scholarly journals The Priesthood of All Believers in Africa

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 127
Author(s):  
CONRAD MBEWE
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Priesthood Of All Believers ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
The Bible ◽  
God's People ◽  
The Reformation

Abstract: Protestant churches in Africa have come under scrutiny from political leaders due to the abuse that citizens in the churches suffer at the hands of their leaders. This is in part due to the loss of the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers taught in the Bible and rediscovered during the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. We trace the discovery of this doctrine in the Reformation, its application to Africa, and its current absence, and we call church leaders to teach this truth afresh to God’s people.

Calvin and the Priesthood of all Believers

1968 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-156
Author(s):  
John R. Crawford
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
John Calvin ◽  
Priesthood Of All Believers ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
God's People ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Way

A Mong those elements of Christian doctrine which surged anew to the forefront of Christian thinking during the early sixteenth century was that biblical idea which, in more modern times, we have come to call the ‘priesthood of all believers’. Luther used the doctrine almost as a battle-axe, to hew away at the pretensions of the Roman hierarchy and sacramental system. Almost invariably, it is Luther's name which we find linked to this doctrine in studies of the Reformation period. However, any serious study of the idea of the priesthood of God's people would do well to include an examination of the way in which John Calvin dealt with it, and indeed, the way in which the idea found certain expressions within his system of ecclesiastical organisation. It is our purpose here to see what Calvin taught in relationship to this biblical idea, and what elements of the life of the Genevan church may be considered to be, at least in part, an expression of the idea.

The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century in Renaissance Italy

1981 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 149-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip M. J. McNair
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Giordano Bruno ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Renaissance Italy ◽  
The One

Between the execution of Gerolamo Savonarola at Florence in May 1498 and the execution of Giordano Bruno at Rome in February 1600, western Christendom was convulsed by the protestant reformation, and the subject of this paper is the effect that that revolution had on the Italy that nourished and martyred those two unique yet representative men: unique in the power and complexity of their personalities, representative because the one sums up the medieval world with all its strengths and weaknesses while the other heralds the questing and questioning modern world in which we live.

Reformation und politisch-gesellschaftliche Emanzipation

2014 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 118-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernd Oberdorfer
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Learning Processes ◽  
Priesthood Of All Believers ◽  
Pluralistic Society ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Church ◽  
Modern Sense

AbstractThe relevance of the reformation for the development of modern liberty rights is much debated. Although the Protestant Reformers fought for the »Freedom of a Christian« against religious patronization, they were not tolerant in a modern sense of the term. However, the Reformation released long-term impulses which contributed to the origin and formation of a modern civil society, e. g. the respect for the autonomy of the individual over against the church, the passion for education, the emphasis on the »universal priesthood of all believers«, and the appreciation of civil professions. Long historical learning processes were necessary, though, until the Protestant churches acknowledged and adopted modern liberty rights, a participatory democracy and a pluralistic society as genuine forms of expression of a Protestant ethos.

The Impact of the Reformation

2019 ◽  
pp. 40-61
Author(s):  
Martin Pugh
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
Long Term Effect ◽  
Queen Elizabeth I ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Impact ◽  
European Diplomacy ◽  
Francis I

This chapter focuses on the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Following Henry VIII's break with Rome in 1531, the English Reformation led Britain into a protracted struggle with the two great Catholic powers, Spain and France, for the next 300 years. The long-term effect was to define Britain as the leading Protestant power; but more immediately, it posed a far greater threat to England than Islam, and effectively destroyed the rationale for crusading activities. In this situation, the Islamic empires actually became a valuable balancing factor in European diplomacy. Henry's readiness to deal with the Muslim powers was far from eccentric during the sixteenth century. Both King Francis I of France and Queen Elizabeth I of England took the policy of collaboration much further.

THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM OF SPEECH IN THE CULTURE OF HUMANISTS AND THE COMMUNICATIVE ORIGINS OF THE REFORMATION

Traditio ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 74 ◽  
pp. 375-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
JORGE LEDO
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Freedom Of Speech ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Common Currency ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
Rules Of The Game

Ideas and opinions about communication and intellectual exchange underwent significant changes during the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The rediscovery of parrhesia by the humanists of the Quattrocento is one of the least studied of these changes, and at the same time, paradoxically, one of the most fascinating. My main argument in these pages is that the recovery of Hellenistic “freedom of speech” was a process that took place from the thirteenth century through the first decade of the sixteenth century; thus it began well before the term παρρησία was common currency among humanists. This is the most important and counterituitive aspect of the present analysis of early modern parrhesia, because it means that the concept did not develop at the expense of classical and biblical tradition so much as at the expense of late-medieval scholastic speculation about the sins of the tongue and the legitimation of anger as an intellectual emotion. To illustrate this longue durée process, I have focused on three stages: (i) the creation, transformation, and assimilation by fourteenth-century humanism of the systems of sins of the tongue, and especially the sin of contentio; (ii) the synthesis carried out by Lorenzo Valla between the scholastic tradition, the communicative presumptions of early humanism, and the classical and New Testament ideas of parrhesia; and (iii) the systematization and transformation of this synthesis in Raffaele Maffei's Commentariorum rerum urbanorum libri XXXVIII. In closing, I propose a hypothesis. The theoretical framework behind Maffei's encyclopaedic approach is not only that he was attempting to synthesize the Quattrocento's heritage through the prism of classical sources; it was also that he was crystallizing the communicative “rules of the game” that all of Christianitas implicitly accepted at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Taking the three ways of manifesting the truth considered by Maffei and fleshing them out in the figures of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Celio Calcagnini, and Martin Luther just before the emergence of the Protestant Reformation could help to explain from a communicative perspective the success and pan-European impact of the Reformation.

Jacob Tengstrom, First Archbishop of Finland

1975 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 336-351
Author(s):  
Toivo Harjunpaa
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Church Of Sweden ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Church

The Reformation of the sixteenth century dealt a heavy blow to the historic episcopal government of the church. Only two of the national churches which embraced the Protestant Reformation succeeded in retaining their old primatical sees and episcopal polity: the Church of England and the Church of Sweden-Finland. For centuries before the Reformation, the Finnish church had been ecclesiastically part of the province of Uppsala (an archbishopric since 1164) just as Finland itself was politically part of the Kingdom of Sweden. Thus there was no need to establish a Finnish archdiocese while union with Sweden continued. But with Napoleon's concurrence (the Tilsit pact of 1807), the Russians invaded Finland in 1808 and met with such success that all Finland was ceded by Sweden to Russia in 1809.

New Directions in Biblical Exegesis

1971 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 317-325
Author(s):  
Martin Kessler
Keyword(s):  
Latin Text ◽  
Biblical Exegesis ◽  
Priesthood Of All Believers ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
New Directions

With the Reformation, its increasing preoccupation with the Bible and its insistence that it be made available to all, came a growing interest in how such literature was to be interpreted, which is to say, Christianity became vitally concerned with exegesis. In spite of the ‘democratisation’ of Bible and religion, the difficulties in making an ancient Semitic literature speak in contemporary accents were surely not underestimated by Luther and Calvin both of whom made solid contributions to biblical exegesis. In his ‘Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen’ (8th September 1530), Luther referred to the lone task of interpretation and the need for patience,1a theme which he elaborated in hisVorreden zur Heiligen Schrift. To understand Vergil'sBucolicsandGeorgics, one should have a five-year experience as a shepherd or farmer; at least twenty years' occupation in politics is needed to fathom Cicero's letters anda fortiori, no one can claim to have digested the Scriptures unless he has led congregations with the prophets for a hundred years—in other words a lifetime of existential experience with the Bible is insufficient. These comments led in turn to his famous affirmation, in Saxon German within a Latin text: ‘Wir sein pettier—Hoc est verum!’2Statements of this kind should preclude once for all the notion that the reformers underestimated the difficulty of exegesis in view of their promotion of the ‘priesthood of all believers’.

Moses and the Magistrate: a Study in the rise of Protestant Legalism

1975 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. D. L. Avis
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Law ◽  
Civil Laws ◽  
The Church

‘It is now disputed at every table’, declared Whitgift in 1574, ‘whether the magistrate be of necessity bound to the judicials of Moses’. Edwin Sandys told Bullinger of Zürich in the previous year that it was being maintained, to the great trouble of the Church, that ‘The judicial laws of Moses are binding upon Christian princes, and they ought not in the slightest degree to depart from them’. Though often neglected by historians as an important factor in the Reformation, the question of the validity of the Old Testament judicial (as opposed to moral or ceremonial) law frequently arises in the writings of the Reformers, and their various answers made no slight impact on the course of events. It bears directly on Henry VIII's divorce and the bigamy of Philip of Hesse; the treatment of heresy and the possibility of toleration; the persecution of witches; usury and iconoclasm; Sabbatarianism and the rise of the ‘puritan’ view of the Bible as a book of precedents, and the corresponding shift to legalism in Protestant theology. The question is also of fundamental relevance to the thought of the Reformers on natural law, the godly prince and magistrate, and the so-called ‘third use of the law’. This article is an attempt to survey, up to the end of the sixteenth century, the various interpretations of the Mosaic penal and civil laws, with particular reference to the development of legalistic tendencies after Luther.

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

1993 ◽  
Vol 28 (112) ◽  
pp. 345-352
Author(s):  
James Murray
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Indigenous Population ◽  
The State ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Irish Context ◽  
Church Of Ireland ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Church

One of the things which has united historians across the generations when writing about the Reformation in its Tudor Irish context is the conviction that the state was ultimately unsuccessful in securing the allegiance of the indigenous population to its religious dictates. Where this agreement has broken down, and continues to break down, is in the significance attached to the Tudor state’s failure, and in determining precisely when it became apparent.Until the end of the 1960s most examinations of sixteenth-century Ireland identified the Tudor failure as being synonymous with the practical and absolute failure of the Protestant Reformation. These studies were generally characterised by a partipris approach and by their employment of an interlinked and deterministic vision to explain this failure. Echoing the observations of contemporaries like Archbishop Loftus of Dublin, who spoke of the Irish people’s ‘disposition to popery’, writers of all religious persuasions saw the Reformation’s failure as an inevitable consequence of the inherently conservative character of the island’s inhabitants.

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