The Reformation Today, and Then

Greetings. Welcome to the dividing line. It is a Tuesday and given that I travel on Thursday to Dallas might extend this one out to. I think we can go to about about 11 10. You said you had to leave after that.

So we'll see. It'll be. It'll be a challenge one way or the other. Let's try to get all in but be that as it may a lot to get to today. I was trying to get stuff put together here real quick and Edd still trying to grab one thing here that I thought I had opened and I didn't.

Unfortunately trying to you know trying to remember what kinds of abbreviations you used many many many many many many years ago is hard to hard to do. But I thought this would be easy to open but since I well I do have it on my phone I suppose if I can't find a computer I can use it on my phone.

Anyways we'll try to get to that. You'll see me since it's hard to hide anything. We have a camera and you're looking for something here but delete that. My files modified ascending. That's close enough.

We'll see if that works anyway. People in channel asking for a link to the dividing line if they would like to watch if we're still working right there on the website. Yes. Well okay. Just telling you what they're saying.

If you don't want them to listen that's okay. You know it's alright. You know I understand perfectly. Anyway a couple things to get to today. I'm gonna try to tie them all together. It won't be easy to do.

Be. Well let me go over them and you'll see what I mean. One of the topics that we addressed on the lost dividing line. We've we've pretty much covered them gone back over them all except for one. And that was an article that appeared on pulpit and pen back in September.

Now this would be September 16th. Nail your confession to Roman Catholic door this Reformation season. It's by the news division. Wink wink. And which is what pulpit and pen uses when they don't really want to tell you who actually is writing it.

But it is pulpit and pen will like to encourage you to take part in Reformation Day celebration season by nailing your confession of faith your local Roman Catholic Church door. Yes you read that. Right.

And it goes on to have an extensive discussion of the Pope is the Antichrist and things like that. And then a lengthy discussion of how not to get yourself thrown in the who's cow. Feel free to attack it.

The Roman Catholic Church bulletin board. It fulfills the spirit of Luther but might not be nearly as gratifying. Use a small fishing nail or attack. If you choose to put on the door. Try not to damage property by any meaningful definition of the term damage.

Place it near the crease. The door in the grains of the tiny hole will is not noticeable once removed. Fourth. Don't do it anonymously. Put your name on it as Luther did. You should provide a short note about why you are doing this.

You are still protesting. Be prepared to be charged with a misdemeanor for vandalism and lengthy discussion of the technical definition of vandalism and all the rest that stuff. Um look just just a couple thoughts about that.

I I would not recommend nailing anything to anybody's door especially because that's not what Luther was doing. Luther's act was not an act of protest. Now if you happen to be a professor at a university and would like to challenge Roman Catholic professors to debate the nature of grace as seen in the doctrine of indulgences.

Well okay then the modern equivalent of that would be posting such a series of possible debate theses on Facebook or the internet or something along those lines. But that's what Luther was doing. He viewed himself as a faithful son of the church.

He did not yet view the Pope as the Antichrist or anything like that at that particular point in time. And this was nothing more than a professor at the rather young still young and upstart University of Wittenberg was started in 1510 as I recall.

So it's only seven years challenging some of the big boys like the University of Leipzig where they eventually did have the debate to to engage in debate on this particular subject. So all the all the stuff that you see right now especially in October of 2017 about Luther protesting the term Protestant that comes out of the second diet of spire in 1529.

So you're talking 12 years. We got 12 years before the term protester or Protestant will actually have its 500th anniversary. And that was a technical term. It was a legal term at the first diet aspiring 1526 the Lutherans outnumbered Roman Catholics and so they gave freedom within the Empire.

The diet is the Holy Roman Empire. It's sort of a congressional meeting. It might be a good idea to only have Congress meet every few years but man all of our rights would be significantly more safe as would our pocketbooks.

But anyway in 1526 freedom was given to people in the Holy Roman Empire to allow for Reformation worship. But then in 1529 with Charles present the Roman Catholics were in the majority and they rescinded all of that and they reaffirmed the condemnation of Luther from the Diet of Worms in 1521.

And so there was a clause in the legal documents of the Empire that allowed for a protest on the part of the minority. Oh against the actions of the majority. And so at the second diet aspire 1529 these individuals protested the political actions taken by the Roman Catholic majority at that particular point in time.

