Values and ideas of the Renaissance that are displayed in a painting.

16

THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES

 

Chapter Objectives

• Describe how the Crusades affected the development of western culture.

• Explain the conditions under which a worldview collapses.

• Identify some key figures who helped shape the emerging modern worldview.

We’ve seen how medieval culture reached its high point in the Gothic style of architecture. We’ve noted how a hierarchical worldview began to define and shape every aspect of medieval culture. We saw as well that the Age of Faith was, paradoxically, an age of great corruption. Medieval literature is an eloquent example of that. Now we’re going to turn our attention to how the Middle Ages came to an end. What brought down this system that was several hundred years in the making? How did the church lose its authority? What factors shook the medieval worldview to its foundation?

In this chapter, we’re going to consider how western culture transitioned from the medieval to the modern world. We’ll do this by looking at two factors—one made-made catastrophe and one natural catastrophe— that contributed to the collapse of the medieval hierarchical system:

• The Crusades

• The Black Death

We’ll conclude this chapter by examining how worldviews—or “paradigms,” as we’ll call them—change within a culture.

The Crusades

The Crusades, which occurred from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, had a profound impact on western culture. They were, without a doubt, the greatest blot on medieval Christianity and one of the great blots on the history of the church. You find today that when skeptics and atheists and unbelievers talk with Christians they will say, “Look at how corrupt the church has been over the centuries. Look at the Crusades, what a corrupt thing that was. If that’s your faith I don’t want to have anything to do with it.” And that’s one of the great tragedies of that and we as Christians need to know how to respond when somebody wants to take this horrible series of events that we call the Crusades and lay them at the foot of the cross or at that feet of the church and say that Christ or the church is somehow responsible for that.

I think it is an easy argument to reject. I didn’t have anything to do with the Crusades. That was the responsibility of so-called Christians who were not really following Christ and it was a product of error and corruption and not the product of truth. But we need to know how to understand this and how to discuss this because this is something that is still referred to today by opponents of Christianity and certainly by Muslims who have a very long list of grievances against the West, which usually go all the way back to what happened in the time of the Crusades.

What were the Crusades? The Crusades were a series of military campaigns whereby medieval Christianity attempted to retake the Holy Land from the Muslims. They wanted to take back Jerusalem. They wanted to take back Bethlehem. They wanted to take back the holy sites. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Church of the Nativity— all those things that you see if you go to the Holy Land today—they wanted to take those and bring them back under the control of the church. Well, they failed time and time again in their attempt to do so. We look back at the Crusades and we see them as an unmitigated colossal failure, but it’s one of the failures that achieved great consequences nonetheless and we will talk about that as well.

The First Crusade was launched in 1096 when Pope Urban II declared that a campaign should be waged to take back the Holy Land for the Church. There was a lot of excitement; people thought this was doable and they were excited about being a part of it. Armies were raised and knights led their troops and they headed to the Middle East, to the Holy Land, and they were successful in the short run. The First Crusade was the only one of the crusades that achieved any measure of success at all. Jerusalem was captured, and it and much of the Holy Land was held by European Christian forces for at least a generation, and then eventually the Muslims defeated them once again and that obviously made necessary the following series of Crusades.

The first Crusade though, really set the tenor and the tone for all the Crusades that would follow. It was a bloodbath. When Jerusalem was captured, the Muslim and the Jewish populations were slaughtered. It was a horrible massacre and a dark stain on medieval Christianity. It should be noted that in the Middle East in Arab cities at this time Jews were not generally persecuted, nor were Christians. Arabic cultures in the Middle Ages were reasonably tolerant and Christians and Jews lived side by side with Muslims; of course, this is something that tragically, unfortunately, has changed over the centuries in ways that affect us deeply to this day.

The second, third and fourth Crusades were then were launched in subsequent generations to try to do what the first Crusade could not manage to succeed at. There were other minor crusades. There was even a Children’s Crusade, and it absolutely defies explanation. This occurred when a couple of young boys began traveling around and preaching that they had received a vision from God to raise an army, and a little ragtag band of children and teenagers started following them. We don’t know how many there actually were but they marched their way to the Mediterranean and they believed in their delusion that the Mediterranean would part like the Red Sea had for Moses when they got there. They were expecting to just march right across to the Holy Land and be able to accomplish what the best knights in Europe weren't able to do. What happened was that they were given passage on ships and probably sold in the slavery when they sailed into the Mediterranean. Many died at sea; it was a horrible event. But, again, how do you explain this? What kind of mass hysteria had taken over the mind of medieval Europe to engage in these foolhardy adventures, even to the point where children’s crusades would be launched with no hope of success? That tells us something about the mind of the Middle Ages, the corruption of this age and the willingness to believe a lie. That’s what we see about the blindness. It’s going to characterize the end times as well that people will believe a lie and you certainly see that in the Middle Ages.

