As we approach another anniversary of Martin Luther’s nailing his 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg (Germany), this question has been on my mind: was the movement that came to be known as the Protestant Reformation a revolution seeking to establish something new or was it a retrieval and renewal of the one, holy , catholic, and apostolic church?
I want to briefly explore that question in this post.
The Purpose of this Post
Why take time to write such a post as this? Nathan Busenitz in his excellent book Long Before Luther describes a part of the problem.
“As I write this, many Protestants are celebrating the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Like them, I am grateful for the courage and faithfulness of the sixteenth-century Reformers. Yet our enthusiasm for this transformational period of church history can have an unintended effect: Protestants can unwillingly give the impression that our theological heritage is only 500 years old. Such an impression is neither helpful nor accurate…”[1]
I think Busenitz is exactly right for convictional Protestants. However, the problem is deeper. Several years ago I taught a 15-week Church History study at the church where I serve as pastor. As I went through the study I was not only shocked by how little the class knew about Church history before the year 1500 but even more so by the large number who had no knowledge of what the Reformation even was! This experience (among others) showed me that many Protestants have a general lack of appreciation for Church history. It was a precious learning experience that revealed to me and others some of the weaknesses of my own Protestant tradition.
Other traditions often point out these weaknesses repeatedly and twist them into fatal flaws, encouraging Protestants to leave their churches in search of a more trustworthy church home. In our present day we are seeing a many people turning to traditions they perceive as ancient, rugged, and durable, such as Roman Catholicism. Though the data is nuanced many are leaving other traditions, such as Protestantism, to make this switch. For a Protestant perspective on this trend, check out this helpful video.
But I wonder if this trend is justified. When Christians switch into something like Roman Catholicism or Orthodoxy, are they really getting what they are seeking? Certainly each case must be taken on its own merits because people switch traditions for all kinds of reasons. But when folks make a move out of Protestantism because they begin to see it as “new” or as a heretical “innovation” or even a “revolution” and therefore not a part of the one-true Church founded by the apostles, I am not confident that they have understood what the Reformers believed themselves to be doing.
Of course the claim of Protestant “innovation” isn’t new. Since the dawn of the Reformation, the Reformers were accused of inventing a new version of the gospel. When they argued that man is justified by faith alone, the Council of Trent (1545-1563), anathematized (formally cursed) them in response.[2]
What Did the Reformers Themselves Think?
The best place to start when looking at a subject like this is with the Reformers themselves. What did they believe they were doing? Of course this is massive topic and my goal here is just to skim the very surface a little to try and push back on the narrative that the Reformers were innovators. My hope is that the few snippets below will give us enough of a sense that they did not see themselves that way.
Admittedly, when we speak of the Reformers, we are talking about a spectrum of beliefs. However, at the core, it is fair to say, according to the Christian historian, Jaroslav Pelikan, that the Reformers did not see themselves as innovators, instead they saw themselves as retrieving something that had been lost: “[R]ecent research on the Reformation entitles us to…say that the Reformation began because the reformers were too catholic in the midst of a church that had forgotten its catholicity.” He goes on to say that the Protestants repeatedly insisted that their position was, “in the best sense, a catholic position.” He writes: “Additional support for this insistence comes from the attitude of the reformers toward the creeds and dogmas of the ancient catholic church. The reformers retained and cherished the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the two natures of Christ which had been developed in the first five centuries of the church.”[3]
Timothy George in his classic Theology of the Reformers says that “Traditional Catholic historiography portrays [Luther] a mad monk, a psychotic demoniac pulling down the pillars of Mother Church.” [4] But is this really what he wanted to do? George argues:
“Luther did not see himself as an agent of ecclesiastical revolution, a sixteenth-century Lenin or Robespierre out to shake the world and overturn kingdoms. That the papacy and the empire were shaken, if not overthrown, by the words of a simple German monk was, he thought, merely a providential by-product of his prior vocation. ‘I have done nothing. I have let the Word act.’ What Luther did do, what he was called to do, was listen to the Word. ‘The nature of the Word is to be heard,’ he remarked.”[5]
When Luther posted the 95 Theses, the standard understanding is that it was not his intention whatsoever to spark a revolution. His desire was to engage in a scholarly discussion about various points of Catholic teaching and practice that he thought questionable. See here for just one example.[6]
John Calvin, one of the leading Reformers, gives us a good sense of what their intentions were in a letter to Cardinal Sadoleto in 1539. Sadoleto had written a letter to the people of Geneva, calling them to return to the Roman Church. Sadoleto’s letter is unique in that it acknowledges some of the more serious complaints that the Protestants had against Rome. Despite having expelled Calvin for reasons that would take us away from our main purpose here, the people of Geneva asked Calvin to respond to the Cardinal. While much has been written about this exchange, my desire here is to point out that in response to Sadoleto’s accusation that the Reformers goal was to destroy the Church by dismantling a system that had been approved by general consent for over fifteen hundred years, Calvin responds by saying:
You know, Sadolet, and if you venture to deny, I will make it palpable to all that you knew, yet cunningly and craftily disguised the fact, not only that our agreement with antiquity is far closer than yours, but that all we have attempted has been to renew that ancient form of the Church, which, at first sullied and distorted by illiterate men of indifferent character, was afterwards flagitiously mangled and almost destroyed by the Roman Pontiff and his faction (my emphasis).[7]
In Matthew Barrett’s tome The Reformation as Renewal he summarizes Calvin’s letter of response this way:
Calvin must have infuriated Sadoleto and the whole Roman Church by his reply. He told Sadoleto that the Reformation is not only catholic but more catholic than Rome. The Reformers were not peddling novelties, leading the people astray into heretical innovations. If anyone had strayed from the catholic heritage, it was Rome (author’s emphasis).[8]
In the preface to his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin writes “It is a calumny to represent us as opposed to the fathers… So far are we from despising them, that if this were the proper place, it would give us no trouble to support the greater part of the doctrines which we now hold by their suffrages” (Preface, Section 4). He then goes on for several pages quotes the fathers and striving to demonstrate various ways that it was Rome that had departed from the fathers and not the Reformers.
