Leaders of the Protestant Reformation

Martin Luther (1483-1546) and John Calvin (1509-1564) were two of the principal leaders of the Protestant Reformation that transformed Western Europe in the sixteenth century. In the German states of the early sixteenth century there was "a combination of circumstances favourable to rebellion," the agricultural peasantry was oppressed and impoverished and the rest of the society strained against the domination of the Church and the excesses of ecclesiastical-temporal rulers of many bishoprics and monasteries (Sykes 28). Yet the form of the vast social change that eventually occurred was very different from outright armed rebellion against the civil or even the ecclesiastical authorities. There were minor peasants' revolts, it is true, but in general social change began in the arena of spiritual matters and this is due almost entirely to Luther's challenge to the Church, which was based on his refreshed understanding of the nature of Revelation, faith, and the relationship between humanity and God. Calvin followed in the broad wake of Lutheran change and amplified Luther's ideas. But he also developed a number of doctrinal differences; most notably, his belief in predestination. Calvin also possessed a much greater interest in the immediate regulation of people's lives and the coercive powers of the godly state and the civil religion. He eventually became the spiritual leader of the city-state of Geneva which had adopted his teachings as its official creed. Lutheranis

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was sufficient that individual sins be readily forgiven and forgotten by means of the Church's intervention. Instead he turned to the theology of Augustine who held that "only the intervention of God can overcome the depths to which mankind has fallen" (Lienhard 86). The means by which humanity is assisted by God are the Word and faith. As Luther argued, the Word was not just the Scripture--which was the only 'evidence' of Revelation that humanity possessed--but the presence of Jesus Christ which people accepted, or did not, into their hearts by means of faith. Salvation was, therefore, "a free gift of God's grace which men receive through the medium of faith" (Sykes 34). Although, as Lienhard points out, much of Luther's theology was not very different from the core theology of the Catholic Church, the reformer soon realized that "salvific communion with God was not identical with communion with a visible Church unless it depended on the very Word of God transmitted to us by Scripture" (90). He found no Scriptural justification for the papacy (which had only assumed supreme leadership of the Church four centuries earlier) or for most of the sacraments which were believed to promise salvation. Each person was responsible f

Category: History - L