Martin Luther's Impact On Religion

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October 31, 1517 marks a day in which the image of Christianity was transformed across all of Western Culture. The Reformation officially began when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Catholic Church in Wittenberg. Luther’s actions triggered by the recent selling of indulgences had far more outcomes than anyone had ever anticipated. Due to the printing press’s efficiency and support from the government, Luther’s ideas were able to spread beyond borders and dramatically alter the way people viewed Christianity and question many beliefs they had formerly held as absolute truths. Luther’s aim of attempting to be entirely devoted to the Church led him to the inquiring of the views he had held in the past. Coming from humble…show more content…
Prior to his conversion to Protestantism, Calvin was a studier of the law, but left his previous pastimes to further advance the Reformation in Switzerland. Calvin developed many new ideas including the union of church and state by stating, “this civil government is designed...to cherish and support the external worship of God,” in his “Institutes of the Christian Religion” (“Institutes of the Christian Religion”). He also came to add another more positive component to view of the law in Christianity by seeing it as a guide to Christian practice, contrary to Luther seeing it as only a means of forcing people to Christ upon realizing their inadequacies. Highly accentuated in Clavin’s perspective was the idea of predestination. Predestination he clarified by explaining that, before even creation, God ordains people to be either going to heaven or to hell when they end their life on Earth. As a result of Luther’s and other reformers’ actions, the Catholic Church did not approve of this new pattern of thinking and retaliated with a counter reformation. Within the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church began a process of internal reform by clarifying the church’s theological foundations and consolidating its administration. The Council directly objected to Luther’s idea of sola scriptura by claiming that it is the Church’s…show more content…
The previous beliefs concerning the details of the universe revolved around Ptolemaic astronomy. Ptolemy’s view of the universe put Earth at the center with the sun, planets, stars, and moon revolving around it in a circular orbit. Copernicus challenged this widely accepted view by pointing out that the universe is actually heliocentric, with the sun at the center (“De Revolutionibus”). Galileo advanced Copernicus’s theory by adding that the universe is not perfect, as previously believed, but rather flawed like the Earth. He saw that the moon had mountains and craters and that Jupiter also had moons orbiting it. Galileo’s discoveries undermined the Aristotelian universe. Another conflicting perspective that Galileo made was to not take the Bible so literally because of the fact that it was written not for a scientific mindset but for the common man (“Letter to the Grand Duchess
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