Love ‘Em Or Hate ‘Em: Christian Sect Leaders Through The Ages

By the 1500’s, the Church had split between East (Orthodoxy) and West (Catholic) due to conflicts over papal authority and the addition of a single word to the Nicene Creed that was already widely practiced if not normed in the West. But such histories we won’t get into. But with the birth of nationalism in politics and a focus on reading the classics in the Renaissance, the Church itself was poised for reformation…

Martin Luther

A Catholic monk, priest and legal scholar, Martin Luther started with an opposition to the selling of indulgences by John Tetzel, seeing it as an abuse of papal power, and appealing for a public response from the Church with his 95 Theses. This one issue set off a chain of controversies centered on the idea of justification and sanctification coming to the believer – through the Church or directly from the Holy Spirit as a gift? (And that’s a long story on its own.) Luther would eventually be excommunicated, but with strong support from local German princes, Lutheranism would survive as arguably the first reformation church.