The Age Of The Reformation - 2258 Words

It is a well known fact that the Age of the Reformation was one of the significant movements in Western Christianity. The Protestant Reformation was a turning point in religion. Martin Luther, John Calvin etc. were reformists that allowed the Reformation to occur. However, before them there were other efforts that had been done for the reformation by Peter Waldo, John Wycliffe, Jan Hus, and so forth. According to (Bainton pg. 12) â€Å"the 16th century was an age of faith. It was even more an age of faith than the preceding period. For a parallel, one must go back several hundred years to the years to the days of the First Crusade or even to the founding of the Inquisition. In the period of the Reformation men were ready both to die and to kill†¦show more content†¦Instead of continuing his path of education for a career, he surprisingly joined a Augustinian monastery, where he prayed,fasted, meditated, and studied the bible in 1505. (history guide. org)â€Å"at this point , Luther rejected the world. He was twenty-one at the time. In 1505, Luther tells us that he experienced the first great event of his life. In that year he experienced some kind of conversion after having been struck by a bolt of lightning. He cried out, Help, St. Anne, I will become a monk. He was struck by the hand of God and felt that God was in everything. He felt doubt within himself – he simply could not reconcile his faith with his worldly ambitions. And so, Luther was plagued by an overwhelming sense of guilt, fear and terror. To relieve his anxiety he joined the Order of the Hermits of St. Augustine. There he would be shielded from worldly distractions. There he would find the true path to heaven. He fasted, prayed and scourged himself relentlessly. But he still felt doubts. One day, as he sat in his cell, he threw his Bible on the table and pointed at a passage at random. The passage was from the Epistles of St. Paul: For the justice of God is revealed from faith to faith in that it is written, for the just shall live by faith. (Romans 1:17)† A- Causes Indulgences: according to Varicana a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven, which the faithful Christian who is duly disposed gains