Brad S. Gregory - Augustana College

tumultuous years of the early German Reformation, when, it might be thought, such
contestation might have been expected, but after which there was some movement toward
agreement about the Bible‟s meaning, once things “settled down.” That is not what
happened. It was not as if, say, once John Calvin rejected the Roman church in late 1533,
or at any time between the first publication of his Institutes in 1536 and his death in 1564,
Protestants tended toward a consensus around his exegetical claims and theological
assertions. 41 On the contrary, like Luther, Calvin was involved in doctrinal controversies
with other Protestants throughout his reforming career. 42 Commitment to the authority of
scripture led neither obviously nor necessarily to justification by faith alone or to
salvation through grace alone as the cornerstone doctrines of Christianity. The
interpretations of many other anti-Roman Christians made abundantly clear that the Bible
did not “interpret itself” in this way, whatever protagonists claimed to the contrary.
Unfettered and unconstrained, the Reformation simply yielded the full,
historically manifest range of truth claims made about what the Bible said. Seeing the
historical consequences of the commitment to sola scriptura does not depend on
examining all the myriad, biblically based truth claims made by those Christian groups
and individuals who rejected the authority of the Roman church beginning in the early
1520s and persisting through the mid-seventeenth century and beyond. The important
analytical point is that every anti-Roman, Reformation-era Christian truth claim based on
41 For Calvin‟s conversion, see the account in Bruce Gordon‟s recent biography, Calvin (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 33-35; see also the analysis of the events of autumn 1533 in the
classic study by Alexandre Ganoczy, The Young Calvin, transl. David Foxgrover and Wade Provo
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1987), pp. 76-83.
42 For a concise overview, see Richard C. Gamble, “Calvin‟s Controversies,” in The Cambridge
Companion to John Calvin, ed. Donald K. McKim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp.
188-203; see also Jean-François Gilmont, John Calvin and the Printed Book, transl. Karin Maag
(Kirksville. Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2005), pp. 69-73, 93-107. On Luther‟s doctrinal conflicts
with magisterial and radical Protestants, see Mark U. Edwards, Jr., Luther and the False Brethren
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975).
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