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Word of the week: W/c 14/03/16 - Debate

12/3/2016

To argue about a subject - especially in a formal manner

By Ian Scott (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

This post is both a plug and discussion of principles - first the plug…

On the 21st March we will be welcoming to our school Professor AC grayling to give a talk entitled “Why study the humanities”. In an age where the focus of education is on grades and future employment, we can sometimes forget to stop and think what 'studying' really means. For many students, studying the Humanities comes with a question mark over future employability - 'what can I do with a Philosophy degree?'. In this talk, Professor AC Grayling will argue a case for studying the Humanities on the grounds of immersing oneself in the 'great conversation of life'. To study the Humanities is to take off one's spectacles and think about our values, our history and the best way to live our lives.

Professor Grayling is a world renowned philosopher who, in 2011, founded and became the first Master of the New College of the Humanities (http://www.acgrayling.com/). He is passionate about the importance of the Humanities and communicating how crucial the skills and learning developed in studying them is to employers, society and our economy. If you, your students or your son/daughter is in the process of selecting which university courses, A levels or GCSEs to take then this talk will help them weigh up the merits of different courses.

Local schools and Teachers are most welcome - In order to help us gauge numbers of people attending – please private message @berkophil I will then send you more details.

Now for the principled bit…

I have been disappointed that some of my colleagues in the Religious Studies community have been very negative about AC Grayling coming to speak - he is Patron and vice president of the Humanist society. AC Grayling’s opposition to Sharia law and faith schools has often been expressed (for example in this “Comment is Free” piece in The Guardian). But more often than not, he looks to make the positive case for Atheism as in this interview. These negative views about religion have led some to suggest that he should not be speaking at a school like Berkhamsted and we should offer him no platform. I think this is precisely the opposite of what one should do.

We need to encourage debate and discussion in society - not stifle it. If you disagree with what AC Grayling says come and ask him about it, try to convince him of the counter arguments, make a case.
I could turn to Voltaire for support here who reputedly said; "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”. But instead I will turn to the leader of the free world - president Obama and a 2015 speech he gave to a group of college students. I think he says it rather well:

Word of the week - Dukkha

6/3/2016

The concept of Suffering within Buddhism

In the west today we live pretty comfortable lives. Many of us do not lack food, shelter, or suffer from illness or disease. Therefore it is perhaps difficult for us to contemplate a philosophical system that is centred around the removal of suffering. For this indeed is what Buddhism is.

SIddhartha Gautama, now known to his followers as the Buddha, live in North East India and from an early age was intrigued by the suffering of the world. He grew up in a Hindu household, Legend would have it that he was the son of a king and his father was determined that he should never see suffering and so was locked up inside the palace. However inevitably Siddhartha did see suffering: His mother died when he was young, and he was not satisfied remaining within the palace and wish to see outside of the walls. So he instructed his chariot driver Chana to take him outside and show him the world. Here he saw for sights that changed his philosophical outlook forever.

He saw an old man.
He saw a sick man.
He saw a dead man.
And he saw a holy man.

Siddhartha asked how he could avoid getting old, being sick and dying and recognise that one way might be to become like the holy man. So he stole away from the palace and tried to lead an ascetic life - the life of a monk. The legends have it that he managed to get down to eating one grain of rice everyday, and he stabbed himself. But he realise that this was not making him satisfied and he could not concentrate on achieving peace because he was so hungry. So in the end he decided to sit down Under the shade of a Bhodi tree until he achieved enlightenment. eventually after many struggles with his inner demons he managed to realise the truth of the world - he had become a Buddha.

Buddhism is the teaching of those truths - what is known to Buddhist as the Dharma. Buddhism is not in fact all that relaxed and liberal, as some people might have you believe. Rather, it is full of lists and traditions that the Buddha passed onto his followers and they try to remember and practice today. These include the learning of the four Noble Truths, the five moral precepts and the eightfold path. The aim of all these practices is detach oneself from the material things of this life, whilst not depriving oneself fully, to reach a state where at death one will pass into Nirvana.

The Buddha realised that suffering cannot be avoided completely but one can take steps to limit its influence upon oneself and so reach the ultimate goal.

Word of the week: w/c 29/02/16 - Sin

29/2/2016

immoral acts considered to be a breaking of God's laws.

