Dairmaid MacCulloch on the Reformation

Dairmaid MacCulloch (whose name I now spell correctly!) has an interesting take on the theological/religious context into which the Reformation was addressed. Firstly, he stresses the importance, in Northern Europe in particular, of the doctrine of purgatory and prayers/masses for the dead. This was both an industry on a mass scale, and crucial to the inner spiritual self-conception of the whole culture. The whole bureaucracy and economy of the afterlife was written into the mentality of western Christianity. The Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith called into question, then, not only ideas but whole systems and institutions of worship and daily life.

Secondly, he notes the waxing power of the papacy in Western Europe, which itself was a fairly recent phenomenon. The conciliarist movement of the fifteenth century had only lately failed to challenge the papacy for supremacy in the Church.