Church History in Plain Language

by Bruce L. Shelley

The new preaching order that we know as Dominicans was called mendicant, meaning begging, and the term friar (or brother) distinguished them from monks because, unlike monks, they went forth to live among people to preach and teach.

1215 the Fourth Lateran Council, under Innocent III’s leadership, provided for the state’s punishment of heretics, the confiscation of their property, excommunication for those unwilling to move against the heretic, and complete forgiveness of sins for those cooperating.

the Synod of Toulouse systematized inquisitorial policies, leaving the alleged heretic with virtually no rights.

Pope Innocent IV authorized torture as a means of getting information and confessions from accused heretics.

Francis called his group the Friars Minor (Lesser Brothers). We call them the Franciscans.

Unam sanctam, the most extreme assertion of papal power in all church history.

the Babylonian Captivity of the papacy.

Wenceslas,

The rule of the Inquisition was simple: if sufficient witnesses testified to the guilt of the accused, then he had to confess and renounce the errors or be burned.

Utraquists,

in 1515 while pondering St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, Luther came upon the words, “For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith” (1:17, KJV). Here was his key to spiritual certainty.

Luther had come to his famous doctrine of justification by faith alone. He saw how sharply it clashed with the Roman church’s doctrine of justification by faith and good works: the demonstration of faith through virtuous acts, acceptance of church dogma, and participation in church ritual.

All too often zealous preachers of indulgences made them appear to be a sort of magic, as though a good deed, especially a contribution, automatically got its reward, regardless of the condition of the doer’s soul. Sorrow for sin was completely and conveniently overlooked. That troubled Luther deeply.

Luther brushed aside the traditional view of the church as a sacred hierarchy headed by the pope and returned to the early Christian view of a community of Christian believers in which all believers are priests called to offer spiritual sacrifices to God.

Luther also revised the Latin liturgy and translated it into German. He abandoned the Catholic practice of only partaking of the bread at the supper. The laity received the Communion in bread and wine, as the Hussites had demanded a century earlier. And the whole emphasis in worship changed from the celebration of the sacrificial mass to the preaching and teaching of God’s Word.

Augsburg Confession

Luther’s greatest contribution to history, however, was not political. It was religious. He took four basic Catholic concerns and offered invigorating new answers.

By mid-century three groups appeared in German-speaking Europe: (1) the Swiss Brethren, led by Conrad Grebel and Felix Manz at Zurich; (2) the Hutterite brethren in Moravia; and (3) the Mennonites in the Netherlands and North Germany.

Puritanism.

Bruderhof,

Hutterites.

Munster rebellion.

Although Menno was not the founder of the movement, most of the descendants of the Anabaptists are to this day called Mennonite.

Schleitheim Confession.

Usually, Christians think one must understand (interpret) then obey; Anabaptist instinct is the opposite: only obedience yields understanding.

Just as Luther’s central doctrine was justification by faith, so Calvin’s was the sovereignty of God.

If Luther’s ultimate text was “the just shall live by faith,” Calvin’s was, “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

While Calvin did not profess to know absolutely who were God’s chosen (the elect) he believed that three tests constituted a good yardstick by which to judge who might be saved: participation in the two sacraments Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, an upright moral life, and a public profession of the faith. These were adequate for a disciplined church on earth.

Calvinist resistance to the exercise of arbitrary power by monarchs was a key factor in the development of modern constitutional governments.

Known as Huguenots, French Calvinists were threatening to seize leadership of the country when thousands of them were ruthlessly massacred on St. Bartholomew’s Day in 1572.

Knox escaped to the Continent, where he developed the theory that Protestants had the right to resist, by force if necessary, any Roman Catholic ruler who tried to prevent their worship and mission.

Via Media, the Middle Way between Protestantism and Catholicism.

Loyola (1491–1556) transformed his rebirth at Manresa to a plan for spiritual discipline, a military manual for storm troopers at the service of the pope. The result was the Jesuits, the Society of Jesus, the greatest single force in Catholicism’s campaign to recapture the spiritual domains seized by Protestantism.

Loyola came out of his struggle believing that both God and Satan are external to man, and man has the power to choose between them. By the disciplined use of his imagination man can strengthen his will so as to choose God and his ways.

Everything the Protestant Reformation stood for was vigorously—one could almost say violently—rejected at Trent.

Luther, Calvin, and Grebel stressed salvation by grace alone; the council emphasized grace and human cooperation with God to avoid, in Loyola’s terms, “the poison that destroys freedom.”

Spain’s first policy toward the Indians, called encomienda, granted the Spanish colonists a number of Indians who were supposed to toil in the mines and on the plantations of their captors. For their trouble the Indians received protection and instruction in the holy faith.

Goa, the center of the Portuguese commercial empire in the Orient, became a city of great baroque churches.

Two years later the Jesuits did establish a new town as a home for Christian converts. They called it Nagasaki.

The first Puritans had little confidence in traditional religion. Their plans for a new England arose from a deep conviction that spiritual conversion was crucial to Christianity.

In its emphasis upon the interior life of the saint, Puritanism was a taproot of later evangelical Christianity with its born-again message. In its stress upon a disciplined “nation under God” and his laws, it contributed significantly to the national character of the American people.

The Puritans wanted the selection of their ministers to rest with the people; the queen insisted that the appointment of bishops was a responsibility of rulers.

The Puritan’s zeal to purify the Church of England was fired by eager reading of popular versions of the Bible. Chief among these was the Geneva Bible.

Thanks to their study of the Bible and their reading of The Book of Martyrs, Puritans came to think of themselves as God’s new Israel.

James made it plain that he meant to be an absolute monarch. In 1611 he dissolved Parliament and for the next ten years he ruled England without it.

It called to Westminster scores of Puritan theologians and assigned to them the creation of a new form of worship and a new form of church government for the Church of England.

Edict of Nantes (1598).

Thirty Years’ War

Peace of Westphalia

These Dissenting Brethren of Westminster articulated the denominational theory of the church in several fundamental truths: