Reformed Church of France, church organized in 1938 by merging several Reformed churches that had developed in France during and after the 16th-century Protestant Reformation. During the early part of the Reformation, Protestant movements made slow progress in France. Yet reforming movements within the Roman Catholic Church had appeared early. Before Martin Luther had emerged as a reformer in Germany, French humanists had created much interest in biblical studies and had aroused a concern for a purer type of Christianity. Margaret of Angoulême, a sister of King Francis I, became the centre of a humanistic group known as the group of Meaux, which created great interest in reform. Its members contributed much by their writings to biblical and theological studies that were used by the Protestants. Several members of the group left it and became Protestants. Not until 1555, however, was any attempt made to organize Protestant congregations in France. The Reformation movement then gained rapidly in France until 1562, when a long series of civil wars began in France and the Huguenots (French Protestants) alternately gained and lost. During this period of strife the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day occurred (1572), and several thousand Huguenots were murdered.
Peace was restored when the Huguenot leader, Henry of Navarre, became king of France (Henry IV; reigned 1589–1610) and accepted Roman Catholicism. This satisfied the Roman Catholics, and Henry in 1598 promulgated the Edict of Nantes, which guaranteed the Huguenots virtual freedom of religion. French Protestantism then made a good recovery from the persecutions it had endured, but the Edict of Nantes was revoked by Louis XIV in 1685. Protestants again suffered persecutions before and after this act, and, despite laws against emigration, more than 250,000 Huguenots fled to Germany, Holland, England, Switzerland, and America. Those who remained in France persisted as a virtual underground movement and did not regain their full rights until the French Revolution in 1789.
After 1848 the union of Reformed churches in France ceased to exist. Schisms occurred because of disagreements between the conservative and liberal wings. The conservatives maintained strict loyalty to the ancient confessions of the church, while the liberals encouraged individual liberty of conscience and were hostile to any obligatory confession of faith. By the early 20th century these disputes had resulted in the formation of four major Reformed groups in France. A 1905 French law separated all religious groups from the state, and the churches had to support themselves on their own from that time.
Efforts to unite the Reformed churches caused the national synods of the four Reformed groups to enter into negotiations in 1933 and to vote a common declaration of faith in 1936. As a result the Reformed Church of France was organized in 1938.
The Reformed and Lutheran churches of Alsace-Lorraine, however, are supported by the French state. This is a continuation of the situation of the churches in France at the time Alsace-Lorraine was annexed to Germany after the Franco-German War of 1870–71. The area was returned to France after World War I.
This article was most recently revised and updated by Matt Stefon.
The Reformation is said to have begun when Martin Luther posted his Ninety-five Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, on October 31, 1517.
What did the Reformation do?
The Reformation became the basis for the founding of Protestantism, one of the three major branches of Christianity. The Reformation led to the reformulation of certain basic tenets of Christian belief and resulted in the division of Western Christendom between Roman Catholicism and the new Protestant traditions. The spread of Protestantism in areas that had previously been Roman Catholic had far-reaching political, economic, and social effects.
Who were some of the key figures of the Reformation?
The greatest leaders of the Reformation undoubtedly were Martin Luther and John Calvin. Martin Luther precipitated the Reformation with his critiques of both the practices and the theology of the Roman Catholic Church. John Calvin was the most important figure in the second generation of the Reformation, and his interpretation of Christianity, known as Calvinism, deeply influenced many areas of Protestant thought. Other figures included Pope Leo X, who excommunicated Luther; the Holy Roman emperor Charles V, who essentially declared war on Protestantism; Henry VIII, king of England, who presided over the establishment of an independent Church of England; and Huldrych Zwingli, a Swiss reformer.
John CalvinPortrait of John Calvin by Henriette Rath; in the collection of the Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire, Geneva.
Reformation, the religious revolution that took place in the Western church in the 16th century. Its greatest leaders undoubtedly were Martin Luther and John Calvin. Having far-reaching political, economic, and social effects, the Reformation became the basis for the founding of Protestantism, one of the three major branches of Christianity.
The world of the late medievalRoman Catholic Church from which the 16th-century reformers emerged was a complex one. Over the centuries the church, particularly in the office of the papacy, had become deeply involved in the political life of western Europe. The resulting intrigues and political manipulations, combined with the church’s increasing power and wealth, contributed to the bankrupting of the church as a spiritual force. Abuses such as the sale of indulgences (or spiritual privileges) by the clergy and other charges of corruption undermined the church’s spiritual authority. These instances must be seen as exceptions, however, no matter how much they were played up by polemicists. For most people, the church continued to offer spiritual comfort. There is some evidence of anticlericalism, but the church at large enjoyed loyalty as it had before. One development is clear: the political authorities increasingly sought to curtail the public role of the church and thereby triggered tension.