Jaroslav Pelikan repeats this fact in his book The Riddle of Roman Catholicism:
“Not a new ‘Protestant’ gospel, then, but the gospel of the true church, the catholic church of all generations, is what the Reformation claimed to be espousing. Substantiation for this understanding of the gospel came principally from the Scriptures; but whenever they could, the reformers also quoted the fathers of the catholic church. There was more to quote than their Roman opponents found comfortable. Every major tenant of the Reformation had considerable support in the catholic tradition.”[9]
Nathan Busenitz wants to go a step further than merely the claims of the Reformers in his book Long Before Luther. He makes his goal in the book to look at the actual evidence in their stated beliefs. Did the Protestant Reformers articulate the gospel message and the Christian faith in ways that contradicted the church fathers? He looks at what has come to be known as the “material principle” of the Reformation: the doctrine of justification by grace alone through faith alone and asks if we find the core elements of this doctrine in the teaching of the ancient church?
To do this he divides up the doctrine into three crucial elements: (1) Forensic justification: the Reformers understood justification in terms of a divine declaration of righteousness, like a judge issuing a full pardon to a defendant in a courtroom. This contrasted with the medieval Roman view which viewed justification as a process. (2) Justification distinguished from regeneration: in justification, God declares a sinner to be righteous by virtue of Christ’s righteousness. This is a positional righteousness, given to us because we are “in Christ” as Paul says repeatedly in his writings (see for example see Philippians 3:8-9). In regeneration, God gives the sinner a new heart so that they can begin to grow and live out their faith in a way that is pleasing to God. Roman Catholic teaching does not make this sharp distinction which has lead them to believe that their justification is dependent upon their personal holiness. (3) The imputed righteousness of Christ: the Reformers argued that our own good works did not contribute anything to our justification, rather we are justified on the basis of Christ’s perfect righteousness, which is credited to our account through faith. Whereas Roman Catholics hold to a doctrine of infused righteousness which enabled them to live holy lives and then be progressively justified.[10]
He then meticulously reveals for the next 10 chapters how each of these elements of justification by grace alone through faith alone can be found—most importantly in the Scriptures—but also in the teaching of the church fathers and the medieval church as well. For a summary of his argument, see this helpful article written by Busenitz himself.
A Closing Appeal
This was a very short article touching an issue that is miles wide and miles deep. I know that I have not done this very important topic justice. Perhaps I will do a few more pieces on this subject sometime. My desire in putting this together was merely to give the reader a sense of what some of the Reformers themselves thought about what they were doing. From what we have seen, I hope, it is clear that they did not desire to be revolutionaries or innovators, rather, they believed their effort was one of retrieval and renewal. I believe, if one is open to it, that what you will discover in the best Protestant sources is not innovation but rather a message that goes back to our Lord, to the apostles, the prophets, and the fathers. I agree with the Reformers that what we find in the beautiful variegated Protestant tradition, is a church that is truly catholic. Perhaps even more importantly, what we will find in the Protestant tradition is a church that gives us the true Christ. While modern day Protestantism has many weaknesses, I do believe it to be the tradition that gives us the true gospel which gives us the true Christ.[11] For that reason, among others, I celebrate the Reformation year after year, not as a revolution but as a renewal of the Church of Jesus Christ.
[1] Nathan Busenitz, Long Before Luther: Tracing the Heart of the Gospel From Christ to the Reformation (Moody Publishers: Chicago, 2017), 17.
[2] See The General Council of Trent: Sixth Session. https://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/trent/sixth-session.htm. Accessed on October 27th, 2026.
[3] Jaroslav Pelikan, The Riddle of Roman Catholicism (Abingdon Press: Nashville, 1952),
[4] Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, Rev. ed. (B&H Academic: Nashville, TN, 2013), 54. For a recent expression of Catholic thought about Luther, you can read this article “Martin Luther: The Prequel,” at Catholic.com, https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/martin-luther-the-prequel. Accessed October 27th, 2026.
[5] George, Theology of the Reformers, 55.
[6] As just one example of this general consensus take what Britannica writes under their article on Martin Luther regarding the “Indulgences Controversy”: “Luther clearly intended the Ninety-five Theses to be subservient to the church and the pope, and their overall tone is accordingly searching rather than doctrinaire.” https://www.britannica.com/biography/Martin-Luther/The-indulgences-controversy. Accessed October 27th, 2026.
[7] See “John Calvin’s Letter to Cardinal Sadoleto,” at Monergism.com, https://www.monergism.com/john-calvins-letter-cardinal-sadoleto-1539. Accessed on October 26th, 2026.
[8] Matthew Barrett, The Reformation as Renewal: Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church: An Intellectual and Theological History (Zondervan Academic: Grand Rapids, 2023), 2.
[9] Pelikan, The Riddle of Roman Catholicism, 48-49.
[10] Busenitz, Long Before Luther, 26-27.
[11] To borrow a book title from Philip Cary, The Meaning of Protestant Theology: Luther, Augustine, and the Gospel that Gives Us Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2019).
