Teaching Humanities:A Brief Study of the Protestant Reformation

Whether you are homeschooling and want to teach a comprehensive world history course, or are supplementing your child's curriculum at home, the Reformation is an important part of history that should be analyzed properly. Those who choose to study religious history for a humanities course should never forget to teach about the religious changes that exploded onto the scene in the 1500s because of the impact they left on virtually every European country. Because of the Reformation, men and women were free to choose their own personal faith.

The Story Behind the Protestant Reformation

If you spoke against the Catholic Church at any time from its initiation to about the 18th century, you were courting trouble. The Church held high positions all around the world, from Europe to certain parts of the Middle East that had been won back by the Crusaders. Every person, from humble village folk to noblemen to kings, knew that to criticize the practice of Catholic rituals would mean one of two things: Life in prison under horrifying circumstances, or, more commonly, death. The snuffing out of a "heretic" life was of little consequence to the rulers of the 16th century, a strange era on the cusp between medieval and modern.

There were people who dared to be different, risking burning at the stake, life in prison, death by hanging, and many other fates involving various instruments of torture. Among these were John Wycliffe, Peter Walden, John Hus and the ever-popular Martin Luther, a German monk who challenged the Church's high authority over the Germanic people and created a major faith - Lutheranism - that many still follow today. From the Protestant Reformation came a surprising number of splinter religions and Protestant off-shoots, spawned by the new concept of freedom of religion. Even with the large number of different faiths, the base of most of them is the Protestant ideal of sola scriptura, Bible alone.

Martin Luther's Contribution