cuases of the protestant reformation?

Question

what are the cuases of the protestant reformation? How did it begin? How it progressed? and how it ended? THANKS :0

Answer 1

Short answer: People finally decided that they wanted to communicate with God directly, rather than through emissaries.

Answer 2

Overflowing with recent grad school discoveries which he imagines are his own. Ahhh, the thrill of historical insights for the very young.

Answer 3

I think I will give you a slightly different view of the Reformation. The Reformation was a Civil War, like all revolutions and civil wars, it was primarily about taxes and the distribution of wealth. The theology of the time was much like the feud between political parties. The split, interestingly enough, occurred along the old Roman line. Anything south of the line was staunchly Catholic, anything above the line was staunchly Protestant. A European professor, particularly a German one, would likely tell you that the cultural norms being feuded over were pre-Christian issues that had been buried under Christendom for over a thousand years.

Southern European Christianity was a very visual and tactile Christianity. All Levantine and Mediterranean Christianity was like that. If you want to see that "old time religion," attend a Catholic or Orthodox service. At their origin, they were written by James, Peter or Mark and then shortened for practicality. As such, it preferred teaching by pictures than words. It trusted signs, symbols and images more than written texts, song, and simplicity. The Greek Orthodox service is a pre-enactment of the Wedding Feast of Cana and all the first services were tied tightly to the book of Revelations. When Christianity came to Northern Europe, it met a non-Roman culture and the Christianity there was quite different in many important ways. Even the Anglicans, who became Protestants, were largely Catholic in all but name.

If you do not trust images, you tend to be an iconoclast, you tend to distrust a visual theology. If you do not trust words, such as the preaching prominent in Protestantism, then you distrust written theology.

So long before the Reformation there was a dual culture in Western Christianity (actually, the Mozarabic Catholics, whose liturgical language was Arabic, and the Italo-Greek Catholics of Southern Italy that used Greek as the primary language were Roman style Christians). The word Catholic means "all embracing," or "according to the whole." It was the "all hugging" religion and so the Western Patriarchate survived by allowing tremendous internal differences. Everyone could accept rule "according to the whole," and so would, begrudgingly, submit local desires to meet the needs of Christians in other parts of the world.

This difference in perception colored Christianity in positive and negative ways for over one thousand years. However, and unfortunately for Christianity, a monk named Martin Luther had deep personal problems. He found salvation in grace alone. This wasn't unusual in Christianity actually and still isn't, but he did not yet feel a need to fight over the form of the issue.

A young tax collector by the name of Tetzel came to raise funds near Luther's monestary. He found his collections were short of needs so he got creative. As it seems his own personal ethics were questionable to start with, this lead to a disastrous sequence of events.

Luther and others, were rightly indignant at Tetzel's behavior. Luther posted a notice for a debate on various issues. His actions were in no way unusual, but the climate was ripe for change, more change than Luther would ever have approved of had he known the final outcome. Luther died regretting how the Reformation went. He believed in it, but the outcomes were outside what he wanted. It would go terribly wrong.

Luther was likely what psychologists that use the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator would label ENTJ. The fascinating thing about "Judgers" is that they tell you exactly what they think, whether you want to hear it or not, and intuitive thinkers (the NT part of ENTJ) tend to lack the social graces to know when they are being rude. Luther didn't just attack the issues, he attacked people and got very personal, essentially pointing out in public their sinful ways. These were very powerful people. Luther actually apologized for this at the Diet of Worms, he realized that personal attacks were wrong.

The whole issue should have remained local, given the Catholic principal of "subsidiarity." The principal says that the Metropolitan Archbishop or the Pope cannot intervene in local matters as a standard operating principal. However, the Pope of the time, like Luther was a judger, believed like Luther, deeper issues were at hand, but was neither that personally deep nor that diplomatically capable. So what should have been a disciplinary issue with Tetzel, or a local theological issue became a regional and then European issue.

The people that Luther inspired were true reformers, as was Luther. They could have been Francis of Assisi's had Luther and the Pope had different temperaments, they could have actually fixed the problem, but neither men nor their coteries had the personal skills to admit their own errors. To the Catholic Church's credit, it almost immediately adopted 1/3rd of Luther's reforms, was wary of about another third, and felt another third were poorly worded and hence heretical. Had it not become a contest of egos and power, Luther would likely have backed down on some and Rome on some, but it became a contest of power and ego.

