Ways That the Rise of Christianity Impacted Art in Medieval Europe

Question

What touch on did the Renaissance have on Christianity?

Answer

The Renaissance was a time of renewed interest in a report of the Humanities, beginning in Italy and spreading throughout Europe in the 14th through the 16th centuries. The Renaissance brought a revival of art, literature, and learning and constituted the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern age. The widespread impact of the Renaissance affected Christianity and helped change the course of church history.

One way that the Renaissance impacted Christianity was that information technology increased curiosity near early church building writings in Greek. In the medieval flow, the accent was on Scholasticism. In the study of Scholastic theology, students studied commentaries on the Scriptures. The near widely used textbook was Peter Lombard's Sentences (12th century), which was a commentary on selected passages of Scripture arranged topically. Lombard had accumulated comments from the church fathers and more recent thinkers. A second widely used textbook was Duns Scotus's commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences. Theological students of the Center Ages studied commentaries and commentaries on commentaries more than they studied the Scriptures themselves!

The Renaissance brought an emphasis upon going back to the original sources. Many of the Greek classics fabricated their way to western Europe as the slap-up Greek libraries of the eastern Roman Empire were moved west to be kept safe from the advancing Muslim armies. Scholars began to desire to read these classics in the original languages. Too, those who wanted to study the Scriptures began to see the need to study them in the original Greek and Hebrew, not Latin. (At that time, the Latin Vulgate, a 4th-century translation, was the officially recognized Bible of the Cosmic Church.)

In an effort to aid this shift to original sources, Erasmus of Rotterdam published a Greek New Attestation in 1516, using the Greek manuscripts that he had available. Fifty-fifty though Erasmus's text was far from perfect, it was a vast improvement over the Latin and was a key to the rise of Christian humanism in the Renaissance. As the Bible was studied in the original languages, errors in the Latin translation were exposed. For instance, Martin Luther discovered that where the Greek has "repent" the Latin Vulgate had "do penance"—two very different things.

Information technology is impossible to carve up the Renaissance and the Reformation. Nascent Renaissance thinking helped to bring about the Reformation, which in turn helped to bring about the full Renaissance. Men like Luther began to study the Bible for themselves rather than rely upon the authorization of the church building to tell them what the Bible said. Equally they studied, they found something radically different from what they had been taught in official church dogma. These men were as well burdened to provide accurate translations of the Bible in the common linguistic communication of the people, and, thanks to the recent invention of the Gutenberg press press, they had the ways to disseminate the truth. Luther produced a German New Testament in 1522, based on the second edition of Erasmus's Greek text. Meanwhile, William Tyndale was working on an English language translation; Pierre Robert Olivétan was penning a French translation; Jacob van Liesveldtin was working in Dutch; Laurentius and Olavus Petri were working on a Swedish Bible; Christiern Pedersen was producing a Danish Bible; Oddur Gotskálksson was toiling over an Icelandic translation; and Casiodoro de Reina was producing a Bible in Castillian Castilian. The common people, who could non read the Scriptures in the original Greek and Hebrew (or in Latin), could at present take a Bible of their own, and literacy rates soared as people determined to read the Bible for themselves.

The natural outgrowth of Reformation thinking, which helped propel the spread of the Renaissance, was to question the authorization of the church and to do away with course distinctions between people. If whatsoever person could arroyo God without a priest, if all believers are priests, and if salvation is through faith in Christ without the mediation of the church, and so the authority of the medieval church was severely weakened. Likewise, thoughts of equality in Christ and in society came to the fore. Kings who had always assumed that they reigned past divine correct were now chosen upon to justify their actions past Scripture; thus their autocratic freedom was curtailed. In the same way, secular rulers felt they could pause with church building authority in favor of their own consciences and agreement of Scripture. In the Reformation the seeds of "separation of church and state" were sown.

Renaissance means "rebirth," and that is certainly what happened to lodge and culture as art and scientific discipline came to full flower. Inside the time of the Renaissance occurred a "rebirth" of the church as well, as men began thinking biblically and independently from Roman Catholicism. Unfortunately, Renaissance thinking kept going where the Reformation stopped. The Reformation said that one could question the church where it disagreed with Scripture. The secular thinkers of the Renaissance said that Scripture, too, could be questioned where it disagreed with 1's own understanding. For the secular Renaissance thinkers, human being was the final authority and arbiter of truth—not God, not Scripture.

Evangelical Christians today are the heirs of the Reformation, which might be chosen the Christian Renaissance, and modern secular society is the heir of the secular Renaissance.

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This folio last updated: Jan 4, 2022

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