AFTER THE CHURCH REFORMATION

What happens to the religious life of Germany and

England

How did the English Reformation affect the everyday life of the
English people?

The English Reformation significantly altered the everyday life of the English
people, impacting their religious practices, social structures, and cultural norms.

The English Reformation, a series of events in 16th-century England by which the

Church of England broke away from the authority of the Pope and the Roman Catholic
Church, had profound effects on the everyday life of the English people. These effects
were not just religious but also social, political, and cultural.

Religiously, the Reformation led to a shift in practices and beliefs. Prior to the
Reformation, England was a predominantly Catholic country with the Pope as the head
of the Church. However, the Reformation led to the establishment of the Church of
England with the monarch as its head. This meant that the English people had to adjust
to new forms of worship, different from the Catholic rituals they were accustomed to.
The Mass was replaced with the Book of Common Prayer, and Latin was replaced with
English in church services. This made religion more accessible to the common people,
as they could now understand the language of the liturgy.

Socially, the Reformation led to significant changes in the structure of society.

The dissolution of the monasteries, a consequence of the Reformation, meant that the
Church was no longer the largest landowner in the country. This led to a redistribution of
wealth and power, with many former Church lands being bought by the nobility and the
emerging middle class. This shift in land ownership had a profound impact on the social
structure of England, contributing to the rise of the gentry and the decline of the feudal
system.

Culturally, the Reformation had a profound impact on the arts and education. The
rejection of Catholic iconography led to a decline in religious art and the destruction of
many religious images and statues. However, it also led to a rise in secular art and
literature, as artists and writers sought to express their ideas and beliefs in new ways.
The Reformation also led to an increased emphasis on education, particularly literacy,
as the Church of England encouraged people to read the Bible for themselves.

Politically, the Reformation strengthened the power of the monarchy. By breaking

away from the Pope, Henry VIII asserted his authority over the Church in England,
effectively making him the supreme head of both the state and the Church. This
increased the power of the monarchy and laid the groundwork for the development of a
more centralized state.

The results of the Reformation were many, including the passing of the Peace of
Augsburg, which would legalize Lutheranism. The Peace of Augsburg allowed local
princes to choose the official religion of their region, decriminalizing Protestant religions.

The Afterlife of the Reformation, 16th to 21st Century

The Protestant Reformation is alleged to have shaped major features of Western

culture, including freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, the dignity of the
individual, and political democracy.

The Protestant Reformation did not have one, but many afterlives. And it has
fundamentally shaped the history of the centuries following it up until our own time.
Even in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, during the age of confessional
conflicts when the Catholic church and different Protestant churches in Europe fought
for the hearts and minds of the people, histories of the Reformation were already written
and conflicting interpretations offered. In martyrologies and historical accounts of both
medieval and recent history, Reformation and Counter-Reformation scholars and
polemicists sought to shape a view of the events of the Protestant Reformation that
could be used as propaganda for their own side and shape their communities' identities.

As time progressed, "The Reformation" came to be seen as a coherent sequence

of events which was described, until the twentieth century, in positive terms by
Protestant historians and in negative terms by Catholic ones. In Britain, the so-called
"Whig history" saw the English Reformation as an integral part of the success story of
the nation. Parliament, a constitutional monarchy, economic success culminating in the
industrial revolution, and Protestantism were bound together into a triumphant story in
which England was the paragon of freedom and progress. In Germany, nineteenth-
century historiography was confessionally split, but dominated by Protestant historians,
mostly in Prussia, who tended to see the Reformation as the beginning of the modern
age.

The thoughts of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth scholars like Ernst
Troeltsch and Max Weber have deeply influenced the perception of the Protestant
Reformation. While Troeltsch regarded the mainstream Reformers as still medieval, he
argued that modernity was ushered in by Protestant sects like the Anabaptists. Max
Weber's saw the Reformation as a major turning point in the "disenchantment of the
world," and he claimed an association between the concept of predestination in
Calvinism and the development of modern capitalism. In Weber's view, the Calvinist
doctrine of "double predestination" led to the "Protestant work ethic" because believers
used their worldly success to confirm in their own minds that they were saved
(predestined by God to heaven). This Protestant work ethic then led, according to
Weber, to the development of capitalism. The economic success of the early modern
Netherlands, where the Calvinist church was the "public church," has often been cited
as an example in this context. Weber's theory has been thoroughly debunked by
historians, but it continues to be a powerful idea to this day.

Overall, this raises the question how to identify and describe the formative long-
term influences of the Protestant Reformation on the Western world more generally and
on American history in particular. The American public retains a sense of relatedness to
the Puritans of Massachusetts, who were products of the English Reformation as a
powerful movement, and Americanists have claimed that without the New England
Puritan regime in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, our nation would have
a different cast of minds.

The Protestant Reformation is on the one hand alleged to have shaped major
features of Western culture, including freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, the
dignity of the individual, and political democracy. On the other hand, scholars have
claimed that the Reformation and the resulting divisions in Western Christianity are
responsible for a secular society based on a harsh capitalist economy in which
community values are underrated and individualism is overrated. These remain matters
of deep concern to modern Americans. Did the Reformation produce or influence them?
Historians will continue to debate these questions because the relationship between
cause and effect is hard to prove over a period of five centuries.