Christians, Jews, and Muslims are all concerned by sin; falling short of the standards set by God in the laws that he gives to humans. But what is sin? Where does it come from and will it be solved? These are clearly very big questions with complex answers so this post will focus purely on a Christian view of sin:

Sin is firstly ‘original’, meaning that it is something we are born with. Christians believe that wrongdoing is more than mere ignorance of how we should behave, it is deliberate defiance, choosing to be selfish or worse, despite what we know to be good. This is born in us and needs to be overcome. The Genesis Garden of Eden myth makes this clear, as Adam and Eve wilfully eat the forbidden fruit and suffer the consequences.

Secondly, sin is a struggle. St Paul speaks of how all have sinned and fall short of God’s standards, that it is as if there is a law pushing us to go the wrong way even when we know the right thing to do. In Christian teaching it is the grace of God that helps us to overcome this tendency, along with self-control and the guidance of scripture and conscience. This is in stark contrast to the fact we are made in God’s image, but just shows the power of free will.

Thirdly, sin is structural. The rich are constantly told to ‘ease the yoke’ of the poor in scripture and not to oppress them; Jesus complained of the burdens the Pharisees placed on ordinary people, and we can see in the world today that global capitalism can have a corrupting effect on whole societies in the pursuit of greed over against the welfare of those in developing countries and the environment. Such sin traps the weak in systems that damage their lives through poverty and oppression, and can lead to violence and other desperate acts to bring about change.

Finally, sin is of this world but not of the next. St Paul makes it clear in his letters that Jesus has "paid the price for sin" and the book of revelation describes heaven as a place of no sin where people will no longer go wrong. So it is that Christians believe they must keep focused on the kingdom of God and try to be as they will be in that eventual state.

Word of the Week: w/c 22/02/16 - Humean

19/2/2016

Relating to the Philosophy of David Hume or those who follow in his tradition.

David Hume is certainly not as famous outside of Philosophy as he perhaps should be and according to many he was the greatest British Philosopher ever! But this is a great shame - not only was Hume's life fascinating, but also his influence upon the way that we think (and the fact we are allowed to think) was huge.

He was born in Edinburgh in 1711 the youngest of three children. His Father died when he was two and his mother was an extremely strong influence upon him; indeed, no other woman, despite a number of romantic interests, seems to have been able to win his affection (perhaps as a result). During his lifetime he wrote about a huge range of topics (including ethics, aesthetics, causation, determinism, history and the self) but he is now chiefly remembered for his work on Philosophy and Science.

He was the final thinker in a line of three great British empiricists (the others being John Locke and George Berkeley) and he left his most potent work to be published after his death in 1776. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion was a bold and radical analysis of religion - he challenged most of the accepted ideas of his era such as that the natural world was designed by God, whether you could rely on the idea of God as the first cause of the universe and challenged religious believers by posing the problem of evil as an "inconsistent triad" that cannot be overcome:

Many Philosophers (including Dr James Orr who addressed the Ontos society just before half-term) believe that Hume's posing of this problem has now been solved through the work of philosophers who have developed Augustine and Irenaeus' theodicies such as Plantinga or Hick. Never-the-less it was phenomenally important that he posed this question.

Hume was sceptical of the received wisdoms of the era and prepared to challenge them. To a modern person looking at the contents of Dialogues and reading the text, it does not seem very controversial especially in the light of modern atheists such as Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and especially Hitchens - but at the time it was seismic and ruffled feathers. We should not underestimate the effect of this on academia and the fact that we now take challenge to intellectual authority for granted - but in Hume's day it would have been enough to ruin your career!

Hume's scepticism was a gift to society that we should not overlook: We are now free to challenge religious dogma and "normal thinking" as much as we like, but it is easy to forget that this ability was hard won and needed brave thinkers like Hume to take the first steps.

Word of the Week: w/c 08/02/16 - Ash

7/2/2016

Powdery, nitrogen rich, residue left behind after burning a substance

Wednesday this week sees the start of the season of Lent as Christians celebrate Ash Wednesday. This is normally marked with a Eucharist including the imposition of ashes - the cross is drawn on the forehead of each person using ash. But why do Christians do this? Why ash?

First of all the ash is made from the burning of last year’s palm crosses given out on Palm Sunday when Christians remember Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. This is symbolic of where the season of Lent is heading to - Ash Wednesday is the start of this penitential season and Christians are look forward to Holy Week which begins with Palm Sunday.

