The Protestant Reformation and the breaking of Western Christendom: From Luther's Protest to a Confessional Europe, AD 1517-1600

Between 1517 and 1600, Western Christianity ceased to function as a single Latin ecclesiastical system and became a permanently plural confessional landscape. This chapter reconstructs that rupture from late medieval reform pressures through Luther's indulgence controversy, his conflict with papal and imperial authority, the consolidation of Lutheran churches, the Swiss and Reformed movements, the Radical Reformation, the English Reformation, and the Catholic renewal centered on the Council of Trent. It argues that the Reformation was neither a simple liberation from a uniformly corrupt medieval church nor one unified Protestant replacement for Rome. Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, and Anabaptist trajectories developed distinct accounts of Scripture, justification, baptism, the Lord's Supper, ministry, discipline, and relations with civil power, while Roman Catholicism underwent substantial moral, educational, institutional, and confessional reform. The chapter also examines attempted reunion at Regensburg, the Roman Inquisition and Index, confessional violence, vernacular Scripture, printing, education, women, everyday religious life, and the extension of Western confessional change into Africa and the wider world. Primary confessional sources are read alongside modern scholarship so that each tradition is represented on its own terms before theological evaluation. Genealogically, the century produced durable Lutheran, Reformed and Presbyterian, Anglican, and Anabaptist families while consolidating a distinctly Tridentine Roman Catholic trajectory. A Sola Scriptura assessment affirms the recovery of Scripture's final normativity and justification grounded in Christ while testing every Catholic and Protestant development, including sacramental systems, baptismal practice, papal claims, coercive church-state arrangements, predestinarian formulations, and confessional persecution, by the apostolic Word.

Keywords: Protestant Reformation; Martin Luther; Lutheranism; Reformed Christianity; Anabaptism; Anglicanism; Council of Trent; Sola Scriptura