Luther and the Protestant Reformation: Crash Course World History #218 Video Lecture | A Complete Guide to World History : 2 - World Knowledge

Hi, I’m John Green, this is Crash Course
World History and today we’re going to talk
about the Protestant Reformation.
Mr Green, Mr. Green, this is irrelevant for me; I’m an atheist.
Yeah I know Me From the Past, because I’m you. Although
actually you are now Episcopalian, a Protestant
church started because a King wanted to get
a divorce.
But anyway let me submit that religious history
is important regardless of your personal religious
beliefs, because it helps us to understand
the lenses through which people have viewed
their lives and communities, and given that,
the Protestant Reformation is what proper
historians refer to as A Big-Ass Deal -- which I
will remind you is not cursing if you are
referring to donkeys.
So before the Reformation, pretty much all
Christians in Europe were Roman Catholic.
Yes, there were other types of Christians
in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa, but Roman
Catholicism was the dominant form of Christianity
and had been since like the 4th century.
The Protestant Reformation broke so-called
“western Christendom” in two—then three,
then four, --until finally there were uncountable
denominations of Christianity--not just Lutherans
but Apostolic Lutherans and Reformed Lutherans
and Free Lutherans and Lutherans for Just
Going Back to Being Catholic Because This
Has Become So Complicated.
This was hugely important--it changed people’s
way of looking at themselves and the world,
it led to wider European literacy, and eventually
forced governments to grant religious freedoms,
while also at the same time maybe being more
of a political revolution than a religious one.
So, during the European Middle Ages, the Catholic
Church really dominated European civilization.
It’s almost impossible to imagine the scope
of the Church’s power in the Middle Ages,
but let’s try.
First off, the Catholic Church was the caretaker
of the most important thing that Christians
had, their souls, which, unlike our temporal
bodies, were eternal.
And then there was the parish priest, who
played a pivotal role throughout every person’s
life, baptizing them, marrying them, hearing
their confessions, providing last rites.
The church also provided all of the social services:
It distributed alms to the poor, and ran orphanages,
and provided what education was available.
And most Europeans would in their lives meet
exactly one person who could read the Bible,
which was only available in Latin - their
parish priest.
And, the church owned over 1/3 of all the
land in Europe, which helped make it the most
powerful economic and political force on the
continent. And the Pope claimed authority
over all the kings of Europe, as the successor
to the Roman Emperor.
So this was a very powerful institution, and
it was undone by one chronically constipated
monk.
Here at Crash Course, we don’t like to get
too into like, Great Man History, but the
Reformation really was initiated and shaped
by one man: Martin Luther. No, Stan, the Martin
Luther he was named for. No, Stan! The Martin
Luther that HE was named for. Yes.
Okay, let’s go to the Thought Bubble:
Luther studied law, and like most law students,
he hated it. Then one day a sudden storm blew
up, lightning struck him to the ground, and
in a panic, he cried, “Help me, Saint Anne!
I’ll become a monk!” He survived and
in the next two weeks, he withdrew from university,
entered an Augustinian monastery, took his
vows, and sent a message to inform his family,
who I’m sure were delighted to have spent
all that money on education because monking
is so lucrative.
In 1505, Luther was sent to Rome on a diplomatic
mission, and he ignored all the awesome art
and focused instead on Rome’s corruption—with
prostitutes openly soliciting on the filthy
streets, priests who made light of their duties,
hurrying through mass so fast that it seemed
to mean nothing, and openly deriding Church
doctrine.
Luther was obsessed with his own sinfulness
and he kept confessing, incessantly. And finally
his confessor and teachers sent him to the
University of Wittenberg, because you know,
they were a little bit annoyed with him, and
they figured he’d be good at teaching scripture.
These days of course, incessant confessors
are put on the real housewives of New Jersey,
but back then, you sent them to the University
of Wittenberg.
Anyway, Luther finally found his answer in
St. Paul’s epistles, specifically in one
line that said, “The just shall live by
faith” (Bainton 65). In other words, salvation
comes through faith, not good works—not
through prayer, or fasting, or vigils, or pilgrimages,
or relics, giving to the poor, or the sacraments,
or any action that a person can take. We can’t
ever be good enough, through our actions,
to merit salvation. We can only have faith.
In Latin, sola fide, only faith.
Thanks, Thought Bubble.
So, Martin Luther’s new interpretation of
“sola fide” grew into a full-scale conflict
with the Catholic Church when a friar named
John Tetzel came to Wittenberg, selling indulgences.
An indulgence was a donation to the church
that came with a promise from the pope to
reduce a sinner’s time in purgatory. Like,
to quote from an indulgence that Friar Tetzel
sold, “[I] replace thee in the state of innocence and
purity in which thou wert at the hour of thy baptism."
Luther felt like that that wasn’t the sort of thing that, you know, should be for sale.
