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Three basic forces dominated sixteenth-century religious life. Two polarized groups, Protestant and Catholic reformers, were shaped by theological debates, over the nature of the church, salvation, prayer, and other issues. These debates articulated critical, group-defining oppositions. Bystanders to the Catholic-Protestant competition were a third force. Their reactions to reformers were violent, opportunistic, hesitant, ambiguous, or serendipitous, much the way social historians have described common people in the Reformation for the last fifty years. But in an ecology of three forces, hesitations and compromises were natural, not just among ordinary people, but also, if more subtly, among reformers and theologians. In this volume, Christopher Ocker offers a constructive and nuanced alternative to the received understanding of the Reformation. Combining the methods of intellectual, cultural, and social history, his book demonstrates how the Reformation became a hybrid movement produced by a binary of Catholic and Protestant self-definitions, by bystanders to religious debate, and by the hesitations and compromises made by all three groups during the religious controversy.
Ockham is often described as the origin of the via moderna, “a current way” in competition with the via antiqua, “an old way.” These terms are often used to structure late medieval intellectual history around a new “nominalism” and a reactionary “realism.” But they are misleading. The “conflict of the ways” (Wegestreit in German historiography) only took definite shape two generations after Ockham’s death. It was prompted not by “nominalism” but by an aggressive, “hyper-realism” taught by John Wyclif. Another related but separate and equally important tension was also at play, between the analytical pedagogy encouraged by a prevalent terminism and a more expository commentary style. This changes the way we must see the force of the “conflict of the ways” in intellectual life. It becomes an illustration of a central quality in all knowledge production: the ludic culture of the schools. Luther, rather than being a nominalist, provides eloquent testimony to scholastic playfulness, an essential quality of a long, hybrid Reformation.
During the Middle Ages, the justification of humanity increasingly came to be linked with an explicitly sacramental economy of salvation, with a particular emphasis upon the sacramenta mortuorum (baptism and penance) as the divinely ordained means of establishing and restoring justification. This chapter considers this development, which forged an increasingly robust link between the practice of justification and the institution of the church. Although the possibility of extra-sacramental justification was recognised, the normative account of the initiation and restoration of justification was now firmly linked with the sacramental ministry of the church. This chapter explores the development of this move, and considers its implications. In closing, it turns to deal with some trends in Renaissance biblical scholarship which opened up new and important questions in relation to the theory and practice of justification, such as the revision of the accepted words of Christ on beginning his ministry from ‘Do penance, for the kingdom of God is at hand’ to ‘Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand’.
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