This quiz, Turbulent Times, includes the Reformation.
Almost exactly 500 years ago, in the 'teens' of the 16th century ~ around a quarter of the way back from now towards the founding events of the Church in New Testament times ~ came the great Break with Rome that was known as the Reformation, giving birth to the Protestant churches. How much do you already know about this momentous event and its consequences?
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Martin Luther King (the 20th-century black American pastor and civil rights leader, who was assassinated for his activism) must surely have been named in honour of this much earlier pioneer campaigner. (See Answer 3)
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Answers 1 & 2 belong in the 19th Century (about 400 years after the Reformation). Johannes Gutenberg had brought movable-type printing to Europe in the closing decades of the 15th Century, which meant that books could be printed in runs of scores or hundreds of copies. Doing this by 'letterpress' was still a time-consuming craft, but nothing like as much so as copying everything longhand in the 'scriptorium' of a monastery (what we might nowadays call 'the forerunner of the copy-shop'!). Ironically, the Reformation would lead to the closure of many monastery and abbey foundations in Britain in the late 1530s.
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This was Henry VIII (he of the six wives, the first of whom the Pope would not allow him to divorce; so he decided to take advantage of the Catholic church being under ideological attack, and set up his own Protestant Church of England, where he could make his own rules on this and other matters!).
There has, at time of writing, been no King Henry IX of England (Answer 3), nor any imminent likelihood of one! |
There is of course the conspicuous 19th-century Martyrs' Memorial on St Giles' St (which looks rather like the steeple of a drowned church), just round the corner from the cross in the road on Broad Street where three men were burned to death for being 'on the wrong side' of the religious disputes. Within a few further hundred metres, the University Church (whose upstairs meeting room was the wartime birthplace of what is now Oxfam) has an eloquent plaque listing an alarmingly high number of casualties on each side of the Reformation.
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The Authorised Version is often alternatively referred to as the 'King James Bible'.
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Cranmer did the original work, but the 'BCP' underwent a number of revisions before becoming standardised in 1662.
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'Protestant' is the general term and would include, for instance, the Lutheran / Evangelical churches of northern Europe and further afield. The French language, perhaps indicatively, refers to all non-Catholic places of worship (however unmistakably 'church-like' they may look in their form or function) as 'un temple', along with those of other non-Christian faiths such as the Buddhists.
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The adjective from this is 'ecumenical'.
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'Change of substance' = 'transubstantiation'. ('Corpus Christi', meanwhile [Answer 3], is Latin for 'the Body of Christ', which is broadly relevant but not a pertinent answer here.) For a reasonably exhaustive analysis of this thorny but pivotal topic, try entering the (correct) T-word into Google or Wikipedia.
It is possibly worth commenting that since Jesus would have been speaking in Aramaic at the Last Supper, there may have been no actual verb connecting the 'elements' of bread and wine with their symbolic meanings (as with modern Russian or Mandarin Chinese, the 'be'-verb is merely implied, and the Disciples would have been well enough used to Jesus' parables to draw their own inferences from whatever precise form of words He did or did not use). |
'Liberation Theology' only made its appearance in the latter decades of the 20th Century. Together with the other 'genuine' answers to this Question, it is a fascinating topic for your further research, if you are curious and interested!
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