On-ramps are really important for merging safely and easily into fast-moving traffic. Where I live near Detroit, the merging lanes at the end of on-ramps are shockingly short, often leaving a sense of dangerous urgency to find a place to fit comfortably as lots of things are coming at you quickly. The purpose of entry ramps is to give you opportunity to adjust and to get up to speed without being overwhelmed.
Familiarity is part of the on-ramp for studying church history. Most readers of this space are probably comfortable hearing and reading about new details concerning John Calvin, Martin Luther, and other major (and even some minor) figures of the Reformation. The reason is because you have probably already heard some things about these people and about the Reformation itself. You have a level of familiarity with the ideas of the Reformation period and its figures that you have conceptual storage buckets to hold new and deeper details when more information comes at you. You are already up to speed, or close to it, and are therefore able to absorb more traffic more easily.
Most of us are less familiar with the medieval period. It can often feel like a period of history that has no on-ramp, expecting you to take a stark left turn from a full stop to get right into seventy-mile-an-hour traffic. We have far fewer conceptual storage buckets to help us make sense of new information that comes to us about the Middle Ages. Given that most of the literature on the medieval period is more academic in nature, I have struggled with how to help people get acquainted with these thousand years of church history.
Iain Wright and Yannick Imbert have produced just the sort of volume that will help Reformation Protestants come to better grips with the medieval period. This book is a collection of ten biographical sketches concerning figures from (roughly) every century of the Middle Ages, ranging from AD 500–1500. Each exploration of a particular figure provides helpful insight on major cultural developments through these centuries, which enables us to see the backdrop for a lot of medieval issues. Alongside these historical insights, Wright and Imbert also highlight a specific theological or ecclesiastical contribution that each person made.
This book’s goal is to show that the moniker “dark ages” is unfit for describing the medieval era. The authors contend that the gospel was always present and that faithful people still served the Lord between the time of Augustine and the Reformation. Certainly, Wright and Imbert note many ways in which Reformed Christians will have even serious disagreements with some of the figures whom they examine. Still, they make the clear case that we also have many things to appreciate about these medieval examples—how they served Christ and worked to help his people.
In other words, the mounted case here is that we should quit thinking that the medieval period was as dark as has been suggested. A fascinating vignette is how the label “dark ages” originated with notable historian Edward Gibbon, who used it in lamenting the fall of the Roman Empire. He thought the Middle Ages were dark because Christendom became the dominant system of government. The merits of Christendom, as it existed in the medieval period, are matters for further discussion. Nevertheless, we should not think that the medieval period was dark simply because Christianity had a prevailing presence across Western society.
In the goal of showing that the church had gospel light, which was a positive thing throughout the Middle Ages, this book is a resounding success. Sometimes the organization of material ends up rehearsing points, especially about context, more than once within a given chapter. This understandably can happen in a multiauthor work. Sometimes the authors might feel too defensive about saying positive things about the medievals, but that stance, too, is understandable given the kneejerk reaction among many Protestants to the medieval era. I do wish that they had given us footnotes or endnotes to their citations from primary sources because there is great stuff that would be worth pursuing further if we could find it. The overall result of this book is a resounding success.
I lead a class about medieval theology for Westminster Theological Seminary Online, and one of the challenges, at least at the beginning, is overcoming students’ skepticism that the medieval period has anything evangelical (in the proper sense) to study that can help us. I have struggled to address that concern without getting bogged down in details to show Reformed Christians why this period of history deserves more appreciation. I will be recommending to my class that they read at least one chapter of this book per week. Seminary needs interstate-speed traffic with more academic literature. Still, students can be aided by an on-ramp so they know how to deal with that traffic. I think this book will help on that front.
Familiarity is one of those orientating features that helps us make sense of big blocks of material. The church’s middle thousand years is undoubtedly a big block of material. This little book is a great way to dip into most centuries of the medieval period without diving headfirst into the ocean. It will show you that Christ was at work through his people and that his gospel was still present during this period.
©Harrison Perkins. All Rights Reserved.
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Harrison Perkins
Harrison Perkins (PhD, Queen’s University Belfast; MDiv, Westminster Seminary California) is pastor of Oakland Hills Community Church (OPC), a member of the of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, a Senior Research Fellow at the Craig Center for the Study of the Westminster Standards, online instructor in church history at Westminster Theological Seminary, a visiting lecturer in systematic theology at Edinburgh Theological Seminary, and author of Reformed Covenant Theology: A Systematic Introduction. You can read more from him at Pastor Perks.
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A little side point: Glad to see that this book references Peter Waldo.
I’m in the final stages of producing a booklet on the historic Waldensian Confessions, two of which (the Waldensian Catechism and the Noble Lesson) predate the Reformation, and the rest of which were produced after the Reformation to clear the Waldensians of accusations of heresy.
