World Impact

The Reformation Changed the World

he Reformation is stunningly more than just an article of church history—the Reformation changed the world. Many of the social blessings that we now take for granted were corrupt or non-existent before the Reformation.

To look upon the Reformation of the sixteenth century as only the substitution of one set of theological doctrines for another, or the cleansing of the Church from notorious abuses and corruptions, or even a return of Christianity to something like primitive purity and simplicity—is to take an inadequate view of its nature and importance. Charles Beard Hibbert Lectures

Some have said that the Reformation was merely the religious side of the Renaissance, but this is terribly shortsighted. We (in the west) live in a world that enjoys the fruits of the Reformation while forgetting its roots. Our advanced civilization benefits from Reformation impact and yet increasingly bites the hand that feeds it. The Reformation is more than relevant, it stands as a monument of God's rule and purposes for today.

The claim can be tested. Take one city and one ministry. Before Calvin came to Geneva in 1536 the town had some fifty merchants, three printers, and few if any resident nobles; by the late 1550s it had about a hundred and eighty merchants, a hundred and thirteen printers and publishers, and seventy or more aristocratic refugees. It had founded an academy that enrolled twelve hundred students in the college and three hundred in the seminary by the year Calvin died, both of them tuition free. It had built a diaconate that fed and housed a flood of refugees larger than the city's own population. It had put the psalms into the language of the people and printed them by the tens of thousands. And it had learned to govern itself through elected councils, none of which could act alone.¹

In comparing medieval theology with the gospel, B. B. Warfield writes:

This is a radically different doctrine from that; and it produced radically different effects on Luther; Luther the monk and Luther the Reformer are two different men. And it has produced radically different effects in the world; the medieval world and the modern world are two different worlds. B. B. Warfield

None of that was the point of the Reformation. The point was the gospel. But a recovered gospel does not stay in the sanctuary, and the five areas below trace where it went.

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