10 very short stories about the Reformation

1. Moral corruption in public office

Since the major reforms of Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073-1085) and his successors, the Roman Church had gone through several cycles of moral panic, attempting to crack down on the ‘abuses’ of the clergy. The main abuses that got folk worked up were simony (i.e. bribery), nepotism, holding multiple benefices, keeping mistresses and having illegitimate children with them, and getting entangled in secular power politics. The Reformation occurred just at a particularly severe instance of one of these moral panics. Both Protestants and Catholics responded with unprecedented reforms, in many ways similar: the clergy was transformed from a comfortable club for elites into a smaller band of well-educated and committed professionals. In the new Latin church, increasingly, nobility was neither necessary nor sufficient, but education and moral virtue were. Amongst Catholics, the priest became the spiritual equivalent of a Personal Trainer. They became experts at hearing confessions and guiding the highly personal development of their flock. Amongst Protestants, priests and ministers focused much more on shared community life, leading communal Psalm-singing and teaching their congregations with sermons. Amongst both Catholics and Protestants, clergy were expected to be resident in their parish or diocese, preach the Gospel, catechise, and administer sacraments.

2. The Eucharist

In the 14th and 15th centuries, people in Latin Christendom became increasingly devoted to celebrating the Eucharist. However, ordinary people became increasingly estranged from it. The Eucharist was only distributed to the laity under one kind, and then perhaps as infrequently as once a year at Easter, the legal minimum. The liturgy became a spectacle, but not something ordinary people could participate in or even understand. This had led to major protests, including the Hussite and Lollard revolts, in the fifteenth century. These revolts had been repressed by the Church. However, in the sixteenth century, the Church failed to hold back the tide. Protestants reformed the liturgy, turning the priest to face the congregation, translating the liturgy into the vernacular, and distributing the elements in both kinds. Catholics, while not abolishing the Mass altogether as the Protestants did, mandated frequent attendance at Mass and encouraged priests to explain to the laity what was happening in their own language as the liturgy went on. Christians in the Latin tradition now receive communion in a variety of ways, much of that diversity explicable in sixteenth-century terms, but almost all receive communion frequently, receive both species, and can interpret what they are doing theologically: these are all Reformation legacies. The fractious politics of the sixteenth century meant that these different developments of the Eucharist hardened into explicitly irreconcilable doctrines. Christians in the Latin tradition still do not all offer one another communion as a result of this ongoing schism.

3. Monastic reform

In the fifteenth century, there was a well-established monastic system in Latin Christendom. It functioned as a legitimate alternative career to marriage for elite men and women. They had a useful social role: they were paid by other elites to pray for the souls of themselves and their loved ones, thereby, they believed, reducing the duration of their stay in Purgatory. However, in the sixteenth century, this system broke down. Theologians challenged the doctrine of Purgatory, undermining the usefulness of the system. The growing middle-classes resented a system which entrenched the power of the aristocracy. The poor resented the accumulation of wealth in many monasteries, which typically required exorbitant entry fees, or were limited to people of noble birth, or both. In many places, monasteries were overhauled, ending the practice of praying for the souls of benefactors and opening up membership to those of humbler origins, and going out into the world to preach the Gospel and do works of charity. In many other places, the monastic system was abolished altogether.

4. Justification

How can I be right with God? In the medieval Roman Church, there were several doctrinal positions available, and none was authorised as the official ‘correct’ answer. One thing everyone agreed on, even revolutionaries like Jan Hus, was that you had to do something to be right with God. Being justified was a matter of God working in you to transform you from something wretched to something holy. So, if there was no holiness, there was no justification. Profoundly unsatisfied with this, Martin Luther presented a radical alternative: justification is a free, gracious gift of God, won by Christ’s work, not ours. Becoming holy isn’t completely irrelevant, but for Luther, becoming holy, or ‘sanctification’, comes second, and is not the condition of justification. This idea drove a wedge through the Church. Is this doctrine simply presenting the gospel truth of freedom in Christ, or is it an excuse for being lax on sin?

5. The authority of Scripture versus tradition

In the sixteenth century, various schismatics who we now know broadly as Protestants intoned with one voice, that venerating saints is idol-worship. Christians have venerated saints since at least the 3rd century, if not before, and is a tradition affirmed across the Christian world, in Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria and Antioch. How could the Protestants come up with such a novel idea? Their answer: they got it from Scripture. They argued that Scripture consistently condemns worshipping anything other than God, and nowhere promotes exceptions for a special kind of worship for a special kind of non-God. When it was pointed out to them that the cult of saints was an ancient and universal Christian practice, and affirmed by councils and the Pope, they answered that Scripture is a superior authority to the Church.

