Luther and the Reformation

  • SOCIALLY: the Renaissance emphasis on the secular (worldly) and the individual challenged Church authority
  • The printing press helped spread these ideas
  • POLITICALLY: Some rulers (especially the Germans) began to challenge the Church’s political power
  • ECONOMICALLY: northern merchants resented paying church taxes to Rome

  • Corrupt leadership
  • Renaissance-era popes spent extravagantly on personal pleasure
  • Pope Alexander VI admitted that he fathered several children
  • Many priests and monks were poorly educated
  • Some priests got married and had children
  • Some priests drank to excess, many gambled

  • The selling of indulgences (pardons) “releases a sinner from performing the penalty a priest imposed for sins”
  • Johann Tetzel was a monk who sold indulgences to help rebuild St. Peter’s Cathedral
  • A monk named Martin Luther objected to this practice

  • Martin Luther was born in Germany in 1483
  • He studies the trivium - grammar, logic, and rhetoric - and hates it
  • He attends the University of Erfurt (he calls it a beerhouse and a whorehouse)
  • After getting his degree, he enrolls in law school
  • He drops out almost immediately.

  • Martin was on his way back to school after a visit home (he was 21)
  • He was caught in a thunderstorm on horseback, and a lightning bolt almost struck him, knocking him off his horse
  • Martin freaks out, and a cry for help becomes a vow he cannot break...

  • Two weeks later, Martin drops out of law school
  • 1504 - he joins an Augustinian monastery (in closed cloister)
  • 1507 - ordained a priest
  • 1508 - starts teaching theology at the University of Wittenberg
  • 1508 - gets first Bachelor’s degree; 1509 - gets second Bachelor’s degree
  • 1512 - becomes a Doctor of Theology
  • All this before the age of 30

  • Luther thought Tetzel was deceiving people, making them think they could buy their way into heaven (called him “pardon-merchant”)

  • He came up with 95 objections to the way the Church was “doing business” - and nailed it to the church door in Wittenberg on Halloween
  • The official title: Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences
  • We know it as the “95 Theses
(I was gonna type the whole powerpoint but it's just too much)

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