Reformation is a free act or a repeated series of actions which are intended by the
reformer to recover, reestablish, augment, and perfect certain essential values which at one time existed in human society but which subsequently were lost or impaired by willful neglect or due to a general decline(Ladner, 1959).
While history shows that the content of the religious idea of reformation has through the ages been subjected to varying modalities, certain elements have been recurrent, if not constant. For reformation in Western thought has indeed stressed man's intentional efforts, multiple, repeated, and variegated, to reassert good old values and by personal regeneration and individual reform as well as by the restoration and improvement of community life in the Church and the world to lift man above low levels to which he has periodically fallen. If one were to take a bold look at the whole sweep of history, one might venture to conclude that in the early centuries of the Christian era renewal elements were very strong in combination with ideas of personal reformation; that in the medieval and Reformation eras reformation of the individual and of the Christian communities, regular and secular, was prominent; and that in very modern times the reform of society seems to loom large as the primary concern of religious men in the West. The religious idea of reformation has at all times been a powerful force in history. Luther, the magisterial reformer, caught the paradox implied in the religious idea of reformation.
He emphasized strongly that God “works within us” but not “without us.” Reformation is God's work, but at the same time it is man's work. To Luther the world was “the sphere of faith's works,” one of the most powerful organizing thoughts, Wilhelm Dilthey observed, that a man has ever had (Gesammelte Schriften,4th ed., Leipzig and Berlin [1940], II, 61).
