Scripture, Tradition, And Church: From Peter Abelard To Karl Barth

By Douglas A. Sweeney

[Douglas A. Sweeney is Dean and Professor of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School, Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama.]

[This is the third article in the four-part series “Sources of Authority for Teaching Christian Doctrine: A Brief Historical Sketch,” delivered as the W. H. Griffith Thomas lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, February 4–7, 2020.]

“The saying is sure: whoever aspires to the office of bishop desires a noble task. Now a bishop must be above reproach, married only once, temperate, sensible, respectable, hospitable, an apt teacher, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, and not a lover of money. He must manage his own household well, keeping his children submissive and respectful in every way—for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how can he take care of God’s church? . . . I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these instructions to you so that, if I am delayed, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth” (1 Tim 3:1–5, 14–15, NRSV).

In the first lecture of this series, we talked about the sending of the Spirit and the spread of Christian doctrine during early church history. In the second lecture, we treated creeds, canons, church councils, and the best-known contests over biblical exegesis in the post-canonical era. In this third lecture, it’s time to tell the part of our story most know best—the part in which Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants alike debated the relative authority of Scripture, Tradition (now spelled with a capital T), and leaders of the church in the teaching of its doctrine to the faithful.

A fitting place to resume our story is the early twelfth century and Abelard, for no one symbolizes medieval disagreements over doctrine and sources of authority more fully than the Frenchman Peter Abelard, whose Sic et Non (Yes and No, c. 1120) undermined the faith of many in the unified witness of the teachers of the church. Posing one hundred fifty-eight theological questions, he arrayed the church fathers on opposing sides of each question, demonstrating that they contradicted themselves and encouraging a dialectical search for truth. Despite the errors many frequently decried in Sic et Non, it awakened earnest students to the problems that attend glib appeals to “the tradition” or “the witness of the fathers,” and it was placed much later on the Index of Forbidden Books (Index Librorum Prohibitorum).[1] In the meantime, it fueled the rise of orthodox, organized compilations of “sentences” on Scripture and tradition culled from early church fathers, learned commentaries upon the most famous of these sentences, and summaries of doctrine by theologians eager to show that Christian faith coheres. The most influential of these were the Four Books of Sentences by Bishop Peter Lombard (c. 1155–57), an Italian serving in Paris, which became the leading dogmatic textbook in Europe and inspired scores of commentaries in centuries to come.[2]

Many now yearned for a stable and reliable way to inculcate the Word by the Spirit in the church. There are always some who face ambiguity with ease, keeping faith with God and neighbor in the midst of uncertainty, conflict, and mystery. But most want guidance. And by the thirteenth century, many Westerners attained it in a resolution regarding the relationship between Scripture, tradition, and the church close to that of Thomas Aquinas, for whom orthodox tradition, determined by the church, was a source of authority analogous to Scripture. This interrelationship of authorities was varied, to be sure, and shaped doctrine indirectly through the dictates of popes, church councils, and other organs of the Catholic magisterium (which by now stood apart from the bishops of the East, who favored a somewhat more conciliar, less papal, understanding of the promulgation of doctrine). In the main, ecclesial authority was used to guide biblical exegesis. But it also guided doctrine, as it harmonized conflicts under the aegis of the church in favor of Roman Catholic orthodoxy. As Thomas wrote famously in Summa Theologiae (1265–74), “Doctrine is especially based upon arguments from authority, inasmuch as its principles are obtained by revelation: thus we ought to believe on the authority of those to whom the revelation has been made.”[3] He insisted that such conduits of special revelation “ought not to say about God anything which is not found in Holy Scripture either explicitly or implicitly.”[4] Thomas claimed that the bishops usually followed this rule. “In every council of the Church,” he said, “a symbol of faith has been drawn up to meet some prevalent error condemned in the council at that time. Hence subsequent councils are not to be described as making a new symbol of faith; but what was implicitly contained in the first symbol was explained by some addition directed against rising heresies.”[5] Church teaching explicated the deposit of the faith. And even unwritten tradition played a part in this, though always under the tutelage of apostolic heirs. “The Apostles, led by the inward instinct of the Holy Ghost, handed down to the churches certain instructions which they did not put in writing, but which have been ordained, in accordance with the observance of the Church as practiced by the faithful as time went on.”[6] Thus tradition always functioned as a necessary, apostolic guide to revelation when deployed by those entrusted with the teaching of the church. God’s Spirit gave the Word through the bishops of the Catholic Church, who inculcated Scripture in accordance with tradition.

