It is not an everyday occurrence to find highly practical material in the great Medieval commentaries on The Sentences, but I was thinking very much about this statement I read this week in the commentary of Bonaventure:

English translation: And it happens that one handles [the doctrine of] the most holy Trinity in a threefold manner, seeing that, first, one happens to believe the thing itself; second, to understand what is believed; and third, to say or enunciate what is understood. And to believe is by authority, to understand is by reason, and to speak is by catholic [and reasonable] speech.
Original Text (available on-line, thanks to the Fransican Archive): De ipsa autem sacratissima Trinitate tripliciter contingit tractare, quoniam primo contingit ipsam credere, secundo creditam intelligere, tertio intellectam dicere sive enuntiare. Credere autem est per auctoritatem, intelligere per rationem, dicere per catholicam [et rationabilem] locutionem.

This very succinctly summarizes theology and its method:
1.) The doctrines are believed, because they are in scripture. On that authority alone are they received, and not upon reason; for faith is a faculty which receives based upon authority, not evidence.
2.) Then, since they are believed with divine authority, the believer makes every effort to understand them through reason. We take the various principia received by the authority of scripture and understand how they relate one to another.
3.) These understood doctrines are now stated: but not in our own terms, as though we are the first to consider them: rather, we declare them with "catholic speech," or through engagement with the traditional, catholic interpretations of the church.

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Paul Korte
OPC
Flint, MI

They who perceive in themselves discoveries of the divine goodness, so full and absolutely perfect, and who make them the subject of earnest meditation, will never embrace new doctrines, by which the very grace they feel so powerfully in themselves is thrown into the shade. --John Calvin

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Thanks Paul, I like too the following comments by Bonaventure on Holy Scripture...

Bonaventure (1217-1274): Now the narrative modes [i.e. of scripture] cannot proceed to certitude by way of rational argumentation, since particular facts cannot be formally proved. Therefore, lest Scripture appear doubtful and lose some of its moving power, God has given it, in place of the evidence of demonstration through reasoning, the certitude of authority; a certitude so absolute as to surpass any attainable by the keenest human mind. And because the authority of one who is liable to deceive or to be deceived is not absolute, and there is none who can neither be deceived nor deceive but God and the Holy Spirit, therefore Scripture, to be perfectly authoritative, as it must be, was handed down, not through human research, but through divine revelation. St Bonaventure, The Works of Bonaventure: II - The Breviloquium (Paterson: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1963), prologue, (5) On How Holy Scripture Proceeds, 3, p. 17.

1) Scripture was not a "dead letter" for Bonaventure.
2) To him Scripture carried its own certitude and authority.
3) He implicitly denies the quality of infallibility to any human body.

DTK

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Sola Scriptura est norma normans non normata
D. T. King, pastor
Christ Presbyterian Church (OPC)
Elkton, Maryland
Augustine (354-430): Therefore what He [i.e., Christ] has deigned to speak to us, we ought to believe that He meant us to understand. But if we do not understand He, being asked, gives understanding, who gave His Word unasked. NPNF1: Vol. VII, Tractates on John, Tractate XXII, §1.