Brad S. Gregory - Augustana College

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scripture fits into this pattern of fissiparous disagreement among those who agreed that Christian truth should be based solely on scripture. Appeals to the Holy Spirit were of course integral to the determination of God‟s truth by biblical interpreters who were interested not merely in accurate philology and ancient historical events but in eternal salvation. These appeals to the Spirit, too, were made by protagonists on all sides of every dispute, and thus could settle nothing. As Erasmus put it already in 1524, “What am I to do when many persons allege different interpretations, each one of whom swears to have the Spirit?” 43 Indeed. Whether as a supplementary hermeneutical principle, an insistence on the reality of the Spirit‟s action in the believer‟s heart, or a claim of substantively new divine revelation, recourse to the authority of God‟s direct influence intensified the problem it was meant to resolve: the unintended and unending disagreements that derived from sola scriptura. “The Bible, I say, the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants!” the English theologian William Chillingworth famously declared in 1638. 44 This is indeed what Chillingworth and other Protestants said—but what did the Bible say? That was the question, to which by then so many incompatible answers had been given for over a century. In addition to their continuous doctrinal disagreements with Roman Catholics before and after the Council of Trent, Protestants disagreed among themselves on multiple fronts. They disagreed about the meaning and prioritization of biblical texts, and the relationship of those texts to doctrines regarding the sacraments, worship, grace, the church, and so forth. They disagreed about the broad interpretative principles that ought to guide the understanding of scripture, such as the relationship between the Old 43 Desiderius Erasmus, De libero arbitrio diatribe, sive collatio (Basel: Johannes Froben, 1524), sig. b1. 44 William Chillingworth, The Religion of Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation . . . (Oxford: Leonard Lichfield, 1638), p. 375. 18
and New Testaments or the permissibility of religious practices not explicitly prohibited or enjoined in the Bible. They disagreed about the relationship of the textual interpretation of scripture to the exercise of reason and to God‟s influence in the hearts of individual Christians. And they disagreed about whether (and if so, to what extent) explicit, substantive truth claims were even important to being a Christian, with some spiritualists and alleged prophets radically relativizing the place of doctrines in Christian life. 45 This view would find many variations later in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (not to mention the modern period), partly as a result of the unintended disagreements that derived from the appeal to scripture and its supplements. In Benjamin Kaplan‟s apt phrase, “Protestantism itself was irrepressibly fissile.” 46 Adamant claims that “the Bible is the religion of Protestants” did not arrest the fissility—they caused it. But must we not distinguish between the magisterial and radical Reformations from the outset? Why put in the same category Luther and Anabaptists, Zwingli and leaders in the Peasants‟ War, and those who alleged visions and revelations from God? Because all of them purported to be articulating God‟s truth, whether on the basis of the Bible or principles inspired by it (in the case of visions and prophecies). More fundamental than the distinction between the radical and the magisterial Reformations was the shared rejection by their respective leaders of the authority of the Roman church, which precipitated the new problem of determining God‟s truth. How was this problem resolved? It wasn‟t. Scripture “alone,” without an alliance between anti-Roman reformers supported by political authorities, resulted in a vast range of conflicting and 45 For the sixteenth century, see R. Emmet McLaughlin, “Spiritualism: Schwenckfeld and Franck and Their Early Modern Resonances,” in Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, ed. Roth and Stayer, pp. 119- 161. 46 Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 142. 19
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Brad S. Gregory - Augustana College

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