The Reformation of the 16th century was not unprecedented. Reformers within the medieval church such as St. Francis of Assisi, Valdes (founder of the Waldensians), Jan Hus, and John Wycliffe addressed aspects in the life of the church in the centuries before 1517. In the 16th century Erasmus of Rotterdam, a great humanist scholar, was the chief proponent of liberal Catholic reform that attacked popular superstitions in the church and urged the imitation of Christ as the supreme moral teacher. These figures reveal an ongoing concern for renewal within the church in the years before Luther is said to have posted his Ninety-five Theses on the door of the Castle Church, Wittenberg, Germany, on October 31, 1517, the eve of All Saints’ Day—the traditional date for the beginning of the Reformation. (SeeResearcher’s Note.)
IndulgencesThe sale of indulgences in church; woodcut from the title page of Luther's pamphlet On Aplas von Rom, published anonymously in Augsburg, 1525.
Martin Luther claimed that what distinguished him from previous reformers was that while they attacked corruption in the life of the church, he went to the theological root of the problem—the perversion of the church’s doctrine of redemption and grace. Luther, a pastor and professor at the University of Wittenberg, deplored the entanglement of God’s free gift of grace in a complex system of indulgences and good works. In his Ninety-five Theses, he attacked the indulgence system, insisting that the pope had no authority over purgatory and that the doctrine of the merits of the saints had no foundation in the gospel. Here lay the key to Luther’s concerns for the ethical and theological reform of the church: Scripture alone is authoritative (sola scriptura) and justification is by faith (sola fide), not by works. While he did not intend to break with the Catholic church, a confrontation with the papacy was not long in coming. In 1521 Luther was excommunicated; what began as an internal reform movement had become a fracture in western Christendom.
Huldrych ZwingliHuldrych Zwingli, detail of an oil portrait by Hans Asper, 1531; in the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland.
The Reformation movement within Germany diversified almost immediately, and other reform impulses arose independently of Luther. Huldrych Zwingli built a Christian theocracy in Zürich in which church and state joined for the service of God. Zwingli agreed with Luther in the centrality of the doctrine of justification by faith, but he espoused a different understanding of the Holy Communion. Luther had rejected the Catholic church’s doctrine of transubstantiation, according to which the bread and wine in Holy Communion became the actual body and blood of Christ. According to Luther’s notion, the body of Christ was physically present in the elements because Christ is present everywhere, while Zwingli claimed that entailed a spiritual presence of Christ and a declaration of faith by the recipients.
Another group of reformers, often though not altogether correctly referred to as “radical reformers,” insisted that baptism be performed not on infants but on adults who had professed their faith in Jesus. Called Anabaptists, they remained a marginal phenomenon in the 16th century but survived—despite fierce persecution—as Mennonites and Hutterites into the 21st century. Opponents of the ancient Trinitarian dogma made their appearance as well. Known as Socinians, after the name of their founder, they established flourishing congregations, especially in Poland.
How Martin Luther launched the Protestant ReformationLearn more about the Protestant Reformation.
Another important form of Protestantism (as those protesting against their suppressions were designated by the Diet of Speyer in 1529) is Calvinism, named for John Calvin, a French lawyer who fled France after his conversion to the Protestant cause. In Basel, Switzerland, Calvin brought out the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536, the first systematic, theological treatise of the new reform movement. Calvin agreed with Luther’s teaching on justification by faith. However, he found a more positive place for law within the Christian community than did Luther. In Geneva, Calvin was able to experiment with his ideal of a disciplined community of the elect. Calvin also stressed the doctrine of predestination and interpreted Holy Communion as a spiritual partaking of the body and blood of Christ. Calvin’s tradition merged eventually with Zwingli’s into the Reformed tradition, which was given theological expression by the (second) Helvetic Confession of 1561.
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The Reformation spread to other European countries over the course of the 16th century. By mid century, Lutheranism dominated northern Europe. Eastern Europe offered a seedbed for even more radical varieties of Protestantism, because kings were weak, nobles strong, and cities few, and because religious pluralism had long existed. Spain and Italy were to be the great centres of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, and Protestantism never gained a strong foothold there.
In England the Reformation’s roots were both political and religious. Henry VIII, incensed by Pope Clement VII’s refusal to grant him an annulment of his marriage, repudiated papal authority and in 1534 established the Anglican church with the king as the supreme head. In spite of its political implications, the reorganization of the church permitted the beginning of religious change in England, which included the preparation of a liturgy in English, the Book of Common Prayer. In Scotland, John Knox, who spent time in Geneva and was greatly influenced by John Calvin, led the establishment of Presbyterianism, which made possible the eventual union of Scotland with England. For further treatment of the Reformation, seeProtestantism, history of. For a discussion of the religious doctrine, seeProtestantism.
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