Why Was The Protestant Reformation Significant?
1) Why was the Protestant Reformation significant? The Protestant Reformation separated Europe and it affected the power of the church, monarchs, and individual states. Because the Reformation lowered the authority of the church, the monarchs and independent states took advantage and seized more power. Many people started asking about their place in society, for it was tied into politics and religion. Hence they demanded more of democracy. The base was laid for the future without taking notice of religion because church authority wasn't accepted by the majority of people. In the end, the Protestant Reformation lead to the division of the church and state, the Enlightment, revolutions, imperialism, and the contemporary world.
The concept of the Protestant Reformation was change within the church, or reformation. This was in order for it to have justified and be available to everyone no matter what their social status was. (http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/fil/pages/huntreformaca.html) In 1500 CE the Roman Catholic Church was the single church that existed in Western Europe. The pope in Rome was the highest in church and he governed everything. The Protestant Reformation resulted with the separation in Western Christendom. Reformation was more involved with how the church and its ideas differed within people. …show more content…
(http://ap_history_online.tripod.com/apeh3.htm)
The Protestant Reformation was a very significant and rare thing that occurred in the past of Western European Christianity near the sixteenth century. At first, it was an effort to alter the customary fabric of the western church. The fabric was not only the organization of the church but the encouraging concept of giving a way of salvation as well. Protestants aimed to modify things by utilizing the Bible as the first source for doctrine and the Christian church as an example. In the course of development, Protestants abandoned the power of the papal and most of the conventional thoughts and rituals of the recognized church.
The Protestant meaning started to separate families, cities, and states after a generation of its presence. Within a generation of its appearance, the protestant message had begun to divide families, cities and states. Persuasive protestant preachers and theologians, aided by the enormous diffusive power of the new printing press, could compel attention, create controversy and capture converts. The protestant reformation also generated resistance and hostility, not least from the institutions of the traditional church and its defenders. In the ensuing sectarian conflicts of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Protestantism developed further its distinctive theology and patterns and thought, behavior and consciousness. So the protestant reformation was a highly complex and not particularly coherent movement. But its shadow is difficult to avoid at any moment from 1520 onwards in European history. (http://www.gla.ac.uk/centres/tltphistory/protref/intro.htm)
2) How did it change the world?
We have a notion of change leading to a world very different from the one in which we currently live. We can perceive change as possible, even necessary, in order to achieve variously humanly conceived social goals. The sense of change in the sixteenth century was to 're-form' something, to remove the inevitable corruption of the centuries and recover something which had been gloriously fresh and pristine when it had been conceived by God.
Our modern sense of the 'reformation' as a historical concept only gradually took shape in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, developing alongside the protestant reformation's own sense of its past. Inevitably this happened along confessional lines. In France, the Netherlands and elsewhere, the term 'Reformed' came to be applied to the Calvinists whose churches (to their critics) were 'pretended reformed'. And by the time of the centenary of Luther's pinning of the famous Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the cathedral church at Wittenberg in 1517, the term 'Reformation' was adopted by German Lutherans rather narrowly to refer to the events which had surrounded what we now call 'the Luther Affair'. It was not until the eighteenth century that the term 'Reformation' was used to characterize a broader process of religious change. A century later, the German historian, Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886) would refer to 'the Age of the Reformation' to delineate the whole period of European history from 1520 until the end of the Thirty Years War (1648). Catholic contemporaries of Ranke, however, preferred to conceptualize the period as 'The Age of Schism'. Confessionally-rooted interpretations of the protestant reformation have been a fundamental difficulty in its historiography until the twentieth century.
Nowadays, historians are in broad agreement that the term 'protestant reformation' usefully delineates all those religious reformers in the sixteenth century who were inspired by the insistence on scripture alone (in Latin, 'sola scriptura') as the unique validating authority for religious belief and who sought to rid the church of the 'superstition' and corruption which had been introduced into its practices over the centuries. Inevitably, however, the reformers diverged on how to interpret scripture and over how to simplify the ceremonies and practices of the church. They were in broad agreement, however, in rejecting monastic vows and the traditional conception of the monastic life. They united in their abandonment of many well-established devotional practices of the church such as the veneration of saints, pilgrimages, indulgences, and a good deal more. They generally reduced the number of sacraments from the seven (which had been accepted in the medieval western church) to two (or, in some cases, three). There was a good deal of disagreement over the question of images in and around churches, and over the precise role of music in church services, but there was a universal belief that divine services should be held in the vernacular and that the laity (the 'people') should participate in these services.
So the protestant reformation invited lay involvement. It also claimed to have popular support. As you read the protestant reformers of the sixteenth century, you quickly form the impression that the pre-reformation church must have been very unpopular. According to their critique, it was manifestly decadent and corrupt, its failings evident, its inability to reform itself apparent. Already the butt of anticlerical satire and ridicule, they presented it as an institution which could scarcely command the respect of the broad mass of Europe's population. 'Antichrist is enthroned in God's very temple' wrote Luther of the papacy. 'Farewell you unhappy, lost and blasphemous Rome. The anger of God is come upon you at last'. Given the speed and intensity of the spread of the protestant reformation in its early decades, it was easy for protestant reformers to conclude that the reformation was succeeding because God had inspired the righteous frustrations of people against a corrupt, unpopular and out-of-touch institution.
Their critique has provided later historians with a readily available explanatory framework for why the protestant reformation occurred at all. This tutorial does not directly investigate the causes of the reformation, which were inevitably as complex as the phenomenon itself. Any sustained discussion of the causes of the protestant reformation would have to include the fundamental changes which were made to the institutions of the church in the central Middle Ages during the Gregorian reforms. It would also have to examine the profound social changes which were at work in Europe, most notably in its economically more advanced urban heartlands. It would need to investigate the irreversible changes in intellectual perspective which had been brought about by the Renaissance and by what is often referred to as 'Christian humanism'.
We should note, however, that the protestant reformers' critique of the established church almost certainly tells us more about their own aspirations and ideals than it does about the reality of the church on the eve of the reformation. A good deal of recent research has been devoted to demonstrating how much the pre-reformation church embraced popular customs and legitimised ways of behaving which were already part of everyday life. The institutional failings did not always have the negative impact which the protestant reformers claimed for them. The pre-reformation church was not unresponsive to changing circumstances. It benefited from an enormous flow of benefactions, especially from the urban elites, to fund many aspects of its activities. The invention of printing was not regarded as a great threat by individual churchmen. Even the regular orders saw some merit in it - one estimate is that the Dominicans and Franciscans were responsible for 40% of all the extant incunabula titles (i.e. books printed before 1500). Amongst these books were devotional manuals, works for parish priests and confessors, the statutes of diocesan synods and provincial councils. They were, however, generally in Latin and the use of the vernacular (French, German, Spanish etc.), especially for the scriptures, was regarded as problematic.
If we accept that the negative picture of the pre-reformation church created by the reformers is hardly the right way to approach the historical reality, what of the protestant claims to the convictions and loyalties of contemporaries? Historians readily accept that the protestant reformation in its various manifestations was capable of generating remarkably widespread popular support and lay involvement, but these differed widely in their nature, chronology and extent depending on the particular reformation in question. This popular support reflected a variety of motives. These were generally of a religious nature, but political, social and economic aspirations could influence, help to formulate, even overwhelm, issues of religious conviction. While the protestant reformation drew its support from all segments of sixteenth-century society, the conflict between different social groups played a significant role in shaping (and limiting) the support which it was able to mobilise. Generally speaking, the protestant reformation in the sixteenth century tended to be more urban than rural in nature. When rural society was involved, it was often with violent consequences, as in the German Peasants' War. These tendencies are reflected in the balance of the more detailed case-studies of this tutorial.
