The Protestant Christianity and the Political Modernity

The occasion of 500 years from the beginning of the Protestant Reformation – an event of special importance for the central and western Europe – marked decisively the development of the western civil society in the following centuries, representing a reason for reflection and debate on the place and role of the Church in the ampler process of modernisation started in the 16th century. In the Germany of the year 1517, the thesis belonging Martin Luther on the religious consciousness and freedom from the perspective of the public mentality led to the beginning of the later political events, which has as consequences a series of discussions/polemics on the new problem of the relation between the Church and the State and on the role of the modern mentality in this relation. From this perspective, we aim to commemorate the event with an investigation on the evolution and the content of the relations of power between Catholicism and Protestantism, and also an analysis of the radical formulas, of the manner in which the states, on one side, and the Church, on the other side, understood to cooperate, cohabitate and confront each other. In fact, the evolution of the relation between the state and the Church can characterise the progress of the society, being, in our case, a pertinent indicator of the manner and the intensity with which the modernity and its values manifested at a certain time in the history of the European culture and civilisation and wider than this.