Another major symbol of ash is that it reminds them of their mortality - as the ash is placed on their foreheads the priest says: “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return. Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ”. This is an echo of Genesis chapter 3:19 when Adam is cursed following his sin with the words “"Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; And you will eat the plants of the field; By the sweat of your face You will eat bread, Till you return to the ground, Because from it you were taken; For you are dust, And to dust you shall return”. This is also picked up the book of Ecclesiastes when the writer says “All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return“. “Dust to Dust, Ashes to Ashes” is also part of the funeral liturgy. So it is that Christians are focused on the shortness of their lives and the need to be faithful to God during such a short time during Lent.

Ashes also have a long history of being used to express grief and repentance in the BIble - for example Job repents when he doubts God in chapter 42 of the eponymous book of the bible and says: "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes”. And Jesus himself talks of this practice when criticising the scribes and pharisees: “If the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago (sitting) in sackcloth and ashes." (Matthew 11.21). Early Christians such as Tertullian suggested that Christians should confess their sins accompanied by lying in ashes.

Finally Christians might like to reflect on the power of ash - out of such an apparently dead thing comes new life. Ash is a fantastic fertilizer and this seems to be a perfect metaphor for the message of Easter when Christians believe that Jesus used his death to secure new life for the world in the resurrection. Christians remember how in a few short weeks they will celebrate that in Jesus’ death and suffering their future salvation has been bought.

Dig Deeper: Hindu Ideas of Creation - In our time Podcast

31/1/2016

Having just finished studying the Cosmological Argument with my Y12 students and starting the Science and Religion unit this week I have had my fill of western ideas of creation and logic over the last weeks. So it was interesting to listen to this pod-cast of In Our Time (a programme I blogged about last year) which comes at the issue of creation from a totally different perspective - that of Hinduism.

Whereas the western intellectual tradition has tended to look at the question "why is there something rather than nothing" and come up with answers that involve proposing that there must be an utterly different being to the universe to explain the existence of the universe (from thinkers such as Aquinas, Al-Kindi and Liebnitz) the Hindu tradition sees this issue in a rather different way. Rather than what happened in the west Hinduism was less interested in giving a complete explanation (of the kind Copleston is accused by Russell of trying to produce) but is happy to leave many of the questions open and unanswered.

Monotheism in the West leads to a belief in a God that must be the creator of all "Ex Nihilo" - out of nothing. This is arguably logical for an Omnipotent being, and as a result this style of creation God is omniscient as he is the creator of all. But by contrast the Hindu tradition is Polytheistic and so the gods are generally part of created order and instead of creating "Ex Nihilo" they create from themselves - "Ex Deo". So it is that the the Hindu myths have the gods creating the world out of themselves - they make a great egg or a primordial being who becomes the world. One might argue that his in many ways fits much better with our experience of the world and therefore is more coherent reasoning (after all we have never observed anything that creates out of nothing - but rather we always see things being created out of something).

Of course this doesn't pass muster for thinkers such as Libnitz and Coppleston who want a sufficient reason and suggest that a cause within the universe is not a sufficient reason at all. However the Hindu approach fits with Russell's conclusion that one cannot expect to come to a sufficient reason and the universe should simply be accepted as a "brute fact". Whilst this not be very acceptable and satisfying to our minds, one might concede this is as good as it gets. Indeed this programme shows how in different cultures, such as Hindu culture, there is not such a strong intellectual desire for a sufficient explanation. People are happy to simply ponder the mystery without necessarily hoping for an answer. It might not be as satisfactory, but it might be more realistic?

Listen to the pod-cast here:

In Our Time - Hindu Creation Stories

Word of the Week: w/c 01/02/16 - Genocide

31/1/2016

The act of systematically trying to wipe out an entire race or people

The term Genocide was first used in in 1933 by the Lawyer Raphael Lemkin in a paper presented to the League of Nations (the body that later became the UN) to describe the atrocities committed by the Ottoman Empire against the Armenians between 1915 and 1918.

The act of systematically trying to wipe out an entire race or people was formally made illegal under international law in 1946. The UN defines the act as being “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. There of course have been many terrible historical examples of such acts ranging from The Holocaust (see last year’s WOTW; Shoah), the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the slaughtering of Muslims in the Bosnian War and the Civil War in Rwanda.

