Melanchthon

7 Key excerpts on "Melanchthon"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  How Melanchthon Helped Luther Discover the Gospel

  The Doctrine of Justification in the Reformation

  • Scott Leonard Keith, Lowell C. Green, Lowell C Green(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • 1517 Publishing

    (Publisher)

  How Melanchthon Helped Luther Develop His Views

  PART II

  Introduction to Part II

  Philipp Melanchthon has been severely judged for being a humanist and for injecting intellectualism and legalism into Protestant theology.1 Emotions have been so deep and bitter that they have hindered scholars, especially from the Lutheran camp, in reaching an objective appraisal of Melanchthon. The result has been a serious gap in secular and ecclesiastical history. Perhaps Melanchthon’s place in history would be more accurately portrayed if it were realized that he wanted to be and was first of all a philologist and an educator and that his contributions toward theology, no matter how awesome, were secondary to his life’s work. Like no other man from the past, he succeeded in changing the humanist pursuit of the classics from an elitist into a popular movement and in paving the way for the modern public-school system.2

  Melanchthon was a humanist. But as Werner Elert has shown, his humanism made important contributions to the Reformation not only in providing the philological resources for opening the Holy Scriptures and the pedagogical institutions for disseminating religious and secular knowledge among an entire population, but especially in expounding the meaning of the doctrine of justification itself.3 He gave the sixteenth century an authentic understanding of the nature of man in his strengths and weaknesses. Luther had come from the protective cloisters of monastery living. Melanchthon came from the world of Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Machiavelli.

  His anthropology was that of antique humanity, formed by him in absolute personal purity, but still only a worldly existence—looking optimistically toward the future, self-conscious, progressive, and idealistic. Man was the measure of all things.4

  Melanchthon brought to Wittenberg this understanding of man together with his interest in Biblical studies. Deeply impressed by Luther, he quickly became his follower and was involved in the lifelong pursuit of clarifying the doctrine of justification.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  A History of Christian Doctrine

  • Hubert Cunliffe-Jones(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • T&T Clark

    (Publisher)

  What he wrote affected profoundly the religion of the German people, and his legacy to the Lutheran church, his influence on Protestant Orthodoxy and indeed on all subsequent Lutheran development was so fateful that he will always be a centre of controversy. This is not to deny consensus about the main events of his life, and a general admission of his greatness as an evangelical theologian. It seems reasonable, following Maurer, to recognize the deep impact upon his development of three men, his uncle Reuchlin, the great Erasmus, and Martin Luther. Through his birth and his relationship with Reuchlin, Melanchthon was placed within the context not only of the Northern renaissance, but of that South German humanism which owed much to Wimpfeling, and which joined him with other young men, like Oecolampadius and John Brenz, in the Universities of Heidelberg and Tubingen. His whole training was concentrated in the classics and the humanities, and it was as a Professor of Greek that, on his uncle's recom-mendation, he went to Wittenberg. That he was known as 'Master 1 Philip and did not advance beyond the degree of 'Baccalaureus Biblicus' marks him off from Martin Luther, who was very much a mediaeval Doctor of 374 A History of Christian Doctrine Divinity and whose early lectures show striking expertise in that fifteenth-century theological tradition in which he grew and against which he rebelled. Melanchthon was in his teens that tiresome figure, an academic prodigy, taking degrees, bursting into print in prose and poetry, and astonishing and delighting his elders, like Luther, with the maturity of the programme of academic reform which he adumbrated in his celebrated inaugural lecture in 1518.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Ars et methodus

  Philipp Melanchthon's Humanist concept of philosophy

  • Sandra Bihlmaier, Herman J. Selderhuis(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

    (Publisher)

