Augustinian origins of the Reformation reconsidered

2010 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Ellingsen
Keyword(s):  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Dialectical Thinking ◽  
Rich Diversity ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Text Study ◽  
The Church ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
The Way

AbstractThe work of Alister McGrath and Julius Kostlin challenges the often-cited claim regarding Luther's dependence on Augustine. The article demonstrates that such critics fail to recognise the rich diversity of the African father's thought, but have been inclined to read it systematically the way the Roman Catholic interpretative tradition has. Text study of Augustine's writings, as well as Luther's comments about the African father, reveals that the Reformer's insights about soteriology (including the externality and passivity of righteousness as well as other aspects of his dialectical thinking) are affirmed by Augustine. Likewise, even Luther's critiques of Augustine lend insight into the Reformer's appropriation of his thought. The article demonstrates that when Luther diverges from the African father the two men are addressing incompatible pastoral concerns, but when he is inspired by Augustine their pastoral contexts are similar. This insight sheds fresh light on the sense in which we can speak of an Augustinian character of the Reformation. The article's findings also lend further credence to the possibility that there is a pattern to the use of Christian concepts in the history of the church, whereby, in similar contexts such as in response to perceived Pelagianism, Christians have pretty much responded similarly throughout the centuries.

Catholic Revival in the Eighteenth Century

1990 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 99-108
Author(s):  
Sheridan Gilley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
American Scholar ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

In his famous essay on von Ranke‘s history of the Popes, Thomas Babington Macaulay remarked that the ‘ignorant enthusiast whom the Anglican Church makes an enemy… the Catholic Church makes a champion’. ‘Place Ignatius Loyola at Oxford. He is certain to become the head of a formidable secession. Place John Wesley at Rome. He is certain to be the first General of a new Society devoted to the interests and honour of the Church.’ Macaulay’s general argument that Roman Catholicism ‘unites in herself all the strength of establishment, and all the strength of dissent’, depends for its force on his comparison of the Catholic Regular Orders with the popular preachers of Nonconformity. As the son of a leader of the Clapham Sect, his witness in the matter has its interest for scholars of the Evangelical Revival, and has been echoed by Ronald Knox in his parallel between Wesley and the seventeenth-century Jesuit, Paolo Segneri, who walked barefoot 800 miles a year to preach missions in the dioceses of northern Italy. More recently the comparison has been drawn again by Owen Chadwick, with the judgement that the ‘heirs of the Counter-Reformation sometimes astound by likeness of behaviour to that found in the heirs of the Reformation’, and Chadwick’s volume on the eighteenth-century Popes contains some fascinating material on the resemblances between the religion of the peoples of England and of Italy. An historian of Spanish Catholicism has compared the Moravians and the mission preachers of eighteenth-century Spain, not least in their rejection of modern commercialism, while an American scholar has traced some of the parallels between nineteenth-century Protestant and Catholic revivalism in the United States. Not that Wesleyan historians have been attracted to study the great movements of revival religion in the Catholic countries in Wesley’s lifetime—a neglect which is hardly surprising. One point of origin of the Evangelical revival was among refugees from Roman Catholic persecution, and for all the popular confusion, encouraged by men like Bishop Lavington, between Methodists and Papists, and for all Wesley’s belief in religious toleration and tenderness for certain Catholic saints and devotional classics, he was deeply hostile to the Roman Catholic Church, as David Hempton has recently shown. Yet there are many points of likeness as well as difference between the enthusiasts of Protestant and Catholic Europe, and both these need to be declared if Catholics and Protestants are ever to attempt to write an ecumenical history.

scholarly journals Poor Relief and the Church in Scotland, 1560-1650

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John McCallum
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Protestant Church ◽  
Welfare Work ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Relief Efforts ◽  
The Church ◽  
Insight Into

This book analyses poor relief in the century or so after the Scottish Reformation of 1560. In doing so it challenges the assumption that Scottish poor relief was weak, informal and haphazard because it was run by the Protestant church rather than the state, as in England (all too often the yardstick against which Scotland is measured). Instead, the book explores the substantial welfare work carried out by Scottish parishes, and examines in detail how the system operated as well as those who benefitted from it. The rich but under-utilised parish records which are the focus of the study reveal not just the relief efforts themselves, but also provide a rare insight into the lives of poor Scots whom pre-modern historians often struggle to glimpse. The book will therefore appeal to a wide range of scholars of early modern Scotland, of poverty and its relief, and of the Reformation.

