kings suppressed the Reformation using mechanisms such as the Inquisition in Spain or special courts in France. The previous history of religious dissent and the vitality of local humanist movements also affected local Reformation coalitions. In Bohemia, for example, the surviving Hussite church made common cause with the Reformers. The strength of humanism in Italy ensured that serious consideration of evangelical reform within the church continued into the 1550s under the protection of humanist-influenced bishops. Finally, external circumstances shaped the different Reformation coalitions. In the Netherlands, Calvinism became part of a national war against Spanish rule, while the Reformation in Scotland depended on relations between England and France. In eastern Europe political opponents of the Habsburg dynasty often turned to the Lutheran or Calvinist faiths.
Significance of the Reformation
Scholarly views of the Reformation have often reflected religious and ideological perspectives. Protestant historians portrayed it as a moment of heroic recovery from medieval "corruption," while some Catholic historians attacked it as a catastrophic out-break of undisciplined individualism. Nineteenth-century liberal descendants of Protestantism argued that Martin Luther's appeal to conscience represented the "birth of individual liberty," and saw the origins of the modern secular state in conflicts over the free practice of religion. Marxist historians argued that the popular appeal of Luther made him part of an "early bourgeois revolution," while the rebellious peasants were proletarians before their time.
Recent studies of the Reformation more often emphasize its social dimension, going beyond the doctrinal issues that divided Europeans. Because religion helped shape every aspect of European life, the practices of the new churches caused major changes. Sacramental ceremonies from baptism to last rites had long marked key moments in the lives and families and communities. By abolishing or changing the sacraments, Protestantism challenged the social meaning of these rituals. The Protestant attack on clerical celibacy emptied monasteries and nunneries and led to a married clergy. This shattered older understandings about sexuality and personal holiness and led to intensified debate about the role of women in society. New ideas about piety caused the abolition of many public festivals in Protestant regions, often against popular resistance. Poor relief and charity meant something different when they no longer served as rich people's way to perform penance.
In politics the fact that the church had been a political as well as spiritual power led to realignments at every level from villages to international diplomacy. Religious adherence became an important factor in political alliances until the end of the Thirty Years' War in 1648. The emerging Protestant states of northern Europe were strengthened by the windfalls of property they seized from their churches, and gained new authority over daily life through their tight control over the Protestant clergy. Current research concentrates especially on confessionalization, that is, the organizational consolidation of churches and identities along confessional lines. Of particular interest is the question of whether the Reformations—Catholic and Protestant—opened the way for European states to impose new standards of ethical and sexual behavior on their populations. Among intellectuals, debates among the emerging faiths challenged fundamental understandings about the relation of the individual conscience to God, about how sinful humans should live together in ordered societies, and ultimately about the sources of truth and authority. The confidence of the early reformers gave way later in the 1500s to bitter debates among theologians about ever smaller matters on the one hand, and to calls for the forcible reimposition of unity on the other. In contrast, arguments for greater toleration of dissent and skepticism about whether humans could really know God's will were met with repression throughout the 1500s.
Some thinkers have looked to the Reformation to explain the profound transformation of Europe between 1500 and the present. Notably, the sociologist Max Weber proposed that the religious culture of Protestantism, with its emphasis on Bible reading and ethical self-scrutiny, had produced habits that favored the emergence of modern capitalism, especially among Calvinists. Many other thinkers have probed the contrast between a Protestant "religion of the Word" and a Catholic religion focused on action and emotion, often suggesting that Protestant or radical views "disenchanted" the world to produce a more modern worldview. Today, most historians who study the cultures of Protestant and Catholic Europe are more cautious. Major cultural changes did not correlate in a simple way with religious difference. Moreover, recent research has demonstrated that the larger population only slowly absorbed the formal agendas of Protestantism and renewed Catholicism. It therefore seems unlikely that differences in religious doctrine can entirely explain later developments. Instead, current research seeks to include both the spiritual meaning and the social consequences of Europe's Reformations in efforts to explain Europe's early modern history.
Bibliography
Benedict, Philip. Christ's Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism. New Haven, 2002. Definitive study of the Reformed and Calvinist developments from the perspective of social history.
Brady, Thomas A., Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy, eds. Handbook of European History, 1400–1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation. Leiden and New York, 1994. Scholarly assessments of major issues in European history during this period.
Cameron, Euan. The European Reformation. Oxford and New York, 1991. Comprehensive survey suitable for advanced readers, emphasizing the importance of varying coalitions.
Dickens, A. G., and John Tonkin. The Reformation in Historical Thought. Cambridge, Mass., 1985. Reprint 1999. Explores changing perceptions of the Reformation's course and significance.
Gordon, Bruce. The Swiss Reformation. Manchester, U.K., and New York, 2002. Best survey of the Protestant movements in German-speaking Switzerland.
Karant-Nunn, Susan C. The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany. London and New York, 1997. Explores how changes in ritual transformed religious life in Germany after 1520.
Mc Grath, Alister. Reformation Thought: An Introduction, 3rd ed. Oxford, 1999. An accessible introduction to Protestant theology with emphasis on key doctrinal issues.
Oberman, Heiko A. Luther: Man between God and the Devil. Translated by Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart. New Haven, 1989. Sets Luther's career in context of late medieval developments and later interpretations.
O'Malley, John W. Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era. Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2000. Explores changing understandings of reform and Reformation in a Catholic context.
Scribner, Robert W. For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation. 2nd ed. Oxford, 1994. Pathbreaking study of visual propaganda.
Scribner, Robert W., Roy Porter, and Mikulás Teich, eds. The Reformation in National Context. Cambridge, U.K., 1994. Concise introductions to the course of the Reformation in Western and Eastern European contexts.
Tracy, James. Europe's Reformations, 1450–1650. Lanham, Md., 1999. Comprehensive survey, suitable for all readers, reflecting latest research and perspectives.
—RANDOLPH C. HEAD
| Law Encyclopedia: Reformation |
A remedy utilized by the courts to correct a written instrument so that it conforms to the original intent of the parties to such an instrument.
Legal documents, such as contracts, deeds, mortgages, and trusts, are all proper subjects for reformation. Since the original intent of the parties must control, however, a totally new agreement cannot be created through reformation.
The court, in the exercise of its equity powers to do justice, will reform a document only in the event that fraud or mutual mistake occurred in its execution.
Reformation is a remedy that is granted at the discretion of the court only where the facts and circumstances of a particular case warrant it. It will not be granted where an entirely new agreement would result between the parties or where unwarranted hardships would be imposed upon them. Only an individual who has acted in good faith can apply to the court to have an instrument reformed.
Reformation is not available as a remedy to correct every minor error, such as typographical errors; rather, it is granted where there has been a mutual mistake that substantially affects the parties' rights and obligations. The mistake must have been in existence at the time the instrument was drawn up. A mistake in the description of land and its boundaries ordinarily justifies reformation of an agreement where the purchaser and seller intended that all the seller's property be sold to the purchaser. In addition, a mistake of law by which both parties to the instrument have incorrectly comprehended the legal effect of the facts and the document might also result in reformation.
| History Dictionary: Reformation |
A religious movement in the sixteenth century that began as an attempted reform of the
| Wikipedia: Protestant Reformation |
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The Protestant Reformation was a Christian reform movement in Europe which is generally deemed to have begun with Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses although a number of precursors such as Johannes Hus predate that event. As a historical period, the Reformation is considered to have ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648;[1] however, many of the denominations that arose during that period continue to exist and Protestantism constitutes one of the branches of Christianity today.
The movement began as an attempt to reform the Catholic Church. Many western Catholics were troubled by what they saw as false doctrines and malpractices within the Church, particularly involving the teaching and sale of indulgences. Another major contention was the practice of buying and selling church positions (simony) and what was seen at the time as considerable corruption within the Church's hierarchy. This corruption was seen by many at the time as systemic, even reaching the position of the Pope.
Martin Luther's spiritual predecessors included men such as John Wycliffe and Johannes Hus, who had attempted to reform the church along similar lines. The Reformation is generally deemed to have begun on October 31, 1517, in Wittenberg, Saxony (in present-day Germany). There, Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the All Saints' Church, which served as a notice board for university-related announcements.[1] These were points for debate that criticized the Church and the Pope. The most controversial points centered on the practice of selling indulgences and the Church's policy on purgatory. Other reformers, such as Ulrich Zwingli, soon followed. Beliefs and practices under attack by Protestant reformers included purgatory, particular judgment, devotion to Mary (Mariology), the intercession of and devotion to the saints, most of the sacraments, the mandatory celibacy requirement of its clergy (including monasticism), and the authority of the Pope.
The reform movement soon split along certain doctrinal lines. Spiritual disagreements between Luther and Zwingli, and later between Luther and John Calvin, led to the emergence of rival Protestant churches. The most important denominations to emerge directly from the Reformation were the Lutherans, and the Reformed/Calvinists/Presbyterians. The process of reform had decidedly different causes and effects in other countries. In England, where it gave rise to Anglicanism, the period became known as the English Reformation. Subsequent Protestant denominations generally trace their roots back to the initial reforming movements. The reformers also accelerated the Catholic or Counter Reformation within the Catholic Church. The Protestant Reformation is also referred to as the German Reformation, Protestant Revolution or Protestant Revolt.
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All mainstream Protestants generally trace their separation from the Catholic Church to the 16th century. The origin of mainstream Protestantism is sometimes called the Magisterial Reformation because the movement received support from the magistrates, the ruling authorities (as opposed to the Radical Reformation, which had no state sponsorship). Older Protestant churches, such as the Unitas Fratrum (Unity of the Brethren), Moravian Brethren or the Bohemian Brethren trace their origin to the time of Jan Hus in the early 15th century. As it was led by a majority of Bohemian nobles and recognized for a time by the Basel Compacts, this was the first Magisterial Reformation in Europe. In Germany, a hundred years later, the protests erupted in many places at once, during a time of threatened Islamic Ottoman invasion ¹ which distracted German princes in particular. To some degree, the protest can be explained by the events of the previous two centuries in Europe and particularly in Bohemia.
Unrest due to the Great Schism of Western Christianity (1378–1416) excited wars between princes, uprisings among the peasants, and widespread concern over corruption in the Church. A new nationalism also challenged the relatively internationalist medieval world. The first of a series of disruptive and new perspectives came from John Wycliffe at Oxford University, then from Jan Hus at the University of Prague. The Catholic Church officially concluded this debate at the Council of Constance (1414–1417). The conclave condemned Jan Hus, who was executed by burning in spite of a promise of safe-conduct. Wycliffe was posthumously burned as a heretic.
The Council of Constance confirmed and strengthened the traditional medieval conception of Church and Empire. It did not address the national tensions, or the theological tensions which had been stirred up during the previous century. The council could not prevent schism and the Hussite Wars in Bohemia.[2]
Historical upheaval usually yields much new thinking as to how society should be organized. This was the case leading up to the Protestant Reformation. Following the breakdown of monastic institutions and scholasticism in late medieval Europe, accentuated by the "Babylonian Captivity" of the Avignon Papacy, the Great Schism, and the failure of the Conciliar movement, the sixteenth century saw the fomenting of a great cultural debate about religious reforms and later fundamental religious values (See German mysticism). Historians would generally assume that the failure to reform (too many vested interests, lack of coordination in the reforming coalition) would eventually lead to a greater upheaval or even revolution, since the system must eventually be adjusted or disintegrate, and the failure of the Conciliar movement helped lead to the Protestant Reformation in Europe. These frustrated reformist movements ranged from nominalism, devotio moderna (modern devotion), to humanism occurring in conjunction with economic, political and demographic forces that contributed to a growing disaffection with the wealth and power of the elite clergy, sensitizing the population to the financial and moral corruption of the secular Renaissance church.
The outcome of the Black Death encouraged a radical reorganization of the economy, and eventually of European society. In the emerging urban centers, however, the calamities of the fourteenth and early fifteenth century, and the resultant labor shortages, provided a strong impetus for economic diversification and technological innovations. Following the Black Death, the initial loss of life due to famine, plague, and pestilence contributed to an intensification of capital accumulation in the urban areas, and thus a stimulus to trade, industry, and burgeoning urban growth in fields as diverse as banking (the Fugger banking family in Augsburg and the Medici family of Florence being the most prominent); textiles, armaments, especially stimulated by the Hundred Years' War, and mining of iron ore due, in large part, to the booming armaments industry. Accumulation of surplus, competitive overproduction, and heightened competition to maximize economic advantage, contributed to civil war, aggressive militarism, and thus to centralization. As a direct result of the move toward centralization, leaders like Louis XI of France (1461–1483), the "spider king", sought to remove all constitutional restrictions on the exercise of their authority. In England, France, and Spain the move toward centralization begun in the thirteenth century was carried to a successful conclusion.
But as recovery and prosperity progressed, enabling the population to reach its former levels in the late 15th and 16th centuries, the combination of both a newly-abundant labor supply as well as improved productivity, were 'mixed blessings' for many segments of Western European society. Despite tradition, landlords started the move to exclude peasants from "common lands". With trade stimulated, landowners increasingly moved away from the manorial economy. Woollen manufacturing greatly expanded in France, Germany, and the Netherlands and new textile industries began to develop.
The invention of movable type would lead to the Protestant zeal for translating the Bible and getting it into the hands of the laity. This would advance the culture of Biblical literacy.
The "humanism" of the Renaissance period stimulated unprecedented academic ferment, and a concern for academic freedom. Ongoing, earnest theoretical debates occurred in the universities about the nature of the church, and the source and extent of the authority of the papacy, of councils, and of princes.
The protests against Rome began in earnest when Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk and professor at the university of Wittenberg, called in 1517 for a reopening of the debate on the sale of indulgences. Luther's dissent marked a sudden outbreak of a new and irresistible force of discontent which had been pushed underground but not resolved. The quick spread of discontent occurred to a large degree because of the printing press and the resulting swift movement of both ideas and documents, including the 95 Theses. Information was also widely disseminated in manuscript form, as well as by cheap prints and woodcuts amongst the poorer sections of society.
Parallel to events in Germany, a movement began in Switzerland under the leadership of Ulrich Zwingli. These two movements quickly agreed on most issues, as the recently introduced printing press spread ideas rapidly from place to place, but some unresolved differences kept them separate. Some followers of Zwingli believed that the Reformation was too conservative, and moved independently toward more radical positions, some of which survive among modern day Anabaptists. Other Protestant movements grew up along lines of mysticism or humanism (cf. Erasmus), sometimes breaking from Rome or from the Protestants, or forming outside of the churches.
After this first stage of the Reformation, following the excommunication of Luther and condemnation of the Reformation by the Pope, the work and writings of John Calvin were influential in establishing a loose consensus among various groups in Switzerland, Scotland, Hungary, Germany and elsewhere.
