essay on the protestant reformation

The Protestant Reformation

The Protestant Reformation that began with Martin Luther in 1517 played a key role in the development of the North American colonies and the eventual United States.

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Religion, Social Studies, Civics, U.S. History, World History

Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms 1521

Martin Luther, a German teacher and a monk, brought about the Protestant Reformation when he challenged the Catholic Church's teachings starting in 1517.

Photograph of painting by World History Archive/Alamy Stock Photo

The Protestant Reformation was a religious reform movement that swept through Europe in the 1500s. It resulted in the creation of a branch of Christianity called Protestantism , a name used collectively to refer to the many religious groups that separated from the Roman Catholic Church due to differences in doctrine . The Protestant Reformation began in Wittenberg, Germany, on October 31, 1517, when Martin Luther, a teacher and a monk, published a document he called Disputation on the Power of Indulgences , or 95 Theses . The document was a series of 95 ideas about Christianity that he invited people to debate with him. These ideas were controversial because they directly contradicted the Catholic Church 's teachings. Luther's statements challenged the Catholic Church 's role as intermediary between people and God, specifically when it came to the indulgence system, which in part allowed people to purchase a certificate of pardon for the punishment of their sins. Luther argued against the practice of buying or earning forgiveness, believing instead that salvation is a gift God gives to those who have faith. Luther's objections to the indulgence system paved the way for other challenges to the Catholic doctrine throughout Europe. For example, John Calvin in France and Huldrych Zwingli in Switzerland proposed new ideas about the practice of Holy Communion, and a group called Anabaptists rejected the idea that infants should be baptized in favor of the notion that baptism was reserved for adult Christians. Broadly speaking, most of the challenges to the Catholic Church revolved around the notion that individual believers should be less dependent on the Catholic Church , and its pope and priests, for spiritual guidance and salvation. Instead, Protestants believed people should be independent in their relationship with God, taking personal responsibility for their faith and referring directly to the Bible, the Christian holy book, for spiritual wisdom. Protestant reform in England began with Henry VIII in 1534 because the Pope would not grant him a marriage annulment. Subsequently, King Henry rejected the Pope's authority, instead creating and assuming authority over the Church of England, a sort of hybrid church that combined some Catholic doctrine and some Protestant ideals. Over the next 20 years, there was religious turbulence in England as Queen Mary (1553–1558) reinstated Catholicism in England while persecuting and exiling Protestants , only to have Queen Elizabeth I and her Parliament attempt to lead the country back toward Protestantism during her reign (1558–1603). Some English citizens did not believe Queen Elizabeth's efforts to restore England to Protestantism went far enough. These citizens fell into two groups, both labeled Puritans by their opponents. The first group, known as separatists , believed the Church of England was so corrupt that their only choice was to leave England, separate from the church , and start a new church . They called this the English Separatist Church . Around 1607 or 1609, some of the separatists tried to start the new lives they imagined in Holland, in the Netherlands. Ultimately, the endeavor failed due to poverty and the sense that the children were assimilating too much into Dutch culture, so many of the separatists returned to England. By 1620, members of the English Separatist Church were ready for a second try at establishing a new life and church . Those who set sail aboard the Mayflower for New England and eventually landed near Plymouth, Massachusetts, would, in time, become known as the Pilgrims . The other group of English citizens who did not believe Queen Elizabeth's reform efforts went far enough were called non separatists ; over time, the term " Puritan " would become synonymous with the non separatists . They did not seek to leave the Church of England; they wanted only to reform it by eliminating the remnants of Catholicism that remained. In terms of theology, most of them were Calvinists. Although they did not desire to separate from the Church of England, some Puritans saw emigrating to New England as their best chance at true reform of the church and freedom to worship as they chose. In 1630, a decade after the Pilgrims embarked on a similar journey for similar reasons, the first Puritans traveled to the New World and established the Massachusetts Bay Colony in Boston, Massachusetts. Though the separatists and non separatists disagreed about whether to sever ties to the Church of England, both groups of early North American colonists shared a dissatisfaction with the church and a mindset that they were free to establish a church more in alignment with their spiritual views. Perhaps predictably, this freedom to practice religion according to one's beliefs led to the creation of countless different churches , denominations , and doctrines in the colonies. Equally predictable, throughout history this diversity has led to disagreements. However, this diversity of religious thought has also become a core part of the identity of the United States: The Bill of Rights explicitly forbids "establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Over 400 years in the making, this belief in personal empowerment and independence in religious matters, with its roots in the Protestant Reformation , has become an enduring part of the American mindset.

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Unleashed in the early sixteenth century, the Reformation put an abrupt end to the relative unity that had existed for the previous thousand years in Western Christendom under the Roman Catholic Church . The Reformation, which began in Germany but spread quickly throughout Europe, was initiated in response to the growing sense of corruption and administrative abuse in the church. It expressed an alternate vision of Christian practice, and led to the creation and rise of Protestantism, with all its individual branches. Images, especially, became effective tools for disseminating negative portrayals of the church ( 53.677.5 ), and for popularizing Reformation ideas; art, in turn, was revolutionized by the movement.

Though rooted in a broad dissatisfaction with the church, the birth of the Reformation can be traced to the protests of one man, the German Augustinian monk Martin Luther (1483–1546) ( 20.64.21 ; 55.220.2 ). In 1517, he nailed to a church door in Wittenberg, Saxony, a manifesto listing ninety-five arguments, or Theses, against the use and abuse of indulgences, which were official pardons for sins granted after guilt had been forgiven through penance. Particularly objectionable to the reformers was the selling of indulgences, which essentially allowed sinners to buy their way into heaven, and which, from the beginning of the sixteenth century, had become common practice. But, more fundamentally, Luther questioned basic tenets of the Roman Church, including the clergy’s exclusive right to grant salvation. He believed human salvation depended on individual faith, not on clerical mediation, and conceived of the Bible as the ultimate and sole source of Christian truth. He also advocated the abolition of monasteries and criticized the church’s materialistic use of art. Luther was excommunicated in 1520, but was granted protection by the elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise (r. 1483–1525) ( 46.179.1 ), and given safe conduct to the Imperial Diet in Worms and then asylum in Wartburg.

The movement Luther initiated spread and grew in popularity—especially in Northern Europe, though reaction to the protests against the church varied from country to country. In 1529, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V tried, for the most part unsuccessfully, to stamp out dissension among German Catholics. Elector John the Constant (r. 1525–32) ( 46.179.2 ), Frederick’s brother and successor, was actively hostile to the emperor and one of the fiercest defenders of Protestantism. By the middle of the century, most of north and west Germany had become Protestant. King Henry VIII of England (r. 1509–47), who had been a steadfast Catholic, broke with the church over the pope’s refusal to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the first of Henry’s six wives. With the Act of Supremacy in 1534, Henry was made head of the Church of England, a title that would be shared by all future kings. John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536) codified the doctrines of the new faith, becoming the basis for Presbyterianism. In the moderate camp, Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (ca. 1466–1536), though an opponent of the Reformation, remained committed to the reconciliation of Catholics and Protestants—an ideal that would be at least partially realized in 1555 with the Religious Peace of Augsburg, a ruling by the Diet of the Holy Roman Empire granting freedom of worship to Protestants.

With recognition of the reformers’ criticism and acceptance of their ideology, Protestants were able to put their beliefs on display in art ( 17.190.13–15 ). Artists sympathetic to the movement developed a new repertoire of subjects, or adapted traditional ones, to reflect and emphasize Protestant ideals and teaching ( 1982.60.35 ;  1982.60.36 ;  71.155 ;  1975.1.1915 ). More broadly, the balance of power gradually shifted from religious to secular authorities in western Europe, initiating a decline of Christian imagery in the Protestant Church. Meanwhile, the Roman Church mounted the Counter-Reformation, through which it denounced Lutheranism and reaffirmed Catholic doctrine. In Italy and Spain, the Counter-Reformation had an immense impact on the visual arts; while in the North , the sound made by the nails driven through Luther’s manifesto continued to reverberate.

Wisse, Jacob. “The Reformation.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/refo/hd_refo.htm (October 2002)

Further Reading

Coulton, G. G. Art and the Reformation . 2d ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953.

Koerner, Joseph Leo. The Reformation of the Image . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Additional Essays by Jacob Wisse

• Wisse, Jacob. “ Northern Mannerism in the Early Sixteenth Century .” (October 2002)
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Europe 1300 - 1800

Course: europe 1300 - 1800   >   unit 8, the protestant reformation.

• Introduction to the Protestant Reformation: Setting the stage
• Introduction to the Protestant Reformation: Martin Luther
• Introduction to the Protestant Reformation: The Counter-Reformation
• Introduction to the Protestant Reformation: Varieties of Protestantism
• The Council of Trent and the call to reform art
• Iconoclasm in the Netherlands in the Sixteenth Century

A challenge to the Church in Rome

The church and the state, martin luther, indulgences, faith alone, scripture alone, the counter-reformation, the council of trent.

Selected Outcomes of the Council of Trent:

The Council denied the Lutheran idea of justification by faith. They affirmed, in other words, their Doctrine of Merit, which allows human beings to redeem themselves through Good Works, and through the sacraments.

They affirmed the existence of purgatory and the usefulness of prayer and indulgences in shortening a person's stay in purgatory.

They reaffirmed the belief in transubstantiation and the importance of all seven sacraments.

They reaffirmed the authority of both scripture the teachings and traditions of the Church.

They reaffirmed the necessity and correctness of religious art (see below).

The Council of Trent on religious art

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How Martin Luther Changed the World

By Joan Acocella

Clang! Clang! Down the corridors of religious history we hear this sound: Martin Luther, an energetic thirty-three-year-old Augustinian friar, hammering his Ninety-five Theses to the doors of the Castle Church of Wittenberg, in Saxony, and thus, eventually, splitting the thousand-year-old Roman Catholic Church into two churches—one loyal to the Pope in Rome, the other protesting against the Pope’s rule and soon, in fact, calling itself Protestant. This month marks the five-hundredth anniversary of Luther’s famous action. Accordingly, a number of books have come out, reconsidering the man and his influence. They differ on many points, but something that most of them agree on is that the hammering episode, so satisfying symbolically—loud, metallic, violent—never occurred. Not only were there no eyewitnesses; Luther himself, ordinarily an enthusiastic self-dramatizer, was vague on what had happened. He remembered drawing up a list of ninety-five theses around the date in question, but, as for what he did with it, all he was sure of was that he sent it to the local archbishop. Furthermore, the theses were not, as is often imagined, a set of non-negotiable demands about how the Church should reform itself in accordance with Brother Martin’s standards. Rather, like all “theses” in those days, they were points to be thrashed out in public disputations, in the manner of the ecclesiastical scholars of the twelfth century or, for that matter, the debate clubs of tradition-minded universities in our own time.

If the Ninety-five Theses sprouted a myth, that is no surprise. Luther was one of those figures who touched off something much larger than himself; namely, the Reformation—the sundering of the Church and a fundamental revision of its theology. Once he had divided the Church, it could not be healed. His reforms survived to breed other reforms, many of which he disapproved of. His church splintered and splintered. To tote up the Protestant denominations discussed in Alec Ryrie’s new book, “ Protestants ” (Viking), is almost comical, there are so many of them. That means a lot of people, though. An eighth of the human race is now Protestant.

The Reformation, in turn, reshaped Europe. As German-speaking lands asserted their independence from Rome, other forces were unleashed. In the Knights’ Revolt of 1522, and the Peasants’ War, a couple of years later, minor gentry and impoverished agricultural workers saw Protestantism as a way of redressing social grievances. (More than eighty thousand poorly armed peasants were slaughtered when the latter rebellion failed.) Indeed, the horrific Thirty Years’ War, in which, basically, Europe’s Roman Catholics killed all the Protestants they could, and vice versa, can in some measure be laid at Luther’s door. Although it did not begin until decades after his death, it arose in part because he had created no institutional structure to replace the one he walked away from.

Almost as soon as Luther started the Reformation, alternative Reformations arose in other localities. From town to town, preachers told the citizenry what it should no longer put up with, whereupon they stood a good chance of being shoved aside—indeed, strung up—by other preachers. Religious houses began to close down. Luther led the movement mostly by his writings. Meanwhile, he did what he thought was his main job in life, teaching the Bible at the University of Wittenberg. The Reformation wasn’t led, exactly; it just spread, metastasized.

And that was because Europe was so ready for it. The relationship between the people and the rulers could hardly have been worse. Maximilian I, the Holy Roman Emperor, was dying—he brought his coffin with him wherever he travelled—but he was taking his time about it. The presumptive heir, King Charles I of Spain, was looked upon with grave suspicion. He already had Spain and the Netherlands. Why did he need the Holy Roman Empire as well? Furthermore, he was young—only seventeen when Luther wrote the Ninety-five Theses. The biggest trouble, though, was money. The Church had incurred enormous expenses. It was warring with the Turks at the walls of Vienna. It had also started an ambitious building campaign, including the reconstruction of St. Peter’s Basilica, in Rome. To pay for these ventures, it had borrowed huge sums from Europe’s banks, and to repay the banks it was strangling the people with taxes.

It has often been said that, fundamentally, Luther gave us “modernity.” Among the recent studies, Eric Metaxas’s “ Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World ” (Viking) makes this claim in grandiose terms. “The quintessentially modern idea of the individual was as unthinkable before Luther as is color in a world of black and white,” he writes. “And the more recent ideas of pluralism, religious liberty, self-government, and liberty all entered history through the door that Luther opened.” The other books are more reserved. As they point out, Luther wanted no part of pluralism—even for the time, he was vehemently anti-Semitic—and not much part of individualism. People were to believe and act as their churches dictated.

The fact that Luther’s protest, rather than others that preceded it, brought about the Reformation is probably due in large measure to his outsized personality. He was a charismatic man, and maniacally energetic. Above all, he was intransigent. To oppose was his joy. And though at times he showed that hankering for martyrdom that we detect, with distaste, in the stories of certain religious figures, it seems that, most of the time, he just got out of bed in the morning and got on with his work. Among other things, he translated the New Testament from Greek into German in eleven weeks.

Luther was born in 1483 and grew up in Mansfeld, a small mining town in Saxony. His father started out as a miner but soon rose to become a master smelter, a specialist in separating valuable metal (in this case, copper) from ore. The family was not poor. Archeologists have been at work in their basement. The Luthers ate suckling pig and owned drinking glasses. They had either seven or eight children, of whom five survived. The father wanted Martin, the eldest, to study law, in order to help him in his business, but Martin disliked law school and promptly had one of those experiences often undergone in the old days by young people who did not wish to take their parents’ career advice. Caught in a violent thunderstorm one day in 1505—he was twenty-one—he vowed to St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, that if he survived he would become a monk. He kept his promise, and was ordained two years later. In the heavily psychoanalytic nineteen-fifties, much was made of the idea that this flouting of his father’s wishes set the stage for his rebellion against the Holy Father in Rome. Such is the main point of Erik Erikson’s 1958 book, “ Young Man Luther ,” which became the basis of a famous play by John Osborne (filmed, in 1974, with Stacy Keach in the title role).

Today, psychoanalytic interpretations tend to be tittered at by Luther biographers. But the desire to find some great psychological source, or even a middle-sized one, for Luther’s great story is understandable, because, for many years, nothing much happened to him. This man who changed the world left his German-speaking lands only once in his life. (In 1510, he was part of a mission sent to Rome to heal a rent in the Augustinian order. It failed.) Most of his youth was spent in dirty little towns where men worked long hours each day and then, at night, went to the tavern and got into fights. He described his university town, Erfurt, as consisting of “a whorehouse and a beerhouse.” Wittenberg, where he lived for the remainder of his life, was bigger—with two thousand inhabitants when he settled there—but not much better. As Lyndal Roper, one of the best of the new biographers, writes, in “ Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet ” (Random House), it was a mess of “muddy houses, unclean lanes.” At that time, however, the new ruler of Saxony, Frederick the Wise, was trying to make a real city of it. He built a castle and a church—the one on whose door the famous theses were supposedly nailed—and he hired an important artist, Lucas Cranach the Elder, as his court painter. Most important, he founded a university, and staffed it with able scholars, including Johann von Staupitz, the vicar-general of the Augustinian friars of the German-speaking territories. Staupitz had been Luther’s confessor at Erfurt, and when he found himself overworked at Wittenberg he summoned Luther, persuaded him to take a doctorate, and handed over many of his duties to him. Luther supervised everything from monasteries (eleven of them) to fish ponds, but most crucial was his succeeding Staupitz as the university’s professor of the Bible, a job that he took on at the age of twenty-eight and retained until his death. In this capacity, he lectured on Scripture, held disputations, and preached to the staff of the university.

He was apparently a galvanizing speaker, but during his first twelve years as a monk he published almost nothing. This was no doubt due in part to the responsibilities heaped on him at Wittenberg, but at this time, and for a long time, he also suffered what seems to have been a severe psychospiritual crisis. He called his problem his Anfechtungen —trials, tribulations—but this feels too slight a word to cover the afflictions he describes: cold sweats, nausea, constipation, crushing headaches, ringing in his ears, together with depression, anxiety, and a general feeling that, as he put it, the angel of Satan was beating him with his fists. Most painful, it seems, for this passionately religious young man was to discover his anger against God. Years later, commenting on his reading of Scripture as a young friar, Luther spoke of his rage at the description of God’s righteousness, and of his grief that, as he was certain, he would not be judged worthy: “I did not love, yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners.”

There were good reasons for an intense young priest to feel disillusioned. One of the most bitterly resented abuses of the Church at that time was the so-called indulgences, a kind of late-medieval get-out-of-jail-free card used by the Church to make money. When a Christian purchased an indulgence from the Church, he obtained—for himself or whomever else he was trying to benefit—a reduction in the amount of time the person’s soul had to spend in Purgatory, atoning for his sins, before ascending to Heaven. You might pay to have a special Mass said for the sinner or, less expensively, you could buy candles or new altar cloths for the church. But, in the most common transaction, the purchaser simply paid an agreed-upon amount of money and, in return, was given a document saying that the beneficiary—the name was written in on a printed form—was forgiven x amount of time in Purgatory. The more time off, the more it cost, but the indulgence-sellers promised that whatever you paid for you got.

Actually, they could change their minds about that. In 1515, the Church cancelled the exculpatory powers of already purchased indulgences for the next eight years. If you wanted that period covered, you had to buy a new indulgence. Realizing that this was hard on people—essentially, they had wasted their money—the Church declared that purchasers of the new indulgences did not have to make confession or even exhibit contrition. They just had to hand over the money and the thing was done, because this new issue was especially powerful. Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar locally famous for his zeal in selling indulgences, is said to have boasted that one of the new ones could obtain remission from sin even for someone who had raped the Virgin Mary. (In the 1974 movie “ Luther ,” Tetzel is played with a wonderful, bug-eyed wickedness by Hugh Griffith.) Even by the standards of the very corrupt sixteenth-century Church, this was shocking.