The price of this whole-life complete-forgiveness-of-any-horrible-sin
certificate, by the way, was three marks,
probably about half a year’s wages for a
laborer.
So, Luther didn’t like seeing his parishioners
handing over money they didn’t have for
a scrap of paper that he believed to be meaningless,
so in response, he wrote 95 Theses against
indulgences, and then dramatically nailed
them to the Church door, for all to see on
October 31, 1517—or else he mailed them
to the archbishop, or possibly both. We don’t
actually know.
This led to a series of debates with other
men of the cloth, during which Luther’s
positions became increasingly radical. Starting
from the statement that Christians were saved
only through faith and the grace of God, for instance,
Luther then upped the ante, saying that the Church’s
rituals didn't have the power to save souls.
And then he argued that far from being infallible,
the church, and the pope made errors all the
time.
That was a pretty bold thing to say, and then
it got even more dramatic when Luther ultimately
denied that the church and the officers of
it had any spiritual powers.
He said that the priesthood was a human invention;
and that individual Christians didn’t even
need priests to receive the grace of God.
Instead, Luther described a “priesthood
of all believers.”
So this had gone from a call for reforming
indulgences to, to a revolution. So in
1521, Luther was called to defend his ideas
before the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V,
at the Imperial Diet of Worms. Or in German,
Worms.
Also, let me say retroactively, now that everyone
has commented on my poor German pronunciation,
Wittenberg.
Emperor Charles famously said, “A single
friar who goes counter to all Christianity
for a thousand years must be wrong.”
To which Luther was like, “stop flapping
that hideous Hapsburg jaw of yours.”
But there was something to what Charles was
saying, right? Because plenty of radical friars
had criticized the church’s abuses and hypocrisies
over the years; why would Luther prove influential?
Well, one reason was the printing press.
Now, most people in Europe at the time couldn’t
read, but a lot of people could, including,
of course a lot of priests. And over two thousand
editions of Luther’s writings appeared between
1517 and 1526.
And his ideas also appeared in pamphlets,
and posters, and cartoons that were seen and
read aloud, reaching millions of readers and
listeners,
In short, Luther’s ideas were all over,
like, the Tumblr of the day, which was a town
crier and broadsides nailed to doors.
And it caused quite a stir, especially the part
about, like, the Pope being the Anti-Christ
sent by the devil. Like I said, it got pretty
radical.
But maybe the most revolutionary of Luther’s
publications was his new translation of the
Bible into German.
For the first time ever, non-priests could
read the Bible for themselves, because Luther
used the German that people actually spoke,
instead of Latin, and his work quickly caught
on among common people.
Hundreds of thousands of copies of Luther’s
Bible were printed; people carried it in their
pockets and memorized it. Now everyone could
quote scripture and discuss its meaning.
Now, Luther’s theory was that if everyone
just returned directly to the scriptures,
they would see the one single truth, and the
Church would be restored to its original simplicity.
Yeah, no. I have a message to the restorers
of history. There is no original simplicity!
The thing is, once you start making scripture
accessible to everyone and tell them that
their opinions are just as good as those of
the clergy, what happens is that people start,
you know, having different interpretations
of what religious truth is.
So Luther’s protest started creating spinoffs:
the Zwinglians, and the Calvinists, and the
Anabaptists…and then the spinoffs had their
own spinoffs.
It's like how first there was Iron Man, and
then there was the Avengers, and then you
know, like an Avengers TV show. Pretty soon
we’re gonna have Ant Man get his own movie.
The Protestant Reformation is just basically
the same thing as the Marvel Comic Universe,
but no Thor! Because he’s pagan.
Anyway, many of these new denominations will
be familiar to you: the Anglicans and Puritans,
the Quakers, the Presbyterians, the Methodists,
the Baptists.
Each of these new Protestant churches thought
that it knew the one true way to worship God—and
that, you know, everyone else was going to
hell, and this led to some fighting.
And also some disemboweling. Oh, it’s time
for the open letter.
But first, let’s see what’s in the globe
today. Oh, that’s nice, I thought it would
be disemboweled people, but it’s Anabaptists
not baptizing their infants.
Hi there. So, you don’t believe in infant
baptism. You believe that like, people should
come of age; that they can make their own
decision about salvation.
Other people: Catholics, many protestants,
believe that it’s OK to baptize infants,
or even that it’s good.
I don’t feel like this disagreement should
lead to disembowelment, and yet it did.
The fascinating thing to me, Anabaptists, is that
you never had a state, you never had, like,
widespread political say in any community.
And yet, your brand of evangelical Christianity
managed to become incredibly important in
world history.
In short, the bad news is that many of you
are going to be executed. The good news is
that your message will prove surprisingly
resilient
Stan, who did I even make that open letter
for? The Anabaptists are Amish now. They’re
not watching this. I guess some of them are
Mennonites. I made it for you Mennonites!