The Reformation foundations engaged with Augustinianism. Both Luther and Calvin thought along lines linked with the theological teachings of Augustine of Hippo. The Augustinianism of the Reformers struggled against Pelagianism, a heresy that they perceived in the Catholic Church of their day. In the course of this religious upheaval, the Peasants' War of 1524–1525 swept through the Bavarian, Thuringian and Swabian principalities, leaving scores of Catholics slaughtered at the hands of Protestant bands, including the Black Company of Florian Geier,a knight from Giebelstadt who joined the peasants in the general outrage against the Catholic hierarchy.
Even though Luther and Calvin had very similar theological teachings, the relationship between their followers turned quickly to conflict. Frenchman Michel de Montaigne told a story of a Lutheran pastor who once claimed that he would rather celebrate the mass of Rome than participate in a Calvinist service.[citation needed]
The political separation of the Church of England from Rome under Henry VIII, beginning in 1529 and completed in 1536, brought England alongside this broad Reformed movement. However, religious changes in the English national church proceeded more conservatively than elsewhere in Europe. Reformers in the Church of England alternated, for centuries, between sympathies for Catholic traditions and Protestantism, progressively forging a stable compromise between adherence to ancient tradition and Protestantism, which is now sometimes called the via media.[3]
Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Ulrich Zwingli are considered Magisterial Reformers because their reform movements were supported by ruling authorities or "magistrates". Frederick the Wise not only supported Luther, who was a professor at the university he founded, but also protected him by hiding Luther in Wartburg Castle in Eisenach. Zwingli and Calvin were supported by the city councils in Zurich and Geneva. Since the term "magister" also means "teacher", the Magisterial Reformation is also characterized by an emphasis on the authority of a teacher. This is made evident in the prominence of Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli as leaders of the reform movements in their respective areas of ministry. Because of their authority, they were often criticized by Radical Reformers as being too much like the Roman Popes. For example, Radical Reformer Andreas Karlstadt referred to the Wittenberg theologians as the "new papists".[4]
The frustrated reformism of the humanists, ushered in by the Renaissance, contributed to a growing impatience among reformers. Erasmus and later figures like Martin Luther and Zwingli would emerge from this debate and eventually contribute to another major schism of Christendom. The crisis of theology beginning with William of Ockham in the fourteenth century was occurring in conjunction with the new burgher discontent. Since the breakdown of the philosophical foundations of scholasticism, the new nominalism did not bode well for an institutional church legitimized as an intermediary between man and God. New thinking favored the notion that no religious doctrine can be supported by philosophical arguments, eroding the old alliance between reason and faith of the medieval period laid out by Thomas Aquinas.
The major individualistic reform movements that revolted against medieval scholasticism and the institutions that underpinned it were humanism, devotionalism, (see for example, the Brothers of the Common Life and Jan Standonck) and the observatine tradition. In Germany, "the modern way" or devotionalism caught on in the universities, requiring a redefinition of God, who was no longer a rational governing principle but an arbitrary, unknowable will that cannot be limited. God was now a ruler, and religion would be more fervent and emotional. Thus, the ensuing revival of Augustinian theology, stating that man cannot be saved by his own efforts but only by the grace of God, would erode the legitimacy of the rigid institutions of the church meant to provide a channel for man to do good works and get into heaven. Humanism, however, was more of an educational reform movement with origins in the Renaissance's revival of classical learning and thought. A revolt against Aristotelian logic, it placed great emphasis on reforming individuals through eloquence as opposed to reason. The European Renaissance laid the foundation for the Northern humanists in its reinforcement of the traditional use of Latin as the great unifying cultural language.
The polarization of the scholarly community in Germany over the Reuchlin (1455–1522) affair, attacked by the elite clergy for his study of Hebrew and Jewish texts, brought Luther fully in line with the humanist educational reforms who favored academic freedom. At the same time, the impact of the Renaissance would soon backfire against traditional Catholicism, ushering in an age of reform and a repudiation of much of medieval Latin tradition. Led by Erasmus, the humanists condemned various forms of corruption within the Church, forms of corruption that might not have been any more prevalent than during the medieval zenith of the church. Erasmus held that true religion was a matter of inward devotion rather than outward symbols of ceremony and ritual. Going back to ancient texts, scriptures, from this viewpoint the greatest culmination of the ancient tradition, are the guides to life. Favoring moral reforms and de-emphasizing didactic ritual, Erasmus laid the groundwork for Luther.
Humanism's intellectual anti-clericalism would profoundly influence Luther. The increasingly well-educated middle sectors of Northern Germany, namely the educated community and city dwellers would turn to Luther's rethinking of religion to conceptualize their discontent according to the cultural medium of the era. The great rise of the burghers, the desire to run their new businesses free of institutional barriers or outmoded cultural practices, contributed to the appeal of humanist individualism. To many, papal institutions were rigid, especially regarding their views on just price and usury. In the North, burghers and monarchs were united in their frustration for not paying any taxes to the nation, but collecting taxes from subjects and sending the revenues disproportionately to the Pope in Italy.
