How radical was the reforming movement launched by Martin Luther?
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How radical was the reforming movement launched by Martin Luther?
Martin Luther's ideas were both radical and conservative. Of course, as a university professor myself, I love the idea that we would be ushered into the modern world, in many ways, by a university professor. The fact of the matter is that Martin Luther did indeed want to return Christianity to its roots; the word, radical, means root. He wanted to strip away 1500 years worth of accumulated tradition and get back to the Apostolic ministry of Jesus Christ and his disciples. This meant that he wanted to treat the Bible, the Christian New Testament as only and most direct witness to Christ's teachings. He wanted to see, if not a rejection, at least a downplaying of the church theology of the father (Saint Augustine, Saint Jerome). He wanted to downplay the roll of the institutional church, particularly that of the Papacy, in order to get back to this clean, pure evangelical religion. So in that sense, he was extremely radical.
In another sense, he wasn't radical at all. Martin Luther was himself a monk. He was a theologian who taught theology to his students at the University of Wittenberg and he was raised in this deeply medieval tradition. Moreover, a lot of his radical reforming ideas had been had by reforms before him. The idea that the Bible should be available to people in their own language, in the vernacular, was an idea that had been present for hundreds if not thousands of years. There are vernacular translations of the Bible throughout the Middle Ages in various places.
Even Martin Luther's most fundamental idea, which was that the Papacy was in some sense an illegitimate institution, that individual Popes had so abused the privileges of their papal office, that the office itself had been so discredited and needed to be done away with had been thoroughly canvassed a hundred years before Luther at the end of the Great Schism, which had divided the church and resulted in three or four Popes all duking it out for Papal authority. There was a very strong movement within the church that wasn't even new then suggesting that the power of the Pope should be checked by a church council, that Popes themselves should be subject to the law of the church. There was a parallel movement in the secular sphere attempting to make the king subject to the rule of law. In this sense, Luther was really the heir and continuer of a type of reform that had been present in the church from its very inception.
Again, there are strong arguments on both sides. Luther's return to the scriptures, to the ministry of Jesus, is very radical. But the ideas he had were ideas that had been floating around in various forms for a very long time.
How did the Reformation - both protestant and Catholic - fundamentally change the daily lives of average people?
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How did the Reformation - both protestant and Catholic - fundamentally change the daily lives of average people?
Actually, a lot of the things that we consider to be timeless behaviors, family values, things that are considered normal and govern our lives today, are actually a product of the 16th century. One of these is the place of women in the household. Now, this is changing and has been changing since the 1960's but during the Protestant Reformation and its Catholic counterpart, the notion that the man was the head of the household and should be in control of domestic decision-making was, in fact, new. Prior to this time, women had a lot of control over the education of their children, economic decisions, the running of the household, and their own behaviors within the household. But one of the watchwords of the Reformation is "control," meaning control within the domestic sphere and the public sphere. So, the fathers of the families start taking on new roles within the household.
Another thing that was new for women was that there was a new ideal of what was the "good woman." A medieval ideal often looked to the Blessed Virgin, so one of the ways to become an ideal woman in the Middle Ages was to go into a convent because virginity was prized. Going into a convent also gave women a lot of power and independence. Abbesses, the leaders of convents, were often major political players in European politics. So by devaluing the independence of women, even if they were virgins, and instead erecting the idea that the "good woman" is the good wife, both of these Reformations really put in place the importance of obedience to a male figure.
The other issue is the education of children, which was taken for granted. But both Protestants and Catholics emphasize that children need to be indoctrinated into religious education at a very young age. In the Middle Ages, unless you grew up as a monk or became one later in life, you really didn't have a rigorous intellectual education in religion. Both Protestant and Catholic children were catechized, were given the tenets of the faith and were expected to learn them. There was also a very large emphasis placed on literacy, an emphasis in which we see education being perceived as a specifically literate type of endeavor, which is also a big part of the Reformation.
Something we should also look to under this rubric of control is that both Protestant and Catholic governments start becoming interested in controlling aspects of peoples' lives that had never been controlled before. Specifically, they look to control basic appetites. Prostitution is outlawed for the first time in the 16th century. Where prostitution had been subjected to regulation and taxation by the state in antiquity and the Middle Ages, the idea that prostitution should be made illegal and than men and women should not have recourse to this career is a Reformation idea. Even things like the regulation of drinking and the way that we still to this day want to regulate the substances that people put into their bodies would have been unheard of in any government prior to the 16th century.
These are all some very basic ways, things we take for granted as part of what the state should do, that are really just a product of this singular historical movement.