Theological Theses

1Theology, by the etymology of the word, means speech about God. Taken generally, it names every teaching that treats of God and of divine things. And because God can be treated of in two ways — first from principles known by the natural light, then from principles which God has made known in a supernatural manner — a twofold theology is commonly distinguished: one natural, the other supernatural.

Natural theology is that part of philosophy which treats chiefly of immaterial being and of God. Aristotle himself calls metaphysics by this name in the first book of the Metaphysics. Supernatural theology, however, is that teaching about God which has its origin from divine revelation. This theology is called theology absolutely and by antonomasia. It is of this alone that we must treat from here on.

Further, the habit that rests on revelation is twofold. One is that by which we simply believe and embrace what is contained in the word of God; and this habit is nothing other than faith itself. The other is that by which a person is fitted to explain distinctly the things that faith believes, to assert and defend them with various reasons, and from them to draw legitimate consequences. This habit is properly called theology.

Theology, taken in this way, stands to faith as science stands to understanding. For faith is the habit of the principles; theology is the habit of the conclusions. The primary and principal object of faith is certain truths immediately and expressly revealed by God. The proper objects of theology are those revealed only mediately and virtually — that is, those gathered by reasoning from those first immediately revealed truths. So theology, though distinguished from faith, still presupposes faith and in a way includes it. But faith does not necessarily bring theology along with it.

2Many things are commonly disputed about theology in the schools. But what we now propose to teach on this subject will be referred to these heads: first, what and how great is the necessity of theology; second, what is its nature, where we must inquire into its genus and difference; third, what is the dignity of theology and its excellence above the remaining sciences.

As to the first: it is certain that theology is not in itself necessary for each person unto salvation — that is, it is not necessary that all who come to eternal life be endowed with theological science. For in the church all are not teachers, as the Apostle teaches (1 Corinthians 12:29); nor are they for that reason deprived of salvation. For the salvation of individuals, faith suffices; a fuller and wider knowledge of the things of faith is not necessarily required.

Nevertheless theology — that is, such a science of divine things as can defend, explain, and commend the faith itself — is necessary in the church, so that the church may stand and be preserved, and so that individuals may obtain salvation. This the Apostle teaches (Ephesians 4:11-14), where besides other things he affirms that Christ appointed teachers in his church for the perfecting of the saints and the building up of the body of Christ, and so that we may not be children tossed and carried about by every wind of teaching. From this it is plain that there is danger, if there are no teachers in the church, that its frame be dissolved, the building fall, and private persons fall away from the faith, carried off by many and various errors. And the same Apostle requires as a necessary condition in a bishop that he be able to exhort in sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict (Titus 1:9) — which cannot be done by one who is not more learned in sacred things than the common run of the faithful.

3And certainly the church never existed without such men, who by doctrine in divine things stood above the pious and faithful people. For of old doctors of that kind were the patriarchs and the prophets, who had their own schools and disciples — those called in Scripture the sons of the prophets. A school of that kind is thought to have been the hill of God mentioned in (1 Samuel 10). And it is thought to have taken that name because divine teaching was handed down there. Likewise in (2 Chronicles 34) mention is made of the Mishneh, in which Huldah the prophetess is said to have lived. That word is translated by many as school, or college, which our French version has followed. For from the usage of the Chaldee and Rabbinic tongue the root signifies to learn and to teach. Whence the Talmudic text is called by the Hebrews the Mishnah, as if you were to say doctrine, or discipline, by a certain antonomasia.

After the times of the prophets also the Jewish church had its own theologians, who were called Wise Men, Masters, and Scribes. With that title Ezra himself is marked in the book that bears his name. And of this same kind were those who in the Gospel are called doctors and experts of the law. From them Christ, taking away the key of knowledge, handed it to the apostles, and to pastors and teachers, who for their part are their successors.

But besides ordinary bishops and pastors, in whom at least some knowledge of theology is required, the Christian church from the beginning has had its own schools, and doctors professing sacred teaching in them and expounding the divine writings. Especially famous was the Alexandrian school, in which, if Jerome is believed in his book On Ecclesiastical Writers, there had been in an unbroken series, from the times of the evangelist Mark down to Jerome's own times, ecclesiastical doctors. Of whom Pantaenus is especially remembered, and Clement of Alexandria, who succeeded him.

And certainly from the very necessity of faith the necessity of theological science is inferred. For faith cannot be propagated and endure unless there are those who teach, commend, and defend the faith. But it is not for every believer to do this — only for those who are skilled in Scripture and in divine things. So for the preservation of the faith and of the church, and consequently for the salvation of men, theology is necessary: that is, in the church there must be men skilled in divine things, who generate, foster, and nourish faith in others — though it is not necessary that each person be so taught and skilled.

4So much, then, is clear about the necessity of theology. But now, that we may hold clearly and distinctly what it is, we must first inquire into its genus. The first question, therefore, is whether our theology is a science. On which we say that theology is not a science accurately speaking, and according to the definition of science laid down by Aristotle. For science according to Aristotle is an evident assent: but theological conclusions are not evident. And that is because they are gathered from inevident principles. For faith is the habit of the theological principles. But faith is an inevident habit. For the Apostle opposes faith to sight: (2 Corinthians 5:7) — By faith, he says, we walk, not by sight. And (Hebrews 11:1) teaches that faith is of things that are not seen. Faith, he says, is the substance of things hoped for, and the argument of things that are not seen.

Now those things are said to be evident which of themselves move the intellect to the knowledge of them — that is, which of themselves persuade and commend themselves to the mind, and by their own light so strike and convince the mind that it cannot but assent to them. That this does not suit the mysteries of our faith is plain. For they are not things known of themselves, whose truth of itself lays itself open to our mind. But that we assent to them, we do because of the authority and testimony of God, who revealed and confirmed them by his Word.

But here a distinction must be made between the evidence of the consequent and the evidence of the consequence. For theological conclusions are indeed not evident: yet the consequence by which they are drawn from their principles is evident. From inevident premises, to be sure — but they are gathered evidently. For example: that Christ is true God and true man is a principle of faith, which of itself is not evident, but is believed because of God's testimony alone. Yet from it it evidently follows that in Christ there are two wills, one divine and the other human. And so in this respect theology lacks nothing toward the true character of a science.

Although, however, theology is not a science properly and strictly speaking, and according to all the conditions of science laid down by Aristotle, still there is no habit of the mind to which it more nearly approaches, and to which it ought rather to be referred. For it is a certain knowledge evidently deduced from certain principles, which, though they are inevident, are no less certain than if they were evident. And so it is rightly and fittingly called a science, nor can it be designated by any more apt name.

5Further, theology is one science by species, not many. For although it treats of things that are very diverse — for example, of God, of angels, of man, of virtues and vices, which seem to belong to altogether different sciences — still all those things agree in one common formal reason, under which they confront and are objected to theology. That common reason is divine revelation. For the things I have named do not fall under the theologian's consideration in any way whatever, but only insofar as they can be known through divine revelation. For example, concerning the nature, powers, and duty of man the theologian does not teach whatever can be taught, but only those things which he has learned and gathered from the word of God.

Here it must also be noted that not whatever God reveals in any manner whatever pertains to the object of theology. For God may have revealed certain things privately to many persons, which do not fall under this science. But here by revelation we understand that which is common to the whole church, and which was made for its common usefulness, and which God willed to be consigned in writing. For the theologian ought to prove his assertions not from private revelations made to this person or that, but from sacred Scripture.

Further, theology does not seem to be a science merely speculative, nor merely practical, but practical and speculative at once. And that is because theology treats of many things that belong to practical science as well as to speculative. For it contemplates God and the divine mysteries, which do not fall under action; and it also gives precepts of life, and teaches what manners are worthy of a Christian man.

Nevertheless we judge theology to be practical rather than speculative. For the whole of theology is occupied in the explanation and defense of the things contained in the Scriptures. But the teaching contained in the Scriptures, from the scope of God himself who teaches and reveals, is referred to action — namely to the love of God and of neighbor. Nor has anyone attained the scope of this teaching who does not refer whatever he has learned from the word of God to that end. For Christ affirms in (Matthew 22:37-40) that the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments: you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and your neighbor as yourself. Then Paul says in (Romans 15:4) that whatever things were written were written for our learning, that through patience and the comfort of the Scriptures we might have hope. But above all his words in (2 Timothy 3:16-17) are to be weighed: All Scripture is inspired by God, and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for discipline which is in righteousness; that the man of God may be perfect, and thoroughly furnished unto every good work.

To this belongs the fact that the Gospel is called by the same Paul a teaching according to godliness (1 Timothy 6:3). For that is for no other reason than that the chief scope of the Gospel is to form us unto godliness. Indeed those articles which seem most to pertain to contemplation — namely concerning the divinity and incarnation of the Son of God — are called by the Apostle in specie the mystery of godliness, in chapter 3 of the same epistle (1 Timothy 3:16). Add that the habit of the theological principles is faith. But true faith is a practical habit. And the habit of the principles and the habit of the conclusions are of the same genus.

6As for the object of theology, it is to be noted that sometimes the object of a science is said to be whatever the science considers in any way. So the object of theology is not one. For it considers many and very diverse things: God, the church, angels, the sacraments. Yet all these agree in one common appellation, insofar as they fall under the theologian's consideration. For whatever the theologian treats can be called divine things. For they are either God himself, or other things ordered in some way to God. Nor is anything properly considered by the theologian except with some respect to God. So if anyone asks about the object of theology, it can not ineptly be answered that that object is divine things.

But for the most part the object of any science is said to be that of which the science principally intends to give us knowledge, and on account of which it considers all the rest — because, namely, they lead to a fuller and more perfect acquaintance with it. Of this kind the object of theology is God, which almost all confess, and which the very word theology teaches, which, as was noted above, means speech about God. But it is not agreed whether that object is God simply, as God is, or rather under some certain respect. The former is defended by the more celebrated scholastics following Thomas Aquinas, and they state that the object of theology is God as God is, and, as they speak, under the reason of deity. But this seems to us too loose and general. Nor is the scope of theology to lead us simply into the knowledge of God as God is; rather it treats of God with some respect to men.

Therefore the object of theology can more conveniently be said to be God, as God is, and the savior of men. For the whole of Scripture proposes God to us under this respect. And it principally intends to teach us what benefits of God are toward men, and what worship and obedience he in turn requires of them. But if it touches any other things, it does so in order to declare and confirm these more. For example, when it teaches that there are three Persons in God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — its scope is not simply to teach us this truth; but by it it wills to inform us more clearly and richly concerning the manner of our redemption and salvation, which was procured for us through Christ, and is applied and sealed to us through the Spirit. And likewise the attributes of God, such as justice and mercy, are narrated in the Scriptures in relation to men, so that they may know how far the justice of God is to be feared by them, and what refuge they ought to seek in his mercy.

8But as much as this science is commended from its object, so much also does its author commend it. For the remaining sciences glory in some illustrious man as their chief author. Aristotle is held the prince of the philosophers, and Hippocrates of the physicians; and the mathematical disciplines acknowledge Euclid as their parent. But theology claims God for itself as author, from whom this sacred teaching has flowed forth. For prophecy was not brought in of old by the will of man, as the Apostle Peter says (2 Peter 1:21); but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit, who first consigned it in writing.

Not without the deity, indeed, were the good arts and disciplines invented; and the light of reason itself descends from the Father of lights (James 1:17), who is the mover and governor of nature. But the principles on which theology rests are the express sayings and oracles of God, by which those things are made manifest which could not have become known except by a light higher than reason.

9Hence it comes about that theology surpasses all the remaining sciences in certainty. For those rest on human reason, which can be deceived and is liable to error. But theology reclines upon the truth of God, who can neither be deceived nor deceive. Many indeed waver about theological truths, and to them the principles and conclusions of theology seem less certain than the things handed down in the human sciences. But that does not hinder them from being in themselves most certain — just as the sun does not cease to be most splendid, though the blind and the bleary-eyed either do not perceive its light at all, or perceive it only obscurely.

But here it must be noticed that when we set theology as more certain than the other sciences, we do not so understand it as if that certainty were only on the side of the object. For the things which God has revealed are not only most certain in themselves, but can also be known more certainly through the habit of faith and of theology than any truths known through the light of reason alone. So that one who is strengthened in faith and in the science of divine things is more certain, and more persuaded, concerning the divine truths than he is concerning any other truth. And thus the habit of faith and of theology, in itself and from its own species, excels in certainty the habit of the merely natural sciences — although not all participate that habit equally, and it is firmer in one person and less firm in another.

10But in no matter does the dignity and excellence of theology shine forth more than in the excellence of its end and use. For among practical disciplines, the further and more universal the end of any discipline is, the more worthy and excellent that discipline is. So politics excels military science, because the end of military science is victory, which is a means to obtaining public peace and tranquillity — which is the end of political science, and some greater good. But the end of this science is the highest and last of all: namely the perfect beatitude of man, to which the ends of all the other arts and disciplines are subordinated.

The remaining disciplines and arts care for some particular good of man. Medicine, for example, the health of the body; jurisprudence, estates; politics, public peace and tranquillity. But none of these suffices to make a person blessed. Theology, however, cares for the whole happiness of man, and supplies whatever things are desired for living well and blessedly.

Philosophy also strives toward that, indeed. But it attains its scope less fully, and whatever goods it tries to procure for a person are contained within the compass of this life. But theology offers eternal life and happiness, and renders them to those who follow its leading. And so it teaches how to order the present life, that we may be blessed not only for the state of this life, but in such a way that it leads through to everlasting beatitude.

11Therefore by highest right this sacred discipline ought to be called wisdom. For according to Aristotle himself, wisdom is the science of the most excellent things. But as is clear from what has been said, theology treats of the most excellent things: namely of God and of his wonderful works, both in creation and in our redemption. Then also of things of the greatest moment with respect to us, and which it is of the highest interest for us to know — namely of our highest happiness, and of life rightly ordered according to God, which is the way to attaining that happiness. Nor does it treat only of the most excellent things, but also in the most excellent manner: namely not from the inventions of human reason, but from divine revelation.

Besides, among the marks of wisdom it is commonly reckoned that it is occupied about things most difficult and remote from sense; next, that it does not depend on another science; and finally that it directs and judges the other sciences, as their arbiter and mistress. All of which fit theology exactly.

For first it opens to us mysteries far most difficult, which in themselves are not only remote from the senses, but far surpass the capacity of the human mind. For they are, as the Apostle says, things which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have ascended into the heart of man; but God has revealed them to us by his Spirit, who searches all things, even the depths of God (1 Corinthians 2:9-10).

Second, theology does not depend on any other science. For one science is said to depend on another in two ways. First, when a certain science takes its principles from another, which principles are conclusions of that superior science. So the art of fortifying cities depends on geometry; for geometrical conclusions are the principles of that art. Then, when the end of one science is referred to the end of another science. So military science depends on politics; since the military end is referred to the political end, and is a means to attaining it. But in both of those ways theology is plainly independent. For since the end of theology is the last end of man — namely his eternal beatitude — it cannot be referred to any end, but all things are necessarily referred to it. Then also there is no human science from which theology takes its principles; but it has them immediately from the revelation of God, whose are the utterances and pronouncements.

12But you will say: theologians in their arguments often use propositions which are not revealed, but known by the light of reason alone; and many argumentations are found in theology in which only one of the premises is revealed, while the other is one of the conclusions of some natural science. I answer that when theology takes certain things from other sciences, it does not do so from necessity, but to illustrate the matter more, and to accommodate itself to weak persons. For by itself alone it is sufficient to itself, and can prove all necessary conclusions from revealed principles. So when it borrows anything from the natural sciences, it does not do so as an inferior compelled to run back to a superior, but as a mistress who freely uses the faculties of her handmaids.

And in truth theology is the arbiter and mistress of the other sciences, which directs them and judges concerning them, herself to be judged by no other science. For all the remaining disciplines are to be measured by her rule, so that whatever they have not consonant with theology is rejected, and nothing is admitted which does not agree with the principles of theology.

And so various errors in philosophy have been detected — as, for example, concerning the origin of the world, which some of the philosophers thought eternal, others made from matter; but none thought it created from nothing, as it truly is, except with theology showing and leading by the hand. And in many other matters where the philosophers stuck fast and did not have the thing sufficiently explored, theology set it in the open and took away all doubt — as is plain in the business of divine providence and of the immortality of the soul.

Therefore by right and merit sacred teaching is to be adorned with the title Wisdom, which is also often attributed to it in Scripture: as when the Apostle calls the Gospel the wisdom which is in a mystery; and says that it is to the nations foolishness, and to the Jews a stumbling-block; but to those who believe, the power of God and the wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:18-24; 1 Corinthians 2:6-8).

15But there is also a certain faith which is counted among the peculiar gifts of the Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:9), and which does not fall to all who are in the Church, but to a few, as it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit. This is the faith through which miracles are wrought, from which it has also received its name. And it is found in the one who, called by God to work miracles and having a promise concerning this matter — as the Apostles had from the mouth of Christ, and many others from an inward revelation of the Spirit — does not hesitate or distrust, but is certainly persuaded that God is able and willing to accomplish those stupendous works through him. Of this faith Christ speaks in Mark 11:22 when he says to the disciples, Have faith in God. Amen I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, Be taken up and cast into the sea, and does not doubt in his heart but believes that what he says will happen, it will be done for him, whatever he says (Mark 11:22-23). He also reproaches the disciples for the defect of this faith in Matthew 17:20, when he refers the cause why they could not cast out the demon to their unbelief. And to this the Apostle looks in 1 Corinthians 13:2: If I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

Finally there is another faith, to which Scripture attributes our righteousness and salvation, to which it urgently and often exhorts us, and which it adorns with the highest praises and elogies. And this is the faith which we name justifying, saving, living, and true.

But here we have a dispute with the Doctors of the Roman Church: for they confuse justifying faith with that which we have just called historical, and put no distinction between them, but want them to be plainly one and the same. Then they also teach that the faith of miracles is nothing other than a certain excellent grade of justifying faith.

16But that justifying faith ought to be distinguished from historical faith is not hard to prove. For if historical faith were the same as justifying faith, then whoever had historical faith would by that very fact have justifying faith. Yet many hypocrites and ungodly people are endowed with historical faith who nevertheless lack justifying faith. For of this faith Scripture says that whoever believes does not perish but has eternal life (John 3:16), and that Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes (Romans 10:4); and that in the Gospel the righteousness of God is revealed to all and upon all who believe (Romans 1:16-17). From which it is plain that no one is endowed with such faith who is not a partaker of righteousness and salvation. And therefore to those who are in a state of perdition and remain in sin, if they are said to believe, another faith must be assigned.

And certainly what the Pontificians say about these places helps our sentence. For they say that when Scripture says whoever believes has eternal life, it ought to be understood of those who believe as they ought and with the whole heart; and that the reason many believe in the Son and yet do not have life is that they believe badly, and not with the whole heart, and not as they ought — as may be seen in Bellarmine, book one On Justification, chapter ten, paragraph Adde quod. But who can with any reason affirm that it is the same faith by which someone believes well and by which someone believes badly; by which someone believes as he ought and by which someone believes as he ought not? Or that the faith by which someone believes badly, and not with the whole heart, and not as he ought, is the justifying faith which the Apostle says is imputed for righteousness (Romans 4)?

Next, that the faith of miracles is not an eminent grade of justifying faith is also manifest from this: that some are gifted with that faith who nevertheless do not have justifying faith. For to many who will say to Christ, Did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works? Christ will answer, I never knew you, as Christ himself witnesses (Matthew 7:22). Add that the Apostle in 1 Corinthians 12:9 numbers the faith of signs among the various charisms of the Spirit, which the Pontificians call graces given freely (gratiae gratis datae). Yet an eminent grade of justifying faith belongs to grace that makes acceptable (gratia gratum faciens). For it is given for the salvation of the one who has it — not, like those free gifts of the Spirit, for the salvation of others. Then if the faith of miracles were an excellent grade of justifying faith, Christ, when reproaching the disciples for the defect of that faith, would not say to them, If you had faith like a grain of mustard seed, you would say to this mountain, Move from here, and it would move, and nothing would be impossible for you (Matthew 17:20). For a grain of mustard seed denotes something very small in the Scriptures, and it amounts to the same as if Christ said, If you had even a tiny bit of faith.

17Now justifying faith is that by which not only the theoretical intellect is illumined, so that it certainly believes the things taught by the word of God, but also the practical mind of man is so affected that it refers those things to practice and applies them to itself. For the truly faithful person so believes, for example, the promises of the Gospel concerning remission of sins and eternal happiness and glory, that he firmly and effectually judges his highest good and blessedness — to which he must aspire with all his strength — to be placed in them; so he gives faith to the mysteries of our redemption that he plainly thinks consolation and peace of conscience are to be sought for himself in them; finally he so considers the divine commandments that he certainly resolves within himself that life is to be lived according to them.

From which it can be clear that justifying faith is so diverse from historical and temporary faith that it includes all their virtue; and is so distinguished from them as the perfect from the imperfect — or by that distinction by which a higher grade differs from a lower. For justifying faith stands to the remaining species of faith as the rational soul stands to the sensitive and vegetative; whose force and faculties — life, sense, and motion — it eminently embraces, and adds the grade of reason. For so also justifying faith makes us believe all things taught by the word of God, which historical faith performs. And if God should promise something special and call someone to work a miracle, then it also supplies the force of miraculous faith; nor does the one who already believes the word of God as he ought, if a special promise is directed to him, need a new habit in order to give assent to it. Hence it is that the Apostle, commending the force and efficacy of saving faith, attributes to it various miraculous works which holy men once wrought, or which were done for their sake: saying that by faith the fathers crossed the Red Sea, and by faith the walls of Jericho fell, and by faith some stopped the mouths of lions and quenched the power of fire (Hebrews 11). But above the remaining species of faith, justifying faith has this: that it more brightly irradiates the theoretical mind, more fully imbues the practical, penetrates more deeply, and begets a sharper sense of truth and a firmer assent in our souls than historical or temporary faith. Then also whatever it has drawn from the word of God it refers to action and to the ordering of life; and in the way we have said, it applies it to itself.

Which application is indeed to be understood rightly, and in the sense already set out. Not, however, as though the proper act of justifying faith, by which it is discerned from the other species of faith, consisted in this: that someone should bring himself to think that his sins are remitted, and that he is a child of God predestined to life, and will certainly be a partaker of salvation. For this persuasion, if it is legitimate, necessarily presupposes faith and arises from it; and therefore cannot be its primary act. For since remission of sins and eternal life are promised in the Gospel to no one absolutely, but under the condition of faith and repentance: in order that we may be certain of the grace of God and of our salvation, it is necessary that it first be clear to us concerning our faith and repentance. From which it is manifest that that certainty of faith is a consequent, not faith itself; or if someone wishes it to belong to faith, at least that it is not its primary act.

18But that the nature of faith may be more fully understood, it is necessary to discuss its object and subject, cause and effects a little more widely. And indeed from what has been said it is plain that the object of faith is the things that have been revealed by God, and insofar as they have been revealed by God. So that the material object of faith is the things contained in the word of God; but the formal object is the divine authority and truth itself.

Therefore Bellarmine does not dispute rightly against our writers, as though they altogether restricted the object of saving faith to the bare promise of remission of sins. For we set the object of that faith as not only the things promised in the Gospel, but also whatever else is taught, narrated, and commanded in the word of God. Which the Apostle teaches in Hebrews 11, where speaking of justifying faith he says that by faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which appear (Hebrews 11:3). And likewise that Noah by faith believed the divine warning about the coming flood, by which, being moved with fear, he built an ark for the saving of his house (Hebrews 11:7).

But here it must be noted that not all things which are set before our faith belong equally to its object. For just as in the objects of the human sciences some things are those whose knowledge is chiefly intended, and those are called the principal object — as, for example, in Logic the syllogism and demonstration — while others are proposed only for the elucidation of those former things, and so that they may be known more easily and more richly, and these are the secondary and less principal object of the science: so also the matter stands in the doctrine of faith. For some things are set before faith primarily and chiefly, and some secondarily and less chiefly. Now that principal object is the things without which one cannot arrive at salvation, nor can life be rightly ordered: such as those called the articles of faith, summing up the mysteries of salvation, and also the divine precepts. But the word of God contains many other things which pertain only to the confirmation of those and to a fuller knowledge of them — as, for example, the various histories and miracles narrated in the Scriptures — and those are the secondary object of faith.

Further, the things that belong to the principal object of faith must be believed distinctly; for the rest it is enough if they are believed confusedly. Those things are believed distinctly which faith apprehends separately and one by one. And this is the faith which is called explicit. Confusedly, those which are not apprehended in particular, but only in some common principle in which they are contained: and this is the faith which they call implicit. For example, one who believes that the book of Judges is divinely inspired, and yet has not read it, nor heard anything from it recited: he indeed believes that the histories contained there are true, but implicitly and confusedly. But one who reads those histories, and knows one by one what is narrated in that book about Samson and Gideon and the other leaders of the Israelite people, has an explicit and distinct faith of them.

But since God has not at once and once for all manifested the whole doctrine of redemption and salvation to men, but in many ways and in many parts — and first more obscurely, then more clearly — it follows that according to the various differences of times faith ought to have been more or less explicit. For revelation is the measure of faith: and the more things are distinctly revealed, the more things faith must be extended to. And therefore from us, to whom the Gospel has been clearly made known, an explicit faith of many articles is required as necessary, for which under the Old Testament an implicit faith formerly sufficed.

But here too it must be observed that when we say an implicit faith of many things contained in the word of God is sufficient, this ought not to be taken as though it were praiseworthy to rest in any sort of knowledge of the principal heads of faith, and as though no fuller knowledge were to be sought. For although a distinct faith of a few articles is required as plainly necessary to salvation, yet this also is certain: that each person is bound to use every effort, according to the manner of his calling, to advance more and more in the doctrine of salvation, and to be more fully and richly instructed in the word of God. To which the Apostle diligently exhorts the faithful (Colossians 2:2 and 3:16). And therefore those gravely err and sin who, under the pretext of implicit faith, foster the stupid and crass ignorance of the people.

19The authority of Scripture is sharply disputed between the Orthodox and the Pontificians. The question is: whence sacred Scripture has its authority. Both sides, however, understand by the authority of Scripture that dignity according to which it merits faith in everything it says in any way, and the highest obedience from faith in the things it commands and forbids.

But here the Pontificians make a distinction. They grant that Scripture in itself has its authority from nowhere else than from God; yet they contend that that authority, as it concerns us, hangs on the Church's testimony. This is their mind: that Scripture is worthy of all faith and reverence because it proceeded from God, the fountain of all truth and the supreme Lord of all; yet that one cannot know certainly and without doubt that Scripture came forth from God from any other ground than that the Church witnesses it. Thus, that Scripture is of irrefragable truth and has the highest empire over consciences comes from its having God as author; but that it is certainly acknowledged to have God as author already hangs on the Church's testimony.

