Reformed, Yet Catholic: What the Reformation Was Meant to Preserve
Reformation Day — 31 October 2026
The Rev. Dr. Ronald Moore www.virtueonline.org Nov. 1, 2026
On 31 October 1517, an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther challenged the sale of indulgences and called for a theological disputation. His Ninety-Five Theses, written in Latin, would help ignite a movement that transformed Western Christendom. Within a generation, the religious and political landscape of Europe had changed beyond recognition. Churches were divided, ancient institutions were challenged, and questions concerning Scripture, salvation, ecclesiastical authority, and the nature of the Church could no longer be avoided.
Yet more than five centuries later, we ought to ask a question that is too seldom considered: What was the Reformation actually meant to accomplish?
Was its purpose to create an entirely new Christianity, liberated from fifteen centuries of Christian history? Was it intended to discard the ancient Church, abandon the sacraments, abolish the episcopate, and replace the worship of the centuries with whatever each generation might find agreeable?
Or was its proper purpose something altogether different?
For the Anglican, particularly one who understands himself as both reformed and Catholic, the answer is of considerable importance.
The Church did not begin in 1517. Neither did the Gospel.
And any reformation worthy of the name must begin with that recognition.
The Church Before the Reformation
It is sometimes tempting, particularly in certain Protestant circles, to speak as though the Church disappeared into darkness sometime after the death of the Apostles, only to emerge again when Luther challenged Rome. Such an understanding is historically untenable and theologically dangerous.
Christ did not establish a temporary institution destined to vanish for a thousand years. He promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against His Church (Matthew 16:18). He promised to remain with His disciples always, even unto the end of the world (Matthew 28:20).
Those promises were not suspended during the Middle Ages.
The Church that existed before Luther was the same historical Church that had preserved the Scriptures, defended the doctrine of the Trinity, confessed the full divinity and humanity of Christ, and handed down the faith through successive generations.
It was the Church of Athanasius and Augustine, of the great ecumenical councils, of the ancient creeds, and of the sacramental life that had sustained Christians for centuries.
It was also a Church in need of correction.
The medieval Western Church had accumulated serious abuses. The commercialization of indulgences, corruption among portions of the clergy, the entanglement of ecclesiastical authority with political ambition, and widespread failures of pastoral responsibility demanded attention. These were not imaginary grievances manufactured by Protestant propagandists. Many faithful Christians within the Western Church had recognized and condemned such abuses long before Luther appeared.
But corruption within the Church does not mean that the Church itself has ceased to exist.
Indeed, it is precisely because the Church belongs to Christ that her failures must be confronted.
The physician does not heal a patient by declaring that the patient never existed. Neither does the Church reform herself by pretending that her history began yesterday.
Reformation Is Not Reinvention
There is a profound difference between reforming something and replacing it.
To reform is to restore what has become disordered. It is to remove corruption, correct error, and recover the proper purpose of an institution. Reformation presupposes that something valuable already exists and ought to be preserved.
Reinvention, by contrast, begins with the assumption that the old must be discarded to make room for the new.
Much of contemporary Christianity has confused the two.
We see congregations that regard Christian history as little more than an obstacle to innovation. Ancient worship is abandoned because it seems unfamiliar. Creeds are neglected because they appear restrictive. Sacraments are reduced to occasional symbols. Ecclesiastical order is treated as an unnecessary burden upon individual religious enthusiasm.
The result is not necessarily a purer Christianity. Often it is simply a Christianity increasingly detached from its own foundations.
The English Reformation, at its theological best, proceeded from a different understanding.
The Church of England did not claim to have been founded by Henry VIII, Thomas Cranmer, or Elizabeth I. Whatever the political circumstances surrounding the break with Rome, the theological claim of the reformed English Church was that it remained the historic Church in England.
Its bishops continued to occupy ancient sees. Its clergy continued to administer Baptism and the Holy Eucharist. Its worship retained the structure of the historic liturgy, even as it was translated into the language of the people. Its doctrine continued to confess the Catholic creeds.
The English reformers did not agree among themselves on every question, and some changes were unquestionably more radical than others. Nor should we romanticize the period. Political coercion, religious persecution, and the destruction of sacred art and furnishings were tragic features of the English Reformation.