In Luther’s mind, the indulgence trade seems to have crystallized the spiritual crisis he was experiencing. It brought him up against the absurdity of bargaining with God, jockeying for his favor—indeed, paying for his favor. Why had God given his only begotten son? And why had the son died on the cross? Because that’s how much God loved the world. And that alone, Luther now reasoned, was sufficient for a person to be found “justified,” or worthy. From this thought, the Ninety-five Theses were born. Most of them were challenges to the sale of indulgences. And out of them came what would be the two guiding principles of Luther’s theology: sola fide and sola scriptura .

Sola fide means “by faith alone”—faith, as opposed to good works, as the basis for salvation. This was not a new idea. St. Augustine, the founder of Luther’s monastic order, laid it out in the fourth century. Furthermore, it is not an idea that fits well with what we know of Luther. Pure faith, contemplation, white light: surely these are the gifts of the Asian religions, or of medieval Christianity, of St. Francis with his birds. As for Luther, with his rages and sweats, does he seem a good candidate? Eventually, however, he discovered (with lapses) that he could be released from those torments by the simple act of accepting God’s love for him. Lest it be thought that this stern man then concluded that we could stop worrying about our behavior and do whatever we wanted, he said that works issue from faith. In his words, “We can no more separate works from faith than heat and light from fire.” But he did believe that the world was irretrievably full of sin, and that repairing that situation was not the point of our moral lives. “Be a sinner, and let your sins be strong, but let your trust in Christ be stronger,” he wrote to a friend.

The second great principle, sola scriptura , or “by scripture alone,” was the belief that only the Bible could tell us the truth. Like sola fide , this was a rejection of what, to Luther, were the lies of the Church—symbolized most of all by the indulgence market. Indulgences brought you an abbreviation of your stay in Purgatory, but what was Purgatory? No such thing is mentioned in the Bible. Some people think that Dante made it up; others say Gregory the Great. In any case, Luther decided that somebody made it up.

Guided by those convictions, and fired by his new certainty of God’s love for him, Luther became radicalized. He preached, he disputed. Above all, he wrote pamphlets. He denounced not only the indulgence trade but all the other ways in which the Church made money off Christians: the endless pilgrimages, the yearly Masses for the dead, the cults of the saints. He questioned the sacraments. His arguments made sense to many people, notably Frederick the Wise. Frederick was pained that Saxony was widely considered a backwater. He now saw how much attention Luther brought to his state, and how much respect accrued to the university that he (Frederick) had founded at Wittenberg. He vowed to protect this troublemaker.

Things came to a head in 1520. By then, Luther had taken to calling the Church a brothel, and Pope Leo X the Antichrist. Leo gave Luther sixty days to appear in Rome and answer charges of heresy. Luther let the sixty days elapse; the Pope excommunicated him; Luther responded by publicly burning the papal order in the pit where one of Wittenberg’s hospitals burned its used rags. Reformers had been executed for less, but Luther was by now a very popular man throughout Europe. The authorities knew they would have serious trouble if they killed him, and the Church gave him one more chance to recant, at the upcoming diet—or congregation of officers, sacred and secular—in the cathedral city of Worms in 1521. He went, and declared that he could not retract any of the charges he had made against the Church, because the Church could not show him, in Scripture, that any of them were false:

Since then your serene majesties and your lordships seek a simple answer, I will give it in this manner, plain and unvarnished: Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the scriptures or clear reason, for I do not trust in the Pope or in the councils alone, since it is well known that they often err and contradict themselves, I am bound to the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything.

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The Pope often errs! Luther will decide what God wants! By consulting Scripture! No wonder that an institution wedded to the idea of its leader’s infallibility was profoundly shaken by this declaration. Once the Diet of Worms came to an end, Luther headed for home, but he was “kidnapped” on the way, by a posse of knights sent by his protector, Frederick the Wise. The knights spirited him off to the Wartburg, a secluded castle in Eisenach, in order to give the authorities time to cool off. Luther was annoyed by the delay, but he didn’t waste time. That’s when he translated the New Testament.

During his lifetime, Luther became probably the biggest celebrity in the German-speaking lands. When he travelled, people flocked to the high road to see his cart go by. This was due not just to his personal qualities and the importance of his cause but to timing. Luther was born only a few decades after the invention of printing, and though it took him a while to start writing, it was hard to stop him once he got going. Among the quincentennial books is an entire volume on his relationship to print, “ Brand Luther ” (Penguin), by the British historian Andrew Pettegree. Luther’s collected writings come to a hundred and twenty volumes. In the first half of the sixteenth century, a third of all books published in German were written by him.

By producing them, he didn’t just create the Reformation; he also created his country’s vernacular, as Dante is said to have done with Italian. The majority of his writings were in Early New High German, a form of the language that was starting to gel in southern Germany at that time. Under his influence, it did gel.

The crucial text is his Bible: the New Testament, translated from the original Greek and published in 1523, followed by the Old Testament, in 1534, translated from the Hebrew. Had he not created Protestantism, this book would be the culminating achievement of Luther’s life. It was not the first German translation of the Bible—indeed, it had eighteen predecessors—but it was unquestionably the most beautiful, graced with the same combination of exaltation and simplicity, but more so, as the King James Bible. (William Tyndale, whose English version of the Bible, for which he was executed, was more or less the basis of the King James, knew and admired Luther’s translation.) Luther very consciously sought a fresh, vigorous idiom. For his Bible’s vocabulary, he said, “we must ask the mother in the home, the children on the street,” and, like other writers with such aims—William Blake, for example—he ended up with something songlike. He loved alliteration—“ Der Herr ist mein Hirte ” (“The Lord is my shepherd”); “ Dein Stecken und Stab ” (“thy rod and thy staff”)—and he loved repetition and forceful rhythms. This made his texts easy and pleasing to read aloud, at home, to the children. The books also featured a hundred and twenty-eight woodcut illustrations, all by one artist from the Cranach workshop, known to us only as Master MS. There they were, all those wondrous things—the Garden of Eden, Abraham and Isaac, Jacob wrestling with the angel—which modern people are used to seeing images of and which Luther’s contemporaries were not. There were marginal glosses, as well as short prefaces for each book, which would have been useful for the children of the household and probably also for the family member reading to them.

These virtues, plus the fact that the Bible was probably, in many cases, the only book in the house, meant that it was widely used as a primer. More people learned to read, and the more they knew how to read the more they wanted to own this book, or give it to others. The three-thousand-copy first edition of the New Testament, though it was not cheap (it cost about as much as a calf), sold out immediately. As many as half a million Luther Bibles seem to have been printed by the mid-sixteenth century. In his discussions of sola scriptura , Luther had declared that all believers were priests: laypeople had as much right as the clergy to determine what Scripture meant. With his Bible, he gave German speakers the means to do so.

In honor of the five-hundredth anniversary, the excellent German art-book publisher Taschen has produced a facsimile with spectacular colored woodcuts. Pleasingly, the book historian Stephan Füssel, in the explanatory paperback that accompanies the two-volume facsimile, reports that in 2004, when a fire swept through the Duchess Anna Amalia Library, in Weimar, where this copy was housed, it was “rescued, undamaged, with not a second to lose, thanks to the courageous intervention of library director Dr. Michael Knoche.” I hope that Dr. Knoche himself ran out with the two volumes in his arms. I don’t know what the price of a calf is these days, but the price of this facsimile is sixty dollars. Anyone who wants to give himself a Luther quincentennial present should order it immediately. Master MS’s Garden of Eden is full of wonderful animals—a camel, a crocodile, a little toad—and in the towns everyone wears those black shoes like the ones in Brueghel paintings. The volumes lie flat on the table when you open them, and the letters are big and black and clear. Even if you don’t understand German, you can sort of read them.

Among the supposedly Biblical rules that Luther pointed out could not be found in the Bible was the requirement of priestly celibacy. Well before the Diet of Worms, Luther began advising priests to marry. He said that he would marry, too, if he did not expect, every day, to be executed for heresy. One wonders. But in 1525 he was called upon to help a group of twelve nuns who had just fled a Cistercian convent, an action that was related to his reforms. Part of his duty to these women, he felt, was to return them to their families or to find husbands for them. At the end, one was left, a twenty-six-year-old girl named Katharina von Bora, the daughter of a poor, albeit noble, country family. Luther didn’t want her, he said—he found her “proud”—but she wanted him. She was the one who proposed. And though, as he told a friend, he felt no “burning” for her, he formed with her a marriage that is probably the happiest story in any account of his life.

One crucial factor was her skill in household management. The Luthers lived in the so-called Black Monastery, which had been Wittenberg’s Augustinian monastery—that is, Luther’s old home as a friar—before the place emptied out as a result of the reformer’s actions. (One monk became a cobbler, another a baker, and so on.) It was a huge, filthy, comfortless place. Käthe, as Luther called her, made it livable, and not just for her immediate family. Between ten and twenty students lodged there, and the household took in many others as well: four children of Luther’s dead sister Margarete, plus four more orphaned children from both sides of the family, plus a large family fleeing the plague. A friend of the reformer, writing to an acquaintance journeying to Wittenberg, warned him on no account to stay with the Luthers if he valued peace and quiet. The refectory table seated between thirty-five and fifty, and Käthe, having acquired a large market garden and a considerable amount of livestock (pigs, goats), and now supervising a staff of up to ten employees (maids, a cook, a swineherd, et al.), fed them all. She also handled the family’s finances, and at times had to economize carefully. Luther would accept no money for his writings, on which he could have profited hugely, and he would not allow students to pay to attend his lectures, as was the custom.

