A Prolegomenon to Reformation

Abstract

&3 Three times in the past ten centuries faith has broken free of the shackles of institutionalized tradition and confounded the mighty and the learned by claiming to preach anew the Gospel of Apostolic Christianity. Three times in the second Christian millennium religious controversy has powerfully shaped the course of social change. The first of these great upheavals was the Gregorian reform in the second half of the eleventh century; the second was the reformation of the sixteenth century; the third is only now emerging and bids fair to be the most critical intellectual and social movement of the later twentieth century.