Protestant Reformation

“For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’”

— Romans 1:17

The Protestant Reformation was a sixteenth-century movement, beginning in the German lands and spreading through much of Western Europe, that broke with the Roman Catholic Church over the authority of Scripture and the way a sinner is justified before God.¹ It is conventionally dated from 1517, when Martin Luther publicly challenged the sale of indulgences,² though earlier reform movements the medieval church had failed to accommodate had already anticipated its core objections.¹ Rather than reforming Rome from within, it produced separate Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican church traditions.¹

Historical Development

Medieval precursors

Reform movements within the Western church anticipated several of the Reformation’s objections long before Luther. Bavinck groups “the Cathars, the Waldensians, and Protestant precursors such as John Wycliffe and John Huss” among the “significant protest movements” the Middle Ages produced.¹ John Wycliffe (c. 1330-1384) and the Bohemian priest John Huss (1369-1415), who drew on Wycliffe’s teaching, represent the clearest line of continuity with the later Reformation.¹ Even the church’s own conciliar movement, meeting at the Council of Constance in 1414 “motivated by concern for reform,” achieved “little reform,” in Bavinck’s assessment, and Rome resisted the same pressure again a century later at the Council of Trent.¹

Luther and the German Reformation

Martin Luther (1483-1546), an Augustinian monk troubled by his own sin, arrived at his understanding of justification while lecturing through the Psalms, Romans, and Galatians, coming to read Romans 1:17 as teaching that the righteous live by a faith received rather than achieved.² In 1517, “due to having a pastor’s heart for defending his sheep from the wolves,” Luther wrote his Ninety-five Theses against Johann Tetzel’s sale of indulgences, which Tetzel had marketed as freeing the souls of purchasers’ loved ones from purgatory.² Luther’s theses were “cutting” in tone and opposed the pope publicly, but “the laity was largely on his side, and the Reformation spread as a result.”² Pope Leo X condemned Luther as a heretic in the bull Exsurge Domine in 1520.²

The Swiss and Reformed Reformation

Bavinck locates the beginning of a specifically Reformed theology, distinct from Luther’s own, in Huldreich Zwingli (1484-1531) of Zurich, whose “starting point in the radical dependence of humanity on a sovereign and gracious God” launched an independent reforming movement in Switzerland.¹ Bavinck sums up the difference in emphasis between the two traditions as a difference in the question each asked: Lutherans asked “How can I be saved?” while the Reformed asked “How is the glory of God advanced?”¹ John Calvin (1509-1564), whose Institutes of the Christian Religion “were studied throughout the Protestant world,” gave Reformed theology its most systematic statement from Geneva. His successor Theodore Beza (1519-1605) and the Zurich reformer Heinrich Bullinger (1504-1575), a framer of the First and Second Helvetic Confessions, consolidated it further.¹ From Switzerland, “often carried by refugees fleeing religious persecution,” the Reformed faith spread into France, Germany, the Low Countries, and the British Isles.¹

The Reformation in Britain

In Scotland, John Knox (1513-1572) spent his exile from Mary Tudor’s England at Calvin’s side in Geneva before returning to lead the Scottish Reformation. The historian Philip Schaff judged that it made Knox, “next to Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin, … the greatest [name] in the history of the Protestant Reformation.”³

England’s reformation ran through the crown as much as the pulpit. Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1533, worked to move the Church of England toward Protestant doctrine under Henry VIII and then, with fuller authority, under the boy king Edward VI, producing the Forty-two Articles of 1552-1553.² After the Catholic reaction under Mary Tudor cost Cranmer his life in 1556, the Forty-two Articles became the basis of the Thirty-nine Articles the Church of England still holds.² Bavinck notes that the English Reformation “initially had a strong Reformed tone that lasted into the seventeenth century” before “Anglican lukewarmness led to the Puritan movement.”¹

Confessional consolidation

Reformed theology reached its classic confessional expression in the following century: the Canons of Dordt (1618-19) against Arminianism, and the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms (1646). The Particular Baptists who drafted the Second London Confession of 1677, republished in 1689, followed Westminster’s doctrine of justification by faith closely, in places nearly word for word.⁴

Confessional Witness

Two of the Reformation’s central convictions became, and remain, the confessional inheritance of Reformed Baptist churches. On the authority of Scripture, the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession opens by declaring that “the Holy Scripture is the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience,”⁵ the same sola Scriptura Luther and the other reformers set against the medieval church’s practice of placing tradition and papal authority alongside Scripture.¹ On justification, the confession states that “faith, thus receiving and resting on Christ and his righteousness, is the alone instrument of justification,”⁶ language it draws nearly verbatim from the Westminster Confession’s own chapter on justification, itself among the fullest confessional statements of the Reformation’s sola fide.⁴

The Reformation’s third principle, that all believers, not the ordained alone, share a priesthood before God, has no chapter of its own in the 1689 confession, but it shaped the Reformed doctrine of the church the confession assumes.⁷ Luther himself put the principle concretely: “If a company of pious Christian laymen were captured and sent to a desert place, and had not among them an ordained priest, and were all agreed in the matter, and elected one and told him to baptize, administer the Mass, absolve, and preach, such a one would be as true a priest as if all the bishops and popes had ordained him.”⁸ Calvin likewise treated the priesthood of believers as a settled point of Reformed ecclesiology in his Institutes.⁷

Opposing Views

Roman Catholic theology at the Council of Trent. Rome’s official answer to the Reformation’s doctrine of justification came at Trent’s sixth session in 1547. For Trent, justification begins when a sinner prepared by grace receives the infusion of “habitual grace” through baptism, can be increased through charity and good works, can be lost through mortal sin, and can be restored through the sacrament of penance, so that “final salvation is the result both of divine grace and of human merit.”⁹ Trent’s canons “deny sola fide” by name and, with it, “justification on the basis of the imputed righteousness of Christ,” the Reformation’s own account of how a sinner is declared righteous.⁹ Where the medieval scholastic theologians it largely followed had left such questions unsettled, Trent moved beyond them “with its explicit rejection of the Protestant teachings of the enslaved will, sola fide, the imputation of righteousness, and assurance of salvation,” hardening Rome’s position into “a monocovenantal scheme that blends grace and works together as a joint basis of final salvation.”⁹

Related Doctrines

References

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 2, “The History and Literature of Dogmatic Theology.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹²
Jared Heath Moore, A Biblical and Historical Appraisal of Concupiscence with Special Attention to Same-Sex Attraction (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), chap. 3, “On Concupiscence, the Roman Catholics Rejected Augustine and the Reformed Tradition Followed Augustine,” 77-129. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷
Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1932), 237-309. ↩
Samuel E. Waldron, Faith, Obedience, and Justification: Current Evangelical Departures from Sola Fide (Palmdale, CA: Reformed Baptist Academic Press, 2005), chap. 5, “Sola Fide in the Reformation Confessions.” ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 1. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 11, “Of Justification,” para. 2. ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩ ↩²
Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology: A Compendium and Commonplace-Book Designed for the Use of Theological Students, vol. 3 (Philadelphia: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1909). ↩
Aaron Thomas O’Kelley, “Grace and Merit in Late Medieval Theology,” in “A Historical-Theological Critique of the New Perspective on Paul” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 26-68. ↩ ↩² ↩³