These trends heightened demands for significant reform and revitalization along with anticlericalism. New thinkers began noticing the divide between the priests and the flock. The clergy, for instance, were not always well-educated. Parish priests often did not know Latin and rural parishes often did not have great opportunities for theological education for many at the time. Due to its large landholdings and institutional rigidity, a rigidity to which the excessively large ranks of the clergy contributed, many bishops studied law, not theology, being relegated to the role of property managers trained in administration. While priests emphasized works of religiosity, the respectability of the church began diminishing, especially among well educated urbanites, and especially considering the recent strings of political humiliation, such as the apprehension of Pope Boniface VIII by Philip IV of France, the "Babylonian Captivity", the Great Schism, and the failure of Conciliar reformism. In a sense, the campaign by Pope Leo X to raise funds to rebuild St. Peter's Basilica was too much of an excess by the secular Renaissance church, prompting high-pressure indulgences that rendered the clergy establishments even more disliked in the cities.
Luther borrowed from the humanists the sense of individualism, that each man can be his own priest (an attitude likely to find popular support considering the rapid rise of an educated urban middle class in the North), and that the only true authority is the Bible, echoing the reformist zeal of the Conciliar movement and opening up the debate once again on limiting the authority of the Pope. While his ideas called for the sharp redefinition of the dividing lines between the laity and the clergy, his ideas were still, by this point, reformist in nature. Luther's contention that the human will was incapable of following good, however, resulted in his rift with Erasmus finally distinguishing Lutheran reformism from humanism.
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Luther affirmed a theology of the Eucharist called Real Presence, a doctrine of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist which affirms the real presence yet upholding that the bread and wine are not "changed" into the body and blood; rather the divine elements adhere "in, with, and under" the earthly elements. He took this understanding of Christ's presence in the Eucharist to be more harmonious with the Church's teaching on the Incarnation. Just as Christ is the union of the fully human and the fully divine (cf. Council of Chalcedon) so to the Eucharist is a union of Bread and Body, Wine and Blood. According to the doctrine of real presence, the substances of the body and the blood of Christ and of the bread and the wine were held to coexist together in the consecrated Host during the communion service. While Luther seemed to maintain the perpetual consecration of the elements, other Lutherans argued that any consecrated bread or wine left over would revert to its former state the moment the service ended. Most Lutherans accept the latter.
A Lutheran understanding of the Eucharist is distinct from the Reformed doctrine of the Eucharist in that Lutherans affirm a real, physical presence of Christ in the Eucharist (as opposed to either a "spiritual presence" or a "memorial") and Lutherans affirm that the presence of Christ does not depend on the faith of the recipient; the repentant receive Christ in the Eucharist worthily, the unrepentant who receive the Eucharist risk the wrath of Christ.
Luther, along with his colleague Philipp Melanchthon, emphasized this point in his plea for the Reformation at the Reichstag in 1529 amid charges of heresy. But the changes he proposed were of such a fundamental nature that by their own logic they would automatically overthrow the old order; neither the Emperor nor the Church could possibly accept them, as Luther well knew. As was only to be expected, the edict by the Diet of Worms (1521) prohibited all innovations. Meanwhile, in these efforts to retain the guise of a Catholic reformer as opposed to a heretical revolutionary, and to appeal to German princes with his religious condemnation of the peasant revolts backed up by the Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms, Luther's growing conservatism would provoke more radical reformers.
At a religious conference with the Zwinglians in 1529, Melanchthon joined with Luther in opposing a union with Zwingli. There would finally be a schism in the reform movement due to Luther's belief in real presence—the real (as opposed to symbolic) presence of Christ at the Eucharist. His original intention was not schism, but with the Reichstag of Augsburg (1530) and its rejection of the Lutheran "Augsburg Confession", a separate Lutheran church finally emerged. In a sense, Luther would take theology further in its deviation from established Catholic dogma, forcing a rift between the humanist Erasmus and Luther. Similarly, Zwingli would further repudiate ritualism, and break with the increasingly conservative Luther.
Aside from the enclosing of the lower classes, the middle sectors of northern Germany, namely the educated community and city dwellers, would turn to religion to conceptualize their discontent according to the cultural medium of the era. The great rise of the burghers, the desire to run their new businesses free of institutional barriers or outmoded cultural practices contributed to the appeal of individualism. To many, papal institutions were rigid, especially regarding their views on just price and usury. In the North, burghers and monarchs were united in their frustration for not paying any taxes to the nation, but collecting taxes from subjects and sending the revenues disproportionately to Italy. In northern Europe, Luther appealed to the growing national consciousness of the German states because he denounced the Pope for involvement in politics as well as religion. Moreover, he backed the nobility, which was now justified to crush the Great Peasant Revolt of 1525 and to confiscate church property by Luther's Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms. This explains the attraction of some territorial princes to Lutheranism, especially its Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms. However, the Elector of Brandenburg, Joachim I, blamed Lutheranism for the revolt and so did others. In Brandenburg, it was only under his successor Joachim II that Lutheranism was established, and the old religion was not formally extinct in Brandenburg until the death of the last Catholic bishop there, Georg von Blumenthal, who was Bishop of Lebus and sovereign Prince-Bishop of Ratzeburg.
With the church subordinate to and the agent of civil authority and peasant rebellions condemned on strict religious terms, Lutheranism and German nationalist sentiment were ideally suited to coincide.
