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THE PROBLEM OF THE MIXED COMMUNITY We have been arguing that as a member of a believing community the Christian holds his faith in fellowship with all the faithful, saying not only ‘I believe’ (credo) but ‘we believe’ (credimus). The conception that it is faith which is central to the Church's apostolicity was not new among the reformers. It was already well developed in the Carolingian period. Christianus of Stavelot, a contemporary of Hincmar of Rheims, says that everyone who believes and confesses the faith with Peter deserves to be called an apostle as much as he. So important is the collective confession of faith by believers that Luther argues that it is this which makes the Church identifiable as a visible community. But it was also apparent to the reformers that the machinery for the collective expression of the faith has not always worked smoothly, either in Councils, or through the offices of those with a responsibility for oversight. Why has there frequently been imperfect consensus, periods of learning from mistakes, and so slow and patchy a growth in understanding? A reason for this to which Augustine could subscribe as readily as a modern commentator is that in the deep structures of decision-making human needs and failings are accepted and allowed for, and the mode of our learning together is in tune with the enabling of our growth in holiness through living together in the faith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We do not seek unity because we can approve of one another. We seek it because, when we refuse to do so, we treat with contempt the immeasurable kindness of our Lord who has accepted us as we are in order that he may make us what he would have us be. (A–R, 123b) In the last analysis, perhaps we must say that the sixteenth-century debates failed in the attempt to convince and persuade opposing parties that there was a common truth upon which they could continue to build a common ecclesial life, because the urge to unity was simply not strong enough. The doctrine of the Church which Augustine held made schism the worst of heresies. The sixteenth century did not share that priority. The adversarial character of the debates made for polarisation, and the opposition of elements which we should now see as complementary in the balanced ecclesiology of a united Church. Classic principles of formal ‘order’ were reinforced in the Roman Catholic community to the point where rigid rules were imposed as a condition of membership. The reformers tended to place the emphasis on the individual's relationship with Christ, with a correspondingly undeveloped theology of community; and with the strengthening of notions of Scriptural primacy and rights of private judgement in interpretation, over against the community's consensus expressed through time. There was a danger of imbalance on one side in favour of what can be called ‘descending’ authorising and on the other in favour of an ‘ascending’ authorising; on one side a preference for a central and on the other a prejudice in favour of a ‘diffused’ authorising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Underlying both the debates about practice and the doctrinal debates on matters of authority lay questions of another order about the authority on which the authoritativeness of any statement about authority is to be judged. These were of particularly acute concern in the sixteenth-century debates, as reformers pressed for reliance upon ‘Scripture alone’. Inseparable from the question of the primacy of Scripture was a complex of difficulties at this level to which sixteenth-century scholars gave a great deal of attention as they struggled to define the way in which Christ is to be made in practice the ground of all truth in Christian believing, and to understand the manner in which that truth might be expressed in the words and experience of the community of his people first and supremely in Scripture, and also in the continuing life of the Church. Problems of authority at this level lie behind all that was said in our opening chapters about the status of the written and intellectual resources on which the sixteenth-century combatants drew in their debates. We have seen how there grew up a tendency to think in terms of a ‘power-struggle’ between the divine gift of Scripture and the rival authorities of human scholarship, human fancy, human reasoning, human opinion, human tradition, and above all a ‘human’ Church authority. Contemporary work on the text of the Bible in Greek and Hebrew challenged such simplifications at innumerable points, and a good many individuals found themselves at times exasperated (Erasmus), or unable to reconcile a scholarly with a partisan position (Eck). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In The City of God Augustine develops two related ideas. The Church includes all the elect, those who have already died, those still living and those yet to be born, in a bond of unity which transcends the ties of this life. It is therefore a community whose invisible reality is only imperfectly and partly embodied in its visible presence on earth. Secondly, because the human community on earth includes members of both ‘cities’, and because (as Augustine held) only God knows who are his elect, the ostensible Church membership here and now is in fact a mixed community. Wheat and tares grow together until harvest. The principle is echoed in Thomas Becon, Anglican reformer and Homilist, in his Catechism; he points out that ‘This word “Church” in the Holy Scripture is taken not only for the fellowship or company of the good and faithful, but also of the wicked and unfaithful.’ Augustine saw it as essential that the earthly community should preserve its unity as one body, saints and sinners together; no-one should presume to have special knowledge which enabled him to say who were God's people and who were not. There was thus a built-in tension in Augustine's ecclesiology. Visible and invisible Churches have different constitutions. The difficulty Augustine threw into relief arises in part from a doctrine of election which denies that anyone but God can know who are the elect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE PRIESTHOOD OF ALL BELIEVERS One of the most far-reaching of the perspectives of the Second Vatican Council was to view the Church ‘from the starting-point of baptism’, so that the ordained ministry is seen not as possessing a ‘higher power’ but as ‘a service at the centre of the Church community’. To say that ‘the greatest day in the life of a Pope is not that of his election or coronation, but the day on which he receives that which the Greek Fathers call the holy and unbreakable seal of baptismal regeneration’, is to reverse the assumption which was causing difficulty in the late Middle Ages and the sixteenth century: that that which is common to all is of less value than that which is committed only to some. For that carries with it its concomitant problems of resentment, and a sense of alienation among those who are not ordained. That had been and remained the nub of the problem about the authority of the ordained ministry in the Church. Waldensians in the twelfth century, Franciscan factions upholding the virtues of poverty from the thirteenth, a growing number of critics both within and outside the ranks of the clergy, contrasted the simplicity of Jesus' life with the pomp and display and wealth of the higher clergy. While the Church was the only alternative to a military career for the well born, and the higher offices in the Church were filled with scions of the nobility, there were bound to be many who entered the Church from worldly motives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

OVERSIGHT AND DISCIPLINE: OFFICE OR POWER? Although Luther's recommendations to the Bohemians were offered as an emergency solution, he took the underlying theology to have more than interim force. The local focus prominent in Luther's attempts to solve the Bohemian problem, and in the ‘gathered churches’ of some branches of the reforming movement, rests on the best authority. The local church as a territorial entity under the leadership of one presbyteros or episcopos was the fundamental unit of Church organisation in the early Church. The territorial principle of ‘one priest one church’ is insisted upon throughout the Middle Ages. No priest is to abandon the church ‘to which he has been blessed and married’. To give a church two rectors would be ‘spiritual bigamy’. No-one may preside in two bishoprics and no-one may receive in his diocese any priest who does not belong there. But such strictures in the mediaeval period were always understood within the context of the wider Church, a community extending through time and throughout the world. Difficulties about ‘order’ in its wider structural sense quickly became apparent in Lutheran and other reforming communities, as they began to discover that in escaping from the ‘tyranny of clerical dominion’ they were in danger of losing something of that order which had from very early times been inherent in the visible structure of the Church. The new worshipping communities which gathered round the reformers soon found a practical need for a ministerial office which included a power of governing in a larger sphere than that of the local congregation and which could exercise discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Melanchthon proposed a compromise in the matter of the powerlessness of the human will to do good, which was later adopted by the framers of the Lutheran Formula of Concord of 1577. He says that although man's will cannot choose the good in spiritual things (because without the help of the Holy Spirit it cannot even understand what is good), it is possible for human beings to identify what is reasonable in ‘external, temporal and civil affairs’. This anomalous and imperfectly accounted for exception reflects a more pervasive difficulty experienced by the reformers in accommodating secular rule and civil affairs within the religious sphere, and balancing the authority of Church and state. Luther and Melanchthon were among a number of reformers who decried the habit of thinking about the Church's authority in a political way. The Pope is not a magistrate, says Luther, seeking to separate spiritual and temporal jurisdiction as being of different sorts, and to get away from the political analogy. ‘Human polities are bound to a certain succession; they have their laws and power to interpret their laws; they have degrees of persons, kings, dukes; they also have their glory … the Church is not such a polity.’ The particular difficulties involved were in part a matter of contemporary vocabulary. As nineteenth-century debates might emphasise ‘duty’ and today's language might be of ‘responsibility’ and ‘service’, as a democratic model replaces a paternalistic or imperial one; so for the sixteenth century the key concern was with notions of princeliness and magistracy, and their application to the government of the Church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

FORGIVENESS SEALED AND RENEWED The doctrine of justification by faith (with its insistence upon the freedom and completeness of the transformation of the individual's position before God) was not intended by Luther to conflict with the theology of baptism. But he did intend it to show that an elaborate penitential system was unnecessary, and its ‘imposition’ on the faithful dangerously likely to distract them from the great simple truth of their redemption. The new emphasis brought into clear view once more an anomaly which had in fact existed for many centuries. As a rule, the first generations of Christians were baptised as believing adults, able to declare their faith for themselves and to make a deliberate choice in committing themselves to Christ. The response of faith and the rite of baptism went together without strain. There was an emphasis in the first Christian centuries on the power of baptism to wash away sin and also its consequences; and a concomitant discipline which expected those who were baptised not to fall into serious sin again, for it would make a mockery of baptism to suggest that it could be repeated. Not every community was willing to restore to fellowship those who did lapse, and where penitents were readmitted they usually had to demonstrate the sincerity of their repentance to the community so that there could be no doubt about it. Penitents were marked by the wearing of special garments, and they performed various penitential