Reformation: Learning to See Without Sides

When I reached the Reformation in my coursework, I expected clarity. This was the portion of the narrative I believed I already knew.  Corruption exposed. Scripture reclaimed. Authority corrected. I had been taught to approach the sixteenth century as a decisive rupture, even a relief: history finally set right. Instead, the material slowed me down. The closer I read the sources, the less stable my inherited categories became. Reform did not arrive fully formed in 1517, nor did it belong to a single man or moment. Long before Luther, the late medieval Church was already marked by reforming impulses: calls for moral renewal, pastoral attentiveness, catechetical clarity, and interior devotion. These movements were uneven, often insufficient, and sometimes compromised, but they were real. The Church was not inert. It was strained, internally diverse, and struggling to respond to overlapping crises. What unsettled me was not this complexity itself, but how differently historians interpreted it. Protestant historiography often approached the medieval past as something to be exposed: a dense accumulation of practices requiring clarification, correction, or removal. Catholic historiography approached the same material as something received—flawed, burdened, yet continuous. The disagreement was not merely doctrinal. It was methodological. It concerned whether continuity itself could be trusted, or whether endurance was evidence of distortion. Once I recognized that distinction, I could not stop seeing it.

Debates over pilgrimage, purgatory, saints, and sacraments were not simply arguments about belief; they were arguments about memory. Was continuity proof of corruption, or of resilience? Were medieval practices aberrations to be stripped away, or developments to be interpreted within a longer tradition? Increasingly, it became clear that the past itself had become confessionalized. History was no longer shared ground. It was contested territory, read through conclusions already reached. This realization shifted how I understood reform. I had been trained to imagine reform as correction: identify error, remove it, return to purity. But history does not operate that cleanly. Practices do not emerge fully articulated, nor do they survive by accident. They persist because communities carry them forward, adapting them under pressure while preserving their core logic. When I began to apply that framework consistently, the Reformation no longer appeared as a moment of restoration, but as a moment of reconfiguration.

Luther complicated the narrative first. Reading him closely, I was surprised by how much he retained. He honored Mary as the Mother of God. He insisted on Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist. He rejected a purely symbolic understanding of faith. His reform was pastoral, urgent, shaped by fear of judgment and a longing for assurance. He did not initially set out to dismantle the Church’s sacramental world. Yet historically, that is precisely what occurred. Authority shifted from office to conscience, from priesthood to proclamation. The sacrificial dimension of the Mass disappeared. Mediation narrowed. What Luther preserved theologically depended heavily on his own interpretive authority. History revealed what theology alone obscured: once that singular voice was removed, what remained proved difficult to stabilize. Sacramental continuity had been weakened at the structural level, even where reverence remained.

Calvin resolved what Luther left unstable. His theology was systematic, disciplined, and internally coherent. Ambiguity was eliminated rather than endured. Mary belonged firmly to salvation history, not to the Church’s present devotional life. Although, he did believe in her perpetual virginity. Christ was present in the Eucharist, but spiritually rather than sacramentally, and only through faith. Sacrifice vanished entirely. Authority settled decisively in interpretation, order, and doctrinal precision. As a student, I admired the coherence. As a historian, I noticed the cost. Calvin’s system proved durable precisely because it required less inheritance. It did not depend on received practices, only on rightly ordered belief. But in achieving clarity, it thinned something older: sacramentality, mediation, mystery. Where silence had once carried authority, explanation took its place. Where continuity had been embodied, it now required justification. This was when absence became visible.

Earlier Christianity had made room for what I came to think of as quiet guardians: bishops, confessors, monastic superiors. They were figures whose authority rested not in constant articulation, but in custodianship. They did not need to defend every practice. They received, preserved, and transmitted. Their authority functioned through continuity rather than argument. The Reformation had little patience for that kind of silence. Authority increasingly demanded explanation. What could not be defended clearly was suspect. What could not be traced cleanly was dismissed. Silence no longer signaled trust; it signaled weakness. And as these quiet custodians receded, interpretation multiplied. History clarified something theology alone had not: fragmentation does not begin with disagreement. It begins when memory collapses. Studying the Reformation did not make me nostalgic for the medieval world. It made me attentive to loss.

Catholicism did not endure because it resisted change, but because it negotiated it: through ritual, sacrament, discipline, and reform that preserved continuity even while adapting to crisis. Endurance, I learned, is not accidental. It is structured.

By the time I completed that portion of my studies, I was no longer asking whether reform had been necessary. I was asking a different question entirely: what must be preserved for reform not to become erasure? That question did not yet compel belief. But it altered my vision. And history, once it teaches you to see this way, does not allow you to return unchanged.

To be continued: