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Dr. Jim Garlow is a lifelong pastor who most recently served in San Diego, California, and now leads Well Versed, a ministry dedicated to bringing biblical
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High Middle Ages: Crusades and Islamic Threat 0:00 Well, we welcome you back for this next section where we're gonna talk about the high middle ages. That's the years 10 50 to 13 50. We've gone through the early church period, survival, the early0:12 church period, supremacy, then the early middle ages. Now it's the high middle ages, which means the middle of the middle ages. What happened during that time? Remember in our last session, we talked about the middle0:23 ages a little bit harder to manage by chronology, and so we kinda take it a little bit more thematically, certain themes or topics or things that emerge during that time. Let's talk a bit0:35 more about the Islamic threat and the Crusades. Last session, we talked about Mohammed and Islam and how it came about. Now let's take it a step further. In the year 10 71, there were Seljuk Turks. Now0:47 what's that? Seljuk refers to a tribal chief. Turks refers to armies in Central Asia. It's a little bit larger than present day Turkey. And they were moving towards Constantinople. Now remember, Constantinople0:59 is the headquarters of the church in the in the east, and they called the help from the Western church. Now, you full well know and remember that the east and the west didn't always get along, but they could at least1:09 help each other. And so the eastern church says, we've gotta have help and signaled Rome we wanna have we we need help quickly. So in 10 96, Pope Urban the second responded calling for armies to protect the eastern1:21 church and to free the holy lands from Islamic control. Pope Urban the second really was able to rally the troops much more than he ever anticipated, and he preached sermons all over. Let's go over there and help them.1:31 And armies were formed practically overnight, and the Crusades were born. What is the Crusades? Crusades go from 1100 to 13 hundreds. There is in the first 1, 101:42 97, 70000 people made their way to Jerusalem. There was a mini massacred on the way and some horrific stories on the way even there. They would come through some villages and they would rape and1:54 pillage sometimes. These weren't always chivalrous people and great did great havoc. They were sort of they they they were vicious in both Islamic villages and even Christian villages. So they were sort of equal2:05 opportunity offenders. They really did a lot of damage on the way down there, some of them. And they established what's called the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. And if you go to the Israel today, you can still2:17 see many of the fortresses that were built and the buildings that were constructed during that time frame, the Crusader period, there there in Israel. There were 8 different crusades if you count the Children's Crusade,2:29 which was in 12 12, in which children were brought by unsuspecting parents and were sold into slavery. The children were told, the parents were told, that if you'll send your kids down there, surely the2:41 Muslims will back away and give the control of the Holy Land back to the Christians. That's what the whole issue was about. Islam had overrun Palestine. Palestine was not a term that2:53 was used until after, the Roman armies destroyed Jerusalem and destroyed the temple, and that occurs during the New Testament time in 70 AD. It's not referred3:05 to in the New Testament, but it occurs encouraged during the New Testament time. And the Romans wanted to obliterate, the Jewish people. They were so sick of dealing with Jewish uprisings. Remember the Roman armies had3:16 oversight of the entire Roman Empire, but that was the 1 hot spot always. The Jews just chafed under the Roman oppression. And they were constantly trying to throw off, the Roman oppressors. And finally,3:28 Caesar, I mean, they just got sick of it in Rome. It says, obliterate the place. And so they did and destroy the temple and killed many of the Jewish people and changed the name to Palestine3:40 in hopes that Israel would never exist again as a nation. That's where the name Palestine or Palestinian comes from. Sometime possibly, to Philistines3:52 in terms of the in terms of the name. There wasn't a Palestinian people per se, till that particular particular time. Well, the result is that the attempt to get controlled,4:04 and now now we're at the crusade period again, the attempt to get control of the Holy Land from the Islamic forces was what drove these Christians down there 1 army after another. And the belief was in the Children's4:14 Crusade that the Islamists, the Muslims