為宗教改革創造了條件 Setting the Stage
作者: Ryan Reeves 譯者: Maria Marta
在教會歷史漫長的歲月裡，第十五世紀是最可憐的時代。在大眾的想象中，第十五世紀是中世紀與宗教改革之間的一座橋梁。雖然它可能是旅程中的重要一站，但很少有人會停下來欣賞這座橋梁。
如果我們要了解中世紀和宗教改革時代的過渡, 那麼我們需要避免上述這種觀點。第十五世紀是一個毀滅與探索的時代。在非洲，伊斯蘭教的快速擴張帶來首要的壓力，然後是努比亞王國的毀滅[1], 努比亞王國的基督信仰的表述（an expression of Christianity）可追溯到羅馬帝國的信仰擴展, 從第四世紀下半葉起, 或更早時期。當地的基督信仰可能回溯至第四世紀早期，如果不是更早的話。迄今（所掌握的資料看）, 埃塞俄比亞正教會（The Ethiopian Church）可追溯到第一世紀的信仰擴展時期[2], 如果這是真的，教會這分支是現存唯一的非洲前殖民地基督信仰的表述。然而, 在中世紀後期, 在幾百年的時間裏, 基督徒見證阿拉伯帝國擴張的炮火攻擊，以及給教會帶來的壓力， 1504年, 阿拉伯帝國的擴張最終導致努比亞王國的崩潰, 基督教遺產的重要非洲分支在我們的集體記憶當中消失。
在第十五世紀，哥倫布「乘風破浪渡滄海」[3]。哥倫布是一個意大利水手，由於經濟和宗教上的原因，他希望找到一條通往遠東的更好的路徑。哥倫布不相信世界是平坦的。受過良好教育的人都從亞裏士多德（Aristotle）、托勒密（Ptolemy）、和聖畢德尊者（the Venerable Bede）等人那兒知道地球是球形的。但他們沒有意識到，如果一個人朝大西洋方向前進, 從歐洲到亞洲所跨越的經度。如果他們能快速到達那裏，那麼探險就值得一試。相反, 另外一些人投資繞過非洲南端的航行。巴托羅繆迪亞斯（Bartolomeu Dias）於1488年帶領船隊航行至非洲大陸最南端，完成此線路的航行, 他喜歡稱非洲的末端為「好望角」（Cabo das tormenta），原因是希望橫渡這些海域而又不失去一切, 這是不可能的[4]。
在東方, 居住著仍稱自己為「羅馬人」的人, 他們認為自己是創建在第四世紀的君士坦丁堡的繼承人[5] 。這些人是拜占庭人（Byzantines），他們的皇家所在地是君士坦丁堡新城。戰爭的禍害結束他們的生活方式。
1453年五月， 盡管拜占庭人認為自己處於可防守的陣地, 但是土耳其軍隊（the Ottoman armies）航行駛入博斯普魯斯式海峽（the Bosporus）和其周邊城區。環繞城市的「狄奧多西城牆」(Theodosian Walls)是造建史上最顯赫的城牆之一，從正面攻擊幾乎是不可能的[6] 。拜占庭人有充分的理由樂觀。君士坦丁堡屹立超過千年的歷史, 經歷過無數武力征服和殘酷戰爭, 但只淪陷過一次------敗在發起1203年第四次十字軍東征的西方基督徒手中。帝國城市從未落入異教徒之手[7] 。然而, 圍攻的船隊運來一系列巨型的加農炮, 據一位目擊者稱，加農炮能夠向防禦築壘投射近六百英鎊的彈藥。六周後，這城市連同小亞細亞地區的基督教一起淪喪，基督徒成為受迫害的少數群體。聖索菲亞大教堂（Hagia Sophia），歷史上最偉大的教堂建築之一，被改作清真寺，而幾乎所有領先的知識分子和神職人員都逃離這個城市 [8] 。
第十五世紀也是歐洲國王和帝國毀滅和重建的時期。在前半個世紀，老對頭法國和英國在我們所稱為的「百年戰爭」（the Hundred Years’ War）中相互撕打 [9]。這是歐洲境內斷斷續續, 為爭奪王位和土地而進行（長達116年）的小規模戰鬥。在大多數這些戰鬥中, 英國重創法國，要不是一個女扮男裝戰士的幹預, 據稱她看見上帝對法國的計劃的興奮異象，那麼英國可能已經取得歐洲大陸的一半土地。當聖女貞德（Joan of Arc）出現時，雖然她的法國貴族發覺她的外表滑稽，但戰場的失敗使他們在絕望之下, 派貞德到前線, 看看她是否能鼓動士兵們的士氣[10] 。結果貞德發揮了作用。在1429年，她幫助解除奧爾良（Orléans）（傳統上法國國王登位加冕的所在地）之圍[11] , 和扭轉有利於法國的戰局。貞德努力付出得到的卻是背叛, 在法國南部, 勃艮第人（Burgundians）把她交給英國, 她被判作女巫燒死在火刑柱上。
