English Reformation

(This article does not yet include assured, accurate information.)

There is a lot more to the English reformation, but for now, here is a bit of a summary of what happened. I also forgot to add that there were a lot of battles at the end of the English Reformation as well. 😃

“The Protestant Reformation was the religious, political, intellectual and cultural upheaval dating back to the 16th-century,” according to history.com. The Reformation was mainly focused on religious purposes, which lead to inventions such as the printing press. Two of the main points in the English Reformation were the discovery of Lutheranism and Calvinism.

Before the English Reformation began, many reformers such as Martin Luther and John Calvin went to Catholic churches and questioned the church’s ability to spread Catholic practices. The reformers believed that just redistributing the Bible itself would be able to take the Catholic church’s place. According to history.com, “The disruption triggered wars, persecutions and the so-called Counter-Reformation, the Catholic Church’s delayed but forceful response to the Protestants.”

The English Reformation began when Martin Luther wrote “95 Theses” in 1517, whereas the ending of the reformation could possibly take place during the 1555 Peace of Augsburg, a treaty for the existence of Lutheranism and Catholicism in Germany, or the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years War.

history.com states, “The key ideas of the Reformation—a call to purify the church and a belief that the Bible, not tradition, should be the sole source of spiritual authority—were not themselves novel.” This means that many wanted to have the bible as the main source of spiritual authority. Martin Luther and other reformers work together to create the printing press that helped reformers share their notions.

Martin Luther wrote the “95 Theses” to protest the pope’s sale of reprieves from penance. (This means that the pope was making individuals pay to balance those in Purgatory into heaven. Purgatory is the time where you are not sinful enough to go to *the opposite of heaven* but not able to enter heaven. The pope was basically asking people to pay for those in Purgatory to send them to heaven.)

Luther had assumed that the church would agree with his protest, but instead, he was excommunicated and faced the Diet of Worms. The diet of worms was an assembly suggested by Emperor Charles V, where he insisted that Luther recant or take back his writings. Luther refused, saying that he would only retaliate if he had misunderstood something in the Bible. “His conscience was bound by the Word of God.” (history.com) The assembly ended with Emperor Charles V proclaiming Luther an enemy of the state and banned his writings.

Despite this, Martin Luther worked together with Frederick III, who protected him from any exposure of trouble. He translated the Bible into German and continued to release new pamphlets of writing. In 1524, many german peasants began to value Luther’s work, especially to Luther’s quote of “priesthood of all believers,” which means that all humans can have the access to God by Christ and that all Christians are equal. Because of this, Luther sided with the German princes. By the end of the Reformation, Lutheranism became the state religion of most of Germany, Scandinavia, and the Baltics.