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How Protestantism was born / Theses of Martin Luther and the spread in Europe
2024-03-30 18:57:32 / JETË
Protestantism is the common name of various Christian currents, which broke away from the Catholic Church in the century. XVI.
Protestants do not accept the Pope as the head of the church, oppose the celibacy of priests, are for simple religious ceremonies and against the worship of icons.
The main currents of Protestantism are: Lutheranism spread in Northern Germany and the Scandinavian countries: Calvinism spread in Switzerland and the Netherlands and partly in Great Britain and Northern Ireland; Anglicanism in England.
How did it start?
It was a movement within Western Christianity in 16th-century Europe that posed a religious and political challenge to the Roman Catholic Church and papal authority in particular. Although the Reformation is usually considered to have begun with the publication of the Ninety-five Theses by Martin Luther in 1517, there was no schism between the Catholic Church and Luther in the east until the Edict of Worms in 1521.
The order condemned Luther and officially prohibited citizens of the Holy Roman Empire from advocating or propagating his ideas.
The end of the Reformation era is controversial: it can be considered to end with the adoption of the confessions of faith that began the Age of Orthodoxy. Other suggested ending years relate to the Counter-Reformation or the Peace of Westphalia.
From a Catholic perspective, the Second Vatican Council called for an end to the Counter-Reformation.
Background
Luther began by criticizing the sale of indulgences, insisting that the Pope had no authority over purgatory and that the Treasury of Merit had no basis in the Bible. The Reformation further developed to include a distinction between Law and Gospel, a complete reliance on Scripture as the only source of correct doctrine (sola scriptura), and the belief that faith in Jesus is the only way to receive God's forgiveness for sin ( sola fide ) than good works.
Although this is generally considered a Protestant belief, a similar formulation was taught by Molinist and Jansenist Catholics.
The priesthood of all believers minimized the need for saints or priests to serve as intercessors, and compulsory clerical celibacy was ended. Simul justus et peccator meant that although people could improve, no one could become good enough to earn God's forgiveness. Sacramental theology was simplified and attempts to impose Aristotelian epistemology were resisted.
Luther and his followers did not see these theological developments as changes. The Augsburg Confession of 1530 concluded that "in doctrine and ceremony nothing has been received by us against Scripture or the Catholic Church", and even after the Council of Trent, Martin Chemnitz published the 1565-73 Examination of the Council of Trent [4 ] as an attempt to prove that Trent innovated in doctrine while the Lutherans were following in the footsteps of the Church Fathers and Apostles.
The initial movement in Germany diversified, and other reformers arose independently of Luther such as Zwingli in Zürich and John Calvin in Geneva. Depending on the country, the Reformation had different causes and different origins, and also unfolded differently than in Germany. The spread of Gutenberg's printing press provided the means for the rapid distribution of religious materials in Albanian.
During the Reformation era confession, Western Christianity adopted various confessions (Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, Anabaptist, Unitarian, etc.).
The radical reformers, in addition to forming communities outside state sanction, sometimes used more extreme doctrinal changes, such as rejecting the principles of the councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon with the Transylvanian Uniforms. Anabaptist movements were particularly persecuted after the German Peasants' War.
Leaders within the Roman Catholic Church responded with the Counter-Reformation, initiated by the Confutatio Augustana in 1530, the Council of Trent in 1545, the Jesuits in 1540, the Defensio Tridentinæ fidei in 1578, and also a series of wars and expulsions of Protestants that continued into the 19th century. Northern Europe, with the exception of most of Ireland, fell under the influence of Protestantism. Southern Europe remained largely Catholic except for the much-persecuted Waldensians. Central Europe was the site of most of the Thirty Years' War, and there were continued expulsions of Protestants in Central Europe well into the 19th century. After World War II, the removal of ethnic Germans to East Germany or Siberia reduced Protestantism in the Warsaw Pact countries, although some remain today.
The absence of Protestants does not necessarily mean the failure of the Reformation. Although the Protestants had been exterminated and ended up worshiping in separate congregations from the Catholics, contrary to the original intent of the Reformers, they had also been suppressed and persecuted in much of Europe at one point. As a result, some of them lived as Christ-Protestants, also called Nicodemites, contrary to the encouragement of John Calvin, who wanted them to live their faith openly.
Some crypto-Protestants have been identified as early as the 19th century after emigration to Latin America.
Who was Martin Luther?
Martin Luther was born in the city of Aisleben in Germany in 1483. He did his first studies in his hometown. He later studied Philosophy in Erfurt. There was no deep inclination for Theology. In 1507 he became a priest. In 1512, he became a Doctor of Theology and lecturer in the interpretation of the New Testament in Wittemberg.
It goes without saying that Luther belonged to the Church of Rome. As early as 1054, when the One Church of Christ was divided into Eastern and Western, a great gap was created between them, due to the selfish and absolutist views of the church leaders of Old Rome. These improper actions, frauds and abuses, Luther wanted to announce to the people and condemn them. His indignation reached its peak at the strange innovation of Pope Leo X. The latter, being very fond of money, thought how to accumulate as much as possible. He began to publish Pardon Letters, with which he "forgave" the sins of the living and the dead. He said that he had this power because he was a missionary of Christ on earth and a successor of the apostle Peter.
It said that the money collected went to the armies of the Crusades fighting for the liberation of the Holy Land, but in fact, to the looting of the treasures of the Orthodox Church of the East. He declared with certainty that he who gave money for the expenses of a soldier for one year, has the right to sin for five years. It also said that sins are more easily forgiven when the person concerned performs a mass. So, when each person performs mass, one guesses what a large amount of money was found in the many coffers of the Vatican.
