Luther's World

Outline:

A.  Humanists make bad protestants while Catholics make good Christian humanists.

B.  The Education of Martin Luther

C.  Eugene F. Rice:   The leaders of the Protestant Reformation, too, were sensitive to ecclesiastical abuses and wished to reform them.  Yet the reform of abuses was not their fundamental concern.  The attempt to reform an institution, after all, suggests that its abuses are temporary blemishes on a body fundamentally sound and beautiful.  Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin did not believe this.  They attacked the corruption of the Renaissance papacy, but their aim was not merely to reform it; they identified the pope with Antichrist and wished to abolish the papacy altogether.  They did not limit their attack on the sacrament of penance to the abuse of indulgences.  They plucked out the sacrament itself root and branch because they believed it to have no scriptural foundation.  They did not wish simply to reform monasticism; they saw the institution itself as a perversion.  The Reformation was a passionate debate on the proper conditions of salvation.  It concerned the very foundations of faith and doctrine.  Protestants reproached the clergy not so much for living badly as for believing badly, for teaching false and dangerous things.  Luther attacked not the corruption of institutions but what he believed to be the corruption of faith itself.  The Protestant Reformation was not strictly a “reformation” at all.  In the intention of its leaders it was a restoration of biblical Christianity.  In practice it was a revolution, a full-scale attack on the traditional doctrines and sacramental structure of the Roman Church.  It could say with Christ, “I came not to send peace, but a sword.”  In its relation to the Church as it existed in the second decade of the sixteenth century, it came not to reform but to destroy.

D.  Bishop Albert accumulates offices and uses indulgence sales

E.  Luther posts 95 debating points, Theses

Questions to Consider:

1.  Why do Humanists make bad protestants and Catholics make good humanists?

2.  Why is Germany around 1500 the perfect place for a protestant revolt?

3.  In what way is the Protestant Reformation actually a Revolution against the Roman Catholic Church?

4.  What was the political atmosphere in Germany in 1517?

Bibliography: 

Roland H. Bainton.  HERE I STAND:  A LIFE OF MARTIN LUTHER.  New York:  Mentor Books.  1963.

Eugene F. Rice.  THE FOUNDATIONS OF EARLY MODERN EUROPE:  1460 – 1559.  New York:  W. W. Norton.  1970.