The crusades did not accomplish their goal, not by a long shot, but they accomplished a lot of other things. I would say that the crusades are one of the best examples in history of what is sometimes called the law of unintended consequences. The law of unintended consequences refers to a situation in which you set out to do one thing and you don’t accomplish the one thing you set out to do—but along the way a lot of other things happen that you never intended, for good or for bad. History is like that. For example, Alexander set out to conquer the world and did it, though he didn’t hold it for very long; but in the process he spread Greek culture throughout the world. Of course, that was something Alexander was clearly trying to do—but not maybe in the same way that he ultimately accomplished.

The Crusades were like that, setting out to impose the authority of medieval Christianity on the Holy Land and not succeeding; but some very important things were done nonetheless, unintentionally. These are things that on the one hand would help to bring down the medieval worldview and on the other hand lay the foundation for the emergence of the modern world in the centuries to follow. We are going to look very quickly at four unintended consequences of the Crusades.

There was first of all a political impact. Who issues the call for the Crusades? The Pope, but the Pope doesn’t command any armies. Where is the army going to come from? It is going to come from the kings and the knights of Europe, the secular political powers. What happens generation after generation when you’re sending troops off to the Middle East and nothing good is coming out of it and you don’t see any benefits coming from this policy? It’s costing you a lot of money and a lot of men. Are you going to start being skeptical when the Pope issues yet another call for a Holy Crusade for which you have to pony up the troops and the money? Yes, you are, and that’s what we see.

We see a political impact in the increasing conflict between church and state, between Pope and king. It increases the tension between religious and secular power. Why is that significant? Because, if we are going to make it from the Middle Ages to the modern period, the power of the church is going to have to be brought down a few notches.

The connection between church and state is going to have to be severed. We live in a modern world where we assume a disconnect between church and state. For that to come about, you have got to have this kind of tension, this political impact that the Crusades helped to foster at the end of the medieval period.

Secondly, we see a profound intellectual impact. These Christian knights came into contact with all kinds of things, physical things, but also abstract ideas, bodies of knowledge, that were preserved in the Middle East, that had been lost to western Europe for centuries; and those things were rediscovered when they came into contact with Middle Eastern Islamic, Arabic culture. I am referring specifically to the rediscovery of Greek learning. What happened after the fall of the Roman Empire to these ancient books and all this knowledge? Did all this stuff get burnt and lost forever to history? No, it was preserved in the East and ultimately preserved. The irony of this is that it was preserved by Arabic Muslim scholars who translated the works of Greek antiquity, works of science and astronomy and philosophy and so on, into Arabic.

And so these Christian knights come and they find all this stuff and slowly it begins to make its way back into medieval Europe. Why is that important? Because the period that we know as the Renaissance is a rebirth of knowledge of the classical world, and for that rebirth to happen, these books had to be discovered and make their way back into Europe. The Crusades were one of the factors that led to that knowledge making its way back into western culture. So, it is ultimately thanks to Arabic scholarship that this knowledge was rediscovered in the West, which then laid the foundation for the Renaissance and with that the rise of the modern world.

There was also a very important economic impact—unintended, but very real nonetheless. I said that these knights came into contact with a lot of things they weren't familiar with in the Holy Land when they met up with Arabic culture. One of the things they no doubt noted was that the food tasted very different and very flavorful, because of the spices that they didn’t have back in Europe—the kinds of spices that, if you open your kitchen cabinet at home, you’ll see that we cook with today. Where did these spices come from that fill our pantry? They entered into European cuisine at the end of the Middle Ages and this led to new trade routes for things like spices, new textiles, new dyes—things that you can buy and sell.

These commodities entered into Europe from the south, the ports of Italy for example. If you take a culinary trip through Europe, starting in the south from the Mediterranean regions and migrate towards the north, you’re going to find that the food gets blander the farther north you go. Down in the south where all these spices first made their entry into the ports in Italy, Greece, and Spain, the foods are pretty flavorful, pretty spicy and so on. European cuisine kind of reflects the old trade patterns that go all the way back to the Middle Ages. The way the spices transformed the national cuisines of these cultures at this time is still apparent today.