These letters of pardon were given to the preachers who collected the money. Luther, being a preacher, and seeing that this profitable work was being saved from his hands, began to preach against these letters and the power of the Pope.
His harsh words against the Pope testify not only to his fanaticism but also to his unquenchable hatred against the Pope. Luther said that Papacy was created in Rome by the Devil. The devil pulled the Pope from the bottomless pit of Hell. He painted the desolate Pope sometimes with the head of a donkey, sometimes riding on a sow.
He used to say: "As long as I live, I will not stop preaching against the Pope and the Turks." In his book "Against Popism" he wrote: "Come here, parrot, with long ears and mouth cursed for your roots." He calls him "the leader of the wicked, the pig of the devil, his collaborator and the Antichrist." Before he died, with a half-paralyzed hand, he wrote on the wall of the house: "For you, Pope, alive, I was a plague, dead, I will become your death." This rant of his against the Pope, even in the last moments of his life, shows what a disordered spiritual state he was in, how much distrust he showed against the church and its possibly unworthy representatives.
In fact, there were even earlier prominent figures of Christian theology, philosophy and the European renaissance who in one way or another had shown their protests against the Catholic dogmatism of that time, but it was only Martin Luther who through His famous 95 doctrinal theses were giving answers to all the deviations of medieval Christianity.
After Martin Luther put these theses in the church of the city of Wittenberg, he then left the message that he would return in three days to publicly defend these theses. The three days were biblical symbolism, and meant the days of the resurrection of Christ, with this the analogy was in the resurrection of the true Christian church in the evangelical principles and in the principles of the early Christian church, before it was Romanized (Catholicism) or Hellenized (Orthodoxy).
During the night of February 17 and 18, 1546, there was an acute hemiplegia and congestion of the lungs. The doctors were unable to do anything. At three o'clock after midnight he surrendered his soul to the Righteous Judge, saying these words: "God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life."
That, in a nutshell, was the turbulent life of the founder of the 16th century Reformation, Martin Luther. He unfortunately fought with too much confidence, that's why he made all those mistakes. He felt himself cut off from the Church and fearfully asked himself: "My heart trembles and I wonder: You alone are right and all others are wrong? Even if you have led so many souls to damnation?" He shocked he tried to convince himself that he was right. Eventually he was right and became the leader of millions of people today who have the same doctrine as him.
Some of Martin Luther's theses
1. The Lord and Teacher Jesus Christ, when He said Poenitentiam agite (repent), His desire was that the whole life of the believers should be repentance.
2. This word does not mean sacramental penance, that is, confession and penance, administered by priests.
3. It does not even mean only internal repentance; no, there can be no inward penance which does not work outwardly in the many afflictions of the body.
4. In this way the wages [of sin] exist so long as self-hatred continues; for this is true inward repentance, which continues until we enter the kingdom of heaven.
5. The priest does not pretend to forgive, and cannot forgive any sins except those for which he himself is charged either by his authority or by the Canons.
6. The priest cannot forgive any sin, unless he declares that he is forgiven by God and accepts God's forgiveness; yet, surely, he may grant pardon in cases which may be reserved to his judgment. If this right to forgive in such cases is not accepted, then the mistake will remain completely unforgiven.
7. God does not forgive anyone's mistakes if at the same time they do not make that person humble in every respect and submit to His vicegerent (vicar), who is the priest.
8. The canons of penance are imposed only on the living, and according to these, nothing should be imposed on the dead.
9. For this reason the Holy Spirit in the priest is good to us, because because of his human nature, he (the priest) will always make exceptions in cases of death penalty and in need.
10. Ignorant and evil are the actions of those priests who, in the event of death, reserve canonical forgiveness in purgatory.
11. This change of the canonical punishment to the punishment of purgatory is evidently one of the seeds that was sown while the bishops were sleeping.
12. In earlier times canonical punishments were given not after, but before forgiveness, as tests of true repentance.
13. The dead by their death are freed from all punishment; they are already dead to canonical rules, and have a right to be freed from them.
14. Imperfect [spiritual] health, that is to say, imperfect love of the dead brings with it, of necessity, a great fear; and the less the love, the greater the fear.
15. This fear and terror are of themselves sufficient (to say nothing of other things) to create the punishment of purgatory, because it is very close to the terror of despair.
16. Hell, purgatory and heaven are different from each other just as despair is different from near-despair and finding safety.
17. Since souls are in purgatory, it seems necessary that terror should decrease and love should increase.
18. It seems not evident either by reason or the Scriptures, that they are out of the state of merit, that is, of growing love.
19. Again, it seems to be approved that they, or at least all of them, are sure of their sanctity, even though we may be quite sure of it.
20. Thus, when the priest says "full forgiveness for all sins", he does not actually mean "all" but only those caused by himself.
21. For this reason the preachers of indulgences are wrong when they say that by means of the indulgences of priests a man can be freed from all guilt and saved;
22. Meanwhile, he does not pay for the souls in purgatory for any mistake that according to the canons they had to pay in this life.
23. If it is at all possible to grant forgiveness of all punishments to anyone, then it is certain that this forgiveness should be granted only to those who are most perfect, that is, to be granted to very few people .
24. It is necessary to say that most people are deceived by this indiscriminate and hopeful promise of deliverance from punishment.
25. The power that the pope has, in a general way, over purgatory, is equal to the power that every bishop or parish assistant has, in a special way, within his own diocese or parish./ Alfapress.al
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