evangelicalism. This was a movement associated with no specific denomination and not bound – after its first few decades, at least – to any standard theology. Its emphasis was upon the personal experience of conversion, repentance, redemption by God’s grace and sanctification. Its typical expression was a certain type of worship marked by palpable

St Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), founder of the Jesuits, who went so far as to proclaim that he would have counted it a cause for pride had he been of Jewish extraction.

when the revolt began, Luther nevertheless exhorted the peasants to desist from rebellion; and when they did not, he wrote a scorching tract – ‘Against the Murderous and Thieving Hordes of Peasants’ – in which he encouraged the legal authorities to slaughter the rebels without pity.

subscribed in 433 to a declaration – intended as a compromise between the Alexandrian and Antiochian positions – that Christ was one Person (that is, the eternal Son of God) possessing two complete natures (divine and human). Not

It varied in form, but its content was fairly uniform: it was an attempt at a ‘natural’ or ‘rational’ religion, common to all nations and cultures, available to all reflective minds without recourse to childish mythologies, ‘revealed’ truth, miracles or abstruse metaphysical systems.

The new order soon attracted many of the most talented young men of western Europe; its emphasis upon scholarship in every field of learning, its missions to the farthest-flung regions of the world, its stated aim of making Christ known in every quarter of the globe – all these things imbued the Society of Jesus with a quality of what one can only

the birth of Spain as a nation-state, and as an incipient empire, gave shape to a new ideology of religious and racial unity – an ideal ultimately known by the name of ‘blood purity’ (limpieza de sangre), despite the absurdity of such a concept after centuries of intermarriage among Christians, Jews and Muslims.

Justin Martyr (c.100–c.165), who employed the Stoic conception of a divine ‘Reason’ (Logos) pervading all things – partially present in all rational intellects – to explain who the eternal Son of God, incarnate in Jesus, was.

She was a confirmed iconodule, and in 843, in her son’s name, she revoked the iconoclast laws of the past three decades and reinstituted the use of icons in Church worship and private devotion once and for all.