The story
A German in 1517 could buy a printed certificate that promised to shorten a dead relative's time in purgatory, and the money went toward building a church in Rome he would never see. Most people thought this was ordinary religion.
To understand 1517 you have to picture a world where the church was not one part of life but the frame around all of it. It baptized you, married you, buried you, ran the schools and most of the charity, and read you a Bible in Latin, a language almost nobody in the pews spoke. Then in 1516 a scholar named Erasmus printed the New Testament in the original Greek. For the first time an educated man could set the church's practice beside the apostles' actual words and see the gap.
For the gospel reveals the righteousness of God that comes by faith from start to finish, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”The verse Luther was stuck on and then saw through, that "the righteousness of God" is not the standard he was failing but the gift God hands over, received by faith; he said it opened the gates of paradise to him.
The immediate spark was indulgences, and it helps to say plainly what they were. Officially an indulgence did not forgive sin; it released a person from some of the punishment still owed for sins already confessed, drawing on what the church called a treasury of merit. That is the fine print. What was preached in the German towns in 1517 was much simpler and much worse: a Dominican friar named Johann Tetzel sold certificates that promised to release dead loved ones from purgatory, and Luther quoted the jingle back at him, as soon as the coin in the box rings, the soul out of purgatory springs.
Follow the money and the protest makes sense. Half the take was going to build St. Peter's in Rome; the other half quietly repaid the bankers who had lent Albrecht of Brandenburg the money to buy a second archbishopric he was too young to hold. Poor families were handing over coins they needed for bread. Luther's ninety-five points were written in Latin for a university debate. He expected an argument among professors, instead, all of Europe joined in.
For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the law.The Reformation's plainest sentence, a person is put right with God by faith, apart from the works of the law; Luther's German rendered it "by faith alone," a word not in the Greek, and he defended the addition as the honest sense of Paul's argument.
But the real quarrel underneath was not about money, it was about how a guilty person gets right with God. Luther had tried the whole system: fasting, sleeping in the cold, confessing until his confessor grew tired of him. Then, working through Romans and the Psalms as a young professor, he saw that "the righteousness of God" in Romans 1:17 is not the standard God measures you against but the standing God gives you as a gift. Put plainly: God declares the guilty sinner right with him because of what Jesus did, and that verdict is received by trusting him, not earned by climbing toward him. Luther said it felt like walking through open gates into paradise.
None of it would have traveled without the press. Gutenberg's invention was about seventy years old, and by 1500 presses were running in some 250 European towns, the infrastructure was already built and waiting. Luther wrote short, cheap pamphlets in punchy German, and printers who had never met him ran off editions for the profit. Historians estimate that in the years around 1520 a large share of everything printed in Germany came from his pen. It is hard not to see God's timing in the fact that the century of the open Bible was also the first century in which a book could outrun a soldier.
For it is by grace you have been saved through faith, and this not from yourselves; it is the gift of God,Saved by grace, through faith, and not out of yourselves, the answer the reformers gave to a system in which peace with God could be paid for.
The translation war that followed is where men died over words. William Tyndale, refused permission in England, printed his English New Testament abroad in 1525–26 and had it smuggled home. His enemies were not only angry that the Bible was in English; they were angry at his specific choices. He wrote "congregation" where the old Latin gave "church," "elder" where it gave "priest," "repentance" where it gave "penance," and "love" where it gave "charity." Every one of those words moved authority a little away from the institution and toward the gathered believers, which is exactly why Thomas More attacked him in print and why the stake was waiting. Tyndale was strangled and burned in 1536; roughly four-fifths of the King James New Testament is still his English.
The movement was never just one thing. Lutherans held to justification by faith and to Christ's real bodily presence in the Supper. The Reformed, Zwingli in Zurich, then Calvin in Geneva, pressed further in worship, stripping images and preaching straight through books of the Bible, and understood the Supper differently. In October 1529 Philip of Hesse got Luther and Zwingli in one room at Marburg to unite them. They agreed on fourteen articles out of fifteen and could not close the last one; Luther chalked "This is my body" on the table, and by most accounts refused Zwingli's offered hand. The split held for centuries.
But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession, to proclaim the virtues of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light."A royal priesthood" said of ordinary believers, the ground for putting Scripture into the plow-boy's hands and letting him read it without a priest between.
England's break began for reasons that had nothing to do with the gospel, Henry VIII wanted a marriage annulled and made himself head of the church to get it. What made the English Reformation more than a royal divorce was Cranmer's prayer book and Tyndale's Bible, quietly shaping how ordinary believers actually prayed and read. Meanwhile the Anabaptists, who began in Zurich in 1525 by baptizing one another as adults, were hunted by Protestants and Catholics alike. Felix Manz was drowned by a Protestant council in 1527; Michael Sattler was tortured and burned and his wife Margaretha drowned; thousands more followed. A violent fringe seized the city of Münster in 1534 and was crushed, and the whole movement was blamed for it, though Menno Simons, a Dutch priest who joined them in 1536, spent the rest of his life leading the peaceable majority. In 1569 the Dutch Anabaptist Dirk Willems, fleeing across thin ice, turned back to pull his drowning pursuer out of the water, and was burned for his faith anyway.
