Lesson video

Hello, and welcome to this lesson on the European Reformation, and a man called Martin Luther who lived about 500 years ago.

My name is Mr. Sellin.

And I'm going to be teaching four lessons on the European Reformation.

To start today, you're going to make sure that you've got a pen and something to write on.

And also make sure that there's no distractions nearby.

So turn your phone on silent, make sure it's on the other side of the room.

And make sure that you're in a space which is quiet and you can focus.

You might want to pause the video now while you got that sorted.

Lovely, let's begin.

Hello, I'm up here now.

Throughout this lesson, you'll see me appear and disappear.

I'm going to turn myself off now, so that you can really focus on this photograph of Lincoln Cathedral.

You might not have ever heard the word cathedral before, but it basically just means a really large and quite important church.

This one was built hundreds of years ago in Lincoln, which is in England.

It's a modern photograph but a mediaeval building.

And I think you get a really good sense of the scale by looking at the modern buildings here.

And the sheer size of the mediaeval church here.

If you walk around the streets of Lincoln and look up at the spires, it's almost like the spires are reaching up into the clouds themselves.

And this is part of the plan, cathedrals were built to be enormous.

They were built to make people go.

Wow, what an enormous church that must have been made for a really important reason.

Lincoln's Cathedral has stood for hundreds of years, and the European reformation took place hundreds of years ago in the 16th century.

The 16th century began in the year 1500.

Technically, it's actually 1501.

If you want to really impress your teacher.

You might have studied some topics before 1500 like the Black Death in Europe, or the Norman invasion of England.

But don't worry if you haven't studied that, we're going to be looking at the Reformation today, and focusing there for 500 years ago.

500 years ago in Europe nearly everybody was a Christian.

And so have a look at this painting, the painting that I'm currently hiding part of it.

What do you think I am obscuring? What is hidden behind me? Think about it.

Were you right? It's God.

This 16th century painting is by a man called Dossi.

And it shows God up in heaven surrounded by light.

He's also surrounded by some cherubs, which are those young babies with the wings look a bit unusual perhaps.

Down outside of the clouds are the people on earth, they're looking up at God.

Why on earth would people down on earth be looking up at God? It's because they believe as the vast majority of people were Christian, that God created the earth.

And God lived in heaven where they could go after they died.

We're going to use a special word called salvation today.

It might be a word that you've never heard of before.

In fact, it's quite a complicated word even.

But it is a good word to use.

And it is a word that I want to use because it's the proper word.

The word salvation means getting to heaven.

And ordinary people down on Earth, ordinary Christians in the 16th century, believed that after they died, they might be able to go from.

Oh, I've done it the wrong way.

They might be able to go from there to there.

Not them per se more their souls, their souls would leave their bodies after they died, and they fly up to heaven to spend eternal life with God.

You only need to look at this painting to realise how desperate people were to get into heaven after they died.

This man here is reaching up into the heavens to display how desperately he wants to spend the rest of his life and the rest of the eternal life of the universe with God.

Heaven was often believed to be up in the clouds, it was away from Earth.

And Earth could be full of illness or war or disease, bad things.

And so after somebody died in their earthly life was over, they got to spend the rest of eternal life up with God.

What an incredible thing.

So knowing that you were going to go into heaven after you died that was achieving, what was it? I've hidden myself, I've hidden the word here.

What was it, say it.

Salvation, that's right.

salvation was going to heaven after you died.

And you can only imagine that if you knew that you could potentially spend the rest of eternity with God, you'd do whatever you could to get salvation? you'd listen to the leader of the church, and his name was the Pope.

Pope Leo the 10th was the leader of the Catholic Church.

The word catholic means universal.

And when we talk about Church With a big C, a capital C, this means all of the churches across Europe together in one organisation.

So as you can imagine, Pope Leo the 10th was an incredibly powerful man.

Millions of people across Europe looked to him and his Church in order to achieve salvation and secure their place in heaven after they died.

Pope's instructed that you could get to heaven by doing various things.

And Catholics, that's the word we give to Christians in the Catholic Church.

Catholics knew that they had to do good works in order to get salvation.

This is a photograph of the inside of a cathedral.

It's Cologne Cathedral, which is in Germany.

And you can see that again, the entire design it makes you look upwards towards heaven.

If you walk through a cathedral, you get a sense of something majestic, that it is a place where God might be.

Catholics believed that if you did these good works and the Catholic Church had a long list of good works, that would increase your chance of salvation.

One of these good works is building cathedrals like this one here, paying money at least to help them be built.

But what did that word salvation mean again? Here are four options.

Does it mean doing good works to please God? Does it mean making sure you go to church services? Does it mean reading the Bible frequently? Does it mean going to heaven after you die? Pause the video, tell me which one it is.

