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The Reformation: A Handbook
First published in 1882, T. M. Lindsay's Hand Book on the Reformation is still one of the best summaries of the sixteenth century Reformation available. Understanding the Reformation to be a revival of religion, the author maintains that it cannot be successfully described unless this, its essential character, is kept distinctly in view. Here is a thrilling record of the triumph of the Gospel in Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Scotland, and England in short compass. The final section of the book explains the principles that governed the movement for reform. Also contains a valuable chronological summary.
- GenresHistory
275 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 9, 2025
This is a book that has sat on my shelf for a number of years, and it seemed like this 500th anniversary year of the start of the Reformation was an appropriate time to give it a go. I'm really glad that I did, and wish I hadn't left it unread for so long. This is the best introduction to the Reformation that I've read, and I feel that it gave me a framework to understand what is a complex religious, political and social movement that took hold across most of Europe. The style is also brisk and racy, making this a very enjoyable read.
Some of the main points that struck me were:
Germany: The Reformation in Germany has commonly attracted the most attention due to the conflict with the Emperor it provoked, its rapid spread and the number of kingdoms and states that adhered to it, and the impact on the universities. However, ultimately, it made little progress outside Germany.
Switzerland: The Swiss Reformation had a much more wide-reaching influence. As time went on, it was seen that the principles of doctrine and church organisation emphasised in the Swiss reformation could more easily be transplanted than those emphasised in Wittenberg under Luther and Melanchthon. Two factors seem to have contributed to this. First, the Swiss Reformers were less inclined to submit to the doctrinal and other traditions of the Medieval Church, even in matters of indifference, and insisted throughout in following what seemed to be the clear teaching of Scripture in all things, no matter how small. Second is the political state and training of the Swiss. Both the German and the Swiss Reformers knew that the real visible church is nothing more or less than the pious people who profess faith in Jesus Christ, rather than the ecclesiastical structure of bishops, priests and so on. However, the Swiss Reformers were able to give practical expression to this fact much more clearly than the Germans, for whom the princes and other civil authorities replaced the bishops and bishops' courts of the medieval church. "At a time when Europe had no solid results of reform to show, this little state of Geneva stood up as a great power; year by year it sent forth apostles into the world, who preached its doctrines everywhere and became the most dreaded counterpoise to Rome...The missionaries from this little community displayed the lofty and dauntless spirit which proceeds from a stoical education and training; they bore the stamp of self-renouncing heroism, which was elsewhere swallowed up in theological narrowness. They were a race for whom nothing was too daring, and who gave a new direction to Protestantism by causing it to separate itself from the old traditional monarchical authority, and to adopt the gospel of democracy as part of its creed....A little bit of the world's history was enacted in Geneva, which forms the proudest part of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries."
England: Much of the unique character of the English Reformation came from the fact that Henry VIII simply wanted to replace Papal authority with his own, without any doctrinal Reformation. The reform under Edward VI was largely centralised rather than forced by the mass of the people, so it was easily repressed under Mary. The grass-roots reform seen under Elizabeth was fuelled both by the English mistrust of the Pope and Spain, and by a reaction against the excesses of the Marian persecution of Protestants. Many of the Elizabethan church leaders had fled England during Mary's reign and had been heavily influenced by Reformed teaching, and later brought these influences back to England. This happened in spite of Elizabeth's similarity to her father in desiring royal authority over the church and minimal doctrinal reform.