The Church of Ireland: a critical bibliography, 1536–1992 Part II: 1603–41

1993 ◽  
Vol 28 (112) ◽  
pp. 352-358
Author(s):  
Alan Ford
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Protestant Church ◽  
Church Of Ireland ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Way

There is a marked difference between the history of the Church of Ireland in the sixteenth century and in the early seventeenth century. The historian of the early Reformation in Ireland has to deal with shifting religious divides and, in the Church of Ireland, with a complex and ambiguous religious entity, established but not necessarily Protestant, culturally unsure, politically weak, and theologically unselfconscious. By contrast, the first part of the seventeenth century is marked by the creation of a distinct Protestant church, clearly distinguished in structural, racial, theological and political terms from its Roman Catholic counterpart. The history of the Church of Ireland in the first four decades of the seventeenth century is therefore primarily about the creation of this church and the way in which its new structures and exclusive identity were shaped.

Writing the History of the English Bible in the Early Eighteenth Century

2004 ◽  
Vol 38 ◽  
pp. 268-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Mandelbrote
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Christian Belief ◽  
Rule Of Faith ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

The letter of Scripture suffering various Interpretations, it is plain that Error may pretend to Scripture; the antient Fathers being likewise dead, and not able to vindicate themselves, their writings may be wrested, and Error may make use of them to back itself; Reason too being bypassed by Interest, Education, Passion, Society, &c…. Tradition only rests secure.The 1680s were a difficult decade for the English Bible, just as they were for so many of the other institutions of the English Protestant establishment. Roman Catholic critics of the Church of England, emboldened by the patronage of James II and his court, engaged in controversy over the rule of faith and the identity of the true Church, much as they had done in the early years of the Reformation or in the 1630s. Nonconformists and freethinkers deployed arguments drawn from Catholic scholarship, in particular from the work of the French Oratorian Richard Simon, and joined in ridicule of the Bible as a sure and sufficient foundation for Christian belief.

Transcendence and Community in Zwinglian Worship: the Liturgy of 1525 in Zurich

1999 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 128-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce Gordon
Keyword(s):  
Physical Space ◽  
Comprehensive Treatment ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
The People ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Form Part ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Church ◽  
Insight Into

Iconoclasm, rather than liturgical formulation, usually springs to mind when one reflects upon the events in Zurich in the mid-1520s. Indeed, historians of the Swiss Reformation have hardly interested themselves in liturgy, and one searches in vain the most recent and comprehensive treatment of Zwingli’s theology for a discussion of the subject. Ignored by both historians and theologians, the study of liturgy in the Swiss Reformation cuts the figure of the unknown guest at a party who everyone assumes is being entertained by someone else. The consequence has been that liturgy has not been allowed to inform our understanding of Swiss religious change; historians have preferred to leave it in the safe keeping of liturgists who, for the most part, have attended to the history of worship as a separate and distinct act of the community controlled by the clergy. This, surely, can only form part of the picture, for liturgy was perhaps the most inclusive act of the Church: worship was experienced by all levels of society, even if the people brought and took away a panoply of varied levels of comprehension and acceptance. As the central, public act of the Church, the early liturgies of the Reformation articulated the tangled web of convictions, needs, and requirements of communities in transition. Liturgies cannot be separated from either the beliefs which created them or the physical space in which they were performed. The ordered rhythm of words and actions in a particular locality was intended to engage the intellect and senses, drawing out responses at once emotional and cognitive. If we can glimpse something of the experience of worship, whether positive or negative, we shall have an insight into the mental world of the early Reformation.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Winter
Keyword(s):  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Rich Diversity ◽  
The Social ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Oppression ◽  
The Rich ◽  
To Come

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. The book has shown that the multiplicity of lived ʻAlawi experiences cannot be reduced to the sole question of religion or framed within a monolithic narrative of persecution; that the very attempt to outline a single coherent history of “the ʻAlawis” may indeed be misguided. The sources on which this study has drawn are considerably more accessible, and the social and administrative realities they reflect consistently more mundane and disjointed, than the discourse of the ʻAlawis' supposed exceptionalism would lead one to believe. Therefore, the challenge for historians of ʻAlawi society in Syria and elsewhere is not to use the specific events and structures these sources detail to merely add to the already existing metanarratives of religious oppression, Ottoman misrule, and national resistance but rather to come to a newer and more intricate understanding of that community, and its place in wider Middle Eastern society, by investigating the lives of individual ʻAlawi (and other) actors within the rich diversity of local contexts these sources reveal.

Collected Documents on the History of the Pskov Orthodox Mission: A Recent Publication

2018 ◽  
pp. 306-312
Author(s):  
Veniamin F. Zima ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Personal Data ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Great Patriotic War ◽  
Occupied Territories ◽  
History Of ◽  
Underground Resistance ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
The Church ◽  
Insight Into

The reviewed work is devoted to a significant, and yet little-studied in both national and foreign scholarship, issue of the clergy interactions with German occupational authorities on the territory of the USSR in the days of the Great Patriotic War. It introduces into scientific use historically significant complex of documents (1941-1945) from the archive of the Office of the Metropolitan Sergius (Voskresensky) of Vilnius and Lithuania, patriarchal exarch in Latvia and Estonia, and also records from the investigatory records on charges against clergy and employees concerned in the activities of the Pskov Orthodox Mission (1944-1990). Documents included in the publication are stored in the archives of Moscow, St. Petersburg, Estonia, Lithuania, Leningrad, Novgorod, and Pskov regions. They allow some insight into nature, forms, and methods of the Nazi occupational regime policies in the conquered territories (including policies towards the Church). The documents capture religious policies of the Nazis and inner life of the exarchate, describe actual situation of population and clergy, management activities and counterinsurgency on the occupied territories. The documents bring to light connections between the exarchate and German counterintelligence and reveal the nature of political police work with informants. They capture the political mood of population and prisoners of war. There is information on participants of partisan movement and underground resistance, on communication net between the patriarchal exarchate in the Baltic states and the German counterintelligence. Reports and dispatches of the clergy in the pay of the Nazis addressed to the Metropolitan Sergius (Voskresensky) contain detailed activity reports. Investigatory records contain important biographical information and personal data on the collaborators. Most of the documents, being classified, have never been published before.

Musical Notation as the Externalization of Imagined, Complex Sound

2019 ◽  
pp. 190-218
Author(s):  
Henrik Sinding-Larsen
Keyword(s):  
Complex System ◽  
Computer Programming ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Complex Sound ◽  
Musical Notation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Visual Description ◽  
The Way

Henrik Sinding-Larsen analyzes how new tools for the visual description of sound revolutionized the way music was conceived, performed, and disseminated. Early on, the ancient Greeks had described pitches and intervals in mathematically precise ways. However, their complex system had few consequences until it was combined with the practical minds of Roman Catholic choirmasters around 1000 ce. Now, melodies became depicted as note-heads on lines with precise pitch meanings and with note names based on octaves. This graphical and conceptual externalization of patterns in sound paved the way for a polyphonic complexity unimaginable in a purely oral/aural tradition. However, this higher complexity also entailed strictly standardized/homogenized scales and less room for improvisation in much of notation-based music. Through the concept of externalization, lessons from the history of musical notation are generalized to other tools of description, and Sinding-Larsen ends with a reflection on what future practices might become imaginable and unimaginable as a result of computer programming.

scholarly journals “Decently and order”: Scotland and Protestant pastoral power

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Mutch
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Pastoral Power ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

Foucault’s conceptualization of “pastoral power” is important in the development and application of the notion of “governmentality” or the regulation of mass populations. However, Foucault’s exploration of pastoral power, especially in the form of confessional practice, owes a good deal to his Roman Catholic heritage. Hints in his work, which were never developed, suggest some aspects of Protestant forms of pastoral power. These hints are taken up to explore one Protestant tradition, that of Scottish Presbyterianism, in detail. Based on the history of the church in the eighteenth century, four aspects of Protestant pastoral power are outlined: examination, accountability, ecclesiology, and organizing as a good in its own right.

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