But our writers do not hang the authority of sacred Scripture, either in itself or as it concerns us, on the Church's testimony and authority. For they assert that the sacred books can be acknowledged to have come forth from God from another ground than the voice of the witnessing Church; and that when the faithful receive these books as divine, they do not do so because of the Church's authority; but that Scripture itself is enough to furnish knowledge of itself.

20The parties therefore agree whence Scripture's own authority belongs to it; they do not agree whence it is known that such authority belongs to it. And so the state of the controversy seems easy and ready. Yet when one comes to the fight, and each side explains its mind more clearly and in particular, then great obscurity and confusion arise in this question; and one can scarcely assign in what the parties properly disagree.

Therefore, so that, as far as in us lies, we may bring some light to this most celebrated question, we will try to set out the whole matter more carefully. And first we will investigate and set out the way in which Scripture becomes known to us as divine. Then we will inquire into the Pontificians' sentence, which is not so ready and prompt to acknowledge and perceive as it might seem. And finally, once the state of the controversy has been drawn out from that, we will explain what the Pontificians' error is in this part, and will refute it.

Further, concerning the way by which we come to knowledge of sacred Scripture, four things chiefly will have to be discussed. First: whether sacred Scripture has some light by which it presents itself to be acknowledged, and what that light is and of what kind. Second: what parts the Holy Spirit has in this business, and how far His work is necessary for someone to acknowledge the Word of God and Scripture. Third: what is to be attributed to the Church in this matter, and how much its testimony avails. Fourth: finally, on what foundation especially that faith rests which we give to Scripture as true and divine.

21As for the first point: in this question our writers lay down as a foundation that sacred Scripture has in itself a certain light by which, with all authority of the Church set aside, it can become known through itself. And certainly Scripture in many places compares itself to light. But this noted only in general brings little light to this controversy. Therefore it is necessary to set out more distinctly what that light and evidence of Scripture is. For by that light we understand nothing but a certain evidence of truth which the faithful perceive in Scripture, and by which Scripture proves its own divinity to their minds.

Further, a twofold evidence can be distinguished: one which may be called mathematical or metaphysical; another which can be called moral. I call metaphysical evidence that which belongs to first principles known of themselves, and to conclusions demonstrated through principles of that kind. Moral evidence, however, is that which is seen in things that cannot indeed be demonstrated, yet are urged by such marks and arguments that a prudent and skilled man cannot doubt them or wrest dissent from himself. So it is that the Aeneid was written by Virgil, and the orations against Verres, Catiline, and Antony by Cicero.

22The evidence that belongs to Scripture is not of the former kind. For that Scripture is divinely inspired is not a thing known of itself, as these principles are — The whole is greater than its part; The same thing cannot at once be and not be. Nor can that be demonstrated logically or mathematically, as experience shows. For no one has ever been able to bring any demonstration of this truth. Add that if the matter stood so, the assent we would give to sacred Scripture would be science, not faith, since the definition of science itself is that it is a demonstrative habit.

Therefore sacred Scripture has no other light or evidence besides that moral evidence we have named. For although it is not known of itself, nor can it properly be demonstrated, that sacred Scripture came forth from God, yet this is urged by so many and so probable arguments, and Scripture has in itself so many and so marked notes and indications of its divinity, that from them a pious and prudent man is effectively led to believe that it is true and divine.

23And so that we may bring forward here certain specimens of those arguments: that the Scripture which we hold as sacred is truly such, and divinely inspired, is proved from the condition of those who first handed it down and recommended it as divine. For if sacred Scripture is not true and divine, then the sacred writers, who profess that they wrote as God inspired them, and who testify that the things they write were either seen by them or divinely revealed to them, must have been impostors whose design was to deceive men and mock the world.

But this suspicion cannot fall on the Prophets and Apostles, by whose work Scripture has been consigned to us. For those who mean to deceive aim at that either from desire of gain, or for the sake of some pleasure, or in hope of some glory and of obtaining pleasure. Thus those who were authors of some superstition certainly won wealth and dignities for themselves by their inventions — as, for example, Muhammad, who by deceiving the world with his fables arrogated the highest empire to himself and his own. But such a thing cannot be affixed to the Prophets and Apostles except very shamelessly and against every appearance of truth.

For if the matter is estimated by the sense of men, nearly all of them were most miserable, and of a cast-down and despised condition; nor by their preaching did they produce for themselves any riches in the world, or any empire and glory among men. On the contrary, that doctrine which they asserted by word and writings stirred up against them the hatred of their fellow-citizens and of outsiders, and made them liable to infinite reproaches and insults; nay, it cast them into certain danger of life, so that most of them sealed their writings with their own blood.

24Nor can it be said that they fell into such hardships by thoughtlessness. For when they took up their office they foresaw these calamities, and voluntarily handed themselves over to be exercised and tormented by so many evils. Moses indeed was leader and priest of the Israelite people; yet how little he cared for himself and his own is plain from this: that he did not transmit the principate and the priesthood to his posterity, but designated his servant Joshua as leader of the people after him, and, at God's command, inaugurated his brother Aaron as priest.

And how far the sacred writers were from vain glory is plain from this: that if anything great or illustrious was done or said by them, they refer it wholly to God as received from Him; nay, in those very writings which they commend as divinely inspired they candidly note their own blemishes and defects; and if anything in them was slight and humble and without glory, they do not disguise it. Thus Moses recorded his own diffidence and the penalty of that diffidence which God imposed on him; and likewise his brother Aaron's idolatry and his sister Mary's murmurings.

26For if the matter is considered in itself, everything ought to have stood in the way of men receiving that doctrine, and Scripture which is its foundation. First, the genius of the doctrine itself. For it sets before us to be believed very many mysteries which human sense judges folly; and it commands and exacts things that most of all repugn human affections — namely that we bear Christ's cross, deny ourselves, and for Christ crucified be ready to leave wealth and pleasures and pour out our life (Matthew 16:24).

Next, those who announced that doctrine to men did not use art and eloquence, by which men's minds are usually bent. Nor did they prevail among men by authority, or by fame of wisdom and learning. Nor were they powerful men who could terrify by threats and arms and compel people to embrace their doctrine; but most of them were rude and unlettered men, earning their living by mechanical arts, from the nation of the Jews, despised and hated by all others, and held for barbarians and ignorant by those who were then thought wise and learned. Add that they were preaching to men nursed in another religion, and occupied by many and great prejudices. For the superstition from which they were being turned away they had received from their ancestors, and they saw it established by the consent of peoples, the vote of the wise, and great authority then.

Finally, it can scarcely be said how many and how sharp and powerful enemies the doctrine contained in our scriptures had. For the teachers of the Jews and the philosophers of the nations assailed it with great effort. The former opposed their own authority; the latter exercised against it all the sharpness of their ingenium and unfolded their eloquence. And besides, the magistrates and princes of the age most atrociously persecuted those who had embraced it, and raged against them with every kind of punishment. Since therefore nothing aided it humanly, and on the contrary it had all things adverse, it is necessary that its increase and propagation be ascribed to the power of the one God. For if any other sect and religion has crept widely and found many followers, that was done by human means. Muhammadanism spread briefly from Arabia through many provinces; but that was done by arms and open force. Next, that doctrine in many things flatters the flesh.

27Besides, something divine in Scripture is argued by the constancy, number, and condition of the martyrs who sealed it with their own blood. For since by nature nothing is dearer to a man than life, how did it come about that so many men willingly sought death for the defence of Scripture and of the doctrine it hands down, unless from a certain divine force that had settled thoroughly in their minds? Rage has sometimes been spent on certain heretics and the superstitious, and a few examples can perhaps be found of those who from a certain fierceness and obstinacy of mind chose rather to die than to suffer themselves to be moved from an error once seized. But there is no error, no superstition and human doctrine, that has had followers so obstinate that, when by denying their impiety they could escape safe and unharmed, they nevertheless refused not to endure punishments and torments. But when the Apostolic and prophetic doctrine, and Scripture, first began to be propagated through the world — and could not yet be reckoned established by the tradition of the ancestors and by custom, the deepest roots by which human institutes usually cling to men's minds — not a few only were found, but infinite myriads of men, of every age, sex, and condition, men, women, boys, old men, the lettered and the unlettered, who endured every harshest kind of death rather than deny Scripture's doctrine: although by that denial alone they could not only redeem life, but also enjoy their goods and honors with fellow-citizens by equal right. Nor can they be reckoned to have rushed into certain death by fierceness or stupidity or some disease of mind: since they often extorted from the enemies themselves testimony of a rightly composed mind and of a blameless life, and in death itself attested the highest modesty, the highest humanity, and presence of mind. In which, certainly, unless someone willingly shuts his eyes, the finger of God can easily be noted.

28Besides, that the doctrine handed down in the Scriptures — and so Scripture, which is its foundation — is divine and flowed from God is proved from the miracles done in confirmation of that doctrine. For since Scripture and heavenly doctrine have two chief parts, Law and Gospel: the law was confirmed by those wonders that happened in the desert — that the living voice of God speaking was heard from the midst of fire, that for forty years manna rained in the desert, that water was often led out from the rock, and that the Israelites' clothes were not worn out in that whole time, and more of that kind. To the Gospel almost infinite miracles of Christ bore witness; then those visible and plainly stupendous gifts of the Holy Spirit poured out on the first believers, so that suddenly they spoke in various and foreign tongues, healed any diseases, expelled demons, and performed very many other wonders. Since such things are above nature's powers, it is necessary that God exercised his power in them. But it is unholy to think God willed to use his omnipotence to make faith for a Scripture and doctrine falsely and injuriously ascribed to him, as if he had willed by compact with men to lie.

29But you will say: those miracles are indeed said to have been done, yet how can we know they really were done? For it seems no less uncertain whether those miracles are true than whether that Scripture is divine in whose confirmation they are said to have been done. I answer that those things really happened can be proved efficaciously from our scriptures themselves. For our writers wrote those things in such a manner that they cannot have lied in this matter. For the one denying or doubting that what our writers Moses and Paul narrate about those miracles is true, I will ask, for example, whether he wills to call into doubt that there was a certain Moses who gave laws to the Israelite people and wrote certain volumes; and likewise that there was a certain Paul who preached Christian doctrine and wrote certain epistles ascribed to him. About this matter certainly no one has hitherto doubted, nor have the atheists themselves willed or dared to deny it. And really that is witnessed by a fame so constant, so perennial, so received by the consent of all — even of adversaries — that to doubt about this would plainly be to rave. For frequent mention of Moses and of his writings is made among the Gentiles. Nor do Jews and Muhammadans, most hostile enemies of the Christian religion, deny or doubt that our Apostles were and wrote. If someone would stubbornly wish to call that into doubt, he would have to be driven to bring a cause of his doubt, and some reason why he does not give faith to the concordant testimony of the whole world — and why he believes rather that Pliny and Titus Livius were and wrote than Moses and Paul. And certainly we labor in vain in proving this, since the matter is in confession. For those who reject God's word do not deny that those authors whom we hold as sacred were or wrote, but blaspheme that they did not write true things.

Come then, let us see whether it can be that those things narrated by Moses and Paul about those miracles are not true. Certainly, if they are not true, either those men were deceived in writing, thinking things had happened which really had not; or they wrote with a mind to deceive and tried to thrust false things for true. The former cannot be said. For they do not report those things as received from elsewhere, but testify them as done or seen by themselves. Therefore Moses must have willed to deceive the Israelites, and Paul the Corinthians, Galatians, and others. And so profane men feel who accuse Moses and Paul of imposture. It remains to see whether they were impostors who tried to persuade those to whom they were writing, and into whose hands they were handing their writings, that these and those prodigies and miracles had been done, when nevertheless nothing of them had been done.

30Certainly impostors, and those whose mind is to deceive, are accustomed so to forge their lies that they cannot easily be charged with lying by those they want deceived. Thus Numa, who instituted most of the rites of Roman superstition, feigned that he had conversations by night with the nymph Egeria — truly alone with her alone, where no one could be a witness. In Muhammad's Qur'an also certain portentous things are narrated, yet not as done before men's eyes, but whose credit would rest with him alone. But if someone narrated portents and dreams, and nevertheless appealed about their truth to the senses of those he addressed — as if he were already recounting that by Moses the waters flowed back and grain rained while we were looking on, and willed to persuade us of that itself — this would no longer be imposture, but a certain kind of dementia plainly unusual and incredible; nor can this fall on one who is not altogether raving and stirred by black bile. Now those wonders held in Moses — that the sea was split, that the voice of God speaking was heard from mount Sinai, that in the desert it rained manna and quails, that torrents of water burst from the rock, and more of the same kind — those wonders, I say, Moses does not commemorate as things that happened at other times or in distant places: but he narrates them as having happened in that very time and in that very place where he was writing, indeed while those for whom he was writing were seeing and attending, and into whose hands he was handing his writings. And about the truth of those miracles he appeals to the eyes and ears of the Israelites. You have seen, he often says, and you have heard; and by that name he heavily and often rebukes their mind as ungrateful toward God.

Likewise the Apostle Paul, when he had among the Corinthians certain rivals and envious men who were trying to call his apostleship into doubt and render it suspect, appeals about the truth of his apostleship to miracles and signs done in their midst. The signs of apostleship, he says, were published among you with all patience, through signs and wonders and powers (2 Corinthians 12:12). And in chapters 12, 13, and 14 of the former epistle he discusses the miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit — the gift of healings, the working of powers, the gift of prophecy, and the gift of speaking and interpreting foreign tongues by the Spirit's sudden breath — as things known and customary in their midst: he exhorts them to peace, warns them not to envy one another because of such gifts, and also rebukes that they sometimes used such gifts ambitiously; and he orders that thereafter they do it toward edification, and he prescribes the lawful use of those gifts.

32But besides, that the miracles reported as done by Moses are true, and likewise those attributed to Christ and his Apostles, is clear from the adversaries' own confession. For as to Christ, the Jews who are most hostile enemies of the Christian name neither formerly dared, nor even now dare, to deny that Christ performed miracles: but they have invented I know not what to elude the force of the argument we draw therefrom — namely either that Christ did those things by magic art which he had learned in Egypt, or by virtue of that tetragrammaton Name whose right pronunciation and exposition he held. For they fable that whoever knows how to pronounce that name rightly can by its force do any wonderful works. The vanity of that invention is clear of itself, and there is no need to refute it. Here we only note that the truth of Christ's miracles is not a little confirmed thereby: since the Jews who most envy his glory neither dare nor are able openly to deny that those things were done. And likewise very many of the Gentiles bore testimony to Moses and acknowledged the truth of the Mosaic history, as is to be seen in the books of Josephus against Apion, and of Eusebius on the Preparation of the Gospel.

33Especially do the Prophets' predictions prove the truth of Christian doctrine, and argue Scripture's divine origin. For it belongs to God alone to foreknow future contingencies certainly and distinctly, and things that will come to pass only after many ages. And therefore no one can predict such things except by the afflatus of the divine Spirit. But the Prophets predicted many things for which no causes appeared in the nature of things, and which were fulfilled long after their death. Thus Isaiah named Cyrus, and predicted his empire and wondrous felicity, a hundred and fifty years before Cyrus was born. Thus Jeremiah the Prophet precisely numbered the seventy years of the Babylonian captivity before the Jews were led away to Babylon. Thus finally Daniel prophesied very clearly concerning the Monarchy of the Persians and of the Greeks, concerning the successors of Alexander the Great, and concerning Antiochus especially Epiphanes who profaned the temple of God.

35Further, that these oracles were not forged by Christians the Jews testify — enemies of the Christians, and yet the keenest assertors and defenders of the prophetic books. And besides, that that greatest hatred of the Christian religion could not compel them to erase from their books those oracles so greatly adverse to themselves — this itself, I say, frees them from the crime of which certain Gentiles wished to render them suspect, as if they had inserted into their books those oracles concerning Cyrus and Alexander the Great in order to court those kings' favor. For if they had thought so much allowed to them, those oracles by which Christians so greatly press them would not have remained untouched, especially that of Daniel concerning the time of Christ's advent and his cutting off. Nor will anyone ever suspect such a thing of the Jews who has ascertained with how great religion — not to say superstition — toward the sacred books they conduct themselves, even to such a degree that they keep the syllables and apices of each book numbered, and appoint a public fast if by chance a Scripture codex has fallen to the ground through carelessness. Add that whoever will attentively read through and consider the books of the Prophets Daniel and Isaiah will easily recognize that in them all things cohere and are woven with the same thread and genius, nor is anything found that anyone could deservedly suspect to have been added and inserted there against the author's mind and sense — and that could be torn away from them without the ruin and gap of the whole work.

36Besides these, many arguments can be taken toward conciliating Scripture's authority and veneration from Scripture's antiquity, from God's care in preserving it, and from the world's hatred toward it, and God's just judgment against its haters and despisers. For the books of Moses, which are as it were the basis and foundation of the whole of Scripture, are by far the most ancient of all that exist. Indeed there are no writings that equal the antiquity of Solomon and David. And yet almost the whole world long waged war against Scripture and tried to abolish it — as in Jewish times that Antiochus Epiphanes, and in Christian memory the Roman Emperors, whose power was so great and whose empire so widely extended. But as much as the world worked to abolish it, so much did God's providence watch that it should remain safe and entire hitherto.

Nor is the consensus of the nations — indeed of the various sects — of small moment in this matter. Since today three chief sects thrive, afterward subdivided into many others — namely the Jewish, the Christian, and the Mahometan — which occupy the greatest part of the world. Jews, Christians, and Mahometans all acknowledge the authority of the Old Testament. The Jews indeed reject the New Testament, but the Mahometans hold it in esteem with us, and at least venerate Christ as God's greatest Prophet. What then could compel so many peoples, disagreeing among themselves in customs and sects, and mutually pursuing one another with the keenest hatreds, to approve these books as sacred and divine, unless the force of truth itself and a certain divine efficacy?

Which arguments, although perhaps not all equally valid if taken singly by themselves, nevertheless when taken together have the greatest force toward proving Scripture's excellence and conciliating authority to it. Nay, those superior ones which we have explained more widely we judge to be such that by them Scripture's authority can validly be asserted and proved even against atheists and the profane, who can retort and oppose nothing that has any force, and whose vanity it is not hard to show.

37But besides those arguments by which Scripture's divinity can be asserted against a denier, Scripture has in itself very illustrious notes and indications of truth and divinity, by which it proves and commends itself to a mind well affected, whose eye is not blinded by prejudices and perverse affections — although means suited for disputing cannot be taken from them, or certainly not means so valid and efficacious. For just as there inhere in some excellent work of art — for example a Virgilian poem, or a painting of Apelles — certain things by which it betrays its author and claims itself for him; and these are recognized openly, certainly, and clearly, although the unskilled does not attend to them, nor can arguments easily be drawn from them against a denier: so deeply impressed on sacred Scripture are the footprints of the divine Spirit, and the marks of heavenly origin, which those discern whose mind is not darkened, and who are skilled in divine things, and who thereby become certain of its divinity — although ignorant and profane men make light of those things, or do not notice them at all. And certainly, if any are learned in humane letters, when they unroll some human book they easily note in it a certain genius and character by which they are led into knowledge of its author. By that reason critics assert genuine writings to their authors — to Aristotle, for example, or to Cicero — but expunge spurious and supposititious writings, although often what sagacious critics note and recognize they can scarcely explain and demonstrate to another who is not versed in these things. Shall we doubt that the Prophetic and Apostolic writings savor of the divine Spirit, and that there inheres in them a something which a pious and learned man perceives, and by which he distinguishes them from human and Apocryphal writings — although that could not be demonstrated against a disputant who resists?

38Further, such notes of divinity as we say inhere in Scripture can be noticed both in things and in words. And first in words, or in the manner of speaking, a certain divine character shines forth through the whole of Scripture. For when it narrates deeds it does so ingenuously, simply, and nakedly, without any paint, without any trappings. Human writers, when they recite great things, are accustomed to give signs of an anxious mind, fearing lest it not be believed. For they try secretly to remove what could more offend, and to render the matter, as much as in them lies, credible. But when something must be said by them concerning themselves, either they boast and display their own deeds, or they are timid and fearful and use certain excuses and prefaces — which certainly arises from a certain weakness, and betrays a mind distrusting itself and not secure enough. But as for the sacred writers, although they treat of things greatest and plainly stupendous, and often done by their ministry, in their narrations nevertheless all things are straight and simple, nor is there anything that savors an anxious and solicitous mind lest faith be denied them. But everywhere they speak as if secure concerning men's judgments, relying on the dignity and truth of the matter: which argues a magnanimity and a certain majesty worthy of God.

In Scripture's precepts, corrections, and exhortations also it is easy to observe a certain divine majesty. With equal authority it addresses kings and commoners, the highest and the lowest, magistrates and private persons. It flatters no one, connives with no one, and its author plainly shows himself impartial (ἀπροσωπόληπτον) — devoid of favor and hatred, of hope and fear, and the same toward all of whatever status and condition they are. Nor yet is the speech fierce, swollen, and proud. But in it there appears a certain wondrous gravity, yet tempered with the highest gentleness and a pious affection toward men.

But when it teaches, it uses a certain condescension (συγκαταβάσει) by which it accommodates itself to the capacity of the rude. Nor does it seek for what it teaches ornaments from art and eloquence, but commends them by their own weight and usefulness. Teachers of human arts and sciences are accustomed to forge peculiar terms for each art, and to cover what they hand down with wrappers of grand words, that they may win dignity for their art and feign some mystery for the crowd to look up to and wonder at. But Scripture explains divine things with human words and phrases drawn from the crowd. When it wants to illustrate something, it does not seek its likenesses and examples far off, but uses obvious examples, as if from the crossroads. Nor are its arguments such as only the learned can perceive: but usually of such a sort that every rustic and unlearned person recognizes their force.

Often indeed there is in Scripture's words and phrases something foreign, and abhorrent from common use. But that is to be assigned to the genius of the Hebrew tongue, to which our ears are not accustomed. For the sacred writers either wrote in the Hebrew tongue, as Moses and the Prophets, or used phrases and idiotisms of the Hebrew tongue even when they wrote in Greek, as the writers of the New Testament.

Finally Scripture everywhere acts candidly and ingenuously. And whereas men are accustomed, whether blaming or praising, threatening or promising, to inflate small and humble things and raise them with magnificent words and sublime metaphors, Scripture on the contrary expresses the greatest things in a style usually thin and common, and with words that sink below the magnitude of the matter. And when it threatens and promises, its promises are indeed magnificent and its threats terrific: yet so that the moment and gravity of the thing itself far surpass the sound and emphasis of the words. And yet from that highest simplicity of Scripture gravity and decorum are never absent. Indeed there is often joined to it a wondrous sublimity of speaking: so much so that Longinus himself, the Gentile rhetor and most hostile enemy of Christians, treating of the sublime (περὶ ὕψους), cites its example from Moses: "As," he says, "the Legislator of the Hebrews said, and they were done" (Genesis 1:3).

39Now if we attend to the things themselves of Scripture, notes of divinity still far more illustrious and clearer will appear in them. Whatever Scripture contains is either histories and narrations of things past, or oracles and predictions of things future, or dogmas and precepts that mark no difference of time. Further, two things chiefly commend a history: the truth of the matters, and also their weight and moment — both of which sacred history claims for itself in an eminent way. And first, sacred history has many and great indications of truth. For either reason and the very nature of things give it suffrage, as with the history of the world's creation, which is proved by most strong arguments to have been made from nothing and in time. As for history, even the monuments of ancient and external writers also afford testimony to its truth — for example in the history of the universal flood, of the building of the tower of Babel, of the burning of Sodom and Gomorrah, of the Israelites' exit from Egypt — of which mention is made among approved and ancient historians whose fragments survive in Eusebius, Josephus, and others, and some of which are still current in men's hands.

41Moreover sincerity and candor build faith for the sacred historians — candor so great that they do not hide their own vices, and often brand themselves and their own with many marks of ignominy. Nay, the poets' very fables make Scripture's history credible. For if anyone diligently inspects the ancient poets' fables and compares them with sacred history, he will find those fables to be shadows of things whose body Scripture has, and to have drawn their origin from true histories spread through the whole world by the tradition of Noah's sons, and later corrupted and interpolated by the lapse of time: which could be made plain by many examples, and which learned men who have labored in this matter have made easy to see.

42Now if anyone wishes to weigh the weight and moment of sacred history, what matters of greater weight and moment can be imagined than those which pertain not only to some nation and commonwealth, but to the whole Church which God selected for himself out of the world — nay, to the universal world, to the angels who inhabit Heaven, and to God himself, who is the first cause of all things? These are the things about which sacred Scripture's history turns. For Scripture tells us what were this universe's beginnings and cradles, and how God once founded all things and ordered them to exist; whence the human race was born and propagated; how it spread through the whole earth; and what were at the beginning the divisions of nations and of tongues. It narrates the appearances of angelic spirits and their frequent colloquies with men, and God's own admirable deeds in ruling and guarding the Church and procuring the human race's salvation. If anyone compares Greek or Roman histories with these, he will find nothing whose moment and gravity can in any part match them.

43Especially in the Prophets' oracles and inspirations the greatest light of divinity shines — of which we spoke already above — because it not only suffices to persuade a pious and faithful mind, but also avails much to refute the enemies of God's Word and to prove its divinity even against the profane. For if you regard the matter of the sacred oracles, they are not about things of no or slight moment, but about what looks to God's glory and the salvation of the whole human race. Nor are the prophetic oracles entangled and ambiguous, as the pagans' oracles once were, but so clear and plain that persons and place are often named in them, and the time of fulfillment is fixed beforehand with precision. Nor are they fallacious and uncertain: by the event itself most have already been proved.

