In every generation God has His men and women, His hall of fame and they are those who work with the aphorism; “If it must work, it must begin with me”. As we celebrate the 5th Centenary of the Reformation, we need to recognize that more than splitting the Roman Catholic Church and leaving in its wake deep economic, social and economic implications, the Reformation was a special intervention act of the Holy Spirit that shook the Church of God into life. It was not actually a Martin Luther movement as Luther admitted when he wrote, “Like a blind mule, I was led by Him (God)”, emphasis mine; the reformation movement predated Luther and flourished years after his demise.
Since the reformation was an act of God there has been a well-planned and institutionalized scheme to reverse the gains through disparaging the lives of the reformers and relegating their contributions to the back page of history; in the same breath advancing the age long Roman Catholic Church dogma that all of Christianity is Catholicism and as the mother of all churches she is waiting for the prodigals (generically protestants) to finally come back home. This has been the motivation behind the desecration of relics, epitaphs and institutions set up to celebrate the labors of the leaders of the reformation, replacing them with images celebrating Roman Church saints.
Strangely most of the churches that actually sprouted from the reformation have bought into these dangerous narratives which are clever extensions of the Counter Reformation movement. The distressing corruptions and heresies the reformers fought to remove from Christianity are being perpetrated in other guises in Protestantism today and people are beginning to doubt if there was any reason for the Reformation. We have witnessed periodic dialogues worldwide between the Catholics and Lutherans, Catholics and Charismatics, Catholics and Evangelicals, etc., to commemorate the Reformation but with a different agenda. While Catholics acknowledge there was a need to reform there is tangible dissonance with the reformers on the focuses and degree.
In one of such gatherings of charismatic and protestant leaders a couple of years back, the prominent question was “If the reformation has ended, what are we protesting against?” This is the error of ignoring history. We must never forget the past but constantly reflect on the essential truths that make us who we are, else we will unwittingly cause a recurrence of history; maybe this time with more evil consequences for failing to learn from history. We would want to honour some of these many men that believed they were on a mission from God to restore faith and true worship of God and they caused their lamps to burn so brightly to illumine the path we should walk on.
So, who were the prominent persons of the 15th – 17th century reformation movements? For space, we will restrict our Reformation Hall of Fame to a few, whom God used leaving us great legacies worth teaching in our congregations today.
JOHANNES HUS (circa 1369 – 1416)
In history, Johann Hus is generally accepted to be the first major face that fought for a reformation of the Church. Information on Hus’ early life is virtually nonexistent and at best sketchy and subject to conjectures after his death: his family background, date of birth and even his name was punned from “Jan, son of Michael”, “Jan Hus of Husinec” to “Jan Hus”. Though a diligent scholar of Bohemian extraction, he was not notable for his scholastic brilliance as some of the later reformers or even his mentor John Wycliffe, whose writings were well known by Hus during the time he lived.
In 1402, Hus was ordained a Roman Catholic priest, preached for several years at the Bethlehem Church in Prague, rose to become the rector at the Charles University in Prague and later the inspiration that fueled the budding reform effort in Czechoslovakia. Hus did not fight against the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church or develop his beliefs as basis for doctrines during his lifetime, like the later reformers, but decried the views and moral decadence of the clergy as well as demanding that the Church reform.
We must also appreciate Hus lived in the mediaeval times in Europe, with constant and entrenched clashes for hegemony between the potentates and the Church which greatly eroded the powers of the Popes. He was deeply passionate in his rebukes of the church leaders and this endeared him to his beloved congregation but soon brought him into a heads-on encounter with the Church authorities. In 1410, the Pope issued a decree against the ideas of John Wycliffe in Europe, but this did not deter Hus who continued spreading this new idea through his preaching. Pope Alexander V excommunicated Hus and his followers who, by this time were referred to as the Hussites, in turn burned the Papal bull in 1412, leading to a series of intrigues in the Bohemian Church. The succession of Popes and Kings of the region made attempts to reconcile Hus and his members to the Roman Catholic Church.
Following the failures at reconciliation, Hus left for the countryside and made a special appeal to Jesus Christ, signaling dissent and a point-of-no-common grounds, because he bypassed the highest authority of the Church; an act that was later equated with what Luther did by nailing his 95 theses to the door of the church. Hus was invited by the Pope to the Council of Constance in 1414, where three bishops were detailed to interrogate and arrest him. The guarantee of safe passage was quickly turned down and he was subsequently declared a heretic and imprisoned. While with his protectors in horrible conditions in Kozí Hrádek castle at the Rhine, Hus published many writings in the mould of Wycliffe’s theses and translated Latin into the local language for the priests who could not read or understand the language. In the dungeon, he was chained and poorly fed and soon became terribly ill. Hus was denied a counsel and tried by the Church severally in 1415 but refused to recant unless his persecutors proved his teachings and writings false and not from the Holy Scriptures. In 1415, this hero of the Faith was condemned under false accusation, de-robed of his priestly garments and burnt at the stake, whilst crying out, “Christ, son of the Living God, have mercy on us!”