By the late Middle Ages, even critics of the papacy and pillars of conciliarism rooted their positions in the soil of tradition. Academics disagreed about the relative authority of popes, church councils, Christian princes, canon law, and the doctors of the church in discerning church tradition. Some questioned whether anything not based on the Bible was essential to salvation. During the Western papal schism (1378–1417), many sought a more episcopal approach to solving internal doctrinal disputes. Still, most parties involved laid claim to the past. Even those at the Council of Constance (1414–18), convened at the apex of conciliar dominion to put an end, once and for all, to the Western papal schism, resorted to “the catholic faith,” councils, and the fathers—condemning the English theologian John Wycliffe and the Czech, or Bohemian, theologian Jan Hus, who resisted their rendition of late medieval catholicity—compelling future pontiffs to profess their allegiance to orthodox tradition. “As long as I am in this fragile life,” they had to pledge, “I will firmly believe and hold the catholic faith, according to the traditions of the apostles, of the general councils and of other holy fathers, especially of the eight holy universal councils . . . as well as of the general councils at the Lateran, Lyons and Vienne.” Furthermore, “I will preserve this faith unchanged to the last dot and will confirm, defend and preach it to the point of death and the shedding of my blood.”[7]

Thus when Luther claimed not only that the papacy had erred, but that councils, canon law, and the mass itself were flawed, pandemonium ensued, tearing scabs from several wounds on the global body of Christ that had formed very slowly and had never quite healed. Luther’s brief against the Catholic Church was leveled most loudly in the Ninety-five Theses (1517). Upset about the sale of indulgences in Germany to raise funds for Rome, he contended that this practice misconstrued Christian teaching on salvation by grace. But his case against the Church’s view of Scripture and tradition would continue to develop over the next several years. At the Leipzig Disputation versus Johann Eck of Ingolstadt (1519), he opposed the supremacy of popes and church councils. Then he published three treatises in 1520 against the tyranny of Rome over German-speaking Christians, the “Babylonian”/Roman captivity of the church, and the freedom of the Christian to live for God without subservience to man-made rules. Before these tracts were released, Pope Leo X condemned him in a papal bull (Exsurge Domine, 1520), which summarized his “heresy” in forty-one doctrines and threatened to exclude him from the sacraments if he did not recant in sixty days. Luther publicly burned the bull six months later. He was excommunicated early in 1521 and commanded to appear before the emperor at Worms. In response to the Pope’s condemnation of his views, he claimed to “preach nothing new” and asserted that the Bible had been muffled by the curia—even by the pope—and that Scripture alone, not the Roman magisterium, was infallible and determinative in matters of faith and practice. “This is my answer to those also who accuse me of rejecting all the holy teachers of the church,” Luther wrote. “I do not reject them. But everyone, indeed, knows that at times they have erred, as men will; therefore, I am ready to trust them only when they give me evidence for their opinions from Scripture, which has never erred. . . . Scripture alone is the true lord and master of all writings and doctrine on earth.”[8] Before Emperor Charles V, he added, “unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God.”[9] This is standard fare today among the heirs of Luther’s doctrine. But in 1521, it made him an outlaw.

Church officials at the Council of Trent (1545–63) soon circled the wagons, protecting an inviolate, concatenated concept of the catholic tradition. “Following the example of the orthodox fathers,” they decreed in an effort to repel Luther’s teaching, “the council accepts and venerates with a like feeling of piety and reverence” both the contents of the Vulgate (the common Latin Bible, Apocrypha included) and “traditions” of “faith and conduct, as either directly spoken by Christ or dictated by the holy Spirit, which have been preserved in unbroken sequence” in the church. And “if anyone should not accept” the Vulgate and “aforesaid traditions” of the church, “let him be anathema.” Protestants were severed from the Roman Catholic Church. “No one, relying on his personal judgment,” the council fathers continued,

shall dare to interpret the sacred scriptures either by twisting its text to his individual meaning in opposition to that which has been and is held by holy mother church, whose function is to pass judgment on the true meaning and interpretation of the sacred scriptures; or by giving it meanings contrary to the unanimous consent of the fathers. . . . Whoever acts contrary to this decision is to be publicly named by religious superiors and punished by the penalties prescribed by law.[10]

More than three centuries later, these strictures were confirmed at the First Vatican Council (1869–70). “Supernatural revelation,” its delegates explained, “according to the belief of the universal church, as declared by the sacred council of Trent, is contained in written books and unwritten traditions.” And “that meaning of holy scripture must be held to be the true one, which holy mother church held and holds.”[11]

