The Protestant Reformation
Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation
Throughout the Middle Ages, Europe was unified by its common culture centered around the Roman Catholic Church. The word Catholic means universal, and the Roman Catholic Church considered itself the only true church, and expected to extend its reach throughout the world. The Reformation that polarized Europe in the sixteenth century also marks the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern age, in the opinion of Diarmaid MacCulloch, who also states that it is a Protestant myth that the Catholic church was at the point of collapse when the Protestant reformation came along; the Church was still a potent force, and, for the most part, satisfied the spiritual needs of the European peoples.
Martin Luther ( November 10, 1483- February 18, 1546) was an Augustinian monk, priest, author, composer, and professor of theology, who lived in Germany. Luther was disgusted with the state of the Roman Catholic Church, and especially with the power of the Popes who, in his estimation, were so corrupt that they represented the Antichrist, and that the Roman Catholic Church was the Whore of Babylon described in the Book of Revelation
Luther was particularly upset about the sale of indulgences, which the Pope used to finance his wars. An indulgence reduced the time that a dead sinner had to spend in Purgatory, the half-way house between Earth and Heaven. The idea of the papal indulgence was that the saints had earned extra credits that they didn’t need, and so the Pope felt entitled to pass them out to sinners who needed them—for a price (exactly how carbon credits work today!). Sin created a debt to pay, and penances were how this debt was to be paid. An indulgence was meant to be earned through sincere repentance, which would lead to a desire to do good works, not purchased with money. Luther was convinced that the people were being cheated out of salvation by a pope who sold false promises; only God had the power to forgive and to grant salvation, and good works, prayers to saints, prayers for the dead, pilgrimages, and donations of money, had no power to influence God’s decisions. Faith alone, and a profound sense of our own unworthiness, said Luther, was the only path to salvation. We are all equally priests through baptism, he said, and priests have no special powers of intercession.
Luther didn’t want to start a new church: he always considered himself a Catholic. He wanted to return the Church to the simplicity of the early Church, as it was in the time of Saint Paul and Saint Augustine. Luther wanted to strip away all the pomp and ceremony, and all the doctrine and practices that has no basis in the Bible, including transubstantiation, the belief that the communion bread and wine actually became the body and blood of Christ as a result of the priests’ invocation. Luther also believed, like St. Augustine, that only the “Elect” were to be saved. Luther believed in salvation by faith alone; good works would count for nothing. No one could know if he or she was of the Elect, but all Christians had the duty to obey God’s law.
Luther was also convinced that the end times were near, the main reason why his movement had such urgency. There was no time to lose, and the Catholic Church, in his view, was holding everyone back. Luther’s anti-Semitism, so dismaying today, stemmed from his frustration that the Jews wouldn’t convert, a necessary condition for the Millenium and the Second Coming of Christ.
Luther’s reformation was only one of several reformation movements in that era; there had been earlier attempts to reform the Church. The Roman Catholic Church itself, in the face of the Protestant movement, initiated its own counter-reformation. But Luther is associated with the Protestant movement that swept through Europe and changed history. Ordinary people felt empowered to rebel against unjust authority, and perhaps the seeds of later revolutionary politics were sown then.
The Protestant movement soon splintered off into numerous sects that disagreed with each other on various points of theology and practice, which would have a profound effect on religion in America. In the seventeenth century, theologian John Calvin developed a theology that modified Luther's and became a sect of reformed Protestantism that the Puritans in England adopted, and which was carried over to America to early settlements such as New Haven.
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For further reading, see:
Roland H. Bainton. The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, enlarged edition. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985).
Peter Marshall. The Reformation: A Very Short Introduction. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Diarmaid MacCulloch. All Things Made New: The Reformation and its Legacy. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Also see the Wikipedia article on Martin Luther, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther
As Diarmaid MacCulloch states in All Things Made New "...we will not understand the Christianity we find in modern Europe and America without travelling back in time to the Reformation." Here's a link to an article on how American Christian millenialist beliefs dating back to the Reformation affect U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East today:
https://www.vox.com/videos/2020/2/12/21135110/bible-evangelical-christian-trump-foreign-policy
And here's another link to a Rolling Stone article on how Donald Trump's political agends caters to fundamentalist Christians who think that he will bring on the Millenium: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/donald-trump-christians-fundamentalists-end-times-rapture-1083131/