ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CHURCH HISTORY 02 May 27, 2005 11 CH2 CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY: CAPTION FIRST, INC. P.O. BOX 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 1 800 825 7234 * * * * * This is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in Order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings * * * * >> I have another question regarding humanists. You mentioned Phillip Melanchthon as an example of a humanist who became Lutheran. How did that happen? What was Melanchthon's background? Was he a professor also? What was his discipline of study before theology, I mean? >> Well, Nick, the short answer of your question of how Melanchthon became a Lutheran is that he was hired to teach at the University of Wittenberg and he began to learn along with Luther what really ought to be going on in the church as they read in the Bible and as they studied those texts. How Melanchthon got to be a professor is an interesting story. Melanchthon began in a fairly well off family and his parents provided for his education. He attended a number of universities, and he also had the privilege of having a relative who is quite famous as a humanist. This is Johannes Reuchlin. Reuchlin was the brother of Melanchthon's grandmother. And you don't have to remember that for the test, but it is significant because Reuchlin helped out a lot in guiding Melanchthon's education; and, in fact, his name came from Reuchlin. Melanchthon was not his given name. His given name was Phillipp Schwarzerdt. Schwarzerdt in German means black earth and Melanchthon is simply black earth in Greek. It is a good indication of how these humanists think. They are very concerned to bring back the Greek language to bring back good Latin as opposed to Medieval Latin. And so that's what Philip Melanchthon ended up studying at university. He was interested in a number of things beyond that, like many humanists, and so he would have studied medicine and astrology and theology and law before finally coming to Wittenberg. Again, Reuchlin was the one who recommended him for the position. And so this Philip Melanchthon, who had been a child prodigy, in fact, he had been denied a master's degree at one university simply because he was too young, not because he was unqualified. Melanchthon began, then, in 1518 as a professor at the University of Wittenberg. And as was the custom, he gave an inaugural address. He gave his first speech to the university community. And that speech reminds us of something very important about the Reformation, that it was a movement that began in and was very concerned with university education. In this speech, Melanchthon hit all the right humanist notes and outlined his proposed course of study for the university. It would have been heavy on Greek and Latin and reading the original classical texts and especially the text of the Bible. So as he began to teach at Wittenberg, that's what Melanchthon himself did. He lectured on the Bible. He lectured on other topics, as well. But he really became very famous for his lectures on Romans. Now, Melanchthon was also influential in a number of other areas. We'll get to some of those later. I know Professor McKenzie will be talking about Philip Melanchthon's later career, but another thing I want to mention is his approach to theology and theological method. This, too, is something that he developed while he was teaching at the university. And we have this method in Melanchthon's various works entitled "Loci Communes", the first edition of his Loci came out in 1531. This was a radical departure from the way people had previously studied theology and written about theology. You might remember that I sketched the scholastic method in a previous lecture as being a question and answer format that combined Biblical quotations and citations from fathers and counsels along with philosophy and logic, generally speaking. Melanchthon's approach was very different. He saw how scholastic theology had gotten bogged down in answering questions that weren't really all that important. And so his Loci method was an attempt to deal with those topics that Scripture itself presented as being important. So he will talk about sin and grace and justification and assemble the Biblical material on those topics and present it in a format that you can imagine would have been very easy to listen to as a university lecture. So Melanchthon became extremely important as a teacher at Wittenberg, as a Lutheran theologian, as someone who was really challenging the way theology had traditionally been done. You might be surprised to know, given all of that, that Melanchthon never got a degree in theology, a doctorate, at least, and he was never ordained. He never preached. And in spite of the picture on a famous altarpiece, he never baptized anybody. Melanchthon was not a pastor. He was a lay theologian teaching at Wittenberg. And on numerous occasions, he resisted Luther's pleas that he become ordained and start preaching. So very important theologian of the reformation, but not a pastor like Luther was. And as I said, we'll hear a little bit about Melanchthon later on. * * * * * This is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in Order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings * * * *