okay we're gonna talk about the protestant reformation but first the contest this is the papal palace in avignon france and that's weird who can tell me why that's weird yes carl in the back of the room say it like you mean it don't all the popes live in italy on the nose carl on the news so if all the popes have always lived in the vatican in rome why is there a papal palace in france and can you taste that sauce well if you can there's time to get them bring cow's milk let's get to it 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 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 unconsolidating power and wealth and satisfying their uh urges 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 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 so 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 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 priest we can find 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 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 the 10th offered catholics indulgences for purchase to finance the completion of saint peter's basilica and the deal was the more you spent on indulgences the less time you spent in purgatory now prior to this 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 this was going on an augustinian monk by the name of martin luther it was right in the struggle buzz 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 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 dogma 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 and priests 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 of god i cannot and i will not recant anything for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe god help me amen now while luther was developing his ideas and hiding after the diet of forms 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 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 you know he'd have you burned at the stake like he did michael servatus who disagreed with calvin on baptism so that's funny 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 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 two 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 five on your exam in may i remain your humble servant heimler out