reformation in europe

1. Reformation in Europe
Lutheran Reformation
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2. Background:
• Corruption in Catholic Church through middle ages
• Regular calls for reforms and improvement
• Widespread dissatisfaction with many aspects of the church - at
it’s bloated bureaucracy, perceived arrogance, avarice and
abuses of power
• Pope John XII had open love affairs
• Urban VI tortured and murdered some of his cardinals
• Innocent VIII proudly acknowledged his illegitimate children and
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heaped church riches upon them
• Most efforts ended in the reformers being called heretics and
dying for their trouble
• Eventually the weight of the reformers grew strong enough to
survive and oppose catholic church
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3. Background:
• Widespread agreement that the church needed to be
reformed, to restore it to a purer and more accurate form
• There was little agreement on what should be done
• Main bar to change was the belief that the church still
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offered the only route to salvation
• What was needed for mass change was an argument that
could convince both the masses and priests
• In 1517 Martin Luther, a German Catholic priest at the
University of Wittenberg, appealed to the Pope to correct
abuses in the Roman Catholic Church; He grew angry at the
selling of indulgences and produced 95 theses
• When reforms were not forthcoming, and Luther was
excommunicated by the Pope for insubordination, religious
dissension and wars erupted in Europe, and continued
intermittently for the next 200 years.
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4. BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus
Reformation
• When reforms were not forthcoming, and Luther was
excommunicated by the Pope for insubordination, religious
dissension and wars erupted in Europe, and continued
intermittently for the next 200 years.
• By challenging the power of the Church, and asserting the
authority of individual conscience (it was increasingly possible for
people to read the bible in the language that they spoke), the
Reformation laid the foundation for the value that modern culture
places on the individual.
• When, ultimately, a religious "balance of power" emerged, the
political face of the continent had been changed.
• During this period the Catholic Church was reformed and
reorganized, and numerous "protestant" sects were separately
established. These included Lutheran, Anglican and Calvinist
denominations
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5. Church and State
• At the end of 15th century – Church was extremely powerful
and all the European states depended upon it for legitimacy
• Holy Roman Empire, Italian city-states, England, Spain and
France became powerful during the 15th century and were
looking for greater autonomy
• Reformation offered them an opportunity
• Church as an institution plagued by internal struggles
• Popes claimed temporal and spiritual power; Popes and
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Cardinals lived like kings than spiritual leaders
• Attempts to reform were not successful until Martin Luther’s
actions in the early 1500s
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6. Martin Luther
• Martin Luther was a German monk and Professor of
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Theology at the University of Wittenberg
• Luther sparked the Reformation in 1517 by posting, at least
according to tradition, his "95 Theses" on the door of the
Castle Church
• A list of statements that expressed Luther's concerns about
certain Church practices - largely the sale of indulgences
• Pope Leo X had granted indulgences to raise money for the
rebuilding of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome
• Luther was gravely concerned about the way in which
getting into heaven was connected with a financial
transaction
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7. • Luther (and other reformers) turned to the Bible as the only
reliable source of instruction (as opposed to the teachings of
the Church)
• The invention of the printing press in the middle of the 15th
century (by Gutenberg in Mainz, Germany) together with the
translation of the Bible into the vernacular languages greatly
aided the spread of Protestant movement
• When Luther and other reformers looked to the words of the
Bible, they found that many of the practices and teachings
of the Church about how we achieve salvation didn't match
Christ's teaching
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Scripture
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8. Violence
• The Reformation was a very violent period in Europe
• Northern Europe’s new religious and political freedoms
came at a great cost, with decades of rebellions, wars and
bloody persecutions
• German princes managed to fight Catholic armies to
standstill by 1555, which resulted in the Peace of Augsburg
• The Thirty Years’ War alone may have cost Germany 40
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percent of its population
• Despite the wishes and actions of some old church
governments and the Pope, Protestantism established itself
permanently in Europe
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