  Kusukawa directs her focus towards the historical context of Melanchthonian philosophy. She gives much attention to the external incitement of the composition of Melanchthon’s textbooks. And there is no doubt that the aftermath of the Reformation had caused serious upheaval and had determined an important political, social and also institutional change. The latter had effected a transformation not only of the assessment of the functionality of university teaching, but also in the manner in which a series of reconceptualizations were effected concerning the inter- pretations of ancient authorities. However, at the level of textbook creation, historical urgency and intellectual allegiance can only be artificially separated and, thus, need to be considered together. The present study focuses on the manner in which, in a more restricted context – the institutional framework of Wittenberg University at the beginning of the Lutheran Reformation – Philipp Melanchthon’s project of the reformation of the language arts and, indirectly of the other liberal arts emerges and develops. This development is traced from Melanchthon’s student years in Tübingen to the (2001) rendering of Ciceronian mediated Stoicism of Melanchthon. See Salatowsky, 2006, 35– 131. See also Mundt, 2012, 151–159. 52 This is elaborately undertaken in Melanchthon’s Initia Doctrinae Physicae, CR 13, 342. 53 Frank, 1995, 28. On fathers and grandfathers: Melanchthon’s heritage of dialectic 42 © 2018, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ISBN Print: 9783525570593 — ISBN E-Book: 9783647570594 height of his career in Wittenberg. It discloses Melanchthon’s endeavor to cope with the challenge of conceiving a new curricula: that of (1) of functionality, i. e. pedagogical success, and (2) philosophical broadness and rigour.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Celebrating the Reformation

  Its Legacy And Continuing Relevance

  • Mark D Thompson(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • IVP

    (Publisher)

  Loci Communes.

  Melanchthon: humanist and theologian

  Philip was the son of Georg Schwarzerd, a distinguished armourer, and his mother was the daughter of the mayor of Bretten, the small town where he was born in February 1497. His father died when he was ten, and his mother looked to her uncle, the eminent humanist and Hebraist Johannes Reuchlin, to oversee his education. He was an apt student, to say the least, graduating with a bachelor of arts degree in 1511 at Heidelberg, a lively centre of humanist learning. That university’s regulations would not admit a fourteen-year-old to the next step, so he went on to study at Tübingen where he graduated as Master Philip in 1514 while aged sixteen. Under Reuchlin’s guidance, Philip became a scholar of the new northern humanism and, typically, took on the more elegantly sounding Greek equivalent of his name: from Schwarzerd (meaning ‘black earth’) to Melanchthon. While still a student, he was apprenticed as a corrector to a printer called Thomas Anshelm, who by no coincidence was Reuchlin’s publisher. Both his academic studies and his work as a manuscript editor enabled the young Melanchthon to become immersed in the classics, especially Aristotle. The publication of Erasmus’s Greek New Testament in 1516 was a significant event that prepared Melanchthon for what was to come. Nominated by his great-uncle Reuchlin, he was accepted by the University of Wittenberg to be its first professor of Greek.

  On 29 August 1518 the twenty-one-year-old Greek scholar delivered his inaugural lecture in Wittenberg. Addressing ‘the youth of the Academy, on correcting the studies of youth’, Melanchthon eruditely appealed for the new humanistic learning to be expanded and applied to all areas of learning, including theology:

  For it will be a diligent concern of mine to suggest the things that seem right for each subject. We have in hand Homer, and we have Paul’s letter to Titus. Here you can see how much a sense of appropriate language contributes to understanding the mysteries of sacred things; and also what difference there is between learned and unlearned interpreters of Greek.7

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Medicine, Natural Philosophy and Religion in Post-Reformation Scandinavia

  • Ole Grell, Andrew Cunningham(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 Philip Melanchthon and his significance for natural philosophy 1 Andrew Cunningham

  ‘This whole most beautiful theatre – the Heavens, Lights, Stars, Air, Water, Earth, Plants, Animated beings, and all the bodies of the world – was set up with such skill, ornamented with different kinds, figure, harmony of motions, efficacy of forces, and distributed in order, so that it should be an illustrious testimony of the work of God the creator. And in this splendid home Man has been set up … ’2

  The Lutheran reform of religion and education began as a two-man affair. It had started in 1517 with Martin Luther famously nailing the ninety-five theses on the door of a church in Wittenberg, theses which challenged many central points of Catholic doctrine and discipline. This particular church was the church of the new University of Wittenberg (founded 1502), where Luther was a professor, as well as being an Augustinian friar. The theses were a challenge to others to participate in a scholastic disputation. During the first tempestuous years of reform and – when the dust had settled – during the years of reconstruction, Luther always had at his side his fellow professor, the educationalist Philipp Melanchthon. Their characters were like their physiques. The one, Luther, was big and bold in body and in his ideas for reform; the other, Melanchthon, was lean and cautious, both physically and politically. Initially the reform impulse meant that the works of the heathen Aristotle – the mainstay of university teaching to this point – had to be rejected. But then the challenge of the yet more radical prophets of Zwickau and others meant that Aristotle had to be reincorporated into the reformed curriculum. Melanchthon is the person who performed this dextrous turn-around, making the heathen Aristotle acceptable to Protestants.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Johann Reuchlin (1455-1522)