Strangely, the Reformation arose just when dialectic reasoning was taking hold in place of analogical reasoning. Dialectic reasoning is A is true OR B is true, but one of them is false. Analogical reasoning is A is poetically true AND B is poetically true, they represent deep truths but language cannot convey the truth that is God. Catholicism is still a reasoning by analogy and not rationality. Protestantism is the first real attempt to think out Christian theology in a logical fashion.

This is where the next split begins.

I used to teach engineering. I taught financial decision making by engineers. I used to hand out ten M&M's to each student and asked a variety of questions. One thing I asked was for them to organize their M&M's in a logical fashion. Out of 136 students I had no repeated orders. There were categorical similarities, such as going from fewer of a color to more of a color but no actual repetitions of the structure of the M&M's. I then asked, "who was right?"

Some students would say, "no one," others would defend their own as correct. Who is right? People tend to hold their rationality as the correct one. Dialectic encourages, even demands, the purposeful construction of logical propositions. Psychologically, that guarantees unique outcomes. There are now 42,000 Protestant denominations worldwide.

One other question I ask is "what do you value or not like about your M&M's?" Going back to the ancient cultural split, not everyone valued the same M&M's. Protestant and Catholic theologies split precisely where Roman paganism and Germanic paganism split.

People started coming it with varying theologies. Calvin, Swingli, Menno Simmons and others. They all excommunicated one another as well. They could not see other Protestants as correct. I understand, but have not read, so you should check this out yourself, that Calvin actually calls for the execution of other Reformers in the preface of the Institutes and Luther had 20,000 Baptists burned at the stake for heresy. Of course the Baptists were an extremely violent group, they would kill entire cities that did not convert.

At about this point, the German princes saw this as an opportunity to get out of paying papal taxes. Had they realized 1/3rd of Germans would die by the end of it, the Reformation would have ended before it was allowed to begin.

During all this, the Catholic Church resisted any institutional change, though lots of local change happened. It took over 100 years for the Catholic Church to finally call a council to try and end the schism. By that point both sides had spilled the blood of millions. When you get that far, people won't say, "oops, sorry." When theology is used as a war banner and people die over it, all you get is bad and uncritical theology. If your family died over a particular phrase, regardless of whether that phrase is defended in ancient Christianity, that phrase is not only sacred, but must be right.

All of European history from the 95 thesis until Napoleon was driven by the Reformation. The Reformation is still here. Some Protestant denominations are trying to dissolve into the Catholic Church. The Evangelical Lutheran Church is an example of a Church that is seeking full union with Rome. The Reformation will begin its final end when the first Protestant Church returns.

The Reformation was a center for learning until the late 19th century. By that point, Catholicism was catching up. In many respects a transition in theological power shifted at Vatican II. Almost all Protestant Churches use the Roman Catholic lectionary. If they are reading John 3 in a Catholic Church, it is very likely that John 3 is being read in most Protestant denominations at the same time.

Likewise, the Presbyterian and Lutheran Churches attempted union several years ago and found they were at the theological opposite spectrum of Christianity on most issues, but both were quite close to the Roman position. Rome's position tends to be in the center of the various Protestant groups that are all competing with one another. This shifted quite a bit of power back to the papacy. In the end, the papacy is among the oldest continuous offices in the world. Very few diocese are as old, few are older, and none have ever held its stature as Peter's Church, founded on Peter's blood.

Any writing prior to the Reformation gives Rome an authority no Protestant would even dare claim exists. The earliest writings defer to Rome as presidential head of the Church. Even heretics presumed the correctness of Rome. It was Rome's authority alone that determined the books of the bible in 382, following synods at Hippo Regius, Carthage, Rome and Laodicea.

The causes were cultural splits and taxes. It began unexpectedly, it turned into a very nasty civil war and it has not ended even though Catholicism eventually reformed itself. As one Lutheran bishop commented, "the Catholic Church ended up adopting 93 1/2 of the 95 thesis, what more could we want?"

The split continues because Catholics and Orthodox reason using the "apostolic tradition" as the standard. It is a "goodness of fit" test, using statistical language. Interpretation must fit that which was handed on by the apostles, the bible is part of the apostolic tradition. Protestants use reasoning, taking bits and pieces and stringing them together in the form of logical proofs. They no longer think alike and even when they agree, they do not agree for the same reasons. It is more a causal reasoning method of thinking. The Catholic standard of truth is conformance with the apostolic tradition, the Protestant standard is by convincing or "converting," people.

In the end, Catholics and Protestants are using different M&M's and arrange them differently.