Persecution of the Early Church

Persecution of the Early Church

Martin Luther

The Reformation

Humanism and Learning

Religion and Leadership

Social Changes: The Catholic Church

Changing History

The Persecution of the Early Church

The modern age began to develop around the start of the 16th century. This was largely because society began to develop its initial modern practices during this time. Many things throughout this time had a large impact on the world, and still affect us today. Three things, however, can be singled out as being most important. The American Revolution, the founding of America by Christopher Columbus, and the reformation of the Catholic Church were all instrumental in affecting our world.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Catholic Church in Europe, modeled upon the bureaucratic structure of the Holy Roman Empire, became excessively powerful, but internally corrupt. From the twelfth century onward, there had been calls for a reform. The clergy was unable to live according to the church rules, and the abuse of church practices and principles continued. The western Christendom was immersed in excessive wealth and great privileges, and the corruptive practices of the clergy included, among others, selling indulgences and collecting tithes.

The papacy had become vulnerable to attack because of the greed, immorality, and ignorance of many of its officials in all ranks of the hierarchy. Vast tax-free church possessions, being estimated according to various sources as much as one-fifth to one-third of the lands of Europe, incited the envy and resentment of the land peasantry, ordinary people, and gentry as well. The so-called Babylonian Captivity of popes at Avignon in the 14th century and the Western Schism weakened the authority of the church and divided its supporters into partisans of one or another pope. Church officials recognized the need for reform. Ambitious programs for the reorganization of the entire hierarchy were debated at the Council of Constance from 1414 to 1418, but no program gained the support of a majority, and no radical changes were incorporated at that time.

Martin Luther

Eventually, a man by the name of Martin Luther began to question some of the Roman Catholic ideals in his church. He was not intentionally trying to start his own brand of Christianity or necessarily get rid of the Catholic Church. He was, however, concerned about some of the things that the church was doing, and concerned that much of what the church believed in did not actually fit with the scriptures. He found the Catholic Church to be corrupt, and through speaking out and doing a great deal of things that brought him extreme amounts of persecution, he began a movement toward Protestant Christianity.

Such a situation provoked the most crucial consequences in the form of opposition. As in response to the abuses, in 1517, a German Augustinian friar named Martin Luther (1483-1546) posted a list of grievances, known as the "Ninety-Five Theses," against the Roman Catholic Church. At the heart of Martin Luther's argument was the belief that Christian salvation through personal piety requires a sense of contrition for sins and trust in God's mercy. Attending church, pilgrimages, fasting, and charity alone are not the conditions of salvation.

Those Christians today who call themselves Lutherans are followers of Martin Luther. Christianity, at least on the Protestant side, is divided still further. There are Lutherans, Baptists, Methodists, non-denominational, and many others who call themselves Christians. In general, all of their basic beliefs are the same. They worship the same God, and they believe in salvation through Jesus Christ, his only son.

The theses challenged the practice of selling indulgences not only as a corrupt practice, but also as a theologically unsound practice. Luther attacked numerous aspects of established Roman Catholicism, for example, clerical power, celibacy, the use of Latin in church worship, and eventually papal power. Thus the Reformation movement started. As the spirit of reform was spreading, other leaders appeared: Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531) in Switzerland, French-born John Calvin (1509-1564) settled in Geneva, and John Knox (1505-1572) who carried Calvin's teachings to Scotland.

The Reformation

Reformation, as a great religious revolution in the Christian church, ended the ecclesiastical supremacy of the pope in Western Christendom and resulted in the establishment of the Protestant churches. With the Renaissance that preceded and the French Revolution that followed, the Reformation completely changed the medieval way of life in Western Europe and initiated the era of modern history. Although the movement dates from the early 16th century, when Martin Luther first defied the authority of the church, the conditions that led to his revolution had existed for hundreds of years and had complex doctrinal, political, economic, and cultural elements.

From the revival of the Holy Roman Empire by Otto I in 962, popes and emperors had been engaged in a continuous contest for supremacy. This conflict had generally resulted in the victory of the papal side and "created antagonism between Rome and the German Empire." This antagonism increased in the 14th and 15th centuries by the further development of German nationalist sentiment. Resentment against papal taxation and against submission to ecclesiastical officials of the foreign papacy existed also in other countries of Europe.

In England, the beginning of the movement toward independence from papal jurisdiction was the enactment of the statutes of Mortmain in 1279, Provisors in 1351, and Praemunire in 1393. Those documents greatly reduced the power of the church to withdraw land from the control of the civil government, to make appointments to ecclesiastical offices, and to use judicial authority. The 14th-century English reformer John Wycliff (1320-1384) attacked the papacy itself, criticizing the sale of indulgences, pilgrimages, the excessive veneration of saints, and the moral and intellectual standards of priests. In order to reach the common people, he translated the Bible into English and delivered sermons in English instead of Latin. His teachings spread to Bohemia, where they found an advocate in the religious reformer Jan Hus (John Huss 1372-1415). The execution of Huss as a heretic in 1415 led directly to the Hussite Wars, a violent expression of Bohemian nationalism, suppressed with difficulty by the cooperating forces of the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund and the Pope Martin V. "The wars were a precursor of religious civil war in Germany in Luther's time."

Humanism and Learning

Humanism and the focus on classical learning and speculative studies, beginning in Italy during the early Renaissance, displaced scholasticism as the leading philosophy of Western Europe and brought to an end the church leaders' monopoly of learning. Lay persons studied ancient literature, and scholars such as the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla (1405-1457) critically estimated translations of the Bible and other documents that formed the basis for much of church dogma and tradition.