The women of that century get left out of the telling, and should not be. Katharina von Bora escaped her convent in 1523 hidden in a wagon among herring barrels, married Luther in 1525, ran a household, farm, brewery, and boarding house, and helped create what became the Protestant parsonage, a pastor's home with a wife and children in it. Luther called her "my lord Katie" and left her his whole estate, a will that pushed right up against what the law let a woman inherit. Argula von Grumbach, a Bavarian noblewoman, published an open letter defending a student in 1523 and became one of the best-selling pamphleteers in Germany. Jeanne d'Albret, Queen of Navarre, made her small kingdom a refuge for French Protestants and died two months before the Paris massacre that came for her son's wedding guests. Anne Askew was racked in the Tower of London in 1546, the only woman known to have been tortured there, and had to be carried to the fire in a chair because her joints were destroyed; her own written account of her interrogation survives.
The era's writings, 1 to 3 of 9: each with its date and one line on what it holds.
| Writing | Date | What it holds |
|---|---|---|
| The Ninety-Five Theses | 1517 | Ninety-five short debate points arguing that forgiveness belongs to God and that selling relief from punishment cheats ordinary people; written in Latin for scholars, translated and printed for everyone within weeks. |
| Tyndale's New Testament | 1526 | The first printed English New Testament translated from the Greek rather than from Latin, the source of an estimated eight-tenths of the King James New Testament's wording. |
| The Schleitheim Confession | 1527 | Seven plain articles by hunted Anabaptists on baptism of believers, church discipline, the Lord's Supper, separation from the world, and refusing the sword. Michael Sattler, who led the meeting and sent the articles out, was executed on 21 May 1527. |
Then there is the ledger, and a Protestant ought to read his own side of it. Roughly 280 Protestants were burned under Mary I in England, including Latimer, Ridley, and Cranmer. But Catholics died too: Thomas More and John Fisher under Henry VIII, and about 180 more under Elizabeth, among them Edmund Campion and Margaret Clitherow. And in Geneva in 1553, Michael Servetus was burned with Calvin's approval. Calvin wanted him beheaded instead of burned, a smaller cruelty, not an excuse. Perhaps 100,000 German peasants died in the 1525 rising, after Luther wrote a pamphlet urging the princes to strike them down, words he never adequately took back. Late in life Luther wrote things about Jewish people that are indefensible, words the Nazis later quoted to justify the Holocaust. Recovering the gospel did not make these men holy, and the century's fires burned in every direction.
Rome's answer came at the Council of Trent, meeting on and off from 1545 to 1563. Half of what it did was reform that the reformers themselves had been demanding for years: it abolished the sale of indulgences, required bishops to actually live in their dioceses, and ordered a seminary in every one so priests would be trained. The other half drew lines: it said Scripture and church tradition carry equal authority, it declared the Latin Vulgate the official Bible text, and it defined justification as a righteousness worked into the believer through the sacraments, not credited to him by faith alone. Those decrees settled Catholic teaching for four hundred years, until the Second Vatican Council reopened parts of the conversation in the 1960s.
The era's writings, 4 to 6 of 9: each with its date and one line on what it holds.
| Writing | Date | What it holds |
|---|---|---|
| The Augsburg Confession | 1530 | Melanchthon's calm summary of Lutheran belief, read aloud to Emperor Charles V, the founding doctrinal statement of Lutheran churches to this day. |
| Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion | 1536, final edition 1559 | A complete, orderly walk through the Christian faith, God, Christ, salvation, the church, that became the most influential Protestant book of the century after the Bible itself. |
| The Book of Common Prayer | 1549, revised 1552 | Cranmer's English liturgy, which put daily prayer, Scripture reading, and the sacraments into the language of the people and gave English worship much of its cadence. |
By 1600 the map of Christendom had been redrawn, and Europe would pay for the redrawing in the Thirty Years' War. But the change that mattered most was quieter than any of the wars. Scripture was loose, in German, English, French, Dutch, Czech, Spanish, priced so a working family could own one, printed with numbered verses so two people could find the same line. Once ordinary believers can read the Bible for themselves, the next question arrives on its own: not just what does the church teach, but has my own heart been changed? That question is what the next century was for.
The era's writings, 7 to 9 of 9: each with its date and one line on what it holds.
| Writing | Date | What it holds |
|---|---|---|
| The Geneva Bible | 1560 | The first mass-market English study Bible: numbered verses, readable type, maps, and marginal notes that taught a generation how to read Scripture for itself. |
| The Heidelberg Catechism | 1563 | A warm question-and-answer teaching book from the Rhineland whose famous first question, what is your only comfort in life and in death?, answers, "That I am not my own, but belong to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ." |
| Foxe's Acts and Monuments | 1563 | John Foxe's massive account of the martyrs, with documents and interview records, passionately one-sided, but preserving primary evidence that would otherwise be lost. |
Ephesians 2:8, 1 Peter 2:9