Was the Reformation necessary?-III

Jacques Bénigne Bossuet. History of the variations of the Protestant Churches.

Such were the heads of the new reformation. Men of talent, it is true, and not deficient in literature, but bold, rash in their decisions, and puffed up with their vain learning: men who delighted in extraordinary and particular opinions, and therefore aimed not only to raise themselves above those of their age, but also above the most holy of ages past. OEcolampadius, the other defender of the figurative sense amongst the Swiss, was both more moderate, and more learned; and if Zuinglius appeared by his vehemence another Luther, OEcolampadius resembled Melancthon, whose particular friend he was also. In a letter, which, when a youth, he wrote to Erasmus you observe the marks of a piety equally affectionate and enlightened, together with much wit and politeness. From the feet of a crucifix, before which he had been accustomed to pray, he wrote such tender things to Erasmus on the ineffable sweetness of Jesus Christ, whom this pious image represented so lively to his imagination, that there is no reading it without being affected. The reformation which came to trouble these devotions, and account them idolatry, began at that time; for it was in 1517 that he wrote this letter. He entered into religion in the first heat of these disturbances, with much courage and reflection; at an age, as Erasmus observes, too advanced for any imputation of youthful precipitancy. We also learn from the letters of Erasmus that he was greatly enamoured with the course of life he had undertaken, and relished God in peace of mind, and therein lived quite remote from the novelties that were then spreading. However (such is human weakness, so great the contagion of novelty), he left his monastery, preached the new reformation at Basil, were he was pastor, and tired of celibacy, like the rest of reformers, married a young girl, with whose beauty he was enamoured. “This is the way“, said Erasmus, “they choose to mortify themselves“; he could not but admire these new apostles, who were sure to abandon the solemn profession of celibacy to take wives; whereas, the true apostles of our Saviour, according to the tradition of all the fathers, in order to attend to God and the Gospel only, left their wives to embrace celibacy. “It seems“, said he, “as if the reformation aimed at nothing more than to strip a few monks of their habits, and to marry a parcel of priests; and this great tragedy terminates at last in a conclusion that is entirely comical, since, just like comedies, all ends in marriage“. The same Erasmus complains, in other places, that after his friend OEcolampadius had abandoned his tender devotion, together with the church and monastery, in order to embrace this impious and contemptible reformation, he was no longer the same man; instead of candor, which this minister professed whilst he acted on himself, nothing but artifice and dissimulation could be found in him, after he had once entered into the spirit of the party.

Was the Reformation necessary?-II

John Eck. Enchiridion of Commonplaces.

Objections of the Heretics.

1. The authority of Scripture is greater than that of the Church. For the Church ought to be ruled according to Scripture. For the Word of God yields to no one.

2. It is not lawful for either the Church or any man to go against Scripture.

3. One does not say that what the Pope with the Cardinals and the bishops determine has been determined by the Church, because the Church is the congregation of all believers and the connection in true faith by which the just man lives.

4. The Church of God is in the Spirit alone, because she is believed, and thus hidden.

(…)

Disposal of Objections.

1. Christ did not write any book, nor did He bid the disciples or apostles to write one, yet He gave many precepts concerning the Church; hence when about to send apostles out to plant the Church, He did not say, “Go write“, but “Go into the whole world and preach the Gospel to every creature” [Mt. 24:14]. Therefore the law was written on tablets of stone, but the Gospel on hearts. “Since you are a letter of Christ, sent out by us, and written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not in tablets of stone, but in the physical tablets of the heart” [2 Cor 3:3]. Jeremiah agrees: “Behold, the day is coming, says the Lord, and I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah, not like the covenant I made with your fathers, etc., but this will be one which I shall make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord; I shall give the law in their inward parts, and in their heart I shall write it, and I will be their God and they will be my people” [Jer. 31:31-33]. Jerome: Why is it necessary to take into one’s hand what the Church does not receive?

2. The Church is older than Scripture, for when the Apostles began to preach, there was no written Gospel, no letter of Paul, and yet there was the Church dedicated by Christ’s blood.

Thus the apostles without the Scripture of the New Testament chose Matthias [Acts 1:22ff], ordained seven deacons [Acts 6:3]; Peter caused Ananias and Sapphira to die [Acts 5:1ff]. Even tough the apostles were very diligent in sowing the Word of God, yet very few things are found written by them. It follows logically that they taught many more things than they wrote; the things taught have equal authority with the things written.

3. Scripture is not authentic without the Church’s authority: for the canonical writers are members of the Church. Hence against a heretic wishing to contend against the Church’s constitution and custom one objects with the very weapons wereby he wishes to contend against the Church. He is going to quote the canonical Scriptures or the four Gospels, and the Pauline Epistles. Let the objection immediately be raised against him: how does he know that these Scriptures are canonical except from the Church, for why does he believe the Gospel of Mark, who did not see Christ, to be canonical, and not the Gospel of Nicodemus, who saw and heard Christ, as John testifies [Jn. 3:1ff]? So why has the Gospel of Luke the disciple been received, and the Gospel of Bartholomew the apostle been rejected, unless we humbly confess the authority of the Church with the Blessed Augustine, something Luther sometimes taught, that the Church could judge concerning the Scriptures.

Therefore it thus is clear that the Church is older than Scripture, and Scripture would not be authentic without the Church’s authority. Hence, Augustine, Agains the Epistle Called Fundamental, 5.6 [PL. 42.176]: “I would not have believed the Gospel unless the authority of the Church had moved me to do so“. (…)

i. Scripture teaches: “Remember to hallow the Sabbath day; six days shall you labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath day of the Lord your God“, etc. Yet the Church has changed the Sabbath into Sunday on its own authority, on which you have no Scripture.

ii. Christ said to His disciples on the mountain: “I have not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it” [Mt. 5:17]. And yet the Church of the apostles in council boldly made pronouncement on the cessation of legal matters.

(…)

We confess the Church to be the congregation of all the faithful who are of the body of Christ, and when primates and leaders of any province decide anything, the whole province is said to have decided it. Thus the prelates of the Church are called “the Church”, because they represent it and its subjects. Otherwise the Church could never be gathered. “But if he does not hear you… tell the Church; but if he does not hear the Church, let him be to you as a Gentile and publican” [Mt. 16:16ff]. According to Luther’s view, if anyone wanted to tell the Church, he would have to traverse the whole earth.

(…)

“And when Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension against them, the brethren decided that Paul and Barnabas and certain others of them should go up to the apostles and presbyters in Jerusalem about this question” [Acts 15:2]. See how the Deuteronomy c. 17 passage was fulfilled. And what was the Church? Not the whole congregation, but they went up to the apostles and presbyters who represented the Church.

4. If the Church is hidden, how did Christ enjoin telling it to the Church, and if He did not hear the Church, etc. But if it were hidden, what could be said to it, or how would it hear? Likewise the Church is the body of Christ, and the Christians are its members [Rom. 12:5; 1 Cor 10:17; 12:12; Eph. 1:23; 5:30; Col. 1:24]. Let Luther say wether they were hidden and only mathematically the Church, when Paul said: “Now you are the body of Christ, and members each in his part” [1 Cor 12:27].

It is the way of heretics to have caverns and caves and lurking places: the Church puts the lamp upon a lampstand [Lk. 8:16]. The Church is shown to you in councils, in the Apostolic See, in bishops and leaders of individual Churches. For it the Church were only mathematical, the brother of Paul (Timothy) would not have praise through all the Churches [2 Cor 1:1]. David would not have said: “With you is my praise in the great church” [Ps. 21:26], “and in the seat of the elders let them praise him” [Ps. 106:32].

(…)

Was the Reformation necessary?-I

Edmund Campion. Ten Reasons.

Ancient History unveils the primitive face of the Church. To this I appeal. Certainly, the more ancient historians, whom our adversaries also habitually consult, are enumerated pretty well as follows: Eusebius, Damasus, Jerome, Rufinus, Orosius, Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret, Cassiodorus, Gregory of Tours, Usuard, Regino, Marianus, Sigebert, Zonaras, Cedrinus, Nicephorus. What have they to tell? The praises of our religion, its progress, vicissitudes, enemies. Nay, and this is a point I would have you observe diligently, they who in deadly hatred dissent from us, -Melanchthon, Pantaleon, Funck, the Centuriators of Magdeburg,- on applying themselves to write either the chronology or the history of the Church, if they did not get together the exploits of our heroes, and heap up the accounts of the frauds and crimes of the enemies of our Church, would pass by fifteen hundred years with no story to tell.

Along with the above-mentioned consider the local historians, who have searched with laborious curiosity into the transactions of some one particular nation. These men, wishing by all means to enrich and adorn the Sparta which they have gotten for their own, and to that effect not passing over in silence even such things as banquets of unusual splendour, or sleeved tunics, or hilts of daggers, or gilt spurs, and other such minutiae having any smack of revelry about them, surely, if they had heard of any change in religion, or any falling off from the standard of early ages, would have related it, many of them; or, if not many, at least several; if not several, some one anyhow. Not one, well-disposed or ill-disposed towards us, has related anything of the sort, or even dropped the slightest hint of the same.

For example, our adversaries grant us, -they cannot do otherwise,- that the Roman Church was at one time holy, Catholic, Apostolic, at the time when it deserved these eulogiums from St. Paul: Your faith is spoken of in the whole world. Without ceasing I make a commemoration of you. I know that when I come to you, I shall come in the abundance of the blessing of Christ. All the Churches of Christ salute you. Your obedience is published in every place (Rom. i. 8, 9; xv. 29; xvi. 17, 19): at the time when Peter once in that city was ruling the Church gathered at Babylon (I Peter v. 13): at the time when that Clement, so singularly praised by the Apostle (Phil. iv. 3) was governing the Church: at the time when the pagan Ceasars, Nero, Domitian, Trajan, Antoninus, were butchering the Roman Pontiffs: also at the time when, as even Calvin bears witness, Damasius, Siricius, Anastasius and Innocent guided the Apostolic bark. For at this epoch he generously allows that men, at Rome particularly, had so far not swerved from Gospel teaching. When did Rome lose this faith so highly celebrated? when did she cease to be what she was before? at what time, under what Pontiff, by what way, by what compulsion, by what increments, did a foreign religion come to pervade city and world? What outcries, what disturbances, what lamentations did it provoke? Were all mankind all over the rest of the world lulled to sleep, while Rome, Rome I say, was forging new Sacraments, a new Sacrifice, a new religious dogma? Has there been found no historian, neither Greek nor Latin, neither far nor near, to fling out in his chronicles even an obscure hint of so remarkable a proceeding?

Therefore this much is clear, that the articles of our belief are what History, manifold and various, History the messenger of antiquity, and life of memory, utters and repeats in abundance; while no narrative penned in human times records that the doctrines foisted in by our opponents ever had any footing in the Church. It is clear, I say, that the historians are mine, and that the adversary’s raid upon history are utterly without point. No impression can they make unless the assertion be first received, that all Christians of all ages had lapsed into gross infidelity and gone down to the abyss of hell, until such time as Luther entered into an unblessed union with Catherine Bora.