On OCTOBER 31, 1517, is considered the beginning of the Reformation.
The background is interesting.
In 1054 AD, there was the Great Schism, a break between the Catholic Church in Western Europe and the Orthodox Church in Eastern Europe.
Disagreements were over the "Filioque Clause," where the East taught the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father, and the West -- from the Father and the Son.
The East used leavened bread in communion where the West used unleavened bread.
The East allowed priests to marry and the West did not.
Another schism occurred 1378-1417, known as The Great Western Papal Schism, with three claiming to be Pope at the same time:
John XXIII - the Pisan claimant;
Gregory XII - the Roman claimant;
Benedict XIII - the Avignon claimant.
During this time, John Wycliffe (1330-1384) began to translate Scriptures into English, for which he was declared a heretic.
After his death, the Council of Constance ordered his bones dug up and burned.
Reverend William Gilpin, Vicar of Boldre, wrote in The lives of John Wicliff, and of the most eminent of his disciples; Lord Cobham, John Huss, Jerome of Prague, and Zisca, 1765, quoted by Samuel Newton, Leading Sentiments of the People Called Quakers Examined, London, 1771. p. 50:
“It was now a distinguishing article of Wickliffe’s creed as appears from his publications whilst professor at Oxford that 'the New Testament or Gospel is a perfect rule of life and manners and ought to be read by the people.’ And this was doubtless the confirmed opinion of Huss, his disciple.”
Jan Hus (1369-1415) was a younger contemporary of Wycliffe.
In Prague, Hus shared Scriptures translated into the Czech language.
In 1409, Pope Alexander V condemned the teachings of John Wycliffe and Jan Hus.
Alexander was later declared an "anti-pope."
In 1414, Pope John XXIII convened the Council of Constance, where he summoned Jan Hus to stand trial. Hus repeatedly said he was willing to recant if proven wrong by Scripture.
Pope John XXIII excommunicated Hus, but himself was soon declared an "antipope" by the Council of Constance and deposed.
Pope Gregory XII resigned July 4, 1415.
Pope Benedict XIII was declared an "antipope" and deposed.
The day Jan Hus was burned at the stake, July 6, 1415, there technically was no Pope.
His last words were:
"Lord Jesus, it is for Thee that I patiently endure this cruel death. I pray Thee to have mercy on my enemies."
The Council of Constance ended soon after Martin V was elected Pope in 1417.
Jan Hus, whose name means "goose," reportedly told his persecutors:
"You are going to burn a goose, but in one hundred years you will have a swan which you can neither roast nor boil."
After his death, the Hussite Wars (1419-1434) broke out in the Kingdom of Bohemia, between those who did not hold to Papal authority and those did.
Over 100,000 died.
Whereas Wycliffe and Hus lived before the invention of the printing press, Martin Luther lived after.
Johannes Gutenberg (c.1400-1468) invented the Western world's first moveable-type printing press.
The first book of significance ever printed was the 42-line Gutenberg Bible, known as the Mazarin Bible, 1455.
Pope Pius II wrote of it to Cardinal Carvajal, March of 1455:
"All that has been written to me about that marvelous man seen at Frankfurt is true. I have not seen complete Bibles but only a number of quires of various books of the Bible. The script was very neat and legible, not at all difficult to follow - your grace would be able to read it without effort, and indeed without glasses."
Victor Hugo wrote:
"Whether it be Providence or Fate, Gutenberg is the precursor of Luther."
On October 31, 1517, an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther posted 95 debate questions, called "theses," on the door of Wittenberg Church, which began the movement known as "the Reformation."
Luther's initial objection was to the methods employed by Johann Tetzel to sell indulgences.
He was then fiercely attacked by Johann Eck.
In 1521, 34-year-old Martin Luther was summoned to stand trial before the most powerful man in the world, 21-year-old Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.
Charles V of Spain had an empire that spanned nearly 2 million square miles.
The sun never set on the Spanish Empire. It included lands from Europe to the Netherlands, to the Far East, North and South America, and to the Caribbean.
The Philippine Islands were named after his son, King Philip II of Spain.
At a trial, called the Diet of Worms, Charles V initially dismissed Luther's theses as "an argument between monks."
Luther was ordered to recant without having had his theses addressed. He reportedly responded:
"Unless I am convinced by proofs from Scriptures or by plain and clear reasons and arguments, I can't and will not retract, for it is neither safe nor wise to do anything against conscience. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen."
Luther was declared outside the protection of law.
He was kidnapped and hid by Frederick III of Saxony in the Wartburg Castle, where he translated the New Testament into German.
Martin Luther wrote in his Preface to the Epistle to the Romans:
"I greatly longed to understand Paul's Epistle to the Romans and nothing stood in the way but that one expression, 'the justice of God,' because I took it to mean that justice whereby God is just and deals justly in punishing the unjust.
My situation was that, although an impeccable monk, I stood before God as a sinner troubled in conscience, and I had no confidence that my merit would assuage him.
Therefore I did not love a just and angry God, but rather hated and murmured against him.
Yet I clung to the dear Paul and had a great yearning to know that he meant ..."
Luther continued:
"Night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement 'The just shall live by faith.'
Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which through sheer grace and mercy God justifies us through faith.
Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise.
The whole of Scripture took a new meaning, and whereas before 'the justice of God' had filled me with hate, now it became inexpressibly sweet in greater love. This passage of Paul became to me a gate to heaven ..."
Luther concluded:
"If you have a true faith that Christ is your Savior, then at once you have a gracious God, for faith leads you in and opens up God's heart and will, that you should see pure grace and over-flowing love.
This it is to behold God in faith that you should look upon his fatherly, friendly heart, in which there is no anger nor ungraciousness.
He who sees God as angry does not see him rightly but looks only on a curtain, as if a dark cloud had been drawn across his face."
Luther influenced John Wesley, who began the Methodist movement. He wrote:
“In the evening, I went very unwillingly to a Society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans …
About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed …
I felt I did trust in Christ; Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me, that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”
In the two centuries following Luther, different kings in Europe chose different denominations for their kingdoms.
Not to believe what your king did was considered treason.
This resulted in millions migrating from one country to another simply for conscience sake.
Many of these Christian religious refugees eventually fled Europe to settle colonies in America.
As the Reformation spread through Germany, it unintentionally fueled an uprising in 1524 called the Peasants' War.
Mobs of poorly armed peasants threatened the aristocratic ruling class.
The revolt was put down with over 100,000 peasants being slaughtered.
Meanwhile, in 1527, Charles V's unruly troops sacked Rome and imprisoned Pope Clement VII for six months.
Because of this, Pope Clement declined to annul the marriage between Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, as she was the aunt of Charles V.
As a result, Henry broke from Rome and started the Church of England. Catherine had been married for six months to Henry's older brother Arthur before his death in 1502.
Charles V began the Counter-Reformation and oversaw the Spanish colonization of the Americas.
He eventually responded to the pleadings of the priest Bartolome' de Las Casas and outlawed the enslavement of native Americans.
Gold from the New World was used by Spain to push back the Muslim Ottoman Empire's invasion of Europe. Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent's Ottoman fleet dominated the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf.
Suleiman conquered into Christian Hungary, Christian Serbia, and Christian Austria, in addition to controlling the Middle East and North Africa.
Martin Luther referenced this:
"The Turk is the rod of the wrath of the Lord our God ... If the Turk's god, the devil, is not beaten first, there is reason to fear that the Turk will not be so easy to beat ... Christian weapons and power must do it ..."
Luther continued:
"(The fight against the Turks) must begin with repentance, and we must reform our lives, or we shall fight in vain.
(The Church should) drive men to repentance by showing our great and numberless sins and our ingratitude, by which we have earned God's wrath and disfavor, so that He justly gives us into the hands of the devil and the Turk."
Luther was referring to Deuteronomy 28, which lists blessings and cursings. If a nation "shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the Lord thy God ... all these blessings shall come on thee."
But if a nation does not hearken to the voice of the Lord, "all these curses shall come upon thee," including:
"The stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very high; and thou shalt come down very low ... and shall pursue thee, and overtake thee, till thou be destroyed."
How did God judge Ancient Israel when it sinned? He let the strangers invade: Philistines, Edomites, Moabites, Ammonites. Egyptians, Assyrians Babylonians, etc.
When Israel repented, God raised up deliverers.
In an attempt to unite the Holy Roman Empire against the Ottoman Muslims, Charles V agreed to a truce recognizing the Protestants, as Eric W. Gritisch wrote in Martin-God's Court Jester: Luther in Retrospect (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983, p. 69-70):
"Afraid of losing the much-needed support of the German princes for the struggle against the Turkish threat from the south, Emperor Charles V agreed to a truce between Protestant and Catholic territories in Nuremberg in 1532 ...
Thus the Lutheran movement was, for the first time, officially tolerated and could enjoy a place in the political sun of the Holy Roman Empire."
As the Islamic threat intensified, reformer John Calvin wrote to Philip Melanthon in 1543, (Selected Works of John Calvin: Tracts & Letters, I: 373):
"I hear of the sad condition of your Germany! ... The Turk again prepares to wage war with a larger force. Who will stand up to oppose his marching throughout the length and breadth of the land, at his mere will and pleasure?"
Followers of the reformers who "protested" certain doctrines, were generally referred to as "Protestants."
Notable Protestant Reformers include:
John Calvin,
Thomas Crammer,
John Knox,
Philip Melanchthon,
William Tyndale, and
Huldrych Zwingli.
Some Protestant countries refused to help Charles V who was defending Europe from the Muslim invasion.
Finally, Charles V made a treaty with the German Lutheran Princes by signing the Peace of Augsburg, September 25, 1555, ceasing the religious struggle between Lutherans and Catholics.
A line in the treaty, "cuius regio, eius religio," allowed each king to decide what was to be believed in his kingdom.
A month later, October 25, 1555, suffering from severe gout, Charles V abdicated his throne and lived the rest of his life secluded in the monastery of Yuste, leaving his son Philip II to rule.
In 1582, the Catholic Douay–Rheims New Testament was published, and in 1609, the Old Testament.
Three years before his death, Luther penned an anti-semitic work which led to future Jewish persecutions. Since then, both the Lutheran Church and the Catholic Church publicly rejected this work.
The Reformation begun by Luther influenced John Wesley, who influenced George Whitefield, who preached the Great Awakening Revival in Colonial America.
New York University Professor Emeritus Patricia Bonomi, in her article "The Middle Colonies as the Birthplace of American Religious Pluralism" wrote:
"The colonists were about 98 percent Protestant."
One to two percent of America's population at the time of the founding were Catholic, and one-tenth of a percent were Jewish.
The 56 signers of the Declaration were predominantly Protestant, with a notable exception being Catholic Charles Carroll of Maryland.
British Statesman Edmund Burke addressed Parliament, 1775:
"All Protestantism ... is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in our Northern Colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant religion."
Samuel Adams stated when he signed the Declaration of Independence:
"This day, I trust, the reign of political protestantism will commence."
John Adams wrote in A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1765:
"Desire of dominion ... becomes an encroaching, grasping, restless, and ungovernable power ...
Tyranny, cruelty, and lust ... was soon adopted by almost all the princes of Europe ...
The people were held in ignorance ... till God in his benign providence raised up the champions who began and conducted the Reformation.
From the time of the Reformation to the first settlement of America, knowledge gradually spread in Europe, but especially in England; and in proportion as that increased and spread among the people ... tyranny ... lost ... strength."
Consistent with Adams' view are those of Robert D. Woodberry of the National University of Singapore, who wrote a paper titled "The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy" (American Political Science Review, Vol. 106, No. 2, May 2012). In it, Woodberry demonstrated statistically that countries where Protestant "conversionary" missionaries went to in the 19th century became more prosperous in the 20th century:
"The association between Protestant missions and democracy is consistent in different continents and subsamples, and it is robust to more than 50 controls and to instrumental variable analyses."
Luther wrote:
"I am much afraid that schools will prove to be the great gates of hell unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures, engraving them in the hearts of youth.
I advise no one to place his child where the scriptures do not reign paramount.
Every institution in which men are not increasingly occupied with the Word of God must become corrupt."
Luther wrote:
"The Bible was written for men with a head upon their shoulders."
A quote attributed to Martin Luther was published in the Weimarer Ausgabe edition of Luther’s works (D. Martin Luther’s Werke: kritische Gesamtausgabe, publisher Hermann Böhlau Nachfolger, 1933, Briefwechsel, 18 volumes, 3. Band, ed., 81-82):
"Also it does not help that one of you would say: 'I will gladly confess Christ and His Word on every detail, except that I may keep silent about one or two things which tyrants may not tolerate' ...
For whoever denies Christ in one detail or word has denied the same Christ ... in all details, since there is only one Christ in all His words, taken together or individually."
WONDERFUL!