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-title: 10 very short stories about the Reformation
-description: >-
-  I'm summarising a few of the big stories about the Reformation I've been
-  studying recently.
-pubDate: 2026-02-16
-updatedDate: 2026-02-27
----
-
-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.
-
-NB. It has since been pointed out to me that Elizabeth is famously Henry VIII's
-daughter, not his grand-daughter. I leave this error in situ, so as not to give
-the false impression that these short stories are in any way to be admired or
-trusted.
-
-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.