Thursday, October 1, 2015

Protestantism versus Catholicism

The reformation and counter-reformation was a factor to the witch hunts but was not a reason for its occurrence. The reform ha d contributed to an increase concern and awareness of the devils presence in the world. While leading protestant reformers mers, Martin Luther and Jean Calvin rarely spoke of witchcraft, they had preached about the dangers of the devil, similar to Catholicism.
Brian Levack mentioned that Luther took more of a daily battle approach to the devil and his temptations while Calvin spoke of the Devil only operating with God's permission. Both were different than Catholicism and were dancing on the border of heresy. In regards to witches, both Calvin and Luther agreed that they should be burned immediately. As Protestantism focused on the devil and warned of the corruption of the church, some Catholics warned of Protestantism being the product of the devil. Levack included " the rise of Protestantism itself appeared to many Catholics to be the work of Satan" (114).

Why would there be opinions that Protestantism is the work of the devil?

Although they didn't preach about as much, how did Luther and Calvin's emphasis on the devil reflect onto the witch hunt?
Posted by at

1 comment:

  1. shelley w.October 2, 2015 at 7:52 AM

    One of the things that I noticed was that there were contradictory statements in the last two blogs--so we'll have to parse out what the Reformation meant to the Witch-hunts. We'll make sure to capture all of Levack's arguments!

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)