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Patriarch Outfitters

The Reformation collection

Fear God. Stand and fight.

Seven reformers. One conviction. Graphic tees and an embroidered beanie for men who stand on Scripture.

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The Reformation series

Wear your conviction.

Choose your piece. Every design is made to order.

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What the collection shares

Remember the Lord. Stand your ground.

Do not be afraid of them. Remember the Lord, who is great and awesome, and fight for your brothers, your sons and your daughters, your wives and your homes.

Nehemiah 4:14

SCRIPTURE OVER ROME

Every man on this page held that the church answers to the Bible, not the Bible to the church.

TRUST GOD ALONE

Don't fear men, fear the Lord.

The tees carry Nehemiah 4:14 on the sleeve. The beanie bears SOLI DEO GLORIA: glory to God alone. Different pieces, the same conviction. The verse above is quoted from the Berean Standard Bible, public domain.

A century before Wittenberg

The fire came first.

Rome had the power to burn a man for reading the Bible in English or preaching what John Wycliffe taught, and it used that power for a hundred years before the Ninety-Five Theses. Luther walked into a fight these men had already been burned for starting.

  • Jan Hus, burned 1415

    A Czech priest and preacher in Prague, Hus took up John Wycliffe's call for reform and told Bohemia that church authorities answer to Christ and to Scripture, not the other way around. Promised safe conduct to defend himself at the Council of Constance, he was arrested instead. He offered to recant anything shown to him from Scripture to be wrong. No one showed him anything. The council convicted him of heresy and handed him to the state, which burned him alive on July 6, 1415, and scattered his ashes in the Rhine to leave no relic behind. The reform he preached outlived the river.

  • Jerome of Prague, burned 1416

    Hus's friend and fellow defender of Wycliffe's teaching, Jerome opposed the sale of indulgences and traveled to Constance while Hus sat in prison. Arrested there himself, he broke under confinement and recanted his positions. He did not stay broken. Brought before the council again, he withdrew the recantation, defended Hus and Wycliffe by name, and accepted the consequence he had briefly tried to avoid. The council burned him on May 30, 1416. His courage was not that he never wavered. It is that he came back.

  • John Badby, burned 1410

    An English tradesman and a Lollard, the movement Wycliffe's teaching produced in England, Badby held one plain conviction: the bread of Communion stays bread, and does not become the body of Christ by a priest's words. Rome called that transubstantiation denied, and heresy. Church courts tried him, Archbishop Thomas Arundel condemned him, and the crown burned him at Smithfield in 1410. Offered his life for a recantation, an ordinary working man with no university and no title chose the fire instead.

Their full stories are in Witness: Jan Hus, Jerome of Prague, and John Badby.

The Reformation

The candle stayed lit.

A hundred years after Constance the same conviction had a printing press, a German Bible, and princes willing to shelter it. Rome still burned the men it could reach. These four carried the work. One of them was burned for it.

  • Martin Luther, Worms 1521

    A German monk, pastor, and professor, Luther posted the Ninety-Five Theses in 1517 against the sale of indulgences and set off the Reformation. He taught that salvation is God's gift, received through faith in Christ alone, on the authority of Scripture alone. Ordered to recant before Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms in 1521, he gave the answer Hus had given at Constance: not unless shown from Scripture that he was wrong. Friends staged his abduction on the road home and hid him at Wartburg Castle, where he grew a beard, went by the name Junker Jörg, and translated the New Testament into German. The shirt shows him shouldering a loaded barbell over the words Under Load, Still Standing. The picture is a modern illustration and the words are ours, not his.

  • John Calvin, Geneva 1536

    A French reformer who lived from 1509 to 1564, Calvin published the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536 and spent most of the years after it preaching and teaching in Geneva. His commentaries and the Institutes put the authority of Scripture at the center of the Reformed tradition. When Mary I restored Rome in England, Protestant exiles gathered in Geneva and produced the Geneva Bible in 1560, an English Bible with study notes in the margin, made for ordinary households. Its note on Nehemiah 4:14 tells the reader to play the valiant men. The shirt carries Calvin's portrait over that note's words. They are the note's call to courage, not a quotation of Calvin.

  • Hugh Latimer, burned 1555

    Latimer had served as Bishop of Worcester and preached before two kings. Under Mary I he was tried for heresy with Nicholas Ridley, the former Bishop of London, over their convictions about Scripture and the Lord's Supper. On October 16, 1555, the two were burned together at Oxford. As the fire was lit, Latimer is reported to have told Ridley to be of good comfort and play the man, and said they would that day light a candle in England that, by God's grace, would never be put out. The shirt carries those words over his portrait.

  • James Pilkington, Durham 1561

    Pilkington left England for the Continent under Mary I and came home when Elizabeth I took the throne. She made him Bishop of Durham in 1561. He founded a free grammar school at Rivington and wrote a commentary on Nehemiah that was printed in 1585, after his death. In it he wrote that the Lord hath promised nothing to idle bellies: God had promised to defend Jerusalem's builders, and the wall still had to be raised by hand. The shirt carries those words over a deadlift, a modern picture of his call to diligence, not a scene from his life.

The century between these two sections is told in Before Luther. How the press did it, and why Rome could not burn a print run, is told in Ink against fire. The whole of Pilkington's sentence, and the book it comes from, is in what James Pilkington meant.

Wear it on the day.

Reformation Day is October 31. Every piece is printed to order, made in 2 to 5 business days, then 3 to 7 business days in transit, so order with the date in mind.

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Patriarch Outfitters tells this history from a reformed Protestant conviction. Rome was the authority that condemned these men, and nothing here is written to soften that. The dates, the charges, and the outcomes are drawn from the historical record, not from the shirts. The barbell scenes on the Luther and Pilkington shirts are modern illustrations, not events.