Carl Trueman Knows the Truth About the Medieval Church

I recently came across these lectures by Calvinist Church historian Carl Trueman and I must say that I’m very impressed.  They’re titled The Reformation but a better title would be The Life of Martin Luther.

I’ve watched four of these lectures and from what I’ve heard so far, these lectures are a goldmine.  Trueman makes it his goal to give you the truth.  These lectures aren’t an apologetic work for the reformation or Martin Luther.  He says a lot of things that would be uncomfortable to most Protestants today.

Being a good historian, Trueman knows that one can’t understand the period of Luther without knowing the period that preceded it, also known as the medieval period.  When a Protestant is asked about the early Church, they give mixed answers.  Some say it was great, some say it was a mixed bag, and some say it was full of heresy.  However, if you ask a Protestant about the medieval Church the answer is almost always negative.

Most Protestants would classify the medieval Church as a being enveloped by tradition, superstition, papal bulls, and ecumenical councils.  However, if you listen to lecture 2 of this series, Trueman says that Biblical exegesis was extremely important to the theologians of the medieval Church.  If you go to 44:45 of the above video and watch for a couple of minutes, Trueman says that to qualify to teach as a theologian in a medieval Catholic University you’d need to have taught and preached through more of the Bible than someone trying to get a teaching job at a modern Protestant seminary in North America in the present day.  I bet Protestants are shocked to hear this but this is coming from Trueman and not me.

Trueman is correct.  I know because I’ve read quite a few medieval theologians and scripture is very important to them.  Now, Trueman does say that access to the Greek and Hebrew text was extremely limited, but they held the Latin Vulgate in very high regard.  To this day, the Traditional Catholics regard the Vulgate and the Septuagint as the greatest translations ever made.

Now, I knew that what Trueman said regarding the medieval period was true.  I didn’t know the tidbit of the requirements of Bible teaching to become a theology professor, but I did know that scripture was important to them.  I’m one of the few people who has actually bothered to read medieval theology.  Most Catholics don’t do that and even less Protestants do.

I want Protestants to understand that the Bible was very important to the medieval Church.  I personally don’t care if they say that they got a bunch of stuff wrong.  I think that Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and Tyndale were wrong on many things but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t care about the scripture.  I would never say that.

As a Catholic, I can say that I recommend these lectures from Trueman.  His goal is truth, not apologetics.  My mom once said to me that when she was in university, she had a history professor who said that in the last 200 years there hasn’t been history done, only journalism.  I must agree with him but there are exceptions.  If these lectures aren’t an exception, they certainly come pretty close.