Theologies of Sacraments in the Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael S. Horton
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Means Of Grace ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Divine Activity

This overview chapter for the second part of the book contrasts the theologies of the sacraments in the Reformation era with those of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Salvation in the Protestant view meant believers are “justified by grace alone, through faith alone, in Jesus Christ alone.” This differed significantly from the Roman Catholic position in which “‘created’ grace is a substance infused into the sinner to bring spiritual and moral healing.” For the Reformers grace was not a created substance but God’s attitude or disposition of favor toward sinners. This dependency on grace alone involved both preaching “as a means of grace in its own right” and the sacraments as involving “the divine activity that gives efficacy to Baptism and Communion.” While they differed somewhat in their theologies of the sacraments, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Cranmer, and other Reformers were in agreement in that the grace of God in Jesus Christ is presented in the Word preached and the Sacrament administered.

Theologies of Salvation in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
The Third ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Book Covers ◽  
To Come

This overview chapter for the third part of the book covers the theologies of salvation in the Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation. It covers both the theology of the Reformers, in which God’s declaration of righteousness is based solely upon the righteousness of Jesus Christ, and the ensuing Catholic “Counter-Reformation,” in which salvation had happened, is happening, and is yet to come.

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 Protestant Propaganda in a Cold War of Religion: From the Hartlib Circle to the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge

2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-59
Author(s):  
Sugiko Nishikawa
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Set Up

This article considers how, impelled by confessional divisions caused by the Reformation, a general sense of pan-Protestant community grew across Europe, and its members launched a long battle against Roman Catholicism far beyond the 16th century. Indeed, it continued into the mid-18th century, the so-called Age of Reason. If it cannot necessarily be described as an open war of religion like the Thirty Years War, it was at least a cold war. From their points of view, the Protestant minorities threatened by the Roman Catholic Counter Reformation, such as the Waldensians in northern Italy and the Lithuanian Calvinists, stood on the front line in this war. Thus, financial support was regularly offered by the Protestant churches in Great Britain and Ireland to their distressed brethren across the continent, university scholarships were set up for students from Catholicdominated areas, and plans were drafted for a Protestant union in Europe, from a military level to an ecclesiastical one. It is in this context that we must understand how apparently strange a phenomenon as British support for the translation of the Bible into Lithuanian developed. The author sees Chylinski’s activities in the tradition of learning and charity exhibited in the 1650s by the three leading members of the Hartlib philosophical circle, namely, Samuel Hartlib (originally from Elbing), Jan Amos Comenius (from Moravia), and John Dury (born in Edinburgh, he spent his early life in various places in northern Europe), who were, in a sense, Protestant refugees to England from north-central Europe. After Chylinski, British support for Lithuanian Protestants did not end. She traces the work of Robert Boyle and the foundation of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (1699), which organised relief for Žemaitijan Calvinists in the early 1730s.

Imperial Policy and Church Income: The Sixteenth Century Mexican Church

1986 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Hennessey Cummins
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Internal Conflict ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Church Finance ◽  
Church Hierarchy ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
New Research

The long-traditional view of the Roman Catholic Church in Spanish America as a monolithic, wealthy, and all powerful institution has been gradually modified by successive studies over the last thirty years. From these examinations emerges the picture of a complex institution characterized by diversity, and internal conflict. New research continues to enlarge and clarify understanding of the Church's role as an institution of the Spanish empire.What follows will, in highlighting the colonial Church's relationship to the Spanish crown, add to this view of it as a complex and diverse institution. An examination of crown policy with regard to Church finance in the sixteenth century shows that the episcopal hierarchy of the Mexican colonial Church had a subordinate relationship to the crown in the era of the Counter Reformation. Rather than a strong Church influencing the crown, what emerges is the portrait of a relatively weak, dependent institution, supported by the king. The secular church hierarchy had only enough power to carry out its function and serve as a counterpoint to the religious orders, not enough to achieve financial independence on its own. The basis for this relationship lies in the patrimonial nature of Castilian government and its dominant position over the Church hierarchy because of the Patronato Real.

