Protestant Reform

The Reformation (from Latin reformatio, literally "restoration, renewal"), also referred to as the Protestant Reformation, was a schism from the Roman Catholic Church initiated by Martin Luther and continued by John Calvin, Huldrych Zwingli, and other early Protestant Reformers in 16th century Europe. It is usually considered to have started with the publication of the Ninety-Five Theses by Luther in 1517, lasting until the end of the Thirty Years' War with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

Although there had been significant earlier attempts to reform the Roman Catholic Church before Luther – such as those of Jan Hus, Peter Waldo, and John Wycliffe – Martin Luther is widely acknowledged to have started the Reformation with his 1517 work The Ninety-Five Theses. Luther began by criticizing the sale of indulgences, insisting that the Pope had no authority over purgatory and that the Catholic doctrine of the merits of the saints had no foundation in the gospel. The Protestant position, however, would come to incorporate doctrinal changes such as a complete reliance on Scripture as a source of proper belief (sola scriptura) and the belief that only faith, and not good deeds, bring salvation (sola fide). The core motivation behind these changes was theological, though many other factors played a part, including the rise of nationalism, the Western Schism that eroded faith in the Papacy, the perceived corruption of the Roman Curia, the impact of humanism, and the new learning of the Renaissance that questioned much traditional thought.

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