Church History to the Reformation

Transcription

1 Church History to the Reformation CH506 LESSON 23 of 24 Garth M. Rosell, PhD Experience: Professor of Church History and Director Emeritus, Ockenga Institute at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary Lecture twenty-three. Greetings once again in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and let me invite you to join me in prayer as we begin class today. Let us pray. Our gracious Lord, we come to you once again in our need, asking that you would guide our thinking together, that what we do here would honor you. For we pray this in Christ s name. Amen. I want us to focus attention today on what is usually called the Renaissance, a period which roughly corresponds to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and which helps to form the backdrop for the coming of the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. The term renaissance, of course, was popularized first by Nicola s History of France, published in 1855 and further expanded by the important work by Jacob Burkhardt in Most of us, I suspect, think of the Renaissance as a kind of golden age of art and literature and classical scholarship. Our picture is largely the result of the influence of Jacob Burkhardt who suggested in his book, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, in 1860 that there was a great revival of literature and the arts during that time, following 1000 years of cultural sterility during the fourteenth and fifteenth century when it came and essentially came against the backdrop of the Dark Ages. The idea originated with Italian writers in the Renaissance. They didn t much appreciate futile literature or Gothic art or scholastic theology. They wanted to return to what they considered to be the pristine glory of Roman and Greek culture, the Classical Age. Voltaire, for example, presented the Middle Ages as a dark era of priestly tyranny. The way they wanted to see the world was the brightness of the Greco-Roman Era, followed by the 1000 years without a bat, followed by the great Renaissance outbreak of new light, of liberated reason, of new art. 1 of 14

2 This classic interpretation, which has been a very popular one was based in Burkhardt s terms and accounted for by the special genius of the Italian people, the growth of individualism, the kind of creative energy of that age, an age of some moral chaos. Reaction against the Burkhardt thesis came in the end of the nineteenth century and has been continued ever since. Henry Thode, for example wrote about the Franciscans finding that they were simply as individualistic in Burkhardt s terms as anything that was found in Italy during the time of the Renaissance. This was the first serious challenge to Burkhardt, but not the last, for others came to find the Renaissance growth and vitality way back in the twelfth century. Scholars like Huizinga called attention to the continuity of Medieval ideas and forms in the Renaissance period. We do know, however, that there were important changes at the close of the Middle Ages. Though we need not accept Burkhardt s rather stark contrast between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, there were some differences that emerged at the end of the Middle Ages in the period we call the Renaissance. Those are particularly important to us as we move toward the sixteenth century Reformation. Much of the Reformation thought grows out of that era of both continuity and change which we call the Renaissance a time when society moved away from an Agrarian economy to one based on money, from a rural society to an urban society, from agriculture to trade. Now there were a good many conservative elements in Medieval civilization. The two most dominant influences were Feudalism and the church. Medieval life was molded by these institutions. The two, in fact, were very closely interwoven. Both reached their heights in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Both were conservative; both tended to stand against social change. Feudalism, of course, had grown out of a series of ninth century bargains brought about during the collapse of the effective control of a central government after the disillusion of the Carolingian Empire in Europe. People came to find themselves in jeopardy due to Viking or Magyar attacks and the other unsettling features of European life at this time. Citizens sought protection from private lords since the central government was powerless or seemed powerless to help them. In the eighth century, commerce in the North and merchants in urban centers had been thriving, but increasingly collapsed. So in the ninth through the eleventh centuries, Europe was left as a largely agricultural economy; little trade of goods and small need for any kind of money or the use of money. Barter was used 2 of 14

3 to exchange goods and services. Land became the all-important commodity. Wealth and status, in fact, depended upon one s holding of land. Feudalism then was that economic system which seemed to grow up with the times in the late Middle Ages, built upon that mutual relationship of responsibility and privileges between lords and vassals which central ideas to the whole concept of Feudalism. Along with Feudalism, one of the conserving elements of that society was the church. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries had witnessed a revival of learning and of veneration of the past in the church. The clergy did the thinking in the Medieval world, by and large. They built the idea of society on Paul s body concept, each in his or her own place. The peasants were to work, the nobles were to fight, and the clergy were to pray and think. Each should be content with his lot. The church stood then against merchants and money lenders whose life was based on gaining money. The Gill System fit the picture well. The ideas were largely blocked in terms of any growth and development of a capitalistic or moneyed economy. Feudal decentralization made rulers weak and made the church strong. Church membership in many area, in fact, was more important that national citizenship. The two basic levels of authority in the latter part of the Middle Ages were the local lords and the universal church. This isn t to say that there weren t many dynamic elements also in Medieval society. We ve had a chance to look at a good many of those since the Middle Ages was hardly a dark age; it was a period of growth and vitality and change as well. And we see this in terms of elements of commerce, of money, of towns which began to bring new life in the latter part of the Middle Ages. Commercial revival began with the reopening of trade between Italian coast towns and the Byzantine Empire in the eleventh century. Towns and trade hadn t completely disappeared in Italy. It was far more prevalent there than we find it in the North in this period. The Crusades, in fact, stimulated commerce as we ve suggested before. In the North active commerce grew in the Netherlands, so that the two great centers of commerce emerged as the Netherlands and Italy. They first handled goods which couldn t be locally produced spices, silks, and so on and these prompted expanded use of money as a means of exchange. It also produced growth in town life. It pulled people away from the soil. It also formed a whole new class of people in Medieval society, the 3 of 14

4 burghers. These were added to the three primary classes the noble, the clergy, and the peasant. The gained a sort of individual freedom. There was a new structure of laws that was emerging. Most towns were still under a lord, but there was an increased push for self-government. These Medieval towns were social and economic units. They were largely self-contained, and they started a change, a kind of revolution in cultural values which we see by the time of the Reformation. They gave agriculture a new market. They brought people a variety of goods and gave them a taste for that variety. They broke down isolations. They introduced moneyed economies. They helped finance new cultural pursuits the building of cathedrals, the establishment of universities, and the like. In addition there was a rise of centralized territorial states. The changes reached a climax at the end of the thirteenth century when conservative forces began to change under the pressure of all of these dynamic new developments. Political organization was perhaps the first to change. With a moneyed economy, the kings could finally build strong centralized states. By the end of the fifteenth century, in fact, the English, French, and Spanish kings had largely crushed political Feudalism, and gradually the state was emerging as the most significant unit in European life. Germany, of course, breaks that rule, however, remaining basically a system of territorial principalities for much longer than many of the other areas. Also during this period, landed gentry were suffering economic decline. Central government was, of course, growing and the kings aligned themselves with the burghers often against the nobility, so that you see a basic shift taking place here from Medieval with the focus upon the local lord and the church as authority centers to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when the state and the moneyed economy take over as control through the whole of society. The main losers in this process were the nobility. They had no means of getting money, at least, in the early years. Their wealth was land and the tenants that they could secure to work it. Rents were set and as prices rose, they got poorer and poorer, relatively. Also the overhead tended to be going through the roof. The Feudal unit began to disintegrate, personal obligations started to fall as governments provided the protection that citizens wanted and before this time could only get from the local lord. 4 of 14

5 Along with this, the Medieval Church was declining. The end of the thirteenth century was a turning point in the history of the church. The supremacy of popes, which they had enjoyed over secular rulers, began to falter. A new secular culture challenged the old clerical domination. The new states began to assert their sovereignty. For example, when Boniface VIII in the thirteenth century tried to assert his temporal sovereignty, he met with strong opposition, especially France and England. The pope s bull Unam Sanctum in 1302 was an uncompromising statement of the authority of the popes, but this led to a confrontation between Boniface VIII and Philip IV. The result was that the French monarchy was victorious, not the church. The election of the French pope came after Boniface. The transfer of the capital of Christendom from Rome to Avignon and you remember that story of what is called the Babylonian Captivity of the Church in the fourteenth century. The spectacle of two popes one at Rome and one at Avignon was a difficult problem for the church and it tended to undermine the authority of the central ruling powers of the church, and it elevated the power of the councils over the papacy. The popes were losing great prestige and were deeply weakened by this. By the fifteenth century, then, the pope was considered just like any other European national power with a territory that he owned and controlled in Italy, working treaties called Concordats with others, with very little authority beyond that which any local government would have. Like the nobles, you see, the church s power was in the land, and they began to feel the pinch as the movement was away from a landed economy toward a moneyed economy. They had many benefices, like a patronage system, which they gave, but it often left the parish untended. So you have emerging this problem of absentee church leaders. The church needed money, so they collected more and more with more and more difficult and suspicious means the use or some would say abusive indulgences, the sale of papal pardons, church offices bought for a price. In the fourteenth century, then, there was not only a rise of the attempt of the church to gain money, which they needed now in a new moneyed economy. But a growing storm of criticism and protest against the papacy and against the clergy, many of whom were now becoming personally wealthy as a result of the sale of church benefits. Many were there to criticize the trend, including the Franciscans within the Catholic Church. Others cried out against the abuses Wycliffe in England, Hus in Bohemia these 5 of 14