44Sacred Scripture's precepts and dogmas also do not lack their own light — nay, they have by far the greatest. That this may appear more clearly, note that they are of two kinds. For Scripture teaches and commands many things of which men have by nature some notice, but very confused and wavering. Yet Scripture has laid those things open more lucidly, and taught them fully and accurately. Of this sort are what Scripture hands down concerning God's nature and attributes — namely concerning God's eternal, immense, and immutable essence; concerning his infinite power, wisdom, goodness, and also justice; concerning the creation of the world and of all that is in it; concerning God's providence by which he conserves, rules, and administers all things; likewise concerning man's office both toward God and toward the neighbor: that God is to be loved above all, all things referred to his glory, himself carefully worshiped and invoked, trusted, and that one is to rest upon his care; that the neighbor also is to be loved, good done to all, injuries borne, oneself thought of humbly, innermost thoughts and affections kept pure — and in a word, nearly all and each of the precepts of the Christian life, which ought to be pure and sincere in every part, and from which all filth and luxury ought to be absent. Those things and the like the sense of conscience proves, reason confirms, and certain rudiments of them are discerned in the pagans' books. For they hand down some things concerning God, piety, and man's office that are not contemptible — yet obscurely, sparingly, coldly, doubtfully, and mixed with very many errors. But Scripture places those things in clear light and teaches them fully and openly: so that after its light has shone on us, we wonder that things so certain and undoubted were seen and handed down only thinly, doubtfully, and obscurely by the most excellent minds. But when those most excellent minds handed down so jejunely and obscurely the things whose truth we now discern by Scripture's benefit, while Scripture handed them down so fully and perspicuously — and yet the sacred writers did not excel other men by erudition or by nature's gifts, but on the contrary most were rude and unlearned in the human sciences — it is necessary that they were led by another light than nature's, and taught and inspired by God.

But besides those things of which men have by nature only a thin and fleeing cognition, sacred Scripture teaches many things that surpass reason, which the human mind cannot grasp, and for which it has no certain arguments. Yet they cohere so well with what the sense of conscience proves and right reason is convinced of, and agree so well with those prior things, and are built upon them so fittingly, that it sufficiently appears they are not human inventions but mysteries of divine wisdom. Such, for example, is the doctrine of the expiation of our sins through the death and offering on the cross of Christ, God and man — which is discerned to agree most with God's justice and mercy. For in this manner God's justice was satisfied while our sins were punished in Christ, and mercy while they were forgiven us. And with this doctrine coheres that dogma so sublime and lofty concerning three divine persons in one essence. For unless the Son of God were God and equal to the Father, his sacrifice would not have been of infinite value, such as was required that by it our sins be expiated, inasmuch as they had deserved infinite punishment. And such also is the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. For it seems agreeable to reason that a man who acts well or ill in the body should also receive in the body punishment or reward for what was done justly or unjustly — which, since it does not happen in this life, agrees with God's justice that our bodies, which death has reduced to dust, be joined again to their souls, so that it may go well or ill with the whole man according as he acted well or ill.

But moreover the greatest indication of divinity in sacred Scripture is its efficacy, by which it acts inwardly in a man — partly by terrifying consciences and affecting them with the sense of sin, partly by raising the bruised mind and consoling afflicted consciences; but chiefly by so changing the man that he hates sin and pursues piety and true virtue from the soul. By this efficacy nothing is more powerful in confirming the faithful, although it cannot compel to assent those who have not yet felt that efficacy and have hardened against God's Word. And yet even a most profane man, if he has not felt the efficacy of God's Word, yet if he considers it attentively, can easily recognize that this Word is such as to generate the highest tranquillity and joy in those who firmly believe it, and to compel them to every good work and every virtue.

And let these few things suffice as a taste of this argument, which can never be exhausted, and which is treated more fully and copiously by learned men whose footsteps we follow and who have borne the torch before us. But this seems worth adding: that these characters of divinity which we said shine in Scripture are not to be sought in single parts of Scripture separated from the whole, but in the divine writings as they are considered jointly and as wholes in themselves. For it is not to be thought that any pericope of a Canonical book has a certain mark by which it can be discerned and distinguished from the Apocrypha.

45Besides, we must admit that the marks and signs of divinity we said belong in Scripture do not shine with equal brilliance in every book. Just as one star differs from another in light, so some books of Scripture send out richer and more splendid rays of the divine Spirit, while others send out far feebler and more obscure ones. In the Old Testament, for example, Esther and Ruth are far dimmer in divine brightness than Moses's Pentateuch and the Prophecy of Isaiah. And the vestiges of Christ's Spirit are less open in the epistles of James and Jude than in most of Paul's epistles and the four Gospels.

46In the previous disputation we set out what light sacred Scripture has — that is, what arguments and marks of truth and of divine origin. Next we ask how that light is perceived, and whether, and how far, the Holy Spirit's work is needed if we are to acknowledge Scripture as true and divine.

Here, though, we must distinguish a fleeting, vanishing opinion from true saving faith that is pleasing and acceptable to God. A person can form an opinion that Scripture is divine, drawn by some human incentives, without any inward work of the Spirit; the Schools call that human and acquired faith. Many utterly wicked and perverse heretics do not deny Scripture's authority and grant that it is divinely inspired. Unbelieving Jews themselves fiercely defend at least the Old Testament's authority, and Mohammedans are said to hold and revere both Testaments as divine. Still we need not suppose that the Holy Spirit is at work in all those heretics and unbelievers, illuminating their minds within.

47Saving, legitimate faith about Scripture — faith that actually matters for salvation — does not arise without the Holy Spirit slipping into our minds and working there in secret. The Schools therefore name that faith divine and infused. Scripture itself says so again and again.

Christ teaches in John that no one can come to him (believe in him and take his teaching) unless the Father draws that person, and unless that person has heard the Father teaching within. His words: "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. It is written in the Prophets, And they shall all be taught by God. Therefore everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me" (John 6).

Paul is just as plain: no one can say "Jesus is Lord" except by the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 12). On the Gospel mysteries he adds (1 Corinthians 2): "God has revealed them to us by his Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. But we have not received the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we may know the things freely given to us by God." Then: "But the natural man does not perceive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned." That is why faith itself is called God's gift (Ephesians 2): "By grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God."

48Human crookedness, plus the darkness sin has piled on, forces this need for God's Spirit in the soul. Scripture is full of matter that fights our warped loves. The flesh-bound person therefore recoils and turns away — and that recoil blocks true acknowledgment and right judgment, because we all judge by the grain of our affections.

Sin also darkens the mind so thoroughly that even among ordinary natural things we keep hallucinating and falling into error. How much less, then, can we be sure of what stands above nature? So the Holy Spirit must drive out the mind's native night, and clear the smoke by which wicked desires cloud the intellect and stop it from seeing truth.

Nor is depravity the only reason. The very character of the doctrine Scripture teaches also requires this Spirit work if faith is to be born in us. Scripture holds mysteries that outrun not only fallen nature but human nature taken by itself, even without sin. Nature cannot invent them, think them up, or even understand and take them in. So the Spirit must heal minds sin has blinded, and must also lift the intellect well above its natural level, until it can rise to things that great.

49But what the mode of that operation is remains very obscure and hard to explain — which might seem strange. Since the Holy Spirit's work happens in our souls, we seem as if we ought to know it by sense and experience itself. Yet there is nothing odd here. We experience many things in ourselves, and we ourselves do many things, whose reason and mode we still do not grasp and cannot understand.

Every day we experience that we see and understand; yet when someone must explain how vision and intellection happen, the sharpest and most learned men stick fast and cannot disentangle themselves. Physicists and mathematicians still dispute whether vision happens by the emission of rays or by the reception of visible species.

So although every believer experiences that he embraces God's Word with certain faith and gives full, firm assent to sacred Scripture, it should not surprise us if theologians stick fast when they try to explain how that faith is generated in us, and how the Spirit brings forth that assent. On that we will briefly set out our view.

50Our first settled point: when the Spirit leads someone to faith, he so shapes and moves that person's mind — otherwise groping and blind here — that it can see and own the light of God's Word and of Scripture. The mind seriously watches the arguments, marks, and axioms that prove the Word true and divine; it judges them rightly; and then, as it should, it is persuaded of that divine truth. While he works within, the Spirit is said to give new eyes.

Moses speaks of those eyes (Deuteronomy 29): "You have seen all that the Lord did before you in the land of Egypt to Pharaoh and to all his servants and to all his land, the great trials your eyes saw, those signs and huge wonders: and the Lord has not given you a heart to understand, or eyes to see, or ears that can hear, to this day." David asked for the same help (Psalm 119, pause Ghimel): "Open my eyes, and I will consider the wonders of your law." By "wonders of the law" he means the tokens of divine wisdom sown through God's law. Our fleshly mind cannot judge those rightly while dullness, crookedness, and ignorance — a veil over the mind's eyes — stand in the way. The Holy Spirit lifts that veil in the faithful.

May we doubt, though, whether this Spirit work alone — simply making the mind attend to Scripture's shining light and take it in — is enough to birth a full, sufficiently certain faith about sacred Scripture? We may. The light under discussion is only moral evidence. It does not compel the mind the way self-evident principles do, or the way logical and mathematical proofs do. So it yields a lower grade of certainty, as the previous disputation taught.

That leaves a fork. Either the faith we give Scripture, by its own kind, never reaches the certainty human sciences enjoy — against what theologians commonly hold — or the Spirit, when he stamps that faith on us, does more than merely open eyes to Scripture's light. Take the sacred books one by one and, if we speak honestly, many simply do not carry enough light of themselves to make it wholly certain and plain both that they hold true teaching and that God wrote and inspired them. Old Testament examples: Esther, Ruth, and the Song of Songs. New Testament examples: some epistles, such as Jude and James.

So to receive those books as divine with firm, certain faith, spotting the light in them is not enough. That light cannot force the assent faith requires. And that assent belongs to faith's object, because those books stand inside the rule of faith and are counted among faith's principles.

51So for firm, certain faith in the whole of Scripture as divine — the faith it deserves — opened eyes are not enough. Besides the Spirit’s work of opening our mind’s eyes to the light that shines in sacred Scripture, there seems to need to be a certain inward impulse and instinct (so to speak) that moves us to believe with a force greater than every argument and reason.

That instinct is what we take the Spirit’s inward persuasion and the Holy Spirit’s inward testimony properly to mean. When the Spirit is said to testify in believers’ hearts that Scripture is divine truth, we must not picture them hearing an inward voice that says, clear and express, "This is true and is God’s Word." Take it as a kind of virtual testimony: in a secret way the Spirit urges us to believe and stamps on our minds a settled persuasion of Scripture’s divinity.

That is how to read the famous Augustine passage usually cited from his Confessions. "Let me hear," he says, "and understand how in the beginning you made heaven and earth. Moses wrote this, wrote it and went away, passed from here to you, for he is not now before me. For if he were, I would hold him and ask him and through you beg him to open these things to me, and I would offer the ears of my body to the sounds breaking from his mouth. And if he spoke in Hebrew, he would strike my sense in vain and would not, in my way, touch my mind at all. But if in Latin, I would know what he said — yet how would I know he spoke the truth? And if I knew even that, would I know it from him? Within me, yes within, in the dwelling of thought, truth — neither Hebrew nor Greek nor Latin nor barbarian — without mouth and tongue, without the noise of syllables, would say, ’He speaks the truth’; and I at once, certain, would confidently say to that man of yours, ’You speak the truth.’"

52Do not fear that admitting this Spirit impulse and instinct in the faithful opens the door to enthusiasms. The Spirit’s force and action in us differs greatly from enthusiasm.

In enthusiasm — to leave other differences aside — God slips into men’s minds and reveals things they never learned or heard from any human teacher. The Spirit, by contrast, urges believers only toward what is set before them from outside as to be believed: the Word of God handed down through the Apostles and Prophets.

Nor is the persuasion that impulse births blind or unaware of itself. The Spirit of God does not drive us to believe before he has first made the mind see the light of those things, so the intellect judges them credible and rightly believable with reason. The truth-marks the mind notes in them still do not equal the certainty the Holy Spirit stamps, and they are not that certainty’s rule and measure.

53That Spirit of wisdom and revelation — the force by which people are led into knowledge of God’s Word and form certain faith about it — is common to every member of the church. No believer, no church member, is wholly without him.

"As many as are sons of God are led by the Spirit of God. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not his," the Apostle testifies (Romans 8). And since we already proved that no one can believe God’s Word and receive it as divine without the Holy Spirit’s light, it follows that every believer who trusts that Word has been illuminated by the Holy Spirit.

54Yet that Spirit is given unequally, not to all by the same measure. So although every believer has God’s Spirit at least in some degree, some are still called spiritual over against others called carnal, as in 1 Corinthians 3.

Paul says: "And I, brothers, could not speak to you as to spiritual people, but as to carnal: as to infants in Christ." He does not call them brothers unless they are believers. Yet those he addresses there he calls carnal — still crude and weak in mind, who have not yet received Christ’s Spirit in the measure needed to bear and grasp the more hidden, harder mysteries of the Christian religion. So, as he says, they are as it were infants in Christ. By "the spiritual" he means those the Holy Spirit has raised into a more perfect state.

55So not everyone in the church receives God’s Spirit in a measure that lets each person acknowledge and discern everything that belongs to God’s Word and sacred Scripture. Among believers who have that Spirit, doubt can remain about some book of Scripture, and about some dogma of the Christian religion.

In the early church not all good and holy teachers held the same view of the canonical books: some rejected what others admitted. For example, the Latin church long rejected the Epistle to the Hebrews, while the Greek church acknowledged its sacred and divine authority.

Nor should someone who errs in a head of religion be struck at once from the number of the faithful. Paul in Philippians 3 wants those who are perfect to bear with those who think otherwise, and to keep fellowship with them as brothers, in the meantime, as God reveals to them what they have not yet reached.

56However unequally that Spirit of Wisdom and revelation is shared out, this much is certain: everyone who has God’s Spirit can recognize the Word of God set before him, and tell true teaching from false, as far as his own salvation requires.

It is not necessary for each person’s salvation to know every sacred book, or everything God has revealed in his Word. Some of those things are needed for individuals’ salvation; others look only to the church’s common good. Compare church members one with another and one is bound to know more in God’s Word, another less. What is enough for a private person’s salvation must not be treated as enough for those called to teach in the church.