Luther had not intended to disown the tradition. On the contrary, he thought his evangelical reformers held the best claim to rightful continuity with the past. But as they made use of what they came to call the Scripture principle, wielding God’s Word to weed and prune the tradition and revise Christian doctrine with their own exegesis, they accelerated the doctrinal diversity of Christendom—and expanded the means by which the Spirit was discerned—at a rate unprecedented in history. The French reformer Jean Calvin, in an address to King Francis I prefaced to his Institutes (1536 ff.), did “not at all doubt” that his Reformation doctrine sounded new to Catholic critics, “since to them both Christ himself and his gospel are new.” But it clearly had the weight of Christian history on its side. “All the fathers,” he insisted in a hyperbolic flourish, “with one heart have abhorred and with one voice have detested the fact that God’s Holy Word has been contaminated by the subtleties of sophists and involved in the squabbles of dialecticians. When they attempt nothing in life but to enshroud and obscure the simplicity of Scripture with endless contentions and worse than sophistic brawls, do they keep themselves within these borders?,” Calvin queried. “If the fathers were now brought back to life,” he concluded, they would surely sympathize with the reformers.[12] Even high-church Protestants subscribed to tradition only insofar as the latter followed Scripture. As Richard Hooker clarified in his Elizabethan Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593 ff.), lest “the name of tradition should be offensive . . . consideringe how farre by some it . . . is abused, wee meane by traditions ordinances made in the prime of Christian religion, established with that authoritie which Christ hath left his Church for matters indifferent, and in that consideration requisite to be observed till like authoritie see just and reasonable cause to alter them.” Traditions were derived from the teaching of the apostles and revisable based upon the very same thing—though, for Anglicans like Hooker, only in rightly-ordered ways by ecclesial officials.[13] Even the most radical Protestants interpreted the Bible with assistance from the past. But the Reformation raised some rather disconcerting questions. Did the church’s rightful teachers ever get the Bible wrong? Did popes and councils err? And if they did, what should be done?

As Protestantism spread, so did the spirit of reform, critical thinking, and revision of the church’s teaching ministry that stemmed from the crises of the late “middle ages” (a term that had been coined amid these European culture wars by those who appealed to ancient sources of renewal, leaping over a millennium of meantime to do so). And in the age of “the Enlightenment,” this spirit ran away from its ecclesiastical home, as historicism and evolutionary thought undermined the faith of many in traditionary knowledge, whether in Scripture or the dogmatic history of the church. Western Europe’s literati dared to think for themselves, as Immanuel Kant suggested.[14] They distrusted the traditions of medieval Christendom, employed critical methods in the study of the Bible, and labored to advance upon the thinking of the past. Many thought that human knowledge and behavior were improving. And they hoped that human reason and scientific learning would enable them to overcome the worst of world history. The best-known among them were free-thinking intellectuals in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries: Spinoza, Voltaire, Locke, Hume, Kant, and Hegel. But many church leaders, too, became developmental thinkers, handing on the faith in more historical, progressive, less authoritarian styles—and promoting new methods of listening to the Spirit.

In the grand scheme of things, only a fraction of the people of God participated in this Western intellectual movement, at least in the beginning. Many Christians lived beyond the reach of European culture. And few, even in Europe, read the work of the elite. Most of the Orthodox, for instance, carried on much as before. They continued to affirm the importance of perpetuating orthodox tradition. And they championed the role of ancient practices in doing so, especially ascetic and devotional exercises. “Tradition,” wrote Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow in the eighteenth century, “does not consist uniquely in visible and verbal transmissions of the teachings, the rules, institutions and rites: it is at the same time an invisible and actual communication of grace and sanctification.”[15] These priorities were detailed in the Philokalia (1782), an Orthodox compendium of texts by spiritual masters of the hesychast tradition of prayer without ceasing as a means to union with God. Compiled by the brothers of Mt. Athos in Greece (mainly Nicodemus the Hagiorite and Macarius of Corinth), it facilitated an ancient manner of Christian prayer and piety—lost to the philosophes of early modern Europe—made famous in an anonymous Russian novel, The Way of a Pilgrim (1884).[16]

