Before the Hammer: What Was Happening Before 1517

Welcome to Rooted in the Reformation

October is my favorite month, and no, it has nothing to do with pumpkin spice. October 31 is Reformation Day, and I get a little giddy about it. So this year, I’m doing something about it. Every Sunday this month, I’m going to walk through a piece of the Reformation story right here.

Here is what to expect:

• October 4 (today): What was happening before Martin Luther ever picked up a quill
• October 11: Luther, the 95 Theses, and what really happened in Wittenberg
• October 18: The other reformers, including a few you may never have met
• October 25: The five solas, and why they still matter

You should know two things about how I’ll approach this. First, I am going to do my best to get the history right. That includes what the Roman Catholic Church actually teaches, in its own words, because I have read plenty of Reformation posts that were a little off, and I don’t want to add to the pile. Second, I’m not here to be mean about anyone. I’m here to be accurate, and to show why what the Reformers recovered is worth celebrating.

Now, why does this matter so much to me? Because my entire Christian life rests on one thing: what Scripture says. I am not a “Calvinist” because Calvin told me to be. I’m not here because Luther said so, and I didn’t pick up my doctrine from Spurgeon, though I’m grateful for all three. If someone absolutely must put a label on me, I’ll accept “Reformed,” but I get my doctrine from the Bible. If I sound like them, maybe it’s because we read the same Bible. (They just did it a few centuries before me and wrote it down better.)

That is the heart of the Reformation. Ordinary people getting their hands on God’s Word and discovering what it says. I’m so glad you’re here. Let’s get into it.

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For years I pictured the Reformation as one guy, one door, and one very dramatic hammer. It turns out I had the movie trailer and not the film. (This describes a surprising amount of my historical knowledge.) The real story is bigger, messier, and so much better, and it starts about two hundred years before Martin Luther picked up a quill.

Let’s start with what ordinary people had to work with. Scripture and church services were in Latin, which most people could not read. If you wanted to hear God’s Word, you heard it from a priest. In England it got tighter in 1409, when Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions required a bishop’s approval for new English translations. Historians still debate how strictly that was enforced, but the direction is clear: Scripture in the language of the people was treated as a risk.

Then confidence in the church itself took a hit. From 1378 to 1417, there were rival popes, two at first and eventually three, each with his own cardinals and his own following. Even Catholic sources acknowledge that this schism forced the Church to spend decades sorting out who the true pope was. Imagine being a farmer in 1400 and being told your salvation runs through an office that nobody could agree on.

Into that stepped John Wycliffe, an Oxford theologian who argued that Scripture, not church tradition, was the final authority. He promoted the first complete English Bible, and his followers, the Lollards, carried his ideas across England. Decades after his death, his remains were dug up and burned. That is a lot of effort for a man who was already dead.

Wycliffe’s ideas traveled to Bohemia, where a priest named Jan Hus took them up and preached in the language of the people. Hus was summoned to the Council of Constance in 1415 under a promise of safe conduct. He was imprisoned instead, refused to recant unless shown his error from Scripture, and was burned at the stake. Here is a fair note worth including: in 1999, Pope John Paul II expressed deep regret for Hus’s cruel death. And here is the irony: the same council that burned Hus also ended the schism.

By 1516, the kindling was dry. The printing press was spreading books faster than any scribe could. And Erasmus, a Catholic scholar who never left Rome, published the first printed Greek New Testament. Luther would use it to translate the New Testament into German. Nobody lit the match on purpose. God had simply been stacking the wood for a long time.

Next Sunday: the monk, the theses, and what actually happened in Wittenberg.