The efforts of twentieth-century historians to analyse the social components of the reformation have led to the abandonment of the traditional distinctions of the movement into its more traditional and separate 'confessional' components (Lutheran, Zwinglian, Calvinist . . . ) in favour of other specific 'reformations' within the larger concept. So, for example, the historians of anabaptism and the other dissident movements within protestantism have utilised the term 'Radical Reformation' to identify these groups as in some way more fundamental (in the sense of 'returning to the roots') as well as politically and socially radical. This tutorial does not attempt to investigate these groups at all because their overall influence in Europe was patchy and (partly the result of sustained persecution from both protestant and catholic Europe as well as their tendencies to exclusivism) marginalised. (http://www.gla.ac.uk/centres/tltphistory/protref/intro.htm)
The Reformation went back to first principles in order to go forward. It struck its roots deep in the past and bore rich fruits for the future. It sprang forth almost simultaneously from different parts of Europe and was enthusiastically hailed by the leading minds of the age in church and state. No great movement in history except Christianity itself was so widely and thoroughly prepared as the Protestant Reformation. (http://members.aol.com/jasonte2/reform.htm)
5) What was the Protestant Reformation?
In understanding the history of Protestant Church and the Reformation is important to first understand that one of the claims that the Roman Catholic Church makes is that of Apostolic succession. This means that they claim a unique authority over all other churches and denominations because they say that they can trace the line of Roman Catholic Popes back throughout the centuries all the way to the Apostle Peter. In their view this gives the Roman Catholic Church a unique authority that supersedes all other denominations or churches. This Apostolic succession is only found in the Catholic Church and that no separate Churches have any valid claim to it. It is because of this apostolic succession that the Roman Catholic Church claims a unique authority to interpret Scripture and to establish doctrine, as well the claim of having a supreme leader in the Pope who is infallible when speaking ex cathedra. Therefore according to the Roman Catholic view, the teaching or traditions of the Roman Catholic Church as they come from the Pope are equally as infallible and authoritative as the Scriptures themselves. This is one of the major differences between Roman Catholics and Protestants and was one of the foundational reasons for the Protestant Reformation. The Roman Catholics are not the only ones who try to claim unique authority through Apostolic Succession or by tracing the roots of their church back to the original Apostles. For example, the Eastern Orthodox Church also claims Apostolic Succession as well, although their claim is very similar to the Roman Catholic view as the split between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism did not occur until 1054 AD. There are also some Baptist denominations or groups that will try to establish a Trail of Blood that can be traced back throughout the centuries to the first century church and the Apostles themselves. While the Baptists, who try to establish a direct connection back to the Apostles and the early church, do not try and do so in order to establish the authority of the Pope as an infallible leader like the Catholics do, they still look to that connection to the early church in at least some small degree to establish the authority of their doctrines and practices. A problem with any of these attempts to trace a line of succession back to the Apostles, whether it is Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or even Baptist, is that they all are an attempt to derive or support the authority of what they believe and teach from the wrong source, that of some real or perceived connection with the Apostles. An individual church's or denomination's authority today does not come through some tie to the first century church and the apostles. A Church or Denomination's teachings are authoritative and binding on Christians only if they represent the true meaning and clear teaching of Scripture. This is an important point to realize when it comes to understanding the connection between Protestantism and the Roman Catholic Church and the reason that the Protestant Reformation took place (Got Questions Web).
TRY TO USE ALSO:
1) http://www.newgenevacenter.org/west/reformation.htm
2) http://www.thirdmill.org/files/english/html/ch/CH.Arnold.RMT.2.HTML
6) Who were several important individuals in each period and what were their significant contributions to mankind? Analyze and write their effect on people.
The reformatory Councils of Pisa, Constance, and Basel; the conflict of the Emperors with the Popes; the contemplative piety of the mystics with their thirst after direct communion with God; the revival of classical literature; the general intellectual awakening; the biblical studies of Reuchlin, and Erasmus; the rising spirit of national independence; Wiclif, and the Lollards in England; Hus, and the Hussites in Bohemia; John von Goch, John von Wesel, and Johann Wessel in Germany and the Netherlands; Savonarola in Italy; the Brethren of the Common Life, the Waldenses, the Friends of God, contributed their share towards the great change and paved the way for a new era of Christianity. The innermost life of the church was pressing forward to a new era. There is scarcely a principle or doctrine of the Reformation which was not anticipated and advocated in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Luther made the remark that his opponents might charge him with having borrowed everything from John Wessel if he had known his writings earlier. The fuel was abundant all over Europe, but it required the spark which would set it ablaze.