Nevertheless, the enduring Anglican claim was not that a new Church had been invented.
It was that the ancient Church in England had been reformed.
That distinction matters.
Scripture and the Catholic Faith
The Reformation insisted, rightly, that the Church must be subject to the Word of God.
Article VI of the Thirty-Nine Articles declares that Holy Scripture contains all things necessary to salvation, so that nothing not found therein, nor provable thereby, may be required of any person as an article of faith necessary to salvation.
This is not a rejection of the ancient Church. It is a recognition that the Church herself stands beneath the authority of divine revelation.
The Church did not create the truth entrusted to her. She received it.
The bishops gathered at Nicaea did not invent the divinity of Christ. They defended what the Apostles had proclaimed. The Fathers did not manufacture the doctrine of the Trinity. They articulated the faith revealed in Scripture against those who would distort it.
The creeds possess authority because they faithfully confess the truth of God’s revelation, not because an ecclesiastical assembly possesses the power to manufacture new revelation.
This is an important distinction.
As Anglicans, we ought neither to dismiss the Fathers and councils as irrelevant nor to elevate every ecclesiastical pronouncement to the level of divine revelation.
The Church is the guardian and witness of the faith, not its author.
Article XX expresses the principle clearly: the Church has authority in controversies of faith, yet she may neither ordain anything contrary to God’s written Word nor require anything to be believed as necessary to salvation apart from that Word.
There is nothing inherently uncatholic about this position.
Indeed, the Church can remain faithful to her Catholic inheritance only insofar as she remains faithful to the apostolic revelation from which that inheritance proceeds.
Tradition is not the enemy of Scripture. Faithful tradition is the Church remembering what Scripture has taught her.
The difficulty arises when human customs are confused with divine commandments, or when innovation is presented as though it were apostolic doctrine.
Both errors must be resisted.
The Sacraments and the Historic Church
One of the more unfortunate consequences of the Reformation was the tendency among some Protestant movements to strip Christianity of much of its sacramental character.
The ancient Church understood that God ministers to His people through visible and tangible means.
Water is employed in Baptism. Bread and wine are consecrated in the Holy Eucharist. Hands are laid upon those ordained to sacred ministry. The sick are anointed with oil. Marriage is solemnized before God and His Church.
Christianity is not merely an intellectual agreement with certain theological propositions. It is the life of Christ communicated to His people through the ministry He established.
The Anglican tradition retained this sacramental understanding, although Anglicans have differed concerning the precise classification and number of the sacraments.
Article XXV identifies Baptism and the Supper of the Lord as the two sacraments ordained by Christ in the Gospel, while distinguishing five other commonly called sacraments from those two. This distinction need not require us to deny that God bestows grace through the other sacred rites of the Church.
Nor did the English Reformation, in its settled ecclesiastical order, abolish the historic threefold ministry of bishops, priests, and deacons.
The Preface to the Ordinal declares:
“It is evident unto all men diligently reading Holy Scripture and ancient Authors, that from the Apostles’ time there have been these Orders of Ministers in Christ’s Church; Bishops, Priests, and Deacons.”
That statement is not incidental. It expresses the conviction that the ministry of the Church is not something each generation is free to reconstruct according to its own preferences.
The historic episcopate is not merely an administrative convenience. It is a visible expression of continuity with the apostolic Church.
Certainly, the validity and fruitfulness of Christian communities beyond the historic episcopate raise questions that deserve careful theological consideration. We should not presume that Christ is absent wherever ecclesiastical order is imperfect.
But neither should we conclude that because God may work beyond the ordinary structures of His Church, those structures are therefore unnecessary.
The Church has no authority deliberately to discard what she has received from the Apostles simply because another arrangement might seem more efficient or more agreeable to the age.
The Danger of an Unfinished Reformation
There is a familiar phrase within Protestant Christianity: Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda — the Church reformed, always to be reformed.
Properly understood, the sentiment is sound. The Church, composed of sinful men and women, must continually examine herself in the light of God’s Word.
But the phrase can also be misused.
If perpetual reformation means perpetual innovation, then the Church possesses no stable doctrinal inheritance. Every generation becomes free to reconsider what previous generations received as settled Christian teaching.
We have seen the consequences.
Doctrines concerning marriage, the nature of the ordained ministry, human sexuality, and even the uniqueness of Christ are now treated in some ecclesiastical circles as matters to be revised according to contemporary cultural expectations.
Such revisions are frequently described as the Church continuing the work of the Reformation.
But reforming the Church according to Scripture is not the same as reforming Scripture according to the preferences of the Church.
The former is obedience. The latter is presumption.
There is no virtue in change merely because it is change.
A Church that abandons apostolic doctrine has not become more thoroughly reformed. She has become less faithful.
The proper question is never simply whether a particular teaching or practice is old or new.
The question is whether it is true.
And for the Christian, truth is not established by a majority vote, an ecclesiastical convention, or the prevailing opinions of society.
Truth is received from God.
Reformed, Yet Catholic
To describe Anglicanism as reformed and Catholic is not to claim a convenient compromise between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism.
It is to make a theological assertion about the nature of the Church.
We are Catholic because we confess the faith of the undivided Church, acknowledge the ancient creeds, retain the historic ministry, and worship the Triune God through the sacramental life of the Church.
We are reformed because we acknowledge that ecclesiastical institutions, however ancient, are capable of error and must be judged by the revelation of God in Holy Scripture.
These convictions need not contradict one another.
Indeed, properly understood, they belong together.
A Catholic Church that cannot be corrected has confused her own authority with the authority of God.
A reformed Church that cannot remember her Catholic inheritance has severed herself from the very history through which the faith was handed down.
The Anglican vocation, at its best, is to refuse both errors.
We do not need to choose between the Scriptures and the Fathers, between the Gospel and the sacraments, or between fidelity to Christ and continuity with His historic Church.
We need instead to understand each in its proper relationship to the others.
The Church is not ours to reinvent.
She belongs to Christ.
Her doctrine is not ours to manufacture. Her sacraments are not ours to trivialize. Her ministry is not ours to reshape without regard for apostolic order.
We are stewards of what we have received.
And stewardship demands fidelity.
What We Should Remember on Reformation Day
On this Reformation Day, we may rightly give thanks for those who challenged genuine abuses, defended the authority of Scripture, and called the Church to repentance.
But we should also remember the terrible cost of the divisions that followed.
The Reformation was not an unqualified triumph. It brought necessary corrections, but also conflict, suffering, destruction, and divisions within Western Christianity that remain unresolved.
We ought not celebrate those divisions as though Christ desired His people to be separated from one another.
Nor should we pretend that the Church before 1517 was devoid of grace, truth, or holiness.
The same Lord who preserved His Church through the persecutions of the Roman Empire, the controversies of the early councils, and the failures of medieval Christendom remains her Lord today.
The Church does not survive because her bishops are always wise, her priests always faithful, or her people always obedient.
She survives because Jesus Christ is faithful.
That is the truth which ought to govern every effort at reform.
We do not reform the Church in order to make her resemble the world.
We reform the Church so that she may more faithfully reveal Christ to the world.
We do not discard the ancient faith in pursuit of something fashionable.
We recover the ancient faith whenever human sin, error, or ambition has obscured it.
And we do not imagine that the Church began when Luther nailed his theses to a church door.
She began with Christ and His Apostles, and she will endure until He comes again.
The task entrusted to us is not to build a new Church upon the ruins of the old.
It is to remain faithful to the Church Christ established, correcting what has become corrupt, preserving what has been faithfully handed down, and proclaiming without embarrassment the Gospel once delivered to the saints.
For the Church must always be willing to repent.
But she must never forget who she is.
Reformed, yes. But always Catholic.
“Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.” — Hebrews 13:8 (KJV)
The Southern Anglican
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Happy Reformation Day (for Yesterday)!
By Joshua Bovis
Nov 01, 2026
Imagine that you had visited a church this morning because you had a heavy heart, and the reason you had a heavy heart is that you were wrestling with the question, how are sinners justified before a Holy, Righteous and Sinless God?
Imagine that you as you walk in you find a building adorned with pictures and statues of saints. And then, there was a display case with relics of dead saints; a tooth of St So and So; teeth of St So and So; splinters from the cross of Christ; hair from 13 out of 12 apostles, breast milk from the Virgin Mary; and enough nails from the cross to shoe every horse for Melbourne Cup day. And by simply looking at these sacred relics or touching them, you can win favour with God.
