Short Take: Was the Roman Catholic back then similar to what it is today?

Chapter 14 Chapter 14 Chapter 14 It teaches today—how did that figure into this time? I think, secondly, we need to recognize that it just wasn't the medieval Catholic—Roman Catholic Church wasn't the same 500 as it was in 1517 at the time of the Reformation. But over the centuries, it drifted further away from God's Word and added more and more sort of layers of teaching so that the layers of teaching of the Church became the focus and not the Bible became the focus. That didn't happen overnight in 500, but it happened over the centuries.

So those are some ways for us to understand that sort of thousand-year period. But I think rather than just sort of dismiss—you know, I'm a Protestant, I love the Reformation, so I'm all about the Reformation—but rather than just dismiss the Middle Ages as one big misstep, I think we need to take a look back and say, what was going on there, though, that could be helpful for us? And I think one of the things we see is we've ceded all of this territory in the modern age, and we've let the Academy do its thing, and we as Christians have sort of isolated ourselves into our theology and church sort of bubble. And you come to the Middle Ages and you say, the greatest philosophers, these were absolutely committed to studying who God was and knowing who God was. Not the greatest theologians, the greatest philosophers, right? Whereas in our age, we've got this rampant secularism that has just driven a sharp wedge between philosophy and theology or science and religion. You didn't have that in the Middle Ages. And I think there's some things to be learned there that we don't have to give up this ground as Christians. We can be the best philosophers, we can be the best scientists, because we understand this to be the world that God has made, and that's a tremendous advantage for us. So those are some of the things. Recognizing that there were a lot of theological and ecclesiological missteps in the Middle Ages, there's still a lot that we can gain from that in terms of how we approach life and how we think about the world we live in.