Reformation - Lutherans, The Reformed, Other Confessions, Confessionalism, Bibliography
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The Reformation was a movement in Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that broke the monopoly over religion held by the Roman Catholic Church since the later years of the Roman Empire and that created a new set of alternative Protestant churches that have henceforth helped supply the needs of Christians in Western Europe and in countries influenced by Europe. Each of these churches developed a set of ideas drawn from the common Christian tradition to justify its separate existence, and the Catholic Church restricted itself to yet another set of received ideas. Some of these new churches called themselves Evangelical. They looked to Martin Luther (1483–1546) for their primary inspiration. Others called themselves Reformed. Beginning in a second generation, they looked to John Calvin (1509–1564) for their primary inspiration. An independent Church of England created its own middle way. A variety of radical churches, many of them called by their opponents Anabaptist, had trouble gaining toleration. Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church responded to the challenge by reforming itself.
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The Reformation began in 1517 when Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar and professor of biblical studies at the relatively new university of Wittenberg in Electoral Saxony, posted a set of ninety-five theses inviting anyone to debate a number of propositions about the promulgation of indulgences by the Roman Catholic Church. Indulgences were documents that promised to give a remission of temporal …
A few cities in southern Germany and Switzerland followed the somewhat different leadership of Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531), the principal preacher in the most important church in Zurich, within the Swiss Confederation. So did some of the
principalities in that area, as well as people in other countries. One particularly zealous group of religious reformers developed within France. They fo…
The Church of England broke with Rome over an entirely different issue. King Henry VIII (r. 1509–1547) wanted Pope Clement VII to annul his marriage with Catherine of Aragon and leave him free to marry another woman, Anne Boleyn. Catherine had been his brother's wife, and Henry felt that his marriage to her, which was against church law but permitted by an earlier pope, was the reaso…
By the end of the sixteenth century each of the surviving religious groups identified itself with a succinct statement of belief called a confession. For Lutherans it was the Augsburg Confession, first advanced in 1530 at a meeting of the Diet, the representative body governing the Holy Roman Empire. It was further expanded and refined late in the century in a statement promulgated in 1577, called…
Benedict, Philip. Christ's Churches Purely Reformed. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002. Brady, Thomas A., Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy, eds. Handbook of European History, 1400–1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation, 2 vols. Leiden and New York: Brill, 1994–1995. Brecht, Martin. Martin Luther, translated by James L. Shaaf, 3 vols. Minneapo…
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