6 and others challenged the ecclesiastical authority. But this whole process that I ve been describing helped to lay the foundation for what was to come in the sixteenth century. Let s turn our attention before we come to that, however, to the development of the Renaissance in Italy, which is the very heart and soul of early Renaissance development. Here it revolves again around the economic revolution of the cities. The challenge to Medieval civilization came first in Italy. Feudalism had disappeared there before the end of the thirteenth century. This was replaced by the growth of city states and very rapid urbanization. Italy, in fact, was a land of cities. This was caused largely by trade. They had a natural and very helpful location for trade between the East and the West. And since the eleventh century, they had held commercial supremacy, a position that they continued to enjoy up until about Italy, in fact, was becoming very rich because of this trade and well-developed. They had a complex system of banking. This had been worked out in the earlier centuries, but now had emerged as a full-blown commercial capitalism. Merchants gradually gained control of most of the industries the cloth industry, the leather industry, for example. And in Florence in the fourteenth century, some 30,000 people, a third of the population, worked in the woolen cloth trade. The weavers were paid wages by the great wool merchants. In Pisa, the leather trade was very much the same, dominating the life of the people there, and again underscoring the growing power of this moneyed merchant class. Large industries began to develop around this system. The two great woolen cloth guilds in Florence were the Arte Della Lana and the Calimala, both of them controlled by a very small group of very wealthy merchants. Many trades, of course, were much more localized goldsmith trade, to some extent the armor makers and the like and these tended to follow more of the Medieval guild pattern. But the wave of the future was to be the larger, merchant controlled moneyed economy and the trades that grew out of it. Banking and lending were also developed. The church at first frowned on usury. That had been an ancient taboo. But gradually they began to modify their views. It s interesting to explore this process of change and the attitude toward usury toward the interest on the loan of money which has been an ongoing debate in the life of the church, but gained particular prominence during 6 of 14

7 this period. Between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, Italian bankers really held a kind of monopoly on the money economy in Europe. Most of the land held by the end of the thirteenth century was held by burghers or merchant nobles. The top of the society was this wealthy, newly urban class. We see that effect in political evolution in the Italian states. In Italy, unlike most of the other areas, the cities helped destroy central government. By 1300 each city, except perhaps the kingdom of Naples, had become a center for a separate territorial state, and it was the struggle between the state and the papacy that weakened imperial authority between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. The cities played one power against the other, sometimes pressing the state, other times pressing the church, but using that struggle to gain their own prominence and power and authority within Italy. Political power, you see, rested in the cities, not in the rural areas. Nobles had long since been lured into the cities. The story of Renaissance politics is a rather large muddle. Each city state had its own history and struggles, and although later Venice, Milan, and Florence were to emerge as the dominant powers in all of Italy, during its earlier years, you have many competing interests, focused in the cities, but having each one its own particular unique history. What generalizations can we make then about political development in Italy during the Renaissance? Well, political development was largely determined by the nature of the city s economic life and the relation of classes within the city, and these become increasingly important as we move into the period of the Reformation. In nearly every city, furthermore, republican government broke down and was replaced increasingly by the rule of a despite. Cities began in theory as burgher democracies. Actually, the way it worked was that they came to be ruled by rich merchants and nobles called grandi. They led the cities in their struggle for independence. During the thirteenth century, the dominance of the grandi, these nobles or wealthy families, came to be challenged by a rising class of new rich the merchants, the bankers, the industrial capitalists. These folks were called popolo grosso, the fat people. Below the popolo grosso and grandi were the middle classes and small burghers. They were the guild masters and professionals called popolos. They stressed local trade. At the very bottom of the society were the popolo minute, the workers. They had absolutely no political rights and certainly no economic clout. 7 of 14

8 In most of the cities these classes battled for control, particularly the top two classes, the popolo grasso and the grandi. In Florence the grandi put out of power by the popolo grasso in 1300 tried endlessly to rework their way back into power. In 1378 in Florence, the weavers and workers held power for a short time. In 1382 the popolo grasso again had worked their way into control, which lasted until 1434, until the time of the famous Cosimo de Medici took over control. Thus party and class struggles kept politics in a constant turmoil, and finally tended to discredit republican government itself. By 1300 there was a growing conviction that the only solution was the rule of one person, even though that may be a despite, and even though the mortality rate was enormously high among such despites. The concept of a state as a law unto itself and a division between public and private morality came very early to Italy. This is the location of Machiavelli, the prince, after all. The state commanded no deep loyalty. It tended to be a functional unit. They even hired all the troops to do their fighting for them. Called condottiere, these were the military entrepreneurs who picked up the spirit of the time and sold their services. Many times their services were all that good, but they did free the people of the land who had money to pay for it from having to do the fighting themselves. By the time of the French invasion of 1494, five large states dominated Italy Venice, Milan, Florence, Naples, and, of course, the Papal States. There seemed to be very little national patriotism and eventually this is going to seal the doom of the Italians in the next century. Intellectual and cultural life, however, under this kind of new urban society, tended to thrive. Distinction of birth was important in Italy, family pride was strong, but position in society was based increasingly on wealth and culture, rather than on birth. There was great stress upon achievement, especially entrepreneurial achievement. Education became more wide-spread, and you can see where it would within that context. It came to depend also less upon the clergy and more upon the secular forces. Educated, urban laypersons began to emerge as central to the new life of culture and art and development within the society. These are the folk that promoted the arts, that promoted literature, and that were the patrons of those who produced the art. flourished, essentially on surplus capital by a newly moneyed, 8 of 14

9 urbanized trade-related society. Artists and educated persons took on increased importance. You see this in the Vasari s Famous Lives of Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. The upper classes monopolized this new spirit freedom of thought and action, refinement of social interaction, physical luxury, enjoyment of life, sophisticated worldliness. This Renaissance spirit, however, touched only that upper portion of society. The middle and lower classes were far too busy trying to make a living and were largely untouched by that kind of Renaissance leisurely artistic development. It was among the upper classes, then, that individualism and full development of personality as Jacob Burkhardt described it in his book tended to exist. The de Medici family, for example, a wealthy, powerful family, produced not only bankers and wool merchants, but politicians and poets and even popes. The city provided more chances for individual advancement, and it produced also the growth of Italian culture. People s attitudes toward God, the world, and toward others tended to change with their environment. An urban society in Italy by the thirteenth century gradually emphasized the ideas and modes which were caught up with the changes of this era. One of the shifts was in the growth of a more secular spirit, especially among the upper classes. They were drifting away from ascetic other-worldliness and churchlymindedness to wealthy this-worldliness, the problem we know very well, but one which begins to emerge and helps again to form part of the backdrop against which the Reformation can take place. They are less willing to let the clergy do their thinking for them. They want to do their thinking for themselves. Even the institutional church was becoming more temporally minded. This change, however, did not reach into the areas of dogma. There were very few heretics or atheists at this time. Religion simply had to compete with more ideas and more preoccupations and more secular interests. The one religious revival of the Renaissance was a rebellion, in fact, against the leaders of the church, led by Savonarola in the late fifteenth century. Yet in general the thrust was that of apathy. Interest centered not around theology of the church, but now around the new, exciting secular moneyed economy the making of money, the buying of goods, the enjoyment of what leisure could bring. This is seen in the literature, the scholarship, the sculpture, the painting of the day. The Gothic of the Middle 9 of 14

10 Ages began to change to the Realism of the fifteenth century and ultimately to the Classicism of the sixteenth century. We see this in the literature of the Italian Renaissance. In the fourteenth century, literature began to flourish. There were two basic trends the growth in Italian vernacular literature and the revival of classical Latin and Greek literature. We see this in the work of Dante in the thirteenth century, combining the chivalrous and clerical traditions, the idealized love, and scholastic philosophy in the Middle Ages. His divine comedy really marks a kind of boundary between the Medieval and the Renaissance world and culture. Petrarch in the fourteenth century moves further from Medieval thought. He s one of the first of the new breed of secular people of letters. He lived by and for his writing. His Italian sonnets are less formal and more directly personal and begin to reflect this new mood. Picasso in the fourteenth century, Petrarch s friend drew even farther away from his Medieval moorings in subject matter and form. We see this in the novella and the di Cameron. Florence, in fact, played an important central role in the literature of this period, as in all of the other arts. The great intellectual and artistic people of the day tended to be Florentine. It made Tuscan the dialect of the literary people of Italy. This was later, of course, abandoned in favor of Greek. In the fifteenth and sixteenth century, the literature of the Italian Renaissance tended to focus on the classics of Rome and Greece. The Florentine, Leonardo Bruni, in the fourteenth century, gave the name Humanist to the new learning. The word was actually borrowed from Cicero. It meant that form of culture most worthy of the dignity of man. Most of the fifteenth century spirit tended to aim toward restoring the ancient classics, yet those very ancient writers tended to inhibit originality and very little of the writing of this period in Italy now exists. Much of it was very little more than a copy of the ancients. Though recovered the old Greco- Roman culture, they did not expand upon it in any significant way. Some, however, like Lorenzo Valla in the fifteenth century criticized all authority, even that which had come from Cicero and the other Greek and Roman masters. There also came a revival of Greek literature in the form of the writings of Aristotle and Plato. Cosimo de Medici founded the great Platonic Academy, which became the intellectual center of Florence in the fifteenth century. Led by people like Marsilio 10 of 14

11 Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. They taught there in the academy, combining the ideal of truth with the kind of growing undogmatic Christian ethic. Following this period, basically in the mid-fifteenth century on, there was a movement away from the classical forms, the Greek and the Roman, back into more genuinely Italian forms. There was a revival of the native tongue and the use of Italian language. There was a decline in the ancient study of the Greek and Roman tongues. In the sixteenth century we see this developed with Machiavelli and some of his colleagues. Italian became the standard for writing once again. In art, France, of course, had dominated the Gothic period, but Italy now came to dominate the art of the Renaissance. Art of the twelfth and thirteenth century was almost exclusively religious. The clergy were the ones who patronized the art and who encouraged it and architecture tended to rule. By the end of the thirteenth century, a departure from this Gothic style was beginning from the older Byzantine style. We see this in Giotto s, The Saint of Assisi, which was pretty largely Medieval, but foreshadowed the beginnings of the new. In the fourteenth century, paintings and other forms of art moved closer to nature a kind of embryonic naturalism and by the fifteenth century, there was a decisive change in painting and sculpture. Naturalism reached its maturity. It reflected secular realism with a much wider range of subjects, not only religious ones, but now secular ones. And often patronized not by the church any longer, but by wealthy merchants, they strove to reproduce nature as closely as they could, and you see this in the work of Masaccio. Paintings began to solve technical problems lighting and shadow and perspective. This is picked up further by Donatello with his realistic sculpture, his reproduction of the human figure. The great period of art, of course was from 1500 to 1525 with Michelangelo and Rafael and Leonardo Da Vinci, all names that we know very well. Here s we have the classical style of the High Renaissance. In no other place and no other time did it reach a greater peak than at this time and in Italy. Of course a good bit was going on in Europe as well. was not as early established in the North as it had been in Italy, but it began to develop there and eventually took over control of the development of Renaissance thought. 11 of 14

