On the Journey with Matt and Ken, Ep. 63: What Was the Reformation, And Why Did It Happen? Part II

it's like looking at a gothic cathedral it's beautiful in its structure in its intricacy in its depth and its balance on the other hand if you've ever tried to open up the summa and actually read aquinas you may find yourself sympathizing a little bit with the humanness [Applause] [Music] well hello and welcome to another explosive episode of on the journey with matt and ken i'm matt swaim he's ken hensley we are with the coming home network and if you don't know much about what that is uh essentially we're uh an apostolate a network of people who have all come from various backgrounds or are in the process of coming from various backgrounds toward the catholic faith and because we were all something else first we have a kind of a unique understanding of the various ideas that uh one might wrestle with on one's way into the church and one of those is the whole question of what was the reformation why did it happen and that's what we've been on lately again come visit us at chnetwork.org and especially visit our online community community.chnetwork.org ken hensley are you ready to dig back in to the reformation i believe so good to see you matt and uh i i approve of your choice of adjective this week an explosive episode anyway yeah it it's good to see you uh let me kind of recap quickly then in our last episo episode we looked at that first question what was it and what we mean by that is what was it essentially what was it at its heart okay and what we saw was that at its heart the protestant reformation of the early 16th century it wasn't so much a reformation of the catholic church as it was a revolt against the very idea that there existed on earth a unified spiritual authority of any kind and in particular that the catholic church represented that authority okay it was a revolt against the idea the very idea that christ had established on earth an authoritative church and that the catholic church was that authoritative church in other words then the division that took place matt at the time of the reformation and the division that still exists up till now between protestant and catholic was the division between those who continue to embrace the spiritual authority the united spiritual authority of the catholic church and those who did not but instead rejected that authority to take their stand at least ostensibly on sola scriptura on the idea that the bible will will be our sole and sufficient sufficient is important word there infallible rule of faith and practice okay that's what the reformation was in its essence now why did it happen um and what i mean by that is how is it that so many at that particular point in history the early 16th century again how is it that so many came to react against the spiritual authority of the catholic church at that time what were the causes of the reformation this is what we're going to begin to look at today what were there what were the causes why did it happen and why did it happen when it happened some of those listening are going to be thinking can matt what the heck do you mean i mean what caused the reformation martin luther caused the reformation we we all know that luther opposed some of the teachings of the church luther on october 31 1517 he posted his 95 theses to the to the door of the castle church in wittenberg one thing led to another and christendom was busted apart luther caused the reformation and the response that i want to give here is this yes and no yes i would agree that luther caused the reformation in the sense that luther struck the match luther if you will was the spark that set fire to the house of medieval catholic europe but the answer is also and i think in a more essential way the answer is no luther didn't cause the reformation and here's an image i really want to plant in the minds of all those listening luther didn't cause the reformation any more than a man who strikes a match in a room that is filled with gas causes a fire okay because the reality is the house of late medieval catholicism was primed for such an inferno to to take place i'm going to argue i'm going to argue that the gas was there that is the atmosphere was already in the room in fact the room was filled with an atmosphere in which a spark could ignite a fire that would burn its way all the way um you know all the way through christendom because in the late 15th this is yeah go ahead i was just going to say before you you launch into what that was some might say well yes and no right we get it uh you know the church had been going for 1500 years and you know it was bound to explode at some point but bear in mind also that the church has had a major knockdown drag out with the aryan heresy in the 400s it had major knockdown dragouts in various points francis of assisi comes in and says uh you know god has told me to rebuild the church there's a sense of reform that goes on you know when francis comes on the scene there are all kinds of points at which there is corruption and filth and necessary issues within the church and someone comes along and says hey no this is how it's got to be and i know that you old church people don't get it but let's have the holy spirit come in here and remind us what this is supposed to be about this has happened over and over and over and over again in the life of the church yes by the time it brings about something different by by the time the what we refer to as the protestant reformation took place the church has been in existence for 1500 years and you're entirely right there have been a number of challenges and there have been a number of reformations of various sorts a number of reforms of various sorts in fact the church was always reforming itself but we're asking why did this gigantic explosion occur and why did it happen when it happened why did it occur right then and the point that i'm wanting to make and we're going to begin to unfold in this episode is it is this there were a number of historical cultural societal spiritual moral from every angle there were a number of forces that were at work at this particular time in history that were driving the world i would say i mean like whipping it lashing the world and driving