would just simply back away if the children came in. And the fact is the parents were duped. All their kids were loaded on ships and sold into slavery. It's a pretty pathetic and4:26 tragic period of church history. In 11 87, 1 of the well known Muslims generals recaptures Jerusalem after 88 year span. And finally, then after4:38 the Crusades in 14 83, the Ottoman Turks control take control of Constantinople. And 1 of the most famous churches in the world, the San Sofia Church, became a4:50 mosque and is a mosque to this day. If you tour the city of Istanbul, you see that. And as you well know where Islam is spreading, for example, there's not a week that goes by, they tell us in Britain and maybe5:01 specifically in London, that some Christian church, the cross doesn't come down and the crescent goes up and it becomes a mosque, and the incredible spread, the Islamization of all of Europe for that matter. Now as we5:12 look back on the Crusades, we're not gonna park there longer except to say, we look back on the Crusades. What what do we make of that as contemporary Christians? Well, a couple of things. 1, it's an embarrassment to us.5:21 There's without a doubt is embarrassment. However, there's been so much bad said about the Crusades. I wanna do a little flip side of that 1. Is can any positively be be said about it? And the answer is yes.5:32 We forget oftentimes that these people were defending themselves. This wasn't just a case of them sending off armies to try to create problems. They were trying to defend the fellow Christians. The idea of bashing all5:44 the Crusaders, and there's plenty of bad that we can focus on, but the idea of bashing the Crusaders as an intellectual exercise is a modern phenomenon. There was a time up until recent history where they were seen as a5:55 bit noble in terms of trying to be defenders and keep Muslims from taking more Christian lives. So it was an act of defense. Now it does raise the thorny issue since the church6:07 was raising up armies. How do we understand this nature of church state relationships? We we all know the complexity in our contemporary culture of separation of church and state, and how how those in left wing6:19 organizations have taken that to try to remove any vestige of Christianity in remembrance of God, any reference to God, even whether it be a nativity scene or whatever, or the 10 commandments out of all of public life.6:31 We certainly don't want the intertwining of church and state as it was in the Middle Ages. When God established this planet, he established 3 institutions. In the first 1, he established the institution of the family.6:42 The second 1 is, of course, the government of the family, then the government of civil government, secondly, and the government of the church. Each were to see themselves under his authority6:54 completely. So it's not a case of church versus state meaning secular versus God. It is all to be on the foundation of God and upon his word. And if government is established7:06 appropriately upon the truth of God, and the church is, and the family is, there is not conflictions there's not conflictions at all. Each has their own role or own function in society. It's veryGothic Cathedrals: Architecture of Transcendence 7:17 critical. We see a terrible blurring of church state then. Now we see a distortion of it the opposite way in our in our present culture. Let's go to the next thing that happened right time that I referenced to you, and7:26 that was the building of cathedrals. Very fascinating. Saint Denis Cathedral in France was with the first Gothic church 11 40. How do you explain this phenomenon of cathedral building?7:38 In a in a relatively short span of time, in a 400 year span, over 500 cathedrals were built. Well, they learned that they could build architecturally, they could build with less pillars, larger windows,7:50 using flying buttresses, that's external supports, could build larger. The peaked arches rather than the rounded arches could carry more weight, and the result was this incredible burst in architecture. And what's8:01 amazing, some of them took centuries to build. 