What happens when you have a lot of trade? It’s kind of a truism that free trade and a lot of trade activity is good because it creates wealth, and this is what we see in the Middle Ages as well. If all of this buying and selling is occurring, then somebody has got to be doing the buying and the selling. What is going to happen as a result of this?

This will lead to a fourth profound social impact, namely, a new class of people is going to emerge in late medieval society: the merchant class, the people who do the buying and the selling. We know them as the middle class. Most of us here ourselves are products of the middle class. In fact, American culture is a very much a middle class culture and we can trace our values as a people several hundred years back to this very important transformation in Western culture when the middle class emerges.

I would argue that the emergence of the middle class is the single most important development in understanding the rise of the modern world. It’s a debatable point, but I really want to stress the importance of it. The middle class begins small as a merchant class and it grows in power over the centuries. By the time you reach the eighteenth century, the middle class will have become the most important and most powerful class within Western European societies. When you’ve got economic power, what’s the next thing you’re going to ask for and demand? The answer is political power. What do you see at the end of the eighteenth century? You see two middle class revolutions. One is the American Revolution, over the issue of no taxation without representation. Having attained economic power they now wanted to be able to determine their destiny themselves; and in France you see another middle class revolution, the French revolution of 1789. We understand the ground work of these revolutions and the causes of these revolutions as lying all the way back hundreds of years before in the great transformation that we are looking at—the end of the Middle Ages.

How about that for complexity in history? When you start looking at historical events, you realize how highly leveraged everything really is—how completely interconnected it all is, and how you have to take the long view and be very patient when you look at history.

The Fourteenth Century

As we’ve already noted, great cultural change grows out of periods of chaos—and we have that in spades in the fourteenth century. We are going to see how this period of time, the fourteenth century, followed by the great changes of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, brought about a transition to the modern world. As we go through this I will be introducing or defining some more conceptual terms that are not terribly complex or difficult in and of themselves, but which are abstract. So we will be defining those. So stay focused on the big picture as we go through this material. I am going to try to use some concrete examples as well to break through the abstraction of it a little bit along the way.

If you could travel back in time, you would want to make sure that your time machine was fixed in such a way that it could not possibly take you back to the fourteenth century. You wouldn’t want to be dropped off in that century for anything. It was a really truly horrible time to live in the western world for a lot of reasons, which we are going to look at in due course.

People who lived through it could have sworn they saw the four horsemen of the apocalypse on the horizon. That’s how bad things were. If you think of wars and pestilence and famine and all those, they had it. They also had a major population adjustment in the fourteenth century. In fact, this is one of the most interesting facts that introduces us to just how bad things were in the fourteenth century. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, the population of Europe was as great as it would be for several hundred years. The population rose to the highest point it had ever been at the beginning of the fourteenth century and then it significantly drops off. So much so that it would take several hundred years for it to rise to that level again. Well, you are clearly going to have to have some pretty catastrophic events for that to occur. There was really overpopulation in Europe in the late Middle Ages, and that led to a problem of how to feed all these people, similar to what happened in the late Roman Empire. History is not very imaginative; it keeps bringing out the same set of problems over and over again. And then at the beginning of the fourteenth century you have a few bad years of drought, which brings about a famine that kills we believe about ten percent of the population of Europe.

Well, that's a pretty bad beginning, but things just go from bad to worse. In the 1340s, something very terrifying appeared in the ports of southern Italy, those great trade ports where all the trade was flowing in. Along with all the goodies that they were bringing—spices and textiles and all the other things that they were trading and importing into Europe at that time—along with this came something else that would shake European civilization to its foundation.

What am I talking about? The Black Death, bubonic plague as it's normally believed to have been. But we usually refer to the medieval experience of this plague as “the Black Death,” and that pretty much tells you everything. It’s as though death is not bad enough, so you call it the Black Death. That was a reference to the physiology of what happened with that disease and how the skin would blacken. It was a horrifying disease and a terrifying way to die, a very painful way to die, and a very quick way to die too. Medieval men and women didn't have a clue what caused it, why it was striking them, or how it spread. We're going to see that this experience contributed greatly to the breakdown of the medieval worldview. In a three-year period, this disease had entered from the fleas on the rats that came into the port cities of Italy primarily. The Black Death spread within three years across Europe to kill one third of the population. That's the best estimate. It's a little hard to arrive at precise figures, but that's the closest estimate that we have.

It's hard to wrap our minds around that, isn't it? But let's translate it in terms that you and I can understand. I mean, after 9/11 there has been a lot of talk about bio-terrorism. What would happen if there was a coordinated release in major metropolitan cities of the smallpox virus? Well, nobody is vaccinated against smallpox anymore. It's an extraordinarily contagious and virulent disease, with a very high mortality rate. But what would happen is that, depending on how quickly it was detected and people were quarantined, it's conceivable that a third of the American population could die in such a pandemic, such an outbreak. That would be about 100 million Americans dying in a two- or three-year period. Do you think that would have a profound impact upon American society? Do you think that would shake everything that we are to the foundation, our political institutions, our social or economic institutions, religious institutions? It would turn everything upside down. We cannot even imagine what our country or the world would look like in the aftermath of something like that. Not to mention a terrorist attack with nuclear weapons. What would that do? It's not enough to say it would have a major impact. It would be transformative in a way that we can't even conceive.

And this is the kind of scale we’re talking about. This outbreak wasn't a terrorist thing at all; it wasn't man-made or man driven. It occurred as diseases do. But the impact of it was very similar. It shook to the foundation the certainty that medieval men and women had that they understood the world. It turned their world upside down. They thought they understood the world, this hierarchical world where everything was in its place—this great chain of being that they understood where everything was ranked according to power and authority, where God rewarded those who were good, the favored ones who occupied certain positions in life and so on.

And then comes the Black Death and it completely blows away all those expectations of what the world is like. How does it do that? This plague, like every plague, doesn't spread rationally; it spreads in ways that really defy explanation. And the Black Death spread in such a way that on one side of the street in a village everybody might die and on the other side of the street everybody might live; or everybody in one house might have been affected and everybody in the house right next to it was spared. Or in one valley one village was wiped out and the next village was left untouched. It made no sense, in other words. It didn't fit the way in which they understood the world through their worldview.

And when you encounter something that you can't explain in your worldview it turns everything upside down. I've mentioned C. S. Lewis in another context, but he's a good example of this. He was a great Christian apologist, one who wrote defenses of the faith that are still read and remain powerful today. But when his wife died of cancer, it shook his worldview to the foundation, and he didn't understand why God would bring this woman into his life only to take her away in a very short period of time. He went through a period of great doubt in searching and wondering about God and about the world, and he wrote some really beautiful and searching books in the aftermath of that experience. This is a good example on the small scale of what happens to one person when disaster strikes; But we're talking about a much bigger scale with the Black Death—an entire culture suddenly being faced with a massive challenge to its worldview. This is a picture I am trying to paint of this world in crisis in the late Middle Ages in the fourteenth century. Chaos has the ability to bring about this kind of radical systemic change in every aspect of society. Let's talk a little bit more about worldviews.

Paradigms and Paradigm Shifts

I'm going to introduce another term, which is probably not going to be a new term, but which we'll be using in a very particular way. The term I want to work with is paradigm, because when I am talking about worldviews, I will really be referring to “paradigms of reality.” So, let’s define paradigms in three ways.

First, consider the narrow, technical meaning of the word. Paradigms are grammatical sets you learn when you study a foreign language. When you study Spanish or French or Latin, you study paradigms of how to conjugate a verb. The first person singular, second person singular, third person singular, etc. That's a conjugation, a paradigm. It tells you what the proper form of the verb is for the context in which you are using it. So the first way that you can define a paradigm is to think of a grammatical model. In English the conjugation of a verb is pretty simple in the present tense. But here’s the paradigm, nonetheless.

	Singular	Plural
1st	I sing	we sing
2nd	you sing	you sing
3rd	he, she, it sings	they sing

 

It’s a simple paradigm; but note what the paradigm tells you. In the third person singular, it tells you to do something to the verb. It tells you to add an ending to it, to add an -s to the verb: he/she/ it sings. We sing, you sing, they sing. That's a paradigm in its most basic sense. It's a model that you plug information into in order to get an answer back from. So you have this model here which tells you how to conjugate a verb. You plug a question in—“How do you conjugate the verbto sing in the third-person singular”—and the paradigm gives you the answer. You put an -s on the end: he/she/it sings. This point is essential to how we are going to be defining a paradigm as an explanatory model into which you plug information or questions and out of which you're expecting to get answers. So, this leads logically to the second extended meaning that was mentioned a minute ago.

