Summary: The Title of this episode, is Faith in the Age of Reason. Part 01 After the first flush of Reformation excitement died down, the Protestant churches of Europe went into a long period of retrenchment, of digging in both doctrinally & culturally. This period lasted from the late 16th to the later 17th C. and is referred to by church historians as the Age of Confessionalism. But “confession” here isn’t the personal practice of piety in which someone admits error; Confessionalism is the term applied to how the various Protestant groups were increasingly concerned with defining their own beliefs, or confessions, in contrast to everyone else. It resulted in what is sometimes called Protestant Scholasticism. It’s called this because the churches developed technical jargon to describe their doctrinal positions ever more accurately—just as the medieval Roman Catholic scholastics had done 3 Cs before. (more…)
