ABSTRACT
Martin Luther was not the first reformer to come along, but he was the first whose words inspired a movement that reimagined the possibilities for and parameters of moral authority.1 The Lutheran challenge to the Roman Catholic Church in the early sixteenth century sparked a debate over the nature of reform that profoundly shaped religious discourse in England. Although it had not yet taken on a reformed identity, in the early 1520s the English Church was given the task of defining itself in response to Luther’s attempts to undercut an institutionalized criterion of judgment. In The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Luther did not condemn the seven sacraments per se. In fact, he did something much worse: he denied that they could be validated using scripture.2 This demand for certain proof of religious doctrine alongside his indictment of the Pope and his Curia-the authority responsible for curating religious truth and practice-opened up a new world of questioning within early modern religious culture. The implications of the Lutheran redefinition of a criterion from a normative, institutionalized one to a subjective, individualized one fundamentally changed the intellectual landscape of early modern Europe.3 Luther positioned sola fide and sola scriptura as reasonable alternatives to the tyranny of the Roman Church and the spiritual narcissism of evangelicals. Indeed, far from envisioning himself as a radical skeptic, Luther frequently attacked the infallibility of the Roman Church as the product of a willful and arbitrary interpretation of the scriptures. Over the next century this position would be adopted by the Church of England to reestablish religious authority; however, because this newly created authority lacked the claim of infallibility, the search for the best criterion for true religion resulted in doctrinal pluralism. As indivi duals and institutions generated seemingly infinite manifestations of autho rity, each stamped with its own idiosyncrasies, the dichotomy of corporate and individual authority splintered as a result of the quest to define what was necessary for salvation.
