Sublime

Innocent III was the first great Pope in whom there was no element of sanctity. The reform of the Church made the hierarchy feel secure as to its moral prestige, and therefore convinced that it need no longer trouble to be holy. The power motive, from his time on, more and more exclusively dominated the papacy, and produced opposition from some rel

In 1527 the Danish king, Frederik I, proclaimed that his people should be free to worship in whichever way they pleased, “For His Grace is king and judge over life and property for his realm, not over the souls of men.” (That

Many of his tracts were written in German rather than in the Latin of the learned. These, combined with his efforts to translate the Bible into a language intelligible across the wide variety of dialects that stretched from the Netherlands to Poland, accelerated the birth of a modern German capable of serving as a language of culture.

Jesus Christ is not a proposition, not a theological concept which exists merely in our heads. He is an event of liberation, a happening in the lives of oppressed people struggling for political freedom. Therefore, to know him is to encounter him in the history of the weak and the helpless.

Black liberation theology was created by black theologians and preachers who rejected this white teaching about the meek, long-suffering Jesus. We called it hypocritical and racist. Our christology focused on the revolutionary Black Christ who “preached good news to the poor,” “proclaimed release to the captives,” and “let the oppressed go free” (L

Constantine Campbell says, While the father of the Reformation held a view of imputation that depended on union with Christ, the trajectory of later Protestantism followed Melanchthon rather than Luther. Melanchthon thought primarily of the cross as a transaction and, according to [Mark] Seifrid, “the later Protestant formulaic description of justi

Locke’s breakthrough — unimagined even by Christian thinkers as formidable as Thomas Aquinas — was to combine the classical view of natural law with the concept of inalienable rights. In his Two Treatises of Government (1689), Locke identified these rights as “life, liberty, and property.” He drew from the Scriptures, as well as from Cicero, to arg

It wasn’t until the German theologian Martin Luther came along that our conception of work’s role in life began to shift. In sixteenth-century Europe, the Catholic Church was making a fortune selling little pieces of parchment called indulgences, pardons for sin to citizens looking to buy their way into heaven.

Marsiglio of Padua (1270-1342), on the contrary, inaugurated the new form of opposition to the Pope, in which the Emperor has mainly a role of decorative dignity.