500 years ago, there was only one Christian denomination throughout most of the world. 500 years ago, the church and the government killed those who resisted tradition. 500 years ago, no one could read the bible in their own language. How did we get from there to here? Discover the wild and exciting story of Christianity for the last 500 years, so you can understand how the world ended up the way it is now, avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, and gain inspiration from heroic people who made a difference.
In this first lecture, you’ll learn: 1. What the religious world was like 500 years ago in Europe 2. Precursors to the Reformation, including John Wycliffe and Jan Hus 3. The movement called humanism, including Gutenberg’s printing press and Desiderius Erasmus
All the notes are available here as a pdf.
—— Notes ——
Three aims for this class:
- to understand why the world is the way it is now
- to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past
- to gain inspiration from heroic people who made a difference
I want to talk about Martin Luther, but first need to do some background
- key person
- reason why this class if 500 instead of 600 or 400
- on Oct 31st 1517 he started the Reformation (i.e. the changing of Christianity)
- before we can understand what he reformed, we have to understand what was already there
Three points for today:
- Setting the Scene
- Precursors of the Reformation
- Humanism
1| Setting the Scene
- life and death
- no electricity, running water, indoor plumbing, gas heat, computers, phones, facebook, cars, postal service
- thinly populated (black death in 14th)
- high infant mortality
- 15-35% of infants died before first birthday
- 10-20% of children died before 10
- agricultural subsistence
- 65-90% were peasants or small farmers
- suffering and death were pervasive (bad medical care, famine, epidemic disease, war)
- highly stratified society, most stay at same status they were born into
- towns had extreme differences in wealth
- beliefs/practices
- infant baptism
- church as God’s instrument of salvation on earth
- death => eternal torment in hell, purgatory, heaven
- needed right belief and right behavior, which was determined by church
- faith was not enough for salvation, needed concrete actions
- authority on the basis of apostolic succession and good standing with hierarchy
- hierarchy: pope, bishops, local priests
- religious orders: monks, nuns,
- contemplative orders: Benedictines, Cistercians, etc. cloistered lives of prayer and devotion
- mendicant orders: Franciscans, Dominicans, Augustinians, etc. served through preaching, teaching, missionizing, and hearing confessions
- weekly mass with Eucharist as weekly sacrifice to God (transubstantiation)
- priest’s words make bread and wine Christ’s actual body and blood
- sacraments: means by which God dispenses grace through priests who claimed authority on the basis of apostolic succession
- baptism, penance, communion, confirmation, matrimony, extreme unction, and holy orders
- communion was only once a year before which one did confession and penance to cleanse sins
- processions and pilgrimages (relics)
- vigorous practices
- books of hours were most common printed book 50 years before Reformation
- endowing masses, paying for urban preachers, paying for church upkeep
- many were taking their faith seriously
- anti-cler