System of Sacred Theology — Book 1

1.1.1Book I. On the nature and constitution of sacred theology. Chapter 1. On the definition of theology.

Theology is a practical habit of the intellect, fully sealed by the mystical Holy Spirit from the divine disclosure in the Holy Scriptures, teaching a person on the Spirit's way — according to age, calling, and the measure of his own faith — the manner of worshipping God and of obtaining eternal life, unto the glory of God.

Scholion. First it is asked what the word theology properly signifies: whether in Holy Scripture one reads a God-speech or God-discourse — that is, the reason or speech of God by which we are instructed by God — or the reason, speech, or mental conception about God and divine things formed from the Scriptures by the power of the Holy Spirit. It is taken here in both senses.

For most weightily blessed Irenaeus says that no one can truly know God unless God himself teaches; from (John 6:45): It is written in the Prophets, And they shall all be taught by God. Whoever therefore has heard from the Father and has learned comes to me. For it is not left, says Hilary in book 7 On the Trinity, to human eloquence to speak of the things of God by other words than the speech of God. All other things are narrow, shut in, hindered, and obscure. If anyone wants to demonstrate this by other words than those by which it was spoken by God, either he himself does not understand, or he leaves it not to be understood by his readers. From book 1 On the Trinity: When the discourse is about the things of God, let us grant the knowledge of himself to God; let us serve his speech with pious reverence. For he is a fit witness for himself who is not known as to himself. Let the mystery of heaven, says Ambrose in book 5, letter 31, be taught me by God himself who made it, not by man who has not known himself. To whom should I rather trust concerning God than to God?

Yet lest some fanatic abuse Christ's saying in (John 6:45), here is worth considering the exposition which Urbanus Regius, a serious theologian of the past age, has in the body of doctrine to Julius on formulas for speaking carefully, under the ninth title. We, he says, do not rashly produce this place. For by the unskilled it is tossed about as an encomium of ignorance. And here they think they have a word of God by which all the liberal arts and even the studies of theology themselves may be exploded. Christ sufficiently explains this place in John 6: No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up on the last day. And it is written in the prophets: And they shall all be taught by God. Everyone therefore who has heard from the Father and has learned comes to me. Here Christ speaks of that common doctrine necessary for all who are to be saved, by which we acknowledge Christ to be the Son of God made man for our salvation, and believe in him as our only Savior. By this doctrine certainly all the elect are illuminated; and those who lack it will be condemned. But there is also in the church another learning, which is called the gift of prophecy, with which gift not all Christians are endowed, but those who are set over churches for teaching, that they may expound the Holy Scriptures unto edification, exhortation, and consolation, of which mention is made in (1 Corinthians 14:1-5). This gift is not common to all believers — to tailors and cobblers and apostles alike. Those who lack it ought not to teach in the church, but reverently to hear those who teach, as the Apostle says: If there is no interpreter, let him keep silence in the church, and let him speak to himself and to God.

Indeed the word theology is not read expressly in the Scriptures except for its cognate in the title of the Apocalypse, where John the Evangelist is called Theologian in the strictest sense, as one who asserted the divinity of the Word both by the Gospel history and by his Apocalypse. Yet the term is frequented by the ancient fathers, by profane writers, by the schoolmen, and finally by more recent theologians. Nor is it necessary that a technical vocabulary exist in the Scriptures, because they do not propose the formulas of arts and disciplines, but the things to be believed unto salvation.

1.1.2Why is it called sacred? Because as something set apart it is distinguished from the profane — whether from natural theology, which is known under the light of right reason and is a part of true philosophy, or from the superstitious, which is born from the blindness and hallucination of human reason and is a part of falsely so-called knowledge and empty deceit (1 Timothy 6:20; Colossians 2:8).

Is it a practical habit of the intellect? That it is a habit of the intellect no one will easily deny who at least acknowledges it as a doctrine or discipline. But whether it is a practical habit, the opinions of theologians differ, both of the older and of the more recent. And it is worst of all that the papal schools dispute this ineptly and less theologically — though not without sharpness and subtleties — presupposing philosophical disputations and afterward laboring over the accommodation of theology, while they do not have Scripture as companion.

Among the more recent, most follow a middle opinion, some the first, but the chief and leading men seem to embrace the last, by the argument of the analytic order in which they treat theology — as Melanchthon, Luther, Calvin, Bullinger, Ursinus, Keckermann, and lately William Ames the Englishman, professor at Franeker, Dr. Constantijn L'Empereur, professor at Leiden, and others. To this last opinion we cast our vote in this way: first we explain the terms, then we confirm it by reasons. The terms are (1) theology, (2) practical habit, (3) practice. By theology here we do not understand that which is God's own, as is plain from question 1, but that which is prescribed to us concerning the kingdom of God. And a practical habit is so called denominatively, as the intellect itself is, because of its extension to practice.

So we prove it. First, by clear testimonies of Scripture that express the final end both of the Gospel (concerning the doctrine of the law there is no doubt that it is practical) and of the system in which the doctrine of the Gospel is handed down summarily and methodically arranged: (John 20:31; Romans 15:4; 2 Timothy 3:16-17; Ecclesiastes 12:13; 1 Timothy 1:5; 1 Corinthians 8:1-3; 1 Corinthians 13:2; James 1:22-25; Revelation 22:14).

Second, from the first intention and the internal end, which in reality are the same. That discipline whose first intention and last internal end is practical is a practical habit. But the first intention and last internal end of sacred theology is practical. Therefore sacred theology is a practical habit. The major is plain. The minor is proved first from the first reason, because from the testimonies recited it is clear that theology aims at faith, which is effective through love (Galatians 5:6) and produces the fruit of good works that conform to the divine law in the worship of God and the love of neighbor.

Next, that theology also aims at and regards the generation and confirmation of faith, and the amendment of life as the fruit of faith, is proved from the last external end — namely eternal life — to which we can come only through faith as the apprehending means. That act by which alone a person is led to eternal life is first intended by theology. But faith is that act by which alone a person is led to eternal life, as will be proved below in its place. Therefore faith is first intended by theology.

1.1.39. Third, from practical means. That discipline whose means do not stop in theory but extend themselves to practice is a practical habit. But the means of sacred theology do not stop in theory; they extend themselves to practice. Therefore sacred theology is a practical habit. The major shines with its own light. The minor is proved because the Word of God and the sacraments, by which the Holy Spirit works and confirms faith, do not stop in bare speculation but are handed down for the sake of something else (1 Timothy 1:5; 1 Timothy 4:1 and following).

10. Fourth, from the mode of the primary object. That discipline which does not know its primary object merely in order to know it, but in order to do something about what is known — that is, to worship God by loving him above all things, to correct and humble itself in order to him, and to love the neighbor in order to the same as itself, by building him up — is a practical habit. But sacred theology does not know its primary object merely in order to know it, but in order to do something about what is known. Therefore sacred theology is a practical habit.

11. From all these things it is indeed plain that sacred theology is a practical habit: for it is known not merely in order that it may be known, remaining shut within the intellect in cognition — which is the specific difference of theoretical disciplines, by which they are distinguished from practical ones — but also so that it may extend itself beyond the intellect, namely so that the will may rest in the object known by the intellect: that is, may by faith apprehend the grace of God offered, may love the offering God above all things and the rest in order to him and for his sake, and may set its hope in him — which is altogether a practical discipline.

And a heap of divine testimonies may be brought forward by which this discipline is praised not only as prudence but also as wisdom, as may be seen in (Proverbs 7:4; James 3:17) and many others, both elsewhere and in the Theological Precognita of Master Alsted and in the Syntagma of Doctor Polanus.

1.1.4Next, someone may object that theology contains many theorems — God is; God is one; God is infinitely perfect — and very many like them handed down by us ourselves in theology, from which he gathers this: the object of a practical discipline is the doable (τὸ πρακτόν), which can be produced by us; the object of theology is not the doable which can be produced by us; therefore theology is not a practical discipline. The minor is proved because the object of theology is God and divine things.

Third, someone may take exception: theology does not treat only of practice, that is, of the worship of God, but also of theory or the knowledge of God. Therefore it is not only practical but also theoretical.

Fourth, someone may bring forward: the eternal life that theology sets forth is situated in the knowledge of God (John 17:3). Therefore theology is rather theoretical than practical. The reason of the consequence is that cognition is an act of the intellect and looks to theory.

1.1.513. We reply to the first. First, it is not yet clear whether those places treat of sacred theology as a discipline methodically shaped and arranged — which is the question here — and so a doubt is proved by an equally doubtful thing. Second, even if we liberally grant that these and other sayings of Scripture alleged for this matter treat of sacred theology as such, they still do not prove it non-practical but theoretical, or at least partly theoretical and partly practical — which is what those who differ from us separately desire. For those places more carefully inspected show a Hebraism by which wise is frequently used in Scripture for the prudent and the just, because he is described almost everywhere from just actions. So also the whole book of Proverbs uses the word wisdom everywhere. From chapter 10 verse 11 the most learned Thomas Cartwright says on this place that he who is here called wise appears to be called just, so that he who, justified by faith, does not cultivate righteousness is not truly to be counted wise.

Yet in truth, even if some documents in theology, considered in themselves and by themselves, are theorems of things proposed to be known: still, when related and weighed, as is fair, to their whole as parts of theology and to its last end, all are theorems of manners or practical monuments — for they are handed down not only to be known or contemplated, but to be referred to the worship of God and the salvation of man. Hence by a notable theoretical science of God and divine things hypocrites and the ungodly are made no better or happier. Truly Justin Martyr: our religion consists not in words but in deeds. If that respect is neglected and set aside, no practical discipline at all will be given, because there is no practice that does not include some knowledge.

14. In the first syllogism we distinguish the major. For the object of a practical discipline is the doable, either in itself and its nature, or in another which, though distinct from the object, is so joined to it that the object is known and the discipline treated for its sake. Minor is not true. For although God in himself and his nature is not the doable, yet the simply first and necessary end, and the justification of his name, for which he is proposed to be known in theology, is the doable. John Duns Scotus (on the Sentences book 1 question 4) asserts that even these theological propositions — God is triune; the Father begets the Son; the Father and the Son breathe the Holy Spirit — are practical, because they virtually include the knowledge of the rightness of love tending to the three persons of the Deity, none excluded. As for divine things, some are from God alone, as the works of creation and redemption; others principally from God and secondarily, in a certain respect, also from man, insofar as human actions also concur toward them — as faith, justification, sanctification, and the whole worship of God. The former are referred to the doable in the way God is; the latter are such in themselves and their nature.

1.1.615. To the third, we deny the consequence, because not just any cognition makes a theoretical discipline, but only that which does not of itself direct to practice. But the theological knowledge of God of itself directs a person to the practice of piety.

16. To the fourth, we deny the consequence. Eternal life consists in cognition not as in an end, but as in a means to the end, without which no adult attains the end — namely his salvation and the sanctification of God's name. Doctor Johannes Gerhard, professor at Jena, agrees with us among others in the preface to his Meditations. It is agreed, he says, that theology is a practical doctrine, and therefore those think less rightly who contend that it is speculative, among whom are some of the scholastics. For although not only things to be done, but also things to be believed and hoped, are proposed in this heavenly philosophy, that still does not hinder its still being called practical. For medicine too is occupied with the theory of certain things, and yet is not therefore a theoretical discipline, because it pursues that very theory by reason of practice and in order to practice: the same applies to theology that in those very things to be believed, or in the articles of faith, not bare knowledge but also assent is required, which those to whom this care belongs confirm by arguments to be an act on the will's side. But if theology is a practical doctrine, then surely its end also will not be bare knowledge and subtle theory, but rather practice. If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them, says the Savior to the disciples. The strength of our religion consists not in words but in deeds, says Justin. The sum of religion is to imitate him whom you worship, says Augustine. If therefore the end and perfection of the Christian religion is not bare knowledge but practice, how few will you find today who are truly Christians! Everywhere much science, little conscience. It is most right that orthodoxy is defended by books, disputations, sermons, and every means: but care must also be taken that life answer to the Christian profession. Thus Doctor Gerhard.

1.1.717. Sacred theology, truly and properly speaking, cannot be referred to any of the five logical virtues that Aristotle explains in Nicomachean Ethics book 6, because the things it considers differ in kind — or by their whole nature and condition — from those things from whose variety and unequal nature those five habits of mind and their ends and aims are deduced.

For the three theoretical perfections or habits turn about necessary things, whose knowledge can be searched out by the keenness of the human mind without the Word of God: the knowledge of spiritual things cannot without the Word of God. Contingent things, of which some fall under our action and others under our making, are placed in our power and were first searched out by human study and industry, so that they can be acquired. Hence civil happiness in Ethics book 1 is everywhere called a human good.

But spiritual things are by no means in a person's power and cannot be acquired at his choice: they either are in us by generation from corrupt seed, as original sin, which is the peculiar disease of the animal human being brought forth into light by natural procreation from the corrupt; or they are God-given (θεόδοτον), that is, they come from heaven by mere grace and mercy — as true conversion to God, faith, remission of sins, regeneration, and so on.

Although this discipline, which must be held most firmly, considers spiritual things, and is therefore diverse in whole kind from the other disciplines called theoretical, practical, or productive: still with those called practical and productive it has no small analogy.

1.1.81. For just as in practical — and even in productive — disciplines a certain end is set forth, which is the measure and norm of all the other things considered in them, by which it can be known what belongs to them by right of property and what is more or less ancillary and foreign to them: so also theology has a certain end, about which none of those who in every age have been engaged in this kind of study has ever doubted — namely righteousness before God, which whether you call it before God, or remission of sins, or the inheritance of eternal life, or salvation, or by whatever other name, so long as you understand the thing itself, nothing more concerns this our design.

2. Just as in practical disciplines it is usual to consider the subject set under the end that comes — namely the human being — so the human being under vice is no less necessary in this discipline than the human body and its parts in medicine, and without doubt a hundred thousand times more necessary because of the greatness of the most atrocious spiritual disease of all human beings, plainly hidden beneath reason.

3. Just as in practical disciplines and arts it is supremely necessary that the definition of the end itself, which is the principle of cognition, be constituted most accurately — whence Aristotle carefully warns both about this and about other principles near the end of Nicomachean Ethics book 1 chapter 7 that care must be taken that they be rightly defined, since they have great force for what follows — so in sacred theology the most exact definition of the end, or of justification and eternal life, must be sought from the sacred letters.

Hence almost a thousand times Doctor Luther and other orthodox theologians inculcate in their writings, nearly to nausea, that if the article of justification is lost, the whole Christian doctrine is lost at once; likewise that whoever deny the article of justification at once take CHRIST out of the midst; likewise that when the article of justification is known we walk in clearest light, and when it is unknown in densest darkness; likewise that when this one article is well constituted and known the papacy is overthrown. The reason of these assertions is twofold. First, because the justification of the sinful human being before God is the end for whose sake the whole of sacred Scripture has been disclosed from heaven, and so the aim of our whole theology, which for this end is learned in the schools, taught in the church, and practiced. Second, because if this end is not well constituted and defined, those things cannot be rightly known which have been ordained from heaven for attaining the end and prescribed to us in theology as the speech of the kingdom.

1.1.9Just as in practical disciplines from the notion or well-constituted definition of the end the means leading to the end are elicited and known — and especially those nearer the attaining of the end, as Aristotle teaches (Posterior Analytics book 1 chapter 2; Ethics book 1 toward the beginning of the last chapter) — so also in theology, when justification is well known and accurately defined, that nearest means is more easily known by which alone sinners are made righteous before God, namely faith, which rests on God's mercy and the merit of our Savior Jesus Christ.

I say the nearest means, because there are also others a little more remote, such as the preaching and hearing of the heavenly Word and the use of the sacraments, by which God gathers a Church for himself, the Holy Spirit is effectual, and by the sermon of the law, as by lightning and thunder, strikes consciences and leads them into the acknowledgment of their sins, while he stirs true grief for having offended God. But by the voice of the Gospel he again soothes those struck and as it were raises them from spiritual death and kindles and confirms true faith; by which alone, apprehending God's mercy and Christ's merit, sinners are made righteous before God and are brought into his obedience.

Yet lest anyone be deceived by these analogies and likenesses, our most august sacred theology — of which we dare to pronounce with better right and more truly than Aristotle of his, from Metaphysics book 3 chapter 2, that it is most princely and mistress, to which it is unlawful for the others, as handmaids, to contradict — differs from the others in this: (1) that the end of the others, and the means leading to the end, are of our choice; but by no means are the end and means of sacred theology of the choice of our old Adam; (2) that the subject of the other disciplines also contributes something to the end; but the subject of this one, the sinful human being, contributes plainly nothing. For the Holy Spirit wholly effects the conversion of the sinful human being and kindles the faith by which alone he is made righteous before God.

Although theological learning, insofar as it is common to the holy and the unholy, admits a certain comparison with philosophical habits: yet prophecy, since it is called the gift of understanding and explaining Scripture (1 Corinthians 14:1 and following), rests on its own singular and proper principles and rules.

1.1.10IV. Is sacred theology therefore the same as the habit of faith and piety? Faith is a practical habit, and can rightly be called a doctrine or discipline objectively, according to that word of Christ (John 6:45): Everyone who hears from the Father and learns comes to me. For the object of faith is taught by God and learned by human beings: and without this no one is pleasing to God or is saved (Hebrews 11:6; Mark 16:16).

But sacred theology is another habit, which deduces, explains, confirms the articles of faith from their principles and foundations, and defends them against adversaries. Although this habit is not in all the faithful, yet it is uniquely required by the Apostle in a teacher of the Church (1 Corinthians 12:1 and following). Without this habit many please God and are saved, as unlearned believers: and with this habit, if it is without faith and the struggle of the Spirit, many displease God and are condemned, as unbelieving teachers, hypocrites, seditious wranglers, and tyrants (Matthew 7:21–23; Matthew 23:2, 13, 15; Luke 11:52). Compare the illustration of blessed Augustine (On the Trinity book 14 chapter 1) explaining (1 Corinthians 12:8).

The schools wrongly distinguish science from faith, yet with a praiseworthy intention. For faith is knowledge (Isaiah 53:11). And one must glory in this knowledge as in a gift diverse from worldly knowledge (Jeremiah 9:23). The scholastics meant to teach that Christian faith is not produced by demonstrations that produce human science, because faith is of things not seen and does not rest on philosophical principles or things known by nature. And this is not badly but usefully warned, insofar as theological faith is discerned from philosophical science. Yet this also ought to have been observed: that sacred Scripture takes up philosophical science, as collapsing under its own mass in divine things, and rebuilds what has been made vain, new foundations laid under and new stays added, so that, cultivated from a sacred beginning, it may issue in faith vigorous with the strength of the Word because of God its author.

Experience teaches that whatever philosophers seem somehow to weave about God and divine things, the more curiously and accurately they try to establish it, the less at last they reach its end. And the Apostle rightly wrote (Romans 1:21): They became vain in their reasonings. Therefore the wisdom of the wise is abolished, and the understanding of the understanding is taken out of the midst.

Further, from (1 John 2:3–4; 1 John 3:6; 1 Corinthians 8:1–2) it is easily understood that so great a science of sacred things consists in two things: (1) in the truth of a certain common and universal knowledge about the Word of God and the dogmas of the church; (2) and indeed chiefly in the efficacy of knowledge or in the truth of application, by which our mind rightly accommodates common principles and dogmas to things to be done and to singulars and discerns the things that are excellent (Philippians 1:10; Philemon 1:6; Ephesians 5:10) — that is, so that it may form a practical judgment about the things that occur to be done, which is truly consentaneous to the principles. Otherwise it happens that what we confess with the mouth we deny by deeds (Titus 1:16). That common knowledge, when destitute of efficacy, the Apostle calls puffing-up science: in respect of which whoever would think himself to know God is a liar if we believe John — having indeed a form of truth but denying its power (2 Timothy 3:5).

For this reason he is not sufficiently properly called a theologian, just as he is not properly called prudent in human affairs who, when he has understood common principles, rich in theory, either in no way or badly accommodates the same to singular counsels — as the most exact theologian Doctor Conrad Bergius, my most sincere colleague, truly discusses in the Precognita on Loci Communes Theology, chapter on the internal form of theology, and thence wisely gathers two things: (1) that theology can indeed be true even which an ungodly person possesses, as to the truth of common knowledge; but as to application it will not be true but hypocritical; and Scripture in comparison with the science of the saints judges it unworthy of the name of science and therefore also of theology; (2) that one is a better theologian as to the breadth of science, another as to the efficacy of science — who without doubt is more approved by God.

We say that theology is science and wisdom, not speaking philosophically, but in a mode singularly fitted to this doctrine. For it differs from philosophical science and wisdom by principles not known of themselves; it is confirmed by the authority of God the teacher, to whom they are known of themselves; and it is inspired by a peculiar grace and power, yet through the Word. And that there is a difference of theological wisdom and science is plain from (1 Corinthians 12:8): through the Spirit to one is given the word of wisdom, to another the word of knowledge. This seems chiefly to be it: that science is taken of the cognition of doctrine, but wisdom of the skilled use of science (Job 28:28; Proverbs 14:8; Proverbs 27:12).

1.1.11V. Is the appellation of intelligence, science, wisdom, art, or prudence alien from the nature and definition of sacred theology? Altogether, if one prefers to speak of these habits agreeably to their philosophical definitions with Aristotle, the prince of philosophers — except for one spiritual prudence or faith, by which properly there is cognition of things pertaining to the kingdom of God, which is truly a practical habit and the genus of theology — also by the suffrage of him who writes publicly that theology is practical, not speculative, not by that common reason by which all arts and disciplines have their activity for an end, but especially concerning practice. But whoever attributes all these appellations to one sacred theology not popularly but properly in an accurate and philosophical kind of speech, by the same work attributes contradictory differences to the same defined thing, which we taught to be absurd in question 2 number 4. Nor does the contrary reason bind — namely that all these things are in any accurate discipline. For both the nature of disciplines distinguished from one another by opposite differences, and the whole chorus of the best philosophers, refute this. Otherwise, when the object of theology is taken in such breadth that it embraces whatever things are in the nature of things created and ordered by God, insofar as they are to be referred to God as to their principle and end, even Physics, Ethics, Politics, and other disciplines are contained within the terms of theology — as the most celebrated theologian of the Leiden Academy, Doctor Johannes Polyander, observes from Augustine's letter to Volusianus (Synopsis of purer theology, disputation 1 thesis 12).

VI. Whether sacred theology is from nature and human habit of inquiry, as the remaining disciplines, or rather from divine revelation and institution? A distinction must be made between the principles, the things underlying sacred theology, and the methodical explanation, demonstration, and disposition of principles, things, and conclusions deduced from them.

As to the former: the principles of other disciplines, innate to us, can be expressed and brought to perfection by sense, observation, induction, and experience, as among others Verulam shows eruditely in many places in the Great Instauration. But the solid and native principles of sacred theology, which by human study and industry can be advanced to perfection, are not in us by nature, nor are they found by the powers of nature (Matthew 16:17); but they are learned from divine revelation and institution (Isaiah 54:13; Matthew 11:27; John 6:45; Galatians 1:11–12). Compare chapter 2 aph. 5.

As to the latter: it hangs upon human industry and reasoning applied more or less according to the measure of grace, after the manner of the other disciplines, as is abundantly plain enough from the most published methods of sacred theology, of which some are more, others less, exact.

1.1.12VII. What is the proper subject of sacred theology? Answer. 1. In the schools Thomas (part 1 question 1 article 7) makes God the subject, not taking the word practically, as Lord, prince, and king of the universe, but theoretically, so that the first being is signified: but he rests on the false hypothesis that theology is rather theoretical than practical. Nearer the truth among Gregory of Valencia (disputation 1 question 1 point 3 paragraph 5) are Hugh of St. Victor, who makes the works of reparation the subject; Durandus, who makes God as Savior; Bonaventure, who makes the mystical body of Christ with its head — that is, Christ himself and the Church; and the Riminese, who makes God as glorifier or as rewarder. But they restrict the subject too much. For Bonaventure assigns only the object of evangelical doctrine: the rest act as if someone constituted the prince rather than the commonwealth the subject of politics.

2. But from the sayings (Mark 1:14–15; Matthew 4:23; Luke 9:2; Acts 28:23, 31; Matthew 13:11) it is gathered that most simply and most fittingly to the Scriptures the subject of theological doctrine — what they call the subject of treatment — is said to be the kingdom of God in general, as the kingdom of grace in species is the subject of the Gospel, which Jesus Christ, the fountain of all theology, taught and commanded his Apostles to teach.

3. So the material object is all things that can in any way be reduced to the kingdom of God. 4. But the subject is considered otherwise in practical than in theoretical disciplines: in these its principles and affections are sought for the sake of science; in those, insofar as it is laid under some operation. 5. The formal reason of the object, which is primarily considered in theology, is the same with the form of the kingdom, and they are the very moral acts by which the kingdom of God consists — of which sort are, on God's side, creation, redemption, and sanctification; from which also arise faith, hope, and charity on the human side, and what can be reduced to those, as helping or instrumental causes, as the Church, the magistrate, the sacraments. Whence also the formal reason is sought from the determination of the theological habit or knowledge, so that the object is the kingdom of God: (1) insofar as it is revealed from heaven, which determination is from the principle or efficient cause of knowledge; (2) insofar as it is revealed unto human salvation, which determination is from the end of revelation and knowledge. From which it is concluded that not all things are taught in theology that pertain in any way to the kingdom of God, but those useful to human beings for piety and eternal life (Titus 3:1 and following; 2 Timothy 3:16–17; Isaiah 48:17).

6. But since sacred theology has been granted to us that it may lead a human being under God's rule to the simply highest good and most absolute beatitude, it is clear that its subject also is the human being insofar as he can be subjected to God, made God-minded (θεοῦνουν), conformed to the divine will, and come to eternal life. 7–9. As in theoretical disciplines restriction of the subject is sought from the mode of considering, so in practical ones from the end; and not whatever can be known about the subject need be handed down, but only what makes for attaining the end. 10. Therefore since here the subject is the human being as to be subjected to God his king, conformed to the divine will, and saved, it contributes nothing to the end if he is considered as a natural body endowed with natural principles and affections: but here it is taught how, blessed at the beginning by God Most High unto eternal life, he was deprived of it by the fraud and malice of Satan, what he wholly was after the fall, and into what miseries he was cast headlong, so that we may more easily and clearly know by what means he is freed and saved by God's grace from the dominion of sin and eternal ruin.