Though Charles V fought the Reformation, it is no coincidence either that the reign of his nationalistic predecessor Maximilian I saw the beginning of the movement. While the centralized states of western Europe had reached accords with the Vatican permitting them to draw on the rich property of the church for government expenditures, enabling them to form state churches that were greatly autonomous of Rome, similar moves on behalf of the Reich were unsuccessful so long as princes and prince bishops fought reforms to drop the pretension of the secular universal empire.
Parallel to events in Germany, a movement began in Switzerland under the leadership of Huldrych Zwingli. These two movements quickly agreed on most issues, as the recently introduced printing press spread ideas rapidly from place to place, but some unresolved differences kept them separate. Some followers of Zwingli believed that the Reformation was too conservative, and moved independently toward more radical positions, some of which survive among modern day Anabaptists. Other Protestant movements grew up along lines of mysticism or humanism (cf. Erasmus), sometimes breaking from Rome or from the Protestants, or forming outside of the churches.
Following the excommunication of Luther and condemnation of the Reformation by the Pope, the work and writings of John Calvin were influential in establishing a loose consensus among various groups in Switzerland, Scotland, Hungary, Germany and elsewhere.
Geneva became the unofficial capital of the Protestant movement, led by the Frenchman, Jean Calvin, until his death (when Calvin's ally, William Farel, assumed the spiritual leadership of the group).
The Reformation foundations engaged with Augustinianism. Both Luther and Calvin thought along lines linked with the theological teachings of Augustine of Hippo. The Augustinianism of the Reformers struggled against Pelagianism, a heresy that they perceived in the Catholic Church of their day. Ironically, even though both Luther and Calvin both had very similar theological teachings, the relationship between Lutherans and Calvinists evolved into one of conflict.
All of Scandinavia ultimately adopted Lutheranism over the course of the sixteenth century, as the monarchs of Denmark (who also ruled Norway and Iceland) and Sweden (who also ruled Finland) converted to that faith.
In Sweden the Reformation was spearheaded by Gustav Vasa, elected king in 1523. Friction with the pope over the latter's interference in Swedish ecclesiastical affairs led to the discontinuance of any official connection between Sweden and the papacy from 1523.[5] Four years later, at the Diet of Västerås, the king succeeded in forcing the diet to accept his dominion over the national church. The king was given possession of all church property, church appointments required royal approval, the clergy were subject to the civil law, and the "pure Word of God" was to be preached in the churches and taught in the schools—effectively granting official sanction to Lutheran ideas.[5]
Under the reign of Frederick I (1523–33), Denmark remained officially Catholic. But though Frederick initially pledged to persecute Lutherans, he soon adopted a policy of protecting Lutheran preachers and reformers, of whom the most famous was Hans Tausen.[5] During his reign, Lutheranism made significant inroads among the Danish population. Frederick's son, Christian, was openly Lutheran, which prevented his election to the throne upon his father's death. In 1536, the authority of the Catholic bishops was terminated by national assembly.[6] The next year, following his victory in the civil war, he became Christian III and continued the reformation of the state church.
The separation of the Church of England (or Anglican Church) from Rome under Henry VIII, beginning in 1529 and completed in 1536, brought England alongside this broad Reformation movement; however, religious changes in the English national church proceeded more conservatively than elsewhere in Europe. Reformers in the Church of England alternated, for centuries, between sympathies for Catholic tradition and more reformed principles, gradually developing into a tradition which is considered a middle way (via media) between the Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions.
The English Reformation followed a different course from the Reformation in continental Europe. There had long been a strong strain of anti-clericalism, and England had already given rise to the Lollard movement of John Wycliffe, which played an important part in inspiring the Hussites in Bohemia. Lollardy was suppressed and became an underground movement so the extent of its influence in the 1520s is difficult to assess. The different character of the English Reformation came rather from the fact that it was driven initially by the political necessities of Henry VIII. Henry had once been a sincere Catholic and had even authored a book strongly criticizing Luther, but he later found it expedient and profitable to break with the Papacy. His wife, Catherine of Aragon, bore him only a single child, Mary. As England had recently gone through a lengthy dynastic conflict (see Wars of the Roses), Henry feared that his lack of a male heir might jeopardize his descendants' claim to the throne. However, Pope Clement VII, concentrating more on Charles V's "sack of Rome", denied his request for an annulment. Had Clement granted the annulment and therefore admitted that his predecessor, Julius II, had erred, Clement would have given support to the Lutheran assertion that Popes replaced their own judgement for the will of God. King Henry decided to remove the Church of England from the authority of Rome. In 1534, the Act of Supremacy made Henry the Supreme Head of the Church of England. Between 1535 and 1540, under Thomas Cromwell, the policy known as the Dissolution of the Monasteries was put into effect. The veneration of some saints, certain pilgrimages and some pilgrim shrines were also attacked. Huge amounts of church land and property passed into the hands of the crown and ultimately into those of the nobility and gentry. The vested interest thus created made for a powerful force in support of the dissolutions.
