Protestant+Reformation+in+Europe+(1450-1688)

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Terms to know:

Reformation Martin Luther //95 Theses// Augustinians Jan Hus indulgences //Justification by Faith Alone// //Priesthood of All Believers//

Discussion Question: In what ways did the Reformation contribute to the diversification of European political thought as well as theology?

On October 31, 1519, an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther is said to have nailed a challenge to the Pope on the door of a church in Wittenburg – a challenge that is known today as the **//[|95 Theses]//**. While there is some scholarly debate about whether Luther ever actually did any nailing of documents to doors, the document in question certainly did exist, was authored by Martin Luther, and was successful in creating not only debate, but in splitting Christianity in Europe, inspiring wars and riots, and ultimately for creating, in part, the possibility of scientific revolution and globalization in the Western mode.

So what was the **Protestant Reformation**? Where did it come from, and why did it start with Luther? What effects did it have on Europe’s history? To begin with, we have to be clear that Luther was not the first to object to Church dogma, nor was he the first to vocally challenge it. Instead, Luther was at the end of a long line of challenges to the authority and veracity of Catholic Church doctrine. The period from 1400 to 1517, following the Black Plague and the Renaissance in Italy, the invention of the printing press and the end of the Crusades included much theology, not all of it favorable to the Catholic dogma of the time.

One great change under foot was an increase in interest by European elites in all of the things that gave the Church its authority – ceremony, scripture, theology, and law, to name a few. Lay (that is, not ordained into the Church) elites were in the period of the 15th century becoming wealthier, and more interested in power and position at all levels than they had been during the middle ages. This was due to a number of causes, including a loosening of patron-client bonds of the middle ages, the chartering of towns and their population with merchants, craftspeople, and professionals, the arrival of movable type printing and its use in the education of commoners, and many other factors.

As these elites became better educated, more dialed-in to the local and regional economies and power structures, they naturally sought knowledge of how those power structures worked, and were less and less interested in simple explanations. This resulted, in part, in a greater interest in scripture, theology, and doctrine in the Catholic Church.

Such knowledge inspired those who came to be able to read and understand the Bible and doctrinal documents to be critical of the ideas used by the Church as doctrine. **Jan Hus** (1370-1415), among others, disagreed with Church determinations of things as fundamental to Catholic doctrine as the possibility of the transfiguration of the wine and bread into the blood and body of Christ in the sacrament of the Eucharist and the nature of Jesus. These disagreements with the “orthodoxy” (accepted standard beliefs) of the Catholic Church were considered to be incorrect teachings by the Church, and dangerous to Christians. They were banned, and the purveyors of the ideas themselves were frequently sentenced to death for heresy – attempting to lead the faithful astray with lies.

Martin Luther, a member of the **Augustinian** monastic order, was an inheritor of these ideas. One of the most prominent of the ideas that was gaining currency in the 15th century was that Christians should have access to the scripture, and to do so, they often needed to learn to read. The Augustinians, often also known as the “Brothers of the Common Life,” took up this work. They refused to live in isolated monasteries, but instead occupied buildings in the middle of towns and villages where they could meet with, counsel, and teach lay people of the town about Christianity.

They provided such seemingly simple services as teaching the illiterate to read: no small task at a time when the vast majority of people were unable to decipher even the most basic written passages. Learning to read, people became more interested in scripture, and more interested in the theology being taught them by the Catholic Church. As they compared what they were taught with their own understanding of the scriptures, they found discrepancies, and as literacy grew, so did dissatisfaction with Catholic dogma in many areas.

One of the chief areas of dissatisfaction that **Martin Luther** concerned himself with, though not the only one, was the practice of selling **indulgences**. The Church claimed to have an inexhaustible supply of forgiveness available, and had during the Crusades provided soldiers fighting in the Holy Land with “indulgences” – essentially papal writs that excused the soldiers before the fact for any sins they might commit while at war. After the crusades ended, the wealthy and the elite began to purchase indulgences from the Church, which was only too happy to sell as this provided another revenue stream for the expensive construction of St. Peter’s Basilica, among other works. But for the devout, there was something not acceptable about the church selling prior forgiveness of sins – creating licenses for sin, it seemed, and allowing people who had the money to literally buy their way into heaven. Many of these people, Luther among them, argued that God did not make deals. At best it was unfair and unacceptable in the eyes of God. At worst, it was a form of thievery, promising salvation for money, when the Church was unable to deliver the salvation. By the early 1500’s, it was not uncommon for those who had the money to buy from the Church indulgences not for themselves, but for dead relatives who were in purgatory – to get them out of purgatory and into heaven.

When it was criticized directly for this, the Catholic Church often fell back on its claim that the Pope was the mouthpiece of God on Earth, that the Church was the guardian of the scripture, and that Church interpretation of scripture was correct and could not err. The final argument used was that those who were not ordained into the priesthood of the Church had no right to criticize those who were, since they had a special knowledge and consecrated position that made them literally different from all other people – a caste above, and so beyond the critiques of the laypeople of the time.

It took a radical thinker to solve this, as well as other problems. An Augustinian monk, Martin Luther was also a biblical scholar, and the central question that concerned him had to do with salvation for the imperfect, which dovetailed nicely with the thorny problem of indulgences. In short, he saw the position of the Church on salvation as inadequate. If sin was committed daily, and the only two ways to remove sin from one’s soul were the process of confession, absolution, and penance or the purchase of an indulgence, Luther thought that one could never fully escape one’s own sinfulness, and therefore could never achieve salvation. There had to be a different way that was possible for the average human being.