Violent passions, political intrigues, the ambition and avarice of princes, and all sorts of selfish and worldly motives were mixed up with the war against the papacy. But they were at work likewise in the introduction of Christianity among the heathen barbarians. "Wherever God builds a church, the devil builds a chapel close by." Human nature is terribly corrupt and leaves its stains on the noblest movements in history.
But, after all, the religious leaders of the Reformation, while not free from faults, were men of the purest motives and highest aims, and there is no nation which has not been benefited by the change they introduced....
The Reformation was a grand act of emancipation from spiritual tyranny, and a vindication of the sacred rights of conscience in matters of religious belief.
Luther's bold stand at the Diet of Worms, in the face of the pope and the emperor, is one of the sublimest events in the history of liberty, and the eloquence of his testimony rings through the centuries. To break the force of the pope, who called himself and was believed to be, the visible vicar of God on earth, and who held in his hands the keys of the kingdom of heaven, required more moral courage than to fight a hundred battles, and it was done by an humble monk in the might of
faith.
If liberty, both civil and religious, has since made progress, it is due in large measure to the inspiration of that heroic act. But the progress was slow and passed through many obstructions and reactions. "The mills of God grind slowly, but wonderfully fine."
As important as the civil benefits of the Reformation have been, especially in producing a nation like the United States, the spiritual benefits of the Reformation have been far better. The Reformation called the world back to apostolic Christianity. Salvation is not through works, but through faith alone. The Bible is not just a book of the clergy, but rather is a book for all men, to be distributed freely. Jesus and the apostles said nothing of Popes, Purgatory, and penance. Church leaders were to be held accountable to moral standards rather than retaining their offices while sinning with impunity. These and other truths were popularized by the Reformation at a time when falsehood had been firmly established for centuries. The Reformation removed hundreds of years of corrupt traditions, so that the world could see more clearly the light of apostolic Christianity and the gospel it proclaims. (http://members.aol.com/jasonte2/reform.htm)
The concept of the Protestant Reformation was change within the church, or reformation. This was in order for it to have justified and be available to everyone no matter what their social status was. (http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/fil/pages/huntreformaca.html) In 1500 CE the Roman Catholic Church was the single church that existed in Western Europe. The pope in Rome was the highest in church and he governed everything. The Protestant Reformation resulted with the separation in Western Christendom. Reformation was more involved with how the church and its ideas differed within people. …show more content…
(http://ap_history_online.tripod.com/apeh3.htm)
The Protestant Reformation was a very significant and rare thing that occurred in the past of Western European Christianity near the sixteenth century. At first, it was an effort to alter the customary fabric of the western church. The fabric was not only the organization of the church but the encouraging concept of giving a way of salvation as well. Protestants aimed to modify things by utilizing the Bible as the first source for doctrine and the Christian church as an example. In the course of development, Protestants abandoned the power of the papal and most of the conventional thoughts and rituals of the recognized church.
The Protestant meaning started to separate families, cities, and states after a generation of its presence. Within a generation of its appearance, the protestant message had begun to divide families, cities and states. Persuasive protestant preachers and theologians, aided by the enormous diffusive power of the new printing press, could compel attention, create controversy and capture converts. The protestant reformation also generated resistance and hostility, not least from the institutions of the traditional church and its defenders. In the ensuing sectarian conflicts of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Protestantism developed further its distinctive theology and patterns and thought, behavior and consciousness. So the protestant reformation was a highly complex and not particularly coherent movement. But its shadow is difficult to avoid at any moment from 1520 onwards in European history. (http://www.gla.ac.uk/centres/tltphistory/protref/intro.htm)
2) How did it change the world?