Luther appreciated the sheer increase in his physical comfort. When he writes to a friend, soon after his marriage, of what it is like to lie in a dry bed after years of sleeping on a pile of damp, mildewed straw, and when, elsewhere, he speaks of the surprise of turning over in bed and seeing a pair of pigtails on the pillow next to his, your heart softens toward this dyspeptic man. More important, he began to take women seriously. He objects, in a lecture, to coitus interruptus, the most common form of birth control at the time, on the ground that it is frustrating for women. When he was away from home, he wrote Käthe affectionate letters, with such salutations as “Most holy Frau Doctor” and “To the hands and feet of my dear housewife.”

Among Käthe’s virtues was fertility. Every year or so for eight years, she produced a child—six in all, of whom four survived to adulthood—and Luther loved these children. He even allowed them to play in his study while he was working. Of five-year-old Hans, his firstborn, he wrote, “When I’m writing or doing something else, my Hans sings a little tune for me. If he becomes too noisy and I rebuke him for it, he continues to sing but does it more privately and with a certain awe and uneasiness.” That scene, which comes from “ Martin Luther: Rebel in an Age of Upheaval ” (Oxford), by the German historian Heinz Schilling, seems to me impossible to improve upon as a portrait of what it must have been like for Luther to have a little boy, and for a little boy to have Luther as a father. Luther was not a lenient parent—he used the whip when he felt he needed to, and poor Hans was sent to the university at the age of seven—but when, on his travels, the reformer passed through a town that was having a fair he liked to buy presents for the children. In 1536, when he went to the Diet of Augsburg, another important convocation, he kept a picture of his favorite child, Magdalene, on the wall of his chamber. Magdalene died at thirteen. Schilling again produces a telling scene. Magdalene is nearing the end; Luther is holding her. He says he knows she would like to stay with her father, but, he adds, “Are you also glad to go to your father in heaven?” She died in his arms. How touching that he could find this common-sense way to comfort her, and also that he seems to feel that Heaven is right above their heads, with one father holding out a hand to take to himself the other’s child.

One thing that Luther seems especially to have loved about his children was their corporeality—their fat, noisy little bodies. When Hans finally learned to bend his knees and relieve himself on the floor, Luther rejoiced, reporting to a friend that the child had “crapped in every corner of the room.” I wonder who cleaned that up—not Luther, I would guess—but it is hard not to feel some of his pleasure. Sixteenth-century Germans were not, in the main, dainty of thought or speech. A representative of the Vatican once claimed that Luther was conceived when the Devil raped his mother in an outhouse. That detail comes from Eric Metaxas’s book, which is full of vulgar stories, not that one has to look far for vulgar stories in Luther’s life. My favorite (reported in Erikson’s book) is a comment that Luther made at the dinner table while in the grip of a depression. “I am like a ripe shit,” he said, “and the world is a gigantic asshole. We will both probably let go of each other soon.” It takes you a minute to realize that Luther is saying that he feels he is dying. And then you want to congratulate him on the sheer zest, the proto-surrealist nuttiness, of his metaphor. He may feel as though he’s dying, but he’s having a good time feeling it.

The group on which Luther expended his most notorious denunciations was not the Roman Catholic clergy but the Jews. His sentiments were widely shared. In the words of Heinz Schilling, “Late medieval Christians generally hated and despised Jews.” But Luther despised them dementedly, ecstatically. In his 1543 treatise “On the Ineffable Name and the Generations of Christ,” he imagines the Devil stuffing the Jews’ orifices with filth: “He stuffs and squirts them so full, that it overflows and swims out of every place, pure Devil’s filth, yes, it tastes so good to their hearts, and they guzzle it like sows.” Witness the death of Judas Iscariot, he adds: “When Judas Schariot hanged himself, so that his guts ripped, and as happens to those who are hanged, his bladder burst, then the Jews had their golden cans and silver bowls ready, to catch the Judas piss . . . and afterwards together they ate the shit.” The Jews’ synagogues should be burned down, he wrote; their houses should be destroyed. He did not recommend that they be killed, but he did say that Christians had no moral responsibilities to them, which amounts to much the same thing.

This is hair-raising, but what makes Luther’s anti-Semitism most disturbing is not its extremity (which, by sounding so crazy, diminishes its power). It is the fact that the country of which he is a national hero did indeed, quite recently, exterminate six million Jews. Hence the formula “ From Luther to Hitler ,” popularized by William Montgomery McGovern’s 1941 book of that title—the notion that Luther laid the groundwork for the slaughter. Those who have wished to defend him have pointed out that his earlier writings, such as the 1523 pamphlet “That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew,” are much more conciliatory in tone. He seemed to regret that, as he put it, Christians had “dealt with the Jews as if they were dogs.” But making excuses for Luther on the basis of his earlier, more temperate writings does not really work. As scholars have been able to show, Luther was gentler early on because he was hoping to persuade the Jews to convert. When they failed to do so, he unleashed his full fury, more violent now because he believed that the comparative mildness of his earlier writings may have been partly responsible for their refusal.

Luther’s anti-Semitism would be a moral problem under any circumstances. People whom we admire often commit terrible sins, and we have no good way of explaining this to ourselves. But when one adds the historical factor—that, in Luther’s case, the judgment is being made five centuries after the event—we hit a brick wall. At the Nuremberg trials, in 1946, Julius Streicher, the founder and publisher of the Jew-baiting newspaper Der Stürmer , quoted Luther as the source of his beliefs and said that if he was going to be blamed Luther would have to be blamed as well. But, in the words of Thomas Kaufmann, a professor of church history at the University of Göttingen, “The Nuremberg judges sat in judgment over the mass murderers of the twentieth century, not over the delusions of a misguided sixteenth-century theology professor. . . . Another judge must judge Luther.” How fortunate to be able to believe that such a judge will come, and have an answer.

Luther lived to what, in the sixteenth century, was an old age, sixty-two, but the years were not kind to him. Actually, he lived most of his life in turmoil. When he was young, there were the Anfechtungen . Then, once he issued the theses and began his movement, he had to struggle not just with the right, the Roman Church, but with the left—the Schwärmer (fanatics), as he called them, the people who felt that he hadn’t gone far enough. He spent days and weeks in pamphlet wars over matters that, today, have to be patiently explained to us, they seem so remote. Did Communion involve transubstantiation, or was Jesus physically present from the start of the rite? Luther, a “Real Presence” man, said the latter. Should people be baptized soon after they are born, as Luther said, or when they are adults, as the Anabaptists claimed?

When Luther was young, he was good at friendship. He was frank and warm; he loved jokes; he wanted to have people and noise around him. (Hence the fifty-seat dinner table.) As he grew older, he changed. He found that he could easily discard friends, even old friends, even his once beloved confessor, Staupitz. People who had dealings with the movement found themselves going around him if they could, usually to his right-hand man, Philip Melanchthon. Always sharp-tongued, Luther now lost all restraint, writing in a treatise that Pope Paul III was a sodomite and a transvestite—no surprise, he added, when you considered that all popes, since the beginnings of the Church, were full of devils and vomited and farted and defecated devils. This starts to sound like his attacks on the Jews.

His health declined. He had dizzy spells, bleeding hemorrhoids, constipation, urine retention, gout, kidney stones. To balance his “humors,” the surgeon made a hole, or “fontanelle,” in a vein in his leg, and it was kept open. Whatever this did for his humors, it meant that he could no longer walk to the church or the university. He had to be taken in a cart. He suffered disabling depressions. “I have lost Christ completely,” he wrote to Melanchthon. From a man of his temperament and convictions, this is a terrible statement.

In early 1546, he had to go to the town of his birth, Eisleben, to settle a dispute. It was January, and the roads were bad. Tellingly, he took all three of his sons with him. He said the trip might be the death of him, and he was right. He died in mid-February. Appropriately, in view of his devotion to the scatological, his corpse was given an enema, in the hope that this would revive him. It didn’t. After sermons in Eisleben, the coffin was driven back to Wittenberg, with an honor guard of forty-five men on horseback. Bells tolled in every village along the way. Luther was buried in the Castle Church, on whose door he was said to have nailed his theses.

Although his resting place evokes his most momentous act, it also highlights the intensely local nature of the life he led. The transformations he set in motion were incidental to his struggles, which remained irreducibly personal. His goal was not to usher in modernity but simply to make religion religious again. Heinz Schilling writes, “Just when the lustre of religion threatened to be outdone by the atheistic and political brilliance of the secularized Renaissance papacy, the Wittenberg monk defined humankind’s relationship to God anew and gave back to religion its existential plausibility.” Lyndal Roper thinks much the same. She quotes Luther saying that the Church’s sacraments “are not fulfilled when they are taking place but when they are being believed.” All he asked for was sincerity, but this made a great difference. ♦

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Essay on The Protestant Reformation and Christianity

PDF of essay on the Protestant Reformation and Christianity.

By Cole S. Rogers, Spring 2016

 The Roman Catholic Church dominated Western Europe up until the Protestant Reformation. The church prior to the Reformation owned nearly one-third of all European land.  With financial dominance, political influence, and publicly accepted doctrine, the church experienced extraordinary size. With the extreme success of the church, corruption followed, and the church began to profiteer off rituals. The sale of indulgences for profit promoted even further corruption within the church. At the time indulgences were being sold by the Catholic Church, the movement of the Renaissance was sweeping across all of Europe. The movement of the Renaissance created more and more public dissent towards the Catholic Church. This Renaissance would eventually lead to the Protestant Reformation.