For those people who assume the Waldensian story is merely ancient history, much as the Hussites exist today via the Moravians, there are still some conservative Waldensians left, with an entire organization in the Italian Synod comparable to the Gereformeerde Bond in the old Dutch state church, in which one of the key leaders is Sen. Lucio Malan, the equivalent to the Senate Majority Leader in Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s political party in Italy.
I’m very much aware of the doctrinal problems of the “Protestants before Protestantism,” both of the Hussite and Waldensian traditions. But we make a mistake when we wrongly assume that there was no light left in the church prior to the Reformation.
Always been fascinated by the Waldenses and whether they actually held to sola fide–does your booklet reference this at all? When will it be released? Thanks!
Sam Stahl, PhD
Buffalo, NY
Thank you, Samuel. This booklet has been in process now for about six years and would have been released several years ago if it had not been for some new translation work being done recently of key documents that replaces older work from the 1800s. I need time to make sure I’ve read everything that’s currently in print on the subject to avoid embarrassing mistakes.
Three strong cautions here.
First, there are people, particularly in the “Baptist Successionism” and “Landmark Baptist” movements, who teach things about the Waldensians that go far beyond the historical evidence. Most Reformed people won’t deal with that, but I have to since I live in the Ozarks. J.M. Carroll’s “Trail of Blood” book, written in 1931, continues to have significant influence in American fundamentalism and much of what he wrote is seriously wrong.
Second, the Seventh Day Adventists, for their own reasons, claim incorrectly that the Waldensians are their forebears. The core of the issue is that the word for “shoe” is close to the word for “sabbath,” and the distinctive footwear of some of the early Waldensian preachers caused them to be known by a name that the SDA mistakenly believed meant they were seventh-day sabbath keepers.
Third, and most important for confessionally Reformed people: the early Reformers may have made the Waldensians look more doctrinally sound than they actually were. It’s widely recognized that contact with the Reformed in Geneva, following the 1532 Synod of Chanforan, substantially changed the Waldensians. What were they like before 1532?
My view, after years of reading the major books and articles on the subject, is that the modern critics have overstated their case that the Waldensians fundamentally changed their beliefs, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a case to be made. Many of the critics, beginning with German liberals in the 1800s, are liberals who have a deconstructionist agenda, and are very much like the modern liberal American historians who want to make the American founders look as bad as possible. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t problems, particularly with some of the medieval dualistic groups such as the Cathari who were in fact teaching heresy and sometimes got confused with the Waldensians, even by theologically sound writers of the 1700s and 1800s.
I think, on balance, three things can be said.
1. There is, at least for now, little to no evidence that Waldensianism existed before Peter Waldo in 1173. However, not only the older writers and the Waldensians, but also the medieval Roman Catholics and many of the Reformation-era Calvinists believed the Waldensians were far more ancient. When you read older writers speaking with confidence that Waldensians existed back to 1120, recognize that date is based on a single handwritten document brought back by Oliver Cromwell’s ambassador to the Duke of Savoy that was lost for years but the original document was eventually found in British library archives. The date almost certainly is wrong, but the handwritten document was widely reprinted during the Puritan era with the wrong date.
2. We may never know for sure just how much overlap there was between the Waldensians and other groups such as the Cathari, Bogomils, Albigensians and others. What we know is that some of the people accused of being Waldensians who were tried in Roman Catholic courts are reported in trial documents as having taught things that no orthodox person should believe. What we don’t know is if the trial records accurately report what accused heretics believed or if they were describing the right group to which an accused heretic belonged.
3. I personally think what we’re dealing with is a group of medieval Christians who got the Bible translated into their language, rediscovered the basics of the gospel, made some mistakes, and when they saw the Reformers in the pulpit, said, “This is the core of what we’ve always believed,” and joined the Reformation. Think of simple believers in evangelical “Bible only” churches who become confessionally Reformed. It’s a process and it takes time.
I write all this to make clear the church history, particularly before the Reformation, is a mixed bag. We aren’t going to find something in AD 1173 that looks like the Westminster Standards or Three Forms of Unity.
I believe the Waldensian Catechism, which is likely the oldest and most stable doctrinal standard of Waldensianism, is a fundamentally sound document that can be fairly described as pre-Protestant.
That doesn’t mean I believe all the things that some writers used to say about the Waldensians as being fully formed teachers of sovereign grace dating back to 1120 or to the 800s. That simply cannot be supported based on what we currently have in the historical record.
Hope that helps.
The term “Dark Ages” was coined by a bunch of late medieval writers who were enamored of classical Greek and Roman literature, picked up again by Gibbon and other endarkenment figures who thought the seat of the scornful was the throne of wisdom.
I don’t think the term “Dark Ages” was a medieval invention. Several Renaissance figures gave us the expression “Middle Ages” (medium aevum etc). I think the term “Dark Ages” was an Enlightenment invention but I’m not certain.