After his killing, Pope Martin V issued a Papal bull calling for the complete wipe out of his followers. This led to the Bohemian crusades, where the Hussites (Hus followers) defeated the Crusaders in six different battles according to certain records and by 1434, more than ninety percent of Bohemians were followers of the teaching of Jan Hus.
His greatest legacy was his quest to reform the priesthood. He taught that Christ is the Head of the Church and not the pope, advocated priests should model the ascetic life and spoke against the excesses of the presbytery in that era. He advocated a return to the practices of the Apostolic time where spiritual and moral uprightness was a distinguishing characteristic for a priest rather than the position. This was a revolutionary call at the time that he lived, where a priest’s morality had no bearing on either the official estimation or the execution of his clerical responsibilities. Martin Luther, whose reform movement came about a century after Hus derived much of his impetus from his numerous writings.
JOHN CALVIN (1509 – 1564)
Born on Jehan Cauvin to the family of Gerald Cauvin (a lawyer and church leader) and Jean le Franc on 10 July 1509, at Noyon in France, John Calvin grew up to become a very influential reformer and one of the greatest Protestant Theologians of all times. Early on, the father prepared him for ecclesiastical career by enrolling him to read philosophy in Collège de Montaigu and later to read law at the University of Orleans. His sound training in dialectics and scholastic philosophy was sharpened under the tutorship of a Spanish theologian, Mathurin Cordier, who taught him the Latin language and few years later in 1529 changed to University of Bourges where he was taught Greek by Andreas Alciati a humanist lawyer. By the age of 28, Calvin had started preaching to large congregations although as non-ordained pastor but soon began to dissent from Roman Catholic doctrines.
Following his father’s counsel, Calvin began his study in law under Pierre Taisan de L’toile, the most prominent lawyer of his time and became an admirer of Erasmus. Under the influence of his friend, Wolmar, he quickly learnt Greek; their conversations in spreading reformed doctrines quickly set him on the path to being in the frontier of the spiritual regeneration of his time. The pivotal years of his life were 1531 – 1534, when he gained his liberty from his father’s influence when as he later wrote “God subdued my soul to docility by a sudden conversion”.
He moved to Basel and later Geneva in Switzerland where he stayed for majority of his life; except for the years 1538-1541 when he fled the city as the Libertines gained political hegemony after the fall of the Duke of Savoy and Bishop of Geneva. Whilst in Geneva, Calvin studied Hebrew and here developed most of his form of radical political and theological thoughts that took a decade and a half to be accepted by the Geneva Council.
John Calvin clamoured for a sweeping political transformation that will see the clergy in the position of political leadership or power; a kind of theocracy. He wanted a church modelled after the Apostolic Era where all ministers are equal, had no faith in formal education and went on to develop a catechism for the instruction of children. The form of Church he advocated was one of very austere lifestyles with strict moral codes and worship devoid of musical instruments.
His teachings spread to France in 1553, with the arrival of the Huguenots ministers and they quickly spread on the acceptation of the populace by 1563. With the advancing reform movements across Europe, Calvinism made appreciable progress spreading to countries like Netherlands, Poland and Germany with measured outcomes.
The theme of Calvinism has been captured in his huge volumes of writings and highlighted in the acronym TULIP as:
1. Total depravity of man – inherently evil, without God’s inspiration
2. Unconditional election – God chooses whom He will before time, without man’s influence in time
3. Limited atonement – the death of Jesus Christ on the cross are only for the saved and not for the whole world.
4. Irresistible grace – God’s call must not be ignored.
5. Perseverance of the saints – eternal salvation which cannot be lost.
Calvin preached thousands of sermons and set up the Geneva Academy for ministerial training; one that John Knox referred to as “the most perfect school of Christ seen on earth since the days of the Apostles”. The growing strain of work exerted so much on Calvin’s health and in 1564, he died and was buried with little ceremony in France. According to Theodore Beza, Calvin was “the greatest light there was in this world for the direction of the church of God”.