The essential character of the reformation is that it was a revival of heart religion, and stands in line with all other such movements of the Spirit throughout the life of the church. The difference between the Reformation and the earlier medieval revivals was the renewed realisation and sense of the possibility of direct access to God for pardon for sin through faith in Jesus Christ and the priesthood of all believers. Essential to this was the recovery of the great scriptural and apostolic doctrines of the authority of scripture and justification by faith. This is no sectarian narrowness, as "Protestants do not need to claim kindred with men whose sole mark of a religious life is to disown the authority of the Pope, or to protest against the religious life of their time....They have a nobler ancestry in all those pious men and women who, even in the darkest ages of the church, went direct to God and trusted themselves, for this life and the life to come, to his pardoning and renewing grace revealed in Christ." The thought that God's presence is free to the faithful seeker, that God will not refuse to hear the prayer of any penitent, that God makes his promises speak directly to the hearts of all his people, lies at the foundation of the whole of Reformation theology. The leading impulse of the reformation movement was simply the earnest desire for communion with God, a yearning to come face to face with God, who has revealed himself for salvation in the Lord Jesus Christ.
A related point is that the Reformation was also a recovery of true catholicity, and the Reformers stand in line with faithful, orthodox Christians going back to the Apostles. As Rome introduced false doctrine and caused the schism, so Rome and not the Reformers were the schismatics. Talking about Calvin, Lindsay says that he "had the same opinion about the Reformation that Luther strove to make clear in his tract on The Babylonian Captivity of the Church of God. He did not think that he was helping to found a new church, or that he was making a new creed, or writing a new theology. He did not believe that Protestants were men who held new opinions never before heard of. The theology of the Reformation was the old theology of the church of Christ, and the opinions of the Protestants were views of truth resting on the Word of God, and known to pious people, or at least felt by them, throughout the history of Christendom. The theology which he taught was the old theology of the early creeds, made plain and stripped of the superstitious and false views which had been borrowed by medieval thinkers from pagan practices and a pagan philosophy."
Under God, the Reformation changed the world, and things would never be the same again: "The Reformation was a revival of religion, and cannot be described successfully unless this, its essential character, is kept distinctly in view. The Reformers were men who, under the impulse of a great religious movement arising in the midst of peculiar intellectual, social, and political conditions, desired to be allowed to worship God in their own fashion, and according to the directions of Scripture and the dictates of reason and conscience. But this apparently simple desire involved such a change in the social and political conditions not merely of single provinces and countries, but also of Europe as a whole, that the story of the religious revival cannot be written without introducing a great deal of the political and social history of the times."
Some of the main points that struck me were:
Germany: The Reformation in Germany has commonly attracted the most attention due to the conflict with the Emperor it provoked, its rapid spread and the number of kingdoms and states that adhered to it, and the impact on the universities. However, ultimately, it made little progress outside Germany.
Switzerland: The Swiss Reformation had a much more wide-reaching influence. As time went on, it was seen that the principles of doctrine and church organisation emphasised in the Swiss reformation could more easily be transplanted than those emphasised in Wittenberg under Luther and Melanchthon. Two factors seem to have contributed to this. First, the Swiss Reformers were less inclined to submit to the doctrinal and other traditions of the Medieval Church, even in matters of indifference, and insisted throughout in following what seemed to be the clear teaching of Scripture in all things, no matter how small. Second is the political state and training of the Swiss. Both the German and the Swiss Reformers knew that the real visible church is nothing more or less than the pious people who profess faith in Jesus Christ, rather than the ecclesiastical structure of bishops, priests and so on. However, the Swiss Reformers were able to give practical expression to this fact much more clearly than the Germans, for whom the princes and other civil authorities replaced the bishops and bishops' courts of the medieval church. "At a time when Europe had no solid results of reform to show, this little state of Geneva stood up as a great power; year by year it sent forth apostles into the world, who preached its doctrines everywhere and became the most dreaded counterpoise to Rome...The missionaries from this little community displayed the lofty and dauntless spirit which proceeds from a stoical education and training; they bore the stamp of self-renouncing heroism, which was elsewhere swallowed up in theological narrowness. They were a race for whom nothing was too daring, and who gave a new direction to Protestantism by causing it to separate itself from the old traditional monarchical authority, and to adopt the gospel of democracy as part of its creed....A little bit of the world's history was enacted in Geneva, which forms the proudest part of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries."
