The Protestant Reformation was one of the most monumental and significant events in Western history. As the historian Rudolph Heinze writes, “The changes that occurred were so radical that a medieval Rip van Winkle who went to sleep in 1350 and woke up in 1650 would not recognize the world as the same one in which he was born.” Protestant Christians tend to look back at the 16th century as a kind of Golden Age in church history in which heroic figures such as Martin Luther, William Tyndale, John Calvin,and Menno Simons emerged to challenge the Roman Catholic Church’s dominance over the religious, socialand cultural life of Europe. Certainly, the Reformation was a great watershed event, and there is much about it that is cause for celebration. For the first time in over a thousand years, Europeans had an alternative to the imperial Roman Catholic Church. Not only was the Reformation movement a major grassroots reaction to corruption in the Church, but it also offered an incisive critique of many apostate doctrines and practices of Roman Catholicism by restoring the centrality of the Bible as the source of authority for doctrinal and ecclesiastical orthodoxy. As a result, within twenty years after Luther drafted his Ninety-Five Thesis, the Bible was available to most Europeans in the vernacular.

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