Blog #5

In the early modern era two intersecting cultural trends continued to play out in the twenty first century. The first one was the spread of Christianity to Asians, Africans, and Native Americans. The second one lays in the emergence of a modern scientific outlook which challenged Western Christianity. The early modern era also witnessed novel cultural transformations that connected distant people. Christianity was established solidly in the Americas and the Philippines. A new understanding of the universe and a new approach to knowledge were taking shape among European thinkers of the Scientific Revolution which gave rise to another kind of cultural encounter-science and religion. Science became the new competing worldview and for some it became a new religion. Europeans were central players in globalization of Christianity and the emergence of modern science. Science emerged meeting various receptions in different parts of the world and Islam continued a long pattern of religious expansion and renewal even though Christianity began to compete with its as a world religion. 

Christianity was limited to Europe at the beginning of the early modern era. Christendom stretched from Spain and England in the west to Russia in the east with small communities of various kinds in Egypt, Ethiopia, southern India, and Central Asia. Christianity was divided between the Roman Catholic and Central Europe and Eastern Orthodox. 

Protestant Reformation shattered the unity of Roman Catholic Christianity which provided the cultural and organizational foundation of Western European civilization. Reformation began in 1517 when Martin Luther a German priest publicly invited debate about various abuses within the Roman Catholic Church by issuing a document known as the Ninety-five Theses and nailing it to the door of a church in Whittenberg. Luther's protest was potentially revolutionary because of its theological basis. Luther had come to a new understanding of salvation which held that it came through faith alone.The good works of the sinner nor the sacraments of the Church had any bearing on the eternal destiny of the soul for faith was a free gift of God and it was granted to his needy and undeserving people. Luther took this as a source of beliefs and religious authority as it was not teaching of the Church, but the Bible alone. This was the stuff of revolution in the sixteenth-century.