England: Much of the unique character of the English Reformation came from the fact that Henry VIII simply wanted to replace Papal authority with his own, without any doctrinal Reformation. The reform under Edward VI was largely centralised rather than forced by the mass of the people, so it was easily repressed under Mary. The grass-roots reform seen under Elizabeth was fuelled both by the English mistrust of the Pope and Spain, and by a reaction against the excesses of the Marian persecution of Protestants. Many of the Elizabethan church leaders had fled England during Mary's reign and had been heavily influenced by Reformed teaching, and later brought these influences back to England. This happened in spite of Elizabeth's similarity to her father in desiring royal authority over the church and minimal doctrinal reform.
The essential character of the reformation is that it was a revival of heart religion, and stands in line with all other such movements of the Spirit throughout the life of the church. The difference between the Reformation and the earlier medieval revivals was the renewed realisation and sense of the possibility of direct access to God for pardon for sin through faith in Jesus Christ and the priesthood of all believers. Essential to this was the recovery of the great scriptural and apostolic doctrines of the authority of scripture and justification by faith. This is no sectarian narrowness, as "Protestants do not need to claim kindred with men whose sole mark of a religious life is to disown the authority of the Pope, or to protest against the religious life of their time....They have a nobler ancestry in all those pious men and women who, even in the darkest ages of the church, went direct to God and trusted themselves, for this life and the life to come, to his pardoning and renewing grace revealed in Christ." The thought that God's presence is free to the faithful seeker, that God will not refuse to hear the prayer of any penitent, that God makes his promises speak directly to the hearts of all his people, lies at the foundation of the whole of Reformation theology. The leading impulse of the reformation movement was simply the earnest desire for communion with God, a yearning to come face to face with God, who has revealed himself for salvation in the Lord Jesus Christ.
A related point is that the Reformation was also a recovery of true catholicity, and the Reformers stand in line with faithful, orthodox Christians going back to the Apostles. As Rome introduced false doctrine and caused the schism, so Rome and not the Reformers were the schismatics. Talking about Calvin, Lindsay says that he "had the same opinion about the Reformation that Luther strove to make clear in his tract on The Babylonian Captivity of the Church of God. He did not think that he was helping to found a new church, or that he was making a new creed, or writing a new theology. He did not believe that Protestants were men who held new opinions never before heard of. The theology of the Reformation was the old theology of the church of Christ, and the opinions of the Protestants were views of truth resting on the Word of God, and known to pious people, or at least felt by them, throughout the history of Christendom. The theology which he taught was the old theology of the early creeds, made plain and stripped of the superstitious and false views which had been borrowed by medieval thinkers from pagan practices and a pagan philosophy."
Under God, the Reformation changed the world, and things would never be the same again: "The Reformation was a revival of religion, and cannot be described successfully unless this, its essential character, is kept distinctly in view. The Reformers were men who, under the impulse of a great religious movement arising in the midst of peculiar intellectual, social, and political conditions, desired to be allowed to worship God in their own fashion, and according to the directions of Scripture and the dictates of reason and conscience. But this apparently simple desire involved such a change in the social and political conditions not merely of single provinces and countries, but also of Europe as a whole, that the story of the religious revival cannot be written without introducing a great deal of the political and social history of the times."
February 20, 2022
Fantastic book that describes the Reformation from a variety of locations. It does an excellent job of tracing the separation of the Reformation coming out of a Medieval and Roman Catholic view and illuminating the struggle of the brave men and women who, with God’s help and a focus on the Scriptures as the infallible rule for faith and life, came to embrace and embody this recovery of the true church.
Though the book was written over 100 years ago, it is quite readable and many of the sections are told in a narrative format. This is great for children and adults to read as it is likely to hold the attention of both. Included in the back is a helpful timeline that traces the Reformation in various countries alongside European events.