在英國，亨利七世在博斯沃思戰役（Battle of Bosworth）擊敗李察三世[12], 結束玫瑰戰爭（Wars of the Roses 1455–87） [13] 。根據莎士比亞的描述, 在博斯沃思戰役中, 李察為了逃避政變, 吼叫「一匹馬！願以我的王國換取一匹馬！」 在雙方擊戰中，李察被殺，亨利七世建立都鐸王朝（the Tudor dynasty）[14] 。他的兒子亨利八世，因與凱瑟琳阿拉貢（Catherine of Aragon）的第一段婚姻與教皇鬧翻，他依靠自己的力量創立英國國教會/聖公會（the Anglican Church）[15] 。亨利七世的孫女伊麗莎白一世 [16] ，制造了英國教會內英國國教徒和清教徒鬥爭的背景。
換言之，在宗教改革世界裡的, 我們所熟悉的歐洲政治和社會形態，在宗教改革前幾年才開始成型。
歐洲知識分子的形態也是如此。隨著世紀的展開，胡斯（Jan Hus）的宗教改革運動允許建立單獨的捷克教會[17] 。雖然胡斯也受到愛自己國家的熱忱鼓動, 尋求脫離羅馬帝國的獨立, 但是胡斯援引聖經經文,拒絕中世紀羅馬天主教會的神學改變。結果是建立了胡斯派教會（Hussite church）------在宗教改革期間是異端的代名詞，當路德在1519年萊比錫辯論（the Leipzig
Disputation）中聲稱「是的，我是一個胡斯」（Ja, ich bin Hussite）時, 他公開確認同胡斯派教會。1415年，胡斯因為他的改革, 被教皇處以火刑，萊比錫神學學院的建立, 是從布拉格大學逃離出來的教員, 在萊比錫重建自己的學院的結果。當路得宗教改革開始時, 胡斯運動剛剛平覆。
然而，胡斯不是唯一對羅馬教皇權力提出異議, 或改革中世紀教會的神學家。還有文藝覆興，既是对中世紀教會的內部批判, 又是新知識的興盛時期。新技術讓人文主義者如虎添翼。一個名叫古騰堡（Johannes Gutenberg）的德國企業家發明了印書新方法-------今天稱作活字印刷術 [18] 。古騰堡不是發明印刷機本身，而是研究出倒出活字字模的金屬鑄模, 將它們排列成印刷的書頁的印書新方法, 活字印刷術削減印書成本, 只占先前印書方法之成本的一小部分。印刷聖經的成本曾經等於購買一間小房子的花費，但現在它的成本只等於一個星期的工資。
意識到擴展識字與學習的機會，人文主義者發動一輪聖經、神學、歷史和古典研究的寫作。對所有的人文主義者來說，鹿特丹的伊拉斯謨（Desiderius Erasmus）是他們的王子 [19] 。伊拉斯謨出生於1466年, 是一個神父的私生子，他表現出語言和考證的才能, 這些才能促使他作為文藝覆興新思想運動的重要人物登上舞台。在他的生命歷程中，他帶給世界教父著作全集, 和神學科目的無數短文。迄今為止, 他最具影響力的作品是希臘文新約聖經-----他承認這部作品是匆促搜集自十二世紀的拜占庭文本, 一些錯誤的段落添加到聖經中, 啟示錄有六節經文完全丟失。希臘新約聖經就像一本現代的隔行聖經。一行是希臘語經文；下一行是伊拉斯謨新翻譯的拉丁語經文。希臘文聖經不僅為讀者提供了原始的希臘語，而且還提供了一個路線圖，幫助學生確定如何把希臘語表達成他們的語言。那麼, 路德在沃木斯議會（Diet of Worms）受審後, 把這本希臘文新約聖經變成他的德文新約聖經譯本的基礎, 也就不足為奇了。
籍著毀滅與探索，第十五世紀縮小了中世紀和現代世界兩者間的差距，為宗教改革創造了條件。
本文原刊于Tabletalk雜誌2015年七月號。
Dr.
