short reformation stories

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+---
+title: 10 very short stories about the Reformation
+description:
+pubDate: 2026-02-16
+---
+
+I'm summarising a few of the big stories about the Reformation I've been
+studying recently.
+
+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.