1 of them took 700 years to build 1 church. They're called cathedrals from the word cathedra. Cathedra means chair. Cathedra, this8:13 chair, is the seat of the bishop. It meant not every church was a cathedral, just where the bishop sat. Now, by the way, when the bishop sat, you heard me say this in 1 of the previous lectures, when he spoke, he8:25 sat and the congregation stood. We got to somehow reverse. You're seated and I'm standing, but that's not the way it was in the Middle Ages. It was a reverse of that. The speaker would stay seated and all the listeners8:35 stood. So now we talked about a capacity of a church building, it was how many you could stand in the building. It takes a lot more room to sit people than there's a stand people. You can get a lot more people in when8:44 you're standing them only. And so the cathedra was the chair of the bishop because he sat there in the chair like a, you know, like a king on a throne, and he and he ruled there. The8:56 statues, the stained glass told biblical stories to illiterate people. This is a function of the cathedral. I've taken people on trips of many of the sites we're gonna be talking about. I've taken quite a few trips over9:07 to Europe, and I love to take church history tours, take people on these tours. And a lecture on the bus all day, and we go to site after site after site. I get cathedralled out very quickly. I grow weary of looking at9:19 cathedrals and became kind of anti cathedral. After all, there's big old museums, and then you've seen 1, you've kind of seen them all. And I just got If you go to 1, the curator happens to be there, they want you to9:29 spend 2 days just on their 1 building, and I wanna spend about 10 to 12 minutes on their 1 building and get on to the next thing. And I developed a real lack of appreciation. And so I began to understand, the9:41 backgrounding of this phenomenon called cathedral building. Part of it was the advance in architecture without a doubt that they did it because they could do it. But there's another dynamic going on, and that is9:53 that architecture in a church is a physical liturgy. It's a statement of the theological presuppositions of that church. If you, were10:04 blindfolded and led in any church, you couldn't see the church sign, almost any church you'd go into, you would know whether it was a Catholic church or an Episcopal church. You could probably tell if it was a Methodist10:14 church, you'd look for certain symbols. You could tell whether it was a charismatic church, independent church, a Pentecostal church. You'd have a pretty good idea. By just looking around, you'd kinda know what that10:26 is. A church building is a physical liturgy. It's a statement of what that church believes. Well, what does it tell you when you walk into a cathedral? What happens to you when you walk into a10:38 cathedral? You walk into a cathedral, and a cathedral is bigger than life itself. So you can go your where where is your where are your eyes drawn? Up. You go, oh,10:50 man. Look at that. Now, think of the poor peasant working near the village, and he's doing backbreaking labor, and he stands up, and he looks, and he looks at the cathedral,11:02 and will spires where do they point him? Heaven worth. And know there's a life beyond this life. That this toiling thing I'm going through called life is not always gonna be this way. There is something beyond this.11:14 So it was a reminder of something. But when you walk in the cathedral itself, it makes you smaller than life. What is that telling you? It's saying God is big and you're not. It's called11:26 transcendence, the transcendence of God. And every building will either emphasize the transcendence of God, that's, oh, God word transcendent means God is above and beyond. The transcendence of God,11:38 wow. Or it will emphasize the imminence of God. God's here. He's present. He's with us this very, very moment. It'll be 1 or the other.11:50 Now you walk into a cathedral, and the immediate response is, oh, man. God is big. Look at this. By the way, they weren't built for convenience either. I mean, they had huge columns12:02 around the edges, and there were an awful lot of people that would be behind those columns. They were bitter cold, they were not heated. You couldn't even see the speaker sometimes. Remember there were no pews, and the12:14 speaker would be sometimes way up across a set of steps way up very, very, very high. They weren't built to make you convenient. You're on nice padded chairs right now. You have air conditioning. You have12:25 heating. You have nice lighting. None of the above. The goal was simply to make you aware God is big and you're not. Now, you come into this auditorium. What does this auditorium tell you about the functional12:37 theology of this congregation? You walk in here, is the emphasis transcendence of God? Oh, no, no. Nothing about nothing draws your eyes upward. In fact, the12:49 lighting system is designed not to draw your eyes upward. What are you drawn towards? Suppose you walk in and you're seated right over here. Where are you looking? Or you're seated here or here. Where are you13:01 looking? You're looking at each other. That means the focus is on the warmth of being with each other, the body of Christ. That's the imminence of God. That means the presence13:13 of the Holy Spirit on the face of a brother or a sister. It's not the issue of transcendence, it's the issue of imminence, God's