There were some notable opponents to the Henrician Reformation, such as Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher, who were executed for their opposition. There was also a growing party of reformers who were imbued with the Zwinglian and Calvinistic doctrines now current on the Continent. When Henry died he was succeeded by his Protestant son Edward VI, who, through his empowered councillors (with the King being only nine years old at his succession and not yet sixteen at his death) the Duke of Somerset and the Duke of Northumberland, ordered the destruction of images in churches, and the closing of the chantries. Under Edward VI the reform of the Church of England was established unequivocally in doctrinal terms. Yet, at a popular level, religion in England was still in a state of flux. Following a brief Roman Catholic restoration during the reign of Mary 1553–1558, a loose consensus developed during the reign of Elizabeth I, though this point is one of considerable debate among historians. Yet it is the so-called "Elizabethan Religious Settlement" to which the origins of Anglicanism are traditionally ascribed. The compromise was uneasy and was capable of veering between extreme Calvinism on the one hand and Catholicism on the other, but compared to the bloody and chaotic state of affairs in contemporary France, it was relatively successful until the Puritan Revolution or English Civil War in the seventeenth century.
The success of the Counter-Reformation on the Continent and the growth of a Puritan party dedicated to further Protestant reform polarized the Elizabethan Age, although it was not until the 1640s that England underwent religious strife comparable to that which its neighbours had suffered some generations before.
The early Puritan movement (late 16th century-17th century) was Reformed or Calvinist and was a movement for reform in the Church of England. Its origins lay in the discontent with the Elizabethan Religious Settlement. The desire was for the Church of England to resemble more closely the Protestant churches of Europe, especially Geneva. The Puritans objected to ornaments and ritual in the churches as idolatrous (vestments, surplices, organs, genuflection), which they castigated as "popish pomp and rags". (See Vestments controversy.) They also objected to ecclesiastical courts. They refused to endorse completely all of the ritual directions and formulas of the Book of Common Prayer; the imposition of its liturgical order by legal force and inspection sharpened Puritanism into a definite opposition movement.
The later Puritan movement were often referred to as Dissenters and Nonconformists and eventually led to the formation of various Reformed denominations.
The most famous and well-known emigration to America was the migration of the Puritan separatists from the Anglican Church of England, who fled first to Holland, and then later to America, to establish the English colonies of New England, which later became the United States.
These Puritan separatists were also known as "the pilgrims". After establishing a colony at Plymouth (in what would become later Massachusetts) in 1620, the Puritan pilgrims received a charter from the King of England which legitimized their colony, allowing them to do trade and commerce with merchants in England, in accordance with the principles of mercantilism. This successful, though initially quite difficult, colony marked the beginning of the Protestant presence in America (the earlier French, Spanish and Portuguese settlements had been Catholic), and became a kind of oasis of spiritual and economic freedom, to which persecuted Protestants and other minorities from the British Isles and Europe (and later, from all over the world) fled to for peace, freedom and opportunity.
The original intent of the colonists was to establish spiritual Puritanism, which had been denied to them in England and the rest of Europe to engage in peaceful commerce with England and the native American Indians and to Christianize the peoples of the Americas.
The Reformation in Scotland's case culminated ecclesiastically in the re-establishment of the church along Reformed lines, and politically in the triumph of English influence over that of France. John Knox is regarded as the leader of the Scottish Reformation
The Reformation Parliament of 1560, which repudiated the pope's authority, forbade the celebration of the mass and approved a Protestant Confession of Faith, was made possible by a revolution against French hegemony under the regime of the regent Mary of Guise, who had governed Scotland in the name of her absent daughter Mary Queen of Scots (then also Queen of France).
The Scottish Reformation decisively shaped the Church of Scotland[7] and, through it, all other Presbyterian churches worldwide.
A spiritual revival also broke out among Catholics soon after Martin Luther's actions, and led to the Scottish Covenanters' movement, the precursor to Scottish Presbyterianism. This movement spread, and greatly influenced the formation of Puritanism among the Anglican Church in England. The Scottish Covenanters were persecuted by the Roman Catholic Church. This persecution by the Catholics drove some of the Protestant Covenanter leadership out of Scotland, and into France and later, Switzerland.
Protestantism also spread into France, where the Protestants were nicknamed "Huguenots", and this touched off decades of warfare in France, after initial support by Henry of Navarre was lost due to the "Night of the Placards" affair. Many French Huguenots, however, still contributed to the Protestant movement, including many who emigrated to the English colonies.
Though he was not personally interested in religious reform, Francis I (1515–47) initially maintained an attitude of tolerance, arising from his interest in the humanist movement. This changed in 1534 with the Affair of the Placards. In this act, Protestants denounced the mass in placards that appeared across France, even reaching the royal apartments. The issue of religious faith having been thrown into the arena of politics, Francis was prompted to view the movement as a threat to the kingdom's stability. This led to the first major phase of anti-Protestant persecution in France, in which the Chambre Ardente ("Burning Chamber") was established within the Parlement of Paris to handle with the rise in prosecutions for heresy. Several thousand French Protestants fled the country during this time, most notably John Calvin, who settled in Geneva.
Calvin continued to take an interest in the religious affairs of his native land and, from his base in Geneva, beyond the reach of the French king, regularly trained pastors to lead congregations in France. Despite heavy persecution by Henry II, the Reformed Church of France, largely Calvinist in direction, made steady progress across large sections of the nation, in the urban bourgeoisie and parts of the aristocracy, appealing to people alienated by the obduracy and the complacency of the Catholic establishment.
French Protestantism, though its appeal increased under persecution, came to acquire a distinctly political character, made all the more obvious by the noble conversions of the 1550s. This had the effect of creating the preconditions for a series of destructive and intermittent conflicts, known as the Wars of Religion. The civil wars were helped along by the sudden death of Henry II in 1559, which saw the beginning of a prolonged period of weakness for the French crown. Atrocity and outrage became the defining characteristic of the time, illustrated at its most intense in the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of August 1572, when the Catholic Church annihilated between 30,000 and 100,000 Huguenots across France.[8] The wars only concluded when Henry IV, himself a former Huguenot, issued the Edict of Nantes, promising official toleration of the Protestant minority, but under highly restricted conditions. Catholicism remained the official state religion, and the fortunes of French Protestants gradually declined over the next century, culminating in Louis XIV's Edict of Fontainebleau—which revoked the Edict of Nantes and made Catholicism the sole legal religion of France. In response to the Edict of Fontainebleau, Frederick William of Brandenburg declared the Edict of Potsdam, giving free passage to French Huguenot refugees, and tax-free status to them for 10 years.
The Reformation in the Netherlands, unlike in many other countries, was not initiated by the rulers of the Seventeen Provinces, but instead by multiple popular movements, which in turn were bolstered by the arrival of Protestant refugees from other parts of the continent. While the Anabaptist movement enjoyed popularity in the region in the early decades of the Reformation, Calvinism, in the form of the Dutch Reformed Church, became the dominant Protestant faith in the country from the 1560s onward.
Harsh persecution of Protestants by the Spanish government of Phillip II contributed to a desire for independence in the provinces, which led to the Eighty Years' War and eventually, the separation of the largely Protestant Dutch Republic from the Catholic-dominated Southern Netherlands (present-day Belgium).
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Much of the population of the Kingdom of Hungary adopted Protestantism during the sixteenth century. After the 1526 Battle of Mohács the Hungarian people were disillusioned by the ability of the government to protect them and turned to the faith which would infuse them with the strength necessary to resist the invader.[citation needed] They found this in the teaching of the Protestant Reformers such as Luther. The spread of Protestantism in the country was aided by its large ethnic German minority, which could understand and translate the writings of Martin Luther. While Lutheranism gained a foothold among the German-speaking population, Calvinism became widely accepted among ethnic Hungarians.[9]
In the more independent northwest the rulers and priests, protected now by the Habsburg Monarchy which had taken the field to fight the Turks, defended the old Catholic faith. They dragged the Protestants to prison and the stake wherever they could. Such strong measures only fanned the flames of protest, however.[citation needed] Leaders of the Protestants included Matthias Biro Devai, Michael Sztarai, and Stephen Kis Szegedi.
Protestants likely formed a majority of Hungary's population at the close of the sixteenth century, but Counter-Reformation efforts in the seventeenth century reconverted a majority of the kingdom to Catholicism.[10] A significant Protestant minority remained, most of it adhering to the Calvinist faith.
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The Reformation led to a series of religious wars that culminated in the Thirty Years' War. From 1618 to 1648 the Catholic House of Habsburg and its allies fought against the Protestant princes of Germany, supported at various times by Denmark, Sweden and France. The Habsburgs, who ruled Spain, Austria, the Spanish Netherlands and much of Germany and Italy, were staunch defenders of the Catholic Church. Some historians believe that the era of the Reformation came to a close when Catholic France allied itself, first in secret and later on the battlefields, with Protestant states against the Habsburg dynasty.[1] For the first time since the days of Luther, political and national convictions again outweighed religious convictions in Europe.
The main tenets of the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War, were:
The treaty also effectively ended the Pope's pan-European political power. Fully aware of the loss, Pope Innocent X declared the treaty "null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, empty of meaning and effect for all times." European sovereigns, Catholic and Protestant alike, ignored his verdict.[1]
Chronological order of publication (oldest first)
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| Translations: Reformation |
Dansk (Danish)
n. - reformation, forbedring, afskaffelse, ændring
Français (French)
n. - réforme, (Relig) Réforme
Deutsch (German)
n. - Reformation, Neugestaltung
Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - μεταρρύθμιση, αναμόρφωση, ανασχηματισμός
Português (Portuguese)
n. - reforma (f), modificação (f)
Español (Spanish)
n. - la Reforma
Svenska (Swedish)
n. - förbättring, reform
中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
改革, 改善, 改正
中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 改革, 改善, 改正
日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 改革, 改心, 矯正, 感化, 宗教改革
العربيه (Arabic)
(الاسم) إصلاح
עברית (Hebrew)
n. - תנועת תיקונים דתית, שינוי ערכין, רפורמציה
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