ULRICH (HULDRYCH) ZWINGLI (1484 – 1531)
One of the most influential personalities and a complex character in the story of the Reformation is Ulrich Zwingli. Born on 1st January 1434 into a farming family of nine in the Wildhaus, Canton of Galen in the Swiss Confederation. Zwingli attended the universities of Vienna and Basel, where he received a Master in Arts degree. As a young and newly consecrated priest, he stood on the side of the Roman Catholic Church in the several military campaigns that engulfed the Swiss Confederation with young men fighting against each other as mercenaries for the imperial rulers, the French and the Pope. On being convicted of the immorality of the wars, Zwingli’s patriotic side came to the fore and he left the political podium for an ecclesiastical pulpit. He retreated to hone his mastery of the languages of the Bible, Hebrew and Greek. During this time, he also vastly interacted with humanists and met with Erasmus who heavily influenced his theological thoughts.
In his writings and messages, Zwingli condemned the Roman Catholic doctrines of fasting during lent, celibacy of the clergy and the use of imagery in worship and was vehement in his condemnation of corruption in the priestly order.
Zwingli was respected by the politicians for his stand against the mercenary scheme and the humanist who recognized his gifts as a great moral preacher of the Bible and was elected to the stipendiary priest position in Zurich where he moved to permanently in 1518. Gradually, his sermons became hugely controversial and difficult to be categorized with any of his contemporaries like Luther or supposed mentors like Erasmus; he doubted the reality of hell and his contradiction of tithe as divine affected his support base, but endeared him to many commoners. He was elected to become a canon in 1521, which conferred upon him the full citizenship of Zurich.
The reformation in Switzerland was deemed to have been kick-started with the event of the Affairs of the Sausage, where Zwingli with his followers broke the Lenten fast by eating smoked sausages, stating they violated no Biblical laws. With the growing reformation movement in Europe and the people’s dissatisfaction with the exactions of the Roman Church, Zwingli proceeded to apply for the abolition of the celibacy of the clergy; himself publicly cohabiting with a widow, whom he later married and they had four children.
Following these were several disputations involving Zwingli and representatives of the formal clergy. Issues like infant baptism, use of images and the mass, etc. were topics for the disputes. With the increasing popularity of the reformers, Zwingli influenced the introduction of several populist policies like the abolition of the Roman Catholic Orders and secularization of the church properties, some of which were turned into hospitals and for welfare purposes.
On the whole, Zwingli and Luther could not become allies due to the gaps in their theological and doctrinal views. This outlook categorized the schism in the reform movement amongst the prominent faces of the Reformation across the European states. Though these often irreconcilable doctrinal differences did not allow for unity, God still worked through them to perfect His purpose of pulling the strings of the human hearts to the eternal truths of His Word. We have our parts to fulfill in God’s global Kingdom Plan and while pursuing these purposes, we should identify differences emanating from the mundane things and keep them out as we concentrate on the essentials.
The doctrinal controversies between Zwingli and Luther, as well as other reformers persisted despite efforts to bridge the gap between their views. One of such efforts, which was convened on the interpretation of Christ presence at the communion, was the Marburg Colloquy, where a measure of agreement was reached but no reconciliation on the real presence versus the symbolic presence at the communion; two views still prevalent in Protestantism today.
Zwingli died at the battle front during the Kapel Wars on October 11, 1529. He meddled too much into the politics of his time and ultimately paid the price with his life at the young age of 47. He considered himself a defender of his country and fought to defend her course and was consumed alongside other pastors. Erasmus and Luther saw their deaths as the judgment of God, but one cannot deny the roles he played in the reformation movement in the Swiss States, especially his constant appeal to scriptures and veneration of same above human institutions. He also stood against many of the church’s unbiblical practices which pitched him against the Roman Catholic Church until the time of his death.
MARTIN LUTHER (1483 – 1546)
By far the greatest voice and influence of the 16th Century Reformation, Martin Luther was born on November 10, 1483 to Johann and Margaret Luder (later Luther) in the German city of Eisleben. By the time he died in February the 18th 1546, he was known variously as a theology professor, Bible translator, music composer, a catholic monk and the most prominent face of the Protestant Reformation. His father was a copper miner who in 1493 assumed the position of a councilor after the family relocated from Eisleben to Mansfield shortly after the birth of Martin. He worked hard to sustain his family and to fulfill his life’s ambition of getting his eldest son, Martin to become a lawyer by sending him to a special Latin school early in his life.