We also use the word paradigm to mean worldview—a set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them. Well, that’s just another definition of a worldview. But now think of a how a worldview is like that grammatical paradigm. Think of it as an explanatory model into which you plug a question or a problem and out of which you expect to get an answer.

Let’s say that I, as a Christian, face some challenge in my life. Maybe I face some tragic events in my life. That’s a challenge, that’s the question that I have. What do I do? I take that, I plug it into the paradigm—my Christian faith, my biblical worldview—and out of that I get an answer to that situation. That answer will probably be something like, “God is Sovereign,” “God is good,” “There’s sin in the world.” Those things that the Bible affirms that are part of my worldview as a believer are the answers that I get as I plug my experiences, my questions, my challenges, into that Christian worldview. You can see why we can't live without worldviews. They're the structure that helps us to understand ourselves, our experience, the world around us, and even history.

Related to this is a third definition, which is kind of putting a little twist on it and using an example or a metaphor here. We can think of a paradigm or a worldview as an intellectual computer—if not the hardware then at least the software that runs that computer. How do you use a computer? You sit down and you type data into a computer. Why? Typically, you want to process that information. You want to get something out of that. You might be plugging figures in. Those figures are processed and you get some kind of answer out of it.

You can see where I am going with this and how it's going to relate back to the fourteenth century. What happens when you plug data into your computer that the software program can't handle? We have all experienced this. We wanted to throw our computer out the window and then when we get rational about it we realize that we probably just have to upgrade our software. If it's not powerful enough to handle the things we are plugging into it, then it freezes up, it locks up, and you get one of those error messages that we dread.

Then you’ve got to reboot your computer. If that happens often enough, you're going to just give up on that system and you're going to get a more powerful computer or a better software package. That’s why this metaphor of an intellectual computer makes a lot of sense, because at the end of the Middle Ages, their computer locked up. They were faced with things like the Black Death that they couldn’t explain and the medieval system locked up.

Now why couldn’t they explain what was happening? The Black Death, as I said, seemed completely random. They couldn't figure it out. Some tried to figure out the theology behind it, or the significance behind it, by saying that maybe God was judging them, that it was some kind of divine judgment; but even that didn't seem to make sense, because why is the village drunk who hangs out in the tavern all the time doing perfectly okay while the parish priest is dying of the Black Death? People high up in the church hierarchy were dying and lowlifes in the tavern were getting along just fine. Everything was upside down; it didn’t make sense to them. The hierarchical model didn't explain it. So the computer froze up, locked up, and crashed. That’s the picture I am trying to paint here. It's just a very simple way drawn from our own everyday experience of working with computers, but it helps us to understand the nature of what's happening here, the kind of change that’s occurring at the end of the medieval period and the beginning of the modern. So what I want us to do now, having crashed the computer in the fourteenth century, is to look at how western culture began to reprogram its software in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

What we are going to see now are what are call paradigm shifts, shifts in worldview, shifts in knowledge, shifts in ways of looking at the world. It's kind of a buzz term that’s used in scholarship and has been through the last generation. But that's all that a paradigm shift means—a radical turning around and shifting in your way of looking at the world or your way of looking at a particular problem. I want to focus on four specific paradigm shifts and see how each one of these contributed to the remaking of the western world as we transition from the medieval hierarchical model to a new modern model of understanding reality. We’ll associate four names with the paradigm shifts we examine. Most of these names will be familiar to you:

• Copernicus

• Columbus

• Gutenberg

• Luther

The most important thing that we are going to be doing is to look at these four figures and look at four paradigm shifts that followed on the heels of the chaos of the fourteenth century. The main thing to take from this is what each one of these men contributed to the making of the modern worldview.

