A History of Christianity episode 4 – Reformation – The Individual Before God

Reformation

In the fourth part of the series, Diarmaid MacCulloch makes sense of the Reformation, and of how a faith based on obedience and authority gave birth to one based on individual conscience.


 

 



The Amish today are peaceable folk, but five centuries ago their ancestors were seen as some of the most dangerous people in Europe. They were radicals – Protestants – who tore apart the Catholic Church.

He shows how Martin Luther wrote hymns to teach people the message of the Bible, and how a tasty sausage became the rallying cry for Swiss Reformer Ulrich Zwingli to tear down statues of saints, allow married clergy and deny that communion bread and wine were the body and blood of Christ. ‘Jesus ascended into heaven’, declared Zwingli. ‘He’s sitting at the right hand of the Father, not on a table here in Zurich.

The Reformation (more fully the Protestant Reformation, or the European Reformation) was a schism in Western Christianity initiated by Martin Luther and continued by Huldrych Zwingli, John Calvin and other Protestant Reformers in 16th-century Europe.

 

A History of Christianity episode 4 – Reformation – The Individual Before God

 

It is usually considered to have started with the publication of the Ninety-five Theses by Martin Luther in 1517 and lasted until the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648. It led to the division of Western Christianity into different confessions (Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, Anabaptist, Unitarian, etc.). By the time of its arrival, Western Christianity was only compromised in the Lands of the Bohemian Crown, where Utraquist Hussitism was officially acknowledged by both the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor; in addition, various movements (including Lollards in England and Waldensians in Italy and France) were still being actively suppressed.

Although there had been earlier attempts to reform the Catholic Church – such as those of Jan Hus, Peter Waldo, John Wycliffe, and Girolamo Savonarola – Luther is widely acknowledged to have started the Reformation with the Ninety-five Theses. Luther began by criticising the sale of indulgences, insisting that the Pope had no authority over purgatory and that the Catholic doctrine of the merits of the saints had no foundation in the Bible.

The Reformation incorporated doctrinal changes such as a complete reliance on Scripture as the only source of proper belief (sola scriptura) and the belief that faith in Jesus, and not good works, is the only way to obtain God’s pardon for sin (sola fide). The core motivation behind these changes was theological, though many other factors played a part, including the rise of nationalism, the Western Schism that eroded loyalty to the Papacy, the perceived corruption of the Roman Curia, the impact of humanism, and the new learning of the Renaissance that questioned much traditional thought.

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