Changes

After the humanists’ revelations, many of the faithful began to wonder if the Pope. ‘as the heir of St Peter’ was infallible and should he be rendered unquestioned obedience.<ref> Patrick, p 117</ref> The reformers under the influence of the Humanists began to examine the Bible, which they saw as the unquestioned Word of God, to find answers. They became less inclined to take the words of the Pope as law and argued that only the Bible was the source of authority. They too like the Humanists decided to go back to the ‘sources’ in this case the Bible. They eventually came to see the Bible as the only source of authority and increasingly began to view the Pope and the Catholic Church as having distorted the message of the Gospels.<ref>Collinson, p. 115</ref> This belief soon gained widespread currency among many Reformers and those sympathetic to them in Germany and elsewhere.

The Renaissance was a cultural flourishing that promoted secular values over religious values. However, in Northern Europe, the ideas of the Renaissance were to take on a religious character. The ideas of the Italian humanists, such as textual analysis, the use of critical thinking and rejecting authority that was not sourced on reliable evidence were taken up by Northern Humanists who applied them to the Church.<ref>Chipps, p. 67</ref> The Northern Humanists sought to reform the Church and were generally pious men. However, the humanists perhaps unintentionally weakened the Papacy and its theoretical underpinnings. In their examination of key texts and especially the Bible, they exposed many key assumptions as false. This was to lead to a widespread challenge to the idea of Papal Infallibility and the power structure of the Church.<ref> Chipps, p. 17</ref> The Renaissance also encouraged people to question received wisdom and offered the possibility of change, something that was unthinkable in the middle ages. This encouraged the reformers to tackle abuses in the Church and this ultimately led to the schism and the end of the old idea of Christendom.

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