There can be no doubt, however, that the Reformation has many afterlives. Above
all, it has resulted in the creation of many different Protestant faiths and churches
around the world. Today, Protestantism is expanding in Africa, Asia, and Latin America,
while continuing to have a strong presence in Europe and North America. Soon,
Europeans and people of European descent will no longer form the majority of
Protestants. This raises the question of what types of connections, if any, can be
identified between the origins of a religious movement and the various manifestations of
this religious movement as it adapts to different cultures over the course of five
centuries.

However, there can be no doubt that in terms of identity, these connections are
strong. The many events, websites, activities, and books generated by the five
hundredth anniversary of the Protestant Reformation certainly prove that this event
continues to have an important place both as part of the scholarly enterprise as well as
in the popular imagination.

Impact on Daily Life

The centerpiece of worship now became the sermon. All pastors and deacons
had henceforward to preach, and all laypeople had to attend church. Pews were
increasingly installed to hold them bodily in place and direct their faces to the expositor
of Holy Writ, the Truth of God.

In the late medieval and early modern Catholic world, Christians were surrounded
by reminders of their faith. Crucifixes and images of the Virgin and the many other
saints were everywhere: in churches, outside shrines, city walls, on fountains, and in the
houses of people who could afford them. Clergy and nuns were numerous, and their
houses dotted both urban and rural landscapes. People of means reckoned on sending
excess children into religious orders, where those offspring would prosper their family
members’ chances of salvation. Church bells resounded throughout the day, reminding
of midday and evening prayers, of masses, and of funerals. The calendar revolved
around the feast days of saints, and the vocabulary of liturgy and such sermons as
there were found echoes in patterns of speech: goodbye means “God be with you.”
European Christians had internalized the directive of the Fourth Lateran Council of
1214, which required that every adult confess at least once a year to an authorized
priest and receive Communion. They fulfilled their obligation precisely at Eastertime and
hardly ever more often.

With the Reformation, many of these either ceased or were radically diminished.
Within Lutheranism, works of sacred art could remain in place, provided they were
consonant with Holy Scripture. Crucifixes hung in every sanctuary as a reminder of that
crucial doctrine, the atonement. Unauthorized saints’ images and all usages deemed
superstitious were gradually eradicated—with the notable exception that the great
majority of unlettered people could not simply jettison their entire cultural milieu. Even
Katharina von Bora, Martin Luther’s wife, invoked the Virgin in the dining room one day;
she had been conditioned to do so as a nun. Her husband mildly criticized her. The
centerpiece of worship now became the sermon. All pastors and deacons had
henceforward to preach, and all laypeople had to attend church. Pews were increasingly
installed to hold them bodily in place and direct their faces to the expositor of Holy Writ,
the Truth of God.

Within institutional Lutheranism, a myriad means of indoctrination was brought

to bear on the Christian. Services were in German and were interspersed with and
reinforced by Bible readings and hymns, also in the vernacular. Parishioners were
supposed to sing along, which a number were initially reluctant to do. The first
hymnbook appeared in 1524. Evangelicals retained oral confession to a minister, who
inquired into a person’s knowledge of the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and
the Creed before administering absolution. Luther’s two catechisms of 1529, one short
and one long, served as textbooks of essential belief for little-trained country parsons as
well as children and ignorant adults.

Within Zurich and Geneva, Huldrych Zwingli and John Calvin in turn cleansed
the sanctuaries of every image, even bare crosses. Zwingli eliminated music, whereas
Calvin condoned unaccompanied metric Psalms. Services of worship were designed to
stress communal membership in the church as the bride of Christ. Confession was
collective rather than individual. Previously private rituals, such as baptism and
marriage, were now performed in the presence of the gathered congregation. Dancing
in the latter case was not allowed, which altered social customs. Bells could only be
rung, briefly, to summon the people to a funeral. Calvin perfected the institution of the
consistory in Geneva to compel residents to conform to his definitions of right belief and
practice; an estimated 7% of the population appeared before that consistory every year.
The populace was watched over by designated elders who were simultaneously
members of Geneva’s three city councils; these men had to live in proximity to those
whom they observed.

A greater degree of oversight by a more tightly fashioned and specialized

bureaucracy meant that it became more difficult to avoid detection in case a citizen of
Strasbourg was sympathetic to an Anabaptist preacher such as Melchior Hoffman or a
Spiritualist such as Kaspar Schwenckfeld. Both church and state were determined to
make the people obey their increasing dicta.

With the Reformation, an expanding body of devotional literature became

available to the literate. The expansion of the publishing industry indicates that a sizable
market for such works existed. At the same time, much of the population remained
illiterate, as well as too poor to make elective purchases. But books were loaned out to
relations and neighbors by their owners, and they were read aloud in public places. The
combination of communicative media, the application of pressure by rulers and clergy,
and the reconditioning of people over two to three generations altered the religious
culture in which Protestants lived.

Sources:

Karant-Nunn, Susan, & Lotz-Heumann, Ute (2017). Confessional Conflict. After 500
Years: Print and Propaganda in the Protestant Reformation. University of Arizona
Libraries.

Selected titles from University of Arizona Special Collections:

Johann Sleidan (1506-1556). Commentariorum, Strasbourg, ca.1500?

Philipp Saltzmann, Singularia Lutheri, Naumburg, 1664

Gottfried Weyer (1610-16 82). Ephemerides, Cologne, 1679

Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715). Historie van de reformatie, Amsterdam, 1686

Snyod of Dort (1618-1619). Acta Synodi nationalis, Dordrecht, 1620

Schriftelicke conferentie, The Hague, 1612