it in the direction of what was to occur in fact i will go so far as to say that it would have taken a miracle for the reformation to have not happened then at the time that it happened and what that means spoken i mean hitting it from another direction is that luther calvin zwingli abuser bullinger all the other reformers these men were not the cause of the reformation these men were created by the historical cultural spiritual forces that you and i are going to be looking at they were caught up by these forces these men rode these forces like a surfer rides a wave or like a man might jump on a horse and ride it along um they were not the cause of the reformation they were caused by the forces that we're going to look at if you're ready we'll begin to dive in are you ready matt all right let's get into the explosions ken let's have an explosive time okay well experience experience exploding these questions okay explosion number one is this with the invention of the printing press talking about the gutenberg press in the mid-15th century there was an explosion of literacy that took place in the decades leading up to the protestant reformation there was a tremendous increase in the number of people who could read this is where we're going to start now let me back up to use an illustration because i am an old man as you know and uh you are a youngster a a mere child as i know i mean it's all relative okay but i i clearly remember still when i first heard about something called a modem okay i was talking to someone that i knew back when i was in seminary in 1980 or 81 something like that and i remember him telling me ken i've got this thing it's called a modem he said i what it is is i i can plug a phone line into the back of my computer and i can use this phone line to dial up and i can do research in a library that's the way he described it i'm thinking what how in the world a phone line and you're doing research in a library okay so i i'm an old guy so you understand this is like someone saying to me hey ken there's this thing that can fly to mars you know or whatever you know or this thing that can put you into the fourth dimension you you make fun of me for being a youngster but bear in mind ken i mean i there are people watching this much younger than either one of us i mean i still come from the era where you did have to rewind your vhs tapes before you return them to blockbuster okay good you know you could even get a rewinding machine specifically for this you know i i and you had cassette tapes you know i played like the little tiger electronic games in the car it was just like you know i'm not that crazy young i had i played simon the beep boop four color thingies i played you know i understand this yeah do you understand okay but do you remember when pong came out no no because i'm a child of the 80s the child of the not the 70s but okay well it sounds like we're off the subject but but take a moment to think of the revolution that has occurred with the invention of the computer and then the internet okay if you think about it the world has radically changed radically changed um a hundred years ago if afghanistan was being overrun by the taliban if a major earthquake hit haiti even if a major hurricane hit louisiana well you and i might know something about it but now everyone in the world can watch it real time they can watch these things happening real time can see the faces of these people it's a massive massive revolution that has taken place and that we're in the midst of still and and so take your mind back about six centuries though try to imagine then the revolution and i use that word advisedly the revolution that was brought about by the invention of the printing press in the mid 15th century we're talking about 60 70 years before the revolution i mean before the the reformation took place it was a revolution it was it was radical i mean you and i spend our days now digging ourselves out from underneath piles of paper i go to my mailbox every day and it's just stuffed with paper you know i i look at my walls i was about ready to grab the computer and and change it to where you could see but my walls are completely covered with books many of which i will never read i mean we live in a world now in which we are buried in paper but think about it it wasn't that way before the gutenberg press was invented around 1450 a.d before this written materials were extremely scarce they had to be copied by hand in fact i've read that it took about two years of hand copying to produce a a single volume of the bible okay about two years and by the way this is why i remember one of the things i heard when i was a protestant was oh the catholic church never wanted people to read the bible they always had just like one bible in town and they'd have it chained to a podium so that no one could get to it no they had one bible in town because it took two years to copy a bible to produce one and it was extremely expensive so this is why a bible would have to be taken care of why it would have to be chained up well i mean think about the mass production of information in general that we take for granted today i mean can for um you know for vintage purposes i have roy orbison vinyl on you know my shelf this week i have a different vinyl every week amen the fact that i can i mean and if i had gone back to you in 1965 and said yeah can i got tons and tons of these things i bought them with pocket change at the local thrift store people were just throwing them out i mean this is a think about this concept of like mass production it's crazy and and you know the idea that you could even buy a record player for a few dollars at target right yeah it's crazy the changes that take place but i want you to just sink your teeth mentally into the into what the world would have been like before the printing press where written materials are scarce written materials are extremely expensive and because of that most people can't read so with the invention of the printing press there was an explosion of literacy throughout catholic europe written materials became available and because of that people began to read people began to learn how to read okay in his biography of john calvin very interesting biography written by oxford professor aleister mcgrath who is a protestant well-known protestant theologian he describes the situation like this in the early in the early middle ages the charmed circle of the literate was virtually exclusively clerical written materials took the form of manuscripts which had to be painstakingly copied out by hand and were generally confined to the libraries of monasteries on account of their scarcity with the advent of printing and the development of new paper making industries it became possible for an educated layperson to obtain and understand works which hitherto had been the exclusive preserve of the clergy so imagine it for the first time and i and i mean the first time in human history written materials are becoming available single sheets of paper with words printed on it tracks pamphlets treatises books and we're becoming available at prices that more and more people could afford to purchase so along with this naturally there's this dramatic increase in the number of people who can read literacy and explosion of literacy and with this there's a growing confidence i can read i can understand i can make up my own mind about what i'm reading okay and and and put this together with this all of this is happening precisely in the decades leading up to the protestant reformation and to unpack some of the consequences of that kin and we're going to get into it in this next point especially more but just to kind of back it up to wrap your mind around that you can't get a job at mcdonald's today you can't get a minimum wage job almost anywhere that involve that doesn't have some sort of reading and literacy tied into it you have to fill out a job application where you have to write things and be able to read and answer questions that was not necessary you know it's not that people were dumber back then it's just that literacy wasn't part of that world right right you have to have literacy in order to you know run a farm um it just wasn't necessary in the way that it is now and the other aspect of this too um you know and mcgrath uh who again we talked about a lot in our series on justification because he is kind of the guy um where it says with the advent of printing and development of new paper-making industries it became possible for an educated lay person to obtain and understand these works look around us now right so if then it was educated lay people who could then if you have the reformation you know partly sparked because now educated lay people have access to theological documents then what happens when people who are not as educated but are now literate begin to read have access to these documents you know we we see this because all that has to happen is for anybody to release a statement about anything in the world and suddenly people who may or may not be experts on well let's say virology and immunology are now suddenly like perceive themselves as experts on the pandemic right on anything anything and everyone anything on on political science on uh counterterrorism on anything suddenly because we have access to the documents access to the sources access to a way to write about them we're all experts right and in some ways it's a really amazing and beautiful thing that we're all able to read now but also in some ways it's kind of a scary thing that we're all able to read and publish now yeah and i'm thinking and i'm thinking immediately that quotation that we read i think last week from martin luther where he said um there are as many ideas as there are heads now and he even says in that quotation he says there is no farmer no there is no rustic so rude that if he imagines anything you know forsooth it must be the the voice of the holy spirit and he himself must be a prophet yeah when you talk about a world that is primarily agrarian at that time where a farmer gets up and he begins work very very early and he works long hours all day long by the time he comes home it's dark he's got a family he might have 10 children back then he might have 15 he might have 20 kids he can't read and there's no reason for him to read so so okay the point is the world is changing radically because of the gutenberg press and the advent of printing and the advent i mean and an explosion of literacy beginning throughout catholic europe during the episode during the the episodes the episodes of on the journey i mean everybody's watching the on the on the journey back during the decades leading up to the reformation which leads to a second explosion okay there was also during this time an explosion of new theological ideas as literacy spread as the availability of written materials increased throughout catholic europe the need for schools increased the need for colleges and universities and all of this is increasing at the same time again let me quote from aleister mcgrath the rapid expansion of the university sector throughout western europe led to an increased number of theology faculties professors of theology with a corresponding increase in the number of theological treatises produced then is now okay a little self-deprecating humor here on the part of a theologian he says then as now theologians had to do something to justify their existence okay catch the humor these works that is the things they wrote these works frequently explored new ideas but what was the status of these new ideas the failure to draw a clear distinction between theological opinions and church teaching between private opinion and communal doctrine caused considerable confusion and now listen to the confession of this world-renowned protestant theologian and oxford scholar quoting it is quite possible that martin luther may have confused one theological opinion with the official teaching of the church and he may have initiated his program of reform on the basis of this misunderstanding okay in the context he's making reference to the doctrine of justification and he's basically saying it's possible that luther may have been taught a view there wasn't really the church's view and he may have absorbed that as though it were the church's view and he may have launched his reformation based on a misunderstanding okay but that's another entire subject the point here is not to explore luther's education or his mistakes regarding justification you can see our series on that our series titled a damning system of works righteousness but it's to highlight a a crucial reality and it's this as the 16th century was dawning as martin luther professor of of um of scripture now at the university of wittenberg in germany as martin luther sits at his desk in the early 16th century preparing his lectures on paul's epistle to the romans or the psalms or galatians as about 20 years later john calvin is sitting there in the cafes of the latin quarter of paris discussing philosophy discussing theology with his buddies because he was attending the university of paris then a revolution is taking place okay these guys are living in the midst of a revolution that's embracing all of catholic europe europe is witnessing an unbelievable explosion of new ideas in every realm but also in the realm of theology books and articles tracks pamphlets exploring every aspect of catholic doctrine are being printed they're coming hot off the presses they're being read everywhere colleges and universities are beginning to spring up throughout europe they're popping up right and left and as everyone knows and i love to quote this from mortimer adler the great educator quoting him the halls of academia are like the halls of a madhouse at midnight i love that image and it's kind of more true now than maybe ever but the halls of academia are like the halls of the mad house at midnight everybody's running around yeah everybody's saying everything new ideas are coming off the press it's a mad house so let's let's take a moment to think about like how you and i used to think about it about this idea right so for me with my largely my understanding of the reformation wasn't really given to me by my denomination other than just maybe a hint at like it happened and now we're all free to read the bible right um my kind of impression of of what this all was was you know more taken in by my history classes in public school right as to you know the whole printing press the you know springing up of new ideas and i celebrated it right i celebrated it because finally we got free of the death grip that the catholic church has been having on theology and you know i wouldn't i don't know that i would have even called it christianity but on people's understandings of of god and the bible it's all it's all been contained by this gigantic draconian force that won't let anybody think for themselves and finally people are able to think for themselves right that's how i would have understood it uh now kind of having dug into it a little bit more and realizing this is not merely the spread of a bunch of freedom of ideas but rather like suddenly like nobody knows like nobody knows what the real take is right um just like the anxiety we sort of feel today like when um some sort of issue hits in the political sphere and we want to be like okay let me find the voice out there that matches up the best with the way that i feel about this yeah there really is and then i'm gonna just latch onto their youtube channel right i mean because there's just so many voices like how can you know and this is part of my formation in um you know in communications because that's my degree is in media communications and a lot of it had to do with you know how do we understand the way that we even talk about things and this was in the late 90s ken to talk about how extremely old and young i am right in the late 90s i'm getting this formation and there's this advent of social media and there's a whole bunch of stuff we don't know about what information is going to look like yeah in there for 20 years yeah and there really is a parallel then there really is a practical parallel for us i read an article a couple weeks ago that was saying that in the old days journalists if they were going to name someone in something they wrote it was standard to call that person first and talk to them but now because of social media because when something happens someone's going to be tweeting about it instantaneously or it's going to come out on facebook and like that journalists don't want to take the time anymore to actually check out what they write so better be better to be fast than right yeah because so that's that's sometimes that yeah because then you at least get the the eyeballs but the other aspect of it too ken is that we were we were having this conversation this real live conversation about what's going to happen when you open the floodgates on this is there going to be the fact that we now have a thousand sources looking at a story and all commenting on it does that mean we're all now going to be closer to the truth or does it mean now instead that what will happen and this is us talking in the late 90s right that what's more likely to happen we kind of came to the conclusion is that no each individual person is going to be able to find a version of it in those thousand sources that matches most to their own biases opinions moods and everything else so that in a sense there could be thirty thousand different offshoot opinions about what really happened in any situation much like you have you know the some people throw out the 30 000 number with protestantism i don't know how you even arrive at any number yeah uh you know but that's what kind of has happened is that we all have there's thousands and thousands of views on any particular topic as a result of the social media revolution so it's easy to see how with the advent of the printing press and everything else there'd be thirty thousand theological opinions to choose from yeah yeah and when you think of it if there were no other forces okay we've just named two things so far you know uh but if there were no other forces than the ones we haven't even gotten to the corruption in the church yet right no not even close to it okay if there were no other forces but the ones that we've named contributing to the rise of the kind of spirit uh this intellectual independence what uh hillary bellock referred to as a moral atmosphere of um reaction against a unified spiritual authority i think that these two alone could have done it because you know just do the numbers again you have a technological revolution brought about by the invention of the printing press you have resulting from this a flood of written materials exploring every subject under the sun you have an explosion of new ideas you have this tremendous growth in literacy and then you have the rise of universities and colleges and schools throughout europe and theological faculties interested in examining all these new ideas talking about them batting them back and forth debating them and presenting many of them in some cases as true it doesn't seem all that surprising to me that in such a situation a moral atmosphere characterized as a reaction against united spiritual authority might develop um but as we're going to move on these weren't the only historical and cultural forces at play as it turns out at the very same time an educational philosophy a particular philosophy of education was gaining a strong foothold in the colleges and universities of the time and was having its effect and what i'm referring to here and we're referring to is explosion number three is the rise of renaissance humanism which we're going to talk about for a bit here the rise of renaissance humanism now when you and i hear this word humanism today matt we think most often of secular humanism even naturalism materialism atheism we're thinking of that philosophy that emphasizes the dignity of man apart from god the dignity of man um autonomous man the ability of human beings to decide all things for themselves without reference to god or as one of the ancient greek philosophers put it man as the measure of all things that that's what we think about when we hear the word humanism but what we're talking about here is something very different than that i'm talking about an educational philosophy that arose out of the 14th century renaissance in italy a an educational philosophy that was critical of the kind of theology that was being done by the great doctors of the late medieval or the high medieval catholic church men like albert the great who was saint thomas aquinas teacher saint thomas aquinas duns scotus okay what we're talking about is an educational philosophy that was critical of the kind of philosophy that these men did we refer to these men historically as the schoolmen and we refer to the kind of theology the sort of theology they were doing as scholasticism or scholastic theology well in the minds of the humanist scholastic theology was just too philosophical it was too complicated it was too abstract too dry and it was too downright boring okay it was just boring they in fact are the ones that referred first to duns scotus as the dunce it's from his name don scotus you know the guy who has to sit in the corner with the cone-shaped hat on his head the dunce that was a reference to duns scotus one of the great scholastic theologians the humanist mat they portrayed the scholastic theologians as though they were men who just devoted their entire lives to speculating on pointless bits of trivia asking questions like how many angels can dance on the head of a pen and other such nonsense okay well this was the view and by the way from my understanding they never actually debated that question how many angels can dance on the head of a pen but this is the way it was felt to be okay in the minds of the humanists their view was that the official doctors of the catholic church were just old white guys if you want to use you know like a common way of thinking about it you know can't put them away we don't have anything to do with them go ahead well so this is an attitude that i held uh but i wouldn't have held it in the same exact terms because i came from a different era right there's there was this battle going on um within evangelicalism as i was coming up through um i'd say through the 90s and eventually into bible college and seeing that kind of play out in the christian bookstore industry there's this tension right between the people who are like you don't need some egghead in a seminary telling you some systematic theology you need a relationship with christ right yeah yeah and then as a result there was almost an anti-intellectualism in that and so you'd see other people react against it saying you know we've lost the intellectual you know fire that really you know helped us understand that that christ didn't come to just save you know our emotions and our moral you know orientation he he came to save our our whole person our love the lord with all your minds too like this big tension and you know a lot of the evangelical circles that i grew up with like and it wasn't you know scholasticism versus humanism it was more like do you feel your relationship with christ or you do you just think about it right and so i mean this is attention that's still around today i mean even within catholicism today you find this temperature yeah and you're raising an interesting issue because we're going to get to that next week when we talk about erasmus because that was another thing that was happening at the time but yeah you're exactly right on the one hand within protestantism we say scripture is the sole infallible rule of faith in practice it's sufficient and to know scripture you really i mean to to be able to authoritatively interpret scripture you really need to know greek you need to know hebrew you need to know syntax and grammar and all that and then there's a reaction against that that isn't saying no you know it's just me and jesus and you don't need any of that okay well what i want to say here is that that there is some truth in what the humanists were saying about the complexity of scholastic theology if you read aquinas you know i mean it's beautiful in a way uh it's like listening to a bach fugue and i i like classical music i play classical guitar so okay i'll use bach it's like listening to a bach fugue and it's beauty it's complexity uh it's fine-tunedness if you will or it's like looking at a gothic cathedral it's beautiful in its structure in its intricacy in its depth and its balance on the other hand if you've ever tried to open up the summa and actually read aquinas you may find yourself um sympathizing a little bit with the humanness okay and so for fun what i did was this i went to the sum and i just flipped it open at random and i looked down and i printed off a paragraph here it is here's here's the summa here's aquinas i answer that just as a thing has being by its proper form so the knowing power has knowledge by the likeness of the thing known hence as natural things cannot fall short of the being that belongs to them by their forms but may fall short of accidental and consequent qualities so that knowing power cannot fail to fail in knowledge of the thing with the likeness of which it is informed for it has been said that sight is not deceived in its proper sensible but about common sensibles that are consequent to that object or about accidental objects of sense now you know this is something that's said all the time on the streets right it has been said the site is not deceived okay in its proper form you read this most people just reading this you know their minds are just blown and they're just thinking what is going on here well this is the humanist mentality of the time they were just bored with medieval scholasticism they wanted to abandon what they viewed as the intellectual stagnation of the middle ages they wanted to return to something more pure quote unquote and for them guess what this meant it meant a return to the original sources the humanists wanted to drink fresh water from the beautiful clear crystal clear streams of scripture and the early church fathers in fact their cry was at the time was ad fontes to the sources or back to the fountains is what it literally referred to this is how they wanted to learn their theology not by listening to the doctors of the church and so you have another factor another ingredient thrown in here matt where those men who were considered to be the official doctors of the church had developed theology by the time of the high middle ages to such a degree that you have these massively complicated important i mean much of aquinas is beautiful okay but massively complicated important structures of theology worked out and coming out of the italian renaissance with its focus on on the human on the human you know look at the paintings of the renaissance look at you know they had a new idea the humanists wanted to drink from the old and new testaments that is that those who were theologians wanted to they wanted to drink from the early church fathers they didn't want to listen to the doctors of the church anymore the educational philosophy at the time was becoming the this educational philosophy was becoming extremely popular in the colleges and the universities where young people were saying basically yeah you know to the devil with the scholastics let's just open our bibles and read them well what's funny ken is that this is such a cyclical thing within society and within christianity and within even protestantism um you know of course catholicism embraces at the end of the day the both end right it embraces i mean even thomas aquinas embraced the both hand because the same guy who wrote the scene with theologia wrote some of the most poetic and uh i would say you know beautiful heart heart uh rending hymns about you know uh the panas angelicus the tantamerico and some of these others that are some of the most beloved hymns of the church because they're just so moving and poetic the same guy who is writing about you know whatever whatever it is i read whatever it is i read right but you know i mean think about the uh well i'll just i'll read to you a tweet i won't attribute it because it's sure it's a tweet that was it came from a baptist seminary professor and it's been it's been the source of some theological debate on twitter over the past few days prior to when we recorded this i'll just read you the tweet to give you to capture the sentiment of 2021 to make you think about what you were just describing you know back in 1517 so this is what the professor says he says if you think high browtomism sourced in large part from analytic theology aristotle and dionysius is going to preach in countless baptist churches driven by love for the sufficiency of scripture i have a summer retreat in siberia to sell you at a low low price right is his argument is people in baptist churches they want to hear the love of the scriptures they don't want to hear your theological mumbo jumbo right yes it doesn't matter necessarily whether or not the the tomism is true like the people i'm talking to they don't want to hear about that right and essentially that's kind of what's going on i mean think about you ken were you saved because someone handed you a treatise on theology or are you part of the born-again christian thing that was like that's where the juice was oh yeah i read people getting excited yeah i was reading athanasius uh treat us on the on the um incarnation on the incarnation that's how that's how you know what is interesting though too um one of my professors uh of historical theology when i was in seminary was richard muller who has who is one of the world experts on protestant scholasticism and what he says is whereas protestantism began with luther and calvin and them you know going back to the bible again and going to the early church fathers and and kind of weaving out a fresh theology of their own within a hundred years protestantism also had had become scholastic and the great theologians of the protestant world were scholastic theologians where they had worked out the reformed faith in as much detail and uh fine-tuning as aquinas in them did at the time oh and and you get into neo-calvinism and neo-calvinism is every bit as mind-bending as aquinas yeah although not of your bit is right you know okay but so that's another that's so again i know this is repetitive but we need to get our minds into the situation so again do the numbers and just let your mind rest on this okay imagine the printing press is invented suddenly it's possible to print things and it's possible to print things that had never been printed before and to print small things pay you know page length two pages in length little tracks little pamphlets larger items tree disease books and people are able to buy them more people than ever could before and therefore literacy begins to really expand throughout europe at the time and then new ideas begin to arise new ideas about every subject under the sun but also new ideas about the bible new ideas about christianity and theology and what's being taught because of the increase in literacy schools are needed in a way that they weren't before colleges begin to pop up universities begin to pop up everywhere and they're catholic universities but within them there are faculties of theology that are young people younger men who are reading these pamphlets and reading these books getting excited about new ideas beginning to bat them around to debate them and to present them to their students as true and then at the very same time lo and behold an educational philosophy gaining foothold in particular in the universities which basically was saying the official theologians of the catholic church are abstract they're impractical they're boring let's bypass them let's leave them behind let's allow them to you know die you know and let's return to the pure simple study of the word of god and of the fathers and all of this you know these points we've made today all this is happening precisely in the decades leading up to the explosion that we refer to as the protestant reformation changing everything and and now to the main complaint that you hinted at a little bit earlier too someone could say this point what what are you guys saying are you guys saying that the inventor the printing press was a bad thing are you saying that literacy is a bad thing that it'd be better if no one could read or it'd be better if no if we didn't have books be better if we didn't have colleges and universities i mean when i look at some colleges and universities now i think yes but no i mean these things in in and of themselves are all good things literacy is a good thing the ability to print is a good thing the availability of printed materials and books is a good thing wanting in fact to interact to interact directly with scripture and the holy and the the early fathers this is a good thing too these are all good things and so all i'm saying here i want to be very clear in what i'm presenting all i'm saying here is that historically these amounted to ingredients that mixed with some other ingredients historical cultural societal moral spiritual we're going to get to that the mixed with some other ingredients i think we can see could have taken their place in creating an atmosphere of reaction an atmosphere of individualism an at an atmosphere of reaction against the claims of authority of a united church that is the catholic church the catholic church which we have been talking about in rather abstract uh terms this week because we haven't talked about the fact that the uh the thing that's about to get blown up is corrupted and full of rotten clergymen and full of bad actors who are operating fairly anonymously because there hasn't been a printing press or there hasn't been a marketplace of ideas and there hasn't been a whole bunch of people out there saying look at how bad these guys are right so we haven't even talked about the failures on the part of church leadership we're going to talk about eventually get reacted to by these triple explosions yeah and we're going to talk about that next week we're definitely going to get into that next week but you know step by step by step in fact when i think about the situation one kind of analogy that comes to mind is think think in terms of what happens when our kids become teenagers um you know when our kids begin to read for themselves they begin to think for themselves maybe when they go off to college and they face professors that have completely different world views than the one that they have learned from their parents um what i'm saying is what we're saying here is is pretty natural really at this point that with the invention of the printing press with reading with literacy with printed materials with the availability the ability to buy them with this humanist philosophy of saying let's go back add fontes let's go back to the sources is this very kind of a natural thing that was happening at that time that though mixed with other ingredients which are very important that we're going to get to next week um [Music] caused the explosion that well you know you kind of hit a bottom line if the church at the time that the clergy had been holy and had been extremely knowledgeable and holy and have been teaching people the word of god even these things might not have caused a reformation but when you mix that in boom yeah boom and again it's easier for us to understand the impact of the uh the printing press uh and its impact on media for those of us who've witnessed the impact of digital and social media and how that's gone kaboom in our own day and how it's fragmented society in so many ways yeah it's it's uh it's important you can't really understand the reformation until you understand all those things uh that were going on it's not as simple as someone was selling indulgences and martin luther didn't like it it's a lot more complicated than that and hopefully hopefully we've gotten into a little bit of that um and hopefully it's helped you know clarify some of the points that you yourself may have been confused on as a viewer or listener to on the journey with matt and ken but in the meantime we gotta wrap it up and we'll be back again next week uh with another part of the series on what the reformation was and why it happened please do come visit us at chnetwork.org that's the website for the coming home network but especially come and check out our online community which is community.chnetwork.org ken and i are in there mixing it up having chats with people just like yourself so come say hello oh ken okay until next time i'll see you matt bye-bye take care you too

Channel: The Coming Home Network International

Views: 1,301

Rating: 4.9480519 out of 5

Keywords: God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, Faith, Religion, Spirituality, Prayer, Old Testament, New Testament, Bible, Scripture, Tradition, Authority, Literacy, Gutenberg Press, Reformation, Martin Luther, Humanism, Scholasticism, Church History, early Church, middle ages, Protestant, Catholic, Philosophy, theology, apologetics, becoming Catholic, Pastors becoming Catholic, EWTN, Marcus Grodi, Journey Home, Printing Press, Baptist, Nazarene, Free Methodist, Asbury, Fuller Seminary

Id: q-kVga4FdbY

Length: 46min 18sec (2778 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 08 2021