‘Awakening the echoes of the ancient faith’: the National Pilgrimages to Iona

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-154
Author(s):  
Katherine Haldane Grenier
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Theological Understanding

This article examines two pilgrimages to Iona held by the Scottish Roman Catholic Church in 1888 and 1897, the first pilgrimages held in Scotland since the Reformation. It argues that these religious journeys disrupted the calendar of historic commemorations of Victorian Scotland, many of which emphasized the centrality of Presbyterianism to Scottish nationality. By holding pilgrimages to “the mother-church of religion in Scotland” and celebrating mass in the ruins of the Cathedral there, Scottish Catholics challenged the prevailing narrative of Scottish religious history, and asserted their right to control the theological understanding of the island and its role in a “national” religious history. At the same time, Catholics’ veneration of St. Columba, a figure widely admired by Protestant Scots, served as a means of highlighting their own Scottishness. Nonetheless, some Protestant Scots responded to the overt Catholicity of the pilgrimages by questioning the genuineness of “pilgrimages” which so closely resembled tourist excursions, and by scheduling their own, explicitly Protestant, journeys to Iona.

scholarly journals The Reformation as a Turning Point for the Roman Catholic Church (16th and 17th Centuries)

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Charles Henriques
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Catholic Reformation ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Vatican Council ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Christian Thought

In this article the effects of the Protestant Reformation on the Roman Catholic Church are investigated. The event of 1517, when Luther posted 95 theses on the castle church door in Wittenberg, had a profound effect on society in Europe and the Roman Catholic Church in particular. The Council of Trent (1545–1563) was the official response of the Roman Catholic Church to the Protestant Reformation and issued in the Catholic Reformation (Counter-Reformation). Christian thought went from a uniform approach to one of diversity. The Catholics of the day responded by focusing on strategies such as printing, the liturgy, the inquisition and finally excommunication. The wound to the unity of the Christian community was finally healed at the Second Vatican Council when the Roman Catholic Church joined the ecumenical movement of all Christian Churches. The Roman Catholic Church learnt tremendous lessons from the Protestant Reformation. In certain parts of Europe there was friction and in other parts cooperation between Protestants and Catholics. Through the course of time cooperation and dialogue won the battle eventually, as Protestants and Catholics grappled with both their common beliefs and their many differences.

scholarly journals Co się stało z konfessyjonistą? Dzieje leksemu w polszczyźnie

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-219
Author(s):  
Paulina Michalska-Górecka
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of

The history of the lexeme konfessyjonista shows that the word is a neologism that functioned in the literature of the sixteenth century in connection with religious documents/books, such as the Protestant confessions. Formally and semantically, it refers to Confessio Augustana, also to her Polish translations, and to the Konfesja sandomierska, as well as konfessyja as a kind of genre. In the Reformation and Counter-Reformation period, the word konfessyja was needed by the Protestants; the word konfessyjonista was derived from him by the Catholics for their needs. The lexeme had an offensive tone and referred to a confessional supporter as a supporter of the Reformation. Perhaps the oldest of his certifications comes from an anonymous text from 1561, the year in which two Polish translations of Augustana were announced. The demand for a konfessyjonista noun probably did not go beyond the 16th century, its notations come only from the 60s, 70s and 80s of this century.

scholarly journals The Fall of the Chorupnik Parish. A Contribution to the History of the Reformation in Poland

2019 ◽  
Vol 66 (2 SELECTED PAPERS IN ENGLISH) ◽  
pp. 31-42
Author(s):  
Bogumił Szady
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Local Dimension ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
Parish Priest ◽  
The Social ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Polish Version ◽  
History Of

The Polish version of the article was published in “Roczniki Humanistyczne,” vol. 61 (2013), issue 2. The article addresses the question of the fall of the Latin parish in Chorupnik that belonged to the former diocese of Chełm. The parish church in Chorupnik was taken over by Protestants in the second half of the 16th century. Unsuccessful attempts at recovering its property were made by incorporating it into the neighbouring parish in Gorzków. The actions taken by the Gorzków parish priest and the bishop together with his chapter failed, too. A detailed study of such attempts to recover the property of one of the parishes that ceased to exist during the Reformation falls within the context of the relations between the nobility and the clergy in the period of Counter-Reformation. Studying the social, legal and economic relations in a local dimension is important for understanding the mechanisms of the mass transition of the nobility to reformed denominations, and then of their return to the Catholic Church.

Papacy and Scripture

1962 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-123
Author(s):  
Rudolf J. Ehrlich
Keyword(s):  
Jesus Christ ◽  
The Self ◽  
Reformed Theology ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Church

The subject ‘Papacy and Scripture‘ is of great importance today for two main reasons:1. Reformed Theology itself requires that we must not be satisfied with the theological standpoint reached at the time of the Reformation but should submit ourselves to continual questioning by the Truth, and so move on to a position more in accordance with the dictates of the self-same Truth which is Jesus Christ. The very fact that we are ‘Reformed’ theologians itself raises the question of whether the anti-Roman arguments legitimately used by the Reformers still hold good; which means that, as a matter of urgency, we must reappraise our relationship with the Church of Rome.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document