Friday, April 29, 2022

Esther Chung-Kim on the Reformers, Sola Scriptura, and the Appeal to Tradition and the Patristics in their Eucharistic Debates

  

The Colloquy of Marburg demonstrated how Protestants early in the Reformation struggled to define the function of the church’s ancient tradition in their debates over the Lord’s Supper. Considering the church fathers as mostly faithful interpreters, the early reformers deemed the fathers valuable to biblical interpretation and therefore considered them as exegetical comrades. Even when the fathers seemed to be liabilities, they were somehow construed as positive examples, and the early Protestant reformers usually cited them as allies to bolster their own views and simultaneously challenge other doctrines. (Esther Chung-Kim, Inventing Authority: The use of the Church Fathers in Reformation Debates over the Eucharist [Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2011], 32)

 

Commenting on the 1539 edition of the Institutes

 

. . . Calvin does not see the church fathers as infallible. His willingness to criticize and “correct” the ancient writers is apparent from an early stage. He writes: “I observe that the ancient writers also misinterpreted this memorial in a way not consonant with the Lord’s institution, because their Supper displayed some appearance of repeated or at least renewed sacrifice. . . Not content with the simple and genuine institution of Christ, they have turned aside too much to the shadows of the law” (CO 1:1034). Calvin portrayed their mistakes as tendencies toward one extreme or another. While Calvin wants to uphold the fathers’ piety, he judges that they have misunderstood the Eucharist in their descriptions of renewed sacrifice. Nevertheless, in the same year, in his Reply to Sadoleto (1539), Calvin argues that the Protestant churches are faithful adherents to the early church tradition. (Ibid., 38)

 

Use of the Fathers in the Debate over the Lord’s Supper

 

Both collocutors claimed that the Word of God to be the sole norm—the declared principle of Scripture alone (sola scriptura). Beza, for example, believed that his use of a trope to understand how Christ was present in the elements of bread and wine suggested that the concept belonged to Scripture (not to the originality of the Reformed theologians), and he further testified to its antiquity by quoting Virgil and Homer. The emphasis on the principle of sola scriptura did not diminish the use of the church fathers throughout the sixteenth century; rather, it did just the opposite. In the search for the “correct” interpretation of Scripture, the fathers had a pivotal role in intra-Protestant tensions. The Reformation’s insistence on sola scriptura in no way excluded a reformer’s endeavor to prove connections to the fathers; in fact, the polemical context encouraged the recognition of other authorities. The intra-Protestant debates over the Eucharist provided the impetus for further study of the church fathers. Although the fathers were initially recalled for support, when the words of an ancient father challenged a reformer’s view, even the fathers had to be reinterpreted to fit the shape of Lutheran or Reformed views. There is no doubt that the ancient fathers played an integral role in the sixteenth-century debates over the Eucharist. In those cases, however, the fathers failed to gain any absolute power, and their saying did not cause many reformers to change their views in light of ancient evidence to the contrary. Nevertheless, the reformer’s new interpretations of the fathers because normative for each respective confessional tradition, both Lutheran and Reformed.

 

By 1586 the major confessions had been ratified. The Second Helvetic Confession (1566) had been adopted by the Swiss and also by the French La Rochelle (1571) in harmony with their own French Confession of 1559. The Lutheran Formula of Concord was first published in 1576, with subsequent editions following closely. Each church considered its confession to be the correct interpretation of the Word of God, drawn from Scripture. Although these reformers would not admit that any of the confessions had the unique authority of Scripture itself, they in fact believed that their confession statements stood as the standard for deciding “orthodox” doctrine. Furthermore, it became clear that each of these confessions was meant to define a religious identity based on an interpretation of Scripture that would be distinct from other interpretations.

 

At the Colloquy of Montbéliard, Andreae and his followers presented two groups of theses. The first group of Württemberg theses listed points on which the Lutherans judged there was no controversy. The second set considered controversial topics and included Reformed ideas that the Lutherans considered contrary to Scripture. Bezas’ response did not follow the order of questions or topics in Andreae’s work, but rather a sequence of arguments already formulated in his own Confessio fidei and his theses at the Colloquy of Poissy. These arguments were repeated in his 1593 De Controversiis in Coena Domini, and thereby established a blueprint for the Reformed understanding of the Eucharist. (Ibid., 127-28)