What Was the Protestant Reformation?

The Council of Trent, covered in the companion article, was the Catholic Church's answer. This is the question it was answering — a movement that changed which books count as scripture, and what the word "scripture" is even for.

A monk, a door, and a debt-fueled fundraiser

In 1517, an Augustinian monk and theology professor named Martin Luther publicly objected to the sale of indulgences — payments the church offered in exchange for reduced punishment for sin, being marketed aggressively in parts of Germany to help fund the rebuilding of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Tradition holds that Luther nailed 95 theses for academic debate to the door of Wittenberg's Castle Church on October 31, 1517 — a normal way to propose a public disputation, not itself a radical act, though the argument inside it was.

The theology underneath the protest

Luther's specific complaint about indulgences opened onto a much larger claim: that a right standing with God comes through faith alone, not through the accumulation of good works, payments, or church-administered merit. He anchored this in Paul's own letter to Rome.

A second, equally consequential claim followed close behind: that scripture alone, not church tradition or papal decree, is the final authority for Christian belief — sola scriptura. Together with sola fide (faith alone), these two principles became the theological core of every Protestant tradition that followed.

Excommunicated, not silenced

Pope Leo X excommunicated Luther in 1521. Summoned to defend himself before the Holy Roman Emperor at the Diet of Worms that same year, Luther refused to recant — tradition credits him with the words “Here I stand, I can do no other,” though the earliest printed accounts of the speech don't include that exact line, so it may be a later embellishment of something close to what he actually said. Placed under imperial ban, he spent the next year in hiding at Wartburg Castle, where he translated the New Testament into German directly from Erasmus's printed Greek text — the same Textus Receptus tradition this site's own King James New Testament descends from (see the companion article).

A movement, not one man

Luther's protest didn't stay confined to Germany or to Luther's own theology. Huldrych Zwingli led a parallel, independently arrived-at reform in Zurich; John Calvin's Geneva became the center of a distinct Reformed tradition emphasizing God's sovereign election; more radical Anabaptist groups rejected infant baptism entirely. What started as one monk's academic objection produced, within a generation, several distinct Protestant traditions — Lutheran, Reformed, and Anabaptist — each with its own reading of what reform actually required.

What it meant for the Bible's contents

Luther kept the Apocrypha in his German Bible, but moved it into a separate section between the Testaments, judging it “not held equal to Scripture, but useful and good to read” — the same practice the original 1611 King James Version followed for exactly the same reason (see the companion Apocrypha article). He was notably more skeptical of a few New Testament books too, calling James “an epistle of straw” for its emphasis on works alongside faith — though he included it in his translation regardless.