If you have never studied or read much about the Protestant Reformation, It would be an invaluable way for you better to understand the origins of the various strands of Protestantism that are around today, and a wonderful look at the way God has preserved the witness of the Gospel in His church. Right now I'm reading Diarmid MacCulloch's excellent The Reformation: A History. It's a hefty volume, at 864 pages, but it's excellent. I'm about two hundred pages into it so far, and I'm amazed at MacCulloch's evenhanded treatment of the events, and more importantly the ideas, of the Reformation. Unlike many secular historians today, he takes seriously the idea that people are often moved to do extraordinary things because of what they believe--not simply because of political, social, economic, or psychological factors under the guise of religious belief.
One key selection:
The old Church was immensely strong, and that strength could only have been overcome by the explosive power of an idea. The idea proved to be a new statement of Augustine's ideas on salvation. That is why there is so much description of apparently abstract thought in my account of the Reformation, and why the discussion of this abstract though sometimes has to get extremely intricate. Monarchs, priests, nuns. merchants, farmers, labourers were seized by ideas which tore through their experiences and new memories and made them behave in new ways, sometimes admirable, sometimes monstrous. Social or political history cannot do without theology in understanding the sixteenth century.
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