acts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1367 the Bohemian dissident Milíc spoke of the sacrificium Christi of the Mass, and of himself as ‘offering’ it, with no sense that he was saying something which was potentially controversial (although he uses the expression in a sermon against Antichrist with much of which his successors among the sixteenth-century reformers could have agreed). The debate about sacrifice became so central to the eucharistic controversy of the Reformation that it was the focus of a high proportion of the conversations of the Council of Trent on Eucharist and ministry, in 1547, 1551–2 and 1562. Milíc also regarded the penitential system as having a natural and proper relation to the theology of eucharistic offering and sacrifice. This relationship between the Eucharist and the forgiveness of sins was already being explored in the earliest period of the Reformation debates by Kaspar Schatzgeyer, who died in 1527. He placed an emphasis on the action of the whole Church in the Eucharist, and on the function of the Eucharist within the Church's ministry of reconciliation in this life. In a series of works written in response to the Lutherans in the 1520s he laid the groundwork of a theology of eucharistic reconciliation. But his death and a change in the focus of polemic, as Zwingli and Luther came into conflict and other preoccupations supervened, meant that his ideas were not taken further. The Trent Fathers perceived the interdependency of the Eucharist and penitential practice, but the topics were broadly separated in debate during the Council, and in the making of canons and decrees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Everywhere in the background to Luther's thinking, and that of other reformers, was the habit of looking for what ‘counts’ in the forgiveness of sins, what ‘causes’ salvation, what has ‘power to save’. This is the area of authority with which the Reformation was first and most consistently concerned. Luther's agenda began with the crisis created in human lives by sin. All that he came to hold in later years about the order and constitution of the Church, and the erection of the many planks of his polemical platform, depended upon the position he took on the remission of sins in the first years of his prominence as a controversial figure. Melanchthon, too, put first, of what he saw as the two great areas of contemporary dispute, ‘I believe in the remission of sins’; the debate over the clause, ‘I believe in the Holy Catholic Church’, he put second as depending in large measure upon it. The problem, as both perceived it, was that human beings stand in absolute need of saving from the consequences of their sinful condition, and are desperately vulnerable to false promises of rescue, easily led into parting with their money and their trust. Luther was moved in the first instance by pastoral concern for the spiritual welfare of the people he saw becoming the victims of indulgence-sellers. The theology came later. It proved immensely subtle and complex, and far from the clear-cut matter Luther had first thought it when he framed his notion of a salvation which required only simple faith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are told that baptism ‘… gives … initiates … unites … effects’. It has to be asked what is meant by ‘baptism’ where this sort of language is constantly used. Is it the actual performance of the rites? If so, the language seems at best hyperbole and at worst objectionable. This hostile reaction to the 1982 Statement of the World Council of Churches on Baptism (the ‘Lima’ text) reflects the modern continuance of suspicions of a number of reformers in the sixteenth century. If we say that a sacrament has an effect, do we imply that the Holy Spirit is somehow at the disposal of the Church, so that the mere ‘performance’ of the rite ‘guarantees’ the effect, ex opere operato? The question can be put in that way only if the Church is seen as in some sense standing over against divine authority and laying claim to an independent power; with its ministers endowed with a personal ‘priestly power’, and claiming that ‘rites of the Church’ infallibly bring about the operation of the gift of grace. Such assumptions are to be found on both sides in the sixteenth century debates, and they largely dictate the shape of the discussion about the role of the Church in salvation. Luther was first and foremost concerned with the forgiveness of the individual as he responds to God in faith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ACCEPTANCE, LOVE AND FAITH The Trent theologians remarked early in their discussion of justification that there was a sense here of treading new ground of vocabulary. In discussing original sin they had a conscious and comforting sense of familiarity, a mass of patristic literature and precedent to turn to, and above all, a sense of connection with the many-layered patristic and mediaeval understanding of right order. In the part of the controversy which deals with ‘faith’ and ‘love’ everyone was on this ‘home ground’; we frequently see a reaching down into tradition for a term, a reference or a concept as the adversaries struggle to express their positions clearly. The focus of the late mediaeval debate over what Luther calls ‘justification’ had not been upon the problem of what makes an individual righteous in the sight of God, but upon what makes him acceptable; and not upon faith, so much as upon love. There was a preoccupation with the salvific work of the Holy Spirit within the soul rather than with the work of Christ. These concerns formed a bridge, historically as well as theologically, between the fourteenth-century revival of old controversies over grace, free will and predestination and Luther's ideas about ‘justification’. Luther knew of the late mediaeval work on ‘acceptance’, and he echoes it in both his early and his later writings on justification. It is worth giving a little space to the issues here, because they touch on the question of ‘power to save’ by raising the possibility that the work of the Holy Spirit does by love what is necessary to make the soul acceptable to God in a manner which is in some way complementary to the work of ‘justifying’ accomplished through faith in Christ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

