Tag Archives: Philipp Melanchthon

Five themes in Christian humanism (II)

Posted on August 29, 2022 | 1 comment

This Mob Quad group of buildings in Merton College, Oxford was constructed in three phases and concluded in c. 1378; Wikipedia, public domain

Here is the third of the five potential “dyad topics” for the projected seminar on Christian humanism (again, WordPress can’t handle the auto-numbering in Word docs. Sigh) Continued from part I:

  1. Faith and reason
    1. Reason and the image of God in humanity
    1. The role of reason in the carrying out of the creation mandate (for human flourishing)
    1. Illumination and education in early Christian soteriological understanding
    1. The pendulum of claims for reason
      1. Tertullian vs. Clement on the value of philosophy
      1. Seminal Logos understanding
      1. Augustine, reason and its limitations; the autonomy of scientific knowledge and the critique of bad Christian scientific reasoning
      1. Anselm, “faith seeking reason” – modest claim
      1. Aquinas – moderate claim
      1. Late scholasticism – reason maximized, atrophied, and arrogant – seeking to bring all knowledge under reason’s command
      1. The nominalist critique
      1. The renaissance humanist critique
      1. The Lutheran critique: Luther against the philosophers
      1. The recovery of scholasticism under Melanchthon and the rise of Protestant scholasticism
      1. Positivist, naturalist anti-humanisms of wartime
Continue reading →

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Posted in Christian humanism, Christian humanism, work, & economics, Medieval Wisdom for Modern Protestants

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Saints: The three things early Lutherans thought they could do for us

Posted on September 28, 2010 | 1 comment

Martin Luther by Lucas Cranach the Elder, pain...

I once wrote that Luther tossed the saints off of the church calendar and thus removed an important spiritual tool from Protestantism. Now I am reminded by the “Here I Walk” blogger(s) that I should have qualified that statement. The document cited in the following is Lutheranism’s primary confessional document, the Augsburg Confession.

Melanchthon gives an account of why Chris­tians should not invoke the saints in prayer (Apol­ogy to the Augs­burg Con­fes­sion, Arti­cle xxi). But he and Luther both allowed for the pos­si­bil­ity that the saints pray for us, and nei­ther of them denied the des­ig­na­tion of some believ­ers as saints in the sense of “extra­or­di­nary wit­nesses to Christ.” In fact, Melanchthon lays out three extremely impor­tant things that saints do for believ­ers that makes “giv­ing honor” to them per­fectly appropriate: Continue reading →

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Posted in Patron Saints for Postmoderns

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