You should have unpaused it now.

And of course, the right answer is going to happen after you die.

And it's this desperate urge to get to heaven after you die that led to something called an indulgence.

An indulgence was a paper certificate.

And as you can see, these are really valuable, really precious objects.

Simply the amount of colour and the care and attention that's gone into handwriting this document means that it's incredibly important.

This indulgence is an example from Germany.

And it was made for the townspeople people of Maria in der Tanner.

Maria in der Tanner had something awful happened to it, because it's church was a very old and beautiful building.

But unfortunately it was made of wood.

And as what happened with lots of wooden buildings 500 years ago, it burnt down one night.

There was a small fire in the town and it spread and before the townspeople could do anything about it, the entire building was ablaze.

Now, this is a disaster anyway, let alone if you're a devoted Catholic like the people of Maria in der Tanner.

Well, without a church how are we going to get salvation? How are we going to get to heaven? We can't go to our church services, we can't meet our priests.

We can't do those good works that we're told are needed in order to get into heaven.

But the indulgence was brilliant.

The indulgence was given to the townspeople of Maria in der Tanner, on the request of the town Reeve.

He wrote unto a Cardinal called Oliverius.

Oliverius is actually the name that's shown here.

Oliverius wrote to the Pope.

And the Pope said anyone who donates money to the rebuilding of this church, they are demonstrating a very good work.

They are showing that actually out of this destruction and disaster, a loyal Catholic can still do a very good work.

The indulgence became this way of saying, I deserve salvation.

And for the people of Maria in der Tanner, they saw their indulgence as a way into heaven.

Now, we didn't guarantee that, but it was a really good way of saying, I am a loyal Catholic and I deserve salvation.

This chap here is a pardoner.

A pardoner sold indulgences.

They travelled around on their donkey or horse, telling the people the pope wants you to do good works, and we can arrange an indulgence.

Indulgences became really popular.

They were used, of course to grant salvation, people wanted salvation.

Hang on, what did that word salvation mean again? Yep, you know which one was it? Going to have an after you die, well done.

This pardoner sold salvations.

And actually, some of them sold quite a lot.

This pardoner is actually quite a famous pardoner.

He was known for being a bit dodgy.

He sold them in order to get more money for himself rather than to help people get into heaven.

He was less focused on God and more focused on the money.

Now this became a bit of a problem with the Catholic church.

And the church authorities were quite worried that too many of their priests or their pardoners, were selling indulgences as a quick ticket to salvation.

And it sounds attractive, isn't it? Rather than having to do good works like giving to charity or fasting or going on a crusade, you could just pay someone like this some money and he could get you into heaven.

There were some Catholics that said this is simply not good enough.

Rather than focusing on God, too many priests were trying to use their position to get personal wealth.

They were selling indulgences inappropriately, and this was not the point of the church.

This man here was called Erasmus.

He was a Dutch Catholic, and he read an enormous amount.

You can see his book that he holds so closely to him in this portrait shows how important reading was.

And it wasn't just any old book that he read.

He read the original texts that the church was based on.

Obviously, there was the Bible, but there were other church fathers that had lived 1000, 1200 300 years before Erasmus was even born.

And it was their books that the early church was based upon.

Men like Erasmus believed that the early church was closer to God's plan for what the church should be.

And therefore, the Catholic Church in the 1500s needed to go back to the original.

The Latin phrase for this is ad fontes.

You can use that if you'd like to impress your teacher, but it just means going back to the original.

The church was broken.

It could fix itself, but it needed serious work in order to get back to what God had originally planned.

That was Erasmus's his view at least.

We call people who wanted to change the church to return to the original reformers.

A reform is a change that seeks to improve something.

Reformers like Wycliffe were desperate for people to read the Bible in their own language, so they can understand the word of God.

If you understand the word of God, you're more likely to gain salvation.

It was believed that the Catholic Church was hiding behind the Bible at times.

It was written in Latin, ordinary people could not understand Latin.

In fact, it was only the priests, those who worked for the church who were able to read it.

And this gave them a huge amount of power.

If the priest says.

Well, you need to do this, this and this to get salvation.

And maybe they said, you need to buy this indulgence.

Well, you would do it.

Of course you would.

Men like Wycliffe, reformers, wanted God's Word to be known.

They wanted the Bible to be in English in this example, because that meant ordinary people would be able to realise what they need to do to get to heaven.

And that might not be giving all your money to the church.

So how can we really describe these reformers? Again, we've got four options.

Which statement here best summarises the aim of reformers? Did reformers want to close down all churches? Did they want to improve the church by focusing on God? Did they want to fight against different religions? Or did they want to make a second and better Pope? Pause the video.

Now you've probably unpaused by now.

