Martin Luther
German theologian and religious reformer Martin Luther precipitated the Protestant Reformation with his publication in 1517 of his Ninety-Five Theses, which detailed the indulgences and excesses of the Roman Catholic church. Luther felt that the essence of Christianity lay not in an elaborate organization headed by the pope, but in each person’s direct communication with God. Luther’s protest set off a flood of departures from the Roman Catholic church and set the stage for further Protestant movements, including Calvinism and Presbyterianism.

 

Protestant Reformation
No this isn't a trick question: Notice the Protest in Protestant?

The Catholic Church has weathered many storms, The Reformation was a big one! When someone said the church in Europe before the Reformation it meant only one thing, the Catholic Church. That changed.

The Protestant Reformation was the great 16th-century religious revolution in the Christian church, which ended the ecclesiastical supremacy of the pope in Western Christendom and resulted in the establishment of the Protestant churches. With the Renaissance that preceded and the French Revolution that followed, the Reformation completely altered the medieval way of life in Western Europe and initiated the era of modern history. Although the movement dates from the early 16th century, when Martin Luther first defied the authority of the church, the conditions that led to his revolutionary stand had existed for hundreds of years and had complex doctrinal, political, economic, and cultural elements.

Bottom line: A bunch of new Protestant (protesting) churches were born.

The Five Minute Explanation of the Reformation:

Humanism, the revival of classical learning and speculative inquiry beginning in the 15th century in Italy during the early Renaissance, displaced Scholasticism as the principal philosophy of Western Europe and deprived church leaders of the monopoly on learning that they had previously held.

Laypersons studied ancient literature, and scholars such as the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla critically appraised translations of the Bible and other documents that formed the basis for much of church dogma and tradition. The invention of printing with movable metal type greatly increased the circulation of books and spread new ideas throughout Europe.

Humanists outside Italy, such as Desiderius Erasmus in the Netherlands, John Colet and Sir Thomas More in England, Johann Reuchlin in Germany, and Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples in France, applied the new learning to the evaluation of church practices and the development of a more accurate knowledge of the Scriptures. Their scholarly studies laid the basis on which Luther, the French theologian and religious reformer John Calvin, and other reformers subsequently claimed the Bible rather than the church as the source of all religious authority.

The Protestant revolution was initiated in Germany by Luther in 1517, when he published his 95 theses challenging the theory and practice of indulgences.

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