Imagine that when the service begins, the minister does not speak in English but conducts the service in Latin. Only the clergy and the educated (the rich) spoke Latin, so for most people who came to church it was all ‘hocus pocus’ (and by the way that term is a slang word that came from people hearing the priest say ‘Hoc est corpus’ at Eucharist, which means this is my body).
The priest is elaborately attired in vestments of various colours and spends most of the service conducting a ritual at an altar. And now and then he and everybody else, falls down to worship or pray to what is on the altar because you are taught that the world is filled with good people and bad people and that God lovingly saves the good people and angrily damns the bad people. Therefore, the only hope a person has is to essentially save themselves by doing righteous things to make themselves holy.
Imagine a church where the Bible is closed, the Bible is not read by clergy, nor understood by Clergy and it is written a in language that is hardly anyone speaks. Imagine a church were there was superstition and ignorance of the things of God and that was amongst the clergy. And to read or even own a part of the Bible in English was punishable by death. The services were in Latin,
If you lived in England 500 years ago and attended a service, that is exactly what you would have experienced.
The Bible was shut! Because it was shut, there was no discernment, people could not tell the difference between what was true and what was false.
But because of Luther and other reformers things began to change and over the course of a few decades, a revolution took place – the Bible became an open book. People began to hear the Word of God in their own language, this revolution reformed the church, and history knows this movement as The Reformation. God raised up men who read the Bible, and their eyes were opened to the errors that had riddled the church. It happened in Europe first, with people like Martin Luther, and then it came to England.
During this time, there was a new era of technology, the Printing Press had been invented. Until this time books were rare and expensive. Now books could be published on mass, cheaply, quickly, Bibles could be produced. And God raised up one man, who in God’s providence was placed in a position and a role where he could work for change in England, even though he was risking his life to do so. That man was the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury, and his name was Thomas Cranmer, who was born on the 2nd of July, 1489.
You may have never heard of Thomas Cranmer. Many people have not and perhaps many Anglican Christians have not either. He lived such a long time ago, but the battles he fought are still being fought today. The errors in which he stood against are still with us in Australia in the 21st century as they were in England in the 16th century.
Thomas Cranmer was born in a small village in Nottinghamshire. Following a tough education he studied at Cambridge University at 14 years of age. He went on to become ordained and obtained the Doctor of Divinity and lectured in Divinity at the University. At University he heard about what was happening in Europe, especially in Germany. He started reading books by Martin Luther.
In 1529 Cranmer came to the notice of King Henry VIII. The King did not like the Pope very much and because the Pope would not grant him a divorce, it was enough to make Henry reject the Roman Catholic Church. At the same time King Henry was impressed by Cranmer, and in 1533 Cranmer became the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was the last thing that Cranmer wanted. However he was now in the ideal position to work for Reform in the Church of England. Some people think that this is how the Church of England started, but in actual fact, it was the centuries old Church of England that was being reformed to see it return to genuine, biblical Christianity.
There are three blessings of the Reformation that God gave us through Cranmer.
1. The Bible in English – Cranmer clearly understood that the key to wiping away great ignorance of the things of God, and false doctrine was for the Bible to be available in the language of the people – English. It was only when the teaching of the church could be discerned, or openly tested against the Word of God that truth could be seen. And so in 1534, Cranmer began to work with others for the translation of the Bible into English. Two years later, William Tyndale was strangled and burnt at the stake under the orders of Henry for translating the Bible into English. His last words as the flames engulfed him were “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes”. That prayer was later answered. Cranmer pushed on and in 1539, the King approved the English translation of the Bible and every parish in England was given a year to buy one. It was to be chained in the church so that it couldn’t be removed and so that everyone come and read it, or hear it read.
