Protestant Reformation Dbq Essay

The Protestant Reformation began because people had different opinions on how the Church should be run. These people gained followers and began spreading their ideas with the rest of Christianity. Martin Luther was the initial founder of the Reformation; shortly after his ideas were posted, he obtained followers and his new church began to grow rapidly. Shortly after Luther, many other reform groups were created with different beliefs on how the Church is meant to be organized and how Christianity is meant to be observed. There is no one reform group, rather there many different groups of people who have different approaches on how to run the church. Universities had a key role in starting the spreading the Reformation movement. In source
B it quotes Bernard Moller who said “Without Humanism, No Reformation;” many think he would have added “Without Universities, no Reformation” because the professors created and sustained the reformation throughout its first century. The Protestant Reformation started off as in innocent assignment to create a disputation for class. Martin Luther was concerned about the indulgences taking place in Wittenberg and he choose to look for biblical support for the idea. It is common for professors who wanted people to listen to their ideas and Luther had participated in this public disputations before attacking Socialism. He constructed a list of 95 theses for his disputation on indulgences and they contained revolutionary ideas. In the end, the disputation did not take place, but had it happened, it would have gotten little to no attention. He thought his theology students his ideas and they became some of the leaders of the Reformation and eventually passed down the knowledge to their students. His colleagues were some of his greatest supporters from the earlier days of the Lutheran Reformation. People came from all over to hear Luther and Philipp Mecanchont, a fellow Wittenberg professor, teach their ideas; the entire student body attended the lectures. The enrollment into Wittenberg skyrocketed and they admitted 1,000 more students making it one of the largest universities at the time. The majority of Luther's followers become professors and thought at protestant universities to spread their ideas. Unitivities and their professors were a major cause and spread of the Protestant Reformation. According to Source D, the universities do not get enough credit for creating the different opinions regarding Roman Catholicism.
Philipp Mecanchont joined the Wittenberg faculty right after Luther began to spread his ideas of humanism. Two years after Philipp Mecanchont joined, the Wittenberg curriculum was changed. Aristotle's physics, metaphysics, and ethics were dropped and logic, rhetorics, and poetry stayed. Common Law was dropped but Civil Law was included. Three years after this, students had to be trained in the classics. Latin, Greek, and Hebrew were taught with great detail; theological training was only taught through the Bible. The ideas of Luther and what he preached influenced a change in curriculums at
Universities. These works complaint each other's main ideas very well.
The true absolute contradiction is that Source D says the universities do not get enough credit for the reformation and Source B seems to credit the universities and their professors tremendously. Both sources would agree that the spread of the Protestant Reformation is due to students learning new ideas in universities and people traveling to hear lectures from Protestant Reformation leaders. Source B focuses more on who the professors were and on the influence of Luther and Philipp Mecanchont while Source D focuses on the change in curriculum due to the ideas preached by Luther and
Philipp. The reformation is a movement in which interpretations on Christianity and the bible, such as Lutheran and Calvinism, started to spread and become accepted. According to class discussions, the major event that lead to the Reformation was Luther’s 95 theses on indulgences. Source B adds the outcome for the publication of Luther’s Theses; the Wittenberg University undergoes massive growth in enrollment and students began to follow and preach Luther’s ideas. After this, Source D comes and teaches about the newfound curriculum for the Wittenberg university. Learning is the fastest way from knowledge to spread and the entire curriculum in school was changed to due the ideas of Luther. In addition, another one of Luther's ideas individualism in Christianity. He believed that not only the priests had the ability to learn and interpret scripture, but the common man should have the ability to explore and learn the bible on their own. Source D compliments this fact; in Wittenberg University it says that they would learn theology based on the bible and therefore would be able to obtain their own approach on the bible. The sources build off of what was learned in class and bring new information on the effect of Luther on education.