Kevin Smith. If you want to read a great book on the late medieval church and the Protestant Reformation, I highly recommend Diarmaid MacCullochs book on the subject! He has a great flair for framing the real issues over what gave the western church in the late middle ages both great vitality and great vulnerability at the same time, as this passage illustrates: Already the meeting of art, drama, human fears and hopes in the unpretentious village churches of Preston Bissett and Wenhaston has sent us many hundreds of miles across Europe. That may help us understand the power and European-wide scope of the organization which tore itself apart in the sixteenth-century Reformation. Nicholas Ridley, one of the talented scholarly clergy who rebelled in England against the old Church, wrote about this to one of his fellow rebels John Bradford in 1554, while they both lay in prisons waiting for the old Church to burn them for heresy. As Bishop Ridley reflected on the strength of their deadly enemy, which now he saw as the power of the devil himself, he said that Satans old world of false religion stood on two most massy posts and mighty pillars... These two, sir, are they in my judgement: the one his false doctrine and idolatrical use of the Lords supper; and the oher, the wicked and abominable usurpation of the primacy of the see of Rome. So just as Preston Bissetts chancel arch was supported by its two grotesque stone figures, the whole system of the medieval western Church was built on the Mass and on the central role of the Pope. Without the Mass, indeed, the Pope in Rome and the clergy of the Western Church would have had no power for the Protestant reformers to challege, for the Mass was centerpiece around which all the complex devotional life of the Church revolved. We must examine its significance at length, and in particular he doctrine of Purgatory; for Ridley, this would have been at the heart of the false doctrine which distorted the Mass from its origins in the eucharistic meal.- Chapter 1: The Old Church, 1490-1517
Posted on: Mon, 07 Apr 2014 23:06:13 +0000
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