The Protestant Reformation changed the religion of Christianity forever. Prior to the Reformation, the Renaissance sparked a change in the way of thinking throughout Europe. This change in thinking promoted a society based on individuality, and finding the truth.  Martin Luther, a German monk in the Catholic Church is directly responsible for creating the movement behind the Protestant Reformation. Luther through study and immersion in scripture discovered the corruption behind the Church, and publicly exposed this corruption.  Luther in 1517 nailed 95 Theses to the Church in Wittenberg, Germany.  The 95 Theses exposed the fundamental corruption behind the Church and specifically the sale of indulgences. Luther introduced the concept of salvation being gained only through faith in God. Luther’s work resulted in religious conflict throughout all of Europe.

The Protestant Reformation promoted self-immersion in scripture. Luther’s translation of the Bible from Latin to German gained extreme attention as for the first time in history average people began to explore scripture themselves rather than relying on the Catholic Church for everything. This ideology influenced the rise in several different movements of Christianity that each found individual similarities throughout scripture.  In this time period, a new era of churches arose throughout all of Europe, which challenged the Catholic Church and shaped the future of Christianity. 

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7.5: Protestant Reformation and Counter – Reformation

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Protestant Reformation and Counter – Reformation

In the early 16th century, movements were begun by two theologians, Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli , who aimed to reform the Church; these reformers are distinguished from previous ones in that they considered the root of corruptions to be doctrinal (rather than simply a matter of moral weakness or lack of ecclesiastical discipline) and thus they aimed to change contemporary doctrines to accord with what they perceived to be the “true gospel.”

The Protestant Reformation

The beginning of the Protestant Reformation is generally identified with Martin Luther and the posting of the 95 Theses on the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany. Early protest was against corruptions such as simony, episcopal vacancies, and the sale of indulgences. The Protestant position, however, would come to incorporate doctrinal changes, such as sola scriptura —”scripture alone”—and sola fide —”faith alone.”

The three most important traditions to emerge directly from the Protestant Reformation were the Lutheran, Reformed (Calvinist, Presbyterian, etc.), and Anglican traditions, though the latter group identifies as both “Reformed” and “Catholic,” and some subgroups reject the classification as “Protestant.”

John Calvin was a French cleric and doctor of law turned Protestant reformer. He belonged to the second generation of the Reformation, publishing his theological tome, the Institutes of the Christian Religion , in 1536 (later revised), and establishing himself as a leader of the Reformed church in Geneva, which became an “unofficial capital” of Reformed Christianity in the second half of the 16th century.

Calvin’s theology is best known for his doctrine of (double) predestination , which held that God had, from all eternity, providentially foreordained who would be saved ( the elect ) and likewise who would be damned ( the reprobate ). Predestination was not the dominant idea in Calvin’s works, but it would seemingly become so for many of his Reformed successors.

The English Reformation

Unlike other reform movements, the English Reformation began by royal influence. Henry VIII considered himself a thoroughly Catholic King, and in 1521 he defended the papacy against Luther in a book he commissioned entitled, The Defense of the Seven Sacraments, for which Pope Leo X awarded him the title Fidei Defensor (Defender of the Faith). However, the king came into conflict with the papacy when he wished to annul his marriage with Catherine of Aragon, for which he needed papal sanction. Catherine, among many other noble relations, was the aunt of Emperor Charles V, the papacy’s most significant secular supporter. The ensuing dispute eventually leads to a break from Rome and the declaration of the King of England as head of the English Church. What emerged was a state church that considered itself both “Reformed” and “Catholic” but not “Roman” (and hesitated from the title “Protestant”), and other “unofficial” more radical movements such as the Puritans.

The Counter Reformation

The Protestant Reformation spread almost entirely within the confines of Northern Europe, but did not take hold in certain northern areas such as Ireland and parts of Germany.

The Catholic response to the Protestant Reformation is known as the Counter Reformation , or Catholic Reformation , which resulted in a reassertion of traditional doctrines and the emergence of new religious orders aimed at both moral reform and new missionary activity. The Counter Reformation reconverted approximately 33% of Northern Europe to Catholicism and initiated missions in South and Central America, Africa, Asia, and even China and Japan. Protestant expansion outside of Europe occurred on a smaller scale through colonization of North America and areas of Africa.

Catholic missions was carried to new places beginning with the new Age of Discovery , and the Roman Catholic Church established a number of Missions in the Americas and other colonies in order to spread Christianity in the New World and to convert the indigenous peoples.

At the same time, missionaries, such as Francis Xavier, as well as other Jesuits, Augustinians, Franciscans, and Dominicans were moving into Asia and the Far East. The Portuguese sent missions into Africa. While some of these missions were associated with imperialism and oppression, others (notably Matteo Ricci’s Jesuit mission to China) were relatively peaceful and focused on integration rather than cultural imperialism.

English Puritans in the New World

The most famous colonization by Protestants in the New World was that of English Puritans in North America. Unlike the Spanish or French, the English colonists made surprisingly little effort to evangelize the native peoples. The Puritans, or Pilgrims, left England so that they could live in an area with Puritanism established as the exclusive civic religion. Though they had left England because of the suppression of their religious practice, most Puritans had thereafter originally settled in the Low Countries but found the licentiousness there, where the state hesitated from enforcing religious practice, as unacceptable, and thus they set out for the New World and the hopes of a Puritan utopia. (44)

The Great Awakenings

The First Great Awakening was a wave of religious enthusiasm among Protestants in the American colonies c. 1730–1740, emphasizing the traditional Reformed virtues of Godly preaching, rudimentary liturgy, and a deep sense of personal guilt and redemption by Christ Jesus. Historian Sydney E. Ahlstrom saw it as part of a “great international Protestant upheaval” that also created Pietism in Germany, the Evangelical Revival, and Methodism in England. It centered on reviving the spirituality of established congregations, and mostly affected Congregational, Presbyterian, Dutch Reformed, German Reformed, Baptist, and Methodist churches, while also spreading within the slave population.

The Second Great Awakening (1800–1830s), unlike the first, focused on the unchurched and sought to instill in them a deep sense of personal salvation as experienced in revival meetings. It also sparked the beginnings of groups such as the Mormons, the Restoration Movement and the Holiness movement.

The Third Great Awakening began from 1857 and was most notable for taking the movement throughout the world, especially in English speaking countries. The final group to emerge from the “great awakenings” in North America was Pentecostalism, which had its roots in the Methodist, Wesleyan, and Holiness movements, and began in 1906 on Azusa Street, in Los Angeles. Pentecostalism would later lead to the Charismatic movement. (44)

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• History of Christianity. Authored by : Wikipedia for Schools. Located at : en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Christianity. License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike

Protestant Reformation and Enlightenment Essay

Protestant reformation.

The protestant reformation was a movement which involved reformations of Christianity which started in Europe. Among the individual reformers was Martin Luther who was the leader of the movement.

The reformation was started because many people were not satisfied by the Catholic Church doctrines as it was regarded as corrupt in its dealings.

Reformations required included a change in the language used in writing the bible since many people were unable to read Latin which was the only available version of the bible during that time.

According to the reformists, the Catholic Church was not fair since its accessibility was only to the rich people while it excluded the poor. The main idea in protestant reformations was to bring equality in the church where everyone would have easy access to the church.

One of the most important tenets of the protestant reformers was the belief in children baptism which they believed it was some kind of a sacrament. They believed that through baptism the original sin would be washed away in the newborns.

Another main belief by the protestant reformers was that all individuals need to communicate to God directly and as a result, a proper education was required to facilitate the prayers.

Christian parents were required to bring up their children in the best ways possible to nurture them both in their spiritual and physical growth in accordance to the teachings of the protestant faith to enable them to serve God appropriately.

In return, the children en were required to respect their parents in every aspect of their lives (Wilde 1).

Besides diving Europe into Catholic and protestant Christians, the reformations also affected the social lives of the Europeans. The reformed churches had new practices that were different from those of the Catholic Christians, and this resulted in major changes in the church.

Certain ceremonies that demonstrated customary practices such as baptism and sacraments were abolished by the reformed churches, and this affected the lives of the people because the initial rituals used to shape the social lives of the Europeans.

Despite the church being a religious place, it also had some political powers which facilitated alliances in politics. Certain protestant states emerged, and they used the properties they had grabbed from the other churches to gain authority over the protestant clergy (Wilde 1).

The Thirty Year’s War and its significance

The major cause of the thirty-year war which occurred in Europe was the opposition of Habsburgs by several international opposition members from Australia. However, part of the war resulted from the differences in religious beliefs especially between the Catholics and the Lutherans.

Conflicts in the military equally resulted in the war with the Calvinism forces opposing the Counter-Reformation process. The most felt effect of the thirty-year war was the division and rearrangement of the European powers.

Permanent boundaries for territories in Europe were established with each nation having its form of governance both politically and religiously. However, the war was advantageous in that it caused the end of the religious war that had lasted long in Europe.

The war also resulted in the extension of war by the Europeans to overseas nations. The end of mercenaries also ended as a result of this war (McDonald, Michael 1).

Scientific revolution

One of the major causes of the scientific revolution was the expansion of trade where many traders traveled through the water to different continents for trading purposes.

However, these modes of transport were not efficient, and this prompted researchers to find possible solutions to the problem. Leaders of middle-class universities at the time raised the interest and the need to bring scientific revolution into the light.