But “modern” ways of thinking did filter through the church—slowly but surely, drip by drip—in the West and its colonies. And mainstream Christians began to reconceive tradition not so much as a deposit that is meant to be preserved; but as an ongoing process of clarifying and explicating apostolic teaching (with assistance from believers outside the church hierarchy). John Henry Newman, a convert to and cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church, is the best-known symbol of this modern transformation. In his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), he suggested that the teaching of the Church has improved over time and that her doctrine grows clearer and more detailed with age. “Time is necessary,” he wrote, “for the full comprehension and perfection of great ideas.” Especially with respect to church teaching, he emphasized, “the highest and most wonderful truths, though communicated to the world once for all by inspired teachers, could not be comprehended all at once by the recipients, but, as being received and transmitted by minds not inspired and through media which were human, have required only the longer time and deeper thought for their full elucidation.” He drove this point home with a now-famous metaphor. “It is indeed sometimes said that the stream is clearest near the spring,” he admitted. Nonetheless, 

this image . . . does not apply to the history of a philosophy or belief, which on the contrary is more equable, and purer, and stronger, when its bed has become deep, and broad, and full. It necessarily rises out of an existing state of things, and for a time savours of the soil. Its vital element needs disengaging from what is foreign and temporary. . . . Its beginnings are no measure of its capabilities, nor of its scope. . . . From time to time it makes essays which fail, and are in consequence abandoned. . . . In time it enters upon strange territory; points of controversy alter their bearing; parties rise and fall around it; dangers and hopes appear in new relations; and old principles reappear under new forms. It changes with them in order to remain the same. In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.

Newman was not a relativist, leveler, or liberal. He submitted to the papacy and served as a cardinal. He studied church history, though, specializing in fourth-century Trinitarian doctrine, and he knew that in the past the heat of controversy had often helped to purify and clarify the teaching of the church. He also knew the magisterium had made some big mistakes and that, in seasons of confusion, the religion of the faithful kept the church on course. In “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine” (1859), he contended that the piety of Christians “is one of the witnesses to the fact of the tradition of revealed doctrine.” Their “consensus,” furthermore, when the going gets tough, “is the voice of the Infallible Church.” The teaching office “is more happy,” he appended in a hint to the bishops, “when she has such enthusiastic partisans about her . . . than when she cuts off the faithful from the study of her divine doctrines and the sympathy of her divine contemplations, and requires from them a fides implicita [implicit faith] in her word, which in the educated classes will terminate in indifference, and in the poorer in superstition.”[17]

Conservatives in Rome viewed Newman with suspicion. For as Jacques Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, had put it for them, most notably in History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches (1688), Catholic teaching is “always the same” (semper eadem), which made it far more credible, reliable, and sure than the multiple alternatives on offer from the Protestants.[18] Developmental thinking, furthermore, had paved a way not just for doctrinal diversity, but also for modernism and liberalism. And some Catholic thinkers later radicalized a Newmanesque notion of tradition, undercutting age-old doctrines in the process. The French priest Alfred Loisy, and the Irish Catholic convert and Jesuit Father, George Tyrrell, both well-known academics, were removed from the Church for developmental views. The French philosopher, Maurice Blondel, a married layman, would receive the last rites. But his History and Dogma (1904) criticized both “historicists” and old-fashioned “extrinsicists” (apologists for static, inorganic church tradition) in favor of a theory of tradition as “vital reality,” a living organism that evolves over time under the guidance of the Spirit and whose truth is verified in Christian practice, or action.[19] Many say that the anti-modern statements of Pius X, such as Lamentabili Sane (1907) and Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907), assailed Blondel. For, perhaps most importantly, officials at Vatican I (1869–70) had banned progressive views of doctrine in no uncertain terms. “That meaning of the sacred dogmas is ever to be maintained,” they insisted quite clearly, “which has once been declared by holy mother church, and there must never be any abandonment of this sense under the pretext or in the name of a more profound understanding.” Further, “if anyone says that it is possible that at some time, given the advancement of knowledge, a sense may be assigned to the dogmas propounded by the church which is different from that which the church has understood and understands: let him be anathema.”[20]

