page_title: English Reformation
section_title: Changing religious ideas
hierarchical_section_title: English Reformation / Changing religious ideas
caption_attribution_description: A Tyndale Bible, displayed at the Bodleian Library in June 2014.
context_page_description: The English Reformation took place in 16th-century England when the Church of England broke away from the authority of the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church. These events were, in part, associated with the wider European Protestant Reformation, a religious and political movement that affected the practice of Christianity in western and central Europe. Causes included the invention of the printing press, increased circulation of the Bible and the transmission of new knowledge and ideas among scholars, the upper and middle classes and readers in general. The phases of the English Reformation, which also covered Wales and Ireland, were largely driven by changes in government policy, to which public opinion gradually accommodated itself.
  Based on Henry VIII's desire for an annulment of his marriage, the English Reformation began as more of a political affair than a theological dispute. The reality of political differences between Rome and England allowed growing theological disputes to come to the fore. Until the break with Rome, the Pope and general councils of the church decided doctrine. Church law was governed by canon law with final jurisdiction in Rome.
context_section_description: The Reformation was a clash of two opposed schemes of salvation. The Catholic Church taught that the contrite person could cooperate with God towards their salvation by performing good works. Medieval Catholic worship was centred on the Mass, the church's offering of the sacrifice of Christ's body and blood. The Mass was also an offering of prayer by which the living could help souls in purgatory. Protestants taught that fallen humanity was helpless and under condemnation until given the grace of God through faith. They believed the Catholic emphasis on purgatory was an obstacle to true faith in God and the identification of the Mass with Christ's sacrifice a blasphemous perversion of the Eucharist. In place of the Mass, Protestant worship was centred on the Bible–to them the only road to faith in Christ–either read or presented in sermons.
  Lollardy anticipated some Protestant teachings. Derived from the writings of John Wycliffe, a 14th-century theologian and Bible translator, Lollardy stressed the primacy of scripture and emphasised preaching over the sacrament of the altar, holding the latter to be but a memorial. Unlike Protestants, the early Lollards lacked access to the printing press and failed to gain a foothold among the church's most popular communicators, the friars. Unable to gain access to the levers of power, the Lollards were much reduced in numbers and influence by the 15th century. They sometimes faced investigation and persecution and rarely produced new literature after 1450. Lollards could still be found—especially in London and the Thames Valley, in Essex and Kent, Coventry, Bristol and even in the North—and many would be receptive to Protestant ideas.
  More respectable and orthodox calls for reform came from Renaissance humanists, such as Erasmus (who lived in England for a time), John Colet, Dean of St Paul's, and Thomas More. Humanists downplayed the role of rites and ceremonies in achieving salvation and criticised the superstitious veneration of relics. Erasmus and Colet emphasised a simple, personal piety and a return ad fontes ("back to the sources") of Christian faith—the scriptures as understood through textual and linguistic scholarship. Colet's commentaries on the Pauline epistles emphasized double predestination and the worthlessness of human works. Anne Boleyn's own religious views were shaped by French humanists such as Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples, whose 1512 commentaries on Paul's epistles stated that human works were irrelevant to salvation five years before Luther published the same views.
  Humanist scholarship provided arguments against papal primacy and support for the claim that popes had usurped powers that rightfully belonged to kings. In 1534, Lorenzo Valla's On the Donation of Constantine—which proved that one of the pillars of the papacy's temporal authority was a hoax—was published in London. Thomas Cromwell paid for an English translation of Marsiglio of Padua's Defensor pacis in 1535. The conservative cleric Stephen Gardiner used Marsiglio's theory of a unitary realm to defend royal power over spiritual as well as secular affairs.
  By the early 1520s, the views of German reformer Martin Luther were known and disputed in England. The main plank of Luther's theology was justification by faith alone rather than by good works. In this view, only faith, itself a gift from God, can secure the grace of God. Justification by faith alone threatened the whole basis of the Roman Catholic penitential system with its doctrine of purgatory, prayer for the dead, indulgences, and the sacrificial character of the Mass. Early Protestants portrayed Catholic practices such as confession to priests, clerical celibacy, and requirements to fast and keep vows as burdensome and spiritually oppressive. Not only did purgatory lack any biblical basis according to Protestants, but the clergy were accused of using fear of purgatory to make money from prayers and masses. Catholics countered that justification by faith alone was a "licence to sin".
  English Catholicism was strong and popular in the early 1500s
caption: The Tyndale Bible was the basis for later English translations.
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