Well, okay, we're going to talk about the Protestant Reformation, but first, the context. This is the Papal Palace in Avignon, France. And that's weird.
And who can tell me why that's weird? Yes, Karl in the back of the room, say it like you mean it. Don't all the popes live in Italy? On the nose, Karl, on the nose.
So, if all the popes have always lived in the Vatican in Rome, why is there a Papal Palace in France? And mmm, can you taste that sauce? Well, if you can, then it's time to get them brain cows milked.
Let's get to it. Now I'm not going to give you a bunch of names and places you don't need to know for your exam, so let me just talk in generalities for this contextualization piece. In the high middle ages, there was a series of bitter and ongoing disputes between Roman Catholic popes and European kings, especially the King of France.
So in 1309, the King of France pressured the new pope to establish the papacy in Avignon and away from Italy. And the series of popes who lived in Avignon were all kinds of nasty, focusing almost none on the spiritual well-being of the church and all on consolidating power and wealth and satisfying their… uh… Now, eventually the seat of the papacy moved back to Italy in 1377 under the leadership of a new pope who was all about making sure that such a violation never happened again. And he was pretty intense about it, and that led to a lot of fighting, and so back in France they just elected another pope to rule from Avignon.
If you're keeping track at home, in 1377 the Catholic Church in Europe was dominated by two rival popes who both claimed absolute power. This situation lasted for almost 40 years, and so going into the 16th century, the average European thought the Church was corrupt and hopelessly flawed. People had the general sense that popes were more interested in consolidating power than guiding the lives of the faithful and, you know, They were. So by the 1500s, the Catholic Church had gotten tangled up in political matters and it accumulated a lot of wealth and engaged in some corrupt practices.
And one of those corrupt practices was simony, which was the buying and selling of church offices. Okay, we've got a bishop position open, so who's the most spiritually qualified? Well, my Uncle Cletus is about as immoral as they come, but he does have a hankering to wear one of them funny hats, and so he's prepared to offer you this much for the office.
Well, I'm sure your Uncle Cletus will make a fine bishop. But for sure, the main corrupt practice you need to know in the context of the Reformation is the buying and selling of indulgences. Now, back in the 12th century, the Church developed the doctrine of Purgatory, which said that after After death, you went to neither heaven nor to hell, but to a kind of middle space called purgatory.
Here, the soul was to be purified before it entered heaven. And depending on how much of a turd you were in life, you could spend longer or shorter in that place, and you know, it wasn't a pleasant place to be. So early in the 16th century, Pope Leo X offered Catholics indulgences for purchase to finance the completion of St. Peter's Basilica.
And the deal was, the more you spent on indulgences, the less time you spent in purgatory. Now, prior to this conf- Confession was required for the remission of sin, but now if you bought an indulgence, you could effectively have a sin forgiven without ever confessing it. Now while all of this was going on, an Augustinian monk by the name of Martin Luther was riding the struggle bus. Though he was fastidious about making confession and doing his works of penance, his anxieties concerning personal sin would not leave him in peace. But around 1515, a revolution occurred in his thinking.
As he was studying the New Testament, specifically Romans chapter 1, he discovered that it was not acts of penance which rendered forgiveness to the sinner, but rather God forgave the gave sins for free based on the finished work of Christ. Additionally, he came to see that even salvation itself was a gift of grace and not a reward for good works. And from there, the reformations in his thoughts just kept coming. The further he studied the Bible, the more he saw the conflict with the Catholic Church.
He began to hold to the priesthood of all believers, which challenged the entrenched Catholic dogma of the priesthood of only a few believers. And because the papacy and the priesthood had been severely demoted in many people's estimation thanks to all the conflicts I mentioned before, this idea of the priesthood of all believers would later become very attractive. Luther also began to formulate an idea that would later be a tenet of the Reformation, namely sola scriptura, which means scripture alone. The idea here is that the final authority for Christians was the Bible and not the papal dogmas.
So with all this swirling around in his monkish mind, he composed a document called the 95 Theses which outlined in detail his complaints against the Catholic Church. And, as legend has it, he nailed them to the Wittenberg church door. Now, the fact that he wrote these theses in Latin meant that he was interested in sparking a discussion among a few educated monks in priest, but because of the printing press, the 95 Theses were spread throughout the German states of the Holy Roman Empire with great speed, and he quickly found an eager audience because apparently many other Germans felt the same way about the Catholic Church's abuses. Now, once Luther's complaints and new interpretations of doctrines made it to the Church officials, they officially denounced him as a heretic.
They called him to stand before the imperial Diet of Worms and demanded that he recant his writings, to which he reportedly said, Unless I am convinced by Scripture and plain reason, my conscience is captive to the word God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me. Now, while Luther was developing his ideas in hiding after the Diet of Worms, the Protestant Reformation began to spread rapidly, and the next most significant player in the Reformation was our boy John Calvin.
He was a minister in Geneva, Switzerland, and one of his most significant contributions to the Reformation was to systematize Protestant doctrine, which he did in a lengthy treatise known as the Institutes of the Christian Religion. And in that treatise, we can see an emphasis on two of Calvin's major innovations on doctrine. First was the doctrine of predestination, which taught that God had, from before the foundation of the world, decided who would be saved.
and who would get all crispy in hell. Therefore, salvation and damnation was not a matter of human choice, but of God's choice. The second doctrine he formulated was the doctrine of the elect, which is related to predestination.
The elect were those whom God had chosen to save, and those who were truly elect had no choice in the matter and further, could never lose their salvation. Now, Calvin's Geneva was essentially run as a theocracy, which is to say that the Bible was the rule of law in that city. And not surprisingly, that had some upsides and it had some downsides.
The upside was that Calvin taught that financial wealth was the proper reward for hard work. work and so that as long as the elect didn't allow money to become their god, then the accumulation of wealth could be seen as a sign of God's favor. And since this was going on in the context of the economic shift in Europe into the Atlantic states, places like Geneva and Amsterdam grew wealthy with the support of such doctrines.
But the downside is that if you disagreed with Calvin, he'd have you burned at the stake like he did Michael Servetus, who disagreed with Calvin on baptism. Yeah, so that's fun. And then there was an even further splintering of Protestantism with the rise of the Anabaptists.
They believed in the Reformation principles that Luther and Calvin did, but they said separated from them on the question of baptism. And that's a recipe, as we've already seen, for John Calvin to burn your crap. The main beef the Anabaptists had about baptism was that they believed that only adults should be baptized and not infants, on account of only adults could profess that they had faith and infants could not. All right, click here to keep reviewing my Unit 2 videos, and click right here to grab my AP Euro review pack if you need any help getting an A in your class and a 5 on your exam in May. I remain your humble servant.
Heimler out.