Key figures, councils, and controversies from church history, examined through the lens of Scripture and the Reformation.
Church history is the story of God preserving His church through centuries of controversy, faithfulness, failure, and reform. Understanding that history helps Christians know what has been fought for, what has been lost, and what the Reformers died to recover.
The articles in this section focus particularly on the sixteenth-century Reformation — the movement through which men like Martin Luther, John Calvin, and William Tyndale called the church back to the authority of Scripture and the gospel of grace. That recovery did not come easily. It came at great cost, and it matters to every Christian today.
History is never merely academic. The battles the Reformers fought — over justification, over the authority of Scripture, over the sufficiency of Christ — are battles every generation faces in some form. Knowing what the church has believed, and why, is part of standing firm in the faith once delivered to the saints.
The Eastern and Oriental Orthodox churches have been divided since the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD. This article examines the Christological question at the heart of the split and the deeper issue of tradition versus Scripture.
The charge that Protestants removed books from the Bible does not hold up. The reformers defended the canon affirmed by Jesus, the apostles, and the Jews. Rome added disputed books to Scripture in 1546 to defend its own traditions.
Luther, Calvin, and Cranmer all called the Pope the Antichrist. They reached that conclusion by comparing Scripture's warnings against a figure who rises inside God's church with the claims Rome was actually making.
The Reformation sought to recover biblical Christianity by restoring Scripture's authority and proclaiming salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.
Bede taught that justification comes only through faith, upheld Scripture's authority, and exalted the sufficiency of Christ's blood centuries before the Reformation.
The Council of Trent formally rejected justification by faith alone, placing Rome in conflict not only with Scripture but also with teachings found among its own saints.