The scientific revolution was promoted by the period of renaissance where great leaders inspired people towards the revolution.

The church did not oppose much of the scientific revolutions especially the advancements in communication strategies because they thought of it as a means of spreading the word of God.

However, some fields such as related to nuclear weapons technology were later opposed by the church, and this caused the church to lose its trust in science as a whole (Hunt 1).

Rise and decline of the Spanish empire

In around 1590s when Spain was ruled by Carlos I, Spain obtained several American territories to add on those that were obtained by Fernando who had ruled before Carlos I. Most of the lands in central Europe were also obtained by Spain.

As a result of this as well as Carlos’ good leadership and strong Catholic faith, he was able to succeed in surpassing many of Spain’s neighbors in overseas ventures.

However, the fall of the empire began with the death of Carlos I leaving the throne to his son during the time which there was no adequate trade for development purposes.

The situation got worse when Felipe spend the empire’s finances on costly personal needs after which he was succeeded by unsuccessful leaders (Lemieux 1).

Enlightened Emperors

Enlightened emperors were the heroes especially who told stories, and they were identified with their ability to unite people and bring peace in the society. This was the reason behind their high recognition in their societies.

For one to be recognized as an enlightened emperor, he was required to be unable to die such that if one dies, then he does not become the hero (the enlightened emperor) but the living would.

The existence of the enlightened emperor came into being with the invention of the pyramids something that happened worldwide.

They were identified with their ability to bring happiness and peace between the people by doing all they could to stop evil deeds from happening such as killing human beings or stealing what is not theirs. They were supposed to guide the world into righteousness by acting as the earthly gods (“Emperors”).

During the late 1600s, the systems of governance in France started changing as the Europeans gave up their fight for unity since the support they had from the church had been lost due to the church reformations.

As a result, many leaders drew themselves far from the church as modernization increased. Finally, the state became an absolute monarchy with all its authority lying on the king under whom the state was run.

The authority in power demanded that the state must be recognized and respected by all institutions including the church. The sovereignty of power was extended within the borders of France making it the leading power in the whole of Europe (Jones 1).

English civil war

The major cause of the English civil war was King James who believed that a king had divine rights and no one could oppose him or any decisions that he made. He, therefore, used his powers as the king to control the parliament from where he obtained financial assistance from.

Angered by the king’s relations and behavior towards them, the parliament members restricted income collection by the king something which made James suspend the parliament for almost ten years.

He then runs the nation by himself with some assistance from his friends and this caused conflict between him and the parliament until the time of his death.

Another cause of the war was his son’s marriage to a Catholic wife, and since the nation was protestant, many feared that he would change it to Catholic. The son also used the nation’s finances for his family on leisure activities or for buying weapons for himself.

After the death of Oliver Cromwell, an absolute dictator, English was never reluctant in welcoming monarchy leadership again.

Since James son, Charles I had been an heir of the throne, they assumed that his son, Charles II, had the legitimate rights of a king and he would be the one fit to take over power since many people would not oppose his power as they would if a leader was to be chosen by the parliament.

The decision to return monarchy leadership to Charles II was used to prevent further internal wars (“The Causes of the English Civil War”).

Enlightenment thinkers on US formation

The enlightenment great thinkers who influenced the formation of the United States are Thomas Hobbs who influenced the attainment of equal civil rights to all citizens.

John Locke who brought the idea of the government being the citizen’s creation something which gave the people the right to change the government if not satisfied with its rule. His ideas were also the reason behind the American Revolution.

A French philosopher, Voltaire, brought the idea of the possible change in the social lives of the people and reformations on governance.

Another French thinker, Montesquieu, came up with the idea of different laws for the people arguing that no single set of laws should be functional all the time.

He talked about a better government which would exclude the monarchy form of governance. He had a strong belief that separation of power would bring about effective governance to the benefit of the people.

From his ideas, the constitution came into being. Jean Jacques Rousseau was another great thinker on political issues who argued that the people should decide on the governance rule according to their will.

The people should be allowed to choose another government if the previous one fails to rule as expected by the citizens.

The influence on US formation occurred because people needed knowledge and advancements in various fields such as science. The people also had needed to understand the rights of rulers to enable them to change from their old ways of thinking (Hammond 1).

The economic system of Mercantilism

Mercantilism was an economic system in Europe which emphasized on the maximization of exports as the importation of good was restricted as much as possible.

The main objective of these efforts was to increase the wealth of Europe as well as maintaining a balanced trade between Europe and other nations.

To effect these efforts, Europe’s government made sure that domestic goods were free of foreign competition by imposing economic policies putting more importance on quotas and tariffs.

The inventors of the system speculated that it would increase employment opportunities for the nation’s citizens as well as the supply of the world’s valuable goods, gold, and silver (Hall 1).

Works Cited

“Emperors.” Thinkers network. 2010 – 2011. Web.

Hall, Shane. “What is the economic system of mercantilism”. 2010 – 2011. Web.

Hammond, Majen. “The Enlightenment and the Founding of America”. 2009 – 2011. Web.

Hunt, Olivia. “Causes of Scientific Revolution”. 2007 – 2011. Web.

Jones, Tyler. “Absolutism in the Seventeenth Century”. 1990 – 2011. Web.

Lemieux, Simon. “The Decline of Spain in the 17 th Century”. 2010 – 2011. Web.

“The Decline of Spain in the 17th century”. 2010 – 2011. Web.

McDonald, Michael. “Europe – The Thirty Years’ War”. 1999 – 2011. Web.

“The Causes of the English Civil War”. History Learning Site. 2000 – 2011. Web.

Wilde, Robert. “Reformation 101”. 2011 – 2011. Web.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2022, August 23). Protestant Reformation and Enlightenment. https://ivypanda.com/essays/protestant-reformation/

"Protestant Reformation and Enlightenment." IvyPanda , 23 Aug. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/protestant-reformation/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Protestant Reformation and Enlightenment'. 23 August.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Protestant Reformation and Enlightenment." August 23, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/protestant-reformation/.

1. IvyPanda . "Protestant Reformation and Enlightenment." August 23, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/protestant-reformation/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Protestant Reformation and Enlightenment." August 23, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/protestant-reformation/.

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Causes of the protestant reformation, primary source documents, effects of the protestant reformation, scholarly research.

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Justification and the Protestant Reformation

Other essays.

The Reformation understanding of justification is that it is by grace through faith and by the imputation of Christ’s righteousness.

Justification was the central doctrine of the Christian faith for Martin Luther, and his articulation of it set the terms for the sixteenth-century debates between Catholicism and Protestantism. It drove a theological and liturgical revolution and also raised numerous biblical and pastoral problems. Attempts at reconciliation on this point at Regensburg in 1541 proved futile and the disagreement between the two sides become codified at the Sixth Session of the Council of Trent. While it is hyperbole to claim that it is the doctrine by which the church stands or falls, it remains of critical importance in the distinction between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.

Luther and Justification in the Reformation

The basic elements and concerns of the Reformation doctrine of justification were set by Martin Luther (1483-1546) whose personal struggles with the question of how he, a sinner, could stand before a holy God, combined with his academic studies of the book of Romans and the Psalms, and his pastoral concerns over the apparent detachment of God’s grace from any kind of inward penitence which the sale of indulgences by Johann Tetzel (ca. 1465-1519). As a result of the confluence of these three, he developed his understanding of justification between the years 1515 and 1520, and placed justification at the very center of his theological project.

While popular mythology, fueled by Luther’s own later (and inaccurate) autobiographical statements, has Luther making a sudden breakthrough on justification while studying Romans 1:17, in fact his position emerged over time as the result of a set of subsidiary changes in his thinking on a number of areas. He was first of all indebted to the theology of the medieval via moderna , which made the movement into a state of grace the result of God’s declaration, not the individual’s intrinsic righteousness. Yet he also rejected the moderni ’s commitment to the idea that fallen human beings could exert sufficient effort to trigger God’s declaration: his studies of Paul led him to believe that baptism symbolized death and resurrection and that fallen human beings were therefore morally dead and completely impotent to effect any movement towards God, a position he elaborated with great polemical pungency in his 1525 riposte to Erasmus (1466-1536), On the Bondage of the Will .

Luther saw this human impotence as reflected in his famous contrast of the law and the gospel, a theme which emerges most spectacularly in the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518 and which shapes his thinking thereafter. Here, the law serves only to point human beings towards their duty to God and their fellows, while providing no power for its fulfillment. It therefore serves only to condemn them before God. By contrast, the gospel is a promise of salvation which needs only to be believed. This connects to Luther’s understanding of the work of Christ: Christ has fulfilled the law and undergone its penalty; those who believe in him have this vicarious – or, to use Luther’s terminology, alien – obedience credited to them. Thus, they stand fully righteous before God, but on the basic of the extrinsic righteousness of Christ. That the world does not recognize them as such is only to be expected, given that Christ’s righteousness on the cross was hidden and considered offensive by the Jews and folly by the Gentiles.

While the church of Luther’s day had no formal definition of justification, and therefore Luther’s position could not be declared heretical, it was nonetheless true that this view of justification posed a lethal challenge to church authority because it subverted the priest’s authority by making faith, rather than the sacraments, the instruments of salvation. It also required a liturgical reorientation which placed vernacular reading and preaching of Scripture and not the mass at the center of Christian worship.

