Christian Social Reformers

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The long struggle between the Mediaeval Church and the Mediaeval Empire, between the priest and the warrior, ended, in the earlier half of the thirteenth century, in the overthrow of the Hohenstaufens, and left the Papacy sole inheritor of the claim of ancient Rome to be sovereign of the civilised world.

The picturesque religious background of this conception of the Church of Christ as a great temporal empire had been furnished by St. Augustine, although probably he would have been the first to protest against the use made of his vision of the City of God. His unfinished masterpiece, De Civitate Dei, in which with a devout and glowing imagination he had contrasted the Civitas Terrena, or the secular State founded on conquest and maintained by fraud and violence, with the Kingdom of God, which he identified with the visible ecclesiastical society, had filled the imagination of all Christians in the days immediately preceding the dissolution of the Roman Empire.

TINA SAJI was born in Orissa in 1978. She has been teaching the history of religions at the Federated Theological Faculty of the University of Chicago since 2002. She has her B.D. degree from Seabury Western Theological Seminary, and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Previously She studied at Calcutta University in India, and she has also taught at the Buddhist Koyasan University in Japan, and in other Asian universities. A contributor to religious and scholarly magazines, she is the author of various books on religion.

This History of the Reformation has been written with the intention of describing a great religious movement amid its social environment. The times were heroic, and produced great men, with striking individualities not easily weighed in modern balances. The age is sufficiently remote to compel us to remember that while the morality of one century can be judged by another, the men who belong to it must be judged by the standard of their contemporaries, and not altogether by ours. The religious revival was set in a framework of political, intellectual, and economic changes, and cannot be disentangled from its surroundings without danger of mutilation. All these things add to the difficulty of description.

A History of the Reformation, it appears to me, must describe five distinct but related things-the social and religious conditions of the age out of which the great movement came; the Lutheran Reformation down to 1555 when it received legal recognition; the Reformation in countries beyond Germany which did not submit to the guidance of Luther; the issue of certain portions of the religious life of the Middle Ages in Anabaptism, Socinianism, and Anti-Trinitarianism; and, finally, the Counter Reformation.

This volume describes the eve of the Reformation and the movement. In a second volume I hope to deal with the Reformation with Anabaptism, Socinianism, and kindred matters which had their roots far back in the Middle Ages, and with the Counter-Reformation.

**Contents and Sample Pages**