What Caused the Reformation?

Many people might answer that question by pointing to Martin Luther and his 95 Theses.

But if you were to ask Luther himself, he would not point to himself or his own writings. Instead, he would give all the credit to God and His Word.

Near the end of his life, Luther declared: “All I have done is put forth, preach and write the Word of God, and apart from this I have done nothing. . . . It is the Word that has done great things. . . . I have done nothing; the Word has done and achieved everything.”

Elsewhere, he exclaimed: “By the Word the earth has been subdued; by the Word the Church has been saved; and by the Word also it shall be reestablished.”

Noting Scripture’s foundational place in his own heart, Luther wrote: “No matter what happens, you should say: There is God’s Word. This is my rock and anchor. On it I rely, and it remains. Where it remains, I, too, remain; where it goes, I, too, go.”

Luther understood what caused the Reformation. He recognized that it was the Word of God empowered by the Spirit of God preached by men of God in a language that the common people of Europe could understand and when their ears were exposed to the truth of God’s Word it pierced their hearts and they were radically changed.

It was that very power that had transformed Luther’s own heart, a power that is summarized in the familiar words of Hebrews 4:12: “The Word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword.”

During the late middle ages, the Roman Catholic Church had imprisoned God’s Word in the Latin language, a language the common people of Europe did not speak. The Reformers unlocked the Scriptures by translating them. And once the people had the Word of God, the Reformation became inevitable.

We see this commitment to the Scriptures even in the centuries prior to Martin Luther, beginning with the Forerunners to the Reformation:

In the 12th century, the Waldensians translated the New Testament from the Latin Vulgate into their regional French dialects. According to tradition, they were so committed to the Scriptures that different Waldensian families would memorize large sections of the Bible. That way, if Roman Catholic authorities found them and confiscated their printed copies of Scripture, they would later be able to reproduce the entire Bible from memory.

In the 14th century, John Wycliffe and his associates at Oxford translated the Bible from Latin into English. Wycliffe’s followers, known as the Lollards, went throughout the countryside preaching and singing passages of Scripture in English.

In the 15th century, Jan Huss preached in the language of the people, and not in Latin, making him the most popular preacher in Prague at the time. Yet, because Huss insisted that Christ alone was the head of the church, not the pope, the Catholic Council of Constance condemned him for heresy and burned him at the stake (in 1415).

In the 16th century, as the study of Greek and Hebrew were recovered, Martin Luther translated the Bible into German, with the New Testament being completed in 1522.

In 1526, William Tyndale completed a translation of the Greek New Testament into English. A few years later he also translated the Pentateuch from Hebrew. Shortly thereafter he was arrested and executed as a heretic—being strangled and then burned at the stake. According to Fox’s Book of Martyrs, Tyndale’s last words were “Lord, Open the King of England’s Eyes.” And it was just a couple years after his death that King Henry VIII authorized the Great Bible in England—a Bible that was largely based on Tyndale’s translation work. The Great Bible laid the foundation for the later King James version (which was completed in 1611).

The common thread, from Reformer to Reformer, was an undying commitment to the authority and sufficiency of Scripture, such that they were willing to sacrifice everything, including their own lives, to get the Word of God into the hands of the people.

They did this because they understood that the power for spiritual reformation and revival was not in them, but in the gospel (cf. Rom. 1:16–17). And they used the Latin phrase Sola Scriptura (“Scripture alone”) to emphasize the truth that God’s Word was the true power and ultimate authority behind all they said and did.

It was ignorance of Scripture that made the Reformation necessary. It was the recovery of the Scripture that made the Reformation possible. And it was the power of the Scripture that gave the Reformation its enduring impact, as the Holy Spirit brought the truth of His Word to bear on the hearts and minds of individual sinners, transforming them, regenerating them, and giving them eternal life.

According to economist James Dale Davidson, it was the end of feudalism caused by the Black Death and the arrival of capitalism. Davidson, in his book The Great Reckoning, asked why early reformers such as Tyndale, Wycliffe and Hus failed and were burned at the stake, while Luther succeeded.

Davidson traced it to the Catholic Church’s welfare system known as “feast days”. Today we refer to the “feast of St. Anthony” but don’t connect it with a feast in terms of food. In the medieval period, it was an actual feast. There were nearly 100 feast days per year, and those under feudalism who had money (lords) were required to put on a feast almost every three days for those who didn’t (serfs and vagabonds, whom we refer to today as "bums”). The middle class participated in feast days, but that middle class was small and lacked the kind of money possessed by the lords. It wasn’t easy for the middle class of that period. The key to this was the Catholic principle that to be saved, one must have faith and perform good works. Those feast days constituted the good works for most lay Catholics.

The Black Death depopulated Europe and ended feudalism. Serfs walked off the land they had been bound to for generations. Some went into the towns and cities, started their own businesses and joined the middle class. They inundated the medieval guild system, causing it to collapse in some areas of Europe. But some serfs took on the life of vagabonds, sitting in the town squares, calling “Alms! Alms for the poor!” to every passerby.,

Put yourself in the position of a draper, a curtain maker, in a city in northern Europe. You or your ancestor left the land to which he had been bound, went into the city and built a business. You beat the guild system. You have a hard life working, but you have come to see work as something good in and of itself. Not for you is this life “a vale of tears” in preparation for Heaven. It’s the place you work to earn a living. But every three days you have to put on a feast for those bums who sit in the town square begging, and that grates on you. The Catholic price of salvation is getting a little too high.

A good example encapsulates the problem. One day you go into the town square to hire some casual labor to move large boxes of cloth around. You approach one bum and tell him you’ll pay him one silver crown for a day’s work. The bum turns you down.

“I just offered you money for some work.”

“Work? Work?! I am but a poor sparrow living on the grains removed from cow dung. This is my place, according to Holy Mother Church. Your place is to feed me every three days, according to Holy Mother Church. By faith and good works you will be saved, I will be happy to take your money, good sir, but work for it? Excuse me, sir, I see a rich man entering the square. Alms! Alms for the poor!”

You walk away from that bum ready to support anyone who can make these people work.

Along comes Luther. Unlike Tyndale, Wycliffe and Hus, he has come along after Europe has been changed by the Black Death. He has also come along when primitive capitalism is replacing feudalism. Luther says that by faith alone you will be saved.

If you are a member of the rising, but financially harassed, middle class, and you hear this message, it resonates. In my best John Wayne impersonation, you respond, “Father Luther, if that means I don’t have to support those bums in the town square anymore, then pilgrim, call me a Lutheran!”

This is an approximation, but Davidson’s belief is that all societal, and even religious, change is based on following the money. He calls it “megapolitical change”, and economist Martin Armstrong has blazed new territory in connecting historical change to capital flows.

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Roman SIN!!!

What caused the COUNTER Reformation?

ATTENTION!