OK, So with all these new denominations, there
were years of religious mayhem.
Clergy preached radical new ideas, and then
other people interpreted them in even more
radical ways. People, especially young people,
smashed up churches because the bible says
no graven images.
What started as a doctrinal dispute turned
into a social revolt, and in 1525, German
peasants took up Luther’s ideas to give
voice to longstanding grievances against landlords
and clergymen.
In their most famous revolutionary proclamation,
the Twelve Articles, the peasants echoed Luther’s
language, proclaiming that serfdom was invented
by men, with no basis in scripture.
The peasants rebelled, refused to pay taxes,
pillaged Church lands, and raised an army
estimated at 300,000 people.
And Luther was like YES FREE SOULS SOVEREIGN
AT LAST. No, just kidding, he wasn't.
Luther chose the elite, and said that “Christian
liberty” was a spiritual concept, not meant
to promote equality or freedom in like, the
physical world. He then urged
the faithful to “smite, slay and
stab” rebels and kill them like mad dogs.
He also gave up his idea that congregations
should elect their own ministers and argued
that kings and princes were put in place by
God as caretakers of the church. And that
turned out to be the winning side.
For a few hundred years, anyway. The German
Peasants’ Revolt, the biggest revolutionary
uprising in Europe before the French Revolution,
was suppressed with crushing brutality; an
estimated 100,000 people were killed.
So Luther chose the princes, in the name of
stability and success, but why would princes
choose Lutheranism, when the Holy Roman Emperor
had forbidden it?
Let’s look at one example: the first actual
ruler who broke with the Pope: the heroic,
frequently divorced, founder of Anglicanism,
King Henry VIII of England... What’s that
Stan? Apparently it was not King Henry VIII.
It was Grand Master Albert of the Teutonic
Order of monks, crusaders who’d come to
rule parts of what is now Poland.
So many Teutonic knights individually left
the order for Lutheranism because they liked
the theology. Albert started by reading Lutheran
tracts and he became a fan, allowing Lutheran
preachers into his cities, and even traveliing
to meet with Luther in person.
On Luther’s advice, Grand Master Albert
dissolved the Teutonic State, and founded
instead the Dougy of Prussia. I guess that was
a country where they all danced the Dougie?
Oh, it’s the Douchey of Prussia.
Stan informs me that it is neither the Dougy
nor the Douchey of Prussia, but the Duchy
of Prussia. Anyway, Albert established a Lutheran
Church there—the first Lutheran state Church.
But it’s unlikely that Albert was really
motivated by a desire to purge the church
of corruption. I mean, at the time of his
decision, the Grand Master had been in trouble;
he was losing a territorial battles against
the rest of Poland and he was running out
of money.
By breaking with the Church, Albert was able
to seize the Church assets within his territory
which bolstered his military might and then
allowed him to settle the war favorably.
In another major plus, now that he was a
Duke instead of a Grand Master monk, he could
get married and produce heirs…
Which he did, founding the House of Hohenzollern,
destined to unify and rule the German Empire
a few centuries later.
And this points to a huge incentive for princes
and kings to break with the Pope.
What if instead of the Church having all of that
money and power, I could have it?
Those are like the two favorite things of
monarchs, and protestantism allowed them to
confiscate Church land and other wealth, collect
Church taxes, and use Church land for themselves.
Why is the Queen the largest landowner in
England? Because the Protestant reformation.
That said, we shouldn’t minimize the extent
to which the reformation really was about
belief. I mean, Catholics truly believed that
Protestants were heretics, and Protestants
truly believed that the Pope and his hierarchy
were impostors.
If it were only about land and influence,
how could we explain the case of Saxon elector
John Frederick, for instance?
When defeated and imprisoned by his Catholic
emperor, Frederick was given the choice between
his lands and his faith. He chose his faith.
And then there were the Catholics like Sir
Thomas More, who would not sanction Henry
VIII’s break with the Pope, and chose execution
over sacrilege.
So in the end the Reformation was both a religious
movement AND a political one.
Now, many argue that the Reformation eventually
led to more religious toleration in Europe,
because people just had to learn to live with
each other, once they had a bunch of wars
and figured out that there were going to be
both Catholics and Protestants moving forward.
There were other effects of the Protestant
revolution. Max Weber famously called it the
foundation of European capitalism.
But for me the most crucial aspect of the
Protestant Reformation is contained inside
the words: Protest and Reform.
These have become two of the central political
ideas in recent centuries, and while religion
has justifiably been blamed for much violence
and intolerance, we should also remember that
many of the leaders of the American civil
rights movement, for instance, were Protestant
clergy. And they saw a history of protest that could
fuel real and lasting reform, that included
people like Gandhi and Thoreau, but also people
like Martin Luther. Thanks for watching, I’ll
see you next week.
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