Lecture 25: The Medieval Age in Review, and the Voices Before Luther

The lecture, section by section

1. The councils in one ladder

   Nicaea 325, the deity of Christ against Arius. Constantinople 381, Arianism buried, the Spirit confessed, Apollinarianism condemned. Ephesus 431, Theotokos affirmed to guard the incarnation, Nestorianism condemned. The Robber Synod of 449 pushing Eutyches's one nature, overturned at Chalcedon 451, two natures in one person, the hypostatic union. Constantinople II in 553 reaffirming Chalcedon in the east; Constantinople III in 680, two wills; Hieria in 754 banning icons, overturned at Nicaea II in 787 under the empress Irene; and, far ahead, Constance, 1414 to 1418, ending the papal schism and burning Jan Hus, whose mentor Wycliffe the church hated enough to exhume and burn his bones.

2. The Crusades in one paragraph

   1095 to about 1290: Urban II preaching at Alexius's appeal; the peasants annihilated, the princes taking Jerusalem in 1099; the Second Crusade losing what the first had won; the Third fielding Barbarossa, who drowned, Richard the Lionheart, and Philip Augustus, all outmatched by Saladin; the Fourth sacking Constantinople in 1204; the Children's Crusade ending in disillusionment and slavery; and Louis IX dying on the last of them, canonized for the effort, the Saint Louis after whom the Missouri city is named. The orders to know: Templars, Hospitallers, and the Teutonic Knights of the northern crusades.

3. Leaders, heretics, and emperors, at speed

   The review runs the roster: Chrysostom the expositor, Augustine of Hippo the theologian of grace, Jerome the translator, Nestorius and his accuser Cyril, Dioscorus and Eutyches, Leo of the Tome and of Attila, Leontius of Constantinople II, Gregory the missionary pope and his missionary Augustine of Canterbury; the heretics Arius, Apollinarius, Eutyches, Nestorianism, Pelagius, and Muhammad, whose Quran borrows the Bible's prophets while denying the cross and resurrection; the emperors Constantine, Julian the Apostate, the two Theodosii, Justinian, and the iconoclast line undone twice by iconodule empresses, Irene and Theodora, the sequence the course set out fully in lecture twenty; then Charles Martel at Tours, Charlemagne crowned in 800, Alexius I of the crusade appeal, the tangled Alexiuses of 1204, and Mehmed II with Orban's bombard at the walls in 1453.

4. New names: Damascus, Albertus, Ockham

   Among the medieval scholars the review adds three. John of Damascus, the leading theologian of medieval Eastern Orthodoxy. Albertus Magnus, teacher of Aquinas at Paris and among the first to teach that science and religion need not conflict, a thesis with a long future. And William of Ockham, whose famous razor, prefer the explanation with the fewest assumptions, entered Christian apologetics in this era and has been contested territory ever since; Busenitz's aside: a Creator is a far simpler explanation than evolution.

5. Abelard's other legacy: the moral influence theory

   The review adds a third atonement theory to Anselm's satisfaction and the old ransom view: Abelard's moral influence theory, in which Christ's death pays for nothing and instead models supreme sacrificial love for us to imitate. Busenitz flags its long shadow: the modern liberal understanding of the cross is the moral influence theory reborn, which makes the medieval debate anything but academic.

6. Trueman's millennium

   A discussion of Plato and Aristotle yields the lecture's biggest claim, borrowed from Carl Trueman: the most significant event of the last thousand years in western Christianity was not the Reformation but the philosophical shift from Platonism, where faith precedes reason, to Aristotelianism, where reason claims to precede everything, the shift that ripened into the Enlightenment. Trueman means it as tragedy, not praise. Busenitz draws the apologetic payoff: modern 'science and reason' culture is itself a faith-based philosophical system, one that rejects the unseen world by faith, while Scripture is candid in Hebrews 11 that faith is the conviction of things not seen.

7. Nominalism and humanism, defined properly

   Two easily misread terms get precise definitions. Nominalism is the denial of Plato's universals, the rejection of that perfect realm of forms, nothing to do with the modern sense of a nominal Christian. And humanism, in the medieval and Renaissance sense, is the rediscovery of the humanities, the languages and learning of antiquity, nothing to do with modern secular humanism; its princes prepared the Reformation's tools: Erasmus, whose critical Greek New Testament underlies Tyndale's English and Luther's German Bibles; Reuchlin, who restored Hebrew to western education; and Lefevre, the French translator whose influence reached a young John Calvin.

8. The Roman system, itemized

   The review names the machinery the reformers would confront: the Treasury of Merit, heaven's account of surplus credit from Christ, Mary, and the saints, drawn upon through sacramental works; indulgences, in that era bought outright to shorten purgatory, the very racket Luther's ninety five theses attack; purgatory itself, in Busenitz's pointed definition the place where Christians allegedly pay for the sins Christ could not; limbo, only lately abandoned; the Assumption of Mary; and mandatory clerical celibacy, made official at the First Lateran Council in 1123.

9. The papacy's review dates

   One more short ladder: Leo III crowned Charlemagne in 800; Hadrian I, his rival predecessor, first summoned the Franks against the Lombards; Leo V's two month reign stands for the murderous tenth century; Leo IX's delegation to the patriarch Michael Cerularius split the church in 1054; Urban II preached the First Crusade; Gregory XI ended the Babylonian captivity; and Martin V, elected at Constance, ended the schism after a council declared three reigning popes false.

10. The voices before Luther

    The course ends on its encouragement: even as the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 made the sacramental system official, God was already raising protest. Peter Waldo and the Poor Men of Lyon, the Waldensians, from the twelfth century, a movement that survived to join the Reformation itself; John Wycliffe and the Lollards in England, preaching Scripture alone and faith alone; Jan Hus and the Hussites in Bohemia, and the Moravian church that grew from them; and Savonarola in Florence in the late 1400s. Luther, when he comes, will see himself not as an originator but as heir to generations of witnesses, and in God's providence his stand will ignite what theirs could not. The gospel, the course's last word insists, was obscured in the Middle Ages but never lost, and the Reformation is where the story goes next.

1. Luther saw himself as heir to generations of witnesses, not an originator. How does that reframe both the Reformation and your own place in the church's long story?

2. Trueman calls the faith-to-reason shift the millennium's most significant event. Where do you feel that shift's pressure in your own thinking, and how does Hebrews 11 answer it?

3. The course's last word is that the gospel was obscured but never lost. Having walked all twenty five lectures, where did you see God most clearly preserving his truth?