Christian History Home > Issue 72 > Battle For the Past
Battle For the Past
As traditions clashed during the Reformation, history became hotly disputed territory.
Timothy George | posted 10/01/2001 12:00AM
Two perennial theological questions—"What must I do to be saved?" and "Where can I find the true church?"—took on special urgency in the Reformation era as the Christian world experienced an unprecedented crisis of authority. This crisis and its various resolutions all had roots in Renaissance learning.
As Copernicus and Galileo opened the heavens, and Columbus and Magellan mapped the world, humanist scholars such as Petrarch and Bruni encouraged a new interest in the study of history, especially the history of ancient Greece and Rome. The motto of all Renaissance scholars was ad fontes, "back to the sources," and the heart of this enterprise was the careful study of documents and texts. Sometimes these studies led to a radical critique of the institutional church and traditional theology (see "Church History's Biggest Hoax," page 35).
By the time of the Reformation, Desiderius Erasmus was applying the same kind of scholarly analysis to the Scriptures themselves. He produced a new edition ...
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