12 The economic evolution of the North in the fourteenth and fifteenth century parallels what had happened earlier in Italy. There were decisive changes in the character and organization of society, decline of Feudalism, decline of the Medieval Church, rise of natural states, and rise of a moneyed economy. They also were being urbanized, yet the cities did not become as they had in Italy, the focal centers of all economic, social, and political life. There are important reasons for these changes. There s the growth of capital, of course, the growth of secular cultures, the most distinctive character of the Renaissance, art began as elsewhere to flourish within these northern centers. So did commerce and the growth of commercial capital, banking, lending. State finance developed more slowly in the North, but perhaps even more solidly. By the end of the fifteenth century, banking was in fact dominated by families like the Fuggers in Augsburg. This was also the age of discovery. The changing fortunes of the European States were often tied to what they found elsewhere in the world. By the end of the fifteenth century, the Netherlands, Germany, France, and England began to compete with Italy in banking and commerce. The discoveries of the New World changed things too. sixteenth century triumph of the Atlantic, the demise of Italy, the triumph in Europe of Capitalism. Old Flemish cities began to decline too, followed by the rise of places like Antwerp and others. The English wool trade came to outstrip the Netherland s trade. In the sixteenth century Antwerp in fact became the greatest industrial and commercial city in the North, the very financial capital of Europe. At the same time came the rise of the Dutch. England and France also grew in power and wealth. And Germany, although it had no national government or economy, was also developing through the combination of German cities in the Hanseatic League. They came to play an important role in the trade of the Baltic and the North Sea. There was great growing competition, as the same things that we saw happening in Italy began to evolve now in the northern areas of Europe the concentration of people in cities, the development of liquid capital, the rise of a wealthy, leisured class of educated urban laypeople, the growing consciousness of individual personality and the like. It differed somewhat from Italy in that European government and its authority extended no further than the city walls. In the North, the burghers were a purely urban class, cut off from the landholding nobles and clergy. 12 of 14

13 The literati of the Northern Renaissance were people like Johann Reuchlin, Sir Thomas Moore, Guillaume Budé, Muntane, and others. There s tremendous growth and lay education in politics. No political democracy as such, but political structures beginning to emerge around a more monarchical structure. The courts, in fact, became the centers for learning and the arts, and you see that in the growth of secular culture and lay piety in the North. Secularization was neither so intense or all inclusive in Europe as it had been in Italy, but it was growing. And it s going to become an important ingredient in the understanding of the growth of the Reformation period. There were strong anti-clerical sentiments in the North. They were shocked by the Avignon papacy, by the schisms in the church. The North also had a strong mystic tradition, which can be seen in John Tauler and Meister Eckhart and others who taught an innersubjective religion, a personal rather than institutional faith. You see this in Thomas a Kempis Imitation of Christ. Nowhere is this better seen in the North, however, than in the great Humanist Movement. This played an important part in the North. It was imported actually from Italy. The twelfth century Renaissance had involved the ancient authors, especially in the cathedrals and monasteries in the North. But with the growth of the northern universities, ancient literature was pushed into the background and the emphasis came to be on dialectic, metaphysics, and theology. Humanism, which came through those wandering Italian scholars in the period from , reached its height in Europe in It throve in the cities among the burghers. It developed along both secular and religious lines. In theology, they wished to return to the ancient text to see and read in Greek and Hebrew, to point to the errors in the Vulgate, to ignore the allegorical interpretations which had so long dominated, and stress morals rather than concrete theology. Johann Reuchlin was one of the pioneers in Hebrew studies in the North. The greatest name, however, was Erasmus of Rotterdam, the great Dutch humanist and international leader. Erasmus dates are He s a fascinating figure, one who entered the monastery, later left, never to return to it. He wandered, lived as a freelance writer and a scholar in Paris, in cities in England and Italy and Leuven, in Basel, and so on. He enjoys a prestige (I think a well-earned prestige) beyond any European literary figure. He tied the secular and religious 13 of 14

14 aspects together, published his Greek New Testament in He published his Letters of St. Jerome. He attacked the institutional church unmercifully for its weaknesses and malpractices, and he began to plow the soil for the Reformation which came very much indebted to not only all of the other humanists, but to Erasmus in particular. The art of the Northern Renaissance flourished as well, and we see that developing on many fronts the Flemish painters like Jan van Eyck or Hugo van der Goes or the German artist, Albrecht Durer or Hans Holbein, the younger. Many others could be named as well. Well, what are we to conclude, then, from all of this survey of Renaissance thought? Though we don t know exactly when the Renaissance ended, we do know, however, that it was an important transitional period between the Medieval Church and the coming of the Reformation. The institutions which had tended to be feudal, rural, a culture which had tended to organize itself around the church. The structures of those Feudal lords was changed into a society which was profoundly secular, lay-oriented, moneyed, urban, and increasingly national. It is from that foundation that the sixteenth century Protestant Movement begins to develop. It s in that soil that our Reformation thought is planted and begins to flourish. Christ-Centered Learning Anytime, Anywhere 14 of 14