We have a notion of change leading to a world very different from the one in which we currently live. We can perceive change as possible, even necessary, in order to achieve variously humanly conceived social goals. The sense of change in the sixteenth century was to 're-form' something, to remove the inevitable corruption of the centuries and recover something which had been gloriously fresh and pristine when it had been conceived by God.
Our modern sense of the 'reformation' as a historical concept only gradually took shape in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, developing alongside the protestant reformation's own sense of its past. Inevitably this happened along confessional lines. In France, the Netherlands and elsewhere, the term 'Reformed' came to be applied to the Calvinists whose churches (to their critics) were 'pretended reformed'. And by the time of the centenary of Luther's pinning of the famous Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the cathedral church at Wittenberg in 1517, the term 'Reformation' was adopted by German Lutherans rather narrowly to refer to the events which had surrounded what we now call 'the Luther Affair'. It was not until the eighteenth century that the term 'Reformation' was used to characterize a broader process of religious change. A century later, the German historian, Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886) would refer to 'the Age of the Reformation' to delineate the whole period of European history from 1520 until the end of the Thirty Years War (1648). Catholic contemporaries of Ranke, however, preferred to conceptualize the period as 'The Age of Schism'. Confessionally-rooted interpretations of the protestant reformation have been a fundamental difficulty in its historiography until the twentieth century.
Nowadays, historians are in broad agreement that the term 'protestant reformation' usefully delineates all those religious reformers in the sixteenth century who were inspired by the insistence on scripture alone (in Latin, 'sola scriptura') as the unique validating authority for religious belief and who sought to rid the church of the 'superstition' and corruption which had been introduced into its practices over the centuries. Inevitably, however, the reformers diverged on how to interpret scripture and over how to simplify the ceremonies and practices of the church. They were in broad agreement, however, in rejecting monastic vows and the traditional conception of the monastic life. They united in their abandonment of many well-established devotional practices of the church such as the veneration of saints, pilgrimages, indulgences, and a good deal more. They generally reduced the number of sacraments from the seven (which had been accepted in the medieval western church) to two (or, in some cases, three). There was a good deal of disagreement over the question of images in and around churches, and over the precise role of music in church services, but there was a universal belief that divine services should be held in the vernacular and that the laity (the 'people') should participate in these services.
So the protestant reformation invited lay involvement. It also claimed to have popular support. As you read the protestant reformers of the sixteenth century, you quickly form the impression that the pre-reformation church must have been very unpopular. According to their critique, it was manifestly decadent and corrupt, its failings evident, its inability to reform itself apparent. Already the butt of anticlerical satire and ridicule, they presented it as an institution which could scarcely command the respect of the broad mass of Europe's population. 'Antichrist is enthroned in God's very temple' wrote Luther of the papacy. 'Farewell you unhappy, lost and blasphemous Rome. The anger of God is come upon you at last'. Given the speed and intensity of the spread of the protestant reformation in its early decades, it was easy for protestant reformers to conclude that the reformation was succeeding because God had inspired the righteous frustrations of people against a corrupt, unpopular and out-of-touch institution.
Their critique has provided later historians with a readily available explanatory framework for why the protestant reformation occurred at all. This tutorial does not directly investigate the causes of the reformation, which were inevitably as complex as the phenomenon itself. Any sustained discussion of the causes of the protestant reformation would have to include the fundamental changes which were made to the institutions of the church in the central Middle Ages during the Gregorian reforms. It would also have to examine the profound social changes which were at work in Europe, most notably in its economically more advanced urban heartlands. It would need to investigate the irreversible changes in intellectual perspective which had been brought about by the Renaissance and by what is often referred to as 'Christian humanism'.