But how do such terrible events come about? They certainly don’t just occur overnight and indeed build up over years or decades. We would all like to believe that such an event could never happen in our own time and nation, but one can easily envision that this was also said by ordinary Germans in the 1930s or by Bosnians in the 90s. www.genocidewatch.org suggests that there is a process that tends to occur, based on the work of Gregory H Stanton:

One might argue that to ensure that we never reach stage 7, Extermination, it would be very sensible that we ensure we never even get to stage 1. But can you think of any groups in our society that may already be classified as different? Travellers (Gypsies) and significant populations of immigrants in the UK both strike me as groups that certainly run the risk of being classified as different - programmes such as “My big fat Gypsie Wedding” seem to fan the flames of such classifications. Whilst the actions of one particular landlord in Middlesbrough reported last week in The Times also serves as another example of behaviour that could contribute to the later stages of Stanton’s model.

This week our Year 11 IGCSE pupils will take part in a visit to Northwood Synagogue where they will hear directly from a survivor of the Holocaust. This is only one part of the work of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust to make young people more aware of the events of the past so they can ensure that it never happens again. To use the slogan of HMD 2016 #Dontstandby

Word of the Week: w/c 25/1/16 - Vivisection

24/1/2016

the practice of performing operations on live animals for the purpose of experimentation or scientific research

Animal research is carried out for a number of reasons: To ensure the safety of products for humans, such as pesticides, cancer treatments, and drugs (cosmetics’ testing is no longer in the UK but does happen in some other countries), or to discover the effectiveness of genetic engineering and surgical procedures. However there is a great deal on debate about the need for such experiments today given how effective and accurate techniques such as computer modelling are. There have been some very high profile protests in the news such as that which has taken place at Huntingdon Life Sciences and some highly criticised tactics by protesters. But why do some argue that we have the right to use animals in this way, and why do some argue that we have no such right?

On the one hand the traditional Judeo-Christian attitude that we can use Animals for testing comes from the Genesis narrative which points out that animals were not ‘companions’ for Adam: only another human, Eve, was. Humans are distinctive because they alone are made in God’s ‘image’ and likeness – spiritual creatures who are creative, moral, thoughtful and responsible, we have free will, conscience and the reasoning ability to build a different society. And in Genesis 1 humans are told to “subdue” the earth suggesting a dominance over the world. We have alone have been ‘Breathed into’ by God – Some call this a ‘soul’, an eternal part of a person which is their true identity and which will survive death; animals do not have this and therefore do not have the same value as us. Finally, God became man at the Incarnation – God became Man in .Christ to save us and not animals.

However many Christians would also argue that we are Stewards of God’s creation:This means we are managers on God’s behalf of His world. In Genesis Adam was put into Eden to “work it and take care of it”, that is, to develop it and to make sure it is well looked after. When The Lord’s Prayer says ‘Thy Kingdom come’ it is seeking God’s will to be done here on earth as it is in heaven – that is the job of the steward, to implement the boss’s purposes. Furthermore the Bible shows that God made his covenant with animals as well as human beings in the story of Noah; Human and non-human animals have the same origin in God; The Garden of Eden myth, in which human beings live in peace and harmony with animals, demonstrates God's ideal world, and the state of affairs that human beings should work towards; Animals are weak compared to us - Christ tells us to be kind to them because Jesus told human beings to be kind to the weak and helpless; and finally, in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus refers to the way God cares for the birds and the flowers as examples of ‘how much more’ He cares for us.

Which of these views do you find the more convincing?

Word of the Week: w/c 18/1/16 - Vision

17/1/2016

A vision is something seen in a dream, trance, or religious ecstasy, especially refering to a supernatural appearance that usually conveys a revelation from the divine.

A religious vision occurs when an individual believes that they have seen or heard something supernatural or a supernatural being. It is a form of religious experience that can be utterly convincing and life changing to those that experience them, but often fail to convince those that are sceptical. Often students I teach are rather obsessed by the question of whether visions of God, Jesus or the Virgin Mary prove the existence of God, however this question is in my opinion a rather fruitless one - it is much more interesting to think about what they tell us about religious belief and the insights they might give into human nature.