2. Rediscovery of justification by faith alone – As Cranmer and others read the Bible for themselves, they rediscovered a doctrine that had been lost for hundreds of years, and that was justification by faith alone. What does this doctrine mean? It means that because of my sinful nature I can never be good enough to stand in the presence of a holy and righteous God. As it says in Isaiah 64:6 that our righteous acts are like filthy rags. Only by the mercy and grace of God can we ever be accounted as righteous before him, and God has chosen to do that on the basis of Jesus atoning sacrificial death on the cross. Jesus paid the penalty for the sins of all those who trust in him once for all. When a person trusts in Jesus as Lord and as Saviour, God looks at that person as if they have no sin, as they were paid for by Jesus. That is what Justification By Faith Alone Means – We are made with God solely on the basis of what Jesus has done for us. Or another way of putting it, we are saved by faith alone in Christ alone, by God’s grace alone. We need this reminder for it is our nature to think and act as if we need to bring something with us to God in order to be acceptable to him.
· God will accept me if I am good
· God will accept me if I go to church
· God will accept me if I take Holy Communion every week.
· God will accept me if I put money on plate
· God will accept me if I have been baptised
· God will accept me if I have been confirmed
· God will accept me if I…
Because there is no assurance, one hopes to be saved and hopes that one virtues outweigh their sins, it leads to either religious pride, or spiritual doubt and despair. Listen to what Luther wrote about this despair:
Though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience. I could not believe that he was placated by my satisfaction. I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners, and secretly, if not blasphemously... I was angry with God, and said, “As if, indeed, it is not enough, that miserable sinners, eternally lost through original sin, are crushed by every kind of calamity by the law...without having God add pain to pain by the gospel and also by the gospel...threatening us with his righteousness and wrath!” Thus I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience.
Luther was a tortured soul who thought that striving meant self-effort, meant being good. But…
God in his mercy and grace, enabled Martin Luther to see this, to see the reality of the gospel – that because of Jesus’ sin bearing death on the cross, a sinner is reconciled to God through faith alone in Christ alone. Here is what he said:
At last, by the mercy of God, meditating day and night... I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith. And this is the meaning: the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel... Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.
Cranmer, like his German contemporary Martin Luther rediscovered that we have nothing that God needs, that we can bring nothing to the table and that there is nothing we can do for God to accept us. It is not by our works, nor by merit, nor by religion, that God accepts us. It is by the completed work of Christ on the cross alone.
Thomas Cranmer was able to bring Martin Luther’s rediscovery of justification by faith alone in Christ alone into the heart of the Church of England. It has since spread around the world in Anglican Churches and is now the third largest Christian denomination with about 77 million members and it is largely due to The Bible being translated into Engish and into the mother tongues of non-English speaking Anglican Christians, the rediscovery of justification by faith alone in Christ alone, and the third blessing
3. The Prayer Book – From the Middle Ages, many churches were teaching that the way to be right with God was through good works, in other words we need to earn enough credit to deserve to be saved and to go to heaven when we die. And the very centre of these good works was ‘The Mass’. The Mass was understood to be a way of earning favour with God. It was seen as the best good work that anyone could do. And in the 16th century the reason people came to church was so that they could witness the miracle of the Mass – where you were told that the bread and wine actually transformed into the literal body and blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. And by offering up that real flesh and blood as a continuing sacrifice to God, you could earn the forgiveness of your sins. So the Holy Communion was thought to be an actual offering up of Christ’s body and blood again to God, someone repeating the sacrifice that Jesus made at the cross. And because people believed that the Lord Jesus was physically present in the place of the bread and wine, they would fall down and worship him and pray to him there on the altar. Thomas Cranmer rightly saw that to be the problem. The way he dealt with it was to have the Bible in English, to have sermons in Church, so for the first time in centuries you would be able to go to church and understand what was being said. And thirdly, he taught the people of England through what they were to pray. He is the man behind The Book of Common Prayer. It is for this work that Thomas Cranmer is best known and remembered. His first prayer book was published in 1549, his second in 1552 and the third in 1662.
Imagine that you had come to church this morning because you had a heavy heart, and the reason you had a heavy heart is that you were wrestling with the question, how are sinners justified before a Holy, Righteous and Sinless God?
I give thanks to God for the Reformation as because of it, we have the Bible in English and we have the rediscovery of the doctrine of salvation - we are saved by faith alone in Christ alone, by God’s grace alone and we have the Book of Common Prayer. I give thanks to God that we know the answer, that we don’t have to work our way to God, that we can have the assurance of knowing that by trusting in Christ alone, his death on the cross, of our sins being forgiven and we can respond to Luther’s Words:
Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates,
with a hearty felt resounding. Amen!
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