Ryan Reeves is assistant dean and assistant professor of historical theology at
Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Jacksonville, Fla. He is author of
English Evangelicals and Tudor Obedience.
譯註與网上簡易參考鏈接:
[1]
800年前的苏丹，800年的基督教努比亚文明
http://sinoafrica.home.news.cn/blog/article.do?bid=75685&aid=28191200
《非洲通史古代卷》General History Of
Africa.V 第六章 基督教文明在非洲 莫赫塔尔（B.A. Ogot）著
努比亚
非洲史
[2]
埃塞俄比亞正教會（The Ethiopian Church）
[3]
Columbus
“sailed the ocean blue.” 傳統上譯作: 哥倫布「横渡蓝色的海洋」。
[4]
巴爾托洛梅烏•迪亞士（Bartolomeu Dias）
[5]
君士坦丁堡（地名）（Constantinople）http://baike.baidu.com/subview/8014/14322253.htm
君士坦丁堡
君士坦丁大帝（古羅馬帝國統治者）http://baike.baidu.com/subview/15698/11042954.htm?fromtitle=%E5%90%9B%E5%A3%AB%E5%9D%A6%E4%B8%81%E4%B8%80%E4%B8%96&fromid=2276656&type=syn
[6]
狄奧多西城牆/君士坦丁堡城牆(Theodosian Walls)
土耳其伊斯坦堡 狄奧多西城牆 (Theodosian Wall) 防禦君士坦丁堡的堅固堡壘http://taiwan-motherofmine.blogspot.com/2009/04/theodosian-wall.html
超級工程：羅馬是怎樣建成的VIII君士坦丁堡的餘暉(7) http://zannanzahattusili.blogspot.com/2014/04/viii7.html
[7]
《1453，君士坦丁堡陷落》（原創翻譯，節選）
[8]
聖索菲亞大教堂 (Hagia Sophia church) https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%9C%A3%E7%B4%A2%E8%8F%B2%E4%BA%9A%E5%A4%A7%E6%95%99%E5%A0%82
聖索非亞大教堂（土耳其伊斯坦布爾聖索菲亞大教堂）http://baike.baidu.com/subview/443658/11119557.htm?fromtitle=%E5%9C%A3%E7%B4%A2%E8%8F%B2%E4%BA%9A%E5%A4%A7%E6%95%99%E5%A0%82&fromid=286545&type=syn
[9]
百年戰爭（the Hundred Years’ War）
[10]
贞德（法国民族英雄）
[11]
奧爾良戰役（Battle of Orléans）
奧爾良戰役
[12]
博斯沃思原野戰役（Battle of Bosworth Field）http://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%8D%9A%E6%96%AF%E6%B2%83%E6%80%9D%E5%8E%9F%E9%87%8E%E6%88%98%E5%BD%B9
[13]
玫瑰戰爭（Wars of the Roses）
玫瑰戰爭（薔薇戰爭）
[14]
亨利七世（英格蘭國王）
都鐸王朝（英國朝代名）
[15]
聖公會（ Church of England/Anglican
Church）http://www.baike.com/wiki/%E5%9C%A3%E5%85%AC%E4%BC%9A
聖公會 Church of England, Anglican Church, Episcopal
Church
[16]
伊麗莎白一世（16世紀英國女王）
[17]
揚•胡斯（Jan Hus）
Ecclesiatical
History 教會歷史>> E.16. Jan
Hus 胡司
《歷史的軌跡—二千年教會史》 祁伯爾著 第廿章 教会内部的困扰 （1200一1517）
《見證的火炬》 約翰.甘乃迪著 第十一章風起雲湧
[18]
约翰•古腾堡
[19]
伊拉斯謨（Erasmus of Rotterdam）
Setting the Stage
by Ryan
Reeves
Of
all the centuries of church history, the fifteenth century is one of the most
pitiable. In popular imagination, it is a bridge between the medieval and the
Reformation worlds. And while it may be important for the journey, few stop to
admire a bridge.