We should note, however, that the protestant reformers' critique of the established church almost certainly tells us more about their own aspirations and ideals than it does about the reality of the church on the eve of the reformation. A good deal of recent research has been devoted to demonstrating how much the pre-reformation church embraced popular customs and legitimised ways of behaving which were already part of everyday life. The institutional failings did not always have the negative impact which the protestant reformers claimed for them. The pre-reformation church was not unresponsive to changing circumstances. It benefited from an enormous flow of benefactions, especially from the urban elites, to fund many aspects of its activities. The invention of printing was not regarded as a great threat by individual churchmen. Even the regular orders saw some merit in it - one estimate is that the Dominicans and Franciscans were responsible for 40% of all the extant incunabula titles (i.e. books printed before 1500). Amongst these books were devotional manuals, works for parish priests and confessors, the statutes of diocesan synods and provincial councils. They were, however, generally in Latin and the use of the vernacular (French, German, Spanish etc.), especially for the scriptures, was regarded as problematic.
If we accept that the negative picture of the pre-reformation church created by the reformers is hardly the right way to approach the historical reality, what of the protestant claims to the convictions and loyalties of contemporaries? Historians readily accept that the protestant reformation in its various manifestations was capable of generating remarkably widespread popular support and lay involvement, but these differed widely in their nature, chronology and extent depending on the particular reformation in question. This popular support reflected a variety of motives. These were generally of a religious nature, but political, social and economic aspirations could influence, help to formulate, even overwhelm, issues of religious conviction. While the protestant reformation drew its support from all segments of sixteenth-century society, the conflict between different social groups played a significant role in shaping (and limiting) the support which it was able to mobilise. Generally speaking, the protestant reformation in the sixteenth century tended to be more urban than rural in nature. When rural society was involved, it was often with violent consequences, as in the German Peasants' War. These tendencies are reflected in the balance of the more detailed case-studies of this tutorial.
The efforts of twentieth-century historians to analyse the social components of the reformation have led to the abandonment of the traditional distinctions of the movement into its more traditional and separate 'confessional' components (Lutheran, Zwinglian, Calvinist . . . ) in favour of other specific 'reformations' within the larger concept. So, for example, the historians of anabaptism and the other dissident movements within protestantism have utilised the term 'Radical Reformation' to identify these groups as in some way more fundamental (in the sense of 'returning to the roots') as well as politically and socially radical. This tutorial does not attempt to investigate these groups at all because their overall influence in Europe was patchy and (partly the result of sustained persecution from both protestant and catholic Europe as well as their tendencies to exclusivism) marginalised. (http://www.gla.ac.uk/centres/tltphistory/protref/intro.htm)
The Reformation went back to first principles in order to go forward. It struck its roots deep in the past and bore rich fruits for the future. It sprang forth almost simultaneously from different parts of Europe and was enthusiastically hailed by the leading minds of the age in church and state. No great movement in history except Christianity itself was so widely and thoroughly prepared as the Protestant Reformation. (http://members.aol.com/jasonte2/reform.htm)
5) What was the Protestant Reformation?
In understanding the history of Protestant Church and the Reformation is important to first understand that one of the claims that the Roman Catholic Church makes is that of Apostolic succession. This means that they claim a unique authority over all other churches and denominations because they say that they can trace the line of Roman Catholic Popes back throughout the centuries all the way to the Apostle Peter. In their view this gives the Roman Catholic Church a unique authority that supersedes all other denominations or churches. This Apostolic succession is only found in the Catholic Church and that no separate Churches have any valid claim to it. It is because of this apostolic succession that the Roman Catholic Church claims a unique authority to interpret Scripture and to establish doctrine, as well the claim of having a supreme leader in the Pope who is infallible when speaking ex cathedra. Therefore according to the Roman Catholic view, the teaching or traditions of the Roman Catholic Church as they come from the Pope are equally as infallible and authoritative as the Scriptures themselves. This is one of the major differences between Roman Catholics and Protestants and was one of the foundational reasons for the Protestant Reformation. The Roman Catholics are not the only ones who try to claim unique authority through Apostolic Succession or by tracing the roots of their church back to the original Apostles. For example, the Eastern Orthodox Church also claims Apostolic Succession as well, although their claim is very similar to the Roman Catholic view as the split between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism did not occur until 1054 AD. There are also some Baptist denominations or groups that will try to establish a Trail of Blood that can be traced back throughout the centuries to the first century church and the Apostles themselves. While the Baptists, who try to establish a direct connection back to the Apostles and the early church, do not try and do so in order to establish the authority of the Pope as an infallible leader like the Catholics do, they still look to that connection to the early church in at least some small degree to establish the authority of their doctrines and practices. A problem with any of these attempts to trace a line of succession back to the Apostles, whether it is Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or even Baptist, is that they all are an attempt to derive or support the authority of what they believe and teach from the wrong source, that of some real or perceived connection with the Apostles. An individual church's or denomination's authority today does not come through some tie to the first century church and the apostles. A Church or Denomination's teachings are authoritative and binding on Christians only if they represent the true meaning and clear teaching of Scripture. This is an important point to realize when it comes to understanding the connection between Protestantism and the Roman Catholic Church and the reason that the Protestant Reformation took place (Got Questions Web).