Therefore God variously dispenses his gifts in the church as he sees fit. He does not give his Spirit to all in such fullness that they can reach everything his Word contains. But to each believer he at least metes out the Spirit-measure needed to acknowledge and take in what fits that person’s calling, and what that person needs to know for his own state and condition.

Read the Scripture places that give the faithful power to discern and judge God’s Word under that limit and fitting distribution. Christ says (John 10): "My sheep hear my voice." And (John 7): "If anyone wills to do the Father’s will, he will know concerning the teaching, whether it is from God, or whether I speak from myself." Paul says (1 Corinthians 2): "The spiritual man judges all things." And 1 John 2: "You have an anointing from the Holy One, and you know all things." Likewise: "The anointing teaches you about all things."

By these and like places Scripture does not mean that every believer can at once, by the Spirit’s help, distinguish whatever in any way belongs to God’s Word. It means only this: those the Spirit has touched can, as far as each one’s salvation requires, discern the truth — the Spirit urging and suggesting — from contrary error.

57So it is clear how necessarily, in what manner, and how far the Holy Spirit works in us so that we can acknowledge God's Word and sacred Scripture. Next we should briefly see what also belongs to the Church in this matter. That was the third head of the things we undertook to examine at the start of this disputation.

58So the question is whether the Church's voice and testimony is needed to gain this knowledge. Briefly: absolutely speaking, no human labor is required for it. God can immediately, without anyone's outward ministry, give someone knowledge of Scripture and of his Word, and impress sure faith about it.

So Paul had not received the Gospel from a man, nor been taught it; he received it through the revelation of Jesus Christ, as he himself testifies (Galatians 1). So the other Apostles were led by the Spirit Paraclete into all truth with no man going before. So of old the Prophets learned from the Holy Spirit alone, who inspired them, what they spoke.

59But that was extraordinary. God did not see fit to use that path commonly when bringing people to faith and instructing them in heavenly teaching. He willed that people be taught by people and receive faith, yet with the Spirit himself teaching within and working with them.

So he instituted the sacred ministry in the Church and commanded pastors and teachers to announce, explain, and commend his Word publicly, and to bear witness to its truth. And what pastors do publicly and with authority, individual believers also are bound by divine ordinance to do privately, according to their measure, among those committed to their care.

60So under the ordinary law that ministry is necessary if someone is to know divine teaching and Scripture and conceive faith. The Holy Spirit does not lead us straight into knowledge of God's Word. Nor do we embrace heavenly teaching and revere the Scriptures by some immediate breath of the Spirit. In this matter we need the Church's ministers going before us, and those entrusted with our instruction, who propose and set out that teaching and who point out, explain, and commend Scripture.

First that Church testimony moves us to think well of heavenly teaching and sacred Scripture and to give it faith; otherwise we would stay forever ignorant of it. As the Apostle says (Romans 10): "How will they believe him of whom they have not heard? How will they hear without a preacher?" Likewise: "Faith comes from hearing; and hearing through the Word of God" — that is, from God's command. Here belongs Augustine's oft-sung line: "I would not believe the Gospel unless the Catholic Church's authority moved me." He speaks in the person of someone being brought into faith, who is beginning to have some persuasion of the Gospel's divine truth.

For the Church's common consensus and testimony is ordinarily the first incentive that leads us to give Scripture some faith. And even among the faithful themselves, when doubt arises about some book or divine dogma, we confess that the Church's constant, uniform testimony is an argument of the greatest weight and moment; for a person to set his own judgment against it is insolent and rash. Especially when the question is rejecting or admitting some sacred book, we acknowledge that the perpetual consensus of the Jewish and Christian Church is an inescapable argument, one to which anyone ought to yield.

61Yet the Church's consensus and testimony is not the proper and principal basis of our faith, the thing to which its certainty should be reduced. The Church, as we have just said, is what proposes and explains through its ministers — and through private believers too — the things we are to believe, according to God's ordinance. By its testimony and authority we are first led to give them some faith. But our faith does not rest there. It rests on a far more solid foundation. If it goes no further, it is not true and legitimate faith, only a human persuasion.

The Church does for us what the Samaritan woman once did for her townspeople. It opens the way for us to know Christ and his teaching. First the Church's testimony admonishes us to believe in Christ. But after we have heard Christ himself speaking — outwardly in the Word and inwardly in our hearts — our faith no longer rests on the Church's testimony. We can say to it what the Samaritans said to the woman: "Now we do not believe because of your speech, for we ourselves have heard, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world" (John 4).

62That matters stand this way — that the Church's testimony and authority is not the proper ground of our faith, not the chief thing on which our certainty about God's Word rests — is proved by many arguments. First: if our faith had that foundation, it would be human, not divine, because it would rest on men's testimony, not on divine truth and authority. Next it would follow that believers believe God not for God's sake but for men's, and that for the believers themselves men's authority is greater than God's — which is deeply absurd.

The definition of faith would have to change as well. By the consensus of all the Doctors, faith is the assent we give to God when he speaks. On that view, through faith we would be believing men more than God speaking. Nor would faith be an assent altogether firm and infallible. No human truthfulness is great enough to remove every fear of falsehood.

63Besides, no greater authority ever was in the Church, or ever will be, than the authority the Apostles held. Yet the faith of those who believed the Apostles' preaching did not rest on any Apostle's authority. Paul's words make that plain (Galatians 1): "Even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel other than what we preached to you, let him be anathema."

If the Apostles' authority had been the sole or principal foundation on which believers leaned, then once that foundation was removed their faith would necessarily have been removed or would have tottered. Yet even if Apostles — indeed angels themselves — had taught the contrary of what was first preached, Paul wills that the Gospel's faith remain no less firm and unshaken.

64Next, the Prophets and Apostles who first handed down sacred teaching and Scripture could not resolve the faith they had in God's Word into the Church's authority. They handed that teaching to the Church; they did not receive it as something the Church had already recommended. And it can happen, at least outside the ordinary course, that someone believes the Gospel though taught by no man — happening, say, on a Gospel codex. In that case his faith could not take as foundation a Church authority whose testimony he had never heard.

Yet there is one faith of all. Our faith does not differ in species from the faith of the Prophets and Apostles, or of those taught by God immediately. But our faith would not be the same as theirs if it had another foundation and another formal ground of believing. One species of faith has one proper and principal foundation. As the Schools put it, it does not have diverse formal grounds of believing.

65Add this: those who invent that our faith rests on the Church's authority mean by "Church" the universal Church. But individual believers do not hear that Church. Most are instructed by particular churches and their ministers, who can be deceived and can err. So their faith cannot rest on the testimony of a universal Church they have never heard.

66But once that opinion is exploded — the one that reduces faith in God's Word and sacred Scripture to the Church's authority — we must ask what our faith finally rests on, and what its proper and principal foundation is. To make that clear, a distinction seems needed between God's Word itself, or divine revelation, and the things handed down and contained in God's Word, which become open through divine revelation. Our faith receives the mysteries delivered in God's Word in one way, and God's own voice — divine revelation — in another.

67As for the things themselves handed down in God's Word — the so-called dogmas of faith, and the other things held in the Scriptures — we assent to them and receive them as true because God, who is supremely truthful and can neither be deceived nor deceive, revealed them to us through Apostles and Prophets and taught them in his Word. Besides divine revelation, the dogmas of faith do have many arguments by which they are proved and urged. God does not ordinarily lead us to faith in them except through mediating arguments, indications, and reasons that make their truth credible to our mind and gently work it into our souls.

That is why Peter wills that believers be able to give a defense, and to satisfy anyone who asks a reason for the hope that is in them (1 Peter 3). Whoever would believe with no reason at all, and would have no account of his faith or could not give one, would not have true faith, only a light and rash persuasion. So those who announce God's Word must not merely propose the doctrine of faith. They also need to apply persuasions and draw arguments from the things themselves or from adjuncts, so as to make the mysteries of the Christian religion credible and even strongly prove them. Still, the principal foundation of our faith, and its proper ground, is not those reasons and arguments of whatever kind, but divine revelation, on which our faith especially rests.

68Some learned men — if we have their mind right — think the certainty of the faith by which we embrace religion's dogmas and believe what God has revealed rests in the light of the things revealed, and in a certain inborn splendor of truth that convinces our mind and all but compels assent. When someone believes the Gospel, and is persuaded that the Son of God was made man, came into the world, suffered and died for us, rose again, ascended into the heavens, and the rest that belongs to our redemption, they hold that the proper and principal ground of that assent is the doctrine's own majesty, holiness, sublimity, and truth, and its congruence with right reason — which seizes the mind into assent and makes plain that the doctrine is not only true but has come immediately from God, since things so great and wonderful could neither be found nor fabricated by human wit.

On that view the truth of heavenly doctrine would by nature be recognized by us before we were sure God was its author; and so the ultimate and chief ground of believing it would not be the truthfulness and authority of God speaking, and that God so said and revealed, but — as they put it — the very truth and evidence of the thing. We do grant that religion's dogmas have their own light and arguments of truth, and even of divine origin. Still it seems more agreeable to theological truth and teaching to say that the proper and principal ground of the faith by which we receive those dogmas is the authority of God speaking and revealing, rather than the thing's own truth and light. That is proved by many arguments.

69First: up to now the Schools have held that faith, though it does not shut out reasoning, rests rather on the authority of the one who speaks. But faith does not rest chiefly on divine authority if the principal reason we believe the things of faith is a certain evidence of truth in the things themselves, not divine revelation. The definition of faith would also become absurd — that it is the assent we give to God speaking. For then through faith we would believe God speaking only materially, as the Schools say: we would believe the things God spoke, but not because God had spoken them. And it is absurd to define any habit of mind from its object only as material.

Suppose someone skilled in Peripatetic doctrine happens on a book of Aristotle, studies its teaching carefully, recognizes it as true, and even judges from the sharpness of style and manner of arguing that the book is Aristotle's. The assent he gives that doctrine could only absurdly be called faith held toward Aristotle speaking. Yet up to now the Theologians by common consensus not only define faith as assent exhibited to God speaking, and take its object to be God's Word and things revealed by God; they also teach that the formal ground of that object — under which faith apprehends it, and on account of which it receives and acknowledges it — is divine authority and revelation.

70Next: if the proper and chief ground of faith were the very light of truth discerned in the things to be believed, the light that necessarily determines the mind to assent, then faith would be an evident assent, and the dogmas of faith would be evident. For what is evident is what convinces the mind by its own light and compels assent. But it is almost an axiom of the schools, founded in the Scriptures, that faith is an inevident habit of the mind. Scripture sets faith against sight, and teaches that faith is of things that are not seen.

71Besides: some things God's Word teaches are demonstrable, and can be gathered from principles known through themselves. Still, many things are proposed to faith to be believed which — unless someone wants to be contentious — must be confessed neither known through themselves nor able to be proved by any necessary and convincing arguments. Take that principal article of faith by which we are taught that in one most simple essence of God there are three distinct persons. Who will dare promise a demonstration of so great a mystery, and seriously affirm that there is in it a certain evidence of truth? There our mind sees nothing but mere darkness, dimming toward that inaccessible light as owls' eyes toward the sun. Even the most acute and subtle can scarcely clear that article of apparent contradiction, much less demonstrate it.

The same holds for the satisfaction performed by Christ's death, for the future conflagration of the whole world, and for the resurrection of all the dead. If anyone seeks proofs of their truth besides the authority of sacred Scripture, he will find nothing firm enough, nothing that suffices to support our faith. We do not disapprove the pious labor of those who try to prove and urge these mysteries and the like with reasons sought from every side. But if we deal candidly, we must confess that those arguments, of whatever kind, are only what the Schools call congruences: at most they make the matter probable and likely; they do not necessarily conclude that it is so.

72When the Israelites in Egypt were taught that every male was to be circumcised on the eighth day, that they were to abstain from blood, that some animals might be eaten and others not, and more of that kind, no one can deny those things were to be embraced by them with faith, as things pleasing and acceptable to God. Yet who could sincerely and from the heart say those things had in themselves a light enough to make faith, and enough to compel believers' minds to conclude that God had commanded and handed them down? The same can be said of us today about that washing of water used in Baptism, and about taking bread and wine at the Lord's table.

So when many dogmas and precepts must be taken up by faith, though they do not have in themselves the light and evidence by which they would prove themselves with enough certainty true and handed down by God, it is clear that the principal ground and basis of the faith by which we take up what God's Word delivers and religion's dogmas is not the thing's own truth and evidence, but rather the truth and authority of God teaching and revealing.

73You will ask how we perceive divine revelation, and where the certainty comes from in the faith that embraces God's Word itself. God does not ordinarily speak without notes and marks in his voice and word by which it can be told from human or diabolical fraud. The revelation our faith rests on today — consigned in the sacred Scriptures — has very illustrious arguments claiming it for God, as the earlier theses already showed at length. The faith that receives it is not a blind persuasion with no account of itself. A fitting believer is led to assent by reasons and motives strong enough to persuade a prudent man that God is truly the one speaking, and that a fabricated, false revelation is not being passed off as true.

