Sword & Trowel 2017: Issue 1
SEEDS OF THE REFORMATION
– by Dr Nick Needham –
Seeds that blossomed into the Protestant Reformation of the 16th
century – the
various factors in the late medieval world that made the Reformation possible and pointed the way towards it – movements of thought and outstanding personalities.
S
OME PEOPLE like to see the Protestant Reformation as a celestial ‘bolt from the blue’, a
miraculous restoration of apostolic Christianity which God (so to speak) dropped into history straight down from Heaven. That view once held sway in the English-speaking Protes- tant world. It was, however, strongly challenged in the middle of the 19th century by two reformed giants of historical-theological thinking, John Williamson Nevin and Philip Schaff of Mercersburg Seminary in Pennsyl- vania. Nevin was himself American, trained under Charles Hodge at Princeton, while Schaff was an English-speaker from Switzerland. I must admit my personal bias, and
acknowledge that I have always been an admirer of the lives and work of Nevin and Schaff. (By the way, Schaff’s eight-volume History of the Christian Church is still a masterpiece worthy of our affection and attention. It combines depth of scholarship, fl owing style, rich biographical col- our, and spirituality of tone.)
However, personal bias aside, the arguments of Nevin and Schaff won the day. The Reformation was no heavenly bolt from the blue. It grew organically out of the history that went before it. There were many his- torical roots that sprouted forth in the 16th
century into the fruits of Refor-
mation Protestantism. The historian can perceive and analyse those roots. If we would fully understand what happened in the 16th
-century Refor-
mation, we must look at the medieval soil in which that great movement was planted, and from which it arose. Ever since Nevin and Schaff
presented this argument with over- whelming philosophical force and historical scholarship, there has I think been no going back to the older view. True though it is that God worked mightily by his Spirit in the 16th
century, he did not do this
in a way that bypassed the ongoing stream of history, or short-circuited human causes. What then were the factors present in the late medieval world that gave birth to the Reforma- tion?
A new climate
The fi rst and most widespread was, in my view, very simply the Renaissance. In many ways, the Ref- ormation was in fact the spiritual side of the Renaissance. It is notoriously
Seeds of the Reformation page 21
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