FORMAL REASONING Testimony from ‘authorities’ other than Scripture was used by Protestants in the sixteenth century with restraint, by Roman Catholics much as it had been throughout the Middle Ages. Protestants who employed it at all drew principally on the Fathers, especially Augustine, in a deliberate attempt to cut out what they deemed a millennium or so of corruption in the Church's life. But both alike found themselves needing to use authorities in a context of more or less formal argumentation as a means of proving theological truths, because ‘authorities’ and ‘reasons’ had always gone hand in hand here. It seemed to Luther and others that formal logic had in recent generations created a scholastic obfuscation of plain Scriptural teaching, so that ‘reason’ could be seen as confronting Scripture not harmonising with it; and furthermore, the institutional Church was seen as supporting a professional class of academic theologians in their claim to an authority which overrode that of Scripture. As early as 1516 Luther was mocking ‘the subtlety of the philosophers’ who entertain themselves with proving that what is true is also false. In a similar spirit Melanchthon laughs at attempts to make a difference between Papam vidi and vidi Papam, and the seriousness about these logical squabbles which calls anyone who disputes that ego currit is bad Latin not a poor grammarian but a ‘heretic’. ‘Scholastic’, ‘school’ and their cognates are frequently a term of abuse among humanists and reformers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The confession of Christ as Lord is the heart of the Christian faith. To him God has given all authority in heaven and on earth. As Lord of the Church he bestows the Holy Spirit to create a communion of men with God and with one another. To bring this koinonia to perfection is God's eternal purpose. The Church exists to serve the fulfilment of this purpose when God will be all in all. Christian authority is Christ's authority. The debates on authority which rent apart the Church in the West in the sixteenth century turned again and again on whether Christ's sovereignty was being set at risk in the Church's life; and whether his Word, Holy Scripture, was being disregarded or overridden by those in authority in the Church. The chapters which follow look first at sixteenth-century concerns over the authority on which Christians believe matters of faith. As textual scholarship investigated Greek and Hebrew and raised the possibility that there ought to be emendations, Scripture itself could no longer be looked upon, in an uncontroversial way, as a text to which one could simply point. The testimony of the authorities other than Scripture with which everyone in the West had been familiar for generations, ceased to be uncontroversially acceptable to many Protestants, and qualifications hedged about the use even of the Fathers. Proof by reasoning, which had reached a high point of sophistication in the late Middle Ages, and in which there had normally been embedded authorities to support propositions, underwent revolutionary attack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE WITNESS AND THE JUDGE In the earliest days Jesus' followers proclaimed his message and recorded what eye-witnesses remembered of his life and teachings. The missionary work of the young Church consciously depended upon the witness of those who had known Jesus. There followed a period during which the New Testament books were written, making use of the testimony of the existing Jewish Scriptures, and the Canon came to be accepted as itself authentic witness within the community of the Church. Once the Canon was settled, Scripture's relationship to the Church was set on a new footing. The Church's task of witnessing now became one of stewardship of an existing Scripture. It is with the nature of that stewardship that the sixteenth-century debates in that area were primarily concerned. It would be historically inaccurate to speak of sola Scriptura in any sense which implies that Scripture came into being independently of the Church. It is a product of the life of the early community, and an act of witness by that community; its preservation and transmission continued to depend on that community after the Canon was fixed. This historical process was not yet clear to sixteenth-century scholars. We can see the Liber Ratisbonensis of 1541 trying to reconstruct in a historical way the process by which Scripture came to be written. First, it says, there was oral tradition, because God wanted the Gospel to be transmitted ‘as it were from hand to hand’ (quasi per manus). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It was Luther's contention that the Church could play a part in the salvation of the individual only through her ministry of the Word, and that the ministry of the sacraments stood under that ministry and was salvific only by the power of the Word. He and other reformers were trying to redress an imbalance which had made the sacramental ministry of the Church in the later Middle Ages so prominent as almost to obscure the ministry of the Word altogether. This had been a matter of practice, not dogma. The saving power of Scripture was a commonplace of mediaeval discussion. Peter Lombard, for example, in his preliminary discussion of those signs which not only ‘signify’ but also ‘justify’ in his twelfth-century Sentences, considers the question of the relationship of the Church's ministry of the sacraments to the ministry of the Word. The opening question of Aquinas' Summa Theologiae a century later is whether the study of ‘holy learning’ (sacra doctrina) through Scripture is ‘necessary to salvation’. For the majority of mediaeval authors there was no question of separating Scripture from the Church in its saving work. The ministry of the sacraments could not take place outside the community of the Church; the ministry of the Word belonged there in the same way. Yet in practice that ministry came to be somewhat neglected in the late mediaeval Church. Stephen Langton's Constitutions of 1222 require parish priests ‘to feed the people with the Word of God’, but local priests rarely preached, and many were insufficiently educated to attempt it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]