Besides arguments taken from the matter itself, God has often used signs and miracles to create faith for his word and compel men to believe; the faith of those who believed is not rarely ascribed to those signs. Sergius Paulus, a prudent man, saw the blindness with which Paul the Apostle struck Elymas the Magician, and believed while marveling at the Lord's doctrine (Acts 13). The centurion standing by as Christ died saw the wonders at Christ's death and glorified God, saying truly this man was just (Luke 23). Likewise (John 4): a father recognized that Christ's word had healed his dying son, and that the boy had recovered at the very hour Jesus said your son lives — and he believed, and his whole house with him. Conversion is therefore deservedly suspect when someone asked for its reason has nothing to say, or only trivial things to offer.

74Still, we do not think those arguments and motives of belief — the ones that recommend God's Word and gently bend minds toward obedience to it — are what faith's certainty chiefly hangs on, or its principal foundation. God does use them when he generates faith, and by them faith already generated is also nourished and kept warm. They do not seem to be faith's strongest basis, or the measure of its certainty.

The Christian schools already agree on this, as thesis 8 said: faith's certainty is the highest — equal to every certainty in the human sciences, or even above them — when faith is judged from its own principles and taken as it can and ought to be, not as it actually stands in many people. But the faith that receives God's Word as Scripture now holds it cannot have that certainty if it rests only on the notes and arguments that prove Scripture divine. Those are not demonstrations that produce absolute certainty. They are only moral arguments. They can lead a person to believe prudently, yet by themselves and by their nature they cannot generate a certainty equal to what the mathematical disciplines have — the kind of certainty, or even a greater one, that we suppose faith acquires.

75Especially when we take the sacred books one by one, we must admit that many do not carry in themselves those notes of divinity that would necessarily and evidently prove their divine authority, or found the certainty faith requires. Judges, Ruth, Esther, and the Song of Songs are examples. That they are divinely inspired can scarcely be proved by anything but the general arguments drawn from the testimony and consent of the Jewish and Christian Church.

Yet those books are part of the divine Word and of that most certain rule of faith by which everything that touches religion must be tried and examined. They belong to the object of faith in its full breadth, and the assent we rightly give them is referred to no other virtue than faith. So when some parts of God's Word that faith must receive lack intrinsic arguments of divinity strong enough by themselves to found the assent faith demands, the arguments by which God's Word proves itself divine and from God are plainly not faith's principal foundation, or the last thing into which our faith should resolve.

It is no answer that faith in such books is not necessary for each person's salvation. The question here is not what each person must know to be saved. We are considering the nature and foundation of faith in general — and many things belong to faith's object that individuals need not know for salvation.

76Therefore we state that the last thing into which our faith finally resolves — its principal support — is that impulse and instinct of the Holy Spirit described in thesis 9. By that name we mean the Spirit's action and efficiency: he immediately moves us to receive divine revelation and impresses a sure persuasion of it on our minds.

A comparison with scientific assent helps. What demonstrated conclusions are in the sciences, the dogmas of faith and the other things God's Word teaches are here. What the middle term of a demonstration is to its conclusion, the authority of God speaking and revealing is to the things proposed for belief. As we immediately grasp the middle term and the force of a demonstration by reason's natural, inborn light, so we immediately believe and perceive the revelation given to the Prophets and Apostles through the Spirit's inward instinct and testimony — what the Scholastics call the light of faith.

And as reason's light is not something we come to know by reasoning, but that by which we know and reason, so this testimony of the Holy Spirit is not a further thing believed, nor an argument that moves us to believe. It is only that by which we believe — the action that impresses faith on the mind. Every believer who elicits an act of faith need not know and understand that action by reflexive cognition, any more than a country laborer must think about intelligence and the power of reasoning while he understands and reasons.

77But what the Holy Spirit's testimony actually contributes, and what weight the arguments for Scripture's divine authority have when we give Scripture the faith it deserves — we cannot explain better than in the words of a most famous man speaking on the point.

Let this stand fixed: those the Spirit has taught inwardly rest solidly in Scripture; Scripture is self-authenticating; it is not right to subject it to demonstration and reasoning; and the certainty it deserves among us comes by the Spirit's testimony. Its own majesty does win reverence of itself, yet it first seriously moves us when the Spirit has sealed it on our hearts. Illuminated by that power, we no longer believe Scripture is from God by our judgment or by other people's. Above human judgment we settle more certainly than certain — as if we were beholding God's own deity there — that by human ministry it has flowed to us from God's very mouth.

We do not hunt arguments or probabilities for our judgment to lean on. As for a matter already beyond the hazard of weighing and guessing, we subject our judgment and ingenuity to it. Not as wretched people bind a captive mind to superstitions, but because we feel no doubtful power of the deity thriving and breathing there — and by it, knowing and willing, we are still drawn and kindled to obey more vividly and effectively than human will or knowledge can account for. Such is the persuasion that does not ask for reasons; such the knowledge that has the best reason of all, the one in which the mind rests more securely and constantly than in any reasonings; such, finally, the sense that cannot be born except from heavenly revelation (Calvin, Institutes 1.7.5).

78So far we have set out our judgment on Scripture's authority as distinctly and clearly as we could. To draw the whole into a few words, we have taught first that Scripture bears a splendor of its own and sends out various rays of divinity. Those rays can strike and move a mind rightly disposed, and so Scripture proves itself.

Yet that light is not evidence in the strict sense — not the kind that belongs to things known of themselves, or that fall under demonstration, as in mathematics and metaphysics. It is only a moral evidence. It consists entirely in this: Scripture is recommended by so many probable arguments, and carries in itself so many conspicuous marks of divinity, that a pious and prudent person is effectively led to believe it true and divine — even though its divine authority is not self-evident, and cannot be demonstrated.

80We have also shown this: speaking absolutely, we do not need the Church's voice and testimony in order to know and believe Scripture. Still, by the ordinary rule God uses the Church's ministry when he generates in us faith concerning Scripture. The first incentive that ordinarily moves us to receive it as true and divine is the Church's common consent and testimony.

Even so, the Church's voice and authority are not the principal foundation of our faith, nor the last point to which the certainty of the faith that embraces sacred Scripture is to be reduced.

81We have taught that religion's dogmas, and other things handed down by God's word, can carry many arguments for their truth. Those arguments are still not the proper and principal reason on which the faith rests that receives what God's word hands down. That reason is rather the authority and truthfulness of God as he teaches and reveals.

God's word itself — divine revelation — does have notes and marks by which it can be recognized and told apart from diabolical and human frauds. Even so, our faith does not rest chiefly on notes and marks of that kind. Its certainty is resolved into the Holy Spirit's secret testimony, and into that inward efficiency by which he immediately makes the faithful certain it is God who speaks, and presses a firm persuasion of this on our minds.

82Next we must see what the Roman doctors judge about all this, so that it may be plain where the real state of the question on Scripture's authority lies — the question fought today with such heat between us and them. First of all, notice that among the Pontificii there are two kinds of men.

Many among them are insolent, without candor, with scarcely any learning. Their only aim is to harass our people with importunate disputes. They often fight like the Andabatae — blindfold fighters — not seeing what they hold or where they aim their blows. In debate they not only attack our doctrine; they also tear up their own opinions and contradict themselves. Pointed sophisms and captious subtlety are enough for them if they can make trouble for us. They do not care whether what they urge against us can be turned back on themselves.

So when Scripture's authority is the question, they hiss at the Holy Spirit's inward testimony and babble against our people words that strip sacred Scripture of all authority and hang our faith solely on human testimony. In that way they expose the Christian religion to reproach and make it look ridiculous, as if it rested on no foundation but the authority of those who profess it.

83Besides those babblers and sophists who carry no weight even among their own, we must admit that the Pontifical school has many learned men. They speak more carefully and exactly, and they choose their arguments better. These hold the Roman Church's mind more accurately, explain it better, and defend it more cautiously.

So those earlier quarrelsome wranglers should indeed be checked and put down; our people rightly refute their folly and impiety and expose it in public. Still, when we seek and fix the real state of a controversy with the Roman Church, we should not cling to those men's trifles. We should ask what the later sort think and teach — the ones who stand strong among their own in learning and authority.

84Even those leaders and front-rank men of the Pontifical school must be told apart from themselves. They do not always seem consistent. They speak one way when they deal with their own and teach among them with a calm, composed mind. They speak another way when they fight with us and the heat of disputing and contradicting has caught fire.

In their contests with us, carried off by hatred of us and by the heat of debate, those very Antelignani — front-rank men — of the Roman school rashly blurt out many things that cut against not only us but themselves, and of which they are ashamed. Elsewhere in their writings those same points appear set out far more softly, and closer to the truth.

85Those rash blurted words, born of hatred and blind passion rather than a settled judgment, our people may most justly note and press. Yet when we fix the state of any controversy, we think we should look rather to the places where they speak with a calm mind, treat the matter on purpose, and explain their Church's mind clearly and distinctly.

Not only men who plead a bad cause, but also good men set on defending the truth, often pull too far from the opposing view in the heat of dispute and are carried to the opposite shore. They imprudently urge against an adversary things that also hurt themselves, and that do not sit fully with the truth or with their own settled opinions. Our people and the Pontificii alike often notice this in the ancient Fathers of the Church, when those Fathers refute schismatics and heretics and inveigh against heresies.

Equity and candor require that words spoken so harshly and awkwardly be explained from other places where those authors speak more fitly and more in step with the truth. We do not deny that our own doctors sometimes need the same pardon and indulgence. So if we are to deal kindly and candidly with our adversaries, we judge that the same should be granted them: where they have spoken badly and falsely in one place, but well and truly in another, the earlier words should be softened and read from the later.

86Apply that equity to the matter in hand, and it is plain: not only the empty disputers who count for little even among their own, but the very men who head the Roman school, often urge in debate things that cut clean against what we have taught so far — against the marks of God's Word, against the arguments that prove sacred Scripture, and against that inward Spirit-testimony in which our certainty about the Word must finally rest.

They talk as if Scripture deserved no trust and held no authority except what it borrows from the Roman Church, and as if the whole certainty of our faith lay on today's church doctors — so that, once that witness is set aside, Scripture would be worth no more among us than any pagan book. Our doctors collect those impious and blasphemous lines in their disputations on this subject.

Yet when those same Roman doctors speak so injuriously of Scripture, they forget themselves and pull down their own settled teaching. For nearly everything we have already taught — Scripture's light, the Spirit's secret witness, the proper ground of faith and its chief foundation, and the last point into which faith's certainty resolves — is handed down by Pontifical theologians in the schools. To make that clear, we must run briefly back through the heads already treated and note in a few words what the Pontificii teach on each.

87First: the Pontificii will not allow the things that belong to faith of themselves to be self-evident or demonstrable — and we have already granted that. Still they do not deny that matters of faith carry a kind of outward, moral evidence. Beside their Church's authority they admit many arguments by which Christian doctrine and sacred Scripture are proved and, in their phrase, made evidently credible.

Thomas's commentators teach this commonly on the Secunda secundae, question 1, article 4, where he asks whether the object of faith can be something seen. Thomas holds that faith's object is not something seen or evident; then he faces the Apostle's line in 1 Corinthians 13, We see as through a mirror. Paul is speaking of faith's knowledge, yet says that through it we see as through a mirror — so the believer seems to see faith's object, and faith would be of things seen.

Thomas answers that the things of faith may be taken in special, and then cannot be seen and believed at once; or in general, under the common reason of what is credible, and then the believer does see them. He would not believe, Thomas says, unless he saw that they ought to be believed — either by the evidence of signs or by something of that kind. From those words the scholastics draw this: what falls under faith is not evidently true, yet it is evidently credible, and is urged by many weighty arguments and strong reasons. Each writer then lists the proofs that seem strongest to him — Dominic Banñez, John of Poitiers, Pesantius, and others on that same article of Thomas.

88Gregory of Valencia, a sharp and learned Jesuit, spends the whole first book of his Analysis of Faith chasing the arguments by which Christian doctrine and Scripture (its book) can be proved and pressed. He counts nineteen such arguments, and in them touches nearly every mark of God's Word that our people name — the proofs by which sacred Scripture can be told apart from human writings.

Bellarmine himself, in On the Word of God book 1, chapter 1, leaves aside his Church's testimony (which his opponents refuse) and still proves Scripture's divine authority by many reasons: miracles done to confirm Scripture, the striking agreement of the sacred writers, prophecies of future things contained in Scripture and proved by the event — and other points he urges against Libertines who despise Scripture.

So those of our theologians miss the Roman mind when they labor to prove against them that Scripture has marks and arguments of divinity — as if the whole heat of the authority debate sat there, and as if the Pontificii simply denied that Scripture has any τεκμήρια or notes of divinity and held that it can be known only by the Church's word.

89The doctors of the Roman Church also agree with us that some inward work of the Holy Spirit is needed if we are to recognize God's Word and sacred Scripture and receive it with due faith. They call that work, as we do, the Spirit's inward illumination, revelation, and persuasion, and the inward testimony of the Holy Spirit. They speak of it so clearly and so often that citing them might seem needless; still, lest doubt linger, a few witnesses from many.

Melchior Canus, Loci Theologici 2.8, reply to the fourth argument: human authority and all those outer inducements used by the one who proposes the faith are not enough for the belief we are bound to give; there must also be an interior efficient cause — God's special help moving us to believe. A little later: no outward human persuasion is enough, however well the things of faith are set out by men; there must also be an interior cause — a divine light that urges belief, and inward eyes given by God's kindness for seeing. He presses Thomas, Augustine, and many Scripture places for the point.