The first figure is probably known to most of you: Copernicus. What field are we talking about? Astronomy. What was the view that was held in the ancient World and the medieval world about the structure of the cosmos in a physical sense? It's known as the geocentric or Ptolemaic view, in which the earth is at the center of everything and the planets and the sun are revolving around the earth. The stars were seen as fixed points rotating around the earth. They pictured them like little pinholes of light in a black curtain. This is the conception that they had in the ancient and the medieval world. Copernicus comes along and he observes and he calculates and he observes again. He says: “We've got it all wrong; we have had it wrong for hundreds of years. Actually, the geocentric view,” he says, “is flat out wrong. The earth is not at the center. Rather, in our solar system at least, the sun is at the center and the earth is going around the sun and all the other planets are as well.” This is a radical change in thinking and it's called the Copernican Revolution, which tells you that scholars and historians measure this as a highly significant moment in the history of western thought.

It was like an intellectual earthquake in its significance, in the way it rattled people’s view of the world. It took a few hundred years for it to settle into people's consciousness. Galileo later picked up the Copernican idea and developed it more and had to battle with the authority of the Catholic Church on this point. But really, what Copernicus is saying and going from the geocentric to the heliocentric view of astronomy is that the old books of astronomy are wrong. The old authorities are wrong. We have to throw those old books out. I mean he didn’t literally say that, but this is the implication of it. We've got to get rid of the old books; we've got to rewrite them. We've got to observe, we've got to calculate, we've got to figure out what the truth is, and we can't just believe something to be true because somebody authoritative high up the hierarchies told us it's true.

You can see how this is starting to chip away at the old hierarchical medieval worldview. Before, you just received what's true passed down to you through the chain of command. Copernicus and all those who followed in his wake say, “Now, we've got to figure what's true out for ourselves.” This is one of the watchwords of the modern world, that we come to truth individually. We come to it through our own experience, we come to it through the scientific method, and we see this as a powerful implication of the Copernican Revolution.

Let me give one more implication as well, one more consequence of the Copernican Revolution. This is the one that’s taken a few hundred years to really settle into the consciousness of the Western mind. If you live in the Middle Ages and you believe the Earth is the center of everything, then that’s a pretty important and privileged place to be, right in the middle of God’s creation. You can't get any more important than that, everything revolves around you.

Copernicus and all of those who followed him are basically challenging that view and saying, “Well, how significant is man? How significant is man really?” Now, with the scientific materialist worldview today, it's not uncommon to hear scientists, astronomers, and so on, describing man as just a rather insignificant byproduct of random natural forces crawling on this little rock known as Earth. In others words, there is nothing special about us. That’s the view that has settled into the western mind after five hundred or six hundred years of thinking about Copernicus. And that’s again part of the modern worldview. Obviously the Middle Ages had it wrong about the geocentric view, but they had it right about the idea that man is the crowning achievement of God’s creation made in the image of God. The problem is that this theology got thrown out too.

Let's move onto the next name on the list, and a name that we all recognize: Columbus. We’re using him as a representative of all the other discoverers as well in that period that’s known as the Age of Discovery, the discovery of the New World. Just as men were looking at the stars and the planets and trying to figure out the universe, so also they’re looking at their own world and trying to understand it better and not just taking what some old books says about it. The goal is to see and understand the world for themselves; and so they head out in ships to do this.

And what do you know; they run into continents that nobody knew existed. And they find people living on those continents that nobody have ever heard of. That would be profoundly disorienting. You think you are finding a passage to India, and you run smack into this major continent, and you go look at your old maps and you look at your geography books, and you try to figure out what this land mass is—but it's not there. Complete continents are found: North America, South America, and then, in the eighteenth century when Australia was discovered, at least by western Europeans. What are these places and who are these people? Are they the lost tribes of Israel? I mean all these kinds of crazy ideas emerge trying to figure these things out. And there were plants and animals in these places that you don’t recognize, so you go to the books of botany and zoology and you can't find what these animals and these plants are. So what do you do? Just as Copernicus did: if your astronomy books are wrong, then throw them out and rewrite them. Now you’ve got to rewrite your maps, too; and you’ve got to rewrite your histories. You’ve got to rewrite all of this stuff and go back to the drawing board.

In other words, authority is being challenged in many different ways. In the Middle Ages, how do you know something is true? If you are a medieval peasant how do you know what do you take for granted about the world? Whatever you were told, what somebody higher up the chain of command tells you. The earth is the center of the universe and Europe is the center of the globe; this is what is told about the world and people believe that. It's what's passed down in the old books. But we don’t accept authority like this anymore, and so these paradigm shifts help us to understand where we’re at right now in the western world. You and I are expected to find things out for ourselves. You don’t accept something to be true because somebody has told you, but rather because you figured it out for yourself. That’s what the scientific method is all about. You test it, you experience it, you put it to the test in a laboratory, and you see if it's true. You don’t just accept it as true because somebody said so.