While the Reformation doctrine of justification is often characterized as forensic because of its declaratory quality and the role it assigns to legal condemnation, Luther himself cast his position in terms of conjugal language, with Christ’s righteousness and the believer’s sins being joyfully exchanged in the union of faith as a groom and his bride’s property are exchanged in the bond of marriage. It was Luther’s younger colleague, Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560) who developed the more specifically forensic language, although it is clear that Luther felt no tension between his approach and that of his friend: both conjugal and forensic analogies were legitimate ways of expressing the biblical truth.

While Luther’s understanding of justification does not appear to have been a major factor in the Reformed theology of the early Zurich reformation under Huldrych Zwingli (1484-1531)¸justification soon became a normative part of Reformed theology, as shown in the work of Martin Bucer (1491-1551), Heinrich Bullinger (1504-75), John Calvin (1509=64) and others. It was also a point of continual controversy between the Reformers and the Roman Catholic church, not simply because of its implications for church authority but also because of its perceived biblical and practical/pastoral weaknesses.

Biblically, Luther’s approach seemed to contradict the teaching of the book of James. Luther himself handled this difficulty with a typically dramatic flourish: he simply relegated the book of James to deutero-canonical status. Other Protestants, including Melanchthon, were unwilling to solve the matter in quite such a drastic way and offered interpretations of James which harmonized his teaching with that of Paul by stressing the inseparability of justification by faith and works as an outward demonstration of the same.

This connected to the perceived practical/pastoral weaknesses of the position: try as they might, Protestants found themselves vulnerable to the Roman Catholic accusation that their understanding of justification inevitably undermined the need for good works and pressed inexorably towards an antinomian position. The Luther of the early 1520s had argued that good works flowed as a natural response of gratitude to God for his work in Christ, but as the years went by it became clear that the reality was far more complicated. Lutherans faced their own antinomian crisis as early as the late 1520s. The result was that Luther produced his Small Catechism (1529) which presented the law-gospel contrast in typically opposed terms but elaborated upon exactly what duties the law demanded and therefore implicitly pointed towards the underlying principles of the law as a guide for civic life.

Reformed theology was dogged by the problem throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as evidenced, for example, by the controversy over the posthumous publication of the works of Tobias Crisp (1600-43), the clash between Richard Baxter (1615-91) and John Owen (1616-83), and the debates over imputation at the Westminster Assembly. As a result, debates over the relationship of justification to sanctification within the bounds of orthodox Protestantism continue to the present day.

Regensburg, Trent, and Later Reformation Protestantism

An attempt at reconciliation between Catholics and Protestants on justification was attempted at the Diet of Regensburg in 1541 where delegates from all sides attempted to come to an agreement. The papal legate was Cardinal Gasparo Contarini (1483-1542), and both Bucer and Calvin were present as Protestant representatives. While some agreement was reached at the Diet itself, Luther (who had not been present) was lukewarm regarding the outcome and, when the pope decisively rejected the findings, all hope for reunion was really ended.

The formal Roman Catholic response to Luther’s doctrine came in the Sixth Session of the Council of Trent (1545-63) where the Council asserted that justification was the result of co-operation between God and human beings (thus rejecting the radical anti-Pelagian foundation of Protestant soteriology) and by impartation, not imputation, of Christ’s righteousness, with the sacraments having a central instrumental role. In addition, the Council also rejected the Protestant notion of personal assurance as undermining the moral imperatives of the Christian life.

Post-Tridentine orthodox Protestantism in the sixteenth century remained within the basic framework set forth by Luther, with no major difference between Lutheran and Reformed traditions on this point. Indeed, in his preface to his commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism Reformed theologian, Zacharias Ursinus (1534-83) asserted that the law-gospel distinction was fundamental to correct exegesis and correct theology. What differences did exist were in the matter of the status and nature of sanctification and therefore the status of the law in the life of the church. While both traditions (at least, Lutheranism after Luther) asserted three roles for the law (pedagogical, civil, and moral), the third use – the use of the law as a moral guide to regulate the behavior of the believer) was more positively asserted in Reformed theology than in Lutheranism. This is largely because of the central role the law-gospel dialectic and justification came to play in Lutheran dogmatics and, as so often with Lutheranism, because of the dominant role the life and teaching of Luther himself played in forming the tradition’s teaching and priorities. The problem of sanctification, however, remained an issue for Protestants and (as noted above) continued to dominate intra-Protestant discussions and Protestant-Roman Catholic polemics.

Significance

While many Protestants such as John Owen were and are willing to acknowledge that some Roman Catholics were and are saved on the basis of that which they deny (i.e., justification by Christ’s righteousness received by faith), justification remains a key difference between Roman and Protestant communions, having implications as it does for everything from church authority to sacraments to liturgy to good works. While the claim, ascribed to Luther, that justification is the article by which the church stands or falls (there are numerous articles, such as the Trinity, which are also essential) it is clear that justification, as lying at the heart of the sixteenth-century break in the western church, must be central to any discussion of Roman Catholic-Protestant relations today.

Further Reading

• Matthew Barrett, The Doctrine on which the Church Stands or Falls (Crossway)
• Michael Horton, Justification , 2 vols. (Zondervan)
• Martin Luther, The Freedom of the Christian Man . Available online here .
• The Decrees of the Council of Trent on Justification. Available online here .

This essay is part of the Concise Theology series. All views expressed in this essay are those of the author. This essay is freely available under Creative Commons License with Attribution-ShareAlike, allowing users to share it in other mediums/formats and adapt/translate the content as long as an attribution link, indication of changes, and the same Creative Commons License applies to that material. If you are interested in translating our content or are interested in joining our community of translators,  please reach out to us .

Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation

How it works

The Protestant Reformation revolutionized the way that the church operated and taught its people. Martin Luther saw mamy problems with the Catholic Church such as selling indulgences. Martin Luther believed that indulgences could not rightfully sold. As a result, Martin Luther posted the Ninety-Five

Theses in Wittenberg, Germany, on the door of The Eve of All Saints Day Castle Church on October 31, 1517. As a result of this, Martin Luther participated in a debate with various officials of the Catholic Church in the The Eve of All Saints Day Castle Church.

Martin Luther started a revolution that would change the church’s history and the way it taught forever Martin Luther took a look at the Catholic Church around him and along with many other theologians and scholars, he saw many corrupt things about the church and its teachings. The Catholic Church became increasingly more involved in political powers, political manipulations, and built up a good amount of wealth. He began to question the church. As no coincidence, around this time when scholars started to question the church, translations to the Bible and the writings of the early church philosopher Augustine became more easily accessible.

In Augustine’s texts, he talked about how it was important to focus on and prioritize the teachings of the Bible rather than the teachings of Church officials. If there was ever a conflict between a teaching of the Bible and the teaching of Church officials, the Bible’s teachings were to always overrule those of Church officials’. His texts also stated that man could not receive salvation on their own and had to rely and depend on God for salvation. However, the Church’s practice of selling indulgences completely went against Augustine’s statement of salvation upon reliance of God and Martin Luther quickly noticed this. Indulgences were sold by the church and basically granted salvation to whoever bought them. Martin Luther believed this to be incredibly corrupt and unBiblical. Even though the selling of indulgences had been banned in Germany, it continued. Martin Luther saw this and believed that he needed to take action to fix the church’s corrupt ways. Luther had full intentions on bringing the church’s corruption to the public light. He wrote the “Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences”, or more commonly known as “The 95 Theses”. The 95 Theses were a list of topics for debate that would be held. He nailed these theses to the door of The Eve of All Saints Day Castle on October 31, 1517.

In the Theses, he points out numerous and a diverse set of flaws of the Catholic Church such as their corruption, false teachings, etc. Theses #1-3 focus on the importance of God’s Word in the bible for the life of a Christian. Theses #4-14.focus on the excessive amount of power held by the Pope, the corruption of the clergy, and how only God can forgive sins. Theses #15-82 focus on the indulgences of the preachers and oppose the selling of letters of indulgences in Germany. Theses #83-93 focus on the repetitive use of the word “again” which is then followed by a statement in order to convey a message. The invention of the printing press also helped Luther to distribute copies of the theses to places all throughout Germany. The Thesis also eventually made its way to Rome. In 1518, the debate was held between Martin Luther and Cardinal Thomas Cajetan in front of the imperial assembly. The debate lasted for three days but no conclusion was met. The Pope took notice of Martin Luther’s’ theses and placed them under questioning. His theses were concluded to be heretical and “scandalous and offensive to pious ears”. The Pope gave Luther 120 days to recant; or take back his statements that were made in the theses.

Luther refused to recant and was excommunicated from the Catholic Church by Pope Leo on january 3, 1521. Later, on May 25, emperor Charles V ordered his theses to be burned. Out of fear, Luther fled to a town called Eisenach for a year, where he sought refuge and protection. While staying in Eisenach, he started to translate the New Testament into German. Martin eventually returned back to Wittenberg to discover that his writings had already sparked a reformation. Although Luther’s writings sparked the reformation, he was not very involved with the process towards the end of his life. Towards his death, Luther became more extreme in his beliefs. He declared the pope to be the Antichrist and believed that Jews should be excluded from the empire. Martin Luther died on February 18, 1546. As a result of Martin Luther’s movement, many Christians decided to break off from the Catholic church in order to form the Protestant Church. They were known as the Protestants because of their numerous protests. Rather than listening to the Protestants and considering their side of beliefs, the Catholic Church alienated these people. The Protestants protested many things such as more establishment in the Church’s policy, the sale of indulgences and the Church’s failure to print of religious texts in any language other than Latin. Despite their protests, the Catholic Church only say them as rebels and completely neglected and ignored their demands. German peasants who were inspired by Luther’s writings decided to revolt in 1524. Lutheranism eventually became the state religion throughout Germany, Scandinavia, and the Baltics.

