Month: August 2016

The Lutherans saw their movement as not having introduced any innovations but only correcting abuses

Inasmuch, then, as our churches dissent in no article of the faith from the Church Catholic, but only omit some abuses which are new, and which have been erroneously accepted by the corruption of the times, contrary to the intent of the Canons, we pray that Your Imperial Majesty would graciously hear both what has been changed, and what were the reasons why the people were not compelled to observe those abuses against their conscience.

Augsburg Confession
Article XXI.X

Works cannot save a man

My most merciful and all-merciful God, O Lord Jesus Christ! In Thy great love, Thou didst come down and become flesh in order to save all. Again, I pray Thee, save me by Grace! If Thou shouldst save me because of my deeds, it would not be a gift, but merely a duty. Truly, Thou aboundest in graciousness and art inexpressibly merciful! Thou hast said, O my Christ: “He who believes in me shall live and never see death”. If faith in Thee saves the desperate, behold: I believe! Save me, for Thou art my God and my Maker. May my faith replace my deeds, O my God, for Thou wilt find no deeds to justify me. May my faith be sufficient for all. May it answer for me; may it justify me; may it make me a partaker of Thine eternal glory; and may Satan not seize me, O Word, and boast that He has torn me from Thy hand and fold. O Christ my Savior: save me whether I want it or not! Come quickly, hurry, for I perish! Thou art my God from my mother’s womb. Grant, O Lord, that I may now love Thee as once I loved sin, and that I may labor for Thee without laziness as once I labored for Satan the deceiver. Even more, I will labor for Thee, my Lord and God Jesus Christ, all the days of my life, now and ever and unto ages of ages. Amen.

Orthodox prayer for salvation by grace

Denouncing prescribed prayer is a form of self exhaltation

The best thing, where it is possible, is to keep the patient from the serious intention of praying altogether. When the patient is an adult recently reconverted to the Enemy’s party, like your man, this is best done by encouraging him to remember, or to think he remembers, the parrot-like nature of his prayers in childhood. In reaction against that, he may be persuaded to aim at something entirely spontaneous, inward, informal, and unregularised; and what this will actually mean to a beginner will be an effort to produce in himself a vaguley devotional mood in which real concentration of will and intelligence have no part. One of their poets, Coleridge, has recorded that he did not pray “with moving lips and bended knees” but merely “composed his spirit to love” and indulged “a sense of supplication.” That is exactly the sort of prayer we want; and since it bears superficial resemblance to the prayer of silence as practised by those who are very far advanced in the Enemy’s service, clever and lazy patients can be taken in by it for quite a long time. At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls. It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.

C.S. Lewis
The Screwtape Letters

Luther appeals to the long held Catholic tradition of the sacraments as an interpretive guide to the real presence

a. Moreover, this article is no doctrine or fixture (auff satz) dreamt up by men apart from Scripture, but is clearly established and founded in the Gospel through luminous, pure, undoubted words of Christ, and has been unanimously believed and held in all the world from the outset of the Christian church to this hour, as is proved by the books and writings of the dear Fathers of both Greek and Latin language and also by daily custom and the work of experience to this hour. This testimony of the entire holy Christian church (assuming we had no more than it) should alone suffice to attach us to this article and to move us neither to hear nor to tolerate any factious spirit on this matter. For it is a perilous and dreadful thing to hear or believe anything against the unanimous testimony, belief, and doctrine of the entire holy Christian church.

b. It would be a very dangerous to conclude that for so many hundreds of years the Church across all of Christendom did not have the right understanding of the sacrament.

Martin Luther
a. Letter to Duke Albrecht of Prussia, 1532
b. Opinion of 17 December 1534

The unraveling onion of the Reformation criticism of tradition

Like many of the Protestant critics who followed him, Semler could claim to be following in the footsteps of Luther and the Reformation, and to be doing so with greater consistency than the political situation of the 16th century had permitted the first Protestant reformers themselves to do. The same kind of historical–critical scrutiny to which Luther and his fellow reformers had subjected to cherished traditions and doctrines of the medieval church, such as the claims of the Papacy or even the sacramental system, could and should be rolled back to the very first centuries of the history of the church. Even the first century, revered as “apostolic,” must not be beyond the reach of historical criticism.

Jaroslav Pelikan
Whose Bible Is It?
The Canon and the Critics

The irony of pitting the Bible against the Church

Another aspect of the divine irony that we have seen repeatedly in the history of the use of the Bible within both Judaism and Christianity is that the Bible being used as a weapon against church and tradition had itself come from the arsenal of the church and had been preserved and protected by the tradition.

Jaroslav Pelikan
Whose Bible Is It?
The Bible Only

The Bible is not self authenticating

The very conflict over the biblical canon between the Protestant Reformers and the Council of Trent made it clear that even in a doctrine of sola Scriptura the authority of the Bible did not authenticate itself automatically (which would have required some kind of doctrine of repeated inspiration in each generation of the history of the church) but depended on recognition by tradition and by the church for acceptance.

Jaroslav Pelikan
Whose Bible Is It?
The Bible Only