On the trend of religion in the Medieval period of rhetoric, there was a belief in the separation of the soul and flesh. You are essentially a spirit occupying a body until you die, your earthly bonds released and you’re left to either float up to Heaven or be sucked down into Hell. Your destination post-mortem was determined by your earthly acts while you were still alive, of course following the rules of the Bible as said by the only person who could read and be trusted to give an “honest” interpretation of said Bible.
This brings in homiletics and hermeneutics again. Because those preaching in the Church were really the only ones who could read and they were essentially the governing and law-making force of the people (they were even above the royals), what they preached was what was believed to be in the Bible and it was followed like law. The Church took every advantage of everyone’s concern for the afterlives of their spiritual selves, even at one point claiming that, if you paid a certain sum for certain sins, you would be forgiven and be allowed into Heaven.
This of course led Martin Luther to stepping in and nailing his 95 Theses to the door, starting the Protestant movement (though that wasn’t his goal) and the loss of the trust of the Church.
Homiletics, through this, showed that it is in fact rhetoric. In its simplest definition, rhetoric is the art of persuasion. The Church was able to persuade, through their teachings, that their interpretation and exaggerations of the Bible were correct.
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