THE REFORMATION ON TRIAL

THE REFORMATION ON TRIAL

The aim of this book is to bring home to the reader the true nature of the 16th-century Reformation and what actually took place under the direction of the ‘magisterial’ reformers, such as Luther, Calvin and Zwingli. The Protestant Reformation has been praised as a movement of spiritual renewal which again brought the preaching of the ‘true’ Gospel message to countries and regions in Europe, as well as introducing religious liberty to those persecuted for their faith. However, is this a historically accurate view or a totally romanticised one? This study investigates the reliability of such an interpretation and questions whether the Reformation lived up to the claim that its message was Gospel-based and true to the Scriptures, and to what extent, if at all, the Protestant reformers were any more tolerant of religious dissenters than the Catholic Church had been. These questions are addressed and answered by considering the words and actions of the reformers themselves along with other contemporary sources. On each count, the Protestant Reformers are shown to be woefully lacking. In contrast to many other histories of the Reformation, this study focusses on evaluating the religious nature of the Reformation from a biblical perspective. What may be surprising, if not startling to some readers is that in certain fundamental areas the outlook of the Protestant Reformers was no different to that of the Roman Catholics, whom they preached against. The Reformers’ were wedded to the notion of ‘Christendom’ as much as the Catholics were. That is, they believed that the ‘Christian’ state authority was duty bound before God to enforce the religion of the state on every individual citizen. Consistent with this, the Protestant Reformers not only colluded with, but also urged the state power to relentlessly persecute, banish, imprison and even torture and execute dissenters to the Reformed Religion - in particular, the Anabaptists. After the burning of Michael Servetus in Geneva, Calvin wrote a small book defending the execution of heretics. Most of the leading reformers in Europe hailed this book as a triumph for the preservation of true religion. The Reformers likened the ‘Christian’ State to Israel of old and believed that ‘heretics’ should be eliminated by force even as the godly kings of Israel eliminated false prophets and idolatry from the land. Moreover, the Reformers – including Luther and Calvin – denied the validity of personal conversion. People who testified to a personal conversion to Christ and were baptised on the basis of their faith in Him were branded as deceived and of the devil. This was the result of the Reformers’ strongly held view that infant baptism was the means appointed by God for the regeneration and salvation of the individual. Therefore, any subsequent baptism as an adult was an act of arrogant self-delusion and an affront to the means of grace that God had supplied through infant baptism. The Reformers regarded their own infant baptism at the hands of the Roman Catholic Church as the means of baptising them into Christ and His salvation. Since they viewed the communities that they took over from the Catholics as ‘Christian’, the Protestant Reformers did not engage in evangelism with the aim of converting men and women to Christ, since this would have been a denial of the efficacy of infant baptism. Thus, this book investigates to what extent, if at all, the terms ‘evangelistic’ and ‘evangelical’ apply to the Protestant Reformation.