This talk will look at how the Protestant and Catholic Churches positioned themselves with regard to history in the period of confessionalization. From the Reformation, church history presented a challenge to each confession in its own right. Protestants were compelled to invent particularly creative answers because, as Euan Cameron has noted, “the core message of the Reformation called for a shift in perceptions of the Christian past.” This is because Protestants, who aimed to revert to the pristine early state of the Church, were confronted with the key issue of explaining why error had come into the Church after apostolic times. The prevailing models for church history did not suit their view of the degeneration of the medieval Church, so that Protestant historians in the Reformation had to re-invent the discipline. Catholics, on the other hand, aimed to show that church institutions and doctrine from apostolic times had always been the same.

This talk builds on the recent studies such as “Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World” (edited by Katherine Van Liere, Simon Ditchfield and Howard Louthan, Oxford 2012). It aims to add a further dimension to these by concentrating on the polemical interactions between Catholics and Protestants. It will also explore to which degree history and theology were fused together in the process and to which degree they could be separated.

Speaker
Dr. Stefan BAUER
Department of History, King’s College London

Meeting ID: 990 8868 4183
Meeting link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/99088684183