6. Confessionalisation

In the sixteenth century, there was a sudden profusion of confessions and catechisms. While Christians have used confessions, or creeds, since ancient times to rule on their disputes, the Reformation confessions took on different functions. For the Lutherans, the confessions sought to unify the Lutheran churches in distinction to the Catholic, making no attempt to reconcile their differences, but in contrast, to spell out and emphasise those differences. For the Reformed churches, that went even further, with each national church producing their own confessions in distinction with each other. The Reformed confessions didn’t even function to unite the Reformed churches internationally: they had a local, and perhaps even temporal, character. Confessions became longer and ever more precise as time went on, becoming ‘lawyer-like’ in contrast to the sparse, poetic quality of the ancient creeds. The Catholics were by all means at it too, spelling out exactly what distinguished them from the Protestants in the Tridentine Profession of Faith and in numerous catechisms. All this was doubtless only possible because of the recent introduction of the printing press to Europe from China. For the first time, Christians were using confessional texts at scale not to unite Christians but to divide them.

7. Kings and clerics

Pope Gregory VII was famous for fighting the Holy Roman Emperor for the right to decide who gets to invest priests. This issue and others continued to grind at the relationship between the Pope and Europe’s princes. From the 12th century, popes claimed to have ultimate authority on both spiritual and temporal matters, and attempted to exercise this alleged authority with mixed success. Kings fought back. The kings of France and Spain did particularly well at exacting papal concessions, and by the sixteenth century ended up pretty much in charge of Catholicism in their respective realms. In Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia, England and Scotland, monarchs were more under the papal thumb, sometimes much more. Ulrich Zwingli, the great Swiss reformer, complained that the Swiss had to accept whatever Roman carriage-driver the Pope decided to send as their priest or bishop. In 1538, Henry VIII declared himself the Supreme Head of the Church of England. This move was little distinguished from the actions of his French and Spanish counterparts (apart from its brazenness). But in the context of the time, he was compelled to make entreaties with the German Protestants. After a period of ambiguity, under his grand-daughter Elizabeth, England ended up firmly in the Protestant camp.

8. Mysticism

In the late Middle Ages, a movement known as devotio moderna or ‘the modern devotion’ swept Europe. It challenged the old rituals of public, communal, vocal prayer, and emphasised private meditation and mental prayer. For adherents, the goal was to transform your soul and re-orient it towards God. Along the way, you’d be likely to use methods from books written by Christendom’s top gurus, but there was doubtless plenty of unregulated mysticism happening, too. In the Reformation, mystical experiences became ambiguous on both sides of the fence, for different reasons. Protestants emphasised shared over private spirituality, and suspected mystics of practicing needless and idolatrous false religion. But Protestants also emphasised the work of the Spirit in each believer by faith, and often continued practicing private spirituality. Meanwhile, Catholics celebrated private spirituality and were perfectly happy emphasising that it took hard work to approach a direct encounter with God’s presence, but were unsettled by the thought that if you could have a such an encounter by praying and meditating, you wouldn’t need the mediation of the Church to bring you God’s presence through the sacraments.

9. Conciliarism

The medieval Latin church had a thing for councils. Councils functioned as a way to solve disagreements in a fair way, thus generating robust consensus: in theory, at least. Idealists, called ‘conciliarists,’ wanted to prioritise councils over every other authority, even the Pope: though that meant that ecumenical councils were deeply distrusted by exactly the one person who had the sole authority to call them. These conflicts still lay unresolved when Martin Luther led a revolt against Rome in 1517. For some decades, leaders on both sides of the divide held out hope that an ecumenical council might heal the schism. However, power politics got in the way, and by the end of the Council of Trent, it was abundantly clear that councils had become solidly subservient to papal authority, and were only ever going to exacerbate the split. Conciliarism was finally dead.

10. Persecution

In 1520, Martin Luther was declared an heretic in a papal bull issued by Pope Leo X. In response, Martin Luther burned the bull in public and announced that Leo X was the Antichrist. Various players in various quarters tried various strategies for resolving the schism, and it seems that few were willing to give up on violent coercion. In both Catholic and Protestant domains, magistrates burned books and burned people in an attempt to quell heresy.