Conversion in Protestant and Catholic Thought in the Reformation

Abstract

This chapter reviews various ideas of religious conversion throughout Judeo-Christian history. It first distinguishes two broad lines of development: the body as ‘prison house’ and the body as ‘temple,’ and concludes that it is the latter view that dominated Christian thought, meaning that any religious conversion, including the conversion from death to eternal life, necessarily included body as well as soul (a distinction not analogous to flesh versus spirit). The chapter continues by making a further distinction, this time between how sixteenth-century Catholics and sixteenth-century Protestants viewed bodily conversion. Catholics developed medieval Bernardine traditions that viewed conversion as a matter of bodily purification, and this approach was not acceptable to Renaissance Protestants who did not believe that bodily purification was a valuable aim.