Protestant Reformation Dbq

The Protestant Reformation was a period of time (1500-1700) where there became a change in Western Christendom. This reformation was caused by the resentment from the people because the Catholic Church abusing their powers for political and economic advances. In this time the church was selling pardons for sin and indulgences to forgive sins, decrease days spent in purgatory and save the dead from damnation. The reformation was when people became more aware with the back hand dealings with the church and men like Martin Luther and John Calvin created their own churches to what they believed was not corrupt unlike the church. Unfortunately there many consequences as far at the Roman Catholic church attempting to bring people back to the church,

intolerance and murders of people on account of faith in a certain region, and wars between opposing religions.
Martin Luther was not only monk at one point in time but also a professor of theology.

After entering monastery he sought to be acceptable to God but as it may be for anyone, it was hard because what he saw in himself was sin. After reading from St. Paul, St. Augustine, and the gospels, he discovered that God was filled with mercy and compassion. Luther was exceptionally upset because the Church, at the time, was engaged in the practice of indulgences. This practice was very prevalent and frequent in the Church. Martin Luther ignited many people who believed that the Church had fallen away from the teachings of Jesus and the original meanings. They also believed that the Church was overly obsessed with money. With these beliefs, it compelled Luther to take action. In 1517, on the eve of All Saint's Day, Luther posted up on the doors of Wittenberg Cathedral, ninety-five problems with the Church. They are more popularly known as the Ninety-five

Theses:

21. Therefore those preachers of indulgences are in error, who says that by the pope's indulgences a man is freed from every penalty, and saved;
22. Whereas he remits to souls in purgatory no penalty which, according to the canons, they would have had to pay in this life.
23. If it is at all possible to grant to any one the remission of all penalties whatsoever, it is certain that this remission can be granted only to the most perfect, that is, to the very fewest.

This action set of a spark for the protest against the Church. It began the Protestant Reformation. Although Luther was condemned a heretic and excommunicated from the church, he was able to escape death and with the invention of the printing press he translated the bible to German so now anyone can read the scriptures. After the creation of the thesis, the Anabaptist sect emerged as they are now considered the minority of the church and earliest form of Christians. Often the sects advocated acts of violence against ungodly people and protested them to be punished.
In 1529, King Charles and the Imperial Diet created a decree prohibiting any new religions. In that time the Lutherans and Catholic rulers went to war for nearly 20 years which then ended finally in 1555 with the peace of Augsburg. “In order to bring peace to the Holy Roman Empire of the Germanic Nation between the Roman Imperial Majesty and the Electors, Princes and Estates, let neither his Imperial Majesty nor the Electors, Princes, etc., do any violence or harm to any estate of the empire on the account of the Augsburg Confession, but let them enjoy their religious belief, liturgy and ceremonies as well as their estates and other rights and privileges in peace; and complete religious peace shall be obtained only by Christian means of amity, or under threat of punishment of the Imperial ban.” (Peace of Augsburg 1555). An important outcome of the Peace of Augsburg, and a major factor in the crisis that became the Thirty Years' War, was the formation of the Protestant Union in 1608. The product of six Calvinist princes, that alliance promised mutual aid against Catholic interests
Even after the peace treaty, the Catholic Church would go after Protestants in different districts and harass them into conforming and if that didn’t work they were pressured to choose between conversion and expulsion.

Protestant England also did the same and started persecuting Catholic families and fines them for not attending a Protestant Service. The rival persecutions continued throughout the surrounding countries.
John Calvin produced the first defined the presentation on Protestantism, which was titled 'Institutes of the Christian Religion'. Sometime in 1522-1534, John had what he called a 'sudden conversion' and accepted Protestantism. The Town Council also accepted Calvin's Ecclesiastical Ordinances, which set up a theocracy in Geneva; a government based on Church rule. Calvin mainly believed in the absolute sovereignty of God, and the person's complete inability to contribute anything towards their own salvation. That second point is known as pre-destination.
The Reformed Church also better known as Presbyterian, whose leader was John Calvin. John had many beliefs which had been adopted by the Presbyterian Church. Presbyterians believe in the Trinity as Catholics do but differ with the ideas like original sin, salvation, and penance. Presbyterians believe that original sin is rooted in faithlessness which brought man to fall. The idea of salvation to Presbyterians is that salvation is reached through the grace of God, rooted in the deep faith of a

person.
Peoples preferred religion of Calvinism caused a divide within the Netherlands and country of France. In 1567, King Phillip II of Spain wanted even more harsh economic and political restrictions to the Calvinist but in return Catholics and Calvinist rebelled causing about 50 years of wars and only Netherland began to divide. There was the Anglo-Spanish War Philip II sent a fleet of warships to the Armada in order to carry out his will forcibly. However with the courage of the English seamen as well as the violent storms, succeeded in repulsing and destroying the Armada. It wasn’t until 1609 where they finally got their independence and a truce of the de facto Spanish recognition, but it took 30 years of war to obtain it.

Even in France there remained constant civil war in France between the Catholic rulers and the Huguenots formally the French Calvinists. France at the time was extremely threatened by the religion struggles between themselves and various religions within the country but wanted to end the war. It wasn’t until King Henry IV became a ruler who was a Huguenot but converted into Catholism, he created the Edict of Nantes (1598) which guaranteed Calvinist civil rights, religious tolerance, and even military force. Soon after Henry IV’s death, Cardinal Richelieu diminished the ability for Huguenots to obtain and military arms because he believed they were an obstacle to the royal power.
The Thirty Years War which happened in 1618-1648 caused most of Europe’s problem and changed not only the map of Europe but also the balance of European power. Overall with the Protestant Reformation it was difficult to separate religion and politics, for most of the time it was often intertwined. Although it started to be a way to correct abuses within the Catholic Church eventually led to series of violent conflicts within that society as well as between nations. The various treaties of 1648 that brought the war to an end, the Peace of Westphalia. It placed Calvinists on an equal footing with Lutherans and Catholics. Also it allowed any Church property to continue to be in the possession of those who owned it in 1624.