And that's what the term Protestant came from. And it had deeply heavily political aspect to it at that particular point in time. And it's it's almost a negative thing that that's the terminology that is used today Catholic and Protestant given the origination in the background and stuff like that.

But that's that's the reality. That's what it's about. But Luther wasn't protesting anything in the sense of he saw himself as a faithful son of the church. He saw indulgences as an abuse. He was not alone in this.

There were many people who found the indulgence sales just as so much of what was going on the church that day to be exceptionally offensive and outside the realm of the tradition of the church and things like that.

And so if you do want to do something for this Reformation season may I suggest that you do something that would actually be effective you know as mentioned in the article you know leave a tract on the door.

Well you know you can roll all those things up put inside the you know if it's got a latch on the doors like that you can use a rubber band. You do something that's not to get you called by the cops for for vandalism but may I suggest making it a worthwhile track one that has some some meaning to it.

I am concerned that a lot of what I'm seeing from my Protestant brethren at this time of year especially this this year simply repeating mantras and not recognizing that there was something called the Council of Trent there's something called the counter-reformation you had you know Rome wasn't didn't sit on its thumbs and and do nothing for the past 500 years so many today have little knowledge of Roman Catholic apologetics and little knowledge of the arguments that they present.

And so if you present a very standardized argument that does not take into consideration you know Catholic answers and st. Joseph communication and all the rest that kind of stuff that is out there today you're not really be accomplishing a whole lot.

In 1993 we went up to Denver Colorado to the World Youth Day we hand out track I was gonna show it to you and evidently don't have any but we handed out a track called the pillar and foundation of truth which was specifically designed to address the claims that were being made by Roman Catholics at that point in time so it it takes their claims and provided early church father citations and all sorts of things like that that you know demonstrated that we too have not just been sitting around since 1517 and that there has been a growth in our understanding of what Roman Catholicism teaches and we're keeping up with their apologetics and and and stuff like that.

So I I'd suggest making sure it's not something like a for spiritual laws which is not going to communicate anything in that. In that context you might want to find something a little more relevant at that point speaking of which I listened to a well it was actually called a debate.

It was supposed to just be sort of a testimony type thing but I found it interesting that you know years and years and years and years ago I've told the story many times I the phone in my office rang and we had had to change the number just recently we had had people calling and this was this was back in the days of cassette tape answering machines.

Okay so we're talking a long time ago and so we'd actually had the number changed in this the number number phone rings and I pick it up and and there's this jovial voice on the other side that says hi I'm Chris Arnson of WMCA radio and I'd like to talk to you about coming out to New York to do a debate against gerrymatitics and it gets quiet for a second.

The first thing I said was how did you get this number. Oh well I think I think Bill Webster had given it to him if I recall correctly. And so given that Chris ended up organizing 10 or called the great debates that went on for a decade and other debates besides that I mean my first debate with a Muslim.

I don't consider it my first Muslim debate as I've said many times but my first debate with a Muslim was organized on Long Island and the debate with Saban from the one this Pentecostal Church that was that was also put together by Chris.

So Chris put together a lot of debates on on Long Island over the years and so I you know we arranged that that first debate and that was with gerrymatitics. So we did the Marian dogmas we did soul scriptura the next year then we did Pacwan the papacy and you know St. Genes got involved in Madrid and you know pretty much everybody and so it's it's ironic you know after all of that I started going overseas in 2005 and I forget when I was first on the unbelievable radio broadcast with Justin Brierley but lo and behold just recently Chris Arnzen was on unbelievable.

Chris is a former Roman Catholic and that was sort of what had gotten all that started because he was at one of these get-togethers where Catholics and Protestants talk. That's an interfaith dialogue.

Oh no that's what led to all those debates and all those Roman Catholics getting saved anyway Chris went on with a you know the guy was an Anglican who became Roman Catholic. Sorry in England that's not that big of a of a jump.

Really really really isn't. If you're sort of a liberal Anglican you become Roman Catholic. I'm sorry that's not quite the same thing but anyway a guy named James Bogle who's a barrister a trial attorney and oh I guess the cameras over here now hi I've been ignoring you all looking off in the other direction.

