Teacher: R.V. Seep
For a millennium, the Christian Church weathered myriad pressures: Popes, councils, monastic orders, scholars, heretics (actual as well as alleged), and many others, sought with minimal success to reform its practices and correct its doctrine. Then, in a series of rapidly unfolding events ignited by the excommunication of a German monk and university professor, a religious revolt swept across Europe that changed the face of Christianity in the West. The towering edifice of medieval Christianity collapsed; a new and convulsive era began. We live in the wake of that era. Four streams of reform arising in that age set the stage for the modern Church: the so-called magisterial Reformation, the radical Reformation, the “middle way” of the English, and the response of Roman Catholicism.