  A Theological Biography

  • Franz Posset(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  Nobody would dare to refuse him a leading role as a professional, non-ordained theologian next to Martin Luther (1483 – 1546). Melanchthon may be responsible for the tendency among German Protes-tants to find as many forerunners of Luther as possible, including Melanchthon ’ s distant relative Reuchlin. ⁵ Melanchthon tied Reuchlin and Luther ’ s Reformation together. He also liked to point out that his friend, Martin Luther, was indebted to a large degree to the tradition of monastic theology of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090 – 1153). ⁶ In connecting Luther to Bernard ’ s theology of grace Melanchthon was correct, but a similar, analogous, immediate dependency of Luther upon Reuchlin is not. Melanchthon ’ s Reuchlin biography, delivered thirty years after Reuchlin ’ s death, in the form of a commemorative speech in 1552, is much less trustworthy than his Luther biography of 1546, which Melanchthon finalized shortly after Luther ’ s death. His Luther biography is based upon his research and personal interviews and encounters with Luther over many years, whereas his Reuchlin biography is not. Melanchthon and Reuchlin did no longer meet in per-son after Melanchthon ’ s move from Tübingen to Wittenberg. Their correspond-ence, although cordial, from 1518 up to Reuchlin ’ s death, is minimal. Only five letters are known. ⁷ The last letter of Reuchlin to Melanchthon is dated 12 Septem- Günther Schweizer, “ Die Familie Reuchlin: Eine genealogische Bestandsaufnahme ” , in Jo-hannes Reuchlin und der “ Judenbücherstreit ” , ed. Sönke Lorenz +, Dieter Mertens (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2013) 223 – 262.  Franz Posset, “ A Humanist and Reformer Turns to Saint Bernard: Philip Melanchthon and Bernard of Clairvaux ” , Analecta Cisterciensia 55 (2005) 301 – 315; idem, The Real Luther. A Friar at Erfurt and Wittenberg. Exploring Luther ’ s Life with Melanchthon as Guide (Saint Louis: Concordia, 2011) 129 – 147.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Renaissance Humanism, Volume 3

  Foundations, Forms, and Legacy

  • Albert Rabil, Jr.(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University of Pennsylvania Press Anniversary Collection

    (Publisher)

  Among the chief books, however, should be chronicles and his-tories in whatever language they may be had. For they are of won-drous value for understanding and guiding the course of the world, and especially for noting the wonderful works of God. 26 If Luther took the lead in reforming university education at Witten-berg, his friend Melanchthon helped to develop the regulations that be-came normative and served as a model for all universities in Germany influenced by the Reformation, the Leges academiae of 1545. Melanch-thon's orations from his inaugural lecture of 1518, De corrigendis ado-lescentiae studiis, on improving the studies of the young, through such orations as his Encomium eloquentiae, and through the addresses deliv-ered at the founding of the new humanistic evangelical academies, consistently decried the spreading depreciation of classical culture, and urged the continued cultivation of the classics. His style of advocacy for the study of the classics was duplicated and in part imitated by other HUMANISM AND THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION 3 9 1 Protestant reformed educators. Peter Schade (Petrus Mosellanus, 1493— 1524) at the University of Leipzig, for example, delivered An Oration Concerning the Knowledge of Various Languages Which Must Be Es-teemed. Ulrich Zwingli in his treatise Of the Upbringing and Education of Youth in Good Manners followed the promptings of his hero Erasmus, as well as some of the discourses of the church fathers on education. A friend of Melanchthon and Luther, Joachim Camerarius (1500—1574), who became a professor at Nuremberg, Tübingen, and Leipzig and a leader in the reform of university education at the latter two places, was a professor of classical Greek and the author of more than 150 treatises.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book