presence. The building, the layout of this13:25 building, particularly the chairs of this building, is a statement of its functional theology. These chairs didn't have to be arranged that way. They're arranged this way because somebody want them that way because it13:37 expresses part of who this church is. So there's some real value in both the transcendence and the imminence of God. In fact, ideally, in a perfect world, you design a building that does both13:48 somehow, really focus on both. How can you do that? Well, that's a little bit difficult. There's another thing about about these buildings that's very, very intriguing, and that is the fact that people14:00 who were skilled and wanted to be involved in some kind of ministry in the life of the church had no way to do it unless you were an artisan. You couldn't be a Sunday school teacher. You couldn't be a choir14:12 director. You acquire as as a singer. You couldn't be a nursery worker. You couldn't assist in a parking lot. You couldn't be a home group leader. These didn't exist. If you had something you wanted to give for the glory14:22 of God, guess where you had to give it? As an artisan, as a bricklayer, as a stonemason, or as 1 who did stained glass windows. That was about it. Those were your options.14:34 So part of the compulsion to build is really a very good compulsion. There's another component we touched on briefly, and that is remember the stained glass windows were the only Bible they had to read. That's really how14:45 they knew the Bible stories. If they didn't have that, they didn't have the capacity. And so all my criticism of the cathedrals begin to drain away when I realized the functionality of them. And then there's 1 more14:56 component about the cathedrals that really gripped me, and that was their capacity for longevity. That they could start a building project that could take 700 years. How many generations is that? Well, given the15:08 lifespan back in, that's 28 generations. I'm involved in a building project in our church. We've had all kinds of problems that's been going on, pieces of it for 19 years, and we think that's the worst it's ever been.15:20 Here are some people at least ours isn't 700 years, although it could stretch out to that, I suppose. Is that not imagine starting a construction project. Let's say not 700, not even 500. Let's say it's gonna take 10015:31 years, how many people would be happy to give to a project that they were not gonna it was gonna be their great great grandchildren, they're gonna see that thing completed. Now, is that not a unique way of approaching15:41 life? There's a lesson in there. We want it now. Man, if we have to wait in line at Taco Bell for 3 extra minutes, what's wrong with them? Can't they get their food out any faster than that? And here they15:53 start projects they invest in for all those years. Let's go back to the monastics. We talked about that in the last session, but I wanna take you a little bit further on that. Some monastics and orders that were16:02 developed now during this high middle age period. 1 of the fascinating things about the Roman Catholic church during this time is the fact that every time a movement came along and somebody said, hey, I wanna do it thisMonastic Orders and Gospel-Preserving Mystics 16:13 way. I wanna do it differently. Here's my calling. They didn't have to split off and be and form a new denomination. The Catholic church was quite brilliant. It absorbed them under their umbrella. This is 1 of the good16:24 and great things about the Catholic church during the middle ages. And so when someone would come and say, hey. This is my calling is to do this. I wanna put out a group of elite corps of missionaries who will form16:33 educational centers around the globe. Well, fine. Then you can apply to for a new order within the Roman Catholic Church. Now, as we're gonna find out after the Reformation, anybody come up with a new idea, they just16:44 split it off and did their own thing. But this was quite a fascinating picture of elasticity that the Roman Catholic Church had that could absorb so many different movements within it. There were different orders. 