Ep.124 - The Road to Reformation: The Church Before Luther

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Some imagine that justification by faith, the great rallying cry of the reformation, was a specifically Protestant invention, and more particularly, a Luther invention! Yet as early as 1511 (6yrs before Luther), Cardinal Gasparo Contarini came to an understanding of justification by faith, and was desirous to debate it within the Catholic hierarchy.

That being said, the church collective, was not in a very healthy state in the fifteenth century. The corruptive systemic elements of simony (clerical offices for sale), immorality, and indulgences (purgatory for sale), were deeply entrenched in the Catholic Church. Humanism and the renaissance were question biblical interpretation under the cry; Ad fontes—“to the sources!” Whilst irritants like John Wycliffe and his Lollards, and Jan Hus and his Hussites were causing no end of friction!

In this first episode of our brand new series, The Reformation Road, the Curious team launch into faith in the fifteenth century. What were the influences, the burgeoning practices, the defective thinking that summoned the need for such a seismic change as a Europe-wide reformation ? Who were the instigators, the key personalities that caused many to look beyond the present to see alternative possibilities?

Join the Curious Team this week as they step back in history and seek to review pre-reformation forces that would herald irreversible change.

Further Reading
In an attempt to maintain balance, we have listed below brief overviews of the reformation from both Protestant and catholic perspectives…

The State of the Church Before the Reformation - ModernReformation.org

Searching for Gospel-Centred Theology Before the Reformation - TheGospelCoalition.org

What we’re reading?
As a feature to our notes, we are adding the book or books that we’ve been browsing and reading as part of this series. So here goes. We’ve been getting stuck into the following;

Nick Page — A Nearly Infallible History of the Reformation

Diarmaid MacCulloch — Reformation (Europe’s House Divided)

Richard Rex —The Making of Martin Luther

Andrew Pettegree — Brand Luther

Michael Reeves — The Unquenchable Flame

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