The Medieval World was vastly different from ours in terms of how people operated in their faith. For the Medieval Person there was a duality of the public display of piety and their private lives. What mattered is what your swore to God and to his representatives in public wither it was taking the cross for the crusade, being whipped as King Henry II did for Thomas Beckett, vowing to become a Monk as Martin Luther did, and operating in public displays of giving alms, building churches, making promises to protect Mother Church, and so forth. The clinging to doctrine and texts was more fluid, yes they agreed on Filioque Nicene Creed, but there was a lot of cults, the Cult of Virgin Mary, The Sacred Cross, and Sacred Wounds and etc. Shrines and pilgrimages were popular because faith was about public action and confessions, about piety on display, while Reformed faith focused more on what you believed inside, in your heart and that it was correct Scriptural.
Medieval Faith allowed for a compartmentalized person, they could in private be a heathen but as long as in public they did acts of piety the Church was satisfied. This is illustrates very well in The Fall pf Camelot, the Affair of Lancelot and Guinevere was tolerated long as it was private, Arthur not taking action against his wife and first knight, but when they are caught in public Arthur is forced to have Guinevere burned at the stake and wage war against Lancelot and his knights. Reformed Faith in contrast is New Testament, it is not a duality of in public make promises to God, Jesus said take no vows, “You have also heard that our ancestors were told, ‘You must not break your vows; you must carry out the vows you make to the Lord.’ But I say, do not make any vows! Do not say, ‘By heaven!’ because heaven is God’s throne. And do not say, ‘By the earth!’ because the earth is his footstool. And do not say, ‘By Jerusalem!’ for Jerusalem is the city of the great King. Do not even say, ‘By my head!’ for you can’t turn one hair white or black. Just say a simple, ‘Yes, I will,’ or ‘No, I won’t.’ Anything beyond this is from the evil one,” (Matthew 5:33-37). These words of Jesus deconstructs Medieval faith which was all about making vows and preforming them in penances and pious acts with priests making sure you preformed those oaths and vows, well Jesus says vows are of Satan! So the whole Medieval system which was vow based was Satanic not Christ like!
Reformed faith was about right belief, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.” (John 3:16-18), that you possess the proper Theology and Doxology and relationship with God, “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” (John 17:3). There is public confession, “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved,” (Romans 10:9-10), “All who declare (confess) that Jesus is the Son of God have God living in them, and they live in God.” (1 John 4:15) and etc, but it stems from an interior belief and trust. In contrast, a Medieval person can be scoundrel and murderer but make up for it by pledging to go a crusade (many murderers were let out of cells to go on crusade) or give alms or do penance, you can quickly divorce your heart from your belief systems in Medieval model, this is seen most poignantly in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales where all the public clergy of nuns, monks, and etc are cruel, fat, mean, and harsh but publicly devoted to God, with Chaucer only having any good to say about one man who is town preacher that he commends, “because he practices what he preaches.”. The Pardoner a stark contrast to the preacher exploits the public piety displays by selling pardons and relics while being a thief and wretch. Reformed Piety is a return to New Testament piety where your private and public self are one, that you count all lost but knowing Christ, “Yes, everything else is worthless when compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage, so that I could gain Christ” (Philippians 3:8). There is no room for cognitive dissonance in Biblical/ Reformed Piety, the inner life is tied to public life, not separated and segregated where you can be like King Henry II wanting the king to have supreme power over the church, the state over the ecclesiastical in courts & etc but then do public displays of piety at Canterbury to honor Thomas Beckett, who was against Henry’s desires. For the Reformed believer the inner belief trumps your public show of piety, “But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart,” (1 Samuel 16:7), “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me,” (Matthew 15:8), and “What comes out of a man, that defiles a man. For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lewdness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness.” (Matthew 7:20-23). There is no divorcing the heart from action in New Testament piety, but in the Medieval there is a divorce, which comes from Medieval theologians using Plato to interpret Scripture, Plato separated the world into temporal matter and the transcendent or spiritual, so actions & beliefs are done in separate planes, this is folly because we humans are spirit and flesh, and Jesus Christ our Lord is God who is Spirit, “For God is Spirit, so those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth,” (John 4.24) and flesh, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made...The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth,” (John 1:1-3, 14), and “concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord,” (Romans 1:3-4 ESV). So Plato is actually at odds with Jesus and our Faith by compartmentalizing the two, but thats how you got Medieval piety, where people treat a public act of ritual and confession and etc as transcendent and what they do in private as something else; Medieval piety could be the origin of bipolar disorder, because you are living two lives and identities in Medieval faith when Reformed/ New Testament faith demands that your inner and public lives align, that your beliefs shape your actions, not that your beliefs can be at odds with your actions or vice versa, or that falls into cognitive dissonance where you must decide to either change your beliefs to suite your actions or conform your actions to your beliefs; no duality is allowed.
Martin Luther really honed in on the problem with Medieval piety’s cognitive dissonance, it came to a head with The Indulgences where people decided they could live how they wanted and just buy a piece of paper that publically said they are pardoned of the sins they kept wanting to do. Luther was echoing Paul’s concern mentions in Romans, “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin. Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.” (Romans 6:1-14). Though you may argue that Medieval people obsessed over their sins, that they did not divorce themselves from it as Romans warns, well yes they obsessed over sin, but the public piety displays which evolved into indulgences made it possible for people to turn their lives into a duality where they could keep killing people and just do public pious acts to make up for it without a change of heart, or truly repent which means “turn from it/ stop doing it.” The Medieval System then is a double problem of making people fixate on sin rather than grace, and cheapening repentance by letting you live as a split, long as your public piety, going to church on Sunday and doing works is consistent, then your private sinner life is ok; when as aforementioned your heart is as important as your actions. This Medieval piety allows people to have empty religion, where your heart is divorced from action.
We see that New Testament / Reformed Piety is the only way, where action and heart are one, not split, not divorced, not Plato, but Jesus and the Apostles Teaching. Amen.
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