We
need to avoid this perspective if we are to understand the transition between
the medieval and Reformation ages. The fifteenth century was an era of
destruction and exploration. In Africa, the rapid expansion of Islam brought
first pressure and then destruction to the kingdoms of Nubia—an expression of
Christianity that stretched back to the expansion of the faith in the Roman
Empire from the second half of the fourth century and beyond. Local Christian
faith likely dated as far back as the early fourth century, if not earlier. The
Ethiopian Church to this day dates itself to the first-century expansion of the
faith, and if this is true, it would make this branch of the church the only
extant pre-colonial expression of the faith in Africa. The centuries of
Christian witness, though, came under fire with the expansion of the Arab
empire during the later Middle Ages, which brought pressure to the church, and
eventually led to the collapse of the final Nubian kingdom in 1504 and the loss
in our collective memory of this important African branch of the Christian
heritage.
In
the fifteenth century, Columbus “sailed the ocean blue.” Columbus was an
Italian sailor who, for economic and spiritual reasons, wanted to find a better
path to the Far East. Columbus did not believe that the world was flat. Those
who were well educated knew from Aristotle, Ptolemy, and the Venerable Bede
that the world was spherical. What they were unaware of were the number of
longitudinal spans it would take to go from Europe to Asia if one headed over
the Atlantic. If they could get there quickly, then the exploration was worth a
shot. Others sunk money instead into rounding the southern tip of Africa. This
was accomplished in 1488 by Bartolomeu Dias, who liked to refer to Africa’s tip
as the “Cape of Storms” (Cabo das tormenta) since there was little hope in
sailing these seas without losing everything.
In
the East lived a people who still called themselves “Roman” and who considered
themselves heirs to the world Constantine created in the fourth century. They
were the Byzantines, with their imperial seat in the city of Constantinople.
The plague of war was about to bring an end to their way of life.
In
May 1453, the Ottoman armies sailed to the Bosporus and besieged the city,
though the Byzantines believed they held a defensible position. The “Theodosian
Walls” that surrounded the city were among the most impressive ever built,
making a frontal assault nearly impossible. The Byzantines had good reason to
be optimistic. In a time of rampant wars and conquest, the city of
Constantinople had fallen only once in more than a millennium—and that at the
hands of Western Christians during the Fourth Crusade in 1203. Never had the
imperial city fallen to the infidel. The besieging ships, though, brought with
them a set of massive cannons that, according to one eyewitness, could hurl a
shot of nearly six hundred pounds at the fortifications. After six weeks, the
city fell to invasion, along with Christianity in Asia Minor, where Christians
became a persecuted minority. Hagia Sophia, one of history’s greatest church
buildings, was converted to a mosque, while nearly all of the leading
intellectuals and churchmen fled thecity.
The
fifteenth century was also a time of destruction and renewal for European kings
and empires. For the first half of the century, the old enemies of France and
England threw themselves at each other in what we call the Hundred Years’ War.