Not only left-leaning Catholics but even the most conservative Protestants were subject to this ruling. The latter placed Scripture over creeds, confessions, and other forms of tradition, historicizing them all and thus continuing to transform their churches’ teaching ministries. Those in universities advocated the value of independent, critical thinking, improving on the past by means of humanistic scholarship. Those in congregations or in new, modern seminaries perpetuated their churches’ own confessional traditions. But they often criticized other churches as they did so—a practice then common in every major branch of Christendom—attempting to revise the larger catholic tradition. Philip Schaff, for example, perhaps the best-known Protestant at work in the churches to address these issues during the nineteenth century, valorized tradition more than many of his peers. He believed that it was pulsing well past the Church of Rome, though, ascending to a higher, “evangelical-catholic” future. After moving from Berlin to accept a teaching post at a German Reformed seminary in central Pennsylvania, he released a short treatise titled What Is Church History? A Vindication of the Idea of Historical Development (1846), appearing at first like his Catholic colleague Newman. “So precisely as the single Christian does not become complete at a stroke,” he contended, “but only by degrees, the church, as the complex of all Christians, must admit and require too a gradual development.” This process “is organic,” Schaff continued to echo Newman. “Christianity is a new creation, that unfolds itself continually more and more from within.” Not content with a Rome-bound theory of tradition, though, Schaff claimed “the main stream” of his catholic river, though “formed first by the Greek-Roman universal church,” had wended through “Romano-Germanic Catholicism” only to flow more recently in “evangelical Protestantism.”[21]

A passionate ecumenist, Schaff proved friendlier to those in other churches than the bulk of his contemporaries. Most nineteenth-century Protestants were stoutly anti-Catholic, using Scripture and tradition not simply to surpass but to tear down much of the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Charles Porterfield Krauth is a well-known example. Like Newman, Schaff, and others, he adopted a developmental view of Christian doctrine. In his massive work on The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology (1871), he explained that “the identity of the Church faith resembles not the sameness of a rock, but rather the living identity of a man. The babe and the adult are identical,” he underlined to stress continuity in Protestant theology:

They are the same being in different stages of maturity: that which constitutes the individual does not change. . . . Adult perfection is reached not by amputations and ingraftings, but by growth, in which the identifying energy conforms everything to its own nature. The faith of the Church now is identical with what it was in the Apostolic time, but the relation of identity does not preclude growth—it only excludes change of identity. . . . In a word, the advances are wrought, not by change in the Church faith, but by the perpetual activity of that faith, a faith which because it is incapable of change itself, assimilates more and more to it the consciousness of the Church, her system of doctrine, her language, and her life.

Doctrine grows without change, a paradox resembling the argument of Newman. Krauth clarified, however, that as the faith grew it also outgrew the many errors of the Roman Catholic Church, escaping from the “Babylon” of late-medieval blight. During the Protestant Reformation, “the fire of the Divine Word destroyed the accumulated rubbish of tradition, swept away the hay, wood, and stubble, which the hand of man had gathered on the foundation and heaped over the temple, and the gold, silver, and precious stones of the true house of God appeared.”[22] This sounds harsh today, but it was commonplace among early modern Protestants. And as nineteenth-century Catholic leaders “grew” their Mariology (codifying the doctrine of the immaculate conception in 1854) and strengthened their commitment to the popes’ jurisdiction (codifying the doctrine of papal infallibility in 1870), this anti-Catholic tendency increased.

The most important Protestant thinker to write about these issues for twentieth-century readers was the Swiss Reformed churchman and professor, Karl Barth. In his Church Dogmatics (1932–67), Barth took on board a progressive view of doctrine. But in struggling against the modern domestication of God and his Word (by liberal predecessors who would only speak of God “from below,” on the basis of experience and consciousness), he insisted on the power and priority of Scripture over all other rivals, including church tradition. “The present-day witnesses of the Word of God can and should look back to the witnesses of the same Word who preceded them,” he granted right away. “These fathers and brethren have a definite authority, the authority of prior witnesses . . . who have to be respected.” But the weight of their tradition and the authority of the church must never be confused with the authority of Scripture. The Word of God “is given to the Church in such a way that it is always His Word as against its word.” Underneath the Word of God the church does have authority. She “exercises it,” though, in obedience to the Word, “by claiming for [her]self not a direct, but only a mediate authority, not a material but a formal, not an absolute but a relative.” Hence “what we know as dogma is in principle fallible and is therefore neither final nor unalterable,” he claimed. “Every Church confession can be regarded only as a stage on a road which as such can be relativised and succeeded by a further stage in the form of an altered confession.”[23] This argument was not just academic for Barth. In the face of German Christians who accommodated the faith to the Nazi regime, he had helped in the drafting of the Barmen Declaration (1934), a new church confession that improved Christian witness to the lordship of Christ over all earthly powers.[24]

By the early twentieth century, then, the differences among Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant understandings of the relationship of Scripture and tradition had become deeply entrenched. The modern ecumenical movement had just begun to take flight, but massive differences remained about the nature of and best ways to teach the Christian faith. Would the churches’ leading teachers find a better way forward? How did we get from trench warfare in the early twentieth century to the much more irenic sort of engagement on our questions we have come to know today? These questions will be taken up in the final lecture of this series.

