Who Started The Reformation?
On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther nailed his "The Ninety-five Theses" to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church. This was indeed a historically significant event. However, many people think that Martin Luther started the Reformation but as you can see in Dave Hunt’s article the efforts to reform the church and keep it on the right track had been an going activity well before Martin Luther:
June 2000 Newsletter: A Great Betrayal
Hunt, Dave June 1, 2000
“...For 1,000 years before Luther, Europe saw persecutions, burnings and drownings of evangelical Christians who had never been Catholics and were not called Protestants. That term would only later be attached to those excommunicated from the Church for protesting its evils. A movement among priests and monks calling for a return to the Bible began many centuries before Luther. Priscillian, Bishop of Avila, could be called the first Reformer. Falsely accused of heresy, witchcraft, and immorality by a Synod in Bordeaux, France in A.D. 384 (seven of his writings which refute these charges have recently been discovered in the University of Wurzburg library in Germany), Priscillian and six others were beheaded at Trier in 385 and many martyrdoms followed. Jumping ahead to the late 1300s, John Wycliff, "morning star of the Reformation," championed the authority of the Scriptures, translated and published them in English and preached and wrote against the evils of the popes and transubstantiation. Jan Hus, a fervent Catholic priest and rector of Prague University, was influenced by Wycliff.
Excommunicated in 1410, Hus was burned at the stake as a "heretic" in 1415 for calling a corrupt church to holiness and the authority of God's Word.
Such early reformers set the stage for Martin Luther's Reformation. Luther himself said, "We are not the first to declare the papacy to be the kingdom of Antichrist, since for many years before us so many and so great men...have undertaken to express the same thing so clearly...." For example, in a full council at Rheims in the tenth century the Bishop of Orleans called the Pope the Antichrist. In the eleventh century Rome was denounced as "the See of Satan" by Berenger of Tours. The Waldensians identified the Pope as Antichrist in an 1100 treatise titled "The Noble Lesson." In 1206 an Albigensian conference indicted the Vatican as the woman "drunk with the blood of the martyrs," which she continued to prove...”
The complete article is at http://www.thebereancall.org/node/5704
June 2000 Newsletter: A Great Betrayal
Hunt, Dave June 1, 2000
“...For 1,000 years before Luther, Europe saw persecutions, burnings and drownings of evangelical Christians who had never been Catholics and were not called Protestants. That term would only later be attached to those excommunicated from the Church for protesting its evils. A movement among priests and monks calling for a return to the Bible began many centuries before Luther. Priscillian, Bishop of Avila, could be called the first Reformer. Falsely accused of heresy, witchcraft, and immorality by a Synod in Bordeaux, France in A.D. 384 (seven of his writings which refute these charges have recently been discovered in the University of Wurzburg library in Germany), Priscillian and six others were beheaded at Trier in 385 and many martyrdoms followed. Jumping ahead to the late 1300s, John Wycliff, "morning star of the Reformation," championed the authority of the Scriptures, translated and published them in English and preached and wrote against the evils of the popes and transubstantiation. Jan Hus, a fervent Catholic priest and rector of Prague University, was influenced by Wycliff.
Excommunicated in 1410, Hus was burned at the stake as a "heretic" in 1415 for calling a corrupt church to holiness and the authority of God's Word.
Such early reformers set the stage for Martin Luther's Reformation. Luther himself said, "We are not the first to declare the papacy to be the kingdom of Antichrist, since for many years before us so many and so great men...have undertaken to express the same thing so clearly...." For example, in a full council at Rheims in the tenth century the Bishop of Orleans called the Pope the Antichrist. In the eleventh century Rome was denounced as "the See of Satan" by Berenger of Tours. The Waldensians identified the Pope as Antichrist in an 1100 treatise titled "The Noble Lesson." In 1206 an Albigensian conference indicted the Vatican as the woman "drunk with the blood of the martyrs," which she continued to prove...”
The complete article is at http://www.thebereancall.org/node/5704
posted by David Bennett | 5:02 PM
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