Origin and Impact of Reformation Research Assignment (Essay Sample)

Origin and Impact of Reformation
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Origin and Impact of Reformation
The Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural movement that began in Italy in the fourteenth century as a result of trade relations between Italian merchants of Venice and Genoa with Byzantines and Arabs. The movement soon spread throughout Europe without any restriction to the Peninsula Italy.
The Renaissance was so named because its members sought a revival of the Greco-Roman culture of classical antiquity. Renaissance believed the classical World had been a free culture of medieval religiosity. It definitively broke with the religious and superstitious world view of the middle Ages on contact with the Greek rationalist thoughts. Thus, the main feature of the Renaissance was its quest for understanding humanity as a whole. This concern guided to the development of religion, science and politics in the ideological movement called Humanism.
The Renaissance represented the rise of the bourgeois ideals of thought and medieval culture by breaking with the paradigms defended by the Catholic Church. Its mentality broke with the world view in which religion occupied the center of all issues. The humanists claim that the center of any research should be human beings themselves and not religion, and as an immediate result of this, the Church ceased to be seen as one that had an answer for all the problems of life and society. These renaissance ideological structures shaken the Catholic Church has it lost much of its political power and, incredible as it may seem, it also lost much of its same prestige in the religious environment for new interpretations about religion especially with humanists emerged resulting into protestant reformation CITATION Zop08 \l 1033 (Zophy, 2008).
Martin Luther was a German monk who was against some doctrines of the Catholic Church, such as celibacy, the worship of images among other things. Martin argued that faith and good deeds were the main people’s redemption keys. He wrote ninety five theses viewing religion and church rules. From his so called ‘ninety five theses’, the Monk taught that salvation did not provide good deeds, but a free gift of God received only by grace through faith in Jesus as a redeemer of sin CITATION Pea14 \l 1033 (Peace Lutheran Church, 2014). The theses challenged papal authority in the Roman Catholic Church by teaching that the Bible is the only divinely revealed source of knowledge considering all baptized Christians as a holy priesthood, and as a result, the Ninety Five Theses clearly turned downed papacy authority, and the unquestioned dominance of Catholic Church and religion as a whole during the Renaissance (16th century society).
Justification by faith: According to Luther in the ninety five theses, salvation is an individual process in which the believer has access to heaven through faith in Jesus Christ. This belief was contrary to Catholic preaching which claimed that salvation was a process mediated by the Church, and the believer must fulfill a number of sacraments and good works to get to heaven; Universal Priesthood: Luther argued that all Christians were priests and therefore did not require intermediaries to have contact with God. On the contrary, the Catholic Church claimed that only members of the clergy were priests and only through them, the believers would get into contact with God; and Bible as the only reliable source for faith: For the reformer, the Bible was the only reliable source of information about faith, and therefore, it should be read by all. For Luther, the church's role was to point the way to God and not the role of being the way. These Lutheran doctrines were humanistic in nature; they placed human beings to be personally responsible for their contact with God. For Luther, there were no intermediaries between man and God as the church claimed. These doctrines clearly led to the decline of the authority of the papacy and the church dominance, and as a result, especially in Germany which was the center of Lutherans, these 95 theses led to; the reducing of the number of cardinals and other requirements of the papal court; the abolition of the Pope incomes; the recognition of secular government; renunciation of the papal requirement for temporal power; the abolition of Banns and abuses related to the excommunication; the abolition of harmful pilgrimages; the elimination of excessive holy days; suppression of convents for nuns, begging and magnificence; reform of universities; the abrogation of the celibacy of the clergy; and, finally, a general reform of public morality CITATION Dav05 \l 1033 (Reedy, 2005).
The Reformation movement heavily contributed to the secularization of European society. The movement based its ideologies on the facts that; many priests were not prepared at all to hold office; and abuse rules and exceptions created by the Church were varied and offended most faithful. The movement especially in regions such as France and Germany addressed the interference of the pope and the church in the political affairs of the regions and the fact that the Church was the owner of a large territorial extensio...