Martin Luther's Resistance to the Catholic Church

Paper Summary:

This paper takes a deep look at the true intentions of Martin Luther and his resistance against the Catholic Church by examining the historical context in which he acted and by taking a closer look at the man himself, thereby showing that Luther was a deeply religious man trying to maintain core religious values in the face of great social pressure.

From the Paper:

"The European world of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century was one ensconced in the assumption of Christian values and, moreover, the authority of the Catholic Church. Likewise, it was a world of great injustice, misappropriation of power and perversion of morality. Such was most apparently epitomized by the vast disparity between classes of suffocating poverty and ever-growing wealth. And the necessary correlation between wealth and power was quite explicit in a Church that, to many ways of thinking, was a fat and corrupt entity whose most driving priority had become the exploitation of the weak. Martin Luther was born into this world in 1483, and not of a particular familial disposition to protest the circumstances. In fact, his father had managed to accrue some degree of financial comfort that assured his son the life of an educated man. Rather, his outrage at social conditions manifested itself through his religious observation. Above all, it bears noting, upon his adoption of the holy cloth in 1505, that Luther was a man of God. This was the only law that he saw fit to recognize. So his divergence from the conventions of the Catholic Church was, as he would be quick to assert himself, an act guided by compliance rather than defiance. But his ideology would spark massive reexamination and change, suggesting that it was certainly resistant to many of the prevailing forces of the time and place. Perhaps there may be no genuine reconciliation of these two ostensibly contradictory roles, both of which, one could argue, Luther embodied. However, a more direct study of Luther's motivations and tenets seems to suggest that he was, in both intent and aesthetic, a conservative who, by way of social circumstances, came to be regarded as a revolutionary."

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