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Jul 30, 2012 · It would be heresy to assume that a Christian renaissance is inevitable. Christianity's historical resilience hasn't prevented particular Christendoms from decaying. But to hope is every believer ...
May 17, 2013 · The Italian Renaissance Shows that History is Cyclical A cursory overview of history reveals cyclical patterns. One of the lessons of the Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is that ideas that lie on the margins of elite culture rise again. Dormant values, seemingly part of a bygone era, return.
- “Continual Reformation”
- More Than One Pope
- Clerical Greed
- Illegitimate Families
- The “Sale” of Indulgences
- What Set Luther Apart
- Councils Call For Reform
- Tragic, But Not Necessary
- The Gratuitousness of Salvation
- An Unnecessary Negative Principle
Ecclesia semper reformanda est: “the Church always needs reform.” As Vatican II put it, “The Church, embracing in its bosom sinners, at the same time holy and always in need of being purified, always follows the way of penance and renewal” (Lumen Gentium 8). In its decree on ecumenism, the Council stated, “Christ summons the Church to continual ref...
In the century before Luther, the Catholic Church emerged from one of its greatest crises, the Great Western Schism. From 1378 to 1417, due mainly to political struggles for control of the papacy, there were first two and then three claimants to the papal office simultaneously. Religious orders, dioceses, and other church institutions divided in th...
Then there was the issue of money. Late medieval church bureaucracy was expensive, as were the lifestyles of some of its officeholders, especially certain popes and their curia. There were charges for this, church taxes for that. Although church law frowned on a bishop holding many benefices—income-related church offices—this legal obstacle could b...
Family, too, was often a problem—and not just in the form of nepotism. Some bishops were faithfully celibate, but many were not. Wrote Msgr. Hughes: What of the people? Recent historians challenge the idea of a universal spiritual desert among the faithful at large, pointing to a number of dynamic lay movements. Yet things were far from ideal. Ther...
Which brings us to the celebrated business of the “sale” of indulgences, which set off Augustinian priest Martin Luther in 1517. The indulgence controversy was sort of an ecclesiastical “perfect storm,” bringing together ecclesiastical greed, episcopal power-grubbing, and the spiritually hungry masses so often being “sold”—not given—indulgence “sto...
Fr. Luther may or may not have posted his famous 95 Theses on the cathedral door at Wittenberg, on October 31, 1517. But he did call for debate. He was a theology professor as well as a pastor with parishioners who visited the neighboring territory where Tetzel preached. This was a pastoral matter, not just a theoretical one. Many others beside Lut...
The Fifth Lateran Council (1512-1517) called for reform—Catholic reform—even before Luther challenged the sale of indulgences. Catholic figures such as Giles of Viterbo challenged the Church to repent and live according to the gospel. He criticized popes and prelates and called for the people to be transformed by study of Scripture. In Spain, the F...
We shouldn’t, insisted Vatican II, blame today’s Protestants for the “sin involved in the separation.” But separation did involve sin—that is, a state of affairs contrary to God’s will and brought about by human action. Christ prayed that his followers would be one (John 17:21). The division among Christians is notGod’s will. Catholics, as Vatican ...
Consider the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Bouyer said its positive principle is the gratuitousness of salvation: we enter right relationship with God by his gift, not by any effort we can claim as our own apart from grace. The “alone” element in “justification by faith alone” originally distinguished the gracious activity of God in us—...
Or consider the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura, or Scripture alone. According to Bouyer, Protestantism rightly insists that the Bible is the Word of God in a unique sense: only the Bible is the divinely inspiredwritten word of God. Tradition and pronouncements of the magisterium may be “divinely assisted,” but the Church does not claim for t...
Jan 4, 2022 · The widespread impact of the Renaissance affected Christianity and helped change the course of church history. One way that the Renaissance impacted Christianity was that it increased curiosity about early church writings in Greek. In the medieval period, the emphasis was on Scholasticism. In the study of Scholastic theology, students studied ...
The Renaissance, far from being a godless enterprise, was a rediscovery of the cultural mandate that God had given to humanity from the beginning. It was a pursuit of art and science and learning, a commitment to celebrate and explore the created order and the nature of humankind, fearfully and wonderfully made.
the Renaissance, first, because it is concerned with an area of discus-sion of the Renaissance problem a little off the beaten track of con-ventional Renaissance scholarship; second, because it illustrates a peculiar power of the Renaissance itself, that is, its inevitable and in-variable ability to provoke heat and passion; and third, because it
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Feb 10, 2022 · February 10, 2022. Co-sponsored by Lumen Christi Institute & Abigail Adams Institute. Often characterized in older scholarship as a secularizing tendency that foreshadowed the Enlightenment, Renaissance humanism was actually a movement that aimed to build a more humane, virtuous, wise, tolerant, and open-minded Christian civilization.
