What is the significance of Martin Luther challenging the catholic church?

Answer 1

He started the whole Reformation movement, that led to the protestant split from the catholic church

Answer 2

Prior to Martin Luther almost all Christians were Catholics, Martin Luthers challenge to Papal authority, created the Protestant church and it's many branches, these are churches which follow Jesus, but do not acknowledge the Pope as the ultimate authority on God.
Luther developed the 95 theses which were highly critical of the Catholic practice of 'indulgences' paying money to the church in exchange for a better chance of getting into heaven, it lead to the founding of the Calvinist, Lutheran and Presbyterian churches. Most non-catholic Christian churches trace the root of their origin back to Luther and the Protestant reformation.
Luther was a German, and an anti-semitic and ultimately responsible for the fragmentation of the Christian churches

Answer 3

Prior to Luther, there was but one Church. The Orthodox are not a separate church but rather part of the Catholic Church but in schism. People saw the world as one group or, rather two groups. There were the members of the Kingdom of God and there were those who did not yet know about the Kingdom of God. There were also people who were felt to be through insurmountable ignorance, unwilling to join. Again, this is fifteenth century thinking.

Luther's initial acts, by themselves, were in fact adopted nearly in whole by the Catholic Church as Catholic teaching. This is the reason the Evangelical Lutheran Church is seeking formal union with Rome at this moment. The causes of the Reformation are long since over with.

However, at the time, this is not how it went. Luther's actions set of a spark of dissent. Luther could not have known what would have happened and had he known, he probably would not have nailed the 95 Thesis to the doors of the church at Wittenberg.

The initial ideas of Luther were not that bad and were mostly orthodox teaching or could be brought into alignment with orthodox teaching with little effort. The problem was the political environment they occured in. Luther was a very hot headed person and the type of person who sincerely believed, he alone was right.

He developed powerful supporters in several German princes who saw this dissent as a way to change their political and financial positions. This set off a civil war that was called the Reformation. In Germany, the war lasted for about 30 years and between 1/6th and 1/3rd of the German population died in it. Religious wars lasted for another three hundred years from it. It is the French Revolution and the American version of the Enlightenment that brought all that nonsense to an end. The French banned religion and declared a secular state. In the United States, separation of Church and State was implemented into the national and state constitutions. Jefferson actually rewrote the bible to remove any miracles as superstition and any reference to Jesus as anything other than a thoughtful person. Adams felt the best of all possible worlds would be a world without ministers of any form. And Franklin, while technically Episcopalian, funded any religious group that came along as long as it was good advertising for his business.

The final echoes of this civil war were in Marxist Leninism that destroyed hundreds of millions of lives in the 20th century.

Luther set off a multinational Civil War and in the process destroyed Christiandom. Instead of one single very diverse group of Christians, we now have 46,000 Protestant denominations each very homogenous internally and each believing they are the one that is correct.

It also set off one unintended idea, that one could question what the apostles really thought. Luther removed James, Jude, Revelations and the books now called the Apocrypha from the bible. If you could pick and choose your truth, maybe there is no truth. Further, with multiple views to choose from, maybe scientists should choose "none of the above," which set off a firestorm when Darwin did just that. Darwin did one thing no one else did, he described a world that could exist with or without a God. It brought all knowledge into question and put science on a quest to describe the world using only the data from the world.

Answer 4

He started the Protestant Reformation by leading the first split from the Catholic Church. Up until that point, the Catholic Church was the only christian religion. This started a series of splits into several different christian religions beginning with Lutherans and leading to others such as Anglican and Calvinist.

Answer 5

Martin Luther was out to stop the church from collecting money for the indulgences as well as the tithe.

He posted his Ninety-five thesis on the door of wittenberg cathedral stating why the catholic church was corrupt.

Answer 6

Some historian actually say that it led to the questioning of all received knowledge; and to the scientific revolution of the 17th century.

If the bible and the Catholic Church's wisdom of the ages can be examined rationally, then so can the knowledge of the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Answer 7

His complaint against specific abuses in the Roman Catholic church in 1517

Answer 8

Beginning of PROTESTantism.

Split the Christians into two camps who then killed each other for fun for the next few hundred years.

Answer 9

Population control by the killing of many christians over differences in their worship philosophies.