11. Therefore, to conclude at last, the proper subject of theology is the human being insofar as he is subjected to God his king, conformed, and beatified by him: but the primary yet partial subject is the human heart or intellect and will, in which God reigns, because the life of God is the spiritual act of the whole human being by which he is borne to God rightly known as his king to be held and to be acted according to his will. That this act is proper to the will freed by the grace of Christ from the slavery of sin is agreed (Proverbs 4:23; Proverbs 23:26; Psalm 110:3).

1.1.13VIII. Because there is truly nothing in theology that is not referred to the last end, or to means looking to that end, of which kind all things tend directly to practice — does it follow that that practice of life is so perfectly contained in theology that there is no precept of catholic truth in economics, ethics, politics, or jurisprudence looking to living well that does not properly look to theology? Although someone affirms this, we nevertheless do not dare to assent to him in this, because he dangerously confounds and restricts useful — indeed necessary — and in whole kind different disciplines of the light of nature and of grace, as a cook confuses a great cauldron, when it only boils, with a small ladle. Economics, ethics, politics, and jurisprudence are indeed disciplines: even if they contain precepts of catholic truth — or, what is the same, things universally, of themselves, and reciprocally true, and pertaining to living well — yet they were both invented and cultivated under the light of nature, and under the page of this light they attain their proper end: and although they also borrow many things from the sacred letters and under the light of grace and of Christianity attain a greater eminence and are ordered and corrected unto theological perfection: still they are distinguished in whole kind from sacred theology, which under the revealed light of grace promises eternal life above the force and light of nature. The Gospel of Christ does not take away polities, says the pious soul Philip Melanchthon. We in like manner: Theology does not take away philosophy and jurisprudence, but lifts both up and directs them to the service of Christ.

IX. Do metaphysics and ethics, after they have given testimony to the distribution of theology into faith and observance, vanish of their own accord? 1. There is a learned man who publicly teaches that from the remains of those two parts two theologies have sprung up among certain philosophers, metaphysics and ethics, because metaphysics is the faith of the Peripatetics and ethics their observance. Hence, he says, they attribute to each of these disciplines that they hand down the highest human good. About ethics this is known to all; about metaphysics, which they also call theology, Francis Suárez (disputation 1 section 5 number 43): In the most perfect situation of metaphysics, he says, human beatitude consists. It contemplates the highest good and the last end simply. Divine contemplation formally or elicitively pertains to this science.

2. But in truth neither metaphysics vanishes nor ethics, even if both give testimony to sacred theology. For no one of sound mind has accepted that the light of nature is destroyed and extinguished by the light of grace. The natural faculty of reasoning is not killed by supernatural and divine faith but is perfected, ordered to spiritual things, and sublimated. 3. Nor have philosophers properly made two theologies from these disciplines, although they have sometimes called metaphysics theology, because it also treats of the first being, which by the most common concept of all is God. For the rest it supplies principles to dialectical disputations, as the remaining sciences do to analytics and demonstrations: and therefore metaphysics is no more to be called faith than other sciences. 4. The highest moral good that ethics intends with the remaining practical disciplines, and the natural that metaphysics intends with the remaining theoretical disciplines, differs from the spiritual that sacred theology intends, as that which is in a qualified way and in its own kind — that is, in the sphere of nature, in which God as first being and simply highest is known under the light of nature somehow congruently with nature's powers — from that which is absolutely highest, namely God revealed through Holy Scripture or the Gospel, to be most perfectly known and worshiped in the kingdom of grace and glory. 5. From which we gather that sacred theology does not take these noblest parts of philosophy out of the midst, but rejoices in their obedience and service, and feeds, emends, fosters, and sanctifies them into these.

1.1.14X. What is the END of sacred theology? 1. The end of sacred theology is considered as twofold, internal and external. The internal is to teach the sacred mysteries and dogmas from the Scriptures — that is, to explain, demonstrate, and defend them rightly — unto exciting the life of God in the hearers. The external is the life of God, by which we are united, subjected, and obedient to our creator, redeemer, and sanctifier in light (Ephesians 4:17–18), or human beatitude begun, which is of faith, then consummated, which is of vision or eternal life, by which it is well with us in the way and in the fatherland in God, and by him we are nourished, strengthened, and refreshed as by our last real personal end (Genesis 15:1).

2. This life, one and the same as to essence, remains from its beginning unto eternity (John 3:36; John 5:24; 1 John 3:15). 3. And to live to God and to Christ (Romans 6:10–11) and to righteousness (1 Peter 2:24) is to direct all our actions and operations of faith and of life according to God's will unto God's glory, and to serve him in them, God himself acting within. 4. So we are said to live according to the flesh (Romans 8:12–13) — that is, to institute and carry out all our actions at the pleasure of original malice. Contrary to this is to live by the Spirit (Galatians 5:25), to live justly, soberly, piously (Titus 2:12), no longer to live the remaining time in the flesh to human lusts but to the will of God, and to live according to God, that is, by the Spirit (1 Peter 4:2, 6). So Paul (Galatians 2:19–20): that I may live to God, he says, I have been crucified together with Christ — that is, I have been mortified, or my old Adam has been slain and a new one founded in me, that thereafter I may serve God by the Spirit of newness (2 Corinthians 4:10; Philippians 1:20).

5. The life of GOD — not that by which God himself lives, who is life itself, but that by which we are made alive by him, or rather live — can be taken twofold (Ephesians 4:18): either that which is counted before God, as the glory of God (John 12:43), the righteousness of God (Romans 10:3–4, 6) by the grace of evangelical justification; or that which God communicates to us by the spirit of regeneration. 6. Whichever way you take it, the sense is the same. For this common life by which we are human beings, compared to the life of God, is nothing other than an empty image of life, not only because it quickly passes, but also because our souls are dead while living when they do not cling to God.

7. And there occur in this world four grades of life. For one is most common, which consists only in vigor, which belongs also to plants and the vegetable kingdom and by the Paracelsists is stretched also to the mineral kingdom. Another is universal, which consists in motion and sense, of which beasts also are partakers — which Thomas Campanella in his books on the sense of things extends to all parts of the world and the particles of parts. The third is human, by which we are sons of Adam. But the fourth is supernatural, which the faithful alone obtain. 8. All these grades of life are from God, and therefore can loosely be called the life of God. Of the first and second grade there is (Acts 17:28). But the fourth by excellence — the regeneration of the faithful, which is the principle of eternal life — is here named the life of God, because then God properly lives in us, and we enjoy his life, when he governs us by his Spirit, according to that (Romans 8:10–14): If Christ is in you, the body indeed is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also make alive your mortal bodies through his Spirit dwelling in you. Therefore, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the flesh, it will be that you die: but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are sons of God.

1.2.1Chapter 2. On the principles of sacred theology, and specifically on the first and last complex principle.

I. Sacred theology asks us to weigh two things: the principles from which the discipline is drawn, and the parts into which it is divided.

II. By principles of sacred theology we mean those propositions that let us deduce the sacred dogmas of the Christian faith by ordered discourse — and then resolve the deduced dogmas back into the same propositions — so that a sound, modest, God-fearing person may rightly give assent.

Taken generally, a principle is whatever something proceeds from in any way (Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 33, art. 1). Principles are either simple or complex. A simple principle is a simple term, either principal or less principal. The principal term is God himself — which is to say, Christ — of whom (1 Corinthians 1:30) speaks. Fulgentius writes to Thrasamund (p. 108): Christ is the beginning, for as everlasting he goes before; Christ is the end, for as perpetual he closes all things. Christ is the beginning, for he himself began; Christ is the end, for he perfects. The less principal term is the Word of God, the instrument through which the Holy Spirit converts, illuminates, and saves (Romans 1:16; compare 1 Corinthians and related places).

With those two incomplex principles in place, we turn to the first complex principle: a whole proposition from which a conclusion follows by logic. Some therefore call it a logical principle, or a principle of cognition, because our logical deduction of what we believe starts here, and demonstration cannot climb beyond this first and most general point. The complex principle holds together two respects at once — the respect from which, namely God's infallible testimony, and the respect under which, namely the light of revelation — and so is called a principle from which and under which. That sets it far apart from an exterior principle, which only occasions our knowledge of faith and is a necessary condition without which faith does not arise (today, for example, the parental authority that plants saving truth in us: 2 Timothy 3:15), and also far apart from a motive principle, which is only a topical or probable argument, such as a miracle.

A Christian does not depend on those lesser supports. They win only the assent of human apprehension — Bellarmine himself grants as much. What then is our principle? It is apodictic and indemonstrable, worthy of faith from itself, and such that falsehood cannot underlie it in any way. Still, a necessary condition must be joined to it — hearing or reading — which is why Scripture calls it the word of hearing (1 Thessalonians 2:13). I am speaking of the dogmas of faith as they reach us from outside. Dogmas come in two kinds: some for believing, others for knowing. The first kind is known by God's special revelation; the second lies open under the light of reason. The first is believed; the second is known. Our subject here is properly the former. Propositions that do not properly belong to faith — and some such do appear in the Bible — fall outside this account.

1.2.2III. Among these principles one stands first and last; another hangs from that first principle and is ranked beneath it.

The distinction matters most under the Smyrnaean, Pergamene, Thyatiran, and above all the Sardian church-condition in which we now live. The Ephesian condition still had one principle alone — the written Word of God (Acts 28:25). Augustine praised that same character under the Pergamene state: Let us use the liberty to which the Lord has called us. As for those men whose praise we dare not equal, whose writings we refuse to set beside many Scriptures, whose genius we love, whose speech delights us, whose charity we admire, and whose martyrdoms we revere — whatever they thought otherwise, we must not receive it as canonical. We do them no injury when we mark off any saying or writing of theirs from the canonical authority of the divine Scriptures.

IV. Sacred theology's first and last principle is the one that, once granted, lets every other dogma of faith be deduced, while it itself is not deduced directly from any other — and therefore deserves to be called authentic and autopiston, self-attesting.

We name it first and last because Christian theological discourse cannot go beyond it without sliding into an infinite regress or a circle, and both paths are vicious. The proof runs in six steps. (1) Whatever is known is either a principle or a conclusion; philosophy already teaches that. In theology's dogmas concerning divine and eternal life, just as in other disciplines, we move from one point to another and prove one claim by arguing from another. (2) Those proofs and conclusions must halt in something first that is not itself proved from elsewhere — otherwise they circle or stretch to infinity, both of them faults. (3) First here means first for the Christian person's knowledge. (4) We are not requiring the principles of being and the principles of knowing to be identical everywhere; theology's own character often refuses that identity. God is author and principle of being for the whole creation. Yet our question is how it becomes established for us that God created all things. (5) Still more: the question is less how the point might be proved to this or that hearer, and more how it stands firm for the Christian — and on what he, who neither spins in a circle nor rushes on like a madman into infinity, is finally founded insofar as he is and is called a Christian. (6) Because we are asking for a principle ordered to our cognition, and for one from which further claims can be deduced by discourse, what we seek is plainly the complex principle that Aphorism 2 already named an axiom: an examined, proposed, authentic, autopiston principle.

1.2.37. Here we take as settled that disciplines the human mind can grasp fall into two kinds. One stands under the light of reason. The other — once reason's light is already presupposed and set in its apt place for use — is known under the light of faith, that is, of divine revelation.

8. In the first kind, the ground of assent is the dictate of right reason. By that phrase we do not mean the rational soul itself, or the human intellect as such. That the intellect can err and be deceived — and often is, even in the wisest of mortals — no one doubts. Nor does it stumble only in matters of faith, where it must trip forever unless the Holy Spirit guides and Scripture holds the torch. It also errs, and often, in civil affairs and in the practical business of this life.

9. So "right reason" here is not an intellect that never errs or strikes against anything. It is only the intellect's right judgment about a matter that is either known by nature or follows by legitimate inference from naturally known principles. That remaining judgment after the fall — however much of it is left in us — is what we call right reason: theoretical when it judges theoretical things, practical when it judges practical things.

10. Whenever people say that right reason teaches this or that, or that something agrees with right reason, they mean that the claim is true and certain — either because it is a principle known by nature, or because it can be drawn from such a principle by sound consequence. Right reason, then, is nothing other than true judgment about what natural principles let us know.

11. Many today misuse the word "reason" on its worse side, as if it meant only human corruption. Scripture regularly takes it in the good sense (Romans 12:1; Romans 2:15; compare 1 Peter 2:1). So Gregory Nazianzen, in Oration 2 on theoretical reason: Reason, he says, is given us by God, innate in all, and is so far the first law inhering in everyone that by contemplating what falls under sight it leads us to God. Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will II.18: You look at justice, he says — no one uses it badly. It is counted among the highest goods that are in the human being himself, together with all the soul's virtues that make up an upright and honorable life. For no one uses prudence, fortitude, or temperance badly. In all of them, as in that justice you just named, RIGHT REASON thrives; without it there are no virtues; and no one can use RIGHT REASON badly.

1.2.412. Nor can it be denied that such reason — such knowledge — still belongs to the human being after the fall. To deny it is to deny the innate notions and the law of nature themselves, and so to contradict the Scriptures, which acknowledge nature's light in theoretical and in practical matters alike.

13. In theoretical matters Scripture confirms that this light and knowledge still remain, so far that what stands first in that order is said to be known naturally in some measure — namely that God is, and that he is cause of all things, just, and the avenger of crimes (see Psalm 19:1; Psalm 19:2; Wisdom of Solomon 13:2; Acts 14:16; Acts 17:26; Romans 1:19–Romans 1:21).

14. In practical matters the sacred writings acknowledge the same light no less clearly (Romans 1:32; Romans 2:14–Romans 2:15; 1 Corinthians 11:14).

15. But in the second kind of discipline — the one named in number 7 — the ground of assent is the authority of God who reveals.

16. Still, both of these grounds are remote. They do not so much enter the discursive chain as stand presupposed before it begins.

17. Philosophers prove their dogmas from proximate principles — physics from physical principles, mathematics from mathematical ones — not from the most general maxim, "Whatever right reason dictates is true." In the same way theologians prove their dogmas from proximate principles, namely from the sayings and oracles of sacred Scripture — not from the remote and most general maxim, "Whatever God reveals is true."

1.2.5V. The first principle of sacred theology, then, is divine revelation. By it every doubt about religion ends in the mind of a person who is truly Christian, watchful, and through the Holy Spirit earnestly wrestling with his own errors and sins. In that revelation his faith — the faith that makes him a Christian — at last conquers, stands, and is founded. It frees the assenting mind from every fear and suspicion of being deceived, and makes him so sure that he would rather suffer anything than deny what he has once embraced.

The Apostle calls this first principle of theological teaching the illumination of knowledge — φωτισμὸς τῆς γνώσεως (2 Corinthians 4:6–2 Corinthians 4:7): For God, who said light should shine out of darkness, has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing power may be God's and not from us. Compare 1 Corinthians 2:4 and 1 Corinthians 2:13, where sacred analytics are set out for us, and a spiritual, efficacious demonstration is preferred uniquely to the persuasive words of human wisdom.

1.2.6And Melanchthon speaks wisely in the preface to the Loci Communes. The doctrine of the church, he says, is not taken from demonstrations, but from sayings that God handed down to the human race by sure and illustrious testimonies — sayings through which, in his immense goodness, he disclosed himself and his will.

Just as philosophy seeks what is certain, separates it from what is uncertain, and names as causes of certainty universal experience, principles, and demonstrations, so in the church's teaching the cause of certainty is the revelation of God, and what must be weighed is which sentences God has handed down.

As any sound mind finds this sentence certain — "Twice four are eight" — because it is natural knowledge, like the knowledge of principles, so let the articles of faith, the divine threats and promises, stand for us certain and unmoved. So let the penitent be certain that sins are remitted, that for the Son of God's sake he is heard, and that he is made an heir of eternal life.

But the causes of certainty differ. The mind sees the sentence about numbers by its own judgment. The articles of faith are certain because of revelation, confirmed by God's sure and illustrious testimonies — the raising of the dead and many other miracles. Yet because these are matters set outside the judgment of the human mind, the assent is weaker: it arises because the mind is moved by those testimonies and miracles and is helped by the Holy Spirit to assent.

1.2.7Philosophy teaches that we should doubt what sense has not ascertained, what is not a principle, and what demonstration has not confirmed. So here one may doubt — or ἐπέχειν, withhold judgment — whether hollowness alone is why the rainbow is an arc. Yet we know that the church's doctrine, handed down by God, is certain and unchangeable, even when sense does not grasp it, even when it is not born with us as principles are, and even when demonstration does not find it. The cause of certainty is the REVELATION OF GOD WHO IS TRUTHFUL.

The Word of God makes us ἀμεταπτώτους — unshaken — in Christian faith with πληροφορία, full assurance, as so many martyrdoms testify.

The analytic method applied to the disciplines — or, more clearly, didactic syllogisms drawn from each discipline's own principles — makes us learned in every kind, knowing and assenting ἀμεταπτώτως. Not only because they have a βιαστικήν, compelling force that drives and convicts τὸν ἔσω λόγον, the inner reason, mind, and conscience, but also because such syllogisms draw their reasons from the proper nature of their subjects — not from accidents or from some common attributes, but from true essentials.

In other disciplines analysis aims at nothing else than this: from vernacular propositions whose predicates have an essential and defining bond with their subjects, it leads us necessarily into knowledge of a necessary and vernacular conclusion. So too in sacred theology the only end of analysis to seek is that, by the help of logic and especially of analytics, we may gain accurate knowledge of theological questions from theology's own λήμμασι — its proper assumptions — and enjoy similar fruits: accurate distinctions between proper and common reasons, and a way of defining spiritual things that logical precepts can supply.

Not the greater gifts, though. Justifying faith is God's alone to give, and the Holy Spirit kindles it in our hearts; likewise the fruits of the Spirit's faith are good works. See the most learned Joachim Camerarius, in the prolegomena to his notation of figures of speech on the four Gospels.

1.2.8VI. Divine revelation is of two kinds. One is general, coming from nature (Romans 1:19). The other is special, granted above nature (John 17:6).

VII. Of this revelation, both the object and the mode must be considered.

1.2.9VIII. That object is the things revealed — either had purely and uniquely from supernatural revelation, or also knowable from elsewhere.

Those called revealed κατ' ἐξοχήν, preeminently, stand apart from other dogmas Scripture contains that the light of nature also knows (Romans 1:19–Romans 1:21; Romans 2:14–Romans 2:15; Acts 14:17; Hebrews 11:6). So Theophylact on Hebrews 11: That God is, he says, we hold by faith. Others, following Thomas (Summa I q.2 a.2 ad 1), call that other truth a presupposition of faith and a preamble to the articles of faith.

Scripture presupposes this and the other dogmas of this clause — and the weight of such matters — as known from elsewhere and also to be drawn from nature's light. So they wrong the truth who claim that nature's light conflicts with Scripture, or who think anyone can explain Scripture rightly and sufficiently without secular learning. Otherwise even the unlearned, once they had read and reread the Scriptures, would be great theologians — as certain Anabaptists believe.

The Apostle of the Gentiles himself condemns such men when he expressly appeals to what nature teaches (1 Corinthians 11:14): ἢ οὐδὲ αὐτὴ ἡ φύσις διδάσκει ὑμᾶς; — Does not nature itself teach you this?

1.2.10IX. As to mode, divine revelation is either declaring or proving.

The Apostle says in Hebrews 1:1 that God spoke 'in many portions and in many ways' — polymeros kai polytropos — to the fathers of old, and in these last days has spoken to us in the Son. The modes of divine revelation cannot, it seems, be known with exact precision. On them see Peter Galatinus, On the Secrets of Catholic Truth II.12; Paul Fagius in the Chaldean paraphrase on Exodus 28; and Drusius at the opening of his Commentary on difficult places in Genesis.

X. Declaring revelation is that by which God's will is signified nakedly. Proving revelation is that by which the truth once declared is demonstrated.

1.2.11XI. Revelation is also immediate or mediate. Immediate revelation belongs generally to the ambassadors; mediate, to those to whom they are sent. I say "generally," because sometimes even those who are not ambassadors receive it for their own instruction — as Joseph did (Matthew 1:20; Matthew 2:13; still more, Matthew 2:12).

XII. Immediate revelation is that by which God disclosed his word to his ambassadors through secret inspiration and set it on their mouth to be announced to others.

1.2.12Sacred history establishes that God has spoken either through human messengers or without them — that is, without those he himself appointed as messengers — and not in one mode alone (Numbers 12:6-Numbers 12:8): "Hear now my words: if there is a prophet of the LORD among you, I make myself known to him by some VISION, or I speak with him by a DREAM. Not so my servant Moses, who is faithful in all my house: mouth to mouth I speak with him, and I show him, not in riddles; he beholds the likeness of the LORD." Compare Augustine, On Genesis according to the letter, book 12, chapter 7 and following.

XIII. Divine revelation given to human beings without messengers has diverse modes and grades. Whenever those recipients are so affected that it becomes plain something is being said from God, the spectacle binds them to believe what is said — so strongly that it often drives them to publish it. Compare Amos 3:6-Amos 3:7; Jeremiah 20:9.

XIV. This revelation comes by signs, or by spirit, or by species.

XV. By signs: they seize the senses of people asleep or awake — as in a kind of imperfect ecstasy, carried off from ordinary objects — and affect them outwardly or inwardly. This grade may be called sensual. See the scholion on Aphorism 9.

1.2.13XVI. By spirit: speaking within or without, it teaches the intellect. For examples see Acts 8:29 and Acts 16:7.

XVII. By species: it immediately transforms the mind once a perfect ecstasy has opened that mind and withdrawn it from the senses. Paul the Apostle supplies a famous instance (2 Corinthians 12:2). Compare our epilogism On the true religion and the Catholic Church, disputation 10 on prophetic light, and disputation 12 on divine prophecy. These two degrees can be comprehended under one, which we may without inconvenience call intellectual.

1.2.14XVIII. Mediate revelation is that by which God, through his ambassadors, signifies to others something that must be believed as divine.

XIX. Mediate revelation is either (1) manifest or occult.

XX. It is manifest when God, through his ambassadors, signifies something as divine to others in such a way that the very mode of the revelation and its circumstances — without any further signs added — make it evident of themselves that God is speaking. So God promulgated his law to the people through Moses (Exodus 20 and following). The equity of that law is so plain that, even if no signs were added, a holy voice would still cry aloud its divine origin.

1.2.15XXI. It is occult when God, through his ambassadors, signifies something as divine to others and also employs certain signs — signs whose force drives the messengers to announce and binds the hearers to believe. So God, through Moses, confronted Pharaoh with various signs (Exodus 7-Exodus 10); through Jeremiah he foreshadowed his people's coming ruin by a girdle (Jeremiah 13). Such is the barber's razor (Ezekiel 5:1); such the marriage with a harlot (Hosea 1:2).

1.2.16XXII. Second: divine revelation is either unwritten or written. Divine things can be known only through God and his word — whether that word is ἄγραφον, unwritten, or ἔγγραφον, written. Whatever is known from it returns to this principle: Whatever God has said must be believed; or, The mouth of the Lord has spoken, therefore it must be believed.

As to the substance of doctrine this Word is altogether one; as to the mode of revelation it is, as it were, twofold — unwritten and written. That mode of revelation is what chiefly needs explanation. Although everything revealed proceeds from one and the same Spirit, not everything is disclosed in the same way. Some things are written; some are gathered by inference — as Gregory Nazianzen teaches in book 5 On Theology, Basil the Great in On the true faith, and Augustine in On Baptism against the Donatists, book 2 chapter 14 and book 4 chapter 23.

Some things are not, and yet are said to be in the Scriptures — that God sits, that he has ears and eyes. Some things are, and yet are not said expressly and in so many words — that the Holy Spirit is God — though something is said from which the point follows of necessity, as when one who says twice five says ten, and one who says twice two says four, even without using those exact words. Some things neither are nor are said. Finally, some both are and are said.

Those who join the papists in setting a real distinction between the written and the unwritten word of God go badly astray. Irenaeus speaks wisely (Against heresies, book 3, chapter 1): We have known the disposition of our salvation through no others than those through whom the Gospel reached us — which they first heralded, and afterwards, by God's will, handed down to us in the Scriptures as the foundation and pillar of our faith to come.

1.2.17XXIII. Unwritten revelation is that by which the divine things we must believe are signified by the word handed down with a living voice. By living voice — of God himself, or of angels, or of the holy fathers, prophets, and Apostles — the word of God was once delivered. Human carelessness and Satan's malice corrupted and depraved it in many ways. So God restored and confirmed the purity of his word by fresh revelations from time to time, and at last, for greater stability and certainty, also willed it to be committed to writing.

Here a rule must be noted: once written revelation has been given, the unwritten is not to be demanded rashly, nor forced on others by tyranny — against Coster, Enchiridion of controversies, chapter 1, where he claims Christ willed neither that his Church hang on paper writings nor that mysteries be committed to parchments. See also Bellarmine, On the unwritten word of God, book 4, chapter 3; and Sadeel, Whitaker, and Nigrinus on the papistic contempt of sacred Scripture — indeed Christ himself (John 5:39; John 17) and Paul (2 Timothy 3:15-2 Timothy 3:16).

1.3.1CHAPTER THREE On Sacred Scripture

I. What the prophets and Apostles committed to the sacred letters is written revelation — sacred theology's first principle. From that written deposit the dogmas of the faith and of Christian life are first drawn, and every dispute about revealed things is finally resolved back into it. In that sense we call it Sacred Scripture.

1.3.2This is an analytic principle — proper (οἰκεῖον), native to the discipline, and spiritual — by which every theological and spiritual controversy is to be decided. For just as from the analytics, or even from the whole philosophy of Aristotle, Plato, and others, though you pound such learning in a mortar, you still cannot draw out and elicit a single spiritual proof to confirm the articles of faith, nor solidly refute the spiritual errors of the Arians, the papal party, and other sectaries — so, on the other side, it is most truly said that without the ministry of analytic doctrine, which admits into theology nothing but what is proper (οἰκεῖον) and native, or what theology itself presupposes in other disciplines as agreeing with spiritual things and analogous to the faith (for this is to analyze, ἀναλύειν, in theology, 1 Corinthians 2:13), no controversy's truth can be accurately and solidly proved, taught, or known, nor its falsity struck down and confuted — whether the dispute has been raised in philosophy or in theology.

That analytic gift either falls to excellent natural talents — though only to a few, and imperfectly — or more firmly, from a stronger principle, is granted by the Holy Spirit to some, as to the Apostles, in a more divine mode, or finally is acquired by precepts and teaching; and that teaching is a surer guide than nature. On both sides we are warned to use proper principles for proving the proper theorems of a discipline — philosophical principles for philosophical things, theological for theological. Only so can and should philosophical matters be treated philosophically, and theological matters theologically.

1.3.3So if to the analytic doctrine Aristotle hands down in the Organon we assign not a magisterium but only a ministry and service in seeking the truth of controversies — and if, with Jacopo Zabarella, who holds that the analytic species of logic, when applied to the disciplines, migrates into them, we still concede no metamorphosis of analytics inside theology — no one may fairly object that we are hunting analytic doctrine as mistress of knowing heavenly truth. It is only a handmaid; even when applied to theological matters it remains handmaid of the prince and Lady Theology.

But want of training in the analytics (ἀπαιδευσία τῶν ἀναλυτικῶν) in theology is nothing other than inability to tell apart, on the one hand, what needs proof from what is indemonstrable, and on the other, true proofs from false and pseudographic ones — and likewise theology's own proofs from alien and foreign ones. This is the most fertile mother of ψευδογραφήματα, false spiritual demonstrations, which breed ἄγνοιαν κατὰ διάθεσιν — the ignorance of a vicious affection in heretics and sectaries — altogether contrary to true knowledge or science of spiritual things. Just as that true knowledge is drawn from theology's true and proper principles, so by ignorance of a vicious affection we are seduced when we reason from false and foreign principles. Hence sectaries clutch their errors no less tenaciously, tooth and nail, than the orthodox defend the truth of their judgment, and think they certainly know what in fact they do not know. The same want of analytic training is also mother of many other errors in theology.

1.3.4For when theology's own native proofs are confused with heterogeneous and foreign ones — when philosophical principles and the decrees of human reason are dragged beyond their servant role and twisted to prove spiritual theorems and articles of faith — theology is almost wholly overturned, no less deadly to the human race and to the salvation of souls than any plague, however fierce, is to bodily health. If almost the whole swarm (σμῆνος) of the papal party, whom they commonly call scholastics, had not mixed philosophy with Theology, and had not, through ignorance (ἄγνοιαν) of analysis, transferred the principles philosophy claims by right of property to the proving of spiritual things — and if, leaving philosophical matters aside, they had rightly fitted spiritual things to spiritual theorems — there would have been less to this day of execrable errors and of collisions (συρράξεων) ruinous to the church and to be mourned from the deepest vitals; and God's glory and Christ's most precious merit would have been less obscured, as all the orthodox earnestly complain.

But if this first principle is not settled, whatever is done and disputed is in vain, as Nicephorus Gregoras rightly holds (Roman History, book 10, p. 236). For no dispute can go forward unless we first agree with our adversaries in some common principle. And among us and all heretics whatsoever it is agreed that the Word of God is the rule of faith from which dogmas are to be judged — a common principle conceded by all, from which the arguments are drawn, as Bellarmine says in the preface to Disputation 1. In every theological discourse we teach that the first, proper, native, and unmoved principle on which a mind endowed with a sense of piety should rest today, against the papal party and others, is this: Whatever Sacred Scripture teaches is infallibly true.

1.3.5Reason 1 compares our principle with the papal party's first claim: Whatever the Roman pontiff determines is infallibly true. Bellarmine and the other Jesuits treat that claim as the only principle. Whatever authority others in the papal Catholic Roman Church still distribute, the Jesuits today gather onto one Pontiff alone.

Yet that claim cannot stand first. They themselves try to prove it from elsewhere — from Sacred Scripture (Matthew 16:18; John 21:15-John 21:17; Matthew 10:2); they ground tradition on John 16:12, 1 Corinthians 11:23, 2 Thessalonians 2:2 and 2 Thessalonians 2:15; and they ground the Church or bishops in a universal council on Matthew 23:2, Matthew 28:20, and Luke 10:16. Clearer than day, then: their slogans — Whatever the Roman pontiff, traditions, Church, or council hand down is infallibly true — are dragged back to our principle as something prior, though by a false reading, and so cannot be first.

1.3.62. From inconvenience or absurdity. Refuse our principle and you either circle or beg the question — the papal party's habit. They hang Scripture's authority on Pontiff, Church, traditions, and councils as far as our knowing goes, and then prove those very authorities from the Scriptures. That is nothing but driving their own proofs around a circle.

They hold Scripture true because Church or Pontiff delivers it; then hold Church or Pontiff true because Scripture says so. Call it what you will: it is not a regress. It is a circle. On that circle's nature see Jacopo Zabarella, book 1, preface to the Analytics, controversy 23.

1.3.73. Take the Bereans. Day by day, and with praise, they tested against the Scriptures whether Paul's and Silas's preaching held (Acts 17:11). If Paul's doctrine could lawfully — and praiseworthily — be examined by Scripture, how much more may the Pope's determinations be brought to that same test? In the order of our knowing, then, it is plainer that Scripture does not deceive than that the Roman Church or the Pontiff does not.

4. Moses, the Prophets, Christ himself, and the Apostles show the same proving practice, and Scripture itself presses the same warnings. Moses: do whatever the priests teach you according to the Lord's law (Deuteronomy 24:8). Isaiah: to the law and to the testimony (Isaiah 8:20). David in Psalm 119: blessed are those who search God's testimonies. Christ answers the resurrection-denying Sadducees from the sacred letters alone (Matthew 22:29; Mark 12:24), and the Pharisees likewise (Matthew 22:43-Matthew 22:44). John the Baptist points to Isaiah as witness of his calling (Matthew 3:3). Across their epistles the Evangelists and Apostles both allege law and prophets for the articles of faith and proclaim Scripture's authority as a whole (2 Peter 1:19; 2 Timothy 3:15-2 Timothy 3:17).

These witnesses — and countless more that could be stacked here — seal the analytic proving we press against the papacy and other sophists. The whole method is this: theologians confirm theological and spiritual theorems, and the articles of faith, theologically — from Sacred Scripture's own principles — as the Apostle, teacher of the Gentiles, required in 1 Corinthians 2:4 and 1 Corinthians 2:13. No one is more analytic (ἀναλυτικώτερος) than he. First, he names the kind of proof by which he fixed the Corinthians' articles of faith: ἀπόδειξις, a spiritual demonstration that works in the soul. Second, he names what kind of conclusion and principles that demonstration must have: he fits spiritual principles to the spiritual or theological theorems that hold the articles of faith — not λόγοις ἀνθρωπίνης σοφίας, the reasons of human wisdom that deceiving philosophy hands over.

1.3.85. From the analogy of principles known by nature. (1) Principles are such that everyone who knows the terms also knows them to be true. Picture it this way. Admit the light of reason — as child or elder, scholar or unlettered — and you also admit the principles known by the habit philosophers call νοῦν, intellect. Admit the light of divine revelation, and confess under that Author some divinely inspired discipline, and you also admit Sacred Scripture. No Christian, learned or unlearned, denies our principle or puts it in doubt. Doubt Scripture's truth and you forfeit the name of a true Christian — just as the man who denies nature's known principles hardly deserves the name of a sound, reason-using human being.

(2) Those natural principles are not demonstrated and cannot be. They are grasped as true without arguments, from bare consideration of the terms, by their own evidence. So too our theological principle must not — and cannot — be directly demonstrated. The Christian, lit by Christian faith, assents by the Holy Spirit's power, persuaded in the struggle by Scripture itself as he reads it or hears it opened, and with a learner's zeal weighs it attentively according to his spiritual age. Scripture carries an inward force, planted by its Author, that draws and convinces human minds according to each one's age (1 Thessalonians 2:13; Matthew 7:28-Matthew 7:29; John 6:68).

What evidence is for principles known by the intellect's habit, that spiritual efficacy is for Christ's words and the sacred Scriptures — an efficacy that shows itself in the struggle of spirit and flesh according to each attentive, pious reader's spiritual measure and age (1 Corinthians 2:4-1 Corinthians 2:5, 1 Corinthians 2:12-1 Corinthians 2:14; Ephesians 4:11-Ephesians 4:25).

II. Sacred Scripture's affections and parts are to be considered.

1.4.1CHAPTER FOUR On the affections of Sacred Scripture, and specifically on its AUTHORITY

I. By affections of Sacred Scripture we mean the properties that belong to it properly speaking — the qualities that declare its divinity enough: authority, perfection, clarity, sense together with interpretation, and efficacy.

II. Authority here means that dignity on account of which, God being Author, every statement Scripture makes deserves to be believed. Scripture is self-attesting, authentic, and infallible; consistent throughout, and stands as the unmoved, God-appointed rule of our faith and life (2 Timothy 3:16). Augustine puts it rightly (City of God 11.3): if the divine Scriptures lose their authority, faith itself will stumble.

1.4.2Henry Eckhardus unfairly foists a contrary opinion on our teachers (Fasciculus 1.q.2), twisting Beza's words and Piscator's — that God sometimes by the Word signifies He wills what He does not truly will, or refuses what He truly wills.

Those great men took occasion from Moses' words (Genesis 22:2, Genesis 22:12; Exodus 9:1, Exodus 9:12; Exodus 10:20; Exodus 4:21) — not to ascribe truly contrary wills to God. Far be it from our doctors to charge the Scriptures with that! There is only an apparent opposition (ἐναντιοφάνεια) in Moses' words: God always signifies by the Word that He wills something He truly wills; He does not always signify that He precisely wills what we first imagine Him to will. If Eckhardus wants to be a fair interpreter, let him learn candor.

1.4.3III. That authority is viewed either absolutely in itself, by its own nature as it is, or comparatively by reason of our cognition.

IV. Absolutely and in itself, by the reason of its nature, it is divine, because it is from God. So Paul testifies (1 Thessalonians 2:13; 2 Timothy 3:16; 1 Peter 1:21). Raymond of Sabunde (Natural Theology ch. 209) writes truly: Since it is an honor to believe someone on his words, a human being ought to believe God — first of Himself, without another witness, purely on His bare word. If I refuse to believe God's words because He says them, and hunt another proof, then I trust someone else more than God.

1.4.4Raymond continues (ch. 211): Creatures are founded in nothing except God alone immediately. So too the Bible is founded in nothing except God's authority alone immediately. The certainty of the holy Bible's truth arises infallibly from God's authority alone, because He speaks.

So Gregory of Valencia: Scripture's authority is utterly divine and therefore entirely infallible. Peter a Soto: We show sacred Scripture was written by the Holy Spirit; therefore it is not to be doubted that the Church is subject to it. The Holy Spirit reveals and gives sacred Scripture to the Church; therefore the Church cannot but be subject to it — witnessing and interpreting not as superior to Scripture, but as subject.

1.4.5V. Comparatively, and by the reason of our cognition — insofar as its truth is persuaded to a sound person endowed with a sense of piety by certain arguments.

Here the question is: whence is it established that Sacred Scripture is θεόπνευστος and αὐτόπιστος — divinely inspired and of itself worthy of faith? That must be settled both against atheists who, with Celsus, Porphyry, and Julian, call Scripture's divinity into doubt, and against the papal party, who hang its authority on the testimony of their Roman Church — Cusa, Prierias, Verratus, Eck, Rutland ("no Scripture authentic without the Church's authority; therefore the Church's is greater"), Viguerius (Scripture to Church as body to soul), Hosius, Andradius, Bozius, Pighius, a Soto, Tapper, Stapleton, Salmeron, Gordon Huntly.

1.4.6VI. Its divinity is persuaded by human or divine arguments.

VII. Human arguments are either occasions of believing, or inclinations toward believing. The former may be called monitory, the latter motory.

VIII. Occasions are conditions and essential causes ordinarily required before someone is moved to assent.

IX. Occasions of believing are either persons (doctors, parents, equals) by whom the sacred letters are commended, or things (favorable or adverse, ordinary or miraculous) without which faith in the Scriptures would not be had — though faith as effect does not of itself depend on those occasions. For Augustine the occasion was the Church's authority (Against the Epistle of the Foundation 5): "I would not believe the Gospel unless the catholic Church's authority moved me" — or rather, as the old Amerbach folio reads, "reminded me" (commoneret). For Constantine, the cross in the air: IN HOC SIGNO VINCES. For most of us today, parents' authority, as with Timothy (2 Timothy 3:15).

1.4.7X. Inclinations toward believing are arguments by which unbelievers are moved to acknowledge the Christian religion as credible and, by human persuasion, more probable than all others. Elsewhere they are called motives.

XI. Their variety and use must be considered. Often an occasion is not only in the place of an occasion but also of an argument. So the Church, proposing the Scriptures, moves as an argument when I consider so many cultivated nations embracing them with one consent as divinely revealed. The same holds for miracles and martyrdoms: A religion confirmed by miracles, and for which people face death, cannot be empty.

1.4.8XIII. The use of such arguments is properly to convince unbelievers and atheists. Against true Christians who watch for their souls there is no need of them.

1. The unbeliever either denies that God is, that He is one, truthful, just and good, that the soul is immortal, and that there will be another life — or he grants these. 2. If he denies them, the theologian can do nothing in the theological habit. 3. Therefore convince him in the philosophical habit from nature's principles. 4. If he grants them, first show his religion's vanity. 5. Second, propose that God of infinite goodness takes greatest care of the human being — and that it would clash with that goodness never to reveal His will concerning salvation. 6. Politics makes it plain: providence is credited with kingdoms' preservation; it would be absurd to supply earthly life richly while neglecting eternal life for an immortal soul. 7. Third, once God's care for salvation is proved, some divinely revealed doctrine showing the way to eternal life must be given.

1.4.9First, inspect kingdoms' laws, whose only purpose is temporary worldly benefit. Second, inspect all nations' religions: though they promise ing shown absurd from reason itself. Whatever right reason plainly teaches false is false also in theology — the same thing cannot be true and false at once.

Third, come to the Jewish people, whom even pagans acknowledge as most ancient, and whose Moses leaves Greek historical memory behind. Fourth, from Moses demonstrate how God revealed Himself and the way to eternal life. Fifth, prove that what Christians teach is founded in Moses — as Grotius, Justin Martyr, Ficino, and Mornay did. Sixth, argue: Either the Christian religion, whose principle is Sacred Scripture, is the true religion, or there is no true religion in the world. But it is false that there is none (from providence, nn. 5–6). Therefore the Christian religion is the true religion.

1.4.10The major rests on two foundations: what cannot be absent from the true religion belongs to no pagan religion; those marks belong to the Christian alone. False, absurd, and shameful things can be shown of Greek, Persian, and Roman superstitions, not of the Christian. The true religion has such antiquity that it has been as long as humans have (Genesis 1; Eusebius), and pagan gods' very birthdays are known while the Hebrew-Christian religion began with humankind.

It is certain the true religion will last to the world's end. Yet pagan superstitions have perished. Ours endures through Egyptian bondage, Babylonian captivity, Alexander's wars, Antiochus Epiphanes (Josephus Ant. 12.7), Rome before Daniel's period (Daniel 9), the polity's overthrow, emperors' fury, and Julian's temple grant (Ammianus 23.17). We conclude our religion rests on God's providence from the world's founding — which can be shown of no other. Therefore the Christian religion alone is true, or there is no true religion in the world — which was to be demonstrated.

1.4.11Proceed against atheists this way. Yet these proofs mostly rest only on human authority and produce only human persuasion — far weaker than Christian faith, unable to persevere in serious contest unless the divine argument from the sacred letters is added (Bellarmine, Bullinger, Valencia, Ficino, Mornay, Grotius).

XIV. So much for human arguments. Next the divine argument: the Holy Spirit's efficacy implanted in Sacred Scripture, by which its persuasive power is raised and breathed into the reader's heart — for which Christians receive it in the spiritual struggle with firm, unmoved, world-conquering, utterly divine assent.

1. Christians who watch for their soul's salvation assent so firmly that they would rather die than deny Scripture's divine truth. 2. This assent depends proximately on nothing else than Scripture itself as self-attesting (αὐτόπιστος), as 1 Thessalonians 2:13 shows: they received the word not as a human word but as the word of God.

1.4.12What moved the "barbarians" the Apostles taught to prefer death to deserting the faith? Not the human arguments (they produce only human faith); not the Church's authority (then unknown to them — and if proved from Scripture, circular); not the preachers' authority (unarmed fishermen and obscure weavers). Therefore they believed moved by the luminous power and spiritual efficacy of the Word itself, handed down to us through Scripture.

No effect that depends on a cause cannot exist without that cause.ent to Scripture sometimes exists without the Church's known authority. Therefore this assent does not depend on the Church's authority as on a cause of itself — as history shows of those who believed from New Testament reading alone. Bellarmine himself confesses: no persuasion can compel belief in supernatural articles unless the mind is divinely helped — not even miracles entirely convince.

1.4.13This divine testimony is both from the efficacy so divinely implanted in Scripture that its authority does not of itself depend on proofs sought elsewhere, and from the Holy Spirit's inward operation in the reader's heart. That operation, though it cannot alone convince others, vehemently confirms the one who already reads and believes — called the earnest and seal given to believers, the spirit of judgment and of burning (Isaiah 4:4), and fire (Matthew 3:11).

Those who by Aph. VII's monitory and motive arguments have already acknowledged the Christian religion as more probable cannot but admit this testimony's divinity. Therefore Vitus Miletus of Gmünd, a papal man, acts the atheist, not the Christian who knows Scripture's force, when he says: take away the Church's authority and Sacred Scripture will not even be worth Aesop's fables — take away the Church's infallible authority and tradition, and Scripture will have no certainty among humans.

1.4.14What then, Miletus? If we made this principle simply first against every adversary, your charge would have some color. But ours set Sacred Scripture only as the first principle of theological discourse with one who professes himself a Christian and admits both Testaments. Against an utter atheist — still empty of Christ's Spirit (John 14:17) — the process is Aph. XIII's.

Walaeus wisely reduces convincing such a one to three kinds: (1) historical notes and criteria (Arrian; Josephus against Apion) — far more evident in sacred history than in human writings; (2) the religion's perfection and divinity in the Testaments, by three infallible notes — true God alone worshipped, true way of reconciliation, true duties to God and neighbor; (3) certain divinity-signs — miracles; matter (creation, Trinity, Christ God-man, resurrection, judgment, Decalogue, prayer, prophecies, promises); form (simplicity with majesty); effects (cessation of oracles, conversion of nations); adjuncts of antiquity and duration against Satan's hatreds. From these the books' divinity becomes known to anyone who seriously reads them with a sincere mind eager for salvation.

1.4.15XV. The divine argument by which the Holy Spirit through His legates persuades humans that what they propose is infallibly God's Word — which all to whom it is sufficiently proposed must receive as God's Word, so that those who do not are condemned as unbelievers — contains three things: (1) the Word itself, which God or some legate in God's name has spoken; (2) certain signs and testimonies by which humans not wholly obstinate are persuaded this is from God; (3) eyes, ears, sense and reason, by which they can infallibly perceive that Word and those signs.

1. When God sent Moses and Aaron, He gave them the Word and signs, but had already given sense and intellect to His people (Exodus 4:30; Exodus 19:9). Therefore Israel gladly embraced Moses' word as divine (Deuteronomy 5:27).

2. Those signs were efficacious not only among eyewitnesses (αὐτόπται) but among posterity, who have fathers' history and tradition instead of eyewitnesses (Psalm 44:2; Psalm 78:2; Deuteronomy 4:9-Deuteronomy 4:10).

3. Other prophets followed Moses with equal authority, agreeing with the sacred letters already complete and pressing that no new worship be received.

4. The legate of legates, Apostle and High Priest of our confession, is JESUS CHRIST, whom Moses foretold (Deuteronomy 18:15). Testimony: sacred letters (John 5:39, John 5:46; Luke 24:46; Acts 10:43); John the Baptist (John 1:7); God's voice from heaven (Matthew 3:17; Matthew 17:5; 2 Peter 1:16); miracles (John 5:36; John 10:25); resurrection (Romans 1:4); ascension (Luke 24:51; Acts 1:9). As prophets followed Moses, so the Apostles followed Christ.

1.4.16XV (continued). Just as the other prophets followed Moses, so the Apostles followed Jesus Christ. Testimony is given them: first, the sacred letters (Acts 17:2; Acts 18:24-Acts 18:28); second, Christ's doctrine and works then notorious among the Jews (Acts 2:22); third, the Apostles' miracles (Acts 2:43; Acts 5:12; Mark 16:20); fourth, the cloud of witnesses who saw Christ after His resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:6); fifth, the martyrs' constancy, rejoicing in death itself and praying for enemies (Acts 7:60; Hebrews 11:36; Hebrews 12:1); sixth, the clearest fulfillment of the oft-repeated prophecy of the nations' conversion to Israel's God (Romans 15:9 and following); seventh, Jerusalem's ruin and the Jews' rejection so often foretold by the prophets.

But another question must be briefly decided here: From where and how can and ought we who confess Christ today know surely and infallibly the true and genuine Word of God, to which alone we defer?

The answer: (1) We who have succeeded the first Christians and the fathers of spiritual Israel still use with our own eyes the seventh testimony — how God has punished the Jews' contempt of His Gospel. (2) We also experience the sixth: the calling of the nations by God fulfilled in ourselves. (3) The fifth is likewise plain: the constancy of those who rejoice in adversity, pray for enemies, and would rather lose all than Christ. (4) The second, third, and fourth — Christ's and the Apostles' works, and the living witnesses who spoke with Christ after His resurrection — are not indeed seized by our eyes, nor do we see the Apostles annotate this or that with their own hand. Yet just as once for Israel according to the flesh the fathers' constant, concordant, and public testimony (whether of saints or not) was as certain as if they had seen with their eyes and heard with their ears, so for us the perpetual, concordant, and public testimony of the new Israel — of all who confess Christ's and the Apostles' doctrine — is as certain as if we ourselves had explored with eyes and ears what they unanimously attest. And as for ancient Israelites that fathers' testimony stood in place of the autopsy by which the fathers themselves had known, so for us the testimony of all Christians — and even of Jews as to the Old Testament — ought to stand in place of autopsy we could have used had we lived in their age. By that testimony's benefit we are as sure of the Gospel's truth as we surely know from histories that Constantinople and Jerusalem are or were, even if we never saw either. Whoever calls this testimony into doubt will with far better right doubt everything that ancient Persians, Greeks, Romans, and other historians write and attest by unanimous consent, and will believe nothing but what he himself has seen and handled with his hands. (5) The first testimony also still endures among us: the prophets' Scripture of the Old Testament, which Christ and the Apostles praise.

By all these testimonies the Apostles' doctrine and Scripture — never doubted by God's saints — is so confirmed to have come from the Apostles that no one without notable malice and obstinacy can today deny its divine authority and truth.

A third question remains about the present time, when many teachers and legates thrust themselves upon us and boast the Word of God: Which is the true and infallible Word of God? What are we to hold concerning dogmas or opinions some Christians today foster? This is determined in four conclusions, so that it may become plain in which part the fault of schism chiefly sticks.

1.4.17CONCLUSION I. Everything so clearly and plainly comprehended in the undisputed writings of the Old and New Testament that no one of sound mind can call it into doubt must necessarily be believed and confessed. For this rests on all those testimonies we cited concerning prophetic and Apostolic doctrine.

Yet anyone can readily understand that we ought to receive not only the bare letter by which God's Word was once uttered, but also all interpretations, exhortations, and consequences drawn from Scripture that are so conditioned that all Christian parties — and especially those called Papists, Lutherans, and Calvinists — conspire into them by open and unanimous consent.

Indeed the number and mass of dogmas placed beyond all controversy among these is so great that if one first chooses to select them all and express them in deed — so that we do not merely carry God's Word about on the surface of the mouth but receive it in the heart's center — we almost spontaneously forget both superfluous controversies and human additions, whether of those who condemn and persecute others without God's express Word, or of those who without God's plain Word stir unnecessary quarrels against the catholically received articles of the faith.

1.4.18CONCLUSION II. If some dogma happens to occur in the Scriptures that is not wholly beyond controversy and others' contradiction, yet is not only made probable by many Scripture testimonies but also has been so clearly and plainly handed down and believed by all the saints whose writings have reached us, by the strength of those testimonies, that even laypeople of sound mind can easily demonstrate their unanimous consent — concerning that we confess no pious lover of peace ought to raise controversy, but rather follow the Apostle's warning (1 Corinthians 1:10): "I beseech you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment." And (Philippians 2:2): "Fulfill my joy, that you be like-minded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind."

So we separate ourselves from the Photinians, who indeed sometimes seem to urge the practice of things that are clear and certain, yet meanwhile raise contests even about matters defined from the Church's cradle by very many and most certain Scripture testimonies understood in the simplest way.

From these two prior conclusions, which contain everything each Christian must explicitly know and believe, it is plain we wish to seduce no one: we force on no one our opinions, inventions, subtle interpretations, and consequences, but commend solely this as to be believed which has always been publicly and plainly handed down from Sacred Scripture by God's saints — settling for certain that no one can be in peril for his salvation who exercises himself in these dogmas from the heart and diligently.

1.4.19CONCLUSION III. If some dogma is not found in the Scriptures so clearly and evidently that it cannot be contradicted, and it is at least uncertain and doubtful whether it has been deduced from the Scriptures, believed, and handed down by the unanimous consent of all the saints whose monuments have reached us — we confess we today see no cause why it must necessarily be believed as the infallible and undoubted Word of God; indeed, why this or that person may not doubt it.

For since all the prophets who followed Moses — indeed the Apostles and Christ Himself — if they handed down anything to be believed as God's Word that was not already altogether plain and written without doubt, demonstrated it both from Scripture by solid consequences and legitimate interpretations and from signs and other undoubted testimonies, so that the Lord dared to affirm that if He had not done among them works which no other did, they would not have sin (John 15:24) — how much less ought others to be believed for what is not contained in the Scriptures, unless they can demonstrate it by the Scriptures or by signs and testimonies worthy of faith? Especially since our salvation can nevertheless stand for us if only we receive in mind the dogmas comprehended in the two prior conclusions.

Therefore we not undeservedly fear lest we corrupt God's Word by unnecessary additions (Proverbs 30:6; 2 Corinthians 2:17), preach another Gospel (Galatians 1:8), and tempt God if we lay a new yoke on the disciples (Acts 15:10), and force as necessary and beyond dispute what has not been constantly, unanimously, and publicly handed down from Sacred Scripture in God's Church in every age. And not undeservedly is Augustine's word against the Donatists objected to us: "Are you alone wise? Do you alone see clearly? Do you count all others stocks and blind? Has no church besides your little synagogue had eyes or mind?"

1.4.20CONCLUSION IV. If something is not found plainly in the Scriptures, nor handed down from them by all the saints' unanimous consent, yet does not openly and undoubtingly oppose and contradict them, and is decided by a council or congregation of those Christians who agree with us in the foregoing heads — not, however, as a Gospel or article of faith about which no one may doubt, but simply proposed as true and useful doctrine that may be taught in the Church or school — we acknowledge ourselves bound not to contradict it contentiously, but either to consent especially with those with whom we live (and therefore, so far as in us lies, we are also bound to pursue peace with them), or, if we happen to feel a scruple about it in our consciences, to propose that scruple seasonably and conveniently: so that if we cannot agree on the question of some article's truth simply and in itself, we may at least keep consent on the question of its weight and necessity — namely that although it is not altogether necessary to believe, it may still be usefully taught or at least tolerated in the Church and schools.

Moreover, if someone agreed with us on the article simply and in itself (for example, that the books of Judith, Tobit, and the like were not written by the prophets and accordingly are not of equal honor with the canonical) yet dissented from us on its weight and necessity (namely that for this cause the one who thinks apart and constantly believes otherwise is not to be condemned as a heretic): we acknowledge ourselves bound to side with the one who agrees with us on necessity — namely that neither affirmation nor denial of this article is to be judged necessary to salvation — and to regard as a tyrant or heretic the one who agrees with us on the article simply considered yet dissents on necessity, because he lays an unnecessary yoke on the disciples.

1.4.21From these two last conclusions it is grasped beyond dispute, as plainly as things seen with the eyes, first that we neither are nor can seem malicious and contentious, nor heretics and apostates: because we desire not only to force on no one our private opinions, inventions, and imaginations, but also in other matters, to avoid all harmful and unnecessary quarrels, to conform ourselves — so far as conscience allows — to the dogmas or opinions of other Christians who agree with us in the foundation.

Nor do we turn from or avoid anyone except the contentious and new prophets who press men's words and say "THE LORD HAS SAID" (Jeremiah 23:21), because they declare: "This is God's Word; this is an article of faith; if you deny it you are a heretic" — and yet cannot prop up these assertions with those testimonies by which the prophets and Apostles confirmed their sermons; but they bring it about that God's commandments, which are certain, are neglected (Jeremiah 23:30, Jeremiah 23:32).

Next, as to the opinions we hint at here: since the things written so clearly and plainly in God's Word that no sound Christian who loves peace and is of ripe age can lawfully doubt their truth, we warn all the pious to whom their souls' salvation is dear to guard themselves as carefully as possible from all other fillings-out or additions. (1) Because such added controversial opinions, if not false, are at least uncertain and doubtful: whence there is danger of falling into superstition, idolatry, even spiritual and abominable pride. (2) Because even if we imagine such controversial opinions neither false nor doubtful but true and certain, this at least remains: they are not necessary — not only because not all Christians need know them, but also because not all Christians need necessarily grant and embrace them after the reasons they seem to rest on have been shown them in the Scriptures — since they are not so clearly and evidently comprehended in the Scriptures that a timid and pious conscience, with all due diligence and careful interpretation, in view of the danger just indicated, cannot with praise or at least without wrong abstain from them. (3) Because there is at least this danger: that on this occasion many pious and innocent people who, from fear of conscience and from considering that a person must give account even of every idle word in the last judgment (Matthew 12:36), avoid those controversial opinions and cannot hold them as God's Word and articles of faith, are unjustly and proudly judged and condemned — against the Savior's word (Matthew 7:1; Luke 6:37) and the Apostle's (Romans 14:10, Romans 14:13; Galatians 6:2; 1 Corinthians 8:2). See the Irenic sermons, with appendix and Apology to D. Nicolaus Hunnius, published by the distinguished D. Conrad Bergius, my colleague and dearest fellow-countryman, where he treats this matter piously and learnedly.

1.5.1CHAPTER FIVE On Sacred Scripture's perfection and sufficiency

So far concerning Sacred Scripture's authority: next comes perfection, which is its property by which the catholic principles of sacred doctrine common and necessary to all Christians, set out wholly and purely partly in the Hebrew tongue and partly in the Greek, are so sufficiently embraced that nothing ought to be added and nothing subtracted (Deuteronomy 4:2; Proverbs 30:6; 2 Corinthians 2:17; Revelation 22:18-Revelation 22:19).

So also Aristotle, On the Heavens book 2 chapter 4, defines the perfect as that to which nothing is lacking and outside which nothing of the things that belong to it can be taken. And this the nature of a canon requires, which Varinus defines as μέτρον καὶ κριτήριον — an infallible measure admitting no addition or diminution.

This perfection of the sacred canon is certain (1) as to the number of canonical books, (2) as to the purity of the authentic text, (3) as to the integrity of the lettering.

1.5.2First, as to the number of canonical books: none needful to us for salvation have perished. For Bellarmine is false when he says (On the Word of God book 4 chapter 4): "Many truly sacred and canonical books have perished. Therefore we do not have, nor have we had for 1500 years, sufficient doctrine, if the whole of it is seated in the Scriptures."

The antecedent is false, as is plain from considering the eighteen books Becanus brings forward as lost from the canon. For by God's singular providence the canonical books have been so kept that not even a jot, much less a whole book, could perish from the canon (Matthew 5:18).

Of the books Becanus and other papists complain are lost, we note: (1) some still remain in the canon today; (2) some never existed; (3) some were not books but recensions; (4) some are historical works whose prophetic spirit is not established; (5) some are forensic books, as interpreters will have it.

1.5.3Second, Sacred Scripture is perfect as to the purity of the authentic text. Ours have shown this clearly, and against Gordon Huntly's blasphemies the most learned Salomon Glassius especially has solidly proved it in his Sacred Philology.

For the Hebrew text of the Old Testament was not corrupted in the prophets' time: they knew they were not allowed to change or innovate even the least thing in the law (as the Talmudists note at the end of Leviticus 27); nor would they have suffered that crime to be done by others; nor could corruption have been attempted in the authentic exemplar without them.

Nor was it corrupted from the prophets' time onward: because already from Ezra the Masora was added, and because Christ and the Apostles, most sharp-eyed Aristarchuses of false interpretations of the law, would without doubt have noted a corruption of the context if there had been any — as Origen on Isaiah book 8, Jerome on Isaiah 6, and Augustine City of God 15.13 urge. Nor from the Apostles' time: whether we look to the megilloth-sopher (Psalm 40:8) and the Hebrews' handwritten Bibles, or to the Masora, we find nothing but God's marvelous providence and the Jews' stupendous fidelity and most exquisite diligence in guarding the Bibles — of which Josephus Against Apion and Eusebius Church History 3.10 testify that any Jew would rather die a hundred times than suffer the law to be changed in any point.

Nor in Jerome's age (Ribera on Hosea 9: if the codices were then corrupted when Jerome published the Latin translation, the church does not have the true Scripture). Nor in today's Jewish manuscript Bibles — so great is the consent that not even one book of Scripture written by a Jew's hand can be produced that either lacks something the others have or adds what the others lack.

1.5.4From all this, judgment is made about the printed exemplars we still use, whose typographical slips are known to the learned. Hence Sixtus of Siena (Bibliotheca book 8, heresy 2) says it cannot be said that the divine Scriptures of the Old Testament have been falsified by the malice of Jews or of Christians.

For greater clarity of the matter, let these be observed: (1) Not every change proves corruption. Hence Benedictus Arias Montanus in the preface to volume 1 of the Bibles says the Hebrew books we use were not corrupted by Jewish fraud; and even if some change was made, yet no word or letter or point ever existed that was not observed in the Masoretic tradition. (2) The papists deal with such Old Testament corruption in order that the Latin Vulgate version may flow purer than its source. They will demonstrate that on the Greek Kalends. (3) Corruption asserted by some fathers rests not on demonstration but on suspicion. For they were ignorant of the Hebrew tongue — unless perhaps you except Justin lightly tinged with these letters, and Origen and Jerome excellently steeped in them, who with us vindicate the Hebrew text from corruptions. (4) Many fathers complain of corruption not of the sources but of the versions of the Seventy, Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion, and others. (5) The suspicion of corruption rests on the papists' false hypothesis pronouncing the Latin version authentic, so that no one dares reject it under any pretext (Council of Trent session 4).

1.5.5Third, Sacred Scripture is perfect as to the integrity of the lettering. Some among the Jews, and those among Christians who follow them in this, think the Hebrew text only some centuries after Christ's birth attained the perfection in which it now shines, by the addition of vowel and distinguishing points — so Bellarmine On the Word of God book 2 chapter 2, Petrus Martinius, the Arcanum of punctuation revealed by Thomas Erpenius, Gordon Huntly, and most others today taught by Jewish instructors, who trust the histories of Elias Levita and certain other Jews.

But this assertion seems wholly to contradict the perfection of the holy tongue, which cannot be worse than all other languages, as if it were thought written by divine men with consonants alone without vowels — vowels that in every language animate and perfect every consonant.

1.5.6Besides: (1) The claim is destitute of historical credit. For if the Masoretic correction and perfection of the points had been made after Jerome's time, as they will have it, some mention of so great a deed would doubtless have been inserted somewhere by the holy fathers — especially by Jerome's disciple-bishops who lived in the East skilled in Hebrew. How great the contests were over the version of the Seventy, Symmachus, Aquila, Theodotion, Jerome, Luther, Piscator, and Castalio is all too well known.

(2) It is suspicious as to time, object, authors, and witnesses. The time is after the New Testament canon was complete, when that Masoretic work is said to have been done — after which, since beforehand neither the Apostles nor their apostolic followers nor those who delivered it to the Church doubted even slightly about itly say that anyone either could or would have attempted so great a crime. The object — namely the biblical codex — was so sacred to the Jews that writing upon it was like a sacrilege. The authors would be rabbis, either bad or good. If bad, perhaps the canon's integrity will waver. If good, they would rather have died than add even a jot to the text. The witnesses are rabbis, whose faith is rather shaky, and they do not agree among themselves, as Münster testifies.

1.5.7(3) It is dangerous. First, because that change of the Bibles would have been made without necessity of the time, if it was made at all: both because God by His providence could have preserved the sacred Scripture He had kept until then into late ages without such an addendum, and because neither God's command nor any reason of necessity drove them to this work. For the author of the Arcanum of punctuation revealed (book 1 chapter 18) shows by many reasons that unpointed Hebrew could somehow be read of old, and today we know from Jewish manuscripts that they read the sacred texts most readily without points.

Second, because for so many ages back that would have stood in the authentic text of the Bibles which is not true in every part and does not belong to authenticity's majesty. For when the anonymous author (book 2 chapter 22) teaches that our judgment cannot finally and infallibly be fixed on those points, and that nothing ought to be concluded infallibly and authentically from the truth of sense that arises today from that placement and form of the points — then what has until now been held as belonging to the authentic text's literary integrity collapses and vanishes into air like an Empusa.

Third, because it will then be doubtful what the Holy Spirit properly intended in each place of Scripture, and we will not be able to know it infallibly. For we may not flee to the points we use today as to authenticity's asylum, because they are new, and the infallibility of the sense emerging from them is denied. Nor would one believe the punctators were prophets, since the rabbis are known to have been the fiercest enemies of the Christian name. Nor is it enough meanwhile to appeal to the letters: since these are formless, from where will they draw an infallible form? One will have to flee to a living or mute master: the former is not given, and if given would be fallible; the latter is wanting to this day. The Chaldee paraphrase is a version, not authenticity; the rabbis' darkness is a gulf of trifles; after Christ's ascension there is no synagogue — on that path the genuine sense would hang solely on the Jewish church, and Scripture would be a dead letter.

1.5.8(4) It is contradictory. First, as to the efficient cause — namely the Masoretes. For Buxtorf in his Tiberias and others think the points were added to the Bibles by men of the Great Synagogue — Ezra, Daniel, Zechariah, Malachi, Hananiah, Nehemiah, Zerubbabel, Joshua son of Jozadak, and so on — a council they call the Great Synagogue, in which they chiefly arranged the sacred books by the prophetic spirit they possessed and added the points to them. Others differ much from these and suspect the points were added to the bare bodies of the letters by exiled Jews after Christ's birth (Aaron of Asher's tribe and Jacob of Naphtali's at Tiberias). Finally some assign no certain authors, or are ignorant of them (Elias Levita in Buxtorf).

Second, as to place: this discrepancy depends on the former. Third, as to time: some refer the art of punctuation to what was immediately after the exit from Babylon before Christ was born; others after His birth, who yet themselves disagree (the years 236 / 436 after the temple's destruction, and so on).

(5) It is contrary to the Scriptures, because that the points existed in Christ's time is gathered from Matthew 5:18 and Luke 16:17.

1.5.9The Scriptural argument continues from Luke 16:17, where the keraia — the "tittle" or little horn — is distinguished from the jota, which is the least of the letters and therefore does not belong to their bare shape, as Erpenius holds in the Arcanum of revealed punctuation and Capellus in the Myrothecium. Rather it is beyond doubt the tiniest mark: among the vowels the upper holem, the middle segol, the lower hireq; among the accents, rebia. Nor may one take refuge here in the apices of the Samaritan Bibles and Scripture, of which Jerome speaks in the preface to the books of Kings. For besides the fact that that writing too is done without points, as some note, Christ speaks of the Law, and indeed of authentic Scripture which the Jews had received. Erpenius and Capellus deny that the tittle signifies some little body separate from the letters, and the rabbis do have certain keraiai — tagin, or little crowns — set on letters even in unpointed books; yet it is not likely Christ is so taken here, because a letter's flourish in writing often either perishes or is lengthened, and varies strangely at times. Christ's saying stands best if He is believed to have said: No letter, nor point, and so not even the least of them, will be changed in the Law.

(6) It is impossible. For those who assert the novelty of the points are driven either to say that certain points are missing from the letters, or to set up something analogous to them. Johannes Drusius (Animadversiones 2.60) does not deny that diacritical points occur in a codex before Jerome's time — after which the rabbis themselves say they undertook the work of pointing. Schickard, when in Mishpat ha-melekh he treats the writing of the royal Bibles in the Old Testament and explains a rabbinic saying that mentions pointed letters, says: The points it mentions here are not vowels and accents, but certain extraordinary points. For the rest, as those copies lack vowels, so in turn they have something else our codices do not know — namely very frequent apices, not arbitrary but in a fixed number and in due places, which they call tagin or little crowns, because as a beth stands high on kings' heads, so these stand out above the words.

1.5.10(7) It is absurd. For if the novelty of the points stands, the sense of Scripture is most doubtful — which fights against the truth, simplicity, and immutability of the speaking God, and foists on one simple saying of sacred Scripture several literal senses, and therefore doubtful ones. This is proved in three ways.

First, by the confession of those who defend the novelty of the points. The author of the Arcanum of revealed punctuation (book 2, chapter 22) says: If some places of Scripture are brought forward in which varying pointing begets a varying sense, yet each true, fitting, apt, not badly cohereing with what goes before and after, and not against the analogy of faith — what danger will there be if here one embraces this pointing and with it this sense, another another pointing and another sense with it? Or what danger even if both senses that rise from it? None, he says. And Rabbi Bechai on Numbers 11:15: Consonants, he says, without vowel points have various and ornate understandings; for which cause we have a precept not to add vowels to the book of the Law, because they would then have only one sense — whereas without them they admit various and wonderful significations.

Second, by reason. For as from the determination of subject and predicate by the copula one statement is made, so from the pointing of the words of the Hebrew text there is a determination to one sense, which, that pointing omitted, is often doubtful. Hence Münster: He who does not heed what is written above and below in the books perverts the words of the living God. And from Recanati: It is certain that when a letter is not pointed it can be read in various ways; but when points are added it bears only one sense, according to the form of the pointing. Therefore either the points together with the twenty-two letters are from the Author at once, or else Scripture was once flexible like soft wax, now this way, now that. And if the points were invented by men, it necessarily follows that Scripture in this our time has authority that is not divine — which is most absurd.

Third, by examples, which see in Engelbert's preface to Schindler's Pentaglot Lexicon. For the rest, one must distinguish between authentic and public Bibles and private ones. That the former were of old unpointed has not yet been firmly enough proved; that the latter were not all pointed we grant. For as difficulty made these lack points, so necessity of religion made those not lack them — witness Franciscus Junius in his Animadversions on Bellarmine.

1.5.11II. But it also embraces what is necessary — both insofar as divine revelation is the principal cause of knowing, and insofar as the catholic dogmas of the faith, or revealed propositions, on which religion properly rests, and which have the force of an infallible principle for framing further conclusions, are signified.

It is worth noting here that all who agree in these principles understood in either way are also to be judged to agree in the foundation of religion, and cannot properly be held heretics or unbelievers as far as doctrine is concerned — by the argument of 1 Corinthians 3:15. But those who are ignorant of these principles, or deliberately dissent in them, are no more Christians than those who ignore or deny principles known by nature have commonly been sound.

III. Divine revelation we explained in Chapter 2. But a catholic dogma of the faith is elsewhere taken for a principle, elsewhere for any conclusion truly drawn from a principle — either manifestly and evidently, or not equally manifestly. In the former mode a dogma of the faith cannot be denied by any Christian; yet that can happen in the latter mode.

IV. Catholic dogmas, or the principles and foundations of the Christian religion, are called necessary either with respect to eternal salvation, or with respect to institution, or finally with respect to certainty.

1.5.12V. With respect to eternal salvation they are those that are simply necessary for obtaining salvation, and therefore must be ignored by none, but expressly held by all adults. Such are Hebrews 11:6: Whoever comes to God must believe that He is God and that He rewards those who seek Him. Which place Socinus himself in his Prelections refers to those to whom God has somehow made Himself known. For those, he says, unless they believe that God is, show that they have a mind alien from piety and so from the study of just and unjust.

VI. With respect to institution they are those that are necessarily expounded by all who teach in the Church, and therefore must be withheld by none, but handed on by all in the Church. Such are all and each of the heads of the Apostles' Creed. For it is probable that all that is contained in the Apostles' Creed is precisely necessary to salvation for all who are to be saved in the New Testament — at least as to the sense clearly expressed in other places of Scripture — even if they do not hold the Creed's wording and manner of interpreting. Hence these dogmas are also properly called articles of the faith. Yet because the consideration is different, and we cannot determine with sufficiently evident certainty which or how many heads of doctrine are precisely such that without express knowledge of them God wills to save no one, but more rightly commit this whole matter to the secrets of divine judgment — therefore this latter cause of the naming must somehow be distinguished from the former.

VII. With respect to certainty they are all those that have divine and universal evidence, and therefore, though ignored by many, yet once known must be denied or opposed by none, but necessarily granted. Such is every Word of God — not indeed absolutely, but what is catholically revealed, that is, so that the certainty of divine revelation can be understood by all if it is proposed, and once understood can never be denied without evident malice or unbelief and denial of God. And these are of such a kind as, beyond those that are absolutely necessary, and before the revelation of them is made, are said to be believed by the faithful with a certain preparation of mind. For Calvin aptly says (Institutes 3.2.4): But we grant that faith, as long as we pilgrimage in the world, is implicit — not only because many things still lie hidden from us, but because, surrounded by many fogs of error, we do not attain everything. For of the most perfect, whatever his height of wisdom, the sum is to advance, and with quiet teachableness to press farther.

1.5.13VIII. We therefore assert that all dogmas whose knowledge is necessary for salvation, for catechetical institution, and finally for certainty are perfectly contained in the books of the Old and New Testament, and sufficiently handed down — either expressly, as to the wording itself, or equivalently, as to likeness, by evident equipollence or by a legitimate and catholic consequence.

The reason for the perfection of sacred Scripture that we assert is, first, from the notion of a canon, because it sets forth a rule of the things that are for us to be believed and done (Galatians 6:16; Philippians 3:16). But a rule is a certain measure to which nothing can be taken away, nothing added, by private authority — which Gerson (tome 1, part 2, in the treatise On the examination of doctrine) wisely applied to the canon of sacred Scripture. And of this rule some parts are essential, some integral, and must be prudently distinguished. In the former the substance of things to be believed and done is looked to; in the latter the mode and manner of application. In the former rather than in the latter the force and nature of a rule is placed. And so the whole of Scripture indeed, yet not the whole of what is in Scripture, is established by us as a rule — just as in a material rule not everything that belongs to the rule is itself the rule.

Second, the same is proved by the notion of a testament, by which appellation those sacred books are designated (2 Corinthians 3:6, 14; Galatians 3:17; 4:24; Ephesians 2:12; Hebrews 9:15–17).

Third, from those praises which it has from its Author and from its efficacy (2 Peter 1:21; Psalm 19:7–8; 2 Timothy 3:15–16).

Fourth, from Isaiah's most weighty warning, calling everyone from human and diabolical inventions back to Mosaic and prophetic Scripture alone (Isaiah 8:20): To the law and to the testimony: if they do not speak according to this word, they have no dawn of light.

1.5.14Fifth, from the judgment of Christ, who for this cause exhorts the Jews to search the Scriptures — or at least approves that they set their study in searching them (John 5:39) — because in them He presents Himself wholly to be known, and brands ignorance of them as the mother of all errors (Mark 12:24), and sets them far above every other revelation, however miraculous (Luke 16:29).

Sixth, from the equating of the word pronounced and the word written, as equivalent helps which Christ and the Apostles used (Luke 24:27; Acts 17:2; 26:22; Philippians 3:1; 2 Thessalonians 2:15; 1 John 1:3–4; Luke 1:3–4; Acts 1:1).

Seventh, from Abraham's reply (Luke 16:29): They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.

Eighth, from the testimony of the Apostles, and from their precept by which they forbid us to be wise above what is written, and from their example by which from the Scriptures alone they confirm their doctrine, refute adversaries, and preach nothing beyond what Moses and the prophets had foretold (1 Corinthians 4:6; Acts 26:22).

Ninth, from the less probable. For if the Apostles themselves clung so tightly to the Scripture of the Old Testament, much more we, after that old canon has been enlarged by so lucid an interpretation and addition of the New Testament — we who are endowed neither with an equal measure of the Spirit nor with equal authority. And now the Scripture of the Old Testament is called a perfect law, imparting life (Psalm 19:7; 119), wisdom and prudence (Deuteronomy 4:6; 17:19; 31:11–13).

1.5.15Tenth, from the end of the New Testament, and from the use of all Scripture for the man of God (2 Timothy 3:16; Luke 16:29).

Eleventh, from the sufficient exposition of God's counsel concerning our salvation (Acts 20:27; 26:22; Romans 15:4).

Twelfth, from the closing clause of the whole Christian canon (Revelation 22:18–19), which John Scotus — not the least of the schoolmen, whom Scaliger calls the file of truth — rightly understood not of the Apocalypse alone but of all Scripture.

Thirteenth, from the consent of orthodox antiquity, from which Irenaeus truly and reverently says: The Gospel which they first preached they afterward, by God's will, handed down to us in the Scriptures, to be the pillar and foundation of our faith. And Tertullian: When we believe, he says, this we first believe — that there is nothing beyond which we ought to believe. I omit others. Those who do not hold and defend this strictly and tooth-and-nail, but decide and so propound their dogmas by the authority of whatever church, and finally resolve them into it — they fall from the first line of the Reformation and stand as near as can be to the old leaven of the papists, which they wish to appear to oppose and spit out.

1.5.16IX. To the perfection of sacred Scripture that we have explained, the papists first contradict, who equate tradition — or the unwritten word — with the written, and decree that the whole mass of their traditions must be received and believed with equal affection of piety together with the undoubted Word of God. See the Council of Trent, session 4, chapter 1; Bellarmine, On Justification 3.3. When James, bishop of Cloches, had called that decree hard, he was ordered by the pontiff to go to Rome to obtain pardon, as Paolo Vergerio reports in a letter to the king of Poland. By unwritten traditions, says Adam Tanner in the Ratisbon Colloquy, we understand certain precepts or constitutions pertaining to faith or religion which, the infallible authority of the Church set aside, are neither openly expressed in Scripture nor evidently deduced from it.

Note here the cover they stretch: (1) faith-dogmas; (2) moral institution; (3) observation of rites. Hence of traditions we can call some dogmatic, some ethical, and others hieratic or ritual. Dogmatic and ethical ones outside Scripture we receive none. For though not every particular of the Apostles was written — because we have neither knowledge nor number of the particulars — yet their common foundation, reason, and proof is contained in the Scriptures, in which the Church of Christ finds and recognizes the genera of particulars, even if not every particular of the genera. For singular narratives of the sayings and deeds of Christ and the Apostles that are read among the ancients, and that can be called historical traditions, must be judged from Scripture and held as human writings. But ritual traditions are either universal or particular. The former have a general foundation in Scripture (1 Corinthians 14:40), and so are called unwritten traditions only by catachresis — and these we necessarily and gladly receive. But the particular ones, as the name itself shows, could and should vary according to the variety of times, places, and persons, and therefore we judge that they do not oblige the universal Church of Christ.

1.5.17The first reason is that they are deceitful and uncertain in many ways. First, as to origin. For many things can happen, as Peter de Soto himself teaches in his Defense of the Catholic Confession against Brenz, from which it may justly come into doubt whether some tradition is apostolic. And Andreas Fricius Modrevius: It is no light error of certain theologians of our time who, under the title of ecclesiastical tradition, do not indeed try to lead us away from the Scriptures, yet give first place to traditions and last to Scripture. As if any strength and firmness could be in that consensus and in those traditions that do not rest on the authority of the Word of God — which yet can be shown not even to have been born from the Apostles by this very thing, if they disagree with and are severed from the divine Scriptures, to which all things must be examined, and which must be ratified and firm in the Church of God.

Second, as to number. For in the Ratisbon Colloquy, when ordered to exhibit a certain number of traditions, the papists would not — indeed could not — because they are doubtful of it and do not agree among themselves about it, since some refer to traditions those heads of doctrine which others try to build from the Scriptures. Third, as to discrepancy: because some of the older fathers referred customs whose origin could not easily be shown to the Apostles, as if handed down by them — which yet Chemnitz proves from other writings of the ancients not to be apostolic.

The second reason is that they were proper to the Pharisees and to heretics, as is plain from Matthew 15:2–7; Mark 7:3–8; Irenaeus Against Heresies 3; Chrysostom on Matthew; Josephus; and Peter de Soto the Dominican in his Defense of the Catholic Confession against Brenz's Prologomena.

The third: because even if it were most certain that some unwritten traditions of Christ or of the Apostles remain, equal authority with Scripture could not therefore be given them. For to things that are from the same author the same authority belongs only when the author put it in and willed it to be in them — who, as an agent acting freely, not of necessity but of free choice, puts more or less authority in his things, and hands some down forever and simply, some for a time and in a certain respect. But God uniquely authorized those things which He handed down to us in writing through the prophets and Apostles, because He handed down Scripture as the perpetual and perfect canon of this our life, in which alone is all that is necessary for the man of God to be perfect (2 Timothy 3:16).

The fourth: because those unwritten dogmas that today set Christians colliding mostly fight openly with Scripture, which all Christians with one mouth confess to be the Word of God — as has been variously and solidly shown by the Protestants, and they are condemned as figments of the human heart (Matthew 15:6–9; Mark 7:7; Galatians 1:8; Colossians 2:8).

The fifth: because no sufficiently fit cause can be given why those things which men desirous of eternal salvation equally ought to know had to be partly written and partly unwritten, since God equally willed the help of Scripture for men's institution and memory in all things — unless perhaps we foolishly affirm that of those things which are equally necessary to salvation some are to be learned and committed to memory more lightly, others more accurately.

The sixth: because those very unwritten dogmas, without the support of some Scripture, neither were kept nor could have been kept, as the papists themselves confess.

1.5.18X. But Bellarmine sets this controversy in three heads (On the Word of God, book 4, chapters 3 and 4). The first is that the papists assert that all necessary doctrine, whether of faith or of morals, is not expressly contained in the Scriptures, and therefore besides the written Word of God an unwritten Word of God is required — that is, divine and apostolic traditions. So teaches John of Deventer in The Dart of Christian Truth, or Catapult of the Faith: The Church holds very many things not produced in dead letters, but written by the Holy Spirit in human hearts. To these as firm a faith is to be given as to evangelical Scripture, since it is agreed they were inspired by the same Spirit by which the Gospel was. It is therefore plain as a third truth that not all things to be believed and equally to be kept have been set out in the sacred letters. So Jodocus Clichtove in Anti-Luther book 1, chapter 4; John Fisher, bishop of Rochester; Peter de Soto; Alfonso de Castro of Zamora; Albert Pighius of Kampen; Martin Perez de Ayala, bishop of Guadix; Gregory of Valencia; and countless others. See the refutation in Whitaker and our Chanier, solidly and at length; briefly but with nerve in the Synopsis of purer theology, disp. 6, by the most celebrated D. Polyander, and, Bellarmine being unnerved, by D. Ames and others.

But here the papists are twin brothers of the rabbis, clinging to a double law from Moses — one written, the other by tradition — and branding as heretics those well versed in the Bibles, under the name of letter-men, textualists, biblical men, as Sadducees who, given only to the reading of the Bibles, clung to the written law alone, traditions rejected. But that the Apostles did not openly communicate to all their hearers all that God had revealed to them, but handed some things secretly and to a few as pertaining to the whole Church — Tertullian in the book On Prescription calls that madness.

XI. The second is that we think the Apostles did indeed institute certain things besides Scripture that pertain to the rites and order of the Church, which yet are not necessary for all Christians, nor commanded, but free; but the papists acknowledge apostolic traditions of every kind — that is, not only particular but universal, which are to be kept and handed down to the whole Church, as is to be seen in Bellarmine of the same book, chapter 3. See the refutation in the authors praised and in disp. 4 of our Anti-Bellarmine college, question 2.

XII. The third is that we teach that apostolic traditions, if they ever existed, do not now exist — that is, it cannot be certainly shown that any tradition is apostolic; but the papists assert that there is no lack of sure ways by which apostolic traditions are shown, in Bellarmine of the same book 4, chapter 9. But these are uncertain, obscure, and deceitful, as ours have clearly shown on this book of Bellarmine and elsewhere. Confer the praised disputation of the Anti-Bellarmine college, question 3.

1.5.19XIII. Second, certain zealots contradict — not in the faith of charity, in which no zeal is too little, but in knowledge, that is, in those controversies in which even the pious can sometimes easily err — who demand that their interpretations and certain consequences, though notoriously not received in the Church in every age, be believed equally with the Word of God.

Such men, though they wish to appear to have made a secession from the Papacy, can scarcely, while this opinion of theirs stands safe, defend against the papists that the Scriptures alone are the clear and sufficient canon of the faith: namely if they will that whatever they themselves, by an interpretation and consequence not that catholic one granted by all, but a controversial one peculiar only to certain doctors, think can certainly be deduced from the Scriptures, must necessarily be believed. For in every consequence something of reason is assumed toward the testimony expressly in the Scriptures. And that natural assumption, unless it is common to all the pious, or even to all sound men, and so among them to the pious too, is not certainly and notoriously divine, equipollent and as it were understood under the Scriptures, but belongs to the στοιχεῖα καὶ κόσμου — the elements of the world (Colossians 2:8). Those who use this therefore add to the Scriptures, and by that very thing open a gaping gate to all for inventing new heresies daily. For there will be no one who does not think some argumentation of his own to be necessary and evident.

1.5.20XIV. Third, all contradict by the very deed who, not compelled by duty and the singular necessity of the Church, but stirred by the common itch of writing, already from the time of the Apostles onward, all first love — or the practice of the saints fully described in the sacred letters — set aside, miserably turn the Church of Christ by their πολυλογία from the richest and most wholesome storehouse of the Bibles to the poverty and leanness of their own volumes to this day.

For the sacred Bibles, which we still call so, are that one richest and most sufficient book and canon which, all the rest going into sponge or pyre, alone is more than enough for the worship of God and the salvation of men, even if not the least apex is set to it by a human finger — if only the true and apostolic practice of the saints, and the laborious charity of Christian faith and piety, painted in that book in full colors and graphically enough, is recalled by right of postliminium into use by the bishops and curators of the churches, by Christian magistrates, and by men of every order desirous of eternal salvation, in place of so many glosses, exegeses, interpretations, disputations, commentaries, reconciliations, elucidations, summas, commonplaces, catechisms, Articles, symbols, councils, confessions, postils, and like books, of which there is neither measure nor end, and under whose burden the Christian world groans. For if the pious consult the skill in church histories and controversies which they possess, they will without doubt discover that for no better cause than the omission of first love (Revelation 2:4) the wrath of God, the candlestick moved, so heavily presses upon the church of the New Testament under the Smyrnaean, Pergamene, Thyatiran, and our Sardian condition, that scarcely greater likeness remains between these periods and the Ephesian, in which the Apostles themselves taught, than between lambs and pups — while in place of the true and practical knowledge of God with which the apostolic church was lit, bare heresies and their refutations, fights of words and quarrels of the schools have so prevailed, the efficacy of faith and the practice of piety more and more failing, that the light of the divine letters itself has been judged so dark, obscure, and insufficient, and the foremost of Christians, after the manner of the Israelites over the Baals, almost forgetting the Lord, have mostly begun to seek life from the dead and light from darkness — whether the Pope's or their own.

XV. For the rest, what is revealed in the sacred letters is contained in two ways: one expressly (αὐτολεξεί), according to the thing expressed to us by the signed words; the other virtually (δυνάμει), according to the thing though not expressed in signed words. The former mode, as it has sound words (1 Timothy 6:3), so those words must also be kept and the Apostle's rule held in them (2 Timothy 1:13) — since, though Augustine witnesses (City of God 10.23) that philosophers speak with free words and do not fear offense to religious ears in things hardest to understand, yet it is right for us to speak by a fixed rule, lest license of words also beget an impious opinion about the things signified by them.

But the latter mode has words which, if newly employed by the Church so that by them a thing not so spoken may be expressed, must not be repudiated, provided the thing signified by them is brought into the letters. Of this kind is the Trinity, the Homoousion of the three persons of the Godhead — of which Augustine treats thus (tract. 97 on John): Against the impiety of the Arian heretics the fathers coined the new name Homoousion, but they did not signify a new thing by such a name. For this is called Homoousion which is: I and the Father are one — namely of one and the same substance. But whichever way God reveals some dogma, it makes no difference as to truth and infallibility, since it is agreed that both are truly had from the Holy Spirit. And lest anyone be troubled by the ambiguity of αὐτολεξεί, it is taken in two ways. First, rhetorically, and so it is the same as literally proper, when a certain word is taken properly and not modified and is opposed to tropically. Second, hermeneutically, and so it is the same as literally expressed, when the word by which a dogma or some thing is signed is had in the sacred writings, in whichever signification that is done — which is how we assert that many things must be believed that are not written in so many express words, provided the thing itself is in the Scriptures: to elicit which the fathers long ago judged that a true reasoning is needed.

1.6.1CHAPTER SIX On Sacred Scripture's clarity

So far concerning Sacred Scripture's perfection and sufficiency: next comes clarity. Clarity is Scripture's property by which everything that holds the faith and the manners of living is so openly set down in it, and so found there, that God-fearers — using proper means with careful effort and wisdom, guided by God, and giving no credit to themselves or their own reasoningn's age, know it surely and understand it unto salvation.

1.6.2Our assertion — and it is Augustine's own, and indeed the catholic one — is this: the truth of the sentences of the faith, in dogmas supernaturally revealed and necessary to be known and believed unto salvation, stands plain and open. No one can ignore or deny those dogmas except the idle toward inquiry or the malicious toward contradiction. As Hilary says, God does not lead us to the blessed life through hard questions.

1.6.3The reasons are these.

1. From Scripture's own testimony (Deuteronomy 30:11–Deuteronomy 30:14): that place does not speak of the ease of keeping the law, but of the ease of understanding it — which, with Alfonso Tostado Bishop of Avila, Bellarmine himself (On grace and free will book 3 chapter 6) proves and confesses to seem the most literal and proper reading. And what Moses said here of Old Testament doctrine Paul applies to the dogmas of the New Testament (Romans 10:6 and following).

2. From Scripture's inward property, by which it is called a lamp to our feet (Psalm 119:105), a lamp shining in a dark place (2 Peter 1:19); add Psalm 19:4–Psalm 19:9, Psalm 19:12.

3. From Christ's promise (John 16:12-John 16:13): "I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will lead you into all the truth; for he will not speak from himself, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will announce to you the things that are to come." Likewise 1 John 2:27: "The anointing teaches you concerning all things, and is true and is not a lie; and as it taught you, you will remain in him." By this it is signified that we are most fully instructed in the things needful to salvation — which is wrongly dragged to bishops gathered in a council as if they were infallible, of whom Bellarmine (On the authority of councils book 2 chapter 2) confesses that, existing apart, they are not taught every truth by the Holy Spirit.

1.6.44. From Christ's precept: why would he bid us search the Scriptures (John 5:39) if they could not be understood?

5. From the example of the primitive Church that obeyed this precept (Acts 17:11).

6. From the example of the ancient fathers, who prove the articles of the faith from Scripture. Hence Constantine in the Nicene synod: "Let us dissolve the matters brought into question by the testimonies of the divinely inspired letters." Things brought into question are ambiguous and obscure. If therefore Scripture were equally ambiguous and obscure, those proofs and dissolutions would be ridiculous.

7. From Sacred Scripture's end, which is our teaching (Romans 15:4), to which obscurity is diametrically opposed.

1.6.58. From God's side as Revealer. Either God could speak perspicuously, short of unavoidable obscurity, or he could not. If you say he could not, you speak falsely, because nothing here impedes his power (Exodus 4:11; Lactantius, Institutes book 6 chapter 21). Therefore he could. If he could, either he ought to speak perspicuously, or he ought not. That he ought not is hardly granted by his wisdom and goodness. If he ought, either he willed it, or he did not. That he did not is absurd, and it cries out against sacred Scripture's sayings and aim (Romans 15:4; 2 Timothy 3:15; John 5:39; 2 Peter 1:19). Therefore he willed it, and accordingly he spoke clearly — by the argument of Psalm 115:3.

9. From God's scribes — the prophets and Apostles. Either they could write clearly, or they could not. The latter is absurd, because those who before were rude and unlettered became lettered (Acts 4:13), and soon, moved by God's Spirit, spoke (2 Peter 1:21), knowing every tongue that was under heaven (Acts 2:8 and following). If they could, either they ought, or they ought not. That they ought not, the prophetic office and the apostleship do not permit (Romans 15:4; John 20:31; 1 John 2:3); hence they are called the light of the world (Matthew 5:14; Acts 13:46). If they ought, either they willed, or they refused. Not the latter — by the argument of Acts 4:20. Therefore they willed, and accordingly they wrote with the sun's ray, however much Scripture-shunners deny it — as Tertullian (On the resurrection of the flesh chapter 47) names such people.

1.6.610. From the side of revealed dogmas. Either they could be handed down perspicuously, or they could not. If you assert the latter, you err, because — by the papists' own witnesses — certain things, and indeed those needful to all for salvation, are written so clearly that they can be understood by the pious and industrious. Thomas (Summa Theologiae part 1 question 1 article 9 reply to objection 2): "Those things which in one place of Scripture are said under metaphors are set out more expressly in other places." Costerus (Enchiridion chapter 1): "We do not deny that those chief heads of the faith which are needful for all Christians to know unto salvation are comprehended perspicuously enough in the Apostolic writings." And Gregory of Valencia (Analysis of the faith book 3): "Those truths of the faith which absolutely and simply must necessarily be known and believed by all human beings are truly taught perspicuously in the Scriptures" — as Augustine also noted.

11. From the side of style. For it is simple, open, and most fitting for expressing such great mysteries (1 Corinthians 2:1 and following).

1.6.7II. Next, we do not deny that Sacred Scripture is in some part, somewhere, and for someone obscure — whether we look at sublime matters full of mysteries, or at phrases proper to that ancient time, and also tropic and figured locutions that in this age make some difficulty for us.

That obscurity is increased by human prejudices, ignorance of tongues and of things, vain confidence, negligence, hatred, envy, ambition, avarice, lust of wrangling, and every depraved affection by which the mind is blinded.

Hence Peter also (2 Peter 3:16), concerning Paul's letters, affirms that they contain some things hard to understand (some things difficult to grasp) — to tame pride by labor, and to remove the intellect from distaste, for what is easily investigated often becomes cheap to it.

For magnificently and wholesomely the Holy Spirit so shaped the Scriptures that by the clearer places he meets hunger, and by the obscurer ones he wipes away distaste — as Augustine wisely writes (On Christian Doctrine book 2 chapter 6).

1.6.8We therefore distinctly set out several reasons for this assertion.

1. Because God willed that there should be cause to say with David: "Give me understanding, and I will search your law" (Psalm 119:34).

2. That human arrogance might be beaten back.

3. That distaste might be removed.

4. That our diligence might be stirred.

5. That Sacred Scripture itself might be held in greater price — which Theodoret in the preface to Ezekiel declares by various examples.

6. That a keener desire for the other life might be kindled in us, where we will no longer know in part and prophesy in part, but what is imperfect will be done away, and we will see face to face, not through a mirror or in a riddle (1 Corinthians 13:9 and following).

Consult Flacius Illyricus, Clavis part 2 treatise 1 on the way of knowing the sacred letters. Wisely Augustine adds to the words cited above: "Almost nothing is drawn from those obscurities that is not found said most clearly elsewhere." Before all things, therefore, one must be turned by the fear of God to knowing his will. And in the same book chapter 9: to illustrate obscurer locutions, examples are to be taken from the clearer ones, and the testimonies of certain sentences are to remove doubt about the uncertain.

Here also belongs the law of Constantine the Great in Theodoret (Church History book 1), passed with the votes of three hundred eighteen bishops in the Nicene council: the Evangelical and Apostolic books and the oracles of the ancient prophets perspicuously instruct us in the sense of the Deity — that is, what we ought to think about God and divine things. Therefore, hostile discord laid aside, let us take from the divinely inspired Scriptures the solution and decision of the controversies that are to be handled.

1.6.9III. We therefore do not assert an absolute and every-way perspicuity of the Scriptures handed down to us, but a conditioned and sufficient one for discharging the canonical and didactic office for those who read and search them decently.

This is shown from John 5:39 and Psalm 19:12. For here are all things needful, clear, and straight — all necessary, clear, manifest, and right — Chrysostom witnessing (volume 3 on 2 Thessalonians); not needing explanation but only hearing — Justin Martyr witnessing (Dialogue with Trypho). Yet diligent scrutiny and meditation are needed so that they become perspicuous to the reader, according to Cyril of Alexandria (Against Julian book 9): "Nothing is hard for those who dwell in the Scriptures as they ought." And Clement of Alexandria (Stromata book 7): one must examine the Scriptures accurately, not read them casually. And Epiphanius (Against heresies): all things are clear in the divine Scripture for those who wish to approach the divine word with pious reasoning.

1.6.10Obscurities, therefore, if any seem to be present, are conquerable when the means are applied, for the pious and cautious reader.

Rightly Francis Lambert, once professor at Marburg, teaches that Sacred Scripture is opened to those who attribute nothing to themselves and to their own judgment. Likewise: if you possess wit, learning, and experience, renounce these when you come to Christ's school. Renounce them, I say — not that you wholly refuse them, but that you trust nothing to them: otherwise you will not be a fit disciple of Christ, and he will neither teach you nor open Scripture's most longed-for door.

For of God's truth and will Scripture alone is the certain and infallible testimony.

1.7.1CHAPTER SEVEN On Sacred Scripture's sense and interpretation

So far concerning clarity: next comes sense. Sense is Sacred Scripture's property by which its letter agrees most exactly with the Holy Spirit's intention.

Sacred Scripture's letter is like a body, or an outward bodily sign, by which God's kingdom — which is in power or virtue (1 Cor. 4:20) — is declared to our grasp. Sense is like the vital spirit and soul by which the author's mind is set, as it were, in the open and expressed to the life by a spiritual and effectual demonstration (1 Cor. 2:4). Apart from that sense, the letter of Scripture is not God's, but yourss — just as a king's image cast in gold is not the king's but a dog's, if that very gold is melted by fire and cast into a dog's image, as Irenaeus somewhere argues against heretical interpretations.

Here let the Enthusiast be kept far off — the one who utterly spurns Scripture, the sacred letter, and the outward word that is taught, and sets his own speculations and phantasms before it, not without an opinion of singular holiness. Blessed Luther prophesied of such in his Table Talk under the title on fanatics and sects, and the most learned Philip Marnix solidly refuted them.

1.7.2Becanus (Manual 1.1 q.3) is wont to say a double sense of Scripture is distinguished — one literal or historical, the other spiritual or mystical. Craftily put. For Protestants are not disputing here (1) whether some of the fathers acknowledged a multiplex sense of Scripture — that is nothing to the point; nor (2) whether theologians busy with interpretation may variously accommodate one and the same place — we do not deny that they may, though we do not assert that they must everywhere; nor (3) whether in diverse axioms and places one word may bear several significations — that we grant with a free hand; nor (4) whether certain things contain a mystical and typical sense — for we grant that some things are written which according to the letter report what is a type of another thing (Gal. 4:24; John 3:14; Matt. 12:40).

The question is this: whether one and the same word — not thing — in one and the same place, in one and the same part of an utterance, from the Holy Spirit's intention (not from a man's ingenious collection or arbitrary application), can have several senses besides the literal, three or four. That the papists affirm; we deny: (1) because only from the literal sense, dug out by the norms of true interpretation (which the scholion on Aph. 2 will soon teach), are true, solid, and firm arguments drawn to confirm any dogma of the faith; (2) because the literal sense alone, explained in the aforesaid way, is the Holy Spirit's sense, as the Jesuits themselves confess in Bellarmine, On the Word of God 3.3 §1.

1.7.3II. Interpretation is Scripture's property by which its genuine sense — the sense most fitting to the mind and intention of the Holy Spirit as author, however that sense is uttered — is solidly and clearly shown in the earnest struggle between spirit and flesh, when the right instruments and hermeneutical rules are used.

The Holy Spirit's intention is what just interpretation seeks, and what the whole Christian world is busy digging out of the sacred letters; yet it is not obvious to all, for the reason the Apostle gives in 1 Cor. 2:14. The papists seek it in the breast-reliquary and infallibility of the Roman pontiff, to whom alone they finally defer the right of interpreting and determining Scripture's sense. Pistorius in his Guide (p. 76) concludes that no other medium of understanding Scripture is found, or is sought in vain, except in the church. Conrad Kling explains the ambiguity: as Scripture heard from a man teaches, so one must stand by the just interpretation and judgment of a man — that is, of the Church or of Peter's See. Others set other precipices of error before those who would understand Scripture. Vincent of Lérins (For the Antiquity of the Catholic Faith) notes that because of Scripture's own height not all receive it in one and the same sense, but one and another interpret its utterances differently, so that nearly as many opinions seem diggable from it as there are men.

1.7.4Therefore, so that neither the Stoa, nor the Peripatetics, nor Plato's porch, nor even the light of sounder reason or the better dictate of conscience in adversaries can deny the true and certain sense of Scripture, that sense must be dug out by true and least-suspect means in the serious struggle of spirit with our flesh, according to the hermeneutical rules in Flacius Illyricus's Key of Sacred Scripture, Hyperius on forming sermons, Martinus on ready meditation of things, and Dannhauer's Idea of a Good Interpreter and of a Malignant Calumniator. Nor is every interpretation to be received rashly amid such variety of spirits who handle the sacred letters. Test the spirits whether they are of God, says the beloved disciple (1 John 4:1).

The tokens of proof — and so the norms of true interpretation — are five: (1) Sacred Scripture (Isa. 8:20; 34:16; Luke 16:29–31; John 5:39); (2) its unique orthodoxy and truth, Jesus Christ, God already incarnate (Heb. 13:8; John 20:31; Deut. 13:1–7; Matt. 24:23; 1 John 4:3); (3) these two not in bare words but in the power that consists in spirit and truth (1 Cor. 4:20; 2:4; 1 John 4:2); (4) from this anointing of the Spirit no lies follow, whether in Christian theory or practice, but the purest truth (1 John 2:27); (5) the event, when prophecies are to be interpreted, noted from history as fulfillments of predictions (Deut. 18:21; Jer. 28:5–9). By these, every mortal's theological interpretations, sayings, and writings about divine things are to be examined and proved — each according to his age, grace, and calling — and each is bound to try his own by them, to prove or disprove.

1.7.5III. Interpretation has two parts: the sense and explanation of what is said, and the use and application to dogmas of faith and manners. Sense is that sentence which is immediately understood from the author through the text (Luther, Wittenberg ed., vol. 6, p. 516). Use is what is understood mediately (Rom. 15:4; 2 Tim. 3:16).

IV. In explaining the sense three things are to be observed: subject, object, and medium. If these three stand rightly, interpretation cannot fail to be just, and the truth is dug from the deep.

V. The subject is a fit interpreter, in whom two things come up for consideration: condition and instruction. The former holds the interpreter's state; the latter, his habit.

1.7.6VI. The interpreter's condition is his regeneration and illumination wrought by the Holy Spirit, whom the heavenly Father gives to those who ask (Luke 11:13; 1 Cor. 2:10–16; Jas. 1:5, 17; 2 Tim. 2:15). From this one gathers how rare good interpreters are, and how many thrust themselves into this divine office with more boldness than wisdom. Physicians promise what belongs to physicians; craftsmen handle craftsmen's tools; Scripture alone is the art everyone claims. We write poems, learned and unlearned, everywhere. A chatty old woman, a raving old man, a wordy sophist — the whole world presumes upon it, tear it, teach it before they learn it, as Jerome complains to Paulinus.

VII. Instruction is of intellect, judgment, and will. VIII. The intellect must be perfected by knowledge of the necessary languages and of the things that a discipline sets out by a sure method. Knowledge of languages is necessary for the interpreter (1 Cor. 14:13–14), because each has its properties that must be carefully noted in translating. Hence the Egyptians are praised for learning the Canaanites' tongue (Isa. 19:18). It is absurd for the Holy Spirit's language to be to the interpreter like a flute that makes a sound but without mind — and for the prophet to be to a German like a Turk or an Indian, to each of whom the other is a barbarian. Jerome and Augustine knew this of old; among later writers Luther, and Bellarmine himself, affirms that Augustine was deceived by mere ignorance of Hebrew. An encyclopedia of things supplies the needed knowledge and the way of knowing and teaching (Titus 1:9; Col. 2:4).

IX. A good interpreter's judgment should be uncorrupted, aiming straight at the truth (1 Tim. 5:21; Gal. 2:14). Monkish theology, by contrast, sees nothing in the Scriptures but cowls and wooden shoes, as Luther testifies. X. The sacred interpreter's will should be free from vicious affections, lest against the intellect's dictate he calumniate the truth.

1.7.7XI. The object is the biblical text cohering with itself in its whole series. Clement of Alexandria (Stromata 7) calls the text the body and fabric of God's prophecy, in which, as subject-matter, words are considered, and in the words a proper or tropical signification, from which the sense is so drawn that the interpreter permits neither himself to be severed from the text, nor words from the text, nor sense from the words. Sense is one thing, signification another. The former belongs to whole utterances; the latter to single words. Sense is drawn from the nature and order of the words as they regard one another in Scripture's sayings, and is perfected by the Holy Spirit alone — whose alone is true interpretation, just as in civil law the interpretation of statutes belongs to him who constituted them.

Further: the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, furnished and corrected with Masoretic notes as preserved by us Christians in approved copies (even Jewish ones), is so free from all corruption — whether of diction and sentences or of letters and points — that it is the divine NORM, canon, and rule by which all versions in other tongues, and especially the Latin Vulgate, ought to be examined and emended. The Greek text of the New Testament, preserved in approved codices, is likewise so free from corruptions that it is the most exact norm by which all versions and interpretations ought to be examined and corrected. Glassius demonstrates this at length in Sacred Philology, Book 1, tracts 1 and 2.

1.7.8Versions may indeed be used in settling theological controversies, but not ultimately. Theodoret notes that the Scriptures have been turned not only into Greek but into Roman, Egyptian, Persian, Indian, Armenian, Scythian, and even Sarmatian — once for all, as I may say, into all the tongues the nations have used — and that for our teaching, as Paul teaches (Rom. 15:4). Yet if a laborious and more solid investigation of the truth is to be undertaken, and appeal is made by due process from versions to the original text, then one must flee to no version, but to the Hebrew and Greek truth alone, as to a citadel and stronghold, with Jerome in his letter to Vitalis. For a prophet is one thing, an interpreter another, as Jerome says in the preface to the Pentateuch, calling authentic Scripture itself the truth.

Therefore (1) the Jews err who ascribe prophetic authority to the Chaldean paraphrast; (2) the papists err who make the Latin Vulgate authentic — Trent, session 4, decreeing that the old Vulgate edition be held authentic in public readings, disputations, preachings, and expositions. Yet Arias Montanus, one of the Tridentine fathers, thinks otherwise in his preface to the Biblical work. To him for instruction we commend Martin Becanus, who too awkwardly praises his party's happiness in following one certain, constant, and uniform edition.

1.7.9XII. The medium of interpretation is threefold: one before the thing, another in the thing, a third after the thing. XIII. Before the thing, first to be regarded in the text under interpretation — and in all Sacred Scripture — is the harmony of the text and the analogy of faith; then the leading of pious and learned interpreters who explained the text before us is not wholly to be despised. Polanus: the analogy of faith is nothing other than Scripture's constant and perpetual sentence in open and least obscure places — such as the articles of faith in the Apostles' Creed, collected from Scripture in so many words; such as are contained in the Decalogue, the Lord's Prayer, and other plain texts. Interpretation ought to be made according to this (Rom. 12:6; 2 Tim. 1:13). Nor is the leading of orthodox interpreters wholly to be scorned, as Augustine testifies On the Usefulness of Believing.

XIV. In the thing is the medium that actually enters the explanation of the text and draws its sense from itself. XV. It is either notional or real. XVI. Notional is what turns on the words, phrases, and idioms of the language — here belong criticism, the author's style, and elucidation by metaphrase and paraphrase. XVII. Real is what turns on the thing and its circumstances, on the context and aim, and the rest. For as a building is weak without a foundation, so unless the aim is found Scripture is useless, as Chrysostom testifies. XVIII. After the thing is the comparison of parallel places. From this no small part of hermeneutical harmony emerges. Whoever wants more may see, among other works, Dannhauer's Idea of a Good Interpreter.

1.7.10XIX. The use and application of things is that by which they are related to the sense and norm of sound words expressed by fallible signs from the Spirit's purpose and will, are set forth; catholic dogmas are properly explained and confirmed; heterodox and false things are solidly and vigorously confuted; corrupt manners are amended; good things are commanded; the sorrowful and faint-hearted are raised up; the secure and bold are terrorstruck — so that the man of God may be made perfect and furnished for every good work. The foundation of this interpretation stands in 2 Tim. 3:16; Rom. 15:4; Jude 20–23.

XX. Next, interpretation is either didactic or critical (judicial). Bellarmine admits this distinction (On the Word of God 3.10, reply to argument 16). XXI. Didactic interpretation is what is done as by a teacher, with fit reasons skillfully applied, according to the catholic and manifest laws of interpreting. XXII. It is either ordinary or extraordinary. XXIII. Ordinary is what rests on equivalence or consequence that has no controversy, or that at least has agreeing and notorious testimony from the primitive Church.

1.7.11Some papists little favor this. Forerus calls consequences futile glosses; Veronius says consequences are not the pure Word of God but something drawn by the intellect's discourse from the Word of God. But these men, as they are absurd, so they also contradict Bellarmine, who notes that when the Nicene council defined Christ to be homoousios with the Father, it was for no other reason than that Scripture says the Son is God — from which it NECESSARILY FOLLOWS that Father and Son are of the same substance and deity. Likewise, as in law what is truly and duly deduced from statutes by good consequence is received by jurists no less than what lies there in formal words, so what is truly and duly deduced from Scripture by good consequence is assumed by theologians as itself intended by the Holy Spirit.

We are secure that the Word of God and consequences differ. Consequences can be considered in two ways: (1) in themselves, abstractly and formally — and so they are human and are judged by Aristotle; (2) in and with the matter to which they are applied, so that they coalesce, as it were, with a sacred and infallibly true thing — and so they are not human. The firm rule is: from two premises, one natural and one revealed, there follows a conclusion that cannot be known naturally. XXIV. Extraordinary interpretation is what rests on some authentic and undoubted knowledge and truth of the interpreter, even of one alone. This is wholly infallible — as when God himself by later words teaches what he meant by earlier ones, and when the Apostles with extraordinary and prophetic certainty explain what the sense of the old prophets is.

1.7.12XXV. Critical or judicial interpretation is that by which, as by a judge's sentence, law is fitted with authority to a fact, a rule to an example, a universal precept to singular cases. Examples: 2 Sam. 12:5, when David is pronounced guilty of death because every murderer is guilty of death; 1 Tim. 1:20, when Hymenaeus is pronounced a son of Satan because every heretic is a son of Satan. Such interpretation cannot be done by the law, which is not laid down about singulars, but is left to the judge as judge, who pronounces about singulars according to the law.

XXVI. Judicial interpretation is commonly joined with didactic. So when it is asked whether Hymenaeus is a heretic, he is condemned of heresy because he denies the future resurrection. But the Scripture places that speak of the resurrection of the flesh were to be understood not of a spiritual rising from sins only, as Hymenaeus seems to have taken them, but of the resurrection from the dead properly so called. That interpretation was so clear and certain, handed down by the Apostles themselves, that it could not be denied without open malice and obstinacy (2 Tim. 2:17–18).

XXVII. This interpretation that unfolds the sense of the text or rule is indeed required for the judge's sentence and concurs with it, and so by a certain metonymy of the adjunct can be called judicial; yet properly and formally it is not judicial but didactic — which the judge offers not as a judge having power to fit law to fact, but as a teacher understanding the law's sense by equivalence or consequence or some authentic knowledge. XXVIII. But if the judge lacks knowledge and doctrine, this didactic interpretation can and ought to be supplied by another more skilled — namely, the judge's assessor and counselor.

1.7.13XXIX. Further, judicial interpretation in the Papacy is ascribed partly to a council, partly to the Roman Pontiff, partly to both together. For only the greater prelates — that is, bishops — ordinarily have decisive suffrage in councils; by privilege and custom also cardinals and general abbots of orders, even if not bishops; to laity and to uncalled priests, none; to those and to lesser clerics helping in debate they grant only consultative suffrage, as Bellarmine teaches. On which councils and how far they can err in interpretation, the papists disagree among themselves.

Three questions remain: (1) Can a council err without the Pontiff or before his confirmation? (2) Can the Pontiff err? (3) Is the Pope above a council? Bellarmine (On Councils 2.17) holds that the Pontiff is simply and absolutely above the universal Church and above a general council. But this is a claimed right — indeed pure ambition — the Hildebrandine claim thrust into the church some years ago. From which we gather: about judicial interpretation properly so called (fitting law to fact) there is no controversy, because both sides confess that councils and the Pontiff can err in a question of fact; the controversy that remains is about didactic interpretation.

1.7.14For the papists want interpretation to be infallible and binding on all Christians whenever the Pontiff either decides something with a general council or, without one, teaches from the chair — that is, whenever as Pontiff he defines what is to be believed by all, whether a reason from the Scriptures appears or not. We grant that interpretation is infallible and binding whenever a council, or even any single bishop and doctor of the Church, offers an interpretation that rests on evident equivalence, or on catholic and among Christians undoubted consequence, or on extraordinary or prophetic authority sufficiently demonstrated — as we taught in Aphorisms 23 and 24.

But since extraordinary interpretation is not given in the Church today — for she is not ruled by new revelations but remains in what was once delivered, as Bellarmine himself confesses — therefore one must look to the first two, and because this interpretation is properly didactic, in the ordinary way it is to be followed only so far as reason persuades. So if an interpretation of Scripture is brought without catholic consent, or the Church's consent without the Scriptures, that opinion may indeed be probable; yet not such as ought to be proposed to the church and pressed as catholic and necessarily to be believed.

1.7.15The reasons for our judgment are these. (1) We must continually fear what is said in Prov. 30:5–6: Every word of God is purified: it is a shield to those who take refuge in him. Do not add to his words, lest he rebuke you and you be found a liar. Therefore no one ought in interpreting to put forward anything there is danger of addition, nor propose as God's infallible word what he is not again and again sure carries no charge of falsehood from himself. (2) Eccl. 5:2–3: do not speak rashly, and let not your heart be swift to utter a word before God; God is in heaven, you on earth; therefore let your words be few. (3) Above all the anathema spoken by Paul against those who evangelize anything beyond what he had evangelized must be dreaded (Gal. 1:8–9).

Against the Jesuits who say only the Pontiff holds infallible authority to interpret the Scriptures, one must proceed thus: their argument in form commits a circle and begs the principle. Let the rule be noted: whatever the Holy Spirit teaches through canonical Scripture in the serious struggle is of infallible and most certain truth, in which the conscience can safely rest as on a rock (Matt. 7:24–25). This is the triune principle of all theological interpretation. Scripture indeed contains the truth by itself, but without the Spirit it is not rightly understood, and without the Spirit's power (1 Cor. 2:4) it is discerned only in the struggle against flesh and Satan (Gal. 5:17; Eph. 6:12), according to each person's age and capacity (1 Cor. 3:2).

1.7.16XXX. From what we have taught so far we rightly infer that an interpretation is weak and not solid enough or legitimate which is made (1) according to the sense as canonized in the Vulgate version — because it strikes against the object of legitimate interpretation: that version is not authentic, nor even the text the interpreter ought first to interpret; (2) according to the sense as it depends on old Adam's reason — because Sacred Scripture's sense stands above that reason and is measured by God's Spirit and the will of its writer; (3) according to the sense as measured by the fathers' sense — because then the text that bears sense from itself would be neglected; because either all the fathers' sense or only some would be the rule — neither works; because it conflicts with hermeneutical laws that acknowledge the fathers as guides, not as infallible; because they often missed the genuine sense; because they not rarely followed erroneous senses; (4) according to the sense as completed by unwritten traditions; (5) according to the sense as determined by the Church or by the Pope, for the same reasons we gave at Aph. 26; (6) without distinguishing childish and mature age, milk and solid food, which the Apostle wisely observes in teaching (1 Cor. 3:1–2; Heb. 5:12–14).

1.7.17Solid food is contained chiefly in these four: (1) the true and certain accommodation of the prophets to their defined times, places, things, and persons; (2) the exact and full reduction of Levitical shadows to their body and truth exhibited in the New Testament; (3) the fitting application of the divine governance typified through all Scripture to its truth; (4) the neat and undoubted explanation of the whole created universe — which is its Creator's image, and in which the letter, parables, and phrases of all Sacred Scripture lie ready — to its truth described in the same place.

XXXI. The power of interpreting and judging is twofold: public or private. Both rest on vocation and a singular gift. XXXII. The power of privately judging Sacred Scripture's sense in things necessary to salvation belongs to all the faithful, for confirming their own faith and edifying others, according to the law of charity, the measure of the gift received, and the diverse reason of calling. The Leiden theologians rightly draw this from the Synopsis of Purer Theology (disp. 5, th. 29) out of John 10:3; Matt. 7:15; 1 Cor. 10:15; 1 John 4:1. This kind of judging rests on the gift of discernment (1 Cor. 2:15; Heb. 5:14; Phil. 1:10).

The power of publicly judging the truth of interpretation belongs only to those who by peculiar vocation and gift of interpreting are furnished for it. The grades of this vocation are listed in Eph. 4:11; the gift is indicated in Rom. 12:6; 1 Cor. 14:3, 29. And although in every age there have also been other Christians who by prayers and assiduous reading and meditation of Sacred Scripture received the gift of interpreting the sacred letters for public uses and of proving spirits in fuller measure than some pastors; yet that gift is chiefly to be sought among those whom God has peculiarly called to teach his Church publicly (Mal. 2:6–7).

1.8.1CHAPTER EIGHT On Sacred Scripture's efficacy

So far concerning Sacred Scripture's interpretation: Efficacy is its property by which it is apt by nature to illuminate, move, mortify, vivify, and perfect the man of God who hears or reads decently, by way of an instrument and of a light kindled and elevated by the Holy Spirit — so that he is thoroughly equipped for every good work.

The Apostles magnificently exalt this property of God's word (Romans 1:16; Hebrews 4:12; 2 Corinthians 3:6; 2 Peter 1:19; 2 Timothy 3:16–2 Timothy 3:17) — a property flowing from the Holy Spirit as principal cause, elevating that word as its organ by its own power (John 6:63; 1 Peter 1:23, where toward the chapter's end it is also called immortal seed). That Spirit kills the impure spirit, conquers evil, removes Antichrist from the midst, renews all things under heaven, frees the creature from sin, vanity, and curse, illuminates our darkness with its light, and fills the earth with the knowledge of God (Zechariah 13:2; Revelation 12:11; 1 Thessalonians 2:13; Isaiah 11:4; Joel 2:28; Ezekiel 36:25; Isaiah 32:15; Romans 8:21; Revelation 18:1; Isaiah 11:9).

This efficacy differs from Sacred Scripture's perspicuity, by which it comes about that not only people of sound mind but even evil spirits clearly understand those senses of it needful to know for salvation — without the Holy Spirit's inward illumination — even though they cannot believe or obey them, but rather dissuade faith and obedience. See Whitaker, chapter 1 On Scripture's perspicuity, and Dr. Festus Hommius, Disputation 62 On faith, thesis 5.

1.8.2But here Question I must be weighed: Whether Sacred Scripture exerts this efficacy only objectively, or also effectively?

Answer: in both ways. For (1) it teaches objectively, showing which way of salvation is true and which false, and which faith, hope, and love are pleasing to God. For that reason theologians compare it to a guidepost and a Mercury-statue — who have also pointed out the instrument as 'guidepost,' the sailor's needle at sea, a lamp on the road, and Theseus's thread in this world's Circus gardens — not without Scripture's authority (Numbers 21:8; Isaiah 30:21).

(2) Effectively it confers on those who read or hear rightly what it offers in showing — God, Christ, and eternal life — but exalted and drawn into living operation by the Holy Spirit. For that reason it is compared to an axe cutting when raised by the carpenter for cutting, and to the sword of the Spirit (Ephesians 6:17).

1.8.3Question II. Does Scripture simply — insofar as it is grasped only as letter, is an outward testimony, and is contained in outward tablets — lead to God, convert, sanctify, and make blessed without the Holy Spirit's illumination? It is denied.

I. Because if the act of conversion, sanctification, and salvation is to be attributed to bare Scripture apart from and beyond the Holy Spirit's cooperation, it follows that even the Devil himself, and those hardened with that second hardening which Calvin, that most eminent theologian, notes at Luke chapter 11 — the hardened and blasphemous, yet thoroughly practiced in the Scriptures — would be converted, sanctified, and saved. But the consequent is absurd. Therefore so is the antecedent. The reason of the consequence is this: because the Devil and the ungodly no less than godly people possess, teach, and dispute from Scripture simply as it stands in the letters, without the Holy Spirit's cooperation (Matthew 4:6); they abound in dogmatic faith, yet tremble (James 2:19).

1.8.4II. What converts, sanctifies, and saves us apprehends our soul, draws it, and possesses it. But Scripture on outward tablets without the Holy Spirit's cooperation neither apprehends nor draws nor possesses our soul. Therefore Scripture without the Holy Spirit's cooperation does not convert, sanctify, and save souls.

III. Those who assert the contrary seem to understand little: (1) how salutary understanding comes about; (2) what the requisites are, given which salutary understanding is given, and denied which it is denied; (3) what that intelligible idea is in which the thing to be understood is intimately represented to the intellect; (4) that the thing to be understood and the intellect become one in knowing; (5) that whatever consists in the mind is spiritual and abstracted from every bodily mass and letter; (6) how all these things are at last comprehended in a certain point as in the mind's eye; (7) that faith, hope, love, and that whole chorus of virtues lie hidden implicitly in that spiritual seed — more penetrating than any two-edged sword — as a great oak in an acorn, are preserved, and by a prolific spiritual power, the Lord's Spirit breathing, unfold their branches in the inward and outward man, so that the whole kingdom of God is within us, which is righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit (Romans 14:17).

1.8.5Question III. Can Sacred Scripture be sufficiently understood for salvation without prior grace-light? Or thus: Is the Holy Spirit's grace-light prior in the order of causes by nature to the salutary understanding of Scripture?

Answer I. Under the demonstration of the truer opinion I lay, as principle and foundation, the distinction of a twofold light, namely of object and of subject, or instrumental and principal.

Scripture's light as object and instrument is nothing other than its sense, which the native signification of the words suggests to us. For the object to be known is not destitute of its inward light. Just as every object radiates with its own light, or is tinted with color by which it presents itself to the eyes through a species, so also Scripture — as may be gathered from Isaiah 8:20; Luke 16:29; 2 Peter 1:19.

(2) Sacred Scripture further shows us another light — namely the subject's and principal light — elevating, applying, disposing, and effecting, both in the human mind and in Scripture, so that its inward light may be known. In natural things this is called the light of reason; in divine things, the spirit of revelation (Ephesians 1:17), the light of preventing grace, which Christ himself is with his grace illuminating every person, and is called the light of the nations (John 1:9; Luke 2:32); on which see 4 Ezra 14:15 and Psalm 36:10 and Psalm 43:3. See Theodoret and Flacius's Key to Scripture. Compare also Psalm 18:29 and Psalm 119:18, Psalm 119:33, Psalm 119:124, Psalm 119:135.

Since therefore it is plain from the Scriptures that a twofold light is required for their salutary understanding — namely the instrumental as medium, and the principal, which not only illuminates the Scriptures but also illumines the intellect so that it can apprehend that medium, Scripture's light — therefore let spiritual people, who judge all things (1 Corinthians 2:15), at last judge whether this principal light, as principal efficient cause, does not operate first — not indeed in time, but in the order of nature — so that Scripture's inward light may salutarily exert itself and be poured into the reader's heart unto salvation.

1.8.6The reasons for the affirming opinion are these:

1. From the object to be known. For Scripture's sense is that very thing which must be known salutarily. Therefore there must be some cause that manifests it, and so is prior to it in the order of nature. And who will deny that this cause is the Holy Spirit's illumination?

II. From the reason of the seeker and finder. For that without which, as principal cause, Scripture's essence, nature, and form — which is its true sense — cannot be found, precedes by nature the finding of Scripture's sense: since a cause is prior by nature to its effect. But now Scripture's essence, nature, and form cannot be found without the Holy Spirit's gracious light as principal cause (John 6:44; Matthew 16:17; Psalm 25:4). Augustine, Soliloquies book 1 chapter 1: "Everyone," he says, "has sought you rightly whom you have made to seek rightly." Therefore the Holy Spirit's grace-light precedes by nature the finding or knowledge of the essence, nature, and form — that is, of Scripture's sense.

III. From the reason of exhibition and offering. For whoever pours Scripture's essence into the heart so that it may be kept there unto salvation is prior by nature to the knowledge of Scripture's essence: since it is not the chariot that draws the horses, but the horses the chariot; and the sower's hand precedes the sowing itself. But now the Holy Spirit by his grace-light pours into the heart Scripture's essence or sense (Matthew 13:11, Matthew 13:23; Jeremiah 31; Joel 2; 2 Timothy 2:7; Zechariah 10:1). Therefore the Holy Spirit by his grace-light precedes the knowledge of Scripture's sense.

IV. From the reason of opening and revealing Scripture's seals. For whatever opens Scripture as a closed and sealed book is, as efficient cause, prior to Scripture opened. For if a barred door is to be unlocked, the key must first be inserted into the lock. But now Sacred Scripture is a closed book to all flesh (Isaiah 29:11). Yet Christ and his Spirit with light bear the keys of the house of David suspended from their shoulders, so that he may open and none shut, shut and none open (Revelation 3:7). Whence Theophylact on John chapter 10: "Because," he says, "in the Holy Spirit the Scriptures are understood and opened, which show us Christ, the Holy Spirit is rightly called the doorkeeper." Compare also Augustine, Tractate 3 on John chapter 1. Therefore the Holy Spirit by his gracious illumination is prior by nature to Scripture opened.

1.8.7V. From the reason of the instrument that moves and directs. For no instrument acts unless first moved by the principal cause and put to use.d Scripture is an instrument, and the Holy Spirit's illumination is the principal cause of Scripture's opened sense (Job 32:8; Wisdom of Solomon 7:21 and chapter 8:1; 2 Corinthians 3:6; Acts 16:14 and Acts 26:18; Deuteronomy 29:4; Psalm 119:34; Ephesians 4:23; Jeremiah 31:18). Therefore.

VI. From the matter of prayers. For whatever the sons of God ask in order to obtain from God the salutary, living, and inward sense of Scripture precedes by nature the obtaining of that sense. But now they ask the Holy Spirit's illumination in order to obtain Scripture's sense (Psalm 119:18; Colossians 4:3). Compare also the old hymn "Purify the eye of the inward man," &c., and the preface which Luther prefixed to German volume 1 in the year 1539. Therefore we can obtain no living sense of Scripture without the Holy Spirit's prior illumination.

VII. From the reason of our inability. For if by nature a person with no powers can inwardly affirm and effectually will God's word, which proposes its sense to him — which properly, according to Scripture's phrase, is to understand it rightly — then altogether the Holy Spirit's illumination must precede this effectual and inward affirmation in the order of nature, even though they are simultaneous in time. But the former is true (John 15:5: "You can do nothing without me"; and 1 Corinthians 12:3: "No one can call Jesus Lord without the Holy Spirit"; add Philippians 2:13; Acts 16:14). Therefore so is the latter.

VIII. From the reason of first origin. For whence Scripture's sense has its principle, thence it is also known. For what is the cause of a cause is also the cause of what is caused. Whence Bernard in a sermon to the brothers on the mount: "You will never," he says, "enter Paul's sense unless you have drunk in Paul's spirit." And not a few of the ancients otherwise: "No one can find God unless he has first been found by God." So Didymus On the Holy Spirit: "No one," he says, "ever receives spiritual blessings unless the Holy Spirit has gone before." But Scripture's sense has its principle from the Holy Spirit's illumination (2 Peter 1:20–2 Peter 1:21; 2 Timothy 3:16–2 Timothy 3:17). Therefore, &c.

1.8.8IX. From false teaching. For a doctrine that is properly the Photinians' error ought not to be tolerated in God's church. But that Scripture can be understood salutarily without the Holy Spirit's prior illumination is the Photinians' error. For Christoph Ostorodt in his German Institution chapter 1 §3 says: "We judge that all those err most gravely and dangerously who think Sacred Scripture can in no way work faith and obedience without prior inward illumination and a singular revelation of the Holy Spirit." But since this Photinian doctrine is false, its contradictory — which we here defend — is certainly true. It remains, therefore, that although Sacred Scripture scatters and communicates a grammatical light and historical light without the Holy Spirit's singular illumination — which even demons and the ungodly can see — yet no one can conceive in his mind an inward and living knowledge in Scripture unless the illuminating, influencing, disposing, cooperating, elevating light of grace, as principal cause, goes before, accompanies, and follows.

X. From the testimony and consent of pious antiquity against the Pelagians, who acknowledged no other light converting a person than the grammatical or historical, and so by moral persuasion only. Against them see Augustine, On faith to Peter, chapter 32: "Hold most firmly," he says, "and doubt in no way, that a person whom neither ignorance of letters nor any weakness or adversity hinders can indeed read the words of the sound law and Gospel, or hear them from some preacher's mouth: but that what he hears with the body he also perceives with the heart, and wills to do God's commandments — no one can, unless God has gone before him with his grace, a good will and power having been given from heaven." So Prosper of Aquitaine, Against the ungrateful: "Let the Apostle," he says, "run through the world, preach, exhort, plant, water, rebuke, insist, enter whatever way he finds closed by the word: yet that the hearer is advanced by these labors is effected not by the teacher, not by the disciple, but by grace alone — grace that does not merely counsel by kindly advice and exhortation, but also changes minds, reforms inwardly, and by creating power fashions a new vessel from a broken one."

1.8.9So the Second Council of Orange, chapter 6: "If anyone," it says, "says that mercy is conferred on those who believe, will, desire, and strive without God's grace, and does not confess that it is brought about in us from heaven that we believe and will, by the infusion and inspiration of the Holy Spirit — let him be anathema." So either Ambrose or Prosper of Aquitaine, On the calling of the Gentiles book 2 chapter 9: "Let one come to God with God as guide," he says: "it is necessary that we are not even fit to think what is spiritual except through God's grace." So also Luther on John chapter 16: "The matter," he says, "is not handled that way, nor are there so many who have the Holy Spirit and understanding as many invent for themselves — as is clear from this, that although Scripture is had and heard, still the Holy Spirit's revelation is required, which applies light to such reading and hearing, which the intellect follows: though it is true that the Holy Spirit does not effect this without preaching and instruction." See the same in German volume 4 p. 140 and volume 8 folio 134.

XI. From nature's testimony, which by a certain analogy is offered for our opinion. For (1) if wheat is to spring up in a field, first of all a field is required as patient subject, then a farmer who sows, third God's blessing, which puts vigor into the seed and sends it into the field, removes husks, purifies the seed's little body, and raises the seminal power so that it sprouts in another species and multiple fruit. The same is the ratio of the spiritual field. (2) The same is shown by vineyard culture, where first a suitable place is required, second a vinedresser who plants and tends the vines, third God's blessing, by whose power, as of the eternal Word, the vine once created is still preserved and made fruitful. So, that Sacred Scripture may be known inwardly and effectually and practically, first a human soul endowed with intellect and will is required; second the proposing of Sacred Scripture or the outward word as seed; third, that this living seed may be received effectually and vividly by the human soul unto its salutary change as to the intellect's ignorance and the will's perversion — which properly is to understand Scripture rightly — the Holy Spirit's illumination is needed, which as principal cause precedes, accompanies, and follows Scripture itself in the order of nature.

Hence Gregory the Great: "Unless," he says, "the Spirit is present to the hearer's heart, the teacher's speech is idle: unless there is one within who teaches, the teacher's tongue labors outwardly in vain." For this reason those about to read the Scriptures for their salvation should not neglect the Lord's precept (Matthew 7:7): "Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you."

1.8.10II. From what has been said we infer:

1. That the reading of Sacred Scripture is by far most useful unto salvation and the discerning of spirits not only for ecclesiastics but also for those in civil life, and so even for those whom the papacy designates as laity — Claude d'Espence acknowledging this in his commentary chapters 1 and 2: "Chrysostom," he says, "rightly exhorts all to the reading of the Scriptures: God willed that even the most unlearned craftsman of all should gain some usefulness." That study is approved from heaven (Psalm 1:2; Psalm 119:2; Acts 17:11); and therefore the prophets and Apostles recommended their books not to teachers alone but to the whole church (Deuteronomy 17:18; Romans 1:7; 1 Corinthians 1; 1 Peter 1:1; 1 John 2:12–1 John 2:13). Whence again d'Espence on 2 Timothy 3: "Let Origen," he says, "observe that John writes to four ages: children, youths, young men, fathers."

1.8.112. That the pontificals err who hold that translating Sacred Scripture into vernacular languages is useless, dangerous, even pernicious. So Diego Paiva de Andrade, the Portuguese, in Defense of the Tridentine Catholic Faith book 4 folio 241: "Nothing," he says, "can we now hope from the sacred Bibles made common and turned into vernacular languages except the ruin of piety, the destruction of religion, and the ruin of the faith." And folio 243: "Whoever reads Scripture's bare sentences for the most part drinks deadly poison for nectar." Stanisław Hozjusz, On reading the sacred in the vernacular, p. 664: "Now," he says, "we see it has come about by those translations into the vernacular tongue that women for whom it was more fitting at that time to weave wool have already claimed for themselves also the power of teaching; and if anyone wants to bring them back to duty and sanity, he will have more trouble with them than with the men themselves — since men are not even allowed to be Catholics through their wives, and often the husband is forced to believe what the wife wills." Sixtus of Siena agrees, Sacred Library book 6 annotation 142; Jacobus Ledesma, On the divine Scriptures not to be read everywhere in any language, chapter 3.

3. That those err who interrupt biblical reading. Of this interruption in the papacy Johannes Cochlaeus reports in his Commentary on Luther's acts and writings under the year 1521: "Before," he says, "Emser's book came out, Luther's New Testament was multiplied in a marvelous way by the printers, so that even cobblers and women and any unlearned people who had somehow learned German letters most eagerly read that New Testament as the fountain of all truth — whoever were Lutherans — and by often reading it committed it to memory, carrying the codex with them in their bosom. From which within a few months they claimed so much doctrine for themselves that they were not ashamed to dispute about the faith and the Gospel not only with laity of the Catholic party, but even with priests and monks, and even with masters and doctors of sacred theology."

1.8.124. That those err most gravely of all who forbid biblical reading to those they call laity. For this tyranny is exercised in the papacy. For the Jesuit Juan Azor, Moral Institutions volume 1 book 8 chapter 26: "You ask," he says, "whether the books and chapters of the Bible translated into the vulgar tongue are permitted? Answer: at first glance they are forbidden in the fourth rule, namely that Bibles in the vulgar tongue not be permitted to be read everywhere without distinction. Yet in Spain, in the index of prohibited books published there by the General Inquisitor's authority, the sixth rule runs thus: 'Bibles in the vulgar tongue with all their parts are prohibited.' And in the recent index published by order of Pope Clement VIII, the faculty of granting license to read or keep vulgar Bibles or other parts of Sacred Scripture of both New and Old Testament, even when published in the vulgar tongue, has been taken away." Thomas Harding against Jewel, Article 15 section 2 (in John Jewel volume 1 p. 120) holds the same with others; René Benoist of Angers, Biblical Miscellanies book 3 p. 177; Johannes Bunderius in his Compendium of theological matters title 3 article 3; Johannes Molanus of Louvain in his Compendium of practical theology treatise 3 chapter 23 conclusion 2 p. 221.

5. That those err who believe Sacred Scriptures hung from the neck are endowed with various virtues against the world's dangers, diseases, and demons. Alfonso Salmerón does not dare simply to disapprove this custom of the Roman church (Commentary on Gospel history volume 4 part 3 treatise 42), nor Martin Del Rio (Disquisitions on magic book 1 chapter 4 question 4), Juan Maldonado on John 6, Vitus Miletus in Discussion of 600 errors pp. 51–52, or Landulf the Carthusian in Meditations on the life of Christ part 2 chapter 63: "The word CONSUMMATUM," he says, "is reported by the experienced to be of great efficacy in dangers. And it is said to avail specially against an immoderate flow of blood from the nostrils, if with the same blood the same word is written on the patient's forehead." Other examples of pontifical superstition Johannes Weyer noted in On the illusions of demons book 5 chapter 4, and Martin Del Rio in Disquisitions on magic book 3 part 2 question 4 section 9. Refer here also the Enchiridion or Manual in which are found a devout prayer of Pope Leo, likewise some prayers against all the world's dangers, and a prayer of blessed Augustine and Cyprian, published at Venice by Thomas Membruni — from which it will be clearly seen how maliciously the pontifical Roman church abuses Scripture's words unto superstition and magic.

1.9.1CHAPTER NINE On Sacred Scripture's parts

So far the affections of Sacred Scripture have been treated: the parts follow — namely the canonical books of the Old and New Testament, written and approved by men inspired and directed by God's Holy Spirit, for authentically declaring the whole will of God that pertains to religion.

They are called canonical as legitimate and regular from the canon of which king David (Psalm 19:8) and the Apostle (Galatians 1:6-Galatians 1:9; Galatians 6:16; Philippians 3:15-Philippians 3:16) make mention — books which by those men who were inspired and directed by the Holy Spirit were written or approved for this, that they might be a perpetual norm and measure of faith and life according to the state and condition of each Testament (2 Timothy 3:15-2 Timothy 3:16; 2 Peter 1:20-2 Peter 1:21), and they are opposed to the Apocrypha, that is, to all those that do not rule and measure the Christian faith.

For certain Apocrypha are also joined to these in the Bibles — irregulars — which for the usefulness of reading, not for their certain divinity, were sometimes called deuterocanonical and Ecclesiastical by the ancients, and can be referred to Sacred Scripture's parts only improperly, of which below at Aph. 13, 14, and 15. Canonical books are also called books existing by confession, testamentary, and by St. Athanasius books received into the canon, as in the variant readings of H. Savile on the Life of St. Antony edited by Heschel. And there is a double criterion from which judgment is made concerning each sacred writing that it is canonical accurately and specially so called — internal and external.

1.9.2The internal criterion is of the thing or of the sign. The criterion of the thing is God's immediate inspiration, calling, and instruction (2 Timothy 3:16; 2 Peter 1:20; Luke 16:29; Ephesians 2:20; Hebrews 1:1; Galatians 1 and 11-12, 15-16; Romans 15:18) — of him who wrote the Scriptures with God inspiring, indeed by whose hands God himself wrote, as Alphonsus de Castro speaks, Against Heresies book 1 chapter 2 page 4.

From which we gather: (1) that the prophets or canonical writers have holiness in living (2 Peter 1:21) — not a holiness that means absolute impeccability (1 Kings 8:46; 2 Chronicles 6:36; Ecclesiastes 7:21; Proverbs 20:9), but one that excludes voluntary sins, malice, stubbornness, and an evil purpose — that is, sins against conscience (1 John 3).

(2) The same men's infallibility in writing, because he writes not as a man but as a holy man of God (2 Peter 1:21), led by the Spirit of truth into all truth (John 14:17; John 16:13; 2 Peter 1:21) — by the example of converted David (Matthew 22:43; Psalm 45:2; 2 Samuel 23:2). For if error and falsehood were admitted into so high a summit of authority, no particle of these books would remain that could not be called into doubt, as Augustine well warns in Letter 8 to Jerome.

Therefore, that the Evangelists' writings may stand as canonical and authentic and their authority remain safe, every falsehood ought to be absent from them — not only what is put forward by lying, but also what comes by forgetting — as the same teaches in On the Harmony of the Gospels book 1 chapter 12. Yet judgment about the prophets' infallibility is to be made from the truth of God which they reveal dogmatically, not from the history of a deed and of a speech which they sometimes recount as in character, as Genesis 3:1, Genesis 3:4-Genesis 3:5; John 8:44 — according to Ruiz's rule 219: an evangelical narrative, though most true, yet not all things said there are believed to be true, from Augustine, Against the Priscillianists chapter 9.

1.9.3(3) The divinity, majesty, sharpness, and wonderful force and efficacy of prophecy (Hebrews 4:12; James 1:21; 2 Timothy 3:15; Romans 1:16; Luke 24:32; John 6:68) — which even Stenius from the papal flock acknowledges in the opening of his Cosmopoeia.

The criterion of the sign is one thing for the Old Testament, another for the New. The Old Testament's is the Hebrew tongue, by Justin's witness in Apology 2 for the Christians — except a few pericopes in Daniel, Ezra, and Jeremiah written in the Chaldean idiom. Whether Arabic and Syriac words are sometimes mixed into Job — to say nothing of Greek words — is a deeper inquiry; on which see M. Mayer's Sacred Philology page 151. The New Testament's is the Greek tongue, in which the whole is written — though Baronius, Annals volume 1 at year 45, holds that Mark wrote not in Greek but in Latin, and wins assent from Kirsten in the preface to his Arabic Grammar page 36; and concerning Matthew's Gospel the matter is more tangled — consult Flacius Illyricus in the preface to the Gloss on Matthew, Isaac Casaubon Exercises 15 chapter 1 page 279 and 16 chapter 15 page 485, Johannes Drusius Observations on the New Testament chapter 1, and others.

But the external criterion is the catholic testimony of the primitive and true church concerning each Testament's autograph — from which, in the time of Ezra and Malachi, the Old Testament canon was constituted, and the New's in the time of the Apostolic men and was finished by John the Apocalyptist. For that reason, if there are any sacred books that lack testimony from the autograph and against which the church that flourished when the canon was set has catholically contradicted, they are not trustworthy.

1.9.4From which we conclude: (1) That canonical authority belongs to each of the Old and New Testament books enumerated by us below — from Moses to Malachi and from Matthew to the Apocalypse.

(2) That the Old and New canons' reason is one and the same, which no antiquity obliterates and no novelty varies. Hence the papal distinction between a Hebrew and a Christian canon as to the Old Testament is null — as is also the doubling of the Hebrew canon so that one would be of the Hebrew prophets and another of the Seventy interpreters, which Genebrard has in the preface of Chronology to Arnold Pontanus.

Stapleton also errs, Principles of Doctrine book 9 chapter 6, asserting that certain non-canonical books can become canonical — namely those written in the Apostles' time. And Tanner, Disputation 1 on Thomas part 1, Disputation 5 on the written and unwritten word, thesis 37: "It is not," he says, "altogether improbable what some say, that the Church can even now receive some book newly into the canon." Whom Bellarmine rightly contradicts, On the Word of God book 1 chapter 10: "We confess," he says, "that the church can IN NO WAY make a non-canonical book canonical: but only declare which is to be held for canonical."

1.9.5(3) That all canonical books can judge and determine controversies of religion. For this is the canon's force (2 Timothy 3:15-2 Timothy 3:16; Psalm 119:9; Romans 2:16; Hebrews 4:12; John 3:18; John 12:48; John 16:8). And Sacred Scripture judges and determines as a rule, with the Holy Spirit speaking through it president in it — this one or that with his assessors — by way of the person to whom it falls; who if he is an uncorrupted judge, the judgment of all these becomes one and the same, and so divine and infallible — on which Cornelius Martinius among our philosophers teaches more rightly in Analysis part 2 chapter 3 than Bellarmine in On the Word of God book 3 chapter 9.

(4) The sacred canon's self-sufficiency and its adequate sufficiency for Christian faith and manners — by which all things necessary for Christians to believe and do are contained in it in due manner — so that today, after God's word has been committed to letters and entrusted to the Church, we are in no way bound to receive with equal pious affection, together with the written word of God, another unwritten word of God, or one not written in the Bibles but handed down from the Apostles in Cabbalah-fashion, as necessary for salvation and for establishing other dogmas of faith that stand in the Bibles neither as to letter nor as to sense. For both the name "canon" by which Scripture is marked (Psalm 19:5; Galatians 6:16) and the thing itself teach this (Psalm 19:8; 2 Timothy 3:15-2 Timothy 3:16; James 1:21; John 20:31; John 5:39; 1 Corinthians 4:6; Galatians 1:8).

Against the sophistic charge of imperfection from John Fisher Bishop of Rochester, John Eck, Conrad Kling, Wilhelm Lindanus, Melchior Cano, Martin Perez de Ayala, Rene Benoist, Alphonsus de Castro, Franz Agricola, Gregory of Valencia, Robert Bellarmine, Francis Coster, Thomas Stapleton, Heinrich Lancellot, Vitus Miletus, Adam Tanner, James Gordon Huntly, and Martin Becanus — against which false prophets and their whole papal examination read the most learned Dr. Antonius Thysius, Leiden theologian, succinctly and learnedly treating of canonical and Apocryphal books in Synopsis of Purer Theology Disputation 3, with others praised there by us.

1.9.6II. The canonical books of the Old Testament are no others than those of which it is catholically established that they were written in Hebrew and partly in Chaldean, and were acknowledged as divine by the ancient Jewish Church.

III. The canonical books of the Old Testament are partly historical, partly poetic, partly prophetic.

IV. The historical are the Pentateuch, the Triteuch, and the Octateuch. The word Pentateuch is commonly known; Triteuch stands in Athanasius's Letter to Marcellinus page 581; Octateuch in Procopius of Gaza the sophist's commentary on the eight books of the Old Testament.

1.9.7V. The Pentateuch contains Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy — see Contracted Theology, Book 1, Chapter 9, Aphorisms 6-10.

VI. The Triteuch embraces three books, namely Joshua, Judges, and Ruth. See Aphorisms 11-13.

VII. The Octateuch is that which contains the eight following books: the two of Samuel, the two of Kings, the two of Chronicles, the book of Ezra and Nehemiah, and the book of Esther. See there Aph. 14-15 and following through 23.

VIII. And these are the historical books of the ancient Hebrew canon. The poetic follow, which are the most elegant practice and epitome of the law and the prophets — as Job, the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs. See Chapter 11 on the poetic books.

1.9.8IX. The prophetic books are those that, besides manifold predictions, comprise an accurate interpretation of the Mosaic law, a prudent and exact application of moral doctrine, of divine promises and threatenings — especially of the gracious covenant whose foundation is Christ — and the true use of the divine law.

X. And some are major, others minor.

XI. The major are Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel. See Chapter 12 on the prophetic books.

XII. The minor are twelve, who comprised their sermons in shorter booklets than those: Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi. On which see Sirach 49:11 and our Chapter 13 on the twelve prophets.

1.9.9XIII. These are the canonical books of the Old Testament, to which the Apocrypha are commonly added — not on equal thread — books written indeed by pious and skilled authors, of which it is not yet catholically established whether they were inspired by the Holy Spirit and directed to this, that by them they should enlarge the canon of faith and life; finally inserted among the canonical books for the usefulness of reading. Apocrypha are here so called from a hidden disclosure; they are opposed to the testamentary books — Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith book 4 chapter 18. And since the history and reason of this first name's imposition almost escapes us, we judge it safest that the Apocrypha be described from opposition to the canonicals — seeing they are not equal to them in thread.

XIV. These are partly historical, partly didactic. The historical are the book of Tobit, the Prayer of Manasseh, the book of Judith, Baruch, the Letter of Jeremiah, the additions in Daniel, Ezra's third and fourth books, the additions to Esther, the book of Simon the high priest commonly called Third Maccabees, and First and Second Maccabees. See there chapter 14 on the Apocryphal books from the beginning through Aphorism 14.

XV. The didactic are the book of Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus.

1.9.10XVI. And thus far the Apocrypha also. There follow the canonical books of the New Testament, which are the tables of the most holy contract between God and the human race, established by the blood of the Lamb of God already slain — written by eight scribes, most excellent men, witnesses beyond all exception, inspired by the Holy Spirit.

XVII. And the integral parts of the New Testament are four: one Evangelical, another practical, a third epistolary, and finally a fourth Apocalyptic.

XVIII. The Evangelical part was written by the four Evangelists — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — concerning the conception, birth, teaching, life, wonderful works, passion, death, departure to the Father, and return of Jesus of Nazareth, with great agreement in the matter, to demonstrate that this one is the promised Messiah.

1.9.11XIX. The practical is the second part, written by Luke at Rome by the will of Paul the prisoner — concerning the birth and infancy, growth, and just, gracious, and most simple face, teaching, strength, and whole form of government of the optimally constituted primitive Church of Christ and of reunion, and concerning the deeds of the Apostles fighting against false doctrine, described under the face and condition of the Ephesian Church (Revelation 2:1).

XX. The epistolary is the third part of the New Testament, written by the Apostles in epistolary character concerning the chief heads of Christian religion and the very practice of Christian faith and life in truth, according to the measure of each one's gift and calling, to be exercised by anyone in the course of this pilgrimage until the world's end — written to those absent from the Old Testament, Christ's sermons, and the Holy Spirit's suggestion.

XXI. The Apostolic epistles were written partly by Paul — namely fourteen — partly by James — namely one — partly by Peter — namely two — partly by John — namely three — partly by Jude — namely one.

XXII. Paul wrote these by name: one to the Romans, two to the Corinthians, one to the Galatians, one to the Ephesians, one to the Philippians, one to the Colossians, two to the Thessalonians, two to Timothy, one to Titus, one to Philemon, one to the Hebrews.

1.9.12XXIII. There remains the Apocalyptic, the fourth part of the New Testament, written by the Apostle John concerning those things which Christ himself revealed about the state of the New Testament churches — from its beginning through seven distinct periods and faces portrayed in the Ephesian, Smyrnaean, Pergamene, Thyatiran, Sardian, Philadelphian, and Laodicean, unto the world's end — and concerning their gifts, dangers, calamities, Antichrist's persecutions, deliverances, the last judgment, the dreadful damnation of the impious, and the supreme glorification of the churches and the godly in it — lest, ignorant of their own fates and future lot, like Gentiles or brute beasts, they should be overwhelmed and perish by sudden chances; but taught little by little by the experience of predicted events, they might acknowledge that they are always Christ's care.

1.10.1CHAPTER TEN On the principle of sacred theology dependent on the first and ordered to it

So far we have explained the first principle of sacred theology.

There follows that which depends on the first and is ordered to it.

By directing some believable matter to Sacred Scripture as the first principle, it makes that matter credible.

By disposing the hearer through declaration or proof, it invites him to believe.

1.10.2II. And it is either the Church's testimony, or that of those who are outside the Church. III. The Church's testimony is first pure or mixed. IV. Pure is that which by the Church's voice defines the matter to be believed from the Scriptures alone. V. Mixed is that which by the Church's voice determines the matter from Scripture and nature together.

For there are certain things in theology which become known partly through Scripture, partly through nature: for example, that God is; that there is providence; that there is a magistrate; that there is marriage. Here faith can also be confirmed by natural principles, according to that saying: Turn your eyes to the birds of the sky, and consider the lilies of the field (Matthew 6:26) — of which things Paul also makes mention (Acts 14:17; Romans 1:19).

What then, you ask — are not both theological themes and arguments sought from Scripture alone? Reply: Arguments that found the Christian faith, on which we rest, are rightly drawn from Scripture alone; but illustratives, which we use and are helped by in any way — especially in refuting heresies and human additions, which we necessarily contradict — can also without inconvenience be sought from nature, right reason, and human testimonies ad hominem. See Chemnitz, Theological Commonplaces part I, on creation, chapter 3.

1.10.3VI. And this principle is proof or declaration. VII. Proof is that by which something is shown to be both from nature and from Scripture — thus that God is, nature as well as the free Scripture asserts (Isaiah 41:22; Psalm 19:2).

VIII. Declaration is that by which something proposed by Scripture is declared from nature. Thus Damascene declares the generation of the Son of God from nature (On the Orthodox Faith book 1, chapter 9): Just as, he says, light is always begotten from fire, and always is in it, and is by no means separated from it — in this way also the Son is begotten from the Father, and is by no means separated from him, but always is in him.

1.10.4IX. And here rules are to be noted. 1. The mysteries of faith are to be dug out not from nature's storehouses, but from the pages of the Scriptures — such as the most holy Trinity, the incarnation of the Son of God, election to salvation, redemption, baptism, the Lord's Supper, and the like. For in these saying has place: Athens has nothing in common with Jerusalem; and that of Paul (Galatians 1:15), I did not immediately confer with flesh and blood; and (2 Corinthians 10:5), we take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.

For we do not side with Raymond Lull and Albertinus — of whom the former strives to deduce all articles of faith, the latter all conclusions, from philosophical principles — much less with the Photinians, who seem everywhere to hold human reason in controversies of faith before Sacred Scripture, however much some try to rub this itch onto us.

For we rightly and deservedly observe the distinction of analytic and dialectic treatment: and we call analytic proof in theology the spiritual principle proper to theology, theopneuston, divinely revealed, accommodated to the demonstration or confirmation of the articles of faith in which our salvation is contained. And we judge that he alone can truly be called analytic in theology — that is, a true and solid theologian — who draws his proofs and the principles of his proofs from the clearest springs of the sacred letters, or from those things which have been demonstrated through the Sacred Scriptures, and does not allow anything alien or foreign from philosophy or human traditions or the fathers' testimonies to be mixed in, unless these entirely agree with the sacred letters or pertain to the true interpretation of Sacred Scripture — and that especially when spiritual demonstrations are needed.

1.10.5I add this because, when solid and firm foundations have been laid, or even when the wholly uninstructed are to be taught, Christ himself and the Apostles also employ dialectic proofs and oratorical arts — as may be seen in Andreas Hyperius of Flanders, formerly professor at Marburg, in his Theological Topics — such as: (1) topical places common to several disciplines; (2) proofs sought from the decrees and judgments of councils, from the Church's custom, from human traditions, from the opinions and sentences of the Latin as well as the Greek fathers — for the authority of all these is only probable, and rests on the authority of canonical Scripture, which the Protestants with one mouth testify and Bellarmine also somewhere does not deny; (3) proofs sought not from the proper but from the common nature of the spiritual things under discussion, which are called dialectic and logical only by analogy, even if their terms are merely spiritual.

And they are used chiefly for two causes. (1) For hearers ignorant of the divine mysteries and unskilled in Scripture's language. Thus Paul in Acts uses the authority of Aratus to refute the Stoics and Epicureans, who would not have admitted the Scriptures, just as Mohammedans do not today; likewise the poet Epimenides against the Cretans; and Menander to correct the Corinthians. Thus Christ, in teaching the people, for the most part uses common and dialectic arguments from likes and other such things customary then in Syria. This is useful for instruction. But acroamatically Christ teaches his disciples and analytically disputes against the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Satan. (2) For illustrating those things which were first demonstrated acroamatically or analytically.

1.10.6For what is also customary in other disciplines — that sometimes dialectic syllogisms are premised to analytic ones, sometimes postponed according to the variety of controversies — nothing forbids the same in sacred theology, in which, as I said, there are two genera of legitimate proofs, just as in other disciplines too. The former contains analytic, didactic proofs, which can also be called with the Apostle merely spiritual and theological, proper, vernacular, and likewise of the Spirit and power of God — spiritual and effective demonstrations. The latter has common and dialectic proofs, which we have already briefly indicated as threefold.

But analytic proofs, which are merely spiritual, are either drawn from the written and divinely revealed Word of God — or handed down by Christ from the Father's bosom, by the prophets through whom the Lord's Spirit spoke, and by the Apostles, to whose authority, since they had a certain promise of the Holy Spirit not only in kind but also in individuals, no human authority of synods or even of fathers, Latin or Greek, is to be equated unless they speak with Scripture — or they are drawn from the proper nature of the spiritual things under discussion, which itself is gathered from the Scriptures by the benefit of analytic doctrine. The former proofs for proving the articles of faith are of all the most effective and powerful. For God is the author and fountain of all things, and truth itself. From Plato, Republic book 2, in the second formula for constituting religion: God, he says, is simple and truthful in work and words; he neither changes himself nor deceives others — neither by objects of images, nor by speeches, nor by signs sent in, nor through waking, nor in sleep. To God's truth in the Word is added omnipotence — to which two springs of certainty our Savior looked in confuting the Sadducees (Matthew 22:29).

But the later analytic proofs also have the greatest force for acquiring solid science of spiritual things, because they too are drawn from Israel's saving springs — as when one treats of original sin, faith, justification, and other spiritual things, proofs are sought from their proper nature; but they have more of art and skillful industry. For example, if someone wishes to prove analytically the Pauline saying: That those justified by faith have a pacified conscience. For one must first of all know beforehand what justification is, what faith, what peace, what conscience — which can hardly be done without analytic doctrine applied to the sacred letters. But once definitions of these extremes of the conclusion are constituted, partly perfect, partly also nominal, analytic proof becomes easy: Whoever rests on trust in divine mercy for Christ's merit has a pacified conscience. But the one justified by faith rests on trust in God's mercy for Christ's merit. Therefore the one justified by faith has a pacified conscience.

All the other proofs whose legitimate use is in our theology are only dialectic, of which we spoke a little earlier, together with their use. And although the whole of topics has much weight in theological study, yet first of all there are to be learned from the four progymnasmata set out at the end of the first book of the Topics the precepts of distinguishing things said in many ways, of finding differences, and of discerning likenesses of things — because unless ambiguities are distinguished (as the word justice, Gospel, faith, and the like) and things that are alike are separated by certain differences found (as law and gospel, active and passive righteousness, justification and regeneration, faith and good works, charity, faith and hope), doors are opened to various word-fights and dangerous disputations which Paul everywhere bids us avoid. Here also pertain Topics books 6 and 7, by whose precepts definitions constituted by others are examined — for example, whether the gospel is a sermon of repentance — and the springs and likenesses of differences are shown. From which it is clear that a double mode of treating spiritual things — acroamatic or analytic, and exoteric or dialectic — is not alien to our religion and the sacred letters, but rather is proper; and that it is most fitting for the solid — and to expose the false — theologian as such in theological treatments.

1.10.7But sophists and false theologians, as such, use almost a threefold genus of proofs. The first is pseudographic — when for proving a spiritual theorem proofs are indeed assumed from the sacred letters, yet not true ones, either because of perverse interpretation or because of sinister application to the proposed question — of which pseudographemata countless occur among the Arians and Photinians, as also among Paracelsists and Weigelians and many Jacob-Boehmists and the like, who twist many Scripture testimonies to absurd and blasphemous opinions, as when they attack the deity of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, the truth of the human nature assumed from the virgin Mary, the personal union, and things connected with these. This first genus is opposed to true proofs proper and vernacular to theology, because it constructs a syllogism from vernacular premises that are not true, as the philosopher speaks (Topics book 1, chapter 1).

The second is sophistic, which is opposed to dialectic and common proofs and commits some fallacy either in conjoined words, or in simple ones, or outside diction in things. The third is interposed between the two prior ones, which assumes some heterogeneous principle — alien or foreign — true indeed in its own genus, but transferred to another genus ineffective for what is proposed. Aristotle sometimes calls this logical, sometimes absurd and fictitious, forced toward the proposed question (Metaphysics book 13, chapter 7). This third genus of vicious proof was too familiar to the scholastics, who fitted philosophical principles to proving spiritual theorems, crossing from one genus into another against the analytic laws that demand all terms be related. The Photinians, unlearned and ignorant of analytics, abuse this when they try to destroy the eternal and hyperphysical generation of the Son of God with physical little reasonings.

Moreover, as analytic proofs beget accurate knowledge of things, so pseudographic proofs produce ignorance and a disposition — ignorance of a depraved affection contrary to solid cognition. Sophistic proofs make a show and as it were mock with certain juggling tricks. Heterogeneous foreign proofs bring forward some opinion for science. Hence blessed Luther rightly writes of Scholastic Theology that it is only opinion, or a shadowy and thin cognition of spiritual things, because it constructs spiritual theorems not from proper but from alien or diverse-genus principles.

1.10.8But the mode of solving pseudographic proofs is not one. For sometimes they are solved by applying a sound interpretation of the principles and showing the sinister application to the proposed question; sometimes by denial or even by opposing true principles from diverse Scripture places that agree best among themselves, and by showing the harmony and connection which, agreeably to the nature of the words and things signified, confirms the truer sentence and is destroyed and weakened by the weaker; sometimes by some limitation and distinction; sometimes even by deduction to absurdity, which rests on the negative principle of contradiction and has the greatest force for vigorously weakening such proofs and whatever conflicts with the articles of faith — as may be seen in 1 Corinthians 15, where the Apostle leads those denying the resurrection of the dead to as many absurdities as possible.

2. Where reason fails, there faith's edifice begins. Divine mysteries are not to be pried into, but to be wondered at. Hence St. Athanasius to Serapion: The knowledge of God, he says, is to be comprehended by faith, not sought out by human reason. Let faith preside; let reason sit under.

1.10.9Note here, however: when the proper and interior truth of the mysteries brought into controversy comes to be explained by God's Word, the canon is by no means to be formed according to the natural measure of human reason and that hitherto described by the philosophers, but according to the genius and dictate of faith, which under a new light subjects reason in its mysteries to God's Word, even against blind reason's blind judgment. For example, Scripture teaches that Mary's only-begotten is God's only-begotten Son, and that this man begotten from Mary is the eternal God; likewise, that God suffered, and things like these. Which words by their native signification do not yield that sense of which reason by its natural light is capable, and which can be measured and grasped according to that norm delineated in the genera of logical predications.

Nor is it needful here that the significations of these words be turned so long by artful translations until they yield such a sense as can be comprehended by reason's natural capacity according to logical rules — because the truth of the divine mysteries and institutions exceeds the natural capacity of human reason, and does not temper itself to human wisdom and logical rules, as things and actions subject to reason are customarily disposed and treated according to logical rules. For logic is like the Lesbian rule, which ought to accommodate itself to things as they are; nor are things and their necessary and contingent connections, known by nature or divinely revealed, to be twisted to rules found by logicians from considering natural and moral things. Where therefore the truth of a statement is revealed in the Scriptures as singular and unusual, there the logician ceases; if he is a Christian he believes God revealing, and gladly confesses that his rules fail, and heartily rescinds his own decrees in God's honor.

But whatever right reason demonstrates to be alien to God's wisdom, goodness, equity, and justice — so far that it is alien even from the human — that is to be flatly rejected and spat out. Indeed whatever is absurd, false, and foolish according to right reason is absurd, false, and foolish before God and everywhere — as if someone should say that one is two, that one and two do not make three, that three are even, four odd, and that if we take equals from equals what remain are not equal, and if anything else truly implies a contradiction. For it cannot be that two contradictories are true at once. Let faith be present, and there will be no question. For to scrutinize mysteries is rashness; to believe is piety; to know is eternal blessedness.

Yet here too there is a grave stumbling-block: how does Christian faith prevail over philosophical science? Durandus says: To every knower it can be established concerning his conclusion that it is true, and that it is impossible for it to be otherwise. But concerning a conclusion deduced from principles only believed, it cannot be established for the one deducing that it is impossible for it to be otherwise, nor that it is true. For no more can be established concerning the conclusion than concerning the principles, since knowledge of conclusions depends on knowledge of principles. But we reply that God's Word is indeed the firmest principle of faith, yet one that has its own tokens which argue that the sacred Bibles are the true Word of the most true God; and although in these themselves the human mind acting in a human way now and then wavers, yet God, by illuminating it through that very Word and drawing the will into obedience, so confirms the certainty of the principle that the believer with joyful breast does not hesitate to seal it with his blood. With the principle thus established and unmoved, whatever is comprehended in it is believed with equal firmness, so that thus an infallible full assurance of both the principle and the conclusions drawn from it is given.

For if one proceeds so that to the deduction of tokens by which a persuaded man at first believes that the prophetic and Apostolic Word is the most true Word of the most true God, there is joined that Word's power and efficacy in illuminating the mind and strengthening the hearer's assent perpetually depending on the Word — then what otherwise perpetually fluctuates is set most firmly in our souls. And on this depends the conclusion of Richard of St. Victor, called a solid Doctor: As many of us as are truly faithful — that is, gifted with true faith kindled by divine illumination through the mediation of God's Word — hold nothing more certain, nothing more constant, than what we apprehend by faith. Would that the Jews would attend, would that the pagans would notice, with how great security of conscience we shall be able to approach the divine judgment. Shall we not with all confidence be able to say to God: Lord, if it is error, we have been deceived by you yourself? For these things in us have been confirmed by such great signs and wonders and such as can be done only through you, which also have been handed down to us by men of highest holiness, proved with highest and authentic attestation, you yourself cooperating, confirming the word with following signs? Note here the Lord's cooperation with God's preached Word, besides external miracles — as Christ (John 5:20) reckons the vivification which he performs through the gospel among works greater than visible signs.

1.10.104. Natural things are not to be confused with supernatural. Hence St. Athanasius, Disputation 2 against the Arians: What is said of men, he says, is not to be thought of God. Compare what was said at the first rule. 5. From civil government to spiritual administration the inference is weak. Hence Christ: But you not so (Luke 22:26); compare Casaubon, Exercitationes 14, disputation 5, and Exercitationes 18, chapters 11–12.

IX. Secondly, the dependent principle is public or private. X. Public is that which has been sealed by the consensus of the universal Church. XI. And it is of social collation or of faithful relation. XII. Social collation takes place either in a council or synod, or in some similar assembly, over which the Holy Spirit presides as judge in the choir of prophets and Apostles, by the written law. This is gathered from Acts 15:28; John 16:8, John 16:13; John 5:45; 2 Kings 17:20; Galatians 6:16; Matthew 10:20. See Luther, Jena German volume 7, On Councils and the Church; Calvin, Institutes book 4, chapter 9, section 13; William Whitaker against Duraeus, On Councils book 4.

1.10.11XIII. Faithful relation takes place through a public writing of the Church. Here pertain the three catholic symbols — the Apostolic, Nicene, Athanasian. Then here can be referred the Augsburg Confession, the Gallican, Anglican, Helvetic confessions, the Harmony of Evangelical Confessions, the Heidelberg Catechism, with similar public writings.

XIV. Private is that which some orthodox doctor has made of public right, not in the Church's public name, but in his own. Of this rank are most of the writings of Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, Bullinger, Musculus, Chemnitz, Hemmingius, Martyr, Beza, Ursinus, Zanchi, Benedictus Aretius, Franciscus Junius, David Pareus, Whitaker, Perkins, Polanus, Piscator, and the like — indeed also of the ancient fathers, Latin as well as Greek.

1.10.12XV. And here too rules are to be noted. 1. Between the testimony and phrases of Scripture and between the testimony and phrases of the Church one must accurately and carefully distinguish — as: the bread which we break is the communion of the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 10:16); and the bread is the body of Christ. The former is Scripture's phrase, the latter the Church's. Both indeed true: yet the former proper, the latter improper.

2. In public testimony, although there is one and the same truth, yet there is not always one and the same authority. For greater is the authority of the Apostolic Symbol, but lesser that of the Augsburg, Gallican, Helvetic, Belgian, Anglican confession and the like. 3. Public testimony, other things equal, is deservedly to be preferred to private. Thus the confession of the whole Church surpasses the confession of some one doctor — even if there as here there is one truth.

4. Of testimonies taken from the fathers the unique norm and touchstone is Sacred Scripture. Thus Augustine, On the Unity of the Church chapter 5: It is not to be heard in the Church, he says: I say this, you say this — but the LORD says this. Worthy of observation here too is the warning of Nicephorus Gregoras, Roman or Byzantine History book 10, page 235: Moreover, he says, it is also worth knowing that the writings of the holy fathers are not to be understood simply nor in one way. Of which some look to teaching and admonishing — are accommodated to teaching and admonishing, persons and times being considered, yet all religiously. For some contain decrees dogmatically; others praises encomiastically; others disputations combatively. Nor indeed are the ancients' disputations to be transferred elsewhere. For if someone fighting with enemies, and with whole mind intent on sword and shield, should strike down a fellow-soldier standing before his feet, neither is that to be thought a law, nor is he to be accused who did it, necessity drawing the thought from the struggle, by no means allowing that what was done should happen otherwise. Therefore neither is this to be so done, nor are praises to be used in place of laws. For art has given to those praising license to say anything. But those dogmas which they sanctioned and promulgated — in those alone it is right and safe to use them as canons and the plumbline of religion. Thus Nicephorus — which yet by our rule are always to be tested against Scripture's Lydian stone, as was demonstrated above.

1.10.135. Certain things in Sacred Scripture are explicitly stated; others are present, even if not directly mentioned. Hence Nazianzen, Theology book 5: For, he says, in Scripture re set down as to words and sense together; some as to sense only. 6. Mutual collation should attend that some things are contained in Scripture explicitly; but some only implicitly. 7. Testification is twofold — dogmatic, which is made concerning the heads of our faith; and historical, which is made concerning the divine books.

8. Even if some heresy has not been condemned in a public council: yet it ought to be judged and refuted from God's Word, according to that of 1 John 4:1. Hence Athanasius, letter on the Synod of Ariminum: In vain, he says, those running about pretend that they demand synods for the faith, since divine Scripture is more powerful than all. 9. Carefully beware lest the conclusions of doctors after the Apostles' age rashly pass into norms of faith. For the Apostle teaches (1 Corinthians 2:4) often that my speech and my preaching were not in persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power or virtue — that is, confirmed (1) by testimonies already long ago brought forth by the Spirit and power of God (2 Peter 1:20-2 Peter 1:21); (2) peculiarly then also by the visible outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and by various miracles of divine power — all of which he opposes to the demonstrations of human philosophy; (3) by the affection of charity and the strength of patience, from which the speech arose, with which it was spoken, and to effecting which powerfully it uniquely tended — which he opposes to affected eloquence and human persuasion. Compare 1 Corinthians 4:19; 1 John 3:4, 1 John 3:24; 1 John 4:7; Colossians 1; 1 Timothy 1:5.

He therefore, proving his words from the Scriptures, with such signs and such affections evidently added, and so fitting spiritual things to spiritual that (1) both God's presence of which he spoke, and the speech by which he spoke, was rather spiritual and powerful than outwardly specious to the age's sense; (2) the proved conclusion and the proving testimony breathed the same force — further deduced such conclusions from principles as are themselves principles for us. But we, speaking neither with such signs nor with like affection, content with the principles necessarily set in Scripture, gather conclusions firm only insofar as, compared with the said principles, it has been made evident that they conform to them and flow from them.

10. Doubtful, obscure, difficult, or false consequences are not to be turned into axioms beyond all exception, nor all controversies into necessary dogmas. 11. Although second notions ought not to be plainly proscribed on account of the other genus of legitimate common and dialectic proofs: yet the true and sober use of the organon and the perfection of logical judgment even in theological controversies consists more in distinguishing analytic and dialectic proofs — to which rhetorical ones are also akin — than in abusing either of the opposed deceptive, pseudographic, sophistic, and heterogeneous proofs. For since most mysteries, and certain spiritual and divine things, plainly reject the voices of genus, species, difference, accident, subject, form, and other like second notions — if you wish to use them in such mysteries only analogically against heretics, it can easily happen that you open them hiding-places of refuge in which to conceal their errors.

1.10.14XVI. Outside the Church is the testimony of gentile philosophers, poets, historians, and legislators, of Mercury Trismegistus and the Sibyls, by which the truth and equity of the Christian faith is sometimes asserted by the fathers. By this testimony, as an argument ad hominem — not truly that I might confirm faith and doctrine revealed from heaven by human testimonies — the Apostle Paul sometimes did not blush to use (Acts 17:23-Acts 17:24, Acts 17:28; 1 Corinthians 15:33; Titus 1:12). This the most learned fathers have not rarely used — Clement of Alexandria, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Gregory Nazianzen, Lactantius, Augustine, and others — whose business was chiefly with atheists and gentiles.

Concerning Mercury and the Sibylline oracles which are still read today, I gladly assent to that highest man Isaac Casaubon (Exercitationes 1 to the Apparatus of the Annals, Numbers XVIII and XIX), concerning which it cannot be denied that in them not a few heads of religion — for example, concerning one God, the most holy Trinity, the Word the Son of God through whom the world was made, Christ to be born of a virgin, his passion and cross, regeneration through baptism into eternal life, the future judgment, and likewise other things — are found so clearly and in perspicuous words set forth that scarcely, indeed scarcely at all, anything similar can be brought from the whole law of Moses and the prophets. But the excellent man frankly professes that all oracles of this kind, whether of this Mercury or of the Sibyls announced beforehand, the more open they are, the more suspect they become to him; and he demonstrates them to be spurious by candid refutations: (1) because Christian mysteries were hidden before Christ (Colossians 1:26; Romans 16:25; Ephesians 3:9), which yet are most plainly explained in Mercury's book and the Sibylline songs, which even indicate JESUS CHRIST by acrostic, without circumlocutions or enigmas, by the very name, and narrate his deeds. For it seems contrary to God's Word to think that such deep mysteries were proposed more clearly to the gentiles than to God's people, whom God so instructed by the prophets' voice that through obscure types of future things he led them to Christ as by a pedagogue's hand (Galatians 3:24).

(2) Because the ancient Greeks — Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, and so many other most curious scrutinizers of all disciplines — show absolutely no vestige of those things which today we marvel at in this Mercury and the Sibyls. (3) Because it was solemn in the first times of the church, with a good end, to invent false books, that the new doctrine might more easily be admitted by the gentiles' wise men — of which Pope Gelasius in his decree and that of the Roman council enumerates and by best right condemns very many. And into this census are to be referred those Sibylline oracles which explain the secrets of our religion more openly than was ever done by God's prophets; likewise the whole book which under the name of Mercury Trismegistus began some centuries ago to be circulated, pseudepigraphically falsely inscribed — for it is the mere fiction of some Christian or rather semi-Christian, as our Casaubon from the matter and diction solidly demonstrates in many places. (4) Because writings of this sort, as soon as they came forth, were suspect to very many. For most truly blessed Augustine (City of God book 18, chapter 47): Whatever prophecies of others concerning God's grace through Christ Jesus are brought forth can be thought to have been fabricated by Christians. Therefore nothing is firmer for convincing any aliens, if they contend about this matter, and for supporting our own, if they have thought rightly, than that those divine predictions concerning Christ be brought forth which are written in the Jews' codices.

1.10.15But those who still today defer somewhat more to gentile writings in the business of faith, with the Scholastics and Jesuits — to these ought to be opposed what Eusebius (book 5, chapter 28) reports concerning the Artemonites: They have corrupted the divine Scriptures, he says, without any reverence of the fear of God; and they boldly and impiously reject the rule of the ancient faith, being ignorant of Christ, whom therefore they do not find, because they have not sought rightly. And they have so far slipped into folly and impiety that, if someone proposes to them a discourse from the Scriptures, they on the contrary oppose: whether this discourse under discussion makes a conjoined or a separated genus of syllogism; and abandoning God's holy Scriptures they treat geometry — as those who truly are of the earth, they speak of the earth; and therefore they are ignorant of him who is from above.

Finally Euclid among them flourishes especially in the disciplines of Geometry. But Aristotle and Theophrastus are held by them in admiration. And Galen by some of them is even adored. Who strive to assert the impiety of their heresy by those arts and doctrines; and by deceiving men ignorant of God they undermine the simplicity of the divine Scriptures and the sincerity of faith. But they do these things because they have not even become neighbors to the faith; therefore they also violate the divine Scriptures without any fear, and corrupting them say that they are emending them.

1.11.1CHAPTER ELEVEN On the distribution of sacred theology

So far we have seen the definition, nature, and principles of sacred theology.

The parts follow, of which there are two: the common and the proper.

Since sacred theology is a practical discipline of its own kind, as was shown above in chapter 1, section 3, it is to be treated, by the common judgment even of the philosophers who are masters of the best order, in the analytic order.

According to that order both the whole doctrine itself and all its parts will be treated from its chief end, and each head will occupy the place that suits it by its primary relation to its own whole and to the end of the whole

1.11.2II. Among outstanding theologians there are various treatments and divisions of it.

Doctor Conrad Bergius, in his praised Precognita, refers the tractations of sacred things to five modes.

The first is HISTORY, which is discourse about singular past deeds; in it the order of time is chiefly to be observed.

The second is PROPHECY, which is discourse about singular future deeds; in it partly the order of time is observed, partly the prudence or fitness to the particular end that God or the prophet intends.

1.11.3The third is INVOCATION, which is discourse either proclaiming God's past benefits or asking for future ones; and it uses the order that affection, place, and time nearly dictate.

The fourth is EXHORTATION, which is discourse not so much declaring some deed done or to come as wanting and requiring something to be done by a human being.

It includes (1) a precept about doing or omitting; (2) persuasion, which works by promising and threatening, or by foretelling the goods the obedient will obtain and the evils the resistant will run into; (3) congratulation, complaint, consolation, and the like, which call for joy or patience or sorrow by praising present goods and lessening or enlarging evils, and so on.

And this mode of sacred speech again uses chiefly the order of prudence, or fitness to the affection that is to be stirred or calmed in the hearer.

1.11.4The fifth is DIDASCALIA properly so called, which is either bound to the text it interprets — and from that text its order chiefly depends — whence it is called positive theology, because by interpreting Scripture it lays down the principles and foundations of theological dogmas;

or it is free, and that particular, about a certain argument only: if it is taught in a popular manner, it is fitted to the time, place, and capacity of the hearers; if by the rule of art or scholastically, it nearly follows the laws of treating a theme logically;

or it is universal, and that either compendious or catechetical about all or at least most things necessary to salvation, or full or systematic about all or most things revealed from heaven.

And this can be twofold: historical and logical.

1.11.51. The HISTORICAL is that which narrates in order what has been given, commanded, and done by God and by human beings.

It inserts prophecies, prayers, and exhortations partly into the narration itself, as the order of events allows, and partly sets them apart like certain special acts and documents of the kingdom.

This method is not only popular but also especially fitting to the nature of the subject, which is the kingdom — and a certain and singular one — by which God chiefly governs this world and the Church.

It has therefore been used in the sacred letters, useful and necessary for the learned and the unlearned, for whom no study ought to be preferred to grasping the TEXT OF SCRIPTURE with understanding and memory as far as can be done (Second Timothy 3:15; First Timothy 4:10).

1.11.62. The LOGICAL is that which aptly distinguishes the parts of the divine kingdom and their acts recalled to certain genera, and brings together under one head the parallels that occur scattered in the Scriptures, so that the joining of both methods may give greater light and help to understanding and memory alike.

It can be instituted in two ways.

First, when the end of the doctrine is known beforehand and the subject is set, the acts that are certain means to the end are enumerated nearly in the order in which they follow one another — the method we most approve in compendia and summaries of Christian doctrine, and which we follow in this handbook and idea of theology.

Second, the acts of God's kingdom can be so enumerated and divided that differences are taken chiefly from the subjects or matter of the kingdom; for habits and acts are specified chiefly by subjects and ends, as we taught in chapter 1, section 7.

Remote differences are taken from acting subjects (for example common-place classes about the acts of God and of man, and specifically about the acts and offices of pastors, parents, children, magistrates, subjects, and so on); nearer differences in the acts of each subject are taken from the objects toward which the action tends (for example man's acts and offices toward God, himself, neighbor, friends, enemies, the poor, the rich, and so on); nearest differences are taken from the end or good the action intends and introduces from subject into subject (for example man's acts and offices toward the neighbor as to the good of intellect, will, body, outward worship, and so on).

1.11.7A method of this kind most agrees with a full syntagma of common places, and is most useful to memory and understanding (which alone is to be looked to in method).

To memory, because when a few elements — subjects, objects, ends — are known, from their varied combination as of letters one may see and number in order many classes of acts as of words.

To understanding, because this method will keep more exactly and set out more clearly the analogy of the Church, household, and commonwealth of God, of father and prince; of the Christian as son and subject; of pastor, steward, legate, and the like.

The DIVISIONS of theology vary no less.

1. Some divide into doctrine concerning God and concerning God's actions or works.

2. Others, with doctrine of principles, end, and efficient cause first set down, divide into the methodological and the therapeutic.

3. Others, with principles first — the Word of God and God himself — set as parts the causes of our salvation, and so God's works and effects, and its subject, namely man.

4. Others divide into the knowledge of God and of ourselves.

5. Others into doctrine concerning God and the Church.

1.11.86. Others divide concerning God and the motion of the rational creature toward God.

7. Others into doctrine concerning God, concerning creatures and especially concerning man and his fall, concerning restoration through Christ, and concerning the sacraments and the life to come.

8. Others into doctrine concerning faith and good works, as Doctor Amandus Polanus does in his Syntagma Theologiae, book 2, chapter 1, where he gives the reasons for that division and confirms it by the authority of older doctors — Ignatius, Irenaeus, Lactantius, Augustine, Cyril of Alexandria, the Council of Toledo, and the Historia Tripartita — and of more recent ones: the Helvetic Confession, Theodore Beza, the Irenaeus of our age, Lambert Daneau, Zanchi, Ursinus, and Kinedoncius.

9. Others concerning God the testator, Christ the mediator, and the Church the heir.

10. Others finally distribute into theory concerning God, sin, and Christ, and into conversion and its fruits.

1.11.9III. All treatises and partitions by which the body of sacred theology is explained easily please us, provided that at least in the chief foundations of faith and salvation they agree with Sacred Scripture.

And without taking anything from anyone, we gladly and with thanksgiving give each theologian his due praise; yet with the good leave of others whose gifts we admire and revere, for easier knowledge and practice, as we set out to sketch theology as a practical discipline, we will now follow the analytic order and not inconveniently distribute it into the TWO aforesaid PARTS, the COMMON and the PROPER.

We do so because theological dogmas stand in a twofold difference.

Some contain those acts of God's kingdom that somehow belong to all who desire to be saved — namely the chief heads of the Christian religion as articles of faith and foundations of our salvation, which no one may ignore — and their interpretations, illustrations, religious determinations, and conclusions formed jointly from Scripture's dictates as theological principles by a disciplinary method and order mixed together and treated scholastically for the use of learned youth; once rightly known, these are not to be denied or attacked but approved and received and practiced by anyone according to the measure of his grace and age.

Others embrace those acts that belong not to all but chiefly to those who ought to save themselves and others and who hold ecclesiastical office first of all, or scholastic, political, or economic office, or are at least some part of such orders, whether they preside over others or are under them.

The former we will treat under the common part, the latter under the proper part, with the help of God Most High, mindful as to manner of treatment of that Augustinian precept that theology rather requires foundations than ornaments, and as to the matter itself of that saying of Ambrose or Prosper or Eucherius in On the Calling of the Gentiles, book 1, chapter 7: What God willed to be hidden is not to be searched out; what he has made plain is not to be denied — lest in the former we be found unlawfully curious, and in the latter damnably ungrateful.