Anyway they went on and it turned into a into a mini debate for you know obviously solo scriptura and issues like that there were there were a tremendous number of straw men thrown out by mr. Bogle and Justin's already said hey you know next time you're over you know we could do round two and and I'd be happy to correct all these straw men but I'll just be perfectly honest with you you know just as there are Muslims at different levels of debating ability there are Roman Catholics at different levels of debating ability and in comparison to Peter D Williams mr. Bogle was I just I would just like to think that that Peter would not have made some of the really basic level misrepresentations that that James Bogle did but who knows.

But what I wanted to play for you is just one little section because I was I listened to it on a long ride on Saturday and I was listening this part and I was just like this continues to be said over and over again and and but it's something we need to be prepared to respond to if you're gonna engage with folks be prepared to respond to it.

So here's here's what he had to say this would be a short one but but here's James Bogle and and listen to what he says at this particular this.

Particular point. If we're going to say well then you the gospel arrives with Luther. Throughout the history of Christianity there is a sort of remnant somewhere who believe what the Protestant Reformers believed.

Where is this remnant. Where is the evidence of it. The answer is there isn't one there is. There were no people. Perhaps you might say the the the Lollards or someone but before that time from the very beginning of Christianity there were no people believing what people like Luther and Calvin Melancthon and the other reformers.

Believed now. What was interesting was the next thing queued up on my iPod was the I got about halfway through the new book called a long before Luther which is specifically on the early church representation and witness in regards to issues regarding salvation wherein they did agree with Luther.

So I I found that particularly interesting that that kind of statement would be would be made at that particular point in time. But what also really cut in to my thinking at that at that point was you can't possibly have ever listened to Luther or read any of Luther to come to the to the conclusion that Luther thought he was a revolutionary that he was presenting something absolutely novel that no one had ever believed before.

If you know seriously take the time you will know that for example Melancthon to whom Luther sort of committed a lot of at least a portion of the defense of his position on a scholarly level had extremely high views of Melancthon scholarship length of very young man 21 years old when he began teaching Greek at the University of Wittenberg.

But Melancthon often is citing from John Chrysostom and Augustine and other people like that in the early church in support of the Lutheran position and even in a later in later time in history what's called the Marburg colloquy which we'll get into at a later point in time.

Melancthon and Luther are citing from patristic sources in defense of their position over against the Swiss reformers. So even in in inter-protestant inter-reformed dialogue you know Calvin had done his degree in ancient legal literature.

So these people knew the the history of the church very very well. And we're not sitting there going oh we don't care what anybody before us believe. We've just come up with this on our own. Their stress was upon the apostolic nature of Sola Fide or Sola Scriptura or whatever else it might be but they viewed themselves as clearing away excess tradition.

They did not sit there and go oh we've come up with something brand-new. They believed that there had been many before them who had in fact believed in these things. And so when you talk about Sola Scriptura that's why you have the the three volumes set from Bill Webster and David King.

You've got the infallibility of the church by Salmon. You've got Whitaker's work. You have have so many of these major works that thankfully are still available well have been put back into print really to be honest with they've been put back into print only over the past number of years but they had fallen out of print but but serious interactions with historical sources and things like that to to deal with the teachings the early church and and the development of or the evolution of dogma over over a period of time things like things like that.

So it just it just struck struck me that Mr. Bogle has never done serious reading on the other side that that pretty much all of his argumentations sounded like he was reading from catholic answers but not from not from both sides at the same time which which is not unusual.

It's unusual i mean we have people are on our side that like i you know like i said before if you just repeat the old mantras you don't really keep up with what's going on uh that's going to be the result and it's uh it's it's a bad thing.

So what does all that have to do with with our where we're going today. Well it is uh the 10th of october in 2017 and there is a great deal of conversation going on right now regarding the reformation and it's not from my perspective that i need to get in on that.

I mean i spoke about it a lot over here in germany uh standing there on the bus uh giving uh bus lectures and uh speaking at incredible places. I mean uh the video won't be available for a few months but but uh eventually we'll have the video up from uh michael fallon and the the team at sovereign and so you'll get to see lectures uh recorded uh at the vartberg castle at fritz erba's cell in the south tower at the vartberg castle uh at verms with josh bice um at the reformation monument at verms where i gave a small five ten minute presentation um uh and especially the sermon at the castle church the slush kirka in um in wittenberg so that stuff will be out there.

So i i don't feel any particular uh compelling need to add to the stuff that's there on that level. But what i do want to do is i'll be i'll just be very honest i'm a little concerned uh about the the way in which the reformation is being presented by many even even people on on the right side of things um sometimes present what can only be seen as a cartoonish view of the reformation um and we're certainly not the first generation to do it.

