The Reformation

Oversimplified

• The 16th-century Western movement (Luther, Calvin, Zwingli) that broke from Rome over authority, grace, and the sacraments — birthing Protestantism.
• Orthodoxy sees it as a reaction to genuine Latin distortions that nonetheless carried forward Rome's own errors and added new ones (sola scriptura, sola fide).

Summary

The Protestant Reformation began in 1517 with Luther's protest against indulgences and grew into a wide break from the papacy over the authority of Scripture, justification by faith alone, and the number and nature of the sacraments. It fractured Western Christendom into Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, and radical streams.

An Orthodox appraisal

The East was not a party to the medieval Latin developments (papal supremacy, purgatory, scholastic satisfaction) that the Reformers rightly questioned. Yet the Reformers largely retained the Western framework and answered it with new one-sided formulas — private judgment in place of the Church, sola scriptura against Sacred Tradition, and a forensic Justification. Correspondence between Lutheran theologians and Patriarch Jeremias II (1570s) marked the limits of agreement.[^1] See John Calvin, Radical Reformation.

[^1]: The Tübingen–Jeremias II correspondence (1573–1581), between the Lutheran theologians of Tübingen and Patriarch Jeremias II of Constantinople.