Alvin Petty’s ongoing religious column

#71, The Bible in the Sixteenth Century

By Alvin Petty, retired area minister

(Editor’s notes:  The Pulse has been printing Rev. Petty’s columns for several years, and is continuing this on the website, as well as the print edition.)

In the early sixteenth century it had became fashionable for scholars to read the Bible in its original languages. This requirement helped develop a more impartial, less emotional attitude towards biblical antiquity.

Up until this time exegetes had viewed the Bible as a single work rather than a collection of very different books. Most had never seen the scriptures physically in a single volume. The centuries long practice of students picking out of context essentially different, unequal biblical verses and linking them together had encouraged scholars to downplay the different visions and historical periods of the Bible. Many Jewish and Christian students of the Bible had done this for a long time.

Many of these sixteenth century scholars were humanists like Erasmus. They began to study the biblical authors as individuals, paying attention to each one’s special talents, mental constitution, personal peculiarities and mannerisms.

These exegetes were especially drawn to Paul, who wrote in the common language (koine) Greek of the people and exhibited a direct pertinence and relevance to his present time, place and purpose. His passionate seeking of the way of salvation was to them a most satisfactory countering to the dry scholastic rationalism that dominated their theological landscape.

 
Humanists in this period were not like modern humanists who are often skeptical of religion. These became dedicated followers of Pauline Christianity. They resonated with Paul’s deep sense of sin for they lived in a time when everything about their society was disappearing and being replaced by a new age with new social, political and religious structures. They could not see clearly which way they were going but they could feel the tremors of shift and change of their society’s very foundations.

A general distress ruled everywhere. John Calvin (1509-64) and Huldrych Zwingli suffered from a sharp sense of failure and powerlessness until they broke through into a new religious approach. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), founder of the Jesuits, wept so much that doctors warned he would lose his sight. Others were burdened with worry that their stains of sin would never be cleansed. Perhaps the greatest and most creative case of angst was in a young Augustinian German monk in the monastery of Erfurt, Martin Luther. Luther as we shall see drew also mainly from the Pauline writings of the New Testament.