Day 56

 Luther and the reformation

The Church is weakened and vulnerable

• SOCIALLY: the Renaissance emphasis on the secular (worldly) and the individual challenged Church authority
• The printing press helped spread these ideas
• POLITICALLY: Some rulers (especially the Germans) began to challenge the Church’s political power
• ECONOMICALLY: northern merchants resented paying church taxes to Rome
• 
  
• “...religious reform, please...”

What’s so wrong with the Church?

• Corrupt leadership
• Renaissance-era popes spent extravagantly on personal pleasure
• Pope Alexander VI admitted that he fathered several children
• Many priests and monks were poorly educated
• How can you teach if you can barely read?
• Some priests got married and had children
• Some priests drank to excess, many gambled

But mostly, indulgences

• The selling of indulgences (pardons) “releases a sinner from performing the penalty a priest imposed for sins”
• Johann Tetzel was a monk who sold indulgences to help rebuild St. Peter’s Cathedral
• A monk named Martin Luther objected to this practice

Formative years

• Martin Luther was born in Germany in 1483
• He studies the trivium - grammar, logic, and rhetoric - and hates it
• He attends the University of Erfurt (he calls it a beerhouse and a whorehouse)
• After getting his degree, he enrolls in law school (his father’s wish)
• He drops out almost immediately. Why? See next slide… 
• (...this is his father Hans and his mother Margarethe...)