In a church rocked by controversies over vernacular Scripture, iconoclasm, and the power of clergy, men and women arose in protest. Today we call this protest movement the Protestant Reformation. At its heart, the Reformation was a great revival of the church centered on the recovery of biblical truth and the gospel of free grace. This movement continues to instruct and inspire believers even into the present day. Reformation 500 celebrates the Reformation and probes the ways it has shaped our world for the better. With essays from an array of disciplines, this book explores the impact of the Reformation across a wide range of human experience. Literature, education, visual art, culture, politics, music, theology, church life, and Baptist history all provide prisms through which the Reformation legacy is viewed. From Augustine to Zwingli, historical figures like Luther, Calvin, Barth, Bonhoeffer, Rembrandt, Bach, Bunyan, and Wycliffe all find their way into this amazing 500-year story. From Anglicans to Baptists, scientists to poets, Reformation 500 weaves these many historical threads into a modern-day tapestry.

The Unfinished Reformation offers a thoughtful look at the key theological and sociological differences between Catholicism and Protestantism. In 1517 a Catholic monk nailed a list of grievances on the door of a church in Germany and launched a revolution in the history of Christianity. That monk was Martin Luther, and the revolution was the Protestant Reformation. This upheaval resulted in flexibility and innovation in the church but also religious instability and division, particularly among the Catholic and Protestant fault line. Five hundred years later, there continues to be unresolved issues between the Protestant and Catholic churches. So, Gregg Allison and Chris Castaldo ask the question... is the Reformation really finished? The Unfinished Reformation is a brief and clear guide to the key points of unity and divergence between the two largest branches of Christianity. Fundamental differences in doctrine and practice are addressed in detail: Scripture, Tradition, and Interpretation Image of God, Sin, and Mary Church and Sacraments Salvation Written in an accessible and informative style, The Unfinished Reformation provokes thought about Christian beliefs, equips you for healthy conversations with those on "the other side of the divide", and encourages fruitful discussion about the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Does the Reformation Still Matter? In 1517, a German monk nailed a poster to the door of a church, disputing key doctrines taught by the Roman Catholic Church in that day. This moment set in motion a movement that changed the entire trajectory of church history. But do the Reformers still have something to teach us? In this accessible primer, Michael Reeves and Tim Chester answer eleven key questions raised by the Reformers—questions that remain critically important for the church today.

The Reformation and Counter-Reformation represented the greatest upheaval in Western society since the collapse of the Roman Empire a millennium before. The consequences of those shattering events are still felt today—from the stark divisions between (and within) Catholic and Protestant countries to the Protestant ideology that governs America, the world’s only remaining superpower. In this masterful history, Diarmaid MacCulloch conveys the drama, complexity, and continuing relevance of these events. He offers vivid portraits of the most significant individuals—Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Loyola, Henry VIII, and a number of popes—but also conveys why their ideas were so powerful and how the Reformation affected everyday lives. The result is a landmark book that will be the standard work on the Reformation for years to come. The narrative verve of The Reformation as well as its provocative analysis of American culture’s debt to the period will ensure the book’s wide appeal among history readers.

In the fifty years between 1530 and 1580, England moved from being one of the most lavishly Catholic countries in Europe to being a Protestant nation, a land of whitewashed churches and antipapal preaching. What was the impact of this religious change in the countryside? And how did country people feel about the revolutionary upheavals that transformed their mental and material worlds under Henry VIII and his three children? In this book a reformation historian takes us inside the mind and heart of Morebath, a remote and tiny sheep farming village on the southern edge of Exmoor. The bulk of Morebath’s conventional archives have long since vanished. But from 1520 to 1574, through nearly all the drama of the English Reformation, Morebath’s only priest, Sir Christopher Trychay, kept the parish accounts on behalf of the churchwardens. Opinionated, eccentric, and talkative, Sir Christopher filled these vivid scripts for parish meetings with the names and doings of his parishioners. Through his eyes we catch a rare glimpse of the life and pre-Reformation piety of a sixteenth-century English village. The book also offers a unique window into a rural world in crisis as the Reformation progressed. Sir Christopher Trychay’s accounts provide direct evidence of the motives which drove the hitherto law-abiding West-Country communities to participate in the doomed Prayer-Book Rebellion of 1549 culminating in the siege of Exeter that ended in bloody defeat and a wave of executions. Its church bells confiscated and silenced, Morebath shared in the punishment imposed on all the towns and villages of Devon and Cornwall. Sir Christopher documents the changes in the community, reluctantly Protestant and increasingly preoccupied with the secular demands of the Elizabethan state, the equipping of armies, and the payment of taxes. Morebath’s priest, garrulous to the end of his days, describes a rural world irrevocably altered and enables us to hear the voices of his villagers after four hundred years of silence.