When Did the Reformation End?
‘From the start, it was criticised as an unfinished project’
Alexandra Walsham is Professor of Modern History (1930) at the University of Cambridge
The concept of the Reformation as a discrete event, with a beginning and an end, is a relatively belated development. For much of Christian history reformation was an ongoing and open-ended process. The recurrent impulse to recover the pristine purity of the faith in its infancy took both institutional and personal forms. The medieval Church and the religious orders strove to recapture their original zeal and to correct abuses that had crept in over time. But reform was also a moral and spiritual enterprise that took place in individual hearts, souls, and minds. By definition, such initiatives could never be complete: worldly structures were always riddled with corruption and fallen human beings were frail and sinful creatures. Reformation was understood less as a noun than as a transitive verb.
Martin Luther anticipated that the ‘Reformation’ that his protest against indulgences in October 1517 inaugurated would be over swiftly. Never lacking in confidence, he boasted that the Protestant Gospel would quickly triumph over the Antichristian papacy. This would be the triumphant prelude to the second coming and Christ’s return to reign on Earth. But these hopes were soon dashed. The crystallisation of the Lutheran movement into concrete ecclesiastical and political forms was accompanied by growing disillusionment about whether it could really claim to have succeeded. Like the advent of the millennium, the culmination of this phase of ‘reformation’ was steadily pushed forward into the future.
Elsewhere, a similar sense of disappointment set in. England’s idiosyncratic Reformation was a curious confection of evangelical energy and pragmatism. From the start, it was criticised as an unfinished project. Puritans complained that the established Church was ‘but halfly reformed’ and their efforts to perfect and consummate it were repeatedly frustrated. When the opportunity finally arose to achieve this in the mid-17th century, no one could agree on what the ‘blessed Reformation’ should look like, let alone when it could realistically be completed. For the Roman Catholic minority, meanwhile, the Reformation was a living nightmare, which they earnestly hoped and prayed God would bring to an end. But the glorious day for which they patiently waited never came.
‘Protestantism faced new movements of imagination’
Diarmaid MacCulloch is Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford
We’ve learnt to speak of ‘Reformations’ rather than ‘the Reformation’, making it even more taxing to define a single terminal date. Yet surveying the patchwork Reformations that survived much Catholic rollback in the Thirty Years War (1618-48), 1700 provides a general measure of a new phase in Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. By then a failure was evident: the original aim of Protestant leaders was to establish a purified and uniform Catholic order governing the whole Western Latin Church. They had not.
Instead, a number of regional states sought to impose one out of various different confessional packages on their subjects. Not all were successful: Ireland saw a continuing assertion of popular Catholicism against a Protestant government dominated by England, and the Netherlands was equally odd, with its official Reformed Church prevented by a largely Protestant governing class from imposing itself on the population. The Netherlands was the clearest example of a region where Reformation’s partial success allowed many to choose the shape of their religion regardless of authority – something which only the most radical and imaginative had done during Luther’s initial rebellion. By 1700 even established state Protestant Churches were affected by such personal choices, especially in the fluid situation of North America. The 18th-century global Evangelical Revival was a movement emphasising personal choice: not at all like the earlier Reformation.
Around 1700 all Western Protestantism faced new movements of imagination, looking at the Bible in new ways, and increasingly undermining religious disciplinary institutions that controlled the lives of ordinary people. Women began asserting themselves in intellectual spheres; people of the same sex began imagining lifelong and equal partnerships with each other. Such movements provoked irrational fears without precedent: notably paranoia about masturbation. This has only recently dissipated in Western society, amid a general acceptance that the sexual regime of the 16th century was not eternal but a product of its age. All this amounts to a Protestantism gradually looking past its original goals and accepting that maybe apparent failure simply means recognising new priorities.