Luther claimed that this third way was embodied in two ideas that he put forth. First, that since Christ had died on the cross for so that all humans could have their sins forgiven, one did not need the extra step of Church absolution, but could, if one had faith, accept the fact of forgiveness without any confession, absolution, etc. In a sense, by having faith in the act of suffering and forgiveness made by Christ on the Cross, one already had sins forgiven. This is known as **//Justification by Faith Alone//**. Luther combined with this idea his answer to a key question – if one were mortally injured and dying in a place where access to a Catholic priest were impossible, and so there was no one there to perform the last rights, could one perform them for oneself? Arguing that God would never let such a situation get in the way of salvation, Luther claimed the answer was yes. He went further and claimed that the implications of this were that each individual had a direct connection to God, and thus that the ordination of priests in the Catholic Church was essentially meaningless. All people could talk to God (a revolutionary idea) and all people could act as their own priests.

These two ideas combined with Luther’s audacity in challenging the Church to a debate on his 95 complaints created a firestorm. But the ideas arrived at a particularly critical time in European history, as well, in which the spark of religious dissent could be fanned into flames of political and economic resistance to a status quo with which few, if any, were satisfied. Luther’s ideas that one had a direct connection to God, and that one could be one’s own priest had huge secular implications. It removed the need for the Catholic Church’s approval of any political or individual acts, and instead made ethics and morality a personal choice whose eternal implications were between the actor and God. This meant that where, for example, the Catholic Church had held a monopoly on confirmation of the power of a ruler based on its ability to guarantee or remove God’s support, now, after 1517, it was possible for a ruler to claim the moral and spiritual support of God for him- or herself.

Since Luther’s **//Priesthood of All Believers//** also undermined the idea that the Church had any better knowledge of God’s intentions than lay believers, it also became possible for lay people to criticize the Church and its doctrines. In his famous //[|Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation]// Luther made it clear that it was not only possible to be critical of Church policies, but that lay people had a duty to examine Church doctrine for flaws and point them out, for the good of all Christians. The Pope, he claimed, was no more than a man with an important title, and the church nothing more than the repository (not the sole interpreter) of the scripture, and so both had to be kept on the straight and narrow by everyone who believed.

This amounted to encouragement of the nobility to reject the authority of the Catholic Church, and many accepted the challenge, claiming their right to rule was based on God’s wishes, not those of the Church, and taking the opportunity to assert authority, power, and control over territory that they had never previously had. Since the Church was no longer for many a final arbiter in such political matters, often disputes about political authority and control of territory had to be settled by violence.

Many German princes also began to confiscate Church lands, which had always been free from taxation, and to collect the rents from those lands for themselves, depriving the Church of a large source of income, and increasing their own authority and income simultaneously. Others, including the Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperor, defended the Church, and attempted both to find, try, and execute Luther (who was under the protection of several of the German nobles rejecting Catholic doctrine) and to extirpate the new movement away from the Catholic Church, often through treating it as a heresy and killing its adherents.

In return, the nobles who had decided to reject Catholic dogma, most for political and economic reasons, formed a group and called themselves “protestants” – meaning those who protest.

Both sides ranged against each other by 1521, the year that Martin Luther was excommunicated from the Church and forced to both go into hiding, and create from scratch a Church that followed his principles of primacy of scripture, justification by faith, and the priesthood of all believers. This new Church, for which Luther wrote the liturgy, much of the earliest music, and provided the doctrine, came to be known as the “Lutheran” church, and was the first of the Protestant churches in history. It was quickly followed by others, however, and many of those were not directly in line with Luther’s theology, but differed from it in significant ways. The only connection they had, in fact, was that Luther’s success in breaking from the Catholic Church had opened the playing field. Where in the past it had been possible only to be Catholic if one was Christian (and illegal to be anything else except Jewish, in Europe) now it was possible to profess any number of different beliefs. It was this heterodoxy – the lack of uniform Christian belief – that made most devout and loyal Catholics shudder. Catholic orthodoxy had, since 325, existed in part on the foundational concept that there was one correct understanding of Jesus, God, and the scripture, that to vary from that orthodox understanding was to believe in a lie, and thus to be led by the devil outside of Christian correctness and into a life of lies, sinfulness, and ultimate damnation – and that this was possible while believing that one was Christian and good, without the guiding hand of the Church and its orthodox dogma to keep faith in line. The Catholic Church, and most of those who were still loyal to it (still by far the majority of Christians in Europe, in 1600 about 2/3 of Europeans remained devoutly Catholic), came to regard Protestants as heterodox – heretics who spread lies and tempted good people into damnation. For the Church and its defenders, these people had to be returned to orthodoxy, or destroyed to prevent them from spreading the lie.

For devout Protestants passions ran equally high. They saw Catholic orthodoxy as an abuse of the scripture to acquire worldly power and wealth in the name of God, and thus for them, Catholics were the heretics spreading the lies, and they felt that Catholicism needed to be erased from the face of the Earth.

With such ideas in the air, and with powerful, wealthy princes and kings ranged against each other on both sides of the debate, some for religious, but most for political reasons (many had been confirmed in their power by the Church, and thus remained loyal to the Church for the simple reason that its dogma provided the legitimacy for their rule, and hence for their ability to take taxes, to make law, and to engage in state functions such as diplomacy and war. Others who had been left out by the church in this power structure wanted to claim legitimacy themselves, and saw the first step as removing the old legitimation machine, the Church, through Luther’s ideas), and the fight was on for more than a century.

__Bibliography__:

Briggs, Robin. //Early Modern France, 1560-1715// (second edition). Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Burke, James. //The Day the Universe Changed//. Boston, Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1985.

Dunn, Richard S.. //The Age of Religious Wars, 1559-1715//. New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979, 1970. back to Hist 152 page