After realizing how rapidly the reformation was spreading throughout Europe, the Catholic Church finally decided that changes had to be made. Those who remained in Catholic Church still demanded reform and change. In 1545, leaders of the Catholic Church met in the Northern Italian city of Trent to meet and discuss what would be done of the situation. After almost 20 years of aggressive debating, the Council of Trent decided to start a counter-reformation. Many new rules were passed that covered issues such as Church authority, the holding of multiple offices, the chastity of priests, and a monastic reform. The Catholic Church made more of an effort to be more spiritual, more literate, a more educated. Newer religious orders such as the Jesuits combined rigorous spirituality with a globally minded intellectualism. In today’s world, the division between the Protestant Church and the Catholic Church are still very evident and prevalent. There are many differences today between the Catholic Church and the Protestant Church. Protestant Churches allowed the congregation much more freedom in determining church policy and rejected such Catholic beliefs such as purgatory. While the entire catholic church is under the authority and rulings of the Pope, Protestants are generally under the rulings of a group of elders or deacons within their own individual church. While Catholic Church heavily emphasizes tradition, the Protestant Church does not. Protestants believe in the idea that salvation is obtained by faith, grace, and Christ alone.

Catholics, on the other hand, believe that justification is a process which is dependent on the grace that you receive by participating in the Church. Catholics also pray through Saints and ask them to intervene for them while Protestants do not. Catholics also view Mary as the mother of the church while Protestants do not. Even centuries after the death of Martin Luther, the effects of his reformation still last to this day in how Protestant Churches and Catholic Churches operate. Martin Luther brought the many flaws and mistakes of the Catholic Church into the light and not only reformed Christianity, but also reformed the Catholic Church for the better. After Martin Luther, the Catholic Church made more of an effort to be more spiritual, transparent, and follow the teachings of the Bible. In conclusion, Martin Luther’s reforms changed the way that the church functioned and taught its people.

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Introduction to the Protestant Reformation (part 2 of 4): Martin Luther

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David French

The Line Between Good and Evil Cuts Through Evangelical America

By David French

Opinion Columnist

I’m afraid that an exit poll question has confused America.

Every four years, voters are asked, “Are you a white evangelical or born-again Christian?” And every time, voters from a broad range of Protestant Christian traditions say yes, compressing a diverse religious community into a single, unified mass.

It’s not that the question is misleading. People who answer yes do represent a coherent political movement. Not only do they vote overwhelmingly for Republicans; they’re also quite distinct from other American political groups in their views on a host of issues, including on disputes regarding race, immigration and the Covid vaccines.

But in other ways, this exit poll identity misleads us about the nature and character of American evangelicalism as a whole. It’s far more diverse and divided than the exit poll results imply. There are the rather crucial facts that not all evangelicals are white and evangelicals of color vote substantially differently from their white brothers and sisters. Evangelicals of color are far more likely to vote Democratic, and their positions on many issues are more closely aligned with the American political mainstream. But the differences go well beyond race.

In reality, American evangelicalism is best understood as a combination of three religious traditions: fundamentalism, evangelicalism and Pentecostalism. These different traditions have different beliefs, different cultures and different effects on our nation.

The distinction between fundamentalism and evangelicalism can be the hardest to parse, especially since we now use the term “evangelical” to describe both branches of the movement. The conflict between evangelicalism and fundamentalism emerged most sharply in the years following World War II, when so-called neo-evangelicals arose as a biblically conservative response to traditional fundamentalism’s separatism and fighting spirit. I say “biblically conservative” because neo-evangelicals had the same high view of Scripture as the inerrant word of God that fundamentalists did, but their temperament and approach were quite different.

The difference between fundamentalism and neo-evangelicalism can be summed up in two men, Bob Jones and Billy Graham. In a 2011 piece about the relationship between Jones and Graham, the Gospel Coalition’s Justin Taylor called them the “exemplars of fundamentalism and neo-evangelicalism.” Jones was the founder of the university that bears his name in Greenville, S.C., one of the most influential fundamentalist colleges in America.

Bob Jones University barred Black students from attending until 1971, then banned interracial dating until 2000 . The racism that plagued Southern American fundamentalism is a key reason for the segregation of American religious life. It’s also one reason the historically Black Protestant church is distinct from the evangelical tradition, despite its similar views of the authority of Scripture.

Graham attended Bob Jones University for a semester, but soon left and took a different path. He went on to become known as “America’s pastor,” the man who ministered to presidents of both parties and led gigantic evangelistic crusades in stadiums across the nation and the world. While Jones segregated his school, Graham removed the red segregation rope dividing white and Black attendees at his crusades in the South — before Brown v. Board of Education — and shared a stage with Martin Luther King Jr. at Madison Square Garden in 1957.

But since that keen Jones/Graham divide, the lines between evangelicalism and fundamentalism have blurred. Now the two camps often go to the same churches, attend the same colleges, listen to the same Christian musicians and read the same books. To compound the confusion, they’re both quite likely to call themselves evangelical. While the theological differences between fundamentalists and evangelicals can be difficult to describe, the temperamental differences are not.

“Fundamentalism,” Richard Land, the former head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, once told me, “is far more a psychology than a theology.” That psychology is defined by an extreme sense of certainty, along with extreme ferocity.

Roughly speaking, fundamentalists are intolerant of dissent. Evangelicals are much more accepting of theological differences. Fundamentalists place a greater emphasis on confrontation and domination. Evangelicals are more interested in pluralism and persuasion. Fundamentalists focus more on God’s law. Evangelicals tend to emphasize God’s grace. While many evangelicals are certainly enthusiastic Trump supporters, they are more likely to be reluctant (and even embarrassed) Trump voters, or Never Trumpers, or Democrats. Fundamentalists tend to march much more in lock step with the MAGA movement. Donald Trump’s combative psychology in many ways merges with their own.

A Christian politics dominated by fundamentalism is going to look very different from a Christian politics dominated by evangelicalism. Think of the difference between Trump and George W. Bush. Bush is conservative. He’s anti-abortion. He’s committed to religious liberty. These are all values that millions of MAGA Republicans would claim to uphold, but there’s a yawning character gap between the two presidents, and their cultural influence is profoundly different.

While the difference between evangelicalism and fundamentalism can be difficult to discern, Pentecostalism is something else entirely. American evangelicals can trace their roots to the Reformation; the Pentecostal movement began a little over 100 years ago, during the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles in 1906. The movement was started by a Black pastor named William Seymour, and it is far more supernatural in its focus than, say, the Southern Baptist or Presbyterian church down the street.

At its heart, Pentecostalism believes that all of the gifts and miracles you read about in the Bible can and do happen today. That means prophecy, speaking in tongues and gifts of healing. Pentecostalism is more working class than the rest of the evangelical world, and Pentecostal churches are often more diverse — far more diverse — than older American denominations. Hispanics in particular have embraced the Pentecostal faith, both in the United States and in Latin America, and Pentecostalism has exploded in the global south .

When I lived in Manhattan, my wife and I attended Times Square Church, a Pentecostal congregation in the heart of the city, and every Sunday felt like a scene from the book of Revelation , with people “from every nation, tribe, people and language” gathered together to worship with great joy.

Pentecostalism is arguably the most promising and the most perilous religious movement in America. At its best, the sheer exuberance and radical love of a good Pentecostal church is transformative. At its worst, the quest for miraculous experience can lead to a kind of frenzied superstition, where carnival barker pastors and faux apostles con their congregations with false prophecies and fake miracles, milking them for donations and then wielding their abundant wealth as proof of God’s favor.

The Pentecostal church, for example, is the primary home of one of the most toxic and dangerous Christian nationalist ideas in America — the Seven Mountain Mandate , which holds that God has ordained Christians to dominate the seven “mountains” of cultural influence: the family, the church, education, media, arts, the economy and government. This is an extreme form of Christian supremacy, one that would relegate all other Americans to second-class status.

Pentecostalism is also the primary source for the surge in prophecies about Trump that I’ve described before . It’s mostly Pentecostal pastors and leaders who have told their flocks that God has ordained Trump to rule — and to rule again. Combine the Seven Mountain Mandate with Trump prophecies, and you can see the potential for a kind of fervent radicalism that is immune to rational argument. After all, how can you argue a person out of the idea that God told him to vote for Trump? Or that God told him that Christians are destined to reign over the United States?

When I look at the divisions in American evangelicalism, I’m reminded of the Homer Simpson toast : “To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.” The American church has been the cause of much heartache and division. It is also the source of tremendous healing and love. We saw both the love and the division most vividly in the civil rights movement, when Black Christians and their allies faced the dogs and hoses all too often unleashed by members of the white Southern church. We saw this on Jan. 6, when violent Christians attacked the Capitol, only to see their plans foiled by an evangelical vice president who broke with Trump at long last to uphold his constitutional oath and spare the nation a far worse catastrophe.

I’ve lived and worshiped in every major branch of American evangelicalism. I was raised in a more fundamentalist church, left it for evangelicalism and spent a decade of my life worshiping in Pentecostal churches. Now I attend a multiethnic church that is rooted in both evangelicalism and the Black church tradition. I’ve seen great good , and I’ve seen terrible evil .

That long experience has taught me that the future of our nation isn’t just decided in the halls of secular power; it’s also decided in the pulpits and sanctuaries of American churches. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote that the line between good and evil “cuts through the heart of every human being.” That same line also cuts through the heart of the church.

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David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation .” You can follow him on Threads ( @davidfrenchjag ).