Notes

1. Peter Abelard, Sic et Non (c. 1120); partial English translation at https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/Abelard-SicetNon-Prologue.asp.
2. Peter Lombard, Libri Quattuor Sententiarum (c. 1155–57); partial English translation available for purchase at https://www.franciscan-archive.org/lombardus/I-Sent.html; full English translation: Peter Lombard, The Sentences, trans. Giulio Silano, 4 vols. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2007–2010).
3. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 1, a. 8; English translation at http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1001.htm#article8.
4. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 36, a. 2; English translation at http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1036.htm#article2.
5. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 36, a. 2.
6. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, III, q. 25, a. 3; English translation at http://www.newadvent.org/summa/4025.htm.
7. Decreed in Session 39, 9 October 1417. The Latin original with English translation is provided in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner, 2 vols. (London: Sheed & Ward, 1990), 1:442. The eighth of the “holy universal councils” mentioned in this statement is Constantinople IV (879–80), not recognized as a universal council in the East.
8. From the introduction to Martin Luther, Grund und Ursache aller Artikel D. Martin Luthers so durch romische Bulle unrechtlich verdammt sind, Luther’s German translation of his Assertio Omnium Articulorum M. Lutheri, per Bullam Leonis X, Novissimam Damnatorum, in D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (hereafter cited as WA), 69 vols. (bound as 88) (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1883–2009); 7:94–115; English translation in Martin Luther, Career of the Reformer II, in Luther’s Works (hereafter cited as LW), vol. 32, ed. George W. Forell (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1958), 3–98 (quotation from pages 11–12).
9. WA, 7:838; English translation in LW, 32:112.
10. Council of Trent, Session 4, 8 April 1546, in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Tanner, 2:663–64.
11. First Vatican Council, Session 3, 24 April 1870, in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Tanner, 2:806.
12. From the Praefatio ad Christianissimum Regem Franciae, qua hic ei liber pro confessione fidei offertur, in Calvin’s Christianae Religionis Institutio (Basel: T. Platteru & B. Lasium, 1536), 5–41; English translation in John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, 2 vols., Library of Christian Classics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960), 1:9–31 (quotations from pages 16 and 22).
13. Richard Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, Preface and Books I–V, ed. Georges Edelen and W. Speed Hill, 2 vols., The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), 2:302.
14. Immanuel Kant, “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?,” Berlinische Monatsschrift 12 (1784): 481–94; English translation at http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html.
15. English translation in Georges Florovsky, Puti Russkago Bogoslovia (Paris: YMCA Press, 1937), 178.
16. For English versions of these sources, see The Philokalia, comp. St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarios of Corinth, trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, Kallistos Ware, et al., 3 vols. (London: Faber and Faber, 1979–84); and The Way of a Pilgrim and The Pilgrim Continues His Way, trans. Olga Savin (Boston: Shambhala, 2001).
17. John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 6th ed., Notre Dame Series in the Great Books (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 29–30, 40; and John Henry Newman, “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine,” Rambler, 3d ser., 1 (July 1859): 198–230, quoted here from its definitive, critical edition, John Henry Newman, On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine, ed. John Coulson (Kansas City, MO: Sheed and Ward, 1961), 63, 106. This principle (of the importance of the consensus of the faithful) is one with which the Orthodox agree.
18. Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, Histoire des variations des églises protestantes, 2 vols. (Paris: Chez la veuve de Sebastien Mabre-Cramoisy, 1688).
19. Maurice Blondel, Histoire et Dogme (1904), as presented in The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma, trans. Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 267, 275.
20. First Vatican Council, Session 3, 24 April 1870, in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Tanner, 2:809, 811.
21. Philip Schaff, What Is Church History? A Vindication of the Idea of Historical Development, trans. John W. Nevin (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Co., 1846), 87, 91, 106–7. An expansion of a German lecture given in Mercersburg, this treatise was first released in English.
22. Charles P. Krauth, The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology: As Represented in the Augsburg Confession, and in the History and Literature of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1871), 270, 14, 19.
23. Karl Barth, Die Kirchliche Dogmatik, I/2 (Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag A. G. Zollikon, 1938), § 20; English translation, Church Dogmatics, vol. I/2, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. G. T. Thomson and Harold Knight (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1956), 538–660 (quotations from pages 573, 579, 586, 593, 657–59).
24. Theologische Erklärung zur gegenwärtigen Lage der Deutschen Evangelischen Kirche (Barmer Theologische Erklärung); English translation at http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/barmen.htm.