Are evangelicals utterly ignorant of the Middle Ages?

A number of years ago I was invited to give two talks at a major Reformed conference in America.

I was thrilled by the invitation as I had enormous respect – and still do, I need to add – for the ministry behind the conference.

I suggested that I give both lectures on the second-century apologetic pearl, The Letter to Diognetus. One of the organisers wrote back to say that it would be preferable for me to speak on an era after the Protestant Reformation.

I followed these instructions and spoke on Andrew and Horatius Bonar, which was a blessing, and led to a book on the latter. Looking back on this really minor incident, I believe it bespoke what is increasingly a major issue for me as an historian: the utter ignorance of the evangelical world about the medieval era.

If the era is thought about by evangelicals, the epithet ‘The Dark Ages’ is what comes to mind for them about the centuries between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the Protestant Reformation. To the typical evangelical, this term is especially appropriate, as the Middle Ages was dominated by the superstitious idolatry of Roman Catholicism.

Unease with the Middle Ages

Although I had two excellent medievalists as teachers during my studies for my Master of Religion – the Anglican scholar Eugene R. Fairweather (1920–2002) and the Basilian Michael M. Sheehan – I generally ignored the medieval era when I began teaching at Central Baptist Seminary in 1982. I usually ended my introductory course, Church History I, in the very early Middle Ages. Some of this had to do with my training in patristics and my desire to focus on that very important era. But, honestly, some of it had to do with the typical evangelical unease with the Middle Ages. As the years wound on, however, I have slowly realised the importance of the Middle Ages for telling the story of the history of the church.

Why study the medieval world

First, none of the Reformers can be understood apart from the world of the late Middle Ages. This insight is one of the great fruits of the scholarship of Heiko Augustinus Oberman (1930–2001). To be sure, they were critical of elements of their religious world, but none of the Magisterial Reformers saw themselves initially as breaking with the church of that world. They wanted to reform the medieval church out of love for her.

Then what we call the Roman Catholic Church was essentially born out of the struggle for control of the church in Western Europe. In other words, the Counter-Reformation defined the church that became the Roman Catholic Church in the wake of what we now call Protestantism. As Heiko Oberman has shown, for instance, sola Scriptura (as understood by the Reformers) was not a total novelty in the medieval world: there were forerunners, such as Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (c. 1450–1536). And I shall never forget, in a course taught by Michael Sheehan on Francis of Assisi and his Franciscan heirs, Professor Sheehan talking about a group of Fraticelli or Spiritual Franciscans in southern Italy who placed over the main gated entrance to the town that they inhabited the blunt sign: ‘The Pope is the Antichrist.’

Then, I have always been deeply appreciative of the early centuries of what we call the Middle Ages: the period of what we call the Celtic Church and Patrick its founder and such figures as Columba and Columbanus. I have loved that world since my first study of them in the 1970s. In recent years I have expanded my reading to the Anglo-Saxon world and texts like The Dream of the Rood which is really stunning. And in the past two decades I have also come to appreciate the Church of the East (and men like Timothy of Baghdad) and that remarkable body of churches that comprise the Ethiopic Orthodox Church. The Middle Ages is bigger than Western Europe.

Moreover, the great tradition of the Ancient Church, as well as the Bible itself, was passed on to us through the medieval world. We are deeply in its debt.

Finally, if we dismiss the Middle Ages, we are faced with this conundrum: if the Middle Ages is a write-off, what of Christ’s promise to build His church and what was the Holy Spirit doing all of these centuries?

Michael Haykin is Professor of Church History and Biblical Spirituality at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky.