Reformation and Its Effects on the View of the Devil

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Reformation and Its Effects on the View of the Devil

The Reformation was a period from around 1520- 1650. It was a time of

religious

revolution, where Christianity was being reformed and people were led

to reject Catholic

traditions and to break with the Papacy. Protestantism was becoming a

much more

influential religion. Levack and Oldridge mention many reasons why the

Reformation led

to the increased fear of the Devil, and both try to explain their

reasons.

Darren Oldridge explains how people before the Reformation saw the

devil. They

believed that the devil had his limitations and could be defeated, and

even sometimes, had

a comical depiction. The people, before the Reformation, were mainly

Catholic so they

could use ‘magic’ rituals such as holy water, relics, and statues to

protect themselves from

and rid themselves of the devil. Oldridge then goes on to describe how

Protestants saw the

Devil, after the Reformation.

They believed that they could do nothing to earn the love of God and

lived in devote

prayer. The Devil was said to be everywhere, and Martin Luther once

described Satan as

‘the prince and God’ of the earth. Satan was changed from a limited,

quite unimportant

figure, into a central actor in daily life. This was a much more

profound fear of the Devil

than Catholicism. Oldridge explains how Catholics see the Devil. They

believed in the

Devil, but believed that there was a way of defeating him. He explains

that when the

Reformation occurred, Protestants started to reject the practises of

Catholicism. They,

therefore, were rejecting the ‘magic’ rituals that Catholics used to

fend off the Devil. This

meant that Protestants had to invent their own methods of defeating

him. The medieval

perspectives were that the Devil could assume a physical form and this

concern for

physical details, especially by Protestants, emphasised the bodily

reality of the Devil.

People believed that the Devil was located inside a victim.

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