And you can tell me that the correct answer is improving the church by focusing on God.

That's what reformers wanted.

You're doing really well so far.

Salvation and reform are both complicated topics.

And we haven't even got on to the main focus of our big question yet.

And our big question for the next few lessons is this.

What was Luther trying to achieve? We haven't even looked at who Martin Luther is yet.

I've told you about salvation.

I've told you about reform.

And you know what those are.

Salvation is? That's right, salvation is getting into heaven after you die.

And reformers wanted to? Very good, reformers wanted to improve the church, focus on God, get rid of the priests who were trying to make too much money.

Martin Luther was the most important reformer of all, at least in some people's eyes.

Here he is, this is Martin Luther.

He might not be exactly what you're expecting.

Sometimes when we hear the name Martin Luther, we actually think of this man.

This is Martin Luther King, and he was named after Martin Luther.

Martin Luther King was a black American activist who in the 1960s helps black Americans achieve equal rights in the United States of America.

He's is a very important man.

And therefore, it shows how important this Martin Luther is for this one to be named after this one.

This Martin Luther is actually a German monk.

He was a loyal Catholic, and he devoted his life to God.

Monks separate themselves out from ordinary life.

They leave their ordinary lives behind and they go into monasteries.

This here is called the Luther house, and it's in a town called Wittenberg in Germany.

It's nowadays quite a famous museum.

As a monk, Mark Luther spent a lot of time praying, reading the Bible and worshipping God.

But he was also a professor of divinity.

That means Religious Studies at the University in Wittenberg.

And so he spent a lot of time thinking about God, about the church and about heaven.

And he was a little bit concerned.

Martin Luther read his Bible a lot.

And what he saw in his Bible, in his mind wasn't necessarily what he saw the church to be doing.

Martin Luther was not the first man to point out these problems. We've already seen men like Erasmus and John Wycliffe, pointing them out as well.

But what he did next, where his story goes makes him different from other reformers.

In 1511, Luther travelled from his hometown in Wittenberg to Rome, where the pope lives.

This is the centre of the Catholic Church, so the most important religious site in Europe.

Luther went to Rome because he wanted to get closer to God.

The map I'm using by the way, is a fantastic map from the 16th century.

That's why it's a bit wonky.

It's amazing how much of Europe they did know.

But they didn't have the satellites that we have nowadays that helped make our maps more accurately.

The fact that Luther travelled to Rome in the first place, which in 1511 was not an easy journey, shows how desperate he was to know about God.

He had a good experience in Rome.

He describes in his writings that he felt closer to God when he was in Rome.

And when he returned to Wittenberg, he was positive about his faith.

But unfortunately for him, he still wasn't fully convinced.

He believed that something was not right.

At this point, I'm going to pause the story.

And it's your chance to then read and answer some questions on the story that we just looked at together.

So I'd like you to pause the video, read the slides on the next page and answer the comprehension questions.

And once you finish that, you can come back to this video.

Welcome back.

I hope you enjoyed completing these questions here.

We're going to go through some answers now.

Don't worry if your wording isn't exactly the same as mine.

As long as you get the general sense, then I think you've done really well.

And I'm going to disappear now so that we can look through some of these questions.

So the first question was if a Christian achieves salvation, where does their soul go after death? An acceptable answer would be heaven.

And a really good answer would be the full sentence like Christians believe that if they achieve salvation, their soul goes to heaven after they die.

Again, if it's not exactly the same wording, don't worry.

Question two, what was an indulgence? An acceptable answer would be a certificate that helps you get into heaven.

And a good answer would be indulgences were certificates granted by the Pope.

They helped Catholics achieve salvation by demonstrating their loyalty to God and the church.

Question three, give an example of a reform.

That's a change that some Christians wanted.

Acceptable answers could include no more indulgences, translated Bibles.

Those are just two examples.

A good example might take one of those and put it into a full sentence.

Like one reform was the banning of indulgences, which some Christians believed went against God's teaching of salvation.

Question four, why was Martin Luther concerned about the Catholic Church? An acceptable answer? He didn't think it was doing the right thing.

It's perfectly correct that answer, but a good answer would be something like.

Luther was concerned that the Catholic Church was not following the Word of God correctly.

He worried that the Bible was suggesting different ways to salvation.

Really well done today.

You've looked at some complicated topics like salvation, reformer, indulgence.

You've met a man called Martin Luther with quite a complicated Story already.

You've done brilliantly.

And next lesson, we're going to continue Luther's story.

Find out what he did next, after he was convinced that something wasn't right.

And it's going to help us answer our big question of what was Luther trying to achieve.

So it's been fantastic, our first lesson together.

I've been Mr. Sellin.

You've been learning about Luther, and I'm looking forward to seeing you in the next lesson.

Bye for now.