Um if you if you spend some time in the luther house in wittenberg you can see how even toward the end of luther's life and certainly in the decades afterwards there was this hyper exaltation of luther's bravery at verms and and uh things like that and the the um elevation of luther to a position that historically really shouldn't necessarily be where we would go.

And so you know i understand that uh a a comic book style story of luther is pretty much all most people have um how many non-roman catholic individuals today how many how many uh quote-unquote protestants today have actually read a meaningful um a meaningful biography of luther even roland baiten's here i stand even even reading that would give you so much more of the of the historical background um very very few people.

And so as a result um we are we are really left in a in a difficult situation um in the sense that i think a lot of people if the if you embrace a a false narrative of the reformation and then you encounter the truth about how much politics was involved and you encounter the truth of the fact that luther had his character flaws and zwingli had his history and his background and and then you look at what at the fact that this was a magisterial reformation and what i mean by that is this is a reformation of the the state church the the issue of sacralism or some people call it constantinianism where you have church and state connected to one another.

Uh when you when you have that kind of thing a lot of people become disillusioned and i just i don't want to see that happen. I want to see an accurate understanding on the part of people and you might say well you know i'm more interested in apologetic information regarding islam or something like that.

Okay. Um i really think that there is a need even if you're dealing with something which seems as separate as islam to have a good solid historical understanding of where our own modern day denominations came from if if for no other reason than to give an explanation as to why we differ from one another.

Um but also um luther for example had a quran. Um luther had a fascinating eschatology uh this really freaks a lot of people out. I think there's only one kind of eschatology um but luther had a fascinating eschatology where he had a physical antichrist and a spiritual antichrist.

And the physical antichrist were the muslims. Uh because europe was at war uh with the with the turks and uh they were threatening to overrun vienna and and overrun uh overrun europe itself. So uh he had the and the spiritual antichrist of course was the was the papacy.

Uh eventually it wasn't you know you you have to figure out where you are in luther's life to figure out what he's focused upon at that particular point in time. Um there's there's no question about it anyway.

So i want to spend some time uh between now and you know we don't have to stop on october 31st. I'm going to be in in uh washington. I'm going to be traveling to washington on the 31st. And you know the october 31st 2017 should be seen as the beginning of really more than a decade of consideration of what happened 500 years ago.

Um i honestly think that there are dates more important than october 31st of 2017. Um i think the heidelberg disputation the leipzig disputation diet of verms um and then uh coming up in 2025 the 500th anniversary of the peasants revolt huge impact on luther's thinking.

Um and then you you know you've got to look at the marburg holoquy um the uh production of um the augsburg confession. And then a few years later you're looking at the conversion of john calvin and we can start looking at uh at events in calvin's life and and um i think if i'm still around by then um and i you know if i have a normal lifespan if i live as long as my dad has i should be um we should have a big old celebration of the night that william ferrell uh came to calvin's calvin's room put the fear of god in him.

I think that would be a that'd be a i'm not sure how we'd do that celebration but uh it would be fun and um so all sorts of things we can be doing. But it really there has to be a foundation laid and so i i would like to start by going back and and pointing out that luther didn't just pop into existence.

Um there was there were there's some great movies. Um when i got back to germany i watched the 2003 luther movie and was shocked. It was a 2003 luther movie. I thought it was a lot more recent than that.

But 2003 is not that long ago i guess but for some people it is anyway um real good movie up to the castle and then after that it just goes all over the place it starts squishing events together and stuff and up till then it's pretty accurate uh and then after that it just went went loopy but i guess that's they had to get it into a certain amount of time and that's what they had to do.

But um on youtube you have martin luther heretic uh the bbc's right at right an hour really really good uh video to watch especially this time of year. Um and so you look at those two and in both of them uh john stauppitz luther's father confessor at at erfurt extremely important in directing luther in the right direction.

What do you do with people like that. What do you do. I've been teaching through church history at prbc. I talked about some of this on sunday morning. What do you do when you have people like stauppitz in history.

Um what do you do with people who lived before what we would call a great clarification of biblical doctrine on certain topics. Do you hold them the same standards we hold people to today. Is there a difference between ignorance of something and willful rejection of something.

So many people want to project our modern situation backwards into the distant past and force people to be judged on the basis of things that they had never even heard of or conclusions that were arrived that long before they were alive uh based upon information they never had access to.

