The Protestant Reformation was the 16th century religious, political, intellectual and cultural revolt that divided Catholic Europe, establishing the structures and beliefs that would define the continent in the era Modern. In North and Central Europe, reformers such as Martin Luther, John Calvin and Henry VIII challenged papal authority and questioned the Catholic Church's ability to define the practice Christian. They advocated a religious and political redistribution of power in the hands of pastors and princes who read Bibles and pamphlets. The rupture unleashed wars, persecutions and the so-called Counter-Reformation, the Catholic Church's belated but vigorous response to Protestants.
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Historians generally date the beginning of the Protestant Reformation to the 1517 publication of Martin Luther's “95 Theses”. Its ending can be placed anywhere from the Peace of 1555, which allowed the coexistence of Catholicism and Lutheranism in Germany to the Treaty of 1648. of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War. The key ideas of the Reformation – a call to purify the church and the belief that the Bible, not tradition, should be the only source of spiritual authority – were not in themselves original. However, Luther and the other reformers became the first to deftly use the power of the press to give their ideas a wide audience.
Did you know? No reformer was more adept than Martin Luther in using the power of the press to spread his ideas. Between 1518 and 1525, Luther published more works than the 17 most prolific reformers combined.
Martin Luther (1483-1546) was an Augustinian monk and university lecturer at Wittenberg when he composed his "95 theses", which protested against the sale of the pope's lechers to penance or indulgences. Although he hoped to encourage renewal within the church, in 1521 he was summoned to the Diet of Worms and excommunicated. Sheltered by Friedrich, elector of Saxony, Luther translated the Bible into German and continued his production of vernacular pamphlets.
When German peasants, inspired in part by Luther's “priesthood of all believers,” revolted in 1524, Luther sided with the princes of Germany. By the end of the Reformation, Lutheranism had become the state religion in much of Germany, Scandinavia, and the Baltic States.
The Swiss Reformation began in 1519 with the sermons of Ulrich Zwingli, whose teachings largely resembled Luther's. In 1541, John Calvin, a French Protestant who had spent the previous decade in exile writing his "Institutes of the Christian Religion," was invited to settle in Geneva and put into practice his Reformed doctrine – which emphasized the power of God and the predestined destiny of the humanity. The result was a theocratic regime of forced and austere morality.
Calvin's Geneva became a hotspot for Protestant exiles, and his doctrines quickly spread to Scotland, France, Transylvania and the Netherlands, where Dutch Calvinism became a religious and economic force for the next 400 years old.
In England, the Reformation began with Henry VIII's search for a male heir. When Pope Clement VII refused to annul Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon so that he could remarry, the English king declared in 1534 that he should be the final authority on matters relating to the church. English. Henry dissolved the monasteries of England to confiscate their wealth and worked to put the Bible in the hands of the people. Beginning in 1536, each parish needed to have a copy.
After Henry's death, England turned to Calvinist-infused Protestantism. during the six-year reign of Edward VI and then endured five years of reactionary Catholicism under Mary I. In 1559 Elizabeth I assumed the throne and, during her 44 years of reign, cast the Church of England as a “middle way” between Calvinism and Catholicism, with vernacular worship and a Revised Prayer Book Ordinary.
The Catholic Church was slow to respond systematically to the theological and advertising innovations of Luther and the other reformers. The Council of Trent, which met from 1545 to 1563, articulated the Church's response to the problems that triggered the Reformation and to the reformers themselves.
The Catholic Church of the Counter-Reformation era became more spiritual, more literate, and more educated. New religious orders, notably the Jesuits, combined rigorous spirituality with a global-minded intellectualism, while mystics like Teresa de Avila injected new passion into the orders older. Inquisitions, both in Spain and Rome, were reorganized to combat the threat of the Protestant heresy.
Along with the religious consequences of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation came profound and lasting political changes. Northern Europe's new religious and political freedoms came at a great cost, with decades of rebellion, war and bloody persecution. The Thirty Years War alone may have cost Germany 40% of its population.
But the positive repercussions of the Reformation can be seen in the intellectual and cultural flowering it inspired on all sides of the schism – in universities strengthened from Europe, the music of the Lutheran church of JS Bach, the baroque altarpieces of Pieter Paul Rubens and even the capitalism of the Dutch merchants Calvinists.
In England, the roots of the Reformation were political and religious. Henry VIII, indignant at Pope Clement VII's refusal to grant him the annulment of his marriage, repudiated papal authority and in 1534 established the Anglican church with the king as head supreme. Despite its political implications, the church's reorganization allowed the beginning of religious change in England, which included the preparation of an English liturgy, the Book of Common Prayer. In Scotland, John Knox, who spent some time in Geneva and was heavily influenced by John Calvin, led the establishment of Presbyterianism, which made possible the eventual union of Scotland with the England. For more treatment of the Reformation.
you know what was the Protestant Reformation?
Do you know how long it took and who were responsible for this huge change in the Christian world scene?
In this video we are going to explain historically from where the Reformation began to the opening of the first Pentecostal church!
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