Young Luther attended the University of Erfurt in 1501, where he obtained a master’s degree and enrolled to read law to satisfy his father’s wishes. He saw himself as student of Aristotle, Gabriel Biel and William of Ockham, whose books he passionately read and they exerted great influences on his life. Luther had such an illustrious scholastic career that by 1512, he had acquired two bachelor degrees and a master’s degree in Biblical Studies and Sentences from the University of Erfurt, and was awarded a doctorate degree in Theology in the newly founded University of Wittenberg. In a short time, he was invited into the University’s Senate and was chair of Theology faculty.
However, Luther abandoned his father’s ambition for him to become a lawyer and decided to join the Augustinian Order as a result of a life-changing incident which took place in 1505 during a thunderstorm on his return to the University of Erfurt after a home visit. According to the story Luther recounted to his father, a severe bolt of lightning struck the ground close to him as he rode on horseback and threw him off the horse and being in terror he cried out “Help! St. Anna. I will become a monk.”
He saw this event as spiritually significant, so his spontaneous cry became a vow he steadfastly kept. This marked a turning point in his life as he immediately joined the monastic life of the Order of the Hermits of St. Augustine on July 15, 1505. As a monk, Luther was regular and grave in his devotions of self-inflicted penances, probably a consequence of his earlier education with the Brethren of the Common Life, a lay monastic order; praying and fasting often, regular confessions and studying the scriptures and frequently embarked on pilgrimages, as a means of attaining personal righteousness for which he never got assurances. He wrote later in his life, “If anyone could have earned heaven by the life of a monk, it was I.”
Luther offered courses in the books of Psalms, Galatians, Romans and Hebrews but it was his struggles with understanding Romans 5:17 that had the greatest impact on his life and the reformation movement he started. He saw himself as incapable of exercising faith, being unrighteousness and subject to God’s wrath. He commented: “I hated that word, ‘the righteousness of God,’ by which I had been taught according to the custom and use of all teachers … [that] God is righteous and punishes the unrighteous sinner.” However, the spirit of God illuminated his heart as he wrote, “At last, meditating day and night, by the mercy of God, I … began to understand that the righteousness of God is that through which the righteous live by a gift of God, namely by faith… Here I felt as if I were entirely born again and had entered paradise itself through the gates that had been flung open.”
This event of Luther’s conversion opened up to him the hollowness of the Church’s doctrinal teachings that salvation is earned by observing the sacraments, rather than being the act of God’s grace through the righteousness of Christ Jesus. Faith then assumed its true meaning of accepting the promises of God and trusting in the merit of Christ. Thus began the internal implosions which later transformed into torrents of agitations against the Roman Catholic Church, hugely transformed Western Europe and changed the greater world for the best.
The immediate event of the Reformation, started with the publicising of the 95 theses which in itself was written to challenge Johann Tetzel, a friar of the Dominican Order and a papal emissary, who preached that the purchase of the letter of indulgences ensured forgiveness of sins for citizens. Luther vehemently opposed this teaching and carefully scripted his detailed position titled “Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences” which he attached to a letter to Archbishop Albert of Mainz who was Tetzel’s superior, requesting him to stop Tetzel’s endemic messages as well as proposing an academic debate of the indulgences.
This later became known as the “95 Theses” which were basically objections to the Church’s teaching that salvation could be earned by works, although a couple of them bear hints of Luther’s challenge to the Church authority, as in theses no. 86 which asks: “Why does not the Pope, whose wealth today is greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build the basilica of St. Peter with his own money rather than with the money of poor believers?”
At the time that Luther sent his theses to Albert, he also gave copies to a few of his friends but they soon became public all over Germany, having been translated from Latin to German by his friends and could be read in England, France and Italy within two months. Archbishop Albert did not respond to Luther’s letter but forwarded it to Pope Leo X, who employed several pro-establishment theologians like Sylvester Mazzolini to check Luther’s theses for heresy. He was invited to Rome to defend his position but with the influence of Elector Frederick, who was favourably disposed to Martin Luther, Pope Leo X agreed for the disputation to hold at the ongoing “Imperial Diet” in Augsburg.
Being questioned by Papal Legate Cajetan, Luther vigorously debated the papal right to issue indulgences and further infuriated the Pope who had given a charge to Cajetan to arrest Luther and bring him to Rome for further questioning. Further disputations were held where Luther unequivocally objected that Matthew 16:18 conferred special rights on the Pope and argued to the infallibility of the popes or church council. With his position stated, Luther was declared a heretic by Johann Eck, one of the papal theologians and an exceptionally brilliant scholar of the Dominican Order. In 1520 the papal bull, “Exsurge Domine” was issued to Luther with a threat of excommunication except he recanted in 60 days. Luther in a public display of defiance to the Pope burnt the papal bull in December 1520 before his students in Wittenberg and was subsequently formally declared a heretic and excommunicated from the church.