‘The bloodletting of 1524-25 defeated the evangelicals’ hopes’
Alex Ryrie is Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University
The (very) long Reformation is fashionable: Robert Ingram’s excellent Reformation Without End (2018) is about the 18th century. And of course reformation is a perpetual feature of Christianity’s history. But if ‘the Reformation’ means anything, it had better have a beginning and an end.
We could ask when people began to talk about ‘the Reformation’ as a distinct event in the past. Veit Ludwig von Seckendorf’s Commentary on … the Reformation of Religion Led by Dr. Martin Luther (1688) made the term canonical. But as Benjamin Guyer’s How the English Reformation Was Named (2022) points out, it was normal to talk about ‘the English Reformation’ by the 1640s. In John Knox’s History of the Reformation of the Church of Scotland, written in the mid-1560s, it was already a done deal.
The Peace of Westphalia (1648) is one traditional end-point, but long before that the wars of religion had put an end to dynamic processes of religious change that could meaningfully be called ‘reformation’. The outbreak of civil war in France in 1562 abruptly collapsed fluid, shifting French religion into distinct, entrenched parties that abandoned any attempt to convert each other, except by brute force. So perhaps it is the years of flux from 1555-66, which saw dramatic shifts in Germany, France, England, Scotland, and the Netherlands – plus the unexpectedly decisive conclusion to the Council of Trent. The Calvinist revolutions of the 1560s are sometimes called the ‘second Reformation’: so presumably the first one was now over?
But that’s tediously close to conventional wisdom. Here’s another answer: 1525, the first, most important time that mass violence collapsed the wave-form of religious change into stubbornly persistent, opposed particles. Before the German Peasants’ War, in the heroic days of Luther’s Reformation, anything seemed possible: transformation, reconciliation, synthesis, even a turning of the tide. But the bloodletting of 1524-25 defeated the evangelicals’ dearest hopes while also guarding them from utter suppression. The result was one nobody wanted and which made no theological sense: geographical partition, a pattern which then unfolded itself with grisly inevitability across Europe. By 1525 it was all over bar the shouting and the shooting. There would be plenty of both to come.
‘The Reformation had no easily identified end point’
Bridget Heal is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of St Andrews
In 2017 the beginning of the German Reformation was marked with numerous educational events and publications as well as with Martin Luther rubber ducks and a Luther figurine that became Playmobil’s fastest-selling toy ever. Focusing on one moment obscures the complexity of the Reformation’s origins, but the posting of Luther’s 95 Theses against indulgences on 31 October 1517 does at least provide a convenient date to hang onto, an obvious milestone on the path from medieval to early modern.
The Reformation had no equivalent easily identified end point. A straw poll of colleagues conducted in response to History Today’s question produced a majority response of ‘it’s not over yet’, and most 16th-century reformers would surely have agreed. If the purpose of the Reformation was spiritual renewal, if it was driven by sinful mankind’s search for a right relationship with God, then it was not finite. Movements of evangelical awakening such as Pietism and Methodism testify to the continuing search for an internalisation of Christian teaching and a transformation of Christian life into the 18th century and beyond.
Luther died in 1546 a disappointed man. The promulgation of God’s word had failed to achieve the spiritual and moral renewal that he had sought. There had been no universal theological or ecclesiastical reform, and at that moment the Catholic Church was in fact growing stronger once again. True Christians faced the ongoing onslaughts of Satan and his purported allies, not only the Roman Antichrist but also the Turks, the heathens, the Jews, and the sectarians.
And yet the Protestant Reformation persisted. Historians of Germany might date its terminus to 1555, when the Peace of Augsburg brought an end to religious unity in the Holy Roman Empire by granting limited legal recognition to Lutheranism. Or to 1580, when the Formula of Concord resolved the theological disputes that had divided Lutherans since the reformer’s death. Or to 1648, when the Peace of Westphalia made permanent the settlement of 1555 and extended toleration to Calvinists. Ultimately, however, despite such external landmarks, a movement predicated on the quest for spiritual reform and renewal can never end.