1 we16:55 have listed here is Dominic, a brilliant Spanish spiritual leader, skilled preacher, sacrificed, lived in poverty, organized in order, and everyone became known by his name, the Dominicans, became an elite corps of Roman17:07 Catholic missionaries, and they developed enormous global impact. You notice that missionary zeal and missionary impulse and educational zeal that the content we talked about clear in the previous sessions. And then look17:18 at the next 1, Saint Francis of Assisi, the world's most famous religious leader. Son of a wealthy merchant, he was very flippant in his youth, but he was transformed and he gave away everything he owned. It was in 1217:30 o 5 he came to Rome. He saw a beggar, a beggar covered with leprosy. He even decided to switch places with the beggar to see what that was like. And, back in those days, you didn't have17:42 any contact with somebody who was covered with sores, and he chose to identify with that beggar who was covered with sores and even kiss the sores. And out of that, he found that he left his wealth and he founded the17:53 Preachers of Penance. They became known as the Franciscans. He heard a voice speak to him, said, repair the churches. The churches were in disrepair everywhere. And so he took what wealth he had and began to repair the18:03 churches. His father became very, very angry with him and was convinced that Francis was insane, particularly when Francis could have had all this wealth, but left it all and became a beggar himself. He prayed prayed and18:14 fasted for extremely long periods and then became known for what's called the stigmata. That was the bleeding wounds of Christ's wounds literally located on Saint Francis' body according to18:26 tradition. Very magnetic and electrifying personality. His is a great study in humility. This is an incredible and here's the here's 1 of the most fascinating con contrast in all church history. Who is the most18:38 powerful person in in the high Middle Ages? Who is the most powerful person almost the entire Middle Ages? The most powerful person on earth? I doubt that anybody here is gonna come up with the right answer. The answer18:49 is Pope Innocent the third. Pope Innocent the third had a mass more power than anybody else during the middle ages. He had the civil authority as well as all religious authority. Nobody could cross19:01 him. 1 day, this unknown guy from a town called Assisi came to him and said, I'd like to form a new order. But he ran into the pope a little bit too early and he didn't put his words together well, and,19:13 the pope says, get lost and go roll in the mud with the pigs. Sometime later, Saint Francis came back covered with mud. The pope said, what's your problem? He says, well, I did what you told me. You told me to go roll in19:24 the mud with the pigs, so I did. The pope was so impressed, he says, you can start your own order. Do what you want. Here was an unknown guy rolling around in the mud,19:36 Saint Francis. He was just Francis then. He wasn't saint anything. He was just Francis. Later, he's from Assisi, from the town, so he's called Saint Francis of Assisi. And here was the most powerful19:47 human being in all of history. Saint Francis is the picture of humility. Openness in the third is the picture of arrogance. You don't think about his life at all, and yet here19:59 we are hundreds of years later, and and when I say the name Saint Francis of Assisi, everybody has some recognition of that term, that phrase. I say Pope Innocent the third, the most powerful human20:11 being, proud and arrogant of the entire Middle Ages, and nobody knows who he is. The scripture says very clearly, you humble yourself, I'll raise you up. You fill with pride, I'll I'll bring you I'll bring you20:23 down. And this is a walking example of that. 2 men whose lives interchanged, 1 who had everything, the other had nothing, and now today we still say the praises to Saint Francis. We go to20:35 the mystics. This is a fascinating group of people. Let me tell you why these are important. You walk through the Middle Ages and you're not always sure how the gospel got to you because we can't trace your spiritual20:44 pedigree. We don't the capacity, as you well know, to go back and track your spiritual genealogy, how the gospel got to you. But there was a time in the Middle Ages, remember we talked about being dark ages when there's20:54 so much debauchery and the truth of the gospel gets kind of driven underground, like a river that's driven underground, finally comes back up. There was a group of people during the Middle Ages that are responsible21:04 really for salvaging the gospel and maintaining it for us. And so these names I'm about to go through, though you may not know most of these names, the fact is if you could trace your spiritual pedigree, your spiritual21:15 lineage, it's quite possible I'm giving a name right here that tracks how the gospel came to you. Had they not been there and done what they did, you might not know the gospel in the year we21:27 find ourselves in now. Here's some of those. What are the mystics? They're just simply people who enjoyed unusual intimacy with God and then wrote a great deal and their writing still exists. Bernard of Clairvaux, we've21:36 already talked about in a previous session. Bonaventure was another. He was a Franciscan. He says, if you wanna know God, prayer and meditation, that's