So look at what we’ve done: we’ve thrown out the old astronomy books, we’ve thrown out the old maps, the old geography books, the old history books, the old zoology books, the old botany books. What is the ultimate old book that’s going to get thrown out in the modern period while we’re throwing everything else out? The Bible is the oldest and the most authoritative of these books that’s going to get thrown out in the modern age. Do you see how that’s part of a pattern? And so modern secular people don’t accept the authority of an old book any longer just because somebody says so; from their perspective, it's just another old book and it doesn’t have any claim over our modern lives. This is a trend of modern thinking and you can see how it's all part of this process of these paradigm shifts, different ways of looking at the world around us, different ways of understanding what is true about the world.

The next figure on our list is a little bit different in terms of his contribution, but we’ll see how this connects up as well.Gutenberg is credited with the development of movable type, or printing. Well, let me ask you another leading question. In the Middle Ages who had books? The clergy had books, monks had books, priests had access to books. You and I in the Middle Ages would not have had access to books. You couldn’t just go to a public library; they didn’t have public libraries back then. People didn’t know how to read and write. There wasn’t widespread literacy in the medieval world, and so what happens with Gutenberg is that suddenly books can be mass-produced. What is that going to do? It's going to take books out of the hands of the church. It's going to take books out of the hierarchy, right? Because now you don’t have to have a roomful of monks who are copying manuscripts in a very costly process; now you can mass produce. The price is going to go down and access will go up.

We see a rise of literacy, and now people will have access to books starting in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. It's an amazing thing. We go from this vertical model of the hierarchy where only people in the hierarchy had access to knowledge and held it pretty close to their chest. Here in the modern age we expect to have equal access to knowledge and literacy, public education and public libraries, newspapers and all the various forms of media. Now in our lifetime the rise of the Internet is keeping in line with this trend. It's just another extension of what Gutenberg was trying to do six hundred years ago: bringing knowledge to everybody, making it more democratic, making it more horizontal, breaking the stranglehold on knowledge held by the hierarchy.

So with each one of these paradigm shifts we’re going from this top-down vertical model to a horizontal one. Although the horizontal model may be a better way of learning, isn’t the vertical hierarchy needed in society? Absolutely, and this is where I think the Christian has a lot to say to society today as we look at this, because radical individualism ultimately leads to anarchy. If everybody is searching for his own truth for himself, isn't that kind of the world we live in? People increasingly define truth around themselves: “That might be true for you,” people will say, “but it’s not true for me.” It's one of the classic clichés of postmodernism. But what on earth does that mean? I mean it obviously shows a very limited knowledge of what truth is if truth can be so easily altered from one person to the next. What the Christian affirms is that there is something that is hierarchically known and it’s divine revelation, passed down from God to man.

But, let's look at the last figure on our list, Luther, and see if we can balance this out a little bit. As necessary as hierarchies still are for us today, we clearly don’t accept all these other hierarchical notions of the Middle Ages such as the oppressive and repressive notions of medieval Catholicism. I think we would, as modern Christians, want to reject the worst aspects of hierarchical thinking, even while we affirm the fact that God has revealed Himself to us divinely. Well, let's look at the fourth figure on our list. I think it can help us see our way to the resolution of this dilemma—this tension between vertical and horizontal approaches to truth. Martin Luther is one of the great figures of the Reformation. Notice how Martin Luther, like all these other figures, is challenging the medieval hierarchy. Let me ask you one more leading question. If you’re a medieval Catholic, how do you think you come to God? What is the basis of your relationship with God? Through the priest, through the church, through the hierarchy; that’s how you’re supposed to come to God. Martin Luther says that is absolutely wrong; he goes back to scripture and challenges that. He says, “Forget that hierarchical stuff. We come to God as individuals.” You’ve heard the expression, “The ground is level at the foot of the cross.” What Martin Luther is saying, what the Reformation is all about, is that we don’t come to God through some hierarchy; we come to God as individuals by faith, through the grace that we see in the work of Christ on the cross. We come to God through Christ as individuals. Notice how the Reformation can even be seen as part of this larger process of shifting from this medieval hierarchical view to a horizontal modern view of looking at the world. And that’s the great shift—from vertical to horizontal—that defines the transition from the medieval to the modern world.