September 13, 2018 | Financial Times | by Kate Maltby.

Thomas Cromwell: A Life, by Diarmaid MacCulloch, Allen Lane, RRP£30, 728 pages

Rättfärdiggörelsen i kyrkans liv
HALLONSTEN, GÖSTA

De lutherska kyrkorna i Sverige och Finland har i hög grad bevarat det katolska arvet. Nutidens ekumeniska samtal med den katolska kyrkan gör det möjligt att lägga många kontroversfrågor åt sidan och ytterligare utveckla denna gemenskap.

Höst och vår i ekumeniken
HALLONSTEN, GÖSTA

Abraham Angermannus inspektionsresa 1596-97 förorsakade en våg trolldomsmål i Sverige. Också i Stockholm ägde en stor häxprocess rum kring Geske vid samma tidpunkt. Häxprocesser hade fram till 1590-talet varit mycket ovanliga i Sverige. Enligt den medeltida lagen ansågs trolldom vara en harmlös vidskepelse, och bestraffades normalt enbart om den ansågs ha förorsakat någons död. De åtalade kunde också svära sig fria med karaktärsvittnen. Detta avspeglades i Angermannus häxprocesser. Under inspektionsresan åtalades många kvinnor som uppgav att de kunde bota sjukdomar genom trollramsor de hade fått lära sig av före detta munkar. Bland dem Elin i Järsnäs, som sade sig ha lärt sig trolldom av sin farfar, som varit "munkepräst".

Efter studier vid Gävle trivialskola och därefter Rostocks universitet[1] blev Angermannus skolmästare och predikant i Stockholm där han kritiserade Johan III och de katolikvänliga i skarpa ordalag, bland annat genom att skicka bittra verser till jesuiten Laurentius Nicolai Norvegus, känd som "Klosterlasse".

Milchsuppe is a meal infused with folklore, not least because of its association with Switzerland’s very formation.

“In his brilliant but controversial recent study of the consequences of the Reformation, The Unintended Reformation, Gregory has no doubt that its outcomes were, on balance, negative. The principal of sola scriptura and the rejection of the Church’s teaching authority in the end, he thinks, led to a “market of values” in which all certainties dissolved. The abolition of the vowed religious life of monks and nuns removed a powerful institutional witness to Christian ambivalence about material prosperity, and opened the door to the acquisitive society. By contrast, the intractability of post-Reformation religious disagreements contributed to the emergence of societies which found their rationale in purely materialistic concerns such as the protection of property and the contractual guarantee of the rights of the individual. In the pioneering early modern secular states, notably the Dutch Republic, Gregory argues, men and women decided to stop killing each other over what seemed hopelessly irresolvable religious differences, and went shopping instead. In the long run, because there were no universally accepted norms for truth, religion became a private matter, and this privatization became one of the building blocks of Enlightenment social theory. “It does me no injury,” declared Thomas Jefferson, “for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Here, Gregory thinks, lies the origin of a rootless modern “hyperpluralism,” in which there is no objective basis for shared value, and in which good and bad become matters of arbitrary personal preference, or, as Gregory expresses it, “whatever.”” “Protestantism “desacralized” the world by accepting an essentially binary division of reality into spirit and matter. That division was expressed in Reformation iconoclasm and the rejection of the notion that material objects—the bread and wine of the Mass, relics, images—could be vehicles of spiritual reality. The Reformation, Eire suggests, restricted the supernatural “to heaven and the ancient past.” It thereby changed “the very essence of the Christian religion as it had been lived for the previous 1,500 years.” By outlawing prayer for the dead and denying that the saints could pray for us, the Reformation “stripped religion of mediation and intimacy . . . with the dead,” transforming it into “something strictly for the living, . . . more pragmatically focused on this world.” … gradually turned religion “into a private concern rather than a public one.””

Whilst endorsing the traditinal view that Lollardy was indeed the lay face of Wycliffism, the author nevertheless challenges a number of cherished myths about England's late medieval heretics. Rex controversially argues that Wyclif and the Lollards were far less important than historians and literary scholars have often claimed, and takes issue with recent attempts to restore Lollardy to its once conventional position as a 'cause' of the Reformation.

“Yet catastrophist and triumphalist narratives, however sophisticated and nuanced the idiom, always suffer from a basic error: They oversimplify. To portray Luther as shattering church authority is to miss a simple historical truth: Church authority was already in a state of collapse and confusion by Luther’s day. Medieval Catholicism was a mess. Luther was responding to chaos, not creating it. Yet to portray Luther as recovering the pure gospel is really no better. It ignores his obvious connections to later medieval theology and the fact that he tore Protestantism itself in two, paving the way for the chaotic fragmentation we have today. Modern Evangelicals might portray him as one of their own, but they would have been no more acceptable to him than were the Zwinglians and Anabaptists of his own day.”