1517: Martin Luther Nails the 95 Theses in Wittenberg

• 1517: Martin Luther Nailed the 95 Theses in Wittenberg
Martin Luther was attempting to catch the attention of the Pope and realized the way of doing so would be by nailing all of his complaints to the church door. Luther was then kicked out of the Catholic Church; subsequently establishing the foundation of Protestantism and further emphasizing his disapproval for Catholicism and its beliefs.

• With Catholicism the highest authority was the Pope, which was taught of as having two bodies: an earthly one and a spiritual one. The spiritual body was perfect in the sense that it was the representative of God. Catholics believed in the world of spirituality so when Christ left the physical body, earth, the idea of miracles/magic did not go away, which explains and allows for the existence of saints. Catholics had a profound belief in purgatory because for them an individual either went to heaven or hell; however, for the most part people would end up in purgatory until their dues were paid. While in purgatory Catholics had to give an extensive amount of money to the Church in order for the priest to pray for their passing relative, and it wasn’t until the priest decided you had given enough money to pay for his prayers, that your relative could then move from purgatory into heaven.

• Protestants decided to completely abolish the idea of purgatory. In Hamlet for example, Hamlet dies in this world of Catholicism, but he’s then stuck in a world without a purgatory because now all of a sudden people stopped believing in it. The way people mourned and think of the dead was inevitably affected because it left a sense of a pedestrian culture as it moved away from a world of “magical thinking,” thus the earth they were left with was a world in which magic/miracles become dead entities.

Janet Ruiz
Discussion 1D: Amanda Waldo