Reformation theology

Reformation theology is the body of doctrine the sixteenth-century Reformers articulated and their Reformed-scholastic heirs later systematized, built on two convictions its own theologians called its formal and material principles: Scripture alone as the church’s final, self-authenticating authority,¹ and justification by faith alone, “the material principle of the Reformation, the article by which the church stands or falls.”² Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Huldreich Zwingli held these convictions alongside a thoroughgoing doctrine of predestination,³ a redefined doctrine of the church and its sacraments,⁴ and, in the generations after them, a more systematic scholastic elaboration of the same commitments.⁵

Confessional Witness

The Second London Baptist Confession inherits Reformation theology’s formal principle directly: “The Holy Scripture is the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience,” beyond what “the light of nature, and the works of creation and providence” can supply.⁶ It states the material principle just as directly: God, in justifying the one he calls, does so “not by infusing righteousness into them … but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous … for Christ’s sake alone.”⁷ Both formulations carry forward, in a Baptist confession a century and a half younger, the same two convictions the Reformers themselves drew from Scripture and defended against Rome.

Doctrinal Distinctives

Scriptural authority

Sola scriptura was, in Bavinck’s phrase, the Reformation’s “in principle” opposition to “this hierarchical system of Rome,” which had made Scripture’s authority depend on the church’s own sanction.¹ Calvin and the Reformers held instead that “Scripture’s authority … arises from its own content; it is not granted by the church’s decision,” an authority Reformation theologians described as self-authenticating (αὐτοπίστος).¹ Waldron judges that sola scriptura, though “fundamental to the Reformation” and one of its “distinctive marks,” was not the era’s most original theological advance, since “a sophisticated debate over this issue was … already going on prior to the Reformation.”⁸

Justification by faith alone

Justification is what O’Kelley calls the Reformation’s material principle: not merely an anti-Pelagian doctrine of grace, since anti-Pelagian doctrines of justification “can be adduced from practically every period in the history of doctrine,” but the specific claim that a sinner’s righteousness before God is alien and imputed rather than infused and gradually achieved.² Rome and the Reformers agreed that salvation is by grace; they divided over how grace operates, whether God counts a sinner righteous because grace has begun an “effective, though not yet perfect, transformation” in him, or because Christ’s own righteousness is reckoned to him from outside.²

Sovereign grace and predestination

Boettner calls Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli “thorough-going predestinarians,” Luther stating the doctrine in The Bondage of the Will “as emphatically and in a form quite as extreme as can be found among any of the reformed theologians.”³ Philipp Melanchthon initially agreed, calling predestination “the fundamental principle of Christianity,” before later softening toward a synergistic account of grace and human cooperation that most Lutherans eventually followed, leaving thoroughgoing predestinarian teaching a distinguishing mark of the Reformed rather than the Lutheran branch of the Reformation.³

The church and the sacraments

Luther “restored the Scriptural idea of the priesthood of all believers” against Rome’s “special priesthood, which dispenses salvation through the sacraments,” while keeping a visible and invisible distinction within one Church rather than positing two separate churches.⁴ The Reformers also narrowed the sacraments themselves: where the Council of Trent “expressly declared … that all seven sacraments were instituted by Jesus Christ our Lord himself,” Reformation theology held that Christ instituted only baptism and the Lord’s Supper, the other five lacking scriptural warrant as divine institutions.⁹

Historical Development

The Reformers’ formulations

Luther’s 1517 break with Rome and the national Reformations it set in motion are traced in full at Protestant Reformation; what matters for Reformation theology as a body of doctrine is that Luther, an Augustinian friar, arrived at these convictions “from this rigorous [Augustinian] theology,” Boettner calling the Reformation “essentially a revival of Augustinianism.”³ Calvin and Zwingli went on to systematize the same convictions for the Reformed churches, distinct from Luther’s own German Reformation.³

Reformed orthodoxy and scholastic systematization

In the generations after the Reformers, Reformed theologians consolidated their doctrine into the detailed dogmatic systems historians call Reformed orthodoxy or Reformed scholasticism.⁵ Some have read this scholastic turn as a retreat from the Reformers’ own “biblical and Christ-centered theology,” a return “to the medieval patterns of thought by committing to the scholastic method and using Aristotelian categories.”⁵ Richard Muller argues instead that scholasticism “describes the technical and academic side of th[e] process of the institutionalization of Protestant doctrine,” calling it “preeminently a school-theology,” a matter of teaching method rather than a change in what the Reformers themselves had taught.¹⁰

Opposing Views

Rome’s Counter-Reformation response

The Council of Trent rejected the Reformers’ accounts of both Scripture and the sacraments, requiring the church’s own authority to certify Scripture’s meaning and declaring “that all seven sacraments were instituted by Jesus Christ our Lord himself,” not the two Reformation theology recognized.⁹ Rome likewise retained the hierarchical mediation of grace that sola scriptura and the priesthood of all believers were formulated against.¹

The Radical Reformation

Not every critic of Rome accepted the magisterial Reformers’ own settlement. The Anabaptists “were not satisfied with” Luther’s continued visible Church under civil protection, insisting instead on “a Church of believers only,” and in Berkhof’s account “even scorned the visible Church and the means of grace” as Luther and Calvin had defined them, while also demanding “the complete separation of Church and State” that neither Luther’s nor Calvin’s own settlement provided.⁴

Related Doctrines

References

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 6, “Faith.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Aaron Thomas O’Kelley, “Three Prominent Reformers on Justification,” in “A Historical-Theological Critique of the New Perspective on Paul” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 69-132, at 69-70. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1932), 264. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 543. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Carol Man Fen Chen, “A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants: Unconditionality and Conditionality in Relation to Justification and Sanctification” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 109-10. ↩ ↩² ↩³
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. 1. ↩
Samuel Eldon Waldron, “Faith, Obedience, and Justification: Current Evangelical Departures from Sola Fide” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2005), 11. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 22, “The Spirit’s Means of Grace.” ↩ ↩²
Richard A. Muller, quoted in Chen, “A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants,” 110. ↩