Chuck Bryant

And the humanist says, you got me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then we leapfrog all the way over to the Renaissance.

And you'll note that we leapt over what are called the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, medieval era.

The Renaissance humanists are the ones who gave us the term and the idea of the Dark Ages.

That there was a part of history where essentially the church ruled everything with an iron fist.

Corruption was rampant and people were...

were removed from their relationship with God and the church was inserted.

And what these earliest Renaissance humanists did, they were all Christians to a person, most of them Catholics too.

They changed that whole idea and said, what happens if we get the church out from between the individual and God?

You know, there's a connection between you, this person who is important and matters just because you're a person and God who made you.

And this is where the very beginnings of humanism find themselves, even though no one in the Renaissance would have called themselves a humanist because that concept didn't really exist quite yet.

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?