Patristic and Medieval Theologies of Sacraments

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan M. Reeves
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Sacramental Theology ◽  
Medieval Theology ◽  
John Wycliffe ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Response Set ◽  
Isidore Of Seville ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church

Part I, on patristic and medieval theologies of sacraments, covers Basil, Augustine, Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus. This chapter begins Part I and addresses the sacraments in patristic and medieval theology, how the “mysteries” of the Christian faith were understood and incorporated into the life of the early and medieval Christians with emphasis on “the unity of the church in the life of the Eucharist, as it was the definitive mark of grace upon a church that had been graced with the presence of the Spirit.” This chapter also describes Augustine’s focus on sacraments as expressions of the grace of God, the importance of sourcebooks compiled in the Early Middle Ages by the likes of Isidore of Seville, the impact of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) on sacramental theology, and Thomas Aquinas’s scholastic approach to the sacraments. Finally, this chapter addresses how John Wycliffe and Jan Hus responded, and how their response set the stage for the Reformation.

scholarly journals Áhrif siðbótarinnar á Íslandi. Tilraun til jafnvægisstillingar. Fyrri grein.

Ritið ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 255-288
Author(s):  
Hjalti Hugason
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Small Population ◽  
Church Culture ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Church And Society ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church

n 2017 the 500th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation was celebrated. Then there was a huge discussion about the impact of the Reformation on church, culture and society. In this article and in a second one that follows, this question will be raised, especially in Icelandic context.Here it is assumed that it is only possible to state that a change has occurred or a novelty has arised because of Lutheran influence if it can be demonstrated that the Reformation is a necessary prerequisite for the change / innovation being discussed. Here it is particularly pointed out that various changes that until now have been traced to the Reformation can have been due to the development of the central-con-trolled state power. It is also pointed out that, due to the small population, rural areas and simple social structure, various changes that occurred in urban areas did not succeed in Iceland until long after the Reformation. Such cases are interpret-ed as delayed Lutheran effects. Then, in Iceland, many changes, which were well matched to the core areas of the Reformation, did not work until the 18th century and then because of the pietism. Such cases are interpreted as derivative Lutheran effects.In Iceland two generalizations have been evident in the debate on the influence of the Lutheran Reformation. The first one emphasizes an extensive and radical changes in many areas in the Reformation period and subsequent extensive decline. It is also stated that this regression can be traced directly to the Reformation and not to other fenomenons, e.g. the development of modern, centralized state. The other one states that the Reformation was most powerful in the modernization in both the church and society in Iceland.This article focuses on the influence of the Reformation on religious and church life. Despite the fact that the Reformation has certainly had the broadest and most direct effects on this field, it is noteworthy that the church organization itself was only scarsely affected by the Reformation. After the Reformation the Icelandic church was for example almost as clergy-orientaded as in the middle Ages.

4. Early modern sainthood

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Yarrow
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Church And State ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Northern Europe ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church ◽  
Intellectual Creativity

‘Early modern sainthood’ describes the impact of the 16th-century Reformation on the image of the Christian saint. The Reformation, triggered by Augustinian friar Martin Luther, was a struggle for the highest stakes between fierce adversaries over the relationship between church and state, the authority and mission of the Church, the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith, and the conscience of every soul in Christendom. It spurred immense intellectual creativity, fuelled iconoclasm and bitter polemic, and brought protracted war and martyrdom. It ultimately divided Europe into the Catholic states of southern Europe and those states of northern Europe whose princes embraced various kinds of Protestantism.

“How drie a Cinder this world is”: Dissociation of Sensibility Redux

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-186
Author(s):  
R. V. Young
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Figurative Language ◽  
Charles Taylor ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
General Movement ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Classic Essay ◽  
The Impact

