Key Theological Debates and Developments
Key Theological Debates and Developments
The age of Reformation witnessed intense theological debate over a number of topics, extending into the seventeenth century and beyond. The main issues discussed included the sources of Christian theology, the way in which these were to be interpreted, the nature of grace, and the nature of the church. We shall note these and reflect on their significance in what follows.
The Sources of Theology
The mainstream Reformation was concerned not with establishing a new Christian tradition but with the renewal and correction of an existing tradition. Maintaining that Christian theology was ultimately grounded in Scripture, reformers such as Luther and Calvin argued for the need to return to Scripture as the primary and critical source of Christian theology. The slogan “by Scripture alone” (sola scriptura) became characteristic of the Protestant reformers, expressing their basic belief that Scripture was the sole necessary and sufficient source of Christian theology. However, as we shall see later (pp. 122–6), this did not mean that they denied the importance of tradition.
This new emphasis upon Scripture had a number of direct consequences, of which the following are of especial importance:
The Council of Trent, responding to these developments, insisted that Scripture and tradition were to be given equal weight in theological deliberations. Writers such as Bellarmine argued that Scripture needed to be interpreted reliably; the Protestants had made it open to highly subjective individualist interpretations, which would be destructive to both church order and doctrine.
The Doctrine of Grace
The first period of the Reformation was dominated by the personal agenda of Martin Luther. Convinced that the church had lapsed into an unwitting Pelagianism, Luther developed his distinctive doctrine of justification by faith alone. The question “How can I find a gracious God?” and the slogan “by faith alone” (sola fide) resonated throughout much of western Europe, and attracted him a hearing among a substantial section of the church. The issues involved in this doctrine are complex and will be discussed in detail at the appropriate point later in this volume (see pp. 337–41).
The doctrine of justification by faith is especially associated with the Lutheran Reformation. Calvin, while continuing to honor this doctrine, initiated a trend which became of increasing importance in later Reformed theology: the discussion of grace in relation to the doctrine of predestination, rather than justification. For Reformed theologians, the ultimate statement of the “grace of God” was not to be seen in the fact that God justified sinners; rather, it was to be seen in God's election of humanity without reference to their foreseen merits or achievements. The doctrine of “unconditional election” (see p. 346) came to be seen as a concise summary of the unmerited nature of grace.
The Council of Trent and later Catholic writers regarded such views as a distortion of the teachings of Augustine, and argued vigorously for a return to his ideas. They maintained that the Protestant emphasis on justification by faith alone failed to do justice to the New Testament's emphasis on the importance of good works in the Christian life. In addition, they insisted that Protestants had misrepresented Augustine's teaching on what justification actually was, interpreting it to mean “being accounted as righteous,” whereas the clear sense of his teaching was “to be made righteous.”
The Doctrine of the Sacraments
The age of Reformation saw intense interest in the nature of the sacraments. While Catholicism offered a vigorous defense of the traditional notion of seven sacraments, the Protestant Reformation quickly coalesced around the belief that there were only two proper sacraments – baptism and the eucharist. Protestants also rejected the idea of “communion in one kind” – the practice of allowing clergy to receive bread and wine at the eucharist while restricting the laity to receiving bread alone.
So what did sacraments do? By the 1520s the view had become well established within reforming circles that the sacraments were outward signs of the invisible grace of God. This forging of a link between the sacraments and the doctrine of justification (a development especially associated with Luther and his colleague at Wittenberg, Philip Melanchthon) led to a new interest in the theology of the sacraments. It was not long before this area of theology became the subject of considerable controversy, with the reformers disagreeing with their Catholic opponents over the number and nature of the sacraments, and Luther and Zwingli arguing furiously over whether Christ was really present at communion services (see pp. 400–1).
The Council of Trent reaffirmed the traditional teaching concerning the number and identity of the sacraments, while strongly defending the concept of “transubstantiation” against its Protestant critics, both Lutheran and Reformed. While many Protestant writers tended to interpret the sacraments as signifying but not bestowing grace, Trent vigorously defended the traditional idea that sacraments caused and conveyed grace, rather than functioning simply as signs of grace.
The Doctrine of the church
If the first generation of reformers was preoccupied with the question of grace, the second generation turned to address the question of the church. Having broken away from the mainstream of the Catholic church over the doctrine of grace, the reformers came under increasing pressure to develop a coherent theory of the church which would justify this break and give a basis for the new evangelical churches springing up in the cities of western Europe. Writers such as Martin Bucer and John Calvin argued that the church was not to be defined institutionally but in terms of the preaching of the Word of God and the right administration of the sacraments. Such understandings have since become increasingly significant in global Christianity, and will be considered in greater detail later in the present work (see pp. 364–7).
In response to such developments, the Council of Trent re-emphasized the historical and institutional importance of the church, arguing that Protestants had placed themselves outside its bounds. The church was a divinely ordained and divinely instituted society; salvation was not possible outside its boundaries.