The pioneer of the Reformation, Martin Luther (1483-1546), became an Augustinian friar in 1505 after taking a dramatic vow during a thunderstorm. He was ordained two years later, and at the age of 29 became Professor of Biblical Studies at the new University of Wittenberg, where he began to challenge tradition and to emphasise personal understanding and experience of God's Word. At first, his views attracted little attention, but his career took a dramatic turn after posting his 95 Theses to the north door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on October 31st, 1517.
The 95 Theses were not so much a revolutionary call to reform as a young academic theologian's earnest proposals to discuss the trade in indulgences and the errors and abuses that had developed over the centuries. Luther attacked the church's material preoccupations and contrasted the treasurers of the church with its true wealth, the Gospel.
He was censured by the Archbishop of Mainz, disputed with the Papal authorities in Augsburg and in Heidelberg, refused to recant or accept a summons to Rome, and finally was excommunicated by the Pope in 1521 and outlawed at the Diet of Worms a few months later. But he continued to write and publish, translated the Bible into German, found support among many of the princes and fired the imagination of Europe.
Theologically, Luther today appears surprisingly conservative and catholic in many of his writings. Politically, he was dependent on his princely supporters, and when he condemned the "murderous hordes" during the Peasants' Revolt (1524-1525), he alienated many of the ordinary people. But before long, Luther's teachings had spread widely throughout Germany, and into Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, and were influencing those waiting for an opportunity to propose reform in England.
To the south, in Zurich, Huldreich Zwingli (1484-1531), the parish priest of the Great Cathedral (Grossmunster), began to preach reform at the same time as Luther. Both had been influenced by Erasmus, but Zwingli arrived at his position independently. He had been trained in the Thomist principles, and in the steps of Aquinas he became an important systematic theologian. Zwingli was secretly married in 1522, but even as late as 1523 he received a warm letter from the Pope.
Zwingli and Luther reached deadlock in their debate over the Eucharist at Marburg in 1529, and the Swiss Reform movement lost the support of the German princes. Before long there were two main streams in the new Protest movement - the followers of Luther and the Reformed or Swiss Protestants. Zwingli met an early death on the battlefield, and his place as the leading Reformed theologian was taken by the French humanist scholar, John Calvin (1509-1564), who had been forced into exile from Paris, eventually settling in Geneva.
At first, Luther, Zwingli and Calvin wished to reform church practices and teachings from within; they had no intention of leaving the church to form new churches, nor did they wish to break the links between church and state and they retained the ideal of a state church to which all citizens belonged. Luther depended on the princes for support, while Calvin had tight control over the town council in Geneva, where he tried to bring every citizen under the moral discipline of the church, and sanctioned the arrest of the heretic Michael Servetus, who was burnt to death.
The unity of Church and State was maintained in England when the Reformation took hold only when Henry VIII - honoured by the Pope as "Defender of the Faith" for his attack on Luther in 1521 - became entangled in a dispute with Rome after failing to receive Papal sanction for his planned divorce. The excommunicated Henry remained a Catholic in doctrine and practice until his death, and it was only during the reign of his son Edward VI (1537-1553) that the Reformation was effectively introduced. The English Reformers, led by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556) of Canterbury, Bishop Nicholas Ridley (ca 15001555) and Bishop Hugh Latimer (ca 1485-1555), fused Lutheranism and Calvinism in a state church that retained Catholic order and much of Catholic liturgy.
Lutheranism, the Reformed or Calvinist movement, and Anglicanism formed the three main schools of thought to arise during the Reformation. But there were more radical movements, seeking thorough-going reforms, whose members rejected state-church links and challenged many of the traditions the principal reformers had accepted. They often rejected infant baptism and advocated radical political reform too. From these movements would arise the Baptists, Anabaptists, Mennonites and Quakers of later generations.
The Reformation may have caught Rome largely unprepared, but this situation did not continue for long. The Council of Trent, called by Pope Paul III, met in three sessions between 1545 and 1563 to redefine doctrine and to introduce sweeping reforms. Trent too must be seen as part of the great movement in the 16th century to reform the church.
The Jesuits are often regarded as spearheading the Counter-Reformation attack on the Reformation. But the Society of Jesus was not founded by Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556) with the specific intention of combatting Protestants and Reform: the spirit of Reform was sweeping through Europe, including those branches of the church that retained their links with Rome.
The heritage of medieval spirituality was found to be alive in the challenging writings of the great Spanish Carmelite mystics, Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) and her confessor, John of the Cross (1542-1591), and a new sense of mission was recovered for the whole Church by the Jesuits through the labours of Francis Xavier (1506-1552), who reached India, and Matteo Ricci (15521610) in China. Soon there were Jesuit, Franciscan, Dominican and Augustinian missionaries throughout the Americas, in the Philippines and parts of Africa.
As Europe went to war over religious differences, it may have appeared that the Reformation that first divided the church was also sounding its death knell. Instead, the spirit of Reform swept through all branches of the church, and within a century, all sections of the church were finding new riches of spiritual life and a new zeal for expansion and mission.
Rev Patrick Comerford is a writer on theology and church history and an Irish Times journalist. Contact: theology@ireland.com
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