scholarly journals John Calvin's Christological Assertion of Word Authority in the Context of Sixteenth Century Ecclesiological Polemics

1992 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 465-486
Author(s):  
John D. Morrison
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Face ◽  
Fourth Lateran Council ◽  
The Church

The late medieval synthesis reflected in the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) generally and in the doctrine of transubstantiation in particular established an understanding of the nature of the church and authority that was to be varied and wide in its effects. Transubstantiation as doctrine and as coalescor of Church worship laid the groundwork for a particularly formative understanding of the ekklesia of Christ. It issued in a view of immanental, divine authority and grace that would come to manifest itself in the indulgences, the treasury of merits, invocation of saints, relics, etc. To be critical of the Mass was to bring into question the entire hierarchy of the Church and its authority on earth. In this context of strong ecclesiological authority, God was reckoned primarily as immanent and immediate through the papal head. In the face of this development, John Calvin asserted that Christ, as center of all true Christian reality, is the necessary focus and the preeminent authority in and to the Church through the Word of God, the Scriptures.

Mechanisms for Unity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Black Death ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Church

This chapter investigates changes in mentalities after the Black Death, comparing practices never before analysed in this context—funerary and labour laws and processions to calm God’s anger. While processions were rare or conflictual as in Catania and Messina in 1348, these rituals during later plagues bound communities together in the face of disaster. The chapter then turns to another trend yet to be noticed by historians. Among the multitude of saints and blessed ones canonized from 1348 to the eighteenth century, the Church was deeply reluctant to honour, even name, any of the thousands who sacrificed their lives to succour plague victims, physically or spiritually, especially in 1348: the Church recognized no Black Death martyrs. By the sixteenth century, however, city-wide processions and other communal rituals bound communities together with charity for the poor, works of art, and charitable displays of thanksgiving to long-dead holy men and women.

Hymnody and Liturgy

2019 ◽  
pp. 491-506
Author(s):  
Jonathan Hehn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Metrical Psalmody ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

This chapter outlines the history of Presbyterian worship practice from the sixteenth century to the present, with a focus on North American Presbyterians. Tracing both their hymnody and their liturgy ultimately to John Calvin, Presbyterian communions have a distinct heritage of worship inherited from the Church of Scotland via seventeenth-century Puritans. Long marked by metrical psalmody and guided by the Westminster Directory, Presbyterian worship underwent substantial changes in the nineteenth century. Evangelical and liturgical movements led Presbyterians away from a Puritan visual aesthetic, into the use of nonscriptural hymnody, and toward a recovery of liturgical books. Mainline North American and Scottish Presbyterians solidified these trends in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; however, conservative North American denominations and some other denominations globally continue to rely heavily on the use of a worship directory and metrical psalmody.

I Want More of You: The Politics of Christian Eroticism in Postwar Guatemala

2009 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Lewis O'Neill
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Jacques Lacan ◽  
Teenage Girl ◽  
Media Relations ◽  
Intense Pain ◽  
Eyes Closed ◽  
The Face ◽  
Mystical Experiences ◽  
Great Love ◽  
The Church

The image appeared on the cover of a Sunday bulletin, produced and distributed by one of Guatemala City's most conservative neo-Pentecostal mega-churches. The picture presented the face of a young teenage girl, her eyes closed, lips wet, and skin kissed by a soft, transcendent light; the young woman's head was even tilted to the side in what Jacques Lacan would call jouissance (1998). Across her pink lips read Psalm 4:6: “In peace, I lay myself down.” This image, stitched together by the church's media relations department, makes a sly reference to Gian Lorenzo Bernini's sculpture, St. Teresa in Ecstasy (1652). The statue in Rome presents one of Teresa of Ávila's (1515–1582) mystical experiences of God, which the sixteenth-century Spanish saint narrates with unblinkingly erotic imagery. In her autobiography, St. Teresa writes how “the great love of God” often left her “utterly consumed,” “penetrated to [her] entrails,” and made her “utter several moans” for both the “intense pain” and its “sweetness” (Peers 1927: 197). With St. Teresa in mind, my own reaction to the church bulletin parroted Jacques Lacan's response to Bernini's statue. “She's coming,” Lacan commented, “There's no doubt about it” (1998: 76).

Barth and Reformation Theology

2019 ◽  
pp. 100-115
Author(s):  
Randall C. Zachman
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Reformation Theology ◽  
The One ◽  
The Church ◽  
Free Word

Karl Barth seeks to restore the Gospel to the centre of Protestant theology by orienting dogmatic theology to the witness of the prophetic and apostolic authors of Scripture and to the theology of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. Barth especially endorses Luther’s claim that the proclamation of the living and free Word of God in Jesus Christ lies at the heart of the commission laid on the church, and that the task of theology is to test the truth of that proclamation. However, Barth becomes increasingly critical of Luther and Calvin when they distinguish God revealed in Jesus Christ from God in Godself and when they distinguish a Word of God in Scripture—be it a Word of the Creator or the Word as Law—that is distinct from the one Word of God, Jesus Christ. Barth also disagrees with Luther and Calvin regarding the sacraments, insisting at the end of his career that Jesus Christ is the one and only sacrament of God.

Double Honor: Elite Hutterite Women in the Sixteenth Century

2010 ◽  
Vol 79 (4) ◽  
pp. 753-782 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Darlage
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Early Church ◽  
The New Testament ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Church

Studies of early modern Anabaptism have shown that many Anabaptists sought to model their communities after the examples of the New Testament and the early church before the “fall” of the church into a coercive, sword-wielding institution through the person of Constantine in the fourth centuryc.e.The Anabaptists claimed that one had to voluntarily choose to become a Christian through believer's baptism and suffer for his or her faith just as the martyrs of old had done in the face of Roman persecution. During the course of the sixteenth century, their Protestant and Roman Catholic enemies did not disappoint, as hundreds of Anabaptists were executed for their rejection of “Christendom.” To the “magisterial” Christians, Anabaptists were dangerous heretics because they denied the God-given power of spiritual and secular authorities.

scholarly journals Philip Neri and Charles Borromeo as Models of Catholic Reform

Perichoresis ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (6) ◽  
pp. 119-136
Author(s):  
Charles D. Fox
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Institutional Reform ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
The Core ◽  
The People ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
The Face ◽  
Catholic Reform ◽  
The Church

AbstractIn the face of the external challenge of the Protestant Reformation, as well as the internal threat of spiritual, moral, and disciplinary corruption, two Catholic saints worked tirelessly to reform the Church in different but complementary ways. Philip Neri (1515–95) and Charles Borromeo (1538–84) led the Catholic Counter–Reformation during the middle–to–late sixteenth century, placing their distinctive gifts at the service of the Church. Philip Neri used his personal humility, intelligence, and charisma to attract the people of Rome to Christ, while Charles Borromeo employed his gifts for administration and his experience as a top aide to the pope to promote needed institutional reform. Both men achieved great personal holiness and moved others to holiness of life. It is their response to and sharing of the ‘universal call to holiness’, then, that constitutes the core of both of their approaches to ecclesial reform. Their focus on holiness, expressed in an emphasis on either the ‘charismatic’ or ‘hierarchical’ dimensions of the Church’s life, also provides a model for today’s Church, scarred as she is by scandal and in need of a new movement of reform.

scholarly journals “So shall yoe bee:” Encountering the Shrouded Effigies of Thomas Beresford and Agnes Hassall at Fenny Bentley

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 23-38
Author(s):  
Aimee Caya
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church

The Beresford Monument from the Church of St Edmund at Fenny Bentley in Derbyshire is a funerary monument that has received relatively little attention from scholars due to its unusual imagery and the lack of documentary evidence regarding its creation. The alabaster monument depicts Thomas Beresford (d. 1473) and Agnes Hassall (d. 1467) as fully shrouded three-dimensional effigies. Incised around the base of the monument are enshrouded representations of their twenty-one children. This paper analyzes the impact that veiling the bodies of Thomas Beresford and Agnes Hassall has on the effectiveness of the monument as a commemorative tool and situates the shrouded effigies within their broader visual and social context at the turn of the sixteenth century. Rather than dismiss the unusual imagery of the Beresford Monument as an expedient solution selected by sculptors who did not know what Thomas Beresford and Agnes Hassall actually looked like, this paper argues that shrouding the effigies was a deliberate commemorative strategy meant to evoke specific responses in the monument’s viewers. Although there is little concrete information about the tomb’s commission, contextualizing it by examining the monument in concert with other aspects of late medieval culture—including purgatorial piety, macabre texts and imagery, and ex votos—can provide a richer understanding of the object’s potentiality for its beholders. The anonymizing aspect of the shroud ultimately enabled viewers to identify freely and easily with the individuals depicted on the monument, which would have encouraged them to pray for the souls of Thomas and Agnes, thus perpetuating their memories and reducing their time in purgatory.