And so this is one of the one of the things that i really took umbrage with dave hunt about was his willingness to um read the hearts and minds of men and women that lived long before he did. And dave was pretty old so but they still lived long before he did and to engage in an exceptionally surface level um historiography and i i just i i don't think we are fair when we do that.

We are not going to want to be judged in that way. And so we can't we can't do that to others. So what we need to understand. And sometimes people aren't willing to do this because well you know i'll listen to the story of luther but that's pretty much all i don't want to do anything more than that you know.

Okay maybe calvin or something. But you know just just give me the highlights. Well the problem is you get the highlights. You're never really going to understand why people did what they did. And if you for example want to have any idea whatsoever about what happened with um miguel cervezas in uh in geneva um you just you you you can't just jump into that and judge cervezas or calvin or the swiss cantons or luther and melanchthon who were also involved with with uh well melanchthon was not luther but the lutheran movement.

You can't judge them by modern standards. And if you do you're going to end up really not believing there was almost anybody who was a christian before our modern day which is an untenable position to take.

And so what you have to do is you have to look backwards and recognize um what happened prior to luther coming on the scene to have some idea of why people believe what they believe. For example no one at this time period even could even give serious thought to the idea of a free church because when you were born in such and such an area you're a christian.

The tax rolls the state were the baptismal rolls the church and it had been that way for about a thousand years and so it all it just it always been that way no one could remember a time when it was anything different.

And we look at the 30 years war and we look at all that this tremendous you know we look at luther hiding in the vartberg castle and and it says oh rome's terrible to try to kill him and use. And 10 years later lutheran states are imprisoning anabaptists.

Why. I just can't believe that lutherans forgot uh you know i mean luther is hiding from the political state and then then uh 10 years later he's willing for the political state to persecute other people.

How could you do that. Because he was a sacralist. Because he was a sacralist and you as a non-sacralist are looking back excuse me looking back and judging him uh on a foundation that he didn't have and it's really easy for you to say well he should have but i just go.

Would you have if everyone for a thousand years before you would believe the same thing. I mean it's real easy for you to claim you would have i don't claim that for myself. I don't know what i would have done but i how far would i have gone.

Would i have had the bravery they had. I don't know but so much came before that ended up creating the soil out of which the reformation started. And i've said in many of my presentations if i had been choosing who to head this who to to function as the match or it's someone had well said that it's uh it's like the man climbing a bell tower in the darkness and he misses a step and he begins to fall and he reaches out for anything to to arrest his his descent and he ends up grabbing the the rope to the bells and ends up wakening the entire uh the entire town because the bells are ringing at uh at a ridiculous time in the morning.

Well that's what luther was doing. Luther was not trying to do anything he he reached out and ended up starting something he didn't intend to start. And i would have chosen so many different people. Luther was not the systematizer and and certainly uh when you look at luther at marburg you're not all that impressed and uh with his incalcitrance and the fact that his incalcitrance was primarily motivated by politics.

So lots of things to be extremely extremely um thankful for regarding martin luther. And so much truth and so much gospel insight and yet other things where you sort of go i mean obviously i would look at someone like wickliffe and go there is a scholar for you.

Oh man there's a there's a systematizer and oh but it wasn't time wasn't time there were certain things that had to be in place for the reformation to be the reformation for it to be something other than merely a political movement.

I mean when you think about it there had to eventually be a breakdown of rome's monopoly over religion in europe. But why did it have to be a religious breakdown. In other words we can be extremely thankful that the reformation was focused upon the true gospel a biblical gospel a a strong and powerful proclamation of justification by faith.

And um we can be thankful for that because the breakdown of the roman hegemony in in in europe could have been very secular. It could have been a a collapse of all type of spiritual faith. It could have been very different.

But for that kind of reformation reformation we ended up with for that to exist certain things had to come together. And some of those things did not exist in the days of wickliffe. For example you had to have the printing press you know for 200 years martin luther held the record for the most published works.

In other words the number of copies for like 200 years. Um we we have pamphlets from martin luther today with even our modern scholarship we can't tell who printed them. We don't know where they came from.

That's how secret they were. That's how good at keeping a secret they were because it was illegal. But this was how the word was spread. You had to have printing. And in the west anyways printing with gutenberg's movable type is the middle of the 15th century.