There are 3 broad ways in which the individual may experience a vision:

1. An intellectual vision brings knowledge and understanding such as a revelation from God. One such example is Julian of Norwich, the 14-15th century mystic. In The Revelations of Divine Love, she recounted one vivid experience: ‘And he showed me more, a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, on the palm of my hand, round like a ball. I looked at it thoughtfully and wondered, ‘What is this?’ And the answer came, ‘It is all that is made’. I marvelled that it continued to exist and did not suddenly disintegrate it was so small. And again my mind supplied the answer, ‘It exists, both now and forever, because God loves it. In short, everything owes its existence to the love of God.’

2. An imaginary vision where something that strengthens faith is seen with the mind’s eye such as Jacob’s vision of a ladder to heaven (Genesis 28: 10-22) or Joseph’s dream to protect Mary and Jesus and take them into Egypt.

3. A corporeal vision is where the figure is externally present such as St Bernadette’s visions of the Virgin Mary. St Bernadette was 14 years old when she had visions of the Virgin Mary over several months. At first the figure she saw did not even speak to her but later Bernadette was given instructions by ‘The Immaculate Conception’ (The Virgin Mary), that the spring water at Lourdes had healing powers and that a chapel was to be built on the site.

Bernadette's Vision - Source: Flickr.com

Julian of Norwich - Source: Wikipedia.com

What all these visions have in common is their sense of the Numinous - a term coined by Rudolf Otto in 1936 to describe the feeling of being in the presence of something greater than oneself. It is intriguing that this sense is reported by so many people over history and from a huge range of cultures - does this give it more credibility or is this simple evidence of a shared psychology brought about by a common Human nature? Either way the ramifications for our understanding of humanity are fascinating.

Word Of The Week: W/C 11/1/16 - Reformation

10/1/2016

1. The action or process of reforming an Institution or practice

2. a 16th-century movement for the reform of abuses in the Roman Church ending in the establishment of the Reformed and Protestant Churches.

The Corruption of the Roman Catholic Church was at the heart of Martin Luther's attack on it in 1517 when he wrote the "95 Theses" thus sparking off the German Reformation spread across the whole of Europe including Britain. However Luther was not always rebellious; Luther grew up a faithful Catholic Christian, well educated and intelligent. Having survived being struck by lightning in 1503 he dedicated himself to the religious life and joined an Augustinian monastery in Wittenberg, progressing in his studies there to taking on a university lectureship nearby at the new university.

But during his adulthood and time as a priest he began to have serious misgivings about the way the church acted, it’s practices and the claims that it made upon it’s congregations.One day he saw what he needed in the text of St Paul’s letter to the Romans (New Testament) – God’s grace was there for him all the time if only he reached out by faith alone for forgiveness through Christ: Christ had died for him, he could not save himself however hard he tried, but God could! Fired by a new enthusiasm he set about declaring this truth to all around him and denouncing many Church practices such as penance, the veneration of the saints and the Virgin Mary, belief in Purgatory – indeed anything which could not be found in the Bible.

One day John Tetzel, a pardoner (a priest who toured round hearing confessions and pronouncing forgiveness) came to Wittenberg selling indulgences, the profits going to build a new cathedral in Rome (and to a local dignitary who had given him permission). This was the last straw for Luther, who in 1517 nailed 95 Theses against the errors of the Church to his own church door in Wittenberg. Among these he said –
All Christians are saints; the Virgin Mary has no special place in heaven

Priests have no special status – all believers are priests really
The Mass is a reminder of Christ’s Last Supper and sacrifice for our sins, it does not become Christ’s body and blood
The Pope has no authority to represent Christ on earth or to excommunicate anyone

But was Luther justifed in these claims? Well certainly at the start of the C16, the Roman Catholic Church was all powerful in western Europe. There was no legal alternative. The Catholic Church jealously guarded its position and anybody who was deemed to have gone against the Catholic Church was labelled a heretic and burnt at the stake. The Catholic Church did not tolerate any deviance from its teachings as any appearance of ‘going soft’ might have been interpreted as a sign of weakness which would be exploited.

Latimer & Ridley being burnt at the stake - www.wikimedia.com

Relic of the Nail of the Cross - Ipernity.com

Its power had been built up over the centuries and relied on ignorance and superstition on the part of the populace. It had been indoctrinated into the people that they could only get to heaven via the church.
This gave a priest enormous power at a local level on behalf of the Catholic Church. The local population viewed the local priest as their ‘passport’ to heaven as they knew no different and had been taught this from birth by the local priest. Such a message was constantly being repeated to ignorant people in church service after church service. Hence keeping your priest happy was seen as a prerequisite to going to heaven.

