Search

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]