THEO 520 — The Theology of the Reformers
THEO 520 is a graduate course that reads the theologians of the Reformation in their own words. From Luther’s first protest to the answer Rome gave at the Council of Trent, the sixteenth century recast what the Western church believed about how God saves a sinner and how the church is rightly ordered. The student meets each reformer firsthand, in a license-verified passage of his own writing, rather than through a later account of what he is supposed to have held. Every figure is read on the same four questions. Where does he locate final authority, in Scripture alone or in Scripture together with the church’s tradition and teaching office? How does he say a sinner is set right with God? What does he believe happens in baptism and at the Lord’s table, and who may receive them? And what does he hold the true church to be, and who has the right to reform it when it errs? Put in turn to Luther and Calvin, to Zwingli and the radical reformers, to the English reform and to Rome at Trent, the four questions show both the grammar the Protestants shared and the divisions that hardened into separate churches. The course is taught by a believing Christian and makes no secret of that, yet it adjudicates nothing and leaves the verdict to the reader. Each tradition is set out as it would state itself, in the most generous reading its own sources allow: Rome’s case at Trent is presented as Rome’s own considered argument and never as the Protestant foil, and the radical reformers are taken seriously as a coherent vision of the church rather than dismissed as fanatics. Every answer is put in its strongest form, and what each position was anxious to safeguard is named before any weighing begins. The closing exercise hands the student a reformer not studied in the course and asks him to read that figure fairly, on the same four questions, in his own words.
Learning outcomes
- Read any reformer on the four questions — authority, justification, the sacraments, and the church — and place him on the map of the Reformation.
- State where the Reformers agreed and where they divided on each of the four questions.
- Explain Luther’s recovery of justification by faith and his appeal to Scripture against the church’s teaching office.
- Explain Calvin’s account of authority, justification, and the church, and Zwingli’s memorialist reading of the Lord’s Supper.
- Account for the radical Reformation’s ecclesiology — believer’s baptism, the gathered church, and nonviolence — on its own terms.
- Describe the English Reformation’s reform by vernacular Scripture and the via media.
- Present the Council of Trent as Rome’s own considered response to the Reformation, read on the four questions.
- Apply the four questions to a reformer not studied in the course, reading him fairly in his own words.
The Reformation and the Four Questions
The Reformation was not one argument but several at once, fought across a continent already unsettled by printing, humanist learning, and a long-running call to reform the church. This opening module sets that late-medieval scene and then introduces the discipline the whole course turns on: the four questions of authority, justification, the sacraments, and the church, put in turn to every figure ahead. It shows how to read a reformer in his own words, weighing what he actually says rather than what a later tradition made of him. Erasmus and the humanist appeal to put Scripture into every Christian’s hands frame the call to reform that the reformers would answer in their several ways.
Luther
With Luther the Reformation found its first and loudest voice. The module follows him from the Ninety-Five Theses and the quarrel over indulgences into the deeper question his appeals at Leipzig and Worms forced open, whether final authority rests in Scripture or in the pope and the councils. At its center is the recovery he is most remembered for, justification by faith alone, read in his own Preface to Romans, and beside it stand the bound will set against Erasmus and the priesthood of all believers. Luther kept a real presence in the Supper even as he broke with Rome, and he is read here whole rather than flattened to a single slogan.
Calvin
A generation after Luther, Calvin gave the Reformed wing its most ordered theology. Reading him on the four questions, the module takes his account of authority as Scripture confirmed by the inward witness of the Spirit, his doctrine of justification as the imputed righteousness of Christ received by faith, and his vision of the church with its marks and its discipline. The primary texts are the Reply to Sadoleto and Book III of the Institutes. His teaching on the Lord’s Supper, a spiritual presence standing between Luther’s realism and Zwingli’s memorial, is set out in his own terms.
Zwingli and the Supper
Zurich produced a reform of its own under Zwingli, and on one question it parted from Wittenberg for good. The module reads Zwingli on the four questions through his Sixty-Seven Articles and his confession of faith, giving particular weight to his reading of the Lord’s Supper as a memorial rather than a bearer of Christ’s body. It then reconstructs the Marburg Colloquy, where Luther and Zwingli, agreed on so much else, could not agree on the words “this is my body.” The Supper is presented as the place the evangelical movement first split, each side’s concern named and neither pronounced the winner.
The Radical Reformation
Beyond the magisterial reformers stood a movement that wanted the church reformed further and faster, and gathered out of the world rather than coextensive with it. This module reads the radical Reformation on its own terms through Hübmaier and Menno Simons: believer’s baptism in place of infant baptism, a church of the committed, the refusal of the sword, and the separation of the congregation from the state. The violent episode at Münster is told honestly and set in proportion, never made the measure of the whole. The radicals are weighed as a serious ecclesiology with a coherent reading of the four questions, not dismissed as fanatics.
The English Reformation
England’s reform followed a path unlike the continent’s, driven as much by crown and vernacular Bible as by any single theologian. The module reads the English Reformation on the four questions, beginning with Tyndale’s case for Scripture in the mother tongue and moving to the via media that Cranmer’s prayer book and the Thirty-Nine Articles gave the new church. Authority, justification, the sacraments, and the church each take a distinctively English shape under the royal supremacy and a liturgy meant to carry doctrine. The settlement’s deliberate breadth, holding reformed conviction within received forms, is presented as a considered choice rather than mere compromise.
The Council of Trent
Rome answered the Reformation at the Council of Trent, and this module reads the council as Rome’s considered case rather than as the Protestant foil. It takes Trent on the four questions: Scripture together with the unwritten apostolic traditions received with equal reverence, from Session IV, and the sacrifice of the Mass set out as truly propitiatory, from Session XXII, each in the council’s own words. A closing exercise then puts the same four questions to a reformer not studied in the course, John Knox, to be read fairly and in his own right. The student does unaided what every prior module has practiced together.