This relationship between people and church was essentially based on money - hence the huge wealth of the Catholic Church. Rich families could buy high positions for their sons in the Catholic Church and this satisfied their belief that they would go to heaven and attain salvation. However, a peasant had to pay for a child to be christened (this had to be done as a first step to getting to heaven as the people were told that a non-baptised child could not go to heaven); you had to pay to get married and you had to pay to bury someone from your family in holy ground.
To go with this, you would pay a sum to the church via the collection at the end of each service (as God was omnipresent he would see if anyone cheated on him), you had to pay tithes (a tenth of your annual income had to be paid to the church which could be either in money or in kind such as seed, animals etc.) and you were expected to work on church land for free for a specified number of days per week. The days required varied from region to region but if you were working on church land you could not be working on your own land growing food etc. and this could be more than just an irritant to a peasant as he would not be producing for his family or preparing for the next year.

However, unfair and absurd this might appear to someone in the nowadays it was the accepted way of life in 1500 as this was how it had always been and no-one knew any different and very few were willing to speak out against the Catholic Church as the consequences were too appalling to contemplate.

The Catholic Church also had a three other ways of raising revenue:

Relics: These were officially sanctioned by the Vatican. They were pieces of straw, hay, white feathers from a dove, pieces of the cross etc. that could be sold to people as the things that had been the nearest to Jesus on Earth. The money raised went straight to the church and to the Vatican. These holy relics were keenly sought after as the people saw their purchase as a way of pleasing God. It also showed that you had honoured Him by spending your money on relics associated with his son.

The Pope as the Antichrist, signing and selling indulgences, from Luther's 1521 Passional Christi und Antichristiby Lucas Cranach the Elder. en.wikipedia

Indulgences: These were ‘certificates’ produced in bulk that had been pre-signed by the pope which pardoned a person’s sins and gave you access to heaven. Basically if you knew that you had sinned you would wait until a pardoner was in your region selling an indulgence and purchase one as the pope, being God’s representative on Earth, would forgive your sins and you would be pardoned. This industry was later expanded to allow people to buy an indulgence for a dead relative who might be in purgatory or Hell and relieve that relative of his sins. By doing this you would be seen by the Catholic Church of committing a Christian act and this would elevate your status in the eyes of God.

Pilgrimages: These were very much supported by the Catholic Church as a pilgrim would end up at a place of worship that was owned by the Catholic Church and money could be made by the sale of badges, holy water, certificates to prove you had been etc. and completed your journey

Catholic areas (olive), Protestant areas (blue) and Muslim areas (red) after the reformation - wikipedia.com

It was the issue of indulgences that angered Martin Luther into speaking out against them - potentially a very dangerous thing to do. However, Luther avoided capture or burning at the stake, the fate of several previous (and later) rebels against the Church’s power. He married a former nun, demonstrating that the lifelong celibacy expected of monks, nuns and priests had no place in Protestant Christianity. He bought his former small monastery in Wittenberg and turned it into the family home! He died peacefully at home, having witnessed the transformation of Europe in his lifetime.

Eventually in England William Tyndale headed the reform movement, in Switzerland John Calvin established Geneva as a Protestant city, and princes across the continent joined in, sensing they could get free of the Habsburgs and the Church’s control. Thus a spiritual rebellion and reform movement became a massive political upheaval: for example Henry VIII in England broke with the Catholic Church (now nicknamed ‘Roman’ Catholic), became Protestant and took the entire Church in England with him. Wars were to follow for a new-look Europe over the next hundred years, and considerable conflict occurred under the Tudor and Stuart monarchs in England.

Everywhere Protestant churches were stripped of Catholic emblems or signs, such as saints’ statues or elaborate altars, service books and scriptures were produced in the local language, new Creeds were written for Protestant beliefs, the Bible took centre stage in Christian worship and Christians were encouraged to have a personal faith and to follow their own conscience. Countries gained independence from Rome and from the Empire, scholars were free to undertake new study (hence Protestants were at the forefront of science), and the New World, America, became the home of a vigorous Protestantism.

The question remains as to whether Martin Luther ever intended this all to happen? Did he just want to clean up the church or start a whole new movement? We will never know for certain, but what is for sure is that this single man shaped the destiny of Europe and ultimately the entire world. It shows the power of the individual and the importance of a powerful idea, but it also reminds us to be careful what we wish for!

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