Fruits of Reformation
IDEAS HAVE consequences. And some of those consequences are unintended consequences.
The Protestant Reformation had massive consequences for the 16th century, in which it occurred, and in every subsequent century up to now. We live in a world in which some of its better features are products of the Reformation.
The Reformation put an end to the Medieval Ages and to much of the darkness. Martin Luther has been described as “the last medieval man and the first modern one”.
The question naturally arises as to how the ascendancy and dominance of a religion founded by one who claimed to be “the way, the truth, and the light” could have co-existed with the darkness of the age. Indeed, some would argue that it created the darkness.
An immediate consequence of the Protestant Reformation was the wars of religion, which lasted for more than 100 years, between Protestant and Catholic states. “The wars were strongly influenced by the religious change of the period and the conflict and rivalry that it produced. Nevertheless, the combatants cannot be neatly categorised by religion, nor were they divided by religion alone, and in most cases, religion was only a part of the causes of the wars.” (Wikipedia).
And they vigorously persecuted each other. Which is why freedom of conscience and freedom of religion are so important and should be strenuously preserved in modern society as the Charter of Rights and Freedoms of our Constitution, like what the United States Constitution seeks to do.
The newly invented printing press, first used by Johannes Gutenberg, by 1440, was turned to good advantage to get Protestant ideas out. At the peak of his output, Luther’s works were accounting for one-fifth of published material in Germany. The Reformation was good for printing and printing, was good for the Reformation.
VULGAR TRANSLATIONS
A stream of other technological advances would follow in the climate created by Reformation ideas. The Mediaeval Church actively discouraged access to the Bible by the common people, which was only available to scholars and clergy in the Latin Vulgate version. Luther translated the Scriptures in vigorous vulgar German. ‘Vulgar’ just means from the Latin, the language of the common people; what was generally spoken in the marketplace. Others translated into the other languages of Europe, at peril of their lives from the established Church. The famous Authorised King James version would be released in England in 1611. There were earlier English translations. More than any other book, the vulgar translations of the Bible served to standardise the languages and give them legitimacy.
With sola scriptura as their guiding light for faith and practice, the reformers wanted people, all people, to read the word of God for themselves. The Established Church wanted them not to. This called for mass literacy, mass education, including of girls. The records, which some may want suppressed, or at least ignored, are very clearly showing that for the next 300 years, well into the 20th century when secular states took fuller and more direct charge of education, Protestant states had higher levels of literacy than Catholic ones.
“James Bowen, in A History of Western Education, estimates early sixteenthcentury literacy rates in England to have been less than 1 percent; yet by the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603) ... it was getting close to 50 percent. The Reformation, then, was a major spur to education and to literacy ... Protestant countries generally had better literacy rates than Catholic ones” (Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society/Literacy)
“Before the twentieth century regions with more Protestant individuals within the same European countries did have higher literacy rates, especially among non-elites and women,