Stapleton teaches the same in his relection on the Church's power, and more fully in On the Principles of Faith (Controversy 4, book 8, chapter 1): without special grace and the infused gift of faith it is impossible to produce a true act of faith, or to believe with faith worthy of the name. Against Whitaker he keeps complaining that Rome is falsely charged with denying the Spirit's inward testimony; and in defense of the Church's authority, chapter 3, he says that secret testimony of the divine Spirit is altogether necessary if anyone is to trust the Church's judgment in approving the Scriptures. Gregory of Valencia concurs: God himself first of all, by the voice of his revelation and by an inward instinct and impulse, witnesses to human minds that Christian doctrine — and so sacred Scripture — is true, and persuades, as Scripture itself says in many places. Bellarmine carries the same teaching through a whole sermon titled On the Light of Faith.

90From all this it is clear that those have missed the mark of this controversy who state the question as: Do we believe Scripture on the Church's testimony alone, or chiefly on the inward testimony of the Holy Spirit? — as if Rome wholly rejected and hissed out that inward Spirit-testimony.

And on the other side the Pontificii wrong us when they harry our people as boasters of a private Spirit, gaping after enthusiasms. On the Spirit's secret testimony we teach nothing beyond what they themselves grant. Nor does that testimony cancel, as they falsely charge, the need of the Church's ministry to propose and explain what belongs to faith — as the previous disputation has already shown at length.

91The Pontificii teach no less plainly that the Church's authority is not the formal reason of our faith — not the chief foundation on which faith finally rests. Melchior Canus presses this hardest in Loci Theologici 2.8, reply to the fourth argument. Third, he says, we must hold that faith's formal reason is not the Church's authority: faith's last resolution is not made into the Church's testimony. Below he adds: the Church's authority is not of itself a reason that moves to belief. And again: if the question is asked in general how the believer knows that what he holds by faith was revealed by God, he cannot bring in the Church's authority.

Some of the older scholastics — Durandus and Gabriel Biel — did finally resolve Christian faith into the Church's authority, as if the Church's word were the believer's last ground for believing. That view was exploded long ago and is rejected by today's schools, Canus named among them. Their error, he says, I cannot hide: they claim our faith must be reduced to this last cause of believing — that we take the Church to be truthful.

Then he piles up arguments against it. On that scheme the first formal reason of faith would be created truth, not uncreated; our faith would lean on human truth rather than divine. And since a conclusion is never more certain than its principles, God's being triune would be no firmer for us than the Church's being truthful — a claim we would take on human inducements. He presses Paul's line: "Even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach a gospel to you…" (Galatians 1). Faith's assent, he gathers, does not lean on human causes. So, lest the mind waver, Scripture's divine authority must be sought higher than any human reason or authority. The Apostles and Prophets finally resolved their faith into God's authority and truthfulness; our faith is the same as theirs, and so is not resolved into the Church's human authority — with many like points.

92Stapleton teaches the same in Controversy 4, on the Church's power in itself, question 3, article 3. His second conclusion: the Church's voice is not the formal object of faith. He proves it first because faith can exist without that voice, and second because the Church's voice and authority alone cannot produce faith worthy of the name. He then faces older scholastic arguments, including Augustine's famous line: "I would not believe the Gospel unless the Catholic Church's authority moved me."

Stapleton's short answer: the Gospel is not believed except with the Church's authority moving — ordinarily, because that is the ordinary way the first Truth reveals all things. In the same place he grants that our faith does not hang on the Church's testimony alone, nor chiefly on it. Canus on the same Augustine text: if the Church only opens the door to the sacred books, we must not stop there; we must go on and lean on God's solid truth. Dominic Bañez, on the Secunda secundae 1.1, doubt 4, is just as clear: the assent of our faith cannot be reduced to acquired faith that the Church is truthful, as if that were the rule or formal reason of believing. The opposite, he adds, is not only rash but erroneous in the faith itself.

So this too is not the state of the question between us and the Pontificii — whether the proper reason and chief foundation of the faith we give to Scripture is the Church's authority.

93What then is faith's proper reason? Canus, in the place already cited, joins this to three settled points: faith's last resolution is into an interior efficient cause — God moving us to believe. To the article "God is triune," to "the Church cannot err," and to every other principle of Christian doctrine, I assent by infused faith not because John said it, or any other man, but because God revealed it; and to "God has revealed" I believe at once, moved by God through a special instinct.

So on the object's side the formal moving reason is revealed divine truth; yet that does not move us unless an interior cause is also present — God himself moving by a free and special concurrence. Stapleton's third conclusion (question 1, article 2) says the same: God revealing is properly and absolutely the formal object of faith. He proves it from the Prophets and Apostles, who had no other formal object; therefore every believer's faith has that same object, for there is one faith of all. In reply to the third argument he writes: absolutely and of itself, the last resolution of things to be believed is the truthful God — or God revealing inwardly in the heart — after John the Baptist: "He whom God has sent speaks the words of God, and whoever receives his testimony has set his seal that God is true" (John 3).

Finally the scholastics commonly hold that the assent of our faith is at last resolved into the Holy Spirit's inward motion — as Thomas's commentators show on the Secunda secundae, question 1.

94Those doctors therefore treat the Church's voice and testimony as a cause without which we would not believe, and, in their terms, a condition of faith's object: the Church is the medium through which God reveals and proposes what is to be believed. Yet they refuse to reduce our faith to the Church's testimony as the supreme and last reason of believing. They reduce it to God revealing and the Holy Spirit illuminating — as Bañez teaches carefully in the place already cited.

Stapleton's words in the article we keep marking are the same: faith that begins from the Church's testimony, so far as that testimony proposes and leads to faith, ends in God revealing within and teaching within what the Church preached without. The Church's preaching teaches from outside; it proposes, leads, and helps. But the One who teaches within has his chair in heaven, as Augustine says. Once that inward teaching has come, the Samaritan line has its place: "Now we do not believe because of your speech; for we ourselves have heard, and we know that this is the Savior of the world" (John 4).

95Nor do the scholastic doctors deny that the faith we give to divine revelation is a prudent assent: the one who believes God's Word is moved by arguments that can persuade a prudent mind that what is set before him as God's Word truly is. Faith's certainty does not hang on those arguments, nor properly lean on them. Gregory of Valencia makes the distinction sharpest in Analysis of Faith 1.1: because divine revelation is not evident to human reason, other arguments besides revelation are needed, so that men may prudently persuade themselves that Christian doctrine is true.

Yet those arguments are not required so that people believe properly, surely, and firmly because of them. The certainty and firmness of faith — and the assent itself — lean of themselves on divine revelation alone as their foundation. The arguments only supply clearer motives by which the mind may prudently will to believe surely and firmly because of divine revelation, with God's help. Two soul-motions must be told apart in those who take hold of faith. First, even under prudence's dictate, they judge Christ's doctrine worthy of sure and firm belief. Then, helped by God, they believe by faith's assent that it is true. That sure, firm, God-helped assent must be referred to the divine testimony alone contained in revelation, as the cause and reason of believing; and to the Church's proposing only as a condition without which Christian faith would scarcely be given. The first prudent judgment — that this doctrine may rightly be held as divine and true — is a judgment of prudence, and it properly leans on arguments other than revelation itself.

Canus teaches the same in Loci Theologici 2.8, reply to the fourth argument. It is not enough that the things of faith be simply proposed by a man to the one about to believe, as first principles to a pupil; some exterior persuasion and human inducement must also be used. He proves it from those moved to believe by miracles and other reasons. Once that is set out, he adds, what we said a little earlier is easy to see: certain human, outward supports must intervene for believing, yet they are not fit of themselves, and faith's resolution is not made into them, but into an interior divine cause that stirs and moves us to believe. That is the common teaching of the Roman school, so far as I know with no dissent — so further witnesses would be surplus.

96You will ask: what, then, is the real state of the controversy on Scripture's authority? In the heads reviewed so far the Orthodox and the Pontificii seem to agree. Is the fight only about a name? Not at all. The rift between the two sides is large and of the highest moment.

To see it clearly, note first that some revelations become known to us only through another revelation, and they borrow their authority for us from that other. Balaam's old revelation reached us through the revelation given to Moses. The same holds for that scrap of Enoch's prophecy to which Jude's letter lends authority.

Yet there cannot be an infinite regress here, and a circle — one revelation proved by another, and that other by the first — must not be allowed. So some revelation must be first for us: one that wins our faith by itself and for its own sake, not by help from a better-known revelation.

97Speak carefully and you may also distinguish faith's proper formal reason — taken simply and absolutely, as the Schools put it — from an external principle of faith, an outward rule for what is to be believed.

Faith's proper formal reason was, is, and always will be the same for every believer: God's revelation, however it comes — by God's immediate breath, through men, through angels, through Scripture, or outside Scripture. For every believer the standing formal reason of religious belief is this: because God revealed such things.

Yet God did not judge it enough to reveal privately to each believer whatever that person needed for salvation. To keep unity and communion in the Church, and to meet Satan's tricks, he always willed a common, external, public revelation to stand in the Church as the rule of faith — the measure of every dogma, and the court that ends every dispute about faith.

Before the law was given, that rule was the Patriarchs' voices and God's living oracles. After Moses' law was given and written, the Church's rule was that written law, with the revelations later made to the Prophets and likewise written down. After Christ's coming the New Testament enlarged the rule. So now, in the Christian Church, the rule of our faith is the Scripture of both Testaments.

98Third: our faith can be resolved in two ways — with respect to the object or the subject; with respect to ourselves or with respect to others.

With respect to ourselves and the subject, faith is resolved when we ask what the inward principle is, and where each conscience rests so that we may not press further. With respect to the object and to others, our faith is resolved when we ask for the last foundation we can show and name to someone else.

That last foundation we can show another must be some external principle of faith — an outward rule of faith — where we stop, with no further rule beyond it.

99Apply this to the present case. We and the Pontificii agree, as the earlier theses show, that faith's proper reason simply and of itself is divine revelation, however it comes; on that point there is no fight between us. We also agree that the last rest of each believer's conscience is the Holy Spirit's inward testimony.

What is not agreed is which revelation is today first and most known for us — the one we must receive by itself and for its own sake, not because of some other revelation better known to us and of higher authority; and so which is the first and most common external principle of faith, through which everything else is to be proved, while it itself has no prior.

We hold that this revelation is contained in sacred Scripture. God's Word in the books of both Testaments ought to win faith among us by itself — not by some other Word of God, some further divine revelation that would give it a public external witness better known and more certain to believers than Scripture is. No rule of faith, no external principle, stands prior to sacred Scripture so that Scripture could be proved from something earlier. Scripture is the first and most common rule of everything that belongs to faith, and it is not to be measured by another rule.

Ask why we believe this or that dogma — that God is triune and one, or that believers are to be baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit — and we answer: because inspired Scripture holds it, and we point to the place. Press further why we take that Scripture as divine, and we do not offer another principle of faith to prove Scripture; we say one must stop there. We do offer arguments that Scripture is divine and deserves to be believed as divine. Those arguments are not, properly speaking, faith's principles, nor the foundation on which faith chiefly leans. We believe Scripture at once — God speaking in the Scriptures — moved by the Spirit's inward impulse.

101From this rises the famous question on Scripture's authority. We say Scripture's authority among us is supreme, not borrowed from elsewhere: above itself Scripture has no revelation, and no other principle of faith by which it can be proved.

The Pontificii say Scripture's authority hangs on the Church's: they take the Church's testimony for a principle of faith above Scripture, one by which Scripture must be proved so that the Church may publicly settle its standing.

102To mark the difference between their sentence and ours, and where the hinge of the controversy sits, note how the Pontificii compare sacred Scripture with the Church's doctrine: as we compare a particular dogma of faith with sacred Scripture.

As an article of faith — for example that the dead will one day rise — has its truth and authority in itself from God alone, not from the Prophets' and Apostles' testimony as writers of Scripture, so they admit that sacred Scripture has its authority in itself from God alone, not from the Church's word.

And as the chief reason we embrace that dogma is not properly Peter's, Paul's, or Isaiah's authority, but the divine revelation brought to us by their pen — for the dogma was believed before Scripture, and can still be believed apart from it — so they confess that the Church's testimony is not the proper and chief reason of our faith about Scripture, but simply and absolutely divine revelation.

Yet again: as that dogma, or any like it, must not be publicly received in the Church or set forth for belief unless Scripture's testimonies prove it — since only from those can believers publicly know that something belongs to faith, so that any dogma's authority for us, and its public external certainty, hangs on sacred Scripture's testimony — so they want Scripture's authority for us to hang on the Church's testimony, and a book's divinity not to be publicly settled for believers except by the Church's approval and attestation.

Finally: even with that dependence of dogmas on Scripture, Christian dogmas can be proved and urged by many arguments besides Scripture's testimonies — motives that lead toward faith, not faith's reason and foundation. So the Pontificii also do not deny that sacred Scripture, besides the Church's testimony, has many notes and arguments of divinity by which it can be proved and urged — yet which cannot found public faith in the Church concerning Scripture's divinity.

103From all this the controversy between us and the Roman Church's doctors is plain enough. Is Scripture the first rule of faith and the first external principle of faith — so that no other principle can prove it, and it does not borrow its authority from elsewhere?

Or is the Church's doctrine and testimony the principle and rule of faith, better known and clearer to us than Scripture itself, and the means by which Scripture must be proved so that believers may publicly settle its standing? We assert the former. The Pontificii assert the latter — and by "Church," as already said, they mean the present pastors, above all the Roman Pontiff.

104Their error is answered from this: among believers Scripture is better known than the Church herself.

Every Christian body agrees, at least on the chief books, which writings are true Scripture. Greeks, Armenians, Ethiopians, