RamistThomist
Puritanboard Clerk
Pelikan continues his story of Western Christendom. As in volume 3, the events leading up to the Reformation can be seen as fractures in the Augustinian synthesis. While Warfield is incorrect to say that the Reformation was Augustine vs Augustine, there is some truth in it as both sides could claim Augustine as their champion.
Pelikan explains the pressures of medieval nominalism upon the Christian world. While he doesn’t pin all of the world’s evils on Scotus and Occam, they do force the Western narrative forward in ways that would prove…momentous.
“What the Protestant Reformation had done with its doctrine of justification by faith alone, as the debates at the Council of Trent were to make clear, was to bring into the open some of the unresolved questions about justification in late medieval theology” (253). The Council of Trent was aware of this. They knew that while they would appeal to “antiquity,” some had the suspicion that antiquity was a slippery eel. Pelikan notes, “Although that pluralism was voiced throughout the debates at Trent, the council fathers sought in their definition to respond to the Reformation without involving themselves in the disputes of several schools of theology within Roman Catholicism (280).
Both Trent and Geneva would have to deal with the horror of the Radical Reformation. The Protestants were particularly sensitive to this charge. Were not the chaotics (e.g., Anabaptists) also using sola scriptura, if more radically? What separates the Magisterials from the Radicals on this point, besides the formers’ apparently arbitrary appeal to “tradition?” In response to this the Magisterials posited that Scripture “norms the lesser norms.”
Pelikan explains the pressures of medieval nominalism upon the Christian world. While he doesn’t pin all of the world’s evils on Scotus and Occam, they do force the Western narrative forward in ways that would prove…momentous.
“What the Protestant Reformation had done with its doctrine of justification by faith alone, as the debates at the Council of Trent were to make clear, was to bring into the open some of the unresolved questions about justification in late medieval theology” (253). The Council of Trent was aware of this. They knew that while they would appeal to “antiquity,” some had the suspicion that antiquity was a slippery eel. Pelikan notes, “Although that pluralism was voiced throughout the debates at Trent, the council fathers sought in their definition to respond to the Reformation without involving themselves in the disputes of several schools of theology within Roman Catholicism (280).
Both Trent and Geneva would have to deal with the horror of the Radical Reformation. The Protestants were particularly sensitive to this charge. Were not the chaotics (e.g., Anabaptists) also using sola scriptura, if more radically? What separates the Magisterials from the Radicals on this point, besides the formers’ apparently arbitrary appeal to “tradition?” In response to this the Magisterials posited that Scripture “norms the lesser norms.”
