The Reformation
Lecture 2. THE REFORMATION
Recap:
• Political organisation: and development of Renaissance monarchies, move towards centralised orgnans of administration, expanded bureaucracies, use of media to burnish image of rulers
• Renaissance: individualism, man as autonomous moral agent, capacity to do good or evil
• Society: large percentage, subsitance existance. Much more space for the divine than today
• History as relationship with the past: the process of our own interaction with the pas as worthly of study as past events/people/events.
Today:
• The Late Mediaeval Church
• The figure of Martin Luther
• Why the Reformation became a movement of mass activism
Introduction:
Martin Luther posted his ninety-five theses against indulgences on the door of the castle church in Wittenberg in October, 1517, John Calvin died on Geneva in 1564. Within these less than fifty years a handful of religious geniuses kindled the enthusiasm of million, created original systems of Christian doctrine, and founded new churches hostile to Rome. Inadvertently, decisively and permanently the Protestant reformers cracked the millennial unity of European Christendom.
Protestant: eventually, anyone who left the Catholic church are called Protestant, and the name to be applied to any member of a western Christian church or sect outside the Roman communion.
Reformation: in the sixteenth century was applied to the contemporary movement, begun by Luther, of opposition to Rome and the Catholic Church.
• HENRY CHARLES LEA: "the primary cause of the Reformation is to be sought in the all-pervading corruption of the Church and its opresive exercise of it supernatural prerrogatives". In this view was violent and broke the unity of Christendom because the "abuses under which Christendom groaned were too inveterate, too firmly entrenched, and too profitable to be removes by any but the sternest and sharpest remedies" o This theory has two problems o 1. It masks the concern of all
Recap:
• Political organisation: and development of Renaissance monarchies, move towards centralised orgnans of administration, expanded bureaucracies, use of media to burnish image of rulers
• Renaissance: individualism, man as autonomous moral agent, capacity to do good or evil
• Society: large percentage, subsitance existance. Much more space for the divine than today
• History as relationship with the past: the process of our own interaction with the pas as worthly of study as past events/people/events.
Today:
• The Late Mediaeval Church
• The figure of Martin Luther
• Why the Reformation became a movement of mass activism
Introduction:
Martin Luther posted his ninety-five theses against indulgences on the door of the castle church in Wittenberg in October, 1517, John Calvin died on Geneva in 1564. Within these less than fifty years a handful of religious geniuses kindled the enthusiasm of million, created original systems of Christian doctrine, and founded new churches hostile to Rome. Inadvertently, decisively and permanently the Protestant reformers cracked the millennial unity of European Christendom.
Protestant: eventually, anyone who left the Catholic church are called Protestant, and the name to be applied to any member of a western Christian church or sect outside the Roman communion.
Reformation: in the sixteenth century was applied to the contemporary movement, begun by Luther, of opposition to Rome and the Catholic Church.
• HENRY CHARLES LEA: "the primary cause of the Reformation is to be sought in the all-pervading corruption of the Church and its opresive exercise of it supernatural prerrogatives". In this view was violent and broke the unity of Christendom because the "abuses under which Christendom groaned were too inveterate, too firmly entrenched, and too profitable to be removes by any but the sternest and sharpest remedies" o This theory has two problems o 1. It masks the concern of all