Highly recommended reading—it will encourage Christians today with stories of those who have come before us and the great difficulties and triumphs they experienced.
Though the book was written over 100 years ago, it is quite readable and many of the sections are told in a narrative format. This is great for children and adults to read as it is likely to hold the attention of both. Included in the back is a helpful timeline that traces the Reformation in various countries alongside European events.
Highly recommended reading—it will encourage Christians today with stories of those who have come before us and the great difficulties and triumphs they experienced.
August 6, 2024
This was most most interesting.
Let’s begin.
A few years back I wanted to learn what reformists believe, who are they and where did this reformation stuff stem back from. Well this answered it.
The reformation was a rival of religion, if any didn’t know. The book tells you what was happening in different countries where the reformation started to grow.
So far reading about the Church of England during the reign of Henry VIII I’ve noticed that England did things more out of selfish ambition and political gain, then for any religious revival. The reformation, it seems like, was in the back of their minds with parliament and the king passing laws that suited themselves, not even the separation between Rome and England was because of any religious belief, but simply because Henry wanted to threaten the Roman Catholics and really pour out his vengeance on the pope just because he didn’t get his way with his divorce with Catherine of Aragon. Or that is where things started.
So, kinda sad for England during this time.
Reading about how the reformation started and struggled in France was hard to read. So much bloodshed, so many martyrs, so much death and war—YET, the converts for Jesus Christ kept growing despite the martyrdom. It’s incredible. It was also very sad to read near the end of France’s history how one of their hereditary leaders, a young prince Henry of Navarre for the Huguenots, had become Roman Catholic to be acknowledged by most of France as their king after the Huguenots won in the ninth civil war called, the War of the Three Henry’s.
Overall: If you’re reformed, or your background is, or you believe reformation theology, I highly, highly suggest picking up this book. Some good historical information, and not only that, you see what our brothers and sisters in Christ died for. What we all ought to be ready to die for. The truth.
Let’s begin.
A few years back I wanted to learn what reformists believe, who are they and where did this reformation stuff stem back from. Well this answered it.
The reformation was a rival of religion, if any didn’t know. The book tells you what was happening in different countries where the reformation started to grow.
So far reading about the Church of England during the reign of Henry VIII I’ve noticed that England did things more out of selfish ambition and political gain, then for any religious revival. The reformation, it seems like, was in the back of their minds with parliament and the king passing laws that suited themselves, not even the separation between Rome and England was because of any religious belief, but simply because Henry wanted to threaten the Roman Catholics and really pour out his vengeance on the pope just because he didn’t get his way with his divorce with Catherine of Aragon. Or that is where things started.
So, kinda sad for England during this time.
Reading about how the reformation started and struggled in France was hard to read. So much bloodshed, so many martyrs, so much death and war—YET, the converts for Jesus Christ kept growing despite the martyrdom. It’s incredible. It was also very sad to read near the end of France’s history how one of their hereditary leaders, a young prince Henry of Navarre for the Huguenots, had become Roman Catholic to be acknowledged by most of France as their king after the Huguenots won in the ninth civil war called, the War of the Three Henry’s.
Overall: If you’re reformed, or your background is, or you believe reformation theology, I highly, highly suggest picking up this book. Some good historical information, and not only that, you see what our brothers and sisters in Christ died for. What we all ought to be ready to die for. The truth.
December 22, 2020
If you're interested in the kind of history that has a clear Good Team and a clear Bad Team and if you are furthermore already convinced in the truths of Reformed religion and if you are furthermore already noddingly conversant with much of the history of the religious wars in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, I've got a book for you!
February 16, 2016
A nice summary of the Reformation, from Germany with Luther, to Elizabethian England. No real analysis or doctrine; most just dates, people, and events. The last couple of chapters do give some overviews of core Reformation doctrines and distinctives. Overall a good overview for someone who needs a big picture treatment.
November 6, 2011
This is an excellent book on the Reformation. To be recommended!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews