I write this post using only direct quotes from two theologians, one American and one English. They both wrote in the late 19^th century.  Their concerns were similar.  Their points of view were similar. Alexander V.G. Allen was a professor of Theology at Harvard.  John B. Heard was a British clergyman and graduate/lecturer at Cambridge University, England. These were not theological lightweights.

I chose to address this topic with nothing but quotes from 130 years ago to highlight the fact that precious little has changed in the theological standoff festering openly in the Western Latin Christian Church since the Protestant Reformation of 1517.  Both sides seem content to continue to die, generation after generation, seemingly oblivious (or more probably, willfully ignorant) of their error.

“Are we prepared to discard dogma, and to return to primitive doctrine?  Are we prepared to allow that theology, ever since the fourth century, took a wrong turn, and, in the West especially, has since gone from bad to worse, until dogmatism wrought its own overthrow at the revolt of Luther?  Then, in a fit of short-sighted panic, the Reformers became more scholastic than the Schoolmen, and so it has come down to our day, in which the extreme peril of the situation is at last opening thoughtful men’s eyes to see where the real danger lies.”¹

“To Augustine, the Church, as the keeper and witness to Holy Writ, was the final authority; but the Reformers, in breaking with the Church, and so far parting company with the one Church Father whom they cared even to quote, had to set up some ultimate authority.  This to them was the Bible…  It was not so much the first as the second generation of the Reformers who set up a theory of inspiration as a new court of final appeal with which to combat Church authority.”²

“[Protestant Reformer John] Calvin’s theology is drawn, or professes to be drawn, exclusively from Scripture.  The Bible, as he defined and understood it, is the cornerstone of his system.  He had no respect for Luther’s view of Scripture as the mirror of the religious experience of humanity, nor for Zwingle’s view of a “word of God” in the soul by which man judges the value of the written word.  He denied the position of the Latin church, that the Bible was given and attested by the authority of the hierarchy, or the continuous existence of the episcopate.  According to Calvin, God reveals Himself to man through the book by the power of the Holy Spirit.  Man was incapable of knowing himself or knowing God, except by this revelation.  Revelation, as given in the book, is a communication from God to man, supernaturally imparted, apart from the action of the consciousness or reason; Calvin speaks at times of the human writer as an amanuensis only of the Spirit.  He does not, therefore, presume to criticise the canon or its formation; the Bible is received as one whole, as it has come down through the ages.  There is no other revelation except that which God made to the Jewish people through the Old Testament, and to the Christian world through the New.”³

“…those who broke away from the bondage of an infallible [Latin] Church only did so to set up the second bondage to an infallible Book, taken literally to teach all that men need to know of their origin in the past and of their destiny in the future.”⁴

“We have then to show that, besides Augustinianism proper, there is the popular Protestantism of a book religion which calls for careful restatement.”⁵

1. Heard, John B. Alexandrian and Carthaginian Theology Contrasted. T & T Clark, Edinburgh, 1893. pp. 252, 253. ↩︎
2. ibid., p. 261 ↩︎
3. Allen, Alexander V. G. The Continuity of Christian Thought: A Study of Modern Theology in the Light of its History. Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1884. pp. 298, 299. ↩︎
4. Heard, p. 260 ↩︎
5. Heard, p. 262 ↩︎