Chuck Bryant

This is the first step.

Yeah, so humanism contrasted with scholasticism, which had been going on for hundreds of years.

It was essentially the church's form of teaching, and that was basically reconciling the concept of reality that came from the classical Greeks like Aristotle with Scripture, and basically using Scripture to explain the world and reality as it is.

That's right.

And these humanists came along and they were like,

What happens if we stop doing that?

What happens if we just study the classical Greeks and just basically also still stay Christians, but stop using this scripture, this received wisdom that the church gives us?

What if we study it ourselves instead?

And that brings up the second part you mentioned, which is the dignity of the individual human.

Up to this point, individuality was not prized.

You were not supposed to look inside yourself.

You were supposed to look outside at the glory of God.

You yourself, if you paid too much attention to yourself, that was a quick one-way trip to hell for you when you died.

The humanists were like, no, let's look inside ourselves.

Like, we're important.

You, the individual, is important.

Yeah, and you're not learning just so you can give more money to the church or something like that, too.

And if this sounds a little bit like Protestant thought about the connection between the individual and God, that's exactly right.

These thinkers eventually led to the Protestant Reformation, which basically pushed the face of the church off to the side and said, you and me, God, we're connected.

Oh, yeah.