the only way you can really truly know God. Johannes Eckert, he was21:47 such a skilled discipler and mentor of other people that it became known as Meister Eckert. He's rarely called by his first name, Johannes or John, He's called Meister. What's that mean? Master, Master Eckhart. He21:59 was a master producer of disciples after him. At 1 point he was even accused of heresy. Luther years later will refer to him in a very positive sense. Now that's the High22:11 Middle Ages. What about the Late Middle Ages? 1 is named John Toller. John Toller was a disciple of Master Eckhart, who I referred to just a moment ago. He was an activist. His whole22:23 thing was loving 1 another. Now bear in mind, these are what's called mystics, that means they have unusual intimacy with the Lord, and their writings still exist. Quite a bit of their writings exist, you can still22:35 read. The next 1, John Reusbeck is not quite as well known. He built his ministry off of Matthew 20 five:six, which says, The Bridegroom cometh, and he saw himself, he saw each 1 of us as22:47 Christians, as married to Jesus. He wrote what was called spiritual marriage or spiritual espousal, that means engagement. He became what's called a director of souls. What does that gotta do22:59 with today? Today, many people are asking for mentoring or coaches or life coaches, and if it happens to be in the Christian domain, they're known as spiritual directors. That's a popular23:11 concept today. Will you be my spiritual director, hold me accountable, and help me walk to the next level of maturity? He was 1 of the earliest of that kind and was a very, very successful 1. Catherine of Siena, who was23:23 this 1? This is a fascinating to me. At age 16, she began to care for the sick and dying, and she became so influential. She influenced popes to change their mind, bishops. She challenged23:35 clergy and their greed. There's over 400 letters that are left over from her writings. And she literally challenged princes that were at war and brought closure to wars. You see, our dangers to think of mystics is some23:46 people who just hide away kind of esoteric and kind of concentrating about God, just meditating and praying all day. These were all activistic mystics. They were people who touched their culture, changed their culture,23:58 really enlivened their culture with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Thomas Acampas, we won't stay there very long because so little's known about him. He wrote The Imitation of Christ. Now, Imitation of Christ24:09 sold at 1 point is considered the best selling book in history. What can we tell about the world's most successful author? What do we know about him? Almost nothing. Almost nothing except he wanted to imitate Christ.24:22 Now, if you're not gonna be known for anything except that, ain't that pretty good? All we know is the guy wanted to imitate Christ. He was a copyist for a while, he was skilled in some math, and he was kind of a24:30 bookkeeper for a while, and not too fulfilled, not too happy in that. And somehow in the midst of this wrote he was discipled by 1 of these guys we've already talked about, and the the result is a man named Gerhard Goude24:40 actually, Goude is who discipled him, and he wrote and then what's called the Imitation of Christ, which has had enormous impact from that time to the present. We'll say it even it even impacted John Wesley's24:52 life. The next period is the Counter Reformation period. So we've looked at High Middle Ages, Late Middle Ages, now Counter Reformation period. Again, 2 more mystics, John of the Cross. John of the Cross was so25:04 zealous in his faith in Christ that at 1 point he was locked up for 9 months solitary confinement, kind of a cylinder kind of item. They locked him and it broke his health, and he wrote, the dark night of the soul. They25:16 ex communicated him. In part for his zeal in Christ, he died before they actually got word to him of the excommunication. But he wrote of the pain. He says, you cannot25:28 know Christ fully until you've experienced pain. And thus, he writes in the dark night of the soul. Have you ever noticed when you're around people who've walked through some painful experiences in25:39 life, they come out of that either bitter or better? And when they come out better, they come out knowing God. It would be God's dream for us to all learn from his word, but somehow we don't learn the way we should. And25:51 so we walk through some pretty painful steps sometimes, and the result is we come out of there having experienced the dark night of the soul. Teresa of Avila, he ran with her a good bit. She was a very entertaining,26:02 charismatic personality. She was a party animal. She loved gathering people, and they loved being with her. Then at age 