“THE Reformation may be compared to the Renaissance since it was an attempt to go back behind the Middle Ages, to wipe out a thousand years of historical development and to restore the Christian religion to its primitive “classical” form. Yet on the other hand this return to the past brought the Protestant mind into fresh contact with the Jewish and apocalyptic sources of the Christian view of history, so that the Reformation led to an increased emphasis on the Hebraic prophetic and apocalyptic elements in the Jewish tradition as against the Hellenic, patristic and metaphysical elements that were so strongly represented alike in patristic orthodoxy and in medieval Catholicism.
“Hence we find two tendencies in Protestant thought which find their extreme expression respectively in Socinianism and millenniarism. One represents the attempt to strip off all accretions, to separate religion from history and to recover the pure timeless essence of Christianity. The other represents a crude and vehement reassertion of the historical time-element in Christianity and an attempt to strip it of all its non-Jewish, mystical, philosophical and theological elements. The resultant type of religion was marked by some of the worst excesses of fanaticism and irrationality, yet on the other hand it was intensely social in spirit, as we see, for example, in the case of the Anabaptists, and it made an earnest, if one-sided and over-simplified, effort to provide a Christian interpretation of history.”
~Christopher Dawson: Excerpt from The Kingdom of God and History. (1938)
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