3  Reformations part 1 History's Ink podcast
Channel: malorynye
Date: 2015-09-24

http://malorynye.com/historys-ink

This is part one of my two part discussion of the protestant reformations.

What were the protestant reformations, and why did they matter?

The sixteenth century not only saw the transformations resulting from the colonial exploitations of the ‘new world’.

It was also a time when much of Europe became embroiled in the social, political, and ecclesiastical changes that we now call the reformation.

In the simple version of history, the story goes that the universal catholic church had grown degenerate and beyond reform, so groups of reformers agitated for — and eventually delivered — new Christian religious organisations that are now broadly seen as Protestant. These range from the English protestantism of the Anglican church (which retained bishops along with numerous other ‘idolatrous’ practices and beliefs, such as the mass, confession to a priest, sacraments, etc.), and in other places there was continental European Lutheranism, and Calvinism and its derivatives (in Scotland, Holland, and north America).

All these emerged out of the activism that took place from the early 1400s through to the end of the 1500s (and which have continued to develop in subsequent centuries). Throughout much of this, the assumption is that Catholicism needed to change, and it did not change quickly enough — either in terms of its structures and theology and also in terms of its political role within the societies of Europe.