Salomon Ligthelm: How To Be The Real Christian

Many people who professed their faith to the Catholic Church started to second guess themselves on believing in the Catholic religion. Their main problem with the Church was that the Church sold lies in the form of an indulgence to their loyal worshippers. Few were able to write about their hatred for indulgences because the writing in the time period was censored by the Church itself. The people needed something so that they could speak out about the Church’s wrongdoings and Johannes Gutenberg had a neat idea to solve their problem. Gutenberg made it possible to print articles and books without the Church’s approval with his printing press (Waugh). This created the perfect opportunity for a man named Martin Luther. This man, had this great idea, and now he had a way to show it to other people. He printed his ideologies non-stop with the new Printing press (Kramer). People found out about what the Catholic Church was doing to them because of Martin Luther’s idea. The people rallied behind Martin Luther. He and his people formed their own Church which started the split of the Church and beginning of the Reformation.This all comes

The Protestant Reformation led to dramatic changes within Christianity. In 1517, Martin Luther and a large number of people in Western Europe began to question and eventually reject many key aspects of older theology. There were a significant number of people who had already started discrediting some Roman Catholic practices and beliefs, but they were unable to intimidate the full system. The Roman Catholics responded by establishing the Inquisition to get rid of people with heretical beliefs.

The break from the Catholic Church began when King Henry VIII came into conflict with the Pope over the divorce he wanted to obtain from his wife Catherine of Aragon. After several years of bickering with the Papacy, Henry VIII eventually separated from the church of Rome to the church of England. But this new entity, the church of England, was basically the Catholic Church without the Pope and the monasteries. For the rest of the reign of Henry VIII, and that of following Tudor monarchs there would be vicious competition between the new Protestants and Catholics for supremacy. There was also dissension among the Protestants themselves over how far the reform of the Church should go, and over the course of some years a split began to form between the members of the Church of England.

There are approximately eight hundred million Protestant Christians currently in the world with it being the second largest Christian domination (Fairchild). However, there are over a billion followers of the Roman Catholic faith and it currently stands as the Christian domination with the most followers (Fairchild). If it were not for the German monk, Martin Luther, most Christians would have been Roman Catholic in the present. Martin Luther is famous for “95 Theses” that critiqued the practices and beliefs of the Catholic Church and it was written on Halloween Day, 1517 (Ellis and Esler 423-427). Other people agreed with him and shared their perceptions, which led to the birth of the Protestant Reformation (Ellis and Esler 423-427). In the documents written by people who either supported or were against the Protestant Reformation, the main idea of them is that the Catholic Church supported the idea of paying indulgences and competing with others for power.

During the 1500’s a movement away from traditional Catholicism started to take hold. The most notable figure during this time was Martin Luther. He had ideals that, at the time, were extremely radical. As Gerald Strauss put it, “His doctrine of the two realms- the kingdom of Christ and the kingdom of the world, derived directly from Augustine – entailed the strictest segregation of things spiritual and things material” (22). He did not believe that the people of the church had any right to control the population at large. He believed that they were meant to be spiritual guides, not rulers, and that they wielded way too much control over the common people. One of the most radical things that he did, which was also the most influential

Before I get into answering the question, I thought it would be right to give a little information about The Protestant Reformation which happened from 1517-1648. The Protestant Reformation was started by Martin Luther (1483-1546), who was a Theologian in the sixteenth century. A Theologian is defined as “the study of religious faith, practice, and experience; the study of God and God’s relation to the world.” Martin Luther had submitted a note which contained the 95 Theses that was written in Latin on October 31, 1915, and left on the door of the Castle Church also known as Schlosskirche Wittenberg. Luther questioned some of the ways and the gratifications of the Roman Catholicism, which resulted in individuals to separate from the Roman Catholic Church and branch off to Protestant. (bio.com). Along with Martin Luther there were other individuals from central and northern Europe, which included Henry VIII and also John Calvin. These three were able to question the authority of the pope and the Catholic Church and the way they described how Christianity was supposed to be. They wanted the authority to come from the Bible and not of the popes and such to have that

to fade away. The idea that if one is not with the church they are against the church began to arise.

Christians believed that medieval era Christian Churches had become ungodly and nefarious. They did not believe there was any need for a religious leader with great authority, such as the pope. They also disagreed with the power the church was giving the priests, bishops and church doctrines. These reformers held protests to show how they felt about the Church. The sought to correct the faulty ways of the previous churches and became know as “protestants.”

The 1500’s were a time that had much religious turmoil in the old world and people began to divide themselves into different sects away fro the Roman Catholic Church. The reason for this is because people began to realize how corrupted the Roman Catholic Church actually was and that what the church taught wasn’t in the bible but it was made to benefit the pope and other high level church officials. The two main branches or sects of the R.C.C are the Church of England (Anglicanism) and the Lutheran church (Lutheranism).

Martin Luther’s protests against the Catholic Church led to the Protestant religion. This led to Calvinism and eventually to Puritanism. King James I feared the Puritans would cause political problems and wanted to drive them out of England.

During the Reformation, there were a few strong people who saw problems with the way things had always been done. The churches had corrupt leaders who were not teaching in accordance with the Bible. They were making up whatever they wanted, and they had power to get away with this because they were also part of the government. There arose a movement to refute and stop this. Strong opposers took strong stands to point out the errors of what was going on, and to try to reform the religious system in power. This did not go over very well with the religious leaders, but after years of battling and debating, the protestant view of Christianity won the freedom to worship as they wished. In a similar way, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,

During the elizabethan era most were considered Catholics, however in the early 1500s the practice of roman Catholics was questioned during the reformation according to Linda Alchin. The beliefs of German, Martin Luther caused Protestantism. Martin Luther's supporters protested against the rules and regulations, which resulted in the laws that put a limit on the new ideas Martin was trying to spread (Alchin 2). The protesters decided to create there own religion and beliefs, now known as the Protestants.

We can trace part of the reason to an attempt to set the Christian community apart from the

By the late 1500s, Christian denominations had been popping up all over Europe. This was in response to the reports of indulgences (selling of freedom from purgatory), clerical immorality, abuse of money, along with many other bad actions that were rampant among the Church. It was these problems that Luther and others rebelled and created their own religions. With the rising of these Reformation movements, the Church needed to make some reforms itself. These reforms took the form of educating the clergy, opening monasteries, the Inquisition, and the organizing of councils. In fact, even though Protestant attacks brought these reforms, many of these reforms were needed anyway. The problems in the Church were so bad that the Church would not

The renaissance period marked radical changes in many fields, this includes religion. The so-called Protestant Reformation was the split within western Christian Church initiated by Martin Luther, John Calvin, and other early Protestants. Calls for reform came form all sectors of the European society and it is this dissatisfaction that explains why the ideas of Martin Luther evoked such extreme responses, there was already a ready audience. Although there had been significant attempts at reform before Luther, the date usually given for the start of the Protestant Reformation is 1517, when Luther published The Ninety-Five Theses. As he developed his ideas, Luther gathered followers, who came to be called Protestants. The word protestant