The invention of portable printing greatly increased the circulation of books and spread new ideas throughout Europe. Humanists such as Desiderius Erasmus (1469-1536) in the Netherlands, John Colet (1467-1519) in England, Johann Reuchlin (1455-1522) in Germany, and Jacques Lefevre d'etaples (1450-1537) in France, applied the new learning concerning church practices and the development of a more accurate knowledge of the Scriptures. Their scholarly studies laid the basis on which Luther, Calvin, and other reformers began to claim the Bible rather than the church as the source of religious authority. Such a situation could not be accepted by the Pope Leo X (1475-1521), Luther's contemporary. The papal authorities ordered Luther to retract and submit to church authority.

Nevertheless, he became more intransigent, appealing for reform, attacking the sacramental system, and underlining the importance of individual faith based on the guidance contained in the Bible. Threatened with excommunication by the pope, Luther publicly burned the bull. This act of defiance symbolized a definite break with the entire system of the Western church. In an attempt to stop the tide of revolt, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1500-1558), and the German princes assembled in 1521 at the Diet of Worms, and ordered Luther to recant. He refused and was declared an outlaw. For almost a year he remained in hiding, writing pamphlets explaining his principles and translating the New Testament into German. Although his writings were prohibited by imperial edict, they were openly sold and were powerful instruments in turning the great German cities into "centers of Lutheranism."

The reform movement provoked tremendous reaction among the people, and Luther on the days of retirement returned to his home at Wittenberg as a revolutionary leader. Germany had become sharply divided along religious and economic lines. Those most interested in preserving the traditional order, including the emperor, most of the princes, and the higher clergy, supported the Roman Catholic church. Lutheranism was supported by the north German princes, the lower clergy, the commercial classes, and large sections of the peasantry, who welcomed the changes as an opportunity for greater independence in both the religious and economic spheres.

Religion and Leadership

Henry VIII, one of the most significant historical figures, did many things before his death that did not involve his wives. In 1533 he had a bill passed in Parliament that declared him head of the Church in England and cut off English bishops from their communion with Rome. However, Henry VIII was still insistent at that time on Catholicism in everything except loyalty to the Pope. The Pope had named Henry VIII a Defender of the Faith for the opposition that Henry had to Martin Luther, and Henry's theology did not change any because of his rejection of the authority of the Pope.

Thomas Cranmer and some or the other leaders of the Church, however, decided that there was a need to reform what they considered to be the heresies that had developed. Especially important to them were a liturgy and a Bible that was printed in English. In addition to this, they also wanted to do away with some of the beliefs and practices that the Catholic Church had and that they believed did not fit in with Scripture, such as veneration of saints, celibacy for the clergy, and Purgatory. Their desire by accomplishing these things was to return to the idea that everything that was necessary for salvation was contained within the pages of the Bible.

There was a serious clash at that time between John Stokesley, who was the bishop of London between 1530 and 1535, and Thomas Cromwell, who was the lead councilor to Henry VIII. This clash mirrored the clash that was taking place between the Church and the state. Stokesley, was a strong opponent of the idea of Lutheranism, and Cromwell was urging Henry VIII to look at the Lutheran principles of Germany because he felt that England could have some strong allies there. Stokesley used the pulpit to protect the diocese from what he saw as religious extremes, and Cromwell was then forced to rely on other men that had dubious orthodoxy when it came to religion.

Social Changes: The Catholic Church

As for the social changes taking place during the 16th century, "the reformation of the Catholic Church was without a doubt the most important." The Catholic Church had long held much power over the people of England. Many of the people who came to the New World came to escape the Catholic Church and its strict ways. Many people felt that the Catholic Church was very abusive to the people of England, and because they spoke out about it they were persecuted in their home country. They began a religion on their own terms. This was not fundamentally different from the Catholic religion, as they still believed in the same version of God. However, it was very similar to what people such as Martin Luther had done in making sure that the Catholic Church was questioned when it began to make rules that belonged only to the church and not to the Bible.

Originally, the Protestant Reformation worked to divide Christians in Europe into two separate groups. There were many arguments about how things should be done in various religions and whether the Catholic church was doing things properly. Because of this, individuals such as John Calvin and Martin Luther spearheaded the ideas for change that not only changed the countries that they were in but changed the world as well. This created new denominations of Christianity and as these progressed still further sub-denominations of these denominations became apparent.

For example, those who follow Martin Luther consider themselves Lutherans but in America there are three separate and distinct subgroups of the Lutheran Church. One is extremely particular in sticking to religious doctrine and other issues, one is very relaxed in the attitude that it takes toward issues such as homosexuality and women preachers, and the other congregations or sub-denomination falls somewhere in the middle of these things. There is no way to determine which one of these groups is necessarily right or wrong, as it all depends on one's perception.

However, without Protestant Reformation, including individuals such as Martin Luther and Henry VIII, none of these individuals would have evolved in the same way that they have. That is not to say that there would not have eventually been individuals who broke away from Catholicism and chose a different path. However, the way that this occurred had much to do with both the social and the political aspects of America as "it evolved from a small group of colonial settlers into the almost 300 million people that it houses today," and the evolution of England, as well.

Religion continues to change as well, as there have now been openly homosexual individuals accepted not only into churches but even into the ministry in some areas. Women stand at pulpits in many churches across the world while other churches do not even allow women to speak out or perform any of the scriptural readings that many churches have at their services. It is clear that, although individuals now have a choice other than Catholicism, there are often so many choices between various churches and denominations that it is difficult to determine which one is right in the sense of biblical ideals. Many of these churches have similar ideas to each other but there are also radical differences, sometimes even within a particular denomination.