It's it's not quite a full century. Uh it's about 80 years after wickliffe's death. Now wickliffe's ideas still spread but they can only spread so far because they have to be handwritten. And so his ideas spread to bohemia and to jan hus.

And jan hus would have been a great person but again just too early. It's too early because you had to have printing. And you had to have the renaissance. There had to be a rise in literacy. There had to be a rise in the universities.

There had to be that great renaissance phrase ad fontes to the sources which is what drove desiderius erasmus to learn greek and to then desire to make available a latin greek diglot called the novum instrumentum which as you probably know he did in 1516.

And it was only a matter of months after it came out before a copy found its way into the hands of the fairly new professor of theology at the university of wittenberg named martin luther. And having the latin and the greek on facing pages and being able to compare what's one with the other and and the first few uh greek dictionaries coming out and things like that very very important didn't exist for jan hus didn't exist for wickliffe.

And it and it had to be not just for the the leaders of the movement it had to be for well when luther goes to the vartberg castle hiding from charles after the diet of worms one of the things he does is he translates the bible into german and lutheran schools start cropping up all over the place.

And what is their focus. But literacy reading with a focus primarily upon reading the bible. And this didn't exist in those days in the earlier days. So you had to have the printing press right around the same time as the invention of printing press.

You have the fall of constance and opal. And so you have all these scholars fleeing from the turks into europe bringing their manuscripts with them which then become important in the production of erasmus's uh greek new testament.

A couple other things that had to happen one that i've mentioned um that a lot of people don't think about the crusades had been going on for hundreds of years. They had a tremendous impact upon europe in many ways.

Um but you combine the people that were lost in the crusades the the soldiers that would leave and never come back. You combine that with the black death 1347 to 1350 the great mortality as it was described at that time.

And it's rare that you get if you hear somebody say well you know the reformation sort of required that plague. A lot of people describe the reformation as a plague but um it was in the background because so many people died when i was in when i was in seminary the number we were given was one out of every three people um i read a couple books before going to germany and uh the modern books uh in some areas will be as high as 70 so many of those would say on average to the whole population 50 one out of every two people um talk about thinking that the world is about to end.

Many people believed exactly that the world was about to end. You couldn't blame them for thinking it. And some forms of plague you know we believe it was the bubonic plague but there were like there was a um lung based version of it.

The the regular plague would give you well it was about there would be a very small number of people that would survive it maybe 10 to 15. The form where it started in your lungs there were there was there was no recording of anyone survived it and generally from the time it first manifested to your death was about 18 hours 18 hours.

That's why uh some people at that time actually developed the theory that you could contract it merely by looking in the eyes of an infected person because you know if it can kill in 18 hours you can understand why people would come up with that idea.

Um and by the way horrible horrible aspect of the black death at that time see despite al gore and all the radical leftist socialists of our day who are trying to convince us that your suv is killing the planet.

Um the temperatures in the world have changed down through the centuries and historians have known for a very very long time um that there have been these warming intervals and then cooling intervals.

And a warming interval has started around beginning of the 12th century and it lasted most that century which had allowed for the utilization of land much farther north to be put into cultivation than had been available for centuries.

We know this to be true for many reasons. But there are for example towns in england that are named after vineyards that you can't grow grapes in today we know that when they were founded you could you can't anymore which means it's cooler today than it was then.

So much for your suv. Um but that warming trend uh began to break down and a distinct cooling trend began had nothing to do with nuclear weapons again mankind nothing to do with any of this but started uh in at the beginning of the 14th century and there had been a real population increase if you can if you can grow more food people have more babies and you have more people and there had been a real population increase.

Now all of a sudden a lot of people are right on the edge and when you have populations living around the edge these are populations that are very uh subject to plague and to disease and and things like that.

The theory is that the cold in the russian steppes drove these not rats but uh the original carriers of the bubonic plague farther south into the trade routes and hence brought the fleas um first into muslim areas and many people were in muslim lands were impacted by the plague and then in late 1347 into sicily and then up into all of europe and england etc etc.

Um and people did people did everything to try to avoid the plague. They didn't understand what we understand today. Every scientific treatise that i'm familiar with whether it was written by muslims or christians that dealt with the plague uh included astrological information because people on both sides of that theological divide recognized that there had been a rather important um conjunction of saturn and jupiter i believe in 1345 which was supposed to portend great changes in the world.