AP European History
AP European History
Martin Luther, a Catholic monk, agonized over the question of salvation. He concluded that one could be saved not by good works or by indulgences, but only by faith in God, a belief that became central to his theology.
On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses, an attack on the sale of indulgences. Copies were quickly printed up and distributed throughout the German states. Although initially the pope ignored them, Luther’s ideas soon gained a popular audience. In 1519, the Church challenged Luther to a series of debates with Johann Eck, a Catholic churchman, in an effort to discredit him. Instead, the debates gave Luther a forum for his ideas.
Luther’s theology diverged from the Roman Catholic Church’s in several areas. Luther counted not seven sacraments, but two: baptism and the Lord’s Supper, because they were the only ones described in the Bible. He rejected the idea of transubstantiation, the transformation of bread and wine into the physical body and blood of Christ during communion. Instead, he believed in consubstantiation, in which the bread and wine are not transformed but are filled with the spirit of Christ. Luther also rejected the hierarchical organization of the Catholic Church. He saw Christians as belonging to a “priesthood of all believers” who could interpret the Bible for themselves. And because scripture was the only source of religious truth, he said that Catholic traditions should not be the basis of religious belief. Luther also disagreed with the Church’s demand for clerical celibacy and its insistence on Latin rather than the vernacular for services.
Luther then began to question the authority of the pope, which provoked the Church to condemn him. Moving toward a more permanent split with the Church, Luther wrote several more pamphlets laying out his beliefs, including “Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation,” “The Babylonian Captivity,” and “The Freedom of the Christian Man.”
Martin Luther was not the first to criticize the pope and Church practices, and he did not initially intend to start a new church. Since he was the first to actually split from the Roman Catholic Church and start a new church, he is often referred to as the Father of the Reformation.
Luther was excommunicated and called before the Diet of Worms, a council convened by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1521. When Luther refused to recant, he was declared an outlaw and exiled. Frederick of Saxony intervened and kept Luther in hiding at Wartburg Castle, where he stayed for a year and wrote hymns and a translation of the New Testament. Pamphlets, woodcuts, and sermons by his followers also spread his ideas. Although many humanists had supported Luther’s right to publish his ideas, many, such as Erasmus, believed that he had gone too far by breaking away from the Church, and criticized him for being too radical.
Luther had the support of many members of the nobility, who saw a chance to gain political independence from the Holy Roman Emperor. In addition, by supporting the German Reformed Church, or Lutheran Church, these princes freed themselves from papal dues owed to the Catholic Church. Eventually, they reaped more economic benefit when they forcibly acquired Church lands, convents, and monasteries. Needing the support and protection of the nobility, Luther supported the Knights’ War, but he did not support the social discontent that emerged during the peasants’ revolts, which he stingingly condemned in a pamphlet, “Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants.”
Charles V was unhappy with the rebellion by Luther and the princes, but he was busy with military campaigns against the encroaching Ottoman Empire and the French until 1545. By then, the Lutheran princes posed a threat to the emperor’s power. Both Charles and the Protestant Schmalkaldic League attracted international help, but after nearly a decade of war, they were stalemated. The ensuing Peace of Augsburg of 1555 established the principle cuius regio, eius religio, meaning “whose region, his religion.” The princes could choose the religion – Catholicism or Lutheranism, but not Calvinism of their respective states. A year later, Charles abdicated and became a monk, splitting his empire between his son Philip II, who gained the Spanish Empire, and his brother Ferdinand I, who gained the Holy Roman Empire.
The Peace of Augsburg legalized Lutheranism but left the question of Calvinism unsettled. Keep in mind that although the princes could choose the religions of their individual states, this did not constitute freedom of religion for the general population, because residents were expected to follow the religion chosen by the prince.