40, there was this vision of a dream, a fire tipped sword touching her, and it transformed her life.26:13 She became passionate for Christ, and she called people into the ministry that she was in to help the poor and the sick and the dying. She actually ended up founding some 30 different houses, they called them. That26:24 means, convents that she helped set up during that time. These are all called mystics. They're they're slipping the woodwork of history in such a way that most of us don't even know who they are. But I'm telling you, if26:34 you could track your spiritual pedigree, probably 1 of these names I've just given you, maybe how the gospel was preserved and how it came to you. Let's look at this horrific thing called the inquisition. The least fun26:46 thing to talk about. Roman Catholic church began to redefine heresy as anybody who wasn't just theologically opposed to them, but was organizationally opposed to them. There were a lot of impulses coming where26:58 people were beginning to challenge the Roman Catholic Church during, as we move in these late Middle Age period. And so they began to try to crush these movements, and they simply labeled everybody a heretic that not27:08 only was theologically different, but now organizationally structured different. 1 of those movements were the Kathari. The Kathari were both theologically different and they were organizationally different. Time then27:19 permitted to park there on the Kathari, but the Kathari in part believed some of the teachings from Gnosticism, clear back that we talked about in a previous session, but they are organizationally different from the27:30 Roman Catholic Church, and these people were crushed. It's a very, very sad period. Also the Waldensians. Now we're gonna come back and talk about Peter Waldo and the Waldensians. He's 1 of my favorite27:42 characters, and we're gonna come back to that just for this moment. Remember the tragedy of the inquisition during this time frame. But I wanna shift to Thomas Aquinas. Thomas Aquinas is considered theScholasticism and University Explosion 27:54 Mount Everest theologically of an entire thousand year period. Remember I threw out the term scholasticism a couple sessions ago? What was that? Scholasticism is a fancy way of saying28:06 an attempt to merge faith and reason. There was a renewal and a fascination with the study of some of the early Greek thinkers, even Aristotle28:18 and Socrates and Plato. And that began to rise and they did not know how do we merge faith and reason. We're going to see the same impulse coming later with the Scientific28:30 Revolution and all we're discovering in science, how do we merge what we're learning scientifically with faith, with biblical faith? That will come later. This 1 had to do with more of the resurgence in some of the28:40 ancient learning and learning of antiquity. And Thomas Aquinas becomes the most influential theologian of the entire Middle Ages. Outside of Augustine, clear back in the 300s, this is the most influential28:53 thinker. It's called Thomast thinking. It's after his first name. He wrote what's called Summa Theological, which would be the summary of theology of the entire Roman Catholic Church. Took him 8 years to write it. Now,29:03 he didn't start out that popular. He had a nickname when he was in school, young kid. He was called the dumb ox. He's called the dumb ox because he was large, he was quite overweight, and he was asymmetrical. His face,29:14 he was noticeably ugly. His face was asymmetrical. He was just not a good looking guy. And after his writings came out, people were so enamored with what this man saw and29:26 understood and knew that they nicknamed him by another name, and they called him the angelic Doctor, and that's the nickname that stuck the rest of his life. Now, he29:38 championed this thing called scholasticism, which I've already indicated is the try to merge reason and revelation. Out of this came an unusual teaching. In this teaching,29:50 he developed, barring Aristotelian thought, thought of Aristotle, he borrowed concepts that justified an unusual doctrine to us as Protestants that's widespread among Catholics according, that's called30:01 transubstantiation. Trans change, substance, substance. The transforming of the bread and the wine at the communion service in a Roman30:13 Catholic church, so this perceived to be the actual body and actual blood of Christ. And he developed a whole cause or rationalization for that. He was being challenged this time also by a30:25 man named Dunne Scotus. And so they're referred to those follows are called the Scotus Scotus and Thomas. Were crossing each other back and forth on issues until it was all set aside by the in the 15 hundreds with the30:37 Reformation. There's there's a lot of other