Exploring the boundaries of church/state separation

I’m posting in advance my topic notes for The Atheist Experience today. Expect them to be a bit scattered, as I’m writing this more as speaking notes than as a carefully planned essay.

Note: I am a new-ish member of Chorus Austin, which will be presenting the Bach B-Minor Mass on November 4. My intention is to play a portion of the music as the intro to the show. Follow the above link if you’re interested in tickets. Although this is an overtly religious piece, I think it’s a great piece of music.

A few words about Bach

Wikipedia: Johann Sebastian Bach was a member of one of the most extraordinary musical families of all time. For more than 200 years, the Bach family had produced dozens of worthy performers and composers during a period in which the church, local government and the aristocracy provided significant support for professional music making in the German-speaking world, particularly in the eastern electorates of Thuringia and Saxony. Sebastian’s father, Johann Ambrosius Bach, was a talented violinist and trumpeter in Eisenach, a town of some 6,000 residents in Thuringia.

Important contributions of the church to history (direct and indirect)

Cathedrals: Talking about one of my favorite novels, Pillars of the Earth. The initial main character, Tom Builder, relies on the church for his livelihood, and his lifelong dream is to build a cathedral.

Wikipedia on Cathedral architecture: The church that has the function of cathedral is not of necessity a large building. It might be as small as the Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford. But frequently, the cathedral, along with some of the abbey churches, was the largest building in any region.

There were a number of reasons for this:

• The cathedral was created to the Glory of God. It was seen as appropriate that it should be as grand and as beautiful as wealth and skill could make it.
• It functioned as an ecclesiastical meeting-place for many people, not just those of the town in which it stood, but also, on occasions, for the entire region.
• The cathedral often had its origins in a monastic foundation and was a place of worship for members of a holy order who said the mass privately at a number of small chapels within the cathedral.
• The cathedral often became a place of worship and burial for wealthy local patrons. These patrons often endowed the cathedrals with money for successive enlargements and building programs.

The Renaissance was an explosion of art, science, and creativity. And where do modern scholars partly pinpoint the origin of the Renaissance? They consider the poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) to be the first writer to embody the spirit of the Renaissance.

Protestant Reformation: Luther, taking the revival of the Augustinian notion of salvation by faith alone to new levels, borrowed from the humanists the sense of individualism, that each man can be his own priest (an attitude likely to find popular support considering the rapid rise of an educated urban middle class in the North), and that the only true authority is the Bible, echoing the reformist zeal of the Conciliar movement and opening up the debate once again on limiting the authority of the Pope.

Printing press: Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1447. Wikipedia says: “Gutenberg certainly introduced efficient methods into book production, leading to a boom in the production of texts in Europe — in large part, owing to the popularity of the Gutenberg Bibles, the first mass-produced work, starting on February 23, 1455. Even so, Gutenberg was a poor businessman, and made little money from his printing system.

Art: Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. Da Vinci’s “Last Supper”. Need I say more?

Christianity’s Place in Modern Schools

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