By the 16th century, Europe was in the midst of a great upheaval that was as social and political—and even economical—as it was religious. Religion was woven into the fabric of society to such an extent that it informed each of the other sectors; but they in turn also had an impact on the new concepts and strains of religious thought that were being explored. This paper will discuss some of the examples of these thoughts from men of the time: Erasmus, Luther, Las Casas and Foxe, and show how their writings are evidence of the new era of re-examination of self, society and God—a re-examination that had one foot in the rise of humanism, one foot in the traditional teachings of the Church, and another foot in the camp of rebellion against this same religious authority.
Proper Christian belief and the duties that Christians owed to one another was characterized by many at the time in very different ways. The Protestant Movement had ushered into Europe an entirely new way of thinking about God, self and society. A great deal of personal interpretation of the Word of God was relied upon in order to effect new systems of religious thought. Luther, for example, developed an approach to Christianity that differed radically from what the Church taught—as did John Foxe: each viewed the Church and its representatives as tyrannical and essentially un-Christian. Las Casas and Erasmus held more to the traditional concepts promulgated under official Church doctrine, though each of them also had a unique orientation: Erasmus was inclined to humanism and felt that the more that people understood one another the less inclined they would be to revile one another; and Las Casas was touched by the plight of the Native Americans in the West and felt compelled to defend them from acts of cruelty committed by his fellow Spanish countrymen.
For Luther, the concept of being a proper Christian was based on his own personal interpretation of the Bible. He rejected the Church’s teachings, and, having rejected the teaching authority of the Church, he asserted himself as the teaching authority for his fellow readers. In his preface to the New Testament, he states that “many unfounded [wilde] interpretations and prefaces have scattered the thought of Christians to a point where no one any longer knows what is gospel or law, New Testament or Old.”[footnoteRef:2] While this generalization hints of exaggeration (surely many in the 16th century could distinguish the New from the Old Testament), and its focus on gospel...
Bibliography
Erasmus. “War is Sweet for those who have not tried it.”
Foxe, John. The Book of Martyrs.
Las Casas, Bartolomeo de. “A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies.”
Luther, Martin. “Prefaces to the New Testament,” in Word and Sacrament.
Luther, Martin. “Two Kinds of Righteousness,” in Career of the Reformer.
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