The Reformation Era
Luther and the Reformers challenged Rome's doctrine within Catholic Europe. Believers baptized in Zurich in 1525 were hunted as Anabaptists by Catholics and Protestants alike. Tyndale put the New Testament in English, and the King James Bible followed in 1611.
Read in Order
Oldest first. Each entry opens its page on the church-history timeline.
October 31, 1517 · Reformers & Protestants · Martin Luther, a professor at Wittenberg, challenged the sale of indulgences in ninety-five theses for academic debate. Printed copies spread across Germany within weeks. The controversy that followed led Luther to proclaim to much of Europe that sinners are justified by grace through faith alone and that Scripture stands above popes and councils. The Reformation it began reformed doctrine within Roman Catholic Europe, but it kept infant baptism and churches joined to the state.
January 21, 1525 · Free churches · Days after the Zurich council ordered all infants baptized and silenced those who objected, a small company of believers met in the city. Conrad Grebel baptized George Blaurock on his confession of faith, and Blaurock baptized the others. These Swiss Brethren held that baptism belongs to believers and that the church is a gathered company of disciples, separate from the state. Catholic and Protestant authorities alike persecuted them: Protestant Zurich drowned Felix Manz in 1527, and Catholic Austrian authorities burned Michael Sattler the same year.
AD 1526–1536 · Reformers & Protestants · Refused a bishop's patronage in England, William Tyndale went abroad and in 1526 printed at Worms the first English New Testament translated from the Greek. Smuggled copies were burned at St Paul's, and Thomas More attacked him in print. He went on to translate the books of Moses and other parts of the Old Testament from the Hebrew. Betrayed in Antwerp in 1535, he was strangled and burned at Vilvoorde in 1536. Through Matthew's Bible, the Great Bible, and the Geneva Bible, much of his wording passed into the King James Version.
AD 1529 · Catholic Church · The same Diet of Speyer that gave Protestants their name revived an ancient Roman law against rebaptism and decreed death for Anabaptists, to be carried out by the secular courts. Catholic and Lutheran rulers alike agreed. Believers who baptized only on profession of faith were drowned, burned, and beheaded across the empire.
AD 1545–1655 · Catholic Church · Rome's persecution of the Waldenses did not end with the Reformation. In 1545 Waldensian villages in Provence were destroyed and their people slaughtered; in 1561 the Waldenses of Calabria were wiped out; and in 1655 the Duke of Savoy's troops massacred Waldenses in the valleys of Piedmont, a crime that stirred all of Protestant Europe. Exiled in 1686, they marched home in 1689 and received civil rights only in 1848.
1605 · Heresy & error · Published in Polish at Raków by the Polish Brethren, the catechism set out the teaching of Faustus Socinus, who had died the year before. It denied the Trinity, Christ's preexistence and eternal deity, and Christ's satisfaction for sin, while teaching that Christ, a true man exalted by God, is to be honored. Translations carried its ideas across Europe.
1611 · Reformers & Protestants · At the Hampton Court Conference in 1604, King James I approved a new translation. About fifty scholars of the Church of England, working in six companies, revised the earlier English Bibles against the Hebrew and Greek, building on the work of William Tyndale. Published in 1611, it became the Bible of the English-speaking world for centuries, and it is the text this platform quotes.
1610; synod 1618–1619 · Reformers & Protestants · In 1610 followers of Jacobus Arminius presented five articles to the States of Holland: election based on foreseen faith, a redemption provided for all, the necessity of grace that may be resisted, and an open question on whether believers can fall away. The States General then called the Synod of Dort, a synod of the Dutch Reformed state church joined by Reformed delegates from abroad. It rejected the articles, Remonstrant ministers were removed and banished, and its Canons became the source of the later five points of Calvinism.
People and Errors of This Era
Biographies of those who shaped it, and the false teachings Christ's churches withstood.