In one of Luther’s main books, On the Freedom of the Christian, he outlines some of his views. His most important teaching was that faith alone without works justifies saves and sets free. His belief is that humans are weak and that the law shows us what is good but does not give is the power to follow them, and that through them we are shown our inability to do good and may despair of our own strength. But if you believe in Christ grace, peace, justification and liberty are promised to you. A second point was that we should know God to be truthful and worthy of belief. The soul that believes in the promises of God, and holds him to be true and righteous, can give God no higher glory. Whereas you can give God no greater injustice than to not believe in His promises, which could only make God out to be a liar or to distrust Him and His word. His third point is to unit your soul to God so that you may be filled with Christs grace, life, and salvation and that Christ would take your sin, death, and condemnation. Thus by these things, the believing soul, by the pledge of its faith in Christ, would become free from all sin, be fearless of death, safe from hell, and endowed with eternal righteousness, life, and salvation in Christ.

John Calvin was another protestant reformer who had very similar beliefs as Luther but whereas Luther was unwilling to make a statement on the predestination of people to hell Calvin explicitly stated that God chose some people to go to heaven and some people to go to hell. He became the leader of the town of Geneva where things such as dancing, playing cards, or drinking in a tavern could get you thrown in jail and people were encouraged to spy on their neighbors to see if they had any Catholic or ungodly tendency’s. Despite these harsh sounding conditions people came from all over to live in Geneva, perhaps as a sort of spiritual oasis from the strife of monarchs and kings.

The age before the Protestant reformation and the Catholic Churches reforms was an age in which there were different feelings in the clergy. There was lukewarmness and zeal, immorality and piety which makes it difficult to make broad statements about the church at this time but there were some more universal problems. For one the ordinary monks and priests were ignorant. There were no seminary’s and a priest learned how to perform mass and other ceremonies from the priest before him in a kind of apprenticeship where the clergy generally ended up knowing nothing. Abuses among the bishops could be bishops holding multiple offices to generate more money, not living in their diocese, and being more focused on earthly things such as money. These and others were problems that Martin Luther saw in the Catholic Church.

Martin Luther was born in 1483 to the son of a copper tradesman, who wanted him to become a lawyer. In 1505 when he was twenty-two he was caught in a violent thunderstorm and promised Saint. Anne that if he survived he would become a monk. After he survived the storm he sold his books dropped out of university and entered the Augustinian order. He came to teach theology at the University of Wittenberg and in 1517 he posted his famous ninety-five theses on the door of the Church in Wittenberg. These theses were problems that he found with the Catholic Church and invitation for someone to come and debate him. This eventually happened but in the meantime the theses were printed on the newly invented printing press and distributed for the public to read, giving way for the Protestant reformation.