Although T.S. Eliot's phrase “dissociation of sensibility,” applied to the changes in poetry during the seventeenth century, made a stir when he introduced it in the review essay “The Metaphysical Poets” in 1921, it draws less attention now, and seems never to have been adequately explained. Since Eliot's claims are, in part, historical, it makes sense to consider the most historically significant changes occurring during the seventeenth century. It is during this period that the Reformation culminates and its effects become permanently established. Several recent studies of the Reformation by Charles Taylor, Brad Gregory, and Carlos M.N. Eire provide clues about how the religious and social cataclysm of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may have affected the poetic imagination. James Smith's classic essay, “The Metaphysical Poets,” offers a way of analyzing the figurative language of seventeenth-century poetry in order to grasp the impact of the religious change. The investigations by Taylor, Gregory, and Eire into the dynamic of the reforming tendency, beginning in the late Middle Ages, as well as the Scotist and nominalist intellectual underpinnings of the Reformation, prove to be pertinent to Eliot's insight regarding seventeenth-century poetry. The growth of individualism, personal anxiety about religious choice, and materialism portend a general movement towards secularization and influence the way poets see the world. Dissociation of sensibility can thus be understood as a result of the effect of the religious and social dislocations of the Reformation in the realm of poetry.

SACRED POLYPHONY ‘NOT UNDERSTANDID’: MEDIEVAL EXEGESIS, RITUAL TRADITION AND HENRY VIII'S REFORMATION

2010 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 33-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana T. Marsh
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
Traditional Church ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
To Come ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
The One ◽  
The Church

This study focuses on the ritual ‘conservatism’ of Henry VIII's Reformation through a new look at biblical exegeses of the period dealing with sacred music. Accordingly, it reconsiders the one extant passage of rhetoric to come from the Henrician regime in support of traditional church polyphony, as found in A Book of Ceremonies to be Used in the Church of England, c.1540. Examining the document's genesis, editorial history and ultimate suppression by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, it is shown that Bishop Richard Sampson, Dean of the Chapel Royal (1522–40), was responsible for the original drafting of the musical paragraph. Beginning with Sampson's printed commentaries on the Psalms and on the Epistles of St Paul, the literary precedents and historical continuities upon which Sampson's topos in Ceremonies was founded are traced in detail. Identified through recurring patterns of scriptural and patristic citation, and understood via transhistorical shifts in the meaning of certain key words (e.g. iubilare), this new perspective clarifies important origins of the English church's musical ‘traditionalism’ on the eve of the Reformation. Moreover, it reveals a precise species of exegetical method – anagogy – as the literary vehicle through which influential clergy were able to justify expansions and elaborations of musical practice in the Western Church from the high Middle Ages to the Reformation.

Roman Catholicism and Europe

2021 ◽  
pp. 436-457
Author(s):  
Petr Kratochvíl
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
The Political ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Global Nature ◽  
The Church ◽  
Hostile Attitude ◽  
The Catholic Church

This chapter explores the complex relationship between the Catholic Church and Europe over many centuries. It argues that the Catholic Church and Europe played a mutually constitutive role in the early Middle Ages and one would not be conceivable without the other. However, the Church gradually disassociated itself from Europe and vice versa. Since the Reformation, but even more strongly in the last two centuries, the Church’s attitude to Europe has become markedly more ambivalent, due to the rise of the European state, the hostile attitude of the Church to modern European social and political thought, Europe’s ongoing secularization, and the increasingly global nature of the Catholic Church. While the tension between the Church and Europe persists, the process of European unification marked a watershed in the Church’s relationship to Europe, given that integration is a key area in which the Church strongly supports the political developments of the continent.

Select document: Catholic ownership of tithes: a County Wexford widow’s dispensation, 1595

2018 ◽  
Vol 42 (162) ◽  
pp. 336-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Mac Cuarta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Rural Population ◽  
Catholic Priests ◽  
Ecclesiastical Authority ◽  
Agricultural Produce ◽  
Church Of Ireland ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church

AbstractDown to the mid-nineteenth century, the rural population in Ireland was obliged by law to contribute to the upkeep of the Church of Ireland clergy by means of tithes, a measure denoting a proportion of annual agricultural produce. The document illustrates what was happening in the late sixteenth century, as separate ecclesial structures were emerging, and Catholics were beginning to determine how to support their own clergy. Control of ecclesiastical resources was a major issue for the Catholic community in the century after the introduction of the Reformation. However, for want of documentation the use of tithes to support Catholic priests, much less the impact of this issue on relationships within that community, between ecclesiastics and propertied laity, has been little noted. This text – a dispensation to hold parish revenues, signed by a papally-appointed bishop ministering in the south-east – illustrates how the recusant community in an anglicised part of Ireland addressed some issues posed by Catholic ownership of tithes in the 1590s. It exemplifies the confusion, competing claims, and anxiety of conscience among some who benefited from the secularisation of the church’s medieval patrimony; it also preserves the official response of the relevant Catholic ecclesiastical authority to an individual situation.

The German Enigma

1941 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 428-450
Author(s):  
Goetz A. Briefs
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
German History ◽  
Rhine Valley ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
Thin Veneer

No country within the Western orbit offers to foreign thinkers such an ambiguous and enigmatic aspect as does Germany. There is no end of books and articles wrestling with this problem.German history presents sufficient justification for the existence of an enigmatic dualism within the nation. To begin with: Germany is that country in Europe through which a line of profound cultural demarcation runs. The Limes Germanicus (cf. my articles in this Review, July and October, 1939) signified the borderline of Roman conquest and Roman cultural penetration. Within this line Mediterranean civilization took undisputed hold both during the Roman Empire and throughout the middle ages, in the latter period mediated by the Church. The lands farther to the East and North became christianized hundreds of years later than the lands around the Danube and Rhine valley. Often the christianization of the East was pushed forward by force of arms. Riehl, Nietzsche, Ricarda Huch and others have remarked that, to all appearances, the christianization of the German North and East was only superficial, a thin veneer over a basically heathen reality; of late H. Rauschning expressed his concern over the quick disappearance of the Christian faith and ethics among the Northern German peasants after Nazism came to power, and the prophets of the “German Faith” today spread the suggestion that the Northern German peasant never was a Christian.

Recent Literature in Church HistoryKleine Texte für theologische Vorlesungen und Uebungen. Hans LietzmannHistory of Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian Church. Henry Charles LeaRegesta Pontificum Romanorum. P. F. KehrDas Mönchtum, seine Ideale und seine Geschichte. Adolf HarnackThe Censorship of the Church of Rome and Its Influence upon the Production and Distribution of Literature: A Study of the History of the Prohibitory and Expurgatory Indexes, Together with Some Consideration of the Effects of Protestant Censorship and of Censorship by the State. George Haven PutnamChristliche Antike. Ludwig von SybelPersecution in the Early Church. Herbert B. WorkmanLo Gnosticismo storica di antiche Lotte Religiose. E. BuonaiutaThe Stoic Creed. William L. DavidsonLa théologie de saint Hippolyte. Adhémar d'AlèsDer Traktat des Laurentius de Somercote, Kanonikers von Chichester, über die Vornahme von Bischofswahlen; Entstanden im Jahre 1254. Alfred von WretschkoLes réordinations. Louis SaltetLes martyrologes historiques du moyen âge. Dom Henri QuentinHistory of the Christian Church. Vol. V, Part I: The Middle Ages from Gregory VII, 1049, to Boniface VIII, 1294. Philip Schaff , David S. SchaffLehrbuch der Kirchengeschichte. Wilhelm Moeller , Gustav KawerauW. Capito im Dienste Erzbischof Albrechts von Mainz. Paul KalkoffAhasver, "der ewige Jude," nach seiner ursprünglichen Idee und seiner literarischen Verwertung betrachtet. Eduard KönigLes leçons de la défaite; Ou la fin d'un catholicisme. Jehan de BonnefoyDer Solinger Kirchenstreit und seine Nachwirkung auf die rheinisch-westfälische Kirche bis zum Fall César. Friedrich NippoldA Short History of the Baptists. Henry C. VedderJames Harris Fairchild; Or Sixty-Eight Years with a Christian College. Albert Temple SwingDisestablishment in France. Paul SabatierA History of the Inquisition in Spain. Henry Charles LeaThe Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies. Charles Henry LeaKirchliches Jahrbuch. Kirchliches Jahrbuch. Auf das Jahr 1907, J. SchneiderNachwirkungen des Kulturkampfes. Georg GrauePaul Gerhardt. Artur BurdachDie russischen Sekten. Karl Konrad GrassHistory of the Christian Church since the Reformation. S. CheethamThe English Reformation and Puritanism, with Other Lectures and Addresses. Eri B. Hulbert , A. R. E. Wyant

