Primary Authors & Sources
HIST-202 builds its reading list from required primary and classical sources in sixteenth-century protestant movements and doctrinal shifts. The authors below are read as teachers across the centuries, not as entries in a bibliography. Philip Schaff serves as the great historian of creeds and councils, making confessional documents accessible in their historical context, notably in History of the Christian Church: The German Reformation and History of the Christian Church: The Swiss Reformation. Williston Walker contributes John Calvin: The Organiser of Reformed Protestantism, offering firsthand access to the arguments, methods, and assumptions that shaped this period of study.
Taken together, these readings form a coherent conversation across centuries — students encounter real arguments, not flattened summaries. Thomas Martin Lindsay contributes A History of the Reformation and A History of the Reformation, offering firsthand access to the arguments, methods, and assumptions that shaped this period of study. J.H. D'Aubigne contributes History of the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century and History of the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, offering firsthand access to the arguments, methods, and assumptions that shaped this period of study.
What You Will Study
Students study the sixteenth-century Reformation in its Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, and Radical expressions, examining how God recovered the gospel of grace through Scripture, preaching, and confessional formation. The course covers Luther's breakthrough on justification, Calvin's institutional and theological labors, Zwingli and Bullinger in Zurich, the English Reformation, and Anabaptist movements with careful Reformed assessment of each stream. Readings include primary sources from Reformers alongside the Augsburg Confession, Heidelberg Catechism, and Thirty-Nine Articles. Students analyze political, economic, and technological factors while insisting that theological conviction drove the era's defining conflicts. Particular attention falls on sola scriptura, sola fide, solus Christus, sola gratia, and soli Deo gloria as the Reformation's enduring legacy for evangelical faith.
Course Objectives
Objectives include narrating major Reformation events and figures with chronological accuracy, comparing Lutheran and Reformed doctrines of justification, sacraments, and church, evaluating the Radical Reformation's contributions and errors, and articulating why the Reformation remains essential for Protestant identity. Students will write essays on indulgences, the authority of Scripture, and confessional Protestantism with primary source support. The course cultivates gratitude for martyrs and scholars who risked everything for gospel truth. Students will explain how the Reformation shaped Bible translation, congregational singing, and pastoral ministry patterns still visible today. Assessments require fair engagement with Catholic counter-reformation arguments and Reformed responses.
Ministry & Life Application
Reformation history anchors contemporary Protestants in the gospel recovered at great cost, equipping leaders to defend biblical authority and grace against recurring works-righteousness. House church pastors in the Florida Keys stand in a lineage of believers who chose Scripture and Christ over corrupt tradition. Pastoral ministry gains courage from knowing that ordinary pastors and laypeople changed history through faithful preaching and martyrdom. This course inspires confessional clarity in worship, membership, and discipleship. Congregations thrive when elders can tell the Reformation story as their own story of God's mercy breaking through human religion to save sinners by faith alone.