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This book is based on a course of lectures I gave to undergraduates at Oxford University during the 1980s and 1990s on the core ideas of the European Reformation of the sixteenth century from about 1500 to 1560. To this day, I still get letters from students who attended those lectures, explaining what they found so exciting about them, and the impact they had on their intellectual development. While the thought of the Reformation remains one of the most fascinating areas of study for historians, it also continues to be of central importance to anyone interested in the history of the Christian church or its religious ideas. This book follows the convention of including mainline Protestant, Catholic, and Anabaptist approaches to the questions under discussion during this “Age of Reformation,” aiming for accuracy in scholarship, clarity in explanation, and charity in dealing with disputed questions.

The Reformation embraced a number of quite distinct, yet overlapping, areas of human activity – the reform of both the morals and structures of church and society, shifts in economic and social thinking, the renewal of Christian spirituality, and the reform of Christian doctrine. It was a movement based upon a more or less coherent set of ideas, which were believed to be capable of functioning as the foundation of a program of reform and renewal.

But what were those ideas? How may their origins be accounted for? And how were they modified by the social conditions of the period? One serious difficulty – indeed, perhaps the most serious difficulty – facing those new to the study of the sixteenth-century Reformation is a lack of familiarity with the ideas underlying it. While some students of this period already have a good grasp of basic Christian ideas, perhaps even having a understanding of some of the specific doctrinal debates of this age of Reformation, others will find them unfamiliar, if not incomprehensible.

Many modern students of the Reformation now know relatively little about Christian theology. (The term “theology” has been used by Christians since the third century to mean “talking about God.” The word is now widely used to refer to both the core ideas of the Christian faith, and the academic discipline which reflects on these ideas.) For example, the great theological slogan “justification by faith alone” seems incomprehensible to many students of this era, as do the intricacies of the sixteenth-century debates over the eucharist. Why should these apparently obscure issues have caused such a storm at the time? There is an obvious temptation for the student of the Reformation to avoid engaging with the ideas of the movement, and treat it as a purely social phenomenon. Yet this yields a thin and superficial account of a complex and multi-levelled movement, for which religious ideas were important, if not foundational. To study the Reformation without considering the religious ideas which fueled its development is comparable to studying the Russian Revolution without reference to Marx’s core ideas.

This book is written for students who want to go beyond a superficial engagement with the ideas of the Reformation, and wish to deal with them seriously. They recognize the importance of these ideas, but are often discouraged from engaging them by the formidable difficulties encountered in trying to understand those ideas, and see why they generated such intense discussion and debate. Many also find themselves overwhelmed by the vast research literature in this field, which has changed our understanding both of the Reformation itself, and of its background in the late Renaissance, particularly in relation to late medieval scholasticism. Some of this work has yet to filter through to the student, and there is a pressing need for a work which will explain the findings of recent scholarship, and indicate its importance for our understanding of the Reformation during the sixteenth century.

This textbook aims to provide the resource such readers need. It assumes that the reader knows little, if anything, about Christian theology, and aims to provide an entry level guide to the ideas that proved to be so central to this movement in European history, while at the same time distilling the findings of much recent scholarship in its field. It aims to take both theology and history seriously, exploring the core ideas of this fascinating period, yet being alert to the importance of the historical context within which they emerged and became established. In short, it is a work of historical theology, attentive to the complex interplay of ideas and social contexts. This theme can be explored in many ways, from traditional Marxist to more recent post-colonial accounts of the conceptualization of religious diversity and transformation in the German Reformation.

This book arose from many years’ experience of teaching the field of Reformation studies to students at Oxford University, and I wish to acknowledge my complete indebtedness to those students. It is they who have taught me just how much about the sixteenth-century Reformation, so often taken for granted, actually needs to be explained. It is they who have identified the points of particular difficulty which need special discussion. It is they who have identified the need for precisely this work – and if the reader finds it helpful, it is those students who must be thanked. I am also grateful to my colleagues from the Oxford University Faculties of Theology and History for many helpful discussions concerning the difficulties encountered in teaching Reformation thought in the twenty-first century.

This book first appeared in 1988. It was immediately clear that it had met a real educational need. An expanded and revised second edition appeared in 1993. The third and fourth editions of 1999 and 2012 offered substantially increased biographical coverage of major Reformation thinkers, and extended its coverage to include the thought of the English Reformation.

This new edition draws extensively on intensive research into the Reformation era and its context which I undertook recently in producing the fourth edition of my work Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification (2020). It retains all the features which made its earlier editions so attractive to its readers, while incorporating additional material and updating the work as necessary, reflecting scholarly developments since the last edition. In response to user feedback, discussion of the ideas of the English Reformation have now been transferred to and incorporated within earlier chapters, thus allowing a greater appreciation of the wider intellectual context within which these emerged.

Alister McGrath

Oxford, July 2020