This was a series of skirmishes over land and title within Europe. England pummeled
France for the majority of these wars and, were it not for the intervention of
a cross-dressing female warrior who allegedly experienced ecstatic visions of
God’s plan for France, then England might have taken half of the European
mainland. When Joan of Arc appeared, even her French lords found her appearance
comical, but their cause was desperate enough to send Joan to the front line to
see if she might stoke the morale of the soldiers. It worked. In 1429, she
helped lift the siege of Orléans (the traditional seat of French coronation)
and turned the tide of the war in favor of the French. Her efforts were
rewarded with treachery, when the Burgundians in the south of France handed her
to the English to be burned as a witch.
In
England, the Wars of the Roses (1455–87) were concluded when Henry VII defeated
Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth—with Richard, according to Shakespeare,
bellowing, “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!” in order to escape the
coup. In the stroke that killed Richard, Henry brought into existence the Tudor
dynasty. It was his son, Henry VIII, who would quarrel with the pope about his
first marriage to Catherine of Aragon and who would create by his own power the
Anglican Church. It was Henry VII’s granddaughter, Elizabeth I, who would
create the context of the struggle between Conformists and Puritans within the
Church of England.
In
other words, the political and social shape of Europe that feels so familiar to
us in the Reformation world was in several cases only beginning to take shape
just before the Reformation.
The
same could be said for the intellectual shape of Europe. As the century opened,
the reform movement of Jan Hus allowed for the creation of a separate Czech
church. Hus stood on the text of Scripture to reject the theological changes of
the medieval Catholic church, though he was also spurred by the love of his
country to seek independence from the Holy Roman Empire. The result was the
formation of the Hussite church—a church that during the Reformation was a
byword for heresy, and with which Luther openly identified at the Leipzig
Disputation in 1519, when he claimed, “Ja, ich bin Hussite” (“Yes, I am a
Hussite”). By 1415, Hus had been burned for his reformation, and the theology
faculty at Leipzig had been formed as a result of faculty from Prague fleeing
the university and forming their own in the city of Leipzig. The sting of the
Hussite movement had hardly subsided when Luther’s reformation began.
Yet
Hus was not the only theologian to take issue with papal power or the
innovations of the medieval church. There was also the Renaissance, part
internal critique of the medieval church and part flowering of new learning.
The humanists were aided in their efforts by new technology. A German
entrepreneur named Johannes Gutenberg invented a new method for printing
books—known today as the moveable type press. He did not invent the press
itself, but rather a method for moving letters around on a grid for each page,
which cut the expense of creating a book down to a fraction of the cost to
print one on earlier presses. Once, a printed Bible cost as much as a small
home, but now it was the cost of a week’s wages.
Sensing
the opportunity to expand learning and literacy, the humanists unleashed a
torrent of writing on theology, Bible, classical studies, and history. Of all
the humanists, Erasmus of Rotterdam was their prince. Born in 1466 as the
illegitimate son of a priest, Erasmus demonstrated skill with languages and
textual criticism that propelled him onto the stage as a leading light of the
new intellectual movement of the Renaissance. In the course of his life,
Erasmus gave the world complete editions of the works of the church fathers as
well as numerous tracts on theological subjects. By far his most impactful work
was the Greek New Testament—a work he admitted was gathered in a slapdash
manner from twelfth-century Byzantine texts, with some passages wrongly added
to the Bible and six verses of the book of Revelation missing entirely. The
Greek New Testament was something like a modern interlinear Bible. In one
column was the Greek text; next to it was a fresh Latin translation by Erasmus.
Not only did this provide readers with the original Greek, but it also provided
a road map for students to help determine how to render the Greek into their
language. It is no surprise, then, that Luther used this text as the basis of
his German New Testament, which he translated after his trial at the Diet of
Worms.
Through
destruction and exploration, the fifteenth century did more than bridge the gap
between the medieval age and the modern world; it set the stage for the
Reformation.
