Catholicism

Catholicism has survived for almost 2,000 years with certain core values intact and with a basic framework that has also survived in spite of massive historical changes, countless social movements, defections from the Church and the creation of new sects to compete, and other forces that have challenged the power of the Church, many of its teachings, its structure and administration, and other aspects of the Catholic Church and its beliefs. From time to time, the challenges have become more severe, to be followed eventually by periods of cultural revitalization to which the church has adapted even as it has at times led such an effort. One of the major challenges to Catholic power came during the Reformation with the efforts of Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Ulrich Zwingli to reform perceived excesses in the Catholic Church.

Martin Luther challenged the authority of the Catholic Church when he placed his theses on the church door, and in so doing he empowered a movement away from the strictness of Catholic teaching and from the idea that communion with God required the intercession of the papacy and the religious structure of a Church. Luther was reacting to a variety of specific abuses in the Catholic hierarchy and was also acting out differences he had with Church teachings. His protest challenged the rule of the Catholic Church, but it was not at all irreligious and in fact affirmed the importance of religion and religious belief. Luther's was not the first protest

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ped its development in many ways. In Switzerland, the Reformation grew out of the pervasive Christian humanism in the region. Huldrich, or Ulrich, Zwingli is known as the first Swiss reformer, and it was his powerful personality and his skill as a churchman and preacher that precipitated the Swiss Reformation. Both Zwingli and John Calvin in Geneva followed the same pattern in their ministries--they determined to preach through the scriptures page by page. Zwingli would determine from this that there was a need to learn the doctrine of God from his own word, from the scriptures: Zwingli had experienced no personal struggles of soul compare to Luther's, and the Reformation in Zurich began in good humanist fashion as a return to the sources of the faith in the Bible. The church would be cleansed and reformed by the study and preaching of Scripture (Leith, Reformed Tradition 34). The teaching and preaching of Zwingli transformed the life and practice of the church in a short time. The Great Council of Zurich called disputations in 1523, and the matter was decided in Zwingli's favor, thus assuring the continuance of his program. The mode of worship in the church was transformed in the direction of a simple preaching servic

Category: Philosophy - C