Normally, this would have attracted the death penalty, but he was not subjected to such sentence because of the state fear for the widespread goodwill Luther has amongst many of the citizens who felt he has not been afforded a fair hearing and that some of the charges against him were highly trumped up.
The Diet of Worms was called on the 18th of April 1521 to redress the perceived injustice of Luther’s excommunication. At Worms, Luther was presented with a pile of his writings by Johann Eck and was basically asked to recant the teachings; and here he made his famous classic statement. “Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the Pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience. May God help me. Amen.”
With his stand made, Luther hurriedly left Worms for Wittenberg on April 26th 1521 and was shortly declared political outlaw alongside his teeming supporters. In the meantime, Luther was pronounced kidnapped on his way back to Wittenberg and taken to a location later revealed to be Wartburg Castle by soldiers from Frederick for almost the rest of the year. Being afforded such protection, Luther was able to complete the translation of the New Testament from Latin to German.
The schemes to suppress Luther and his followers proved to be monumental failures, as the management of the results of Worms was left rather too late. Instead of silencing Luther, there were increasing outbreaks of riots and uprisings by many who took the opportunity of the theological debates to realize their economic and political pursuits by demanding for reforms, starting from Wittenberg.
Other reformers like Martin Bucer, Thomas Müntzer and Huldrych Zwingli came up at this time to challenge Luther’s theology and publicize their own versions of reforms. In the ensuing confusion generated by the reformers lack of unity, the Peasant War and the public outcry against the Church, many monks threw off the habits and the nuns deserted the convents, to either reconcile with their families, become governesses or get married. The state of anarchy was such that when Martin Luther met the twelve nuns who were helped to escape the convent by a food supplier, Leonard Kopp, he felt responsible for their plights having preached on the honourability of marriage as God-ordained and chided as devilish the celebration of celibacy of the clergy by the Church. Luther and Katherine von Bora, who came from a noble family, got married on June 13, 1525, two years after her abdication and their memorable union was blessed with six children: Johannes, Magdalene, Martin, Paul, and Margarete and Elizabeth who died when she was about eight months old.
It must be stated here that the marriage of Luther to his love ‘Katie’ awfully incensed papacy although it did not gain the applause from his fellow reformers Philipp Melanchthon, some of whom felt it was a distraction from the reformation cause and others like Erasmus actually derided him calling it the height of comedy. But both ex-monk and ex-nun were deeply in love with each other and truly saw their union as a training in higher level of holiness, with God. Katherine proved to be the perfect partner for Luther, efficiently managing the family businesses and running the home front which afforded Luther the time to concentrate on the affairs of the church and state. Life in the home of the Luthers was strict but a very happy one and Martin was very fond of his wife and children with whom he joked and played with regularly.
At the death of Luther in 1546, Katherine was quoted to have written in a letter to her sister-in-law, Christiana, “I know that you take pity on me and my poor children, for who could not be deeply grieved and saddened over the loss of such a dear and precious man as my husband has been. He gave so much of himself in service not only to one town or to one country, but to the whole world. Yes, my sorrow is so deep that no words can express my heartbreak, and it is humanly impossible to understand what state of mind and spirit I am in . . . I can neither eat nor drink, not even sleep . . . God knows that when I think of having lost him, I can neither talk nor write in all my suffering.” Such was the depth of love and closeness between them. Katherine died on 20 December, 1552 at the age of 53.
Most of Luther’s achievements were made before the last two decades of his life; by that time, he had clearly articulated ideologies, which formed the basis for democratic culture and principles of human rights to life, free expression and freedom of association, gender equality, etc. The development of Protestant tenets and form of worship owes a great deal to Luther’s theology: the dependence on the Word of God, the Bible, as the sole source of Christian authority, the centrality of grace and salvation by faith, the view of the church as a community of the faithful (man, scripture and God) without the hierarchical structures that engineer division between the laity and clergy in the church. Luther also simplified church mass by introducing what is generally accepted today as Protestant form of worship with music as one of its features. In spite of his involvement with the state and the inherent struggles and challenges, Luther propounded a theology that is antithetical to Protestant Christian participation in politics in Germany.
Luther has been criticized in certain circles for his anti-Semitic worldview; which was believed to have been manifested towards the end of his life, but there is not enough evidence for such propositions to be established. It is arguable if such accusations of racism are actually exclusive to Luther or are broad cultural depictions or characterizations of the German society in which he lived.