History A112 16 February 2009 The Spread of the Protestant Reformation Martin Luther was born in Saxony Germany in 1483. He was a brilliant student, but dropped out of law school in order to join the monastery after a near death experience. He proved himself to be an extremely qualified theologian, and spent time as a professor of Scripture in Greek and Hebrew. Despite his success as a theologian, he found himself haunted by the idea of damnation, and spent many hours searching for the way he could gain salvation. One night, while looking to scripture for comfort, he came across a passage which he interpreted to mean that through faith alone one could be saved. The ideas promoted by Luther were not new, but in previous decades an outright rebellion against the teaching of the Catholic Church would have been squelched immediately. However in this case, the strength of Luther’s teachings, the attack of indulgences, the use of the printing press to produce lithographic images, and the invasion by the Ottoman Turks allowed for the teaching of the Protestant reformation to not only take root, but to flourish throughout Europe (Sherman 345). The Protestant Reformation promoted the ideas that the Holy Scripture was the one true source of religious belief, that salvation could be gained through faith alone, and the rejection of sacraments except Baptism and Eucharist. According to Luther the Holy Scripture was the only source that could be completely trusted because of the divine inspiration with which it written. As a fundamentalist Luther read everything in the Bible literally, so to him the Bible contained divine truth in its purest and simplest form. The main focus of Luther’s teaching is the “justification by faith” (Sherman 345). Luther thought that since Jesus died on the cross to save humanity, there was nothing else that a person could physically do that would grant them salvation. All a person had to do was to rely on their faith, and they would be saved by...