Sixteenth-Century Reformed Reception of Aquinas

2021 ◽  
pp. 120-143
Author(s):  
David S. Sytsma
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Free Will ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
Medieval Theology ◽  
Biblical Hermeneutics ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Doctrine Of God

The knowledge of Aquinas’ works among Reformed authors of the sixteenth century varies widely from those, such as John Calvin, who rarely cite him, to Peter Martyr Vermigli, who received a doctorate in the via antiqua at Padua and drew heavily on Thomas even after his conversion to Reformed Protestantism. Martin Bucer initiates a trend in the 1530s of placing Thomas among the ‘sounder scholastics’ on account of his Augustinian soteriology. Leading Reformed theologians follow Bucer’s terminology and comparatively positive estimate of Thomas, even while polemicizing against medieval scholasticism and perceived Pelagian tendencies within late medieval theology. By the end of the sixteenth century Reformed theologians regularly cite Thomas favourably, albeit also eclectically. Aquinas’ influence on nascent Reformed orthodoxy, and to a lesser extent earlier theologians, is evident on a wide variety of topics, including prolegomena, biblical hermeneutics, the doctrine of God, predestination, humanity, free will, natural law, and Christology.

‘The Good Old Way’: Prayer Book Protestantism in the 1640s and 1650s

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 233-256
Author(s):  
Judith Maltby
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Prayer Book ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
Continued Use ◽  
Common Prayer ◽  
The Church

Between 1640 and 1642 the Church of England collapsed, its leaders reviled and discredited, its structures paralysed, its practices if not yet proscribed, at least inhibited. In the years that followed, yet worse was to befall it. And yet in every year of its persecution after 1646, new shoots sprang up out of the fallen timber: bereft of episcopal leadership, lacking any power of coercion, its observances illegal, anglicanism thrived. As memories of the 1630s faded and were overlaid by the tyrannies of the 1640s … the deeper rhythms of the Kalendar and the ingrained perfections of Cranmer’s liturgies bound a growing majority together.Professor John Morrill, quoted above, has rightly identified a set of historiographical contradictions about the Stuart Church in a series of important articles. Historians have until recently paid little attention to the positive and popular elements of conformity to the national Church of England in the period before the civil war. The lack of interest in conformity has led to a seventeenth-century version of the old Whig view of the late medieval Church: the Church of England is presented as a complacent, corrupt, and clericalist institution, ‘ripe’ – as the English Church in the early sixteenth century was ‘ripe’ – to be purified by reformers. However, if this was the case, how does one account for the durable commitment to the Prayer Book demonstrated during the 1640s and 1650s and the widespread – but not universal – support for the ‘return’ of the Church of England in 1660?This paper contributes to the larger exploration of the theme of ‘the Church and the book’ by addressing in particular the continued use by clergy and laity alike of one ‘book’ – the Book of Common Prayer – after its banning by Parliament during the years of civil war and the Commonwealth.

scholarly journals Profit ‘That is Condemned by the Word of God’: John Jewel’s Theological Method in His Opposition to Usury

Perichoresis ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-56
Author(s):  
André A. Gazal
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Theological Method ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Church Councils ◽  
The Church ◽  
Christian Society

Abstract John Jewel, regarded as the principal apologist and theologian for the Elizabethan Church, was also esteemed as one of England’s most important (if not the most important) authority on the subject of usury, and therefore was cited frequently by opponents of usury towards the end of the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth century. One of the most sustained interpretations of Jewel as a theologian on the subject of usury was by Christoph Jelinger, who observed that the late bishop of Sarum employed the same theological method in opposing usury as he did in defending the doctrines and practices of the Church of England against its Catholic opponents, that is, by appealing to the Scriptures, the Church Fathers, Church Councils, and the example of the primitive church. This article seeks to confirm the opinion of Jelinger, and in doing so show that Jewel’s opposition to usury stemmed primarily from the conviction that it was both a vice and heresy that eroded the unifying attribute of Christian society which was love.

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