scholastic thinkers. We only mentioned a couple of them. Anselm, he's known as the father of the schoolmen. Abelard, now here's another 1. Here's another fascinating story. We30:49 could shoot right by that, and it looks like a name on a piece of paper, and a guy who's a scholastic can say, well, how boring could that be? Until you know the story of the guy. Lived in Paris. He lived in the home30:59 with a man named Fulbright, the house of Fulbright. Fulbright was the canon of Notre Dame. We say Notre Dame, but Notre Dame there, Notre Dame. Picture that he was the senior pastor of the big most influential church in31:11 town. Senior pastor's nieces in town, lives with him actually. Hellowise was her name. Abelard was there as a student, and he fell in love with, Hellowise,31:23 and they became sexually active. She became pregnant. Son. He felt very responsible. They weren't married. Felt very responsible and offered to marry her.31:35 And she says, no. Don't marry me because it will harm your career. Well, in the meantime, uncle Fulbert finds out about it. Like Well, in the meantime, uncle Fulbert finds out about it. The canon, the head priest of31:45 Notre Dame, and he's furious with him and castrates Abelard for his punishment. Abelard goes on to be a great theologian, but the letters that continue between him and31:57 Heloise are the most tender love letters. 2 that were never ever to be together. 2 probably very brokenhearted people who shared a son together32:09 and had some deep love. Whoever thought church history was boring doesn't know church history. Now you know the soap opera version of, of church history. Now at the same time, there's another32:21 impulse you cannot explain, and it's simply an explosion in a desire to learn. It's very fascinating. How did people learn in the early Middle Ages? Well, they didn't. They couldn't very easily. Where were the32:33 schools? Well, they were monastery schools. After monastery school, that was and there weren't a lot of monasteries, and there were way too many people scattered across. They couldn't get to them. After that, they32:42 developed what they called cathedral schools. So there were some schools that were actually cathedrals, but there's only 1 cathedral every large town. So most of the population never had any chance at education,32:54 maybe 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 percent of them could even have an opportunity. And that was if they were geographically close enough, they could afford the time off to go. They didn't have it. So when you're when you're 6 years33:04 of age, you're not going to school, you're not in the first grade, You're working the fields with daddy. Somebody else owns the land. You're just working as out there trying to eke out a living somehow. But there's a33:15 monastery schools, then there's the cathedral schools, but then a phenomenon occurs in this time frame. It's really difficult to explain. It's called the university. You and I, 1, versity33:28 varied. Prior to that time, if you were skilled in teaching something, you wandered around. You were itinerant. And you go into a community, you gather students the best you could as a professor, you taught, you tried to33:39 eke out a little bit of living, teaching, they paid you a little bit, and then when you taught everybody that wanted to learn, you went on to the next town. Now they reversed that. They gathered the professors and made33:49 the students do the traveling. What's fascinating, we reversed that now. Now, distance learning, in virtually every university has professors back either on the road literally going to their satellite campuses or by34:00 distance learning, over the web, Internet, it's just now it's reversed back. But at that point, the shift was you and I, 1, versity, varied. So under 1 roof, a lot of varied people are34:12 gathering. In 11 o 8, the first university is founded. By 11 50, Paris University is founded, becomes phenomenon in Oxford and Cambridge in 11 67 in the year 1200, and they begin springing up in34:23 an explosion of learning. Now, I want you to remember that because we're gonna talk a little bit later about the Renaissance and its implications for even understanding theological, truth and even, in the area of Bible34:35 translation. It's very important. At the same time, remember we're kind of moving thematically. It's hard to work through the Middle Ages chronology. Here, I want you to see what's setting the stage now for theShow more In this video 0:00 High Middle Ages: Crusades and Islamic Threat7:17 Gothic Cathedrals: Architecture of Transcendence16:07 Monastic Orders and Gospel-Preserving Mystics27:46 Scholasticism and University Explosion34:41 Papal Schisms Paving Reformation
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