Start of the Reformation

There is a case to be made for dating the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation not to the ninety-five theses on indulgences of October 1517, but to Luther's ninety-seven theses against scholastic theology of a month earlier. As invitations to academic debate, both sets of theses met with a resounding silence, though the indulgence theses caught the popular imagination rather better.

 

David Bagchi, "Sic et Non: Luther and Scholasticism" in Carl Trueman and R. Scott Clark, eds., Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2006), 3