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sixteenth-century Christians, but most of the beliefs and practices listed would have been familiar to early Protestants on the Continent. They included challenges to traditional Catholic ritual and practice, such as railing against the sacraments themselves or against the ceremonies, rites, and observances used in their administration and disparaging Church feasts and fasts; showing refusal to accept the
originated, indeed, from theological discussions that during his time focused on the meaning of the conferral of grace as a gift, via the institutionalised ministering of sacraments by the church. A basic conceptual overlapping with the just sketched discussion on the sacralising shift from brotherhood to corporate personality is already visible here. The way chosen by Weber in order to de-theologise charisma was by pinning down charisma to ‘personality types’, particularly the military hero and the charismatic magician. Thanks to such borrowings from other fields
kaluger curses this object, and it then has to be placed in the garden or around the threshold of the future victim, from where it can exert its evil effect. In a quite serious and mortal version of this, the curse is pronounced upon some earth taken from the graves of nine dead people. The devices of black magic, also used in individual maleficium , thus become a kind of negative version of the church sacraments: ‘religious
Catholic church and address specific practices and aspects of doctrine which encouraged superstition and exploited the laity. The reforms instituted by Luther in 1517 included the elimination of Catholic practices such as the worship of saints, recognition of the authority of the Pope and belief in purgatory. The sacraments were reduced from seven to two to include just baptism and the Eucharist. The elimination of the sacrament of confession for example, whereby individuals could receive penance and absolution for their sins from a priest, redefined the nature of the
one or more child or children being in danger of death although you had notice before of the same, insomuch that they have died without that holy sacrament of baptism from you. 21 But to Swan and others like him this was not a catastrophe. Even if a child’s death was imminent, private baptism by either minister or midwife
. The word ‘cleanness’ used in a religious context had two different groups of senses in Middle English, both abstract: the more general one of ‘freedom from sin’ and the more particular one of ‘chastity’. 1 Both senses were widely current. The sacrament of penance, which was so important in the practice of the faith in the later middle ages, made the former sense universally understood through the idea that the penitent is made clean of sin. The latter sense is the one which is found if one looks up ‘cleanness’ in treatises on morality such as handbooks for priests
that faith was a matter of the heart rather than the mind and that it was a gift from God through revelation and conversion. Learning and knowledge in themselves were not enough, and mere church membership and ritual reception of the sacraments were also by themselves inadequate. Assurance of salvation in this Calvinist tradition rested only on the election by God of the repentant sinner. Christ alone could do this but a visible symbol of election could be found in participation in the sacrament of communion where God publicly affirmed His covenant with the chosen
to receive the same sitting, as formerly you have done, you, the said John Broody, did utterly refuse to receive the sacrament kneeling and did contemptuously and irreverently depart from the said holy communion, to the great danger of your own soul and most wicked example of others. One of the articles against Fryer
remercier, il pleura, ravi, courbé sous le grand signe de croix dont le couvrait le moine. 22 Durtal’s confession dramatises many of the aspects of sin depicted by both English and French Catholic writers. The search for order, the lifting of the burdens of conscience and the tension between the attractions of sin and the divine law are resolved in a merciful gesture circumscribed by a sacrament of the Church. For these poets the ministry of the priest is a kind of bridge between their buffered, autonomous individuality and the religious porosity
They believed that in order to promote greater unity among all Protestants, the established Church should concentrate on the essential doctrines of Christian religion that united rather than those which divided. These essentials, which were necessary for salvation, could be found in the Scriptures, with individuals being left to decide for themselves the validity of doctrinal inessentials. Latitudinarians also believed that the Scriptures were accessible to everyone, no matter what their training. Sacerdotalism, the elevation of the sacraments of the Church beyond