1908 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 291-319
Author(s):  
Franklin Johnson ◽  
Edward B. Krehbiel ◽  
Albert Henry Newman ◽  
J. W. Moncrief ◽  
David S. Muzzey ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Christian College ◽  
Early Church ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Short History ◽  
Christian Church ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Church

Baptism in Martin Luther’s Theology

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsi Stjerna
Keyword(s):  
Nervous System ◽  
Religious Experience ◽  
Human Life ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Sacramental Theology ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Church

Baptism opens a window to the heart of Martin Luther’s 16th-century theology. It offers a perspective for how Luther understands the impact of grace and its channels, as well as the nature of justification in an individual’s life. In his teaching about baptism, Luther demonstrates the vital working of the Word and lays a foundation for a Word-centered and faith-oriented spirituality. With baptism, Luther articulates his vision for the purpose of the Church and the rationale for sacraments. Baptism reveals different sides of the theologian: one who argues with a zeal on the “necessity” of baptism and its meaningful God-mandated practice in Christian communities and another who imagines God’s saving grace too expansive to be limited to any ritual. The apparent tensions in Luther’s articulation can be understood from his overlapping agendas and different audiences: in his baptismal talk, Luther is both processing his own Angst about salvation and negotiating his developing position in relation to the medieval sacramental theology and other emerging reform solutions. While feistily refuting his opponents, he is also speaking from his personal religious experience of being as if reborn with the encounter of the Word of grace and passionately extrapolating his most foundational conviction: God’s unconditional promise of grace as the ground of being for human life, given to humanity in the Word. The matter of baptism leads to the roots of different Christian “confessional” traditions. The format of the ritual has generated less anxiety than differing theological opinions on (1) the role of faith in the validity of baptism, and (2) the effects of baptism in one’s life. Whether infant or adult baptism is favored depends on whether baptism is primarily understood as a sign of faith, a cause of forgiveness and transformation, or an initiation into the Christian community—or all of the above. Baptism is at the center of Luther’s theological nervous system; it connects with every other vital thread in the theological map. Baptism is a mystery and a matter of faith; it calls for a philosophical imagination and mystical willingness to grasp the questions of reality beyond what meets the eye. “I study it daily,” Luther admits in his “Large Catechism.” “In baptism, therefore, every Christian has enough to study and practice all his or her life. Christians always have enough to do to believe firmly what baptism promises and brings.”

Medieval Heretics as Protestant Martyrs

1993 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 185-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Euan Cameron
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Martin Luther ◽  
Church History ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
Church Polity ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Articles Of Faith ◽  
The Church

Two themes which figure repeatedly in the history of the Western Church are the contrasting ones of tradition and renewal. To emphasize tradition, or continuity, is to stress the divine element in the continuous collective teaching and witness of the Church. To call periodically for renewal and reform is to acknowledge that any institution composed of people will, with time, lose its pristine vigour or deviate from its original purpose. At certain periods in church history the tension between these two themes has broken out into open conflict, as happened with such dramatic results in the Reformation of the sixteenth century. The Protestant Reformers seem to present one of the most extreme cases where the desire for renewal triumphed over the instinct to preserve continuity of witness. A fundamentally novel analysis of the process by which human souls were saved was formulated by Martin Luther in the course of debate, and soon adopted or reinvented by others. This analysis was then used as a touchstone against which to test and to attack the most prominent features of contemporary teaching, worship, and church polity. In so far as any appeal was made to Christian antiquity, it was to the scriptural texts and to the early Fathers; though even the latter could be selected and criticized if they deviated from the primary articles of faith. There was, then, no reason why any of the Reformers should have sought to justify their actions by reference to any forbears or ‘forerunners’ in the Middle Ages, whether real or spurious. On the contrary, Martin Luther’s instinctive response towards those condemned by the medieval Church as heretics was to echo the conventional and prejudiced hostility felt by the religious intelligentsia towards those outside their pale.

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