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Purpose Of The Church And What It Means To Be A Good Christian During The Renaissance

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The Purpose of the Church and What it Means to be a “good Christian” During the Renaissance
Throughout most of the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church was a powerful institution that rivaled kings in the amount of its power and wealth. However, the Reformation and the Renaissance eras challenged The Roman Catholic Church. They argued against the Church on many principles, including salvation, repentance, and the definition of a "good Christian." This paper will discuss what the Roman Catholic Church, the Reformation, and the Renaissance's humanists thought of what it meant to be a good Christian and compare them to the scriptures. The Roman Catholic Church had a large amount of influence, power, and riches during the Middle Ages. Due to …show more content…

The reading section on Martin Luther describes the process of repentance and salvation for Catholics. The process begins with "a remorse for sin" and a desire for repentance, to which the individual goes to a priest to confess their sins, and once they confess their sins, they enact penance. The readings describe penance as a "reciting of prayers, fasting, or pilgrimage" (“Section 12: Martin Luther”). During this time, another act of penance was the practice of indulgences, a way to pay for one's sins to the Church or to pay someone out of purgatory. Many critics of the Church arose and adamantly opposed the practice of indulgences. The most famous of these critics is Martin Luther, who nailed 95 theses criticizing indulgences' …show more content…

Amongst the new philosophers and scholastics, the majority that emerged was the secular, commonly known as Humanists. However, they were not similar to modern secularists, as the classical humanists are described as "promoting the humanities" and studied many of the early church fathers (“Section 6: Humanism”). Many northern Humanists remained "deeply religious" and "experienced a revival" (“Section 7: Northern Humanism”). Humanists admired and followed the early Church and adamantly opposed the Roman Catholic Church and its corrupted ways (“Section 8: The Church in the Late Middle Ages and the

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