TRY TO USE ALSO:
1) http://www.newgenevacenter.org/west/reformation.htm
2) http://www.thirdmill.org/files/english/html/ch/CH.Arnold.RMT.2.HTML
6) Who were several important individuals in each period and what were their significant contributions to mankind? Analyze and write their effect on people.
The reformatory Councils of Pisa, Constance, and Basel; the conflict of the Emperors with the Popes; the contemplative piety of the mystics with their thirst after direct communion with God; the revival of classical literature; the general intellectual awakening; the biblical studies of Reuchlin, and Erasmus; the rising spirit of national independence; Wiclif, and the Lollards in England; Hus, and the Hussites in Bohemia; John von Goch, John von Wesel, and Johann Wessel in Germany and the Netherlands; Savonarola in Italy; the Brethren of the Common Life, the Waldenses, the Friends of God, contributed their share towards the great change and paved the way for a new era of Christianity. The innermost life of the church was pressing forward to a new era. There is scarcely a principle or doctrine of the Reformation which was not anticipated and advocated in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Luther made the remark that his opponents might charge him with having borrowed everything from John Wessel if he had known his writings earlier. The fuel was abundant all over Europe, but it required the spark which would set it ablaze.
Violent passions, political intrigues, the ambition and avarice of princes, and all sorts of selfish and worldly motives were mixed up with the war against the papacy. But they were at work likewise in the introduction of Christianity among the heathen barbarians. "Wherever God builds a church, the devil builds a chapel close by." Human nature is terribly corrupt and leaves its stains on the noblest movements in history.
But, after all, the religious leaders of the Reformation, while not free from faults, were men of the purest motives and highest aims, and there is no nation which has not been benefited by the change they introduced....
The Reformation was a grand act of emancipation from spiritual tyranny, and a vindication of the sacred rights of conscience in matters of religious belief.
Luther's bold stand at the Diet of Worms, in the face of the pope and the emperor, is one of the sublimest events in the history of liberty, and the eloquence of his testimony rings through the centuries. To break the force of the pope, who called himself and was believed to be, the visible vicar of God on earth, and who held in his hands the keys of the kingdom of heaven, required more moral courage than to fight a hundred battles, and it was done by an humble monk in the might of
faith.
If liberty, both civil and religious, has since made progress, it is due in large measure to the inspiration of that heroic act. But the progress was slow and passed through many obstructions and reactions. "The mills of God grind slowly, but wonderfully fine."
As important as the civil benefits of the Reformation have been, especially in producing a nation like the United States, the spiritual benefits of the Reformation have been far better. The Reformation called the world back to apostolic Christianity. Salvation is not through works, but through faith alone. The Bible is not just a book of the clergy, but rather is a book for all men, to be distributed freely. Jesus and the apostles said nothing of Popes, Purgatory, and penance. Church leaders were to be held accountable to moral standards rather than retaining their offices while sinning with impunity. These and other truths were popularized by the Reformation at a time when falsehood had been firmly established for centuries. The Reformation removed hundreds of years of corrupt traditions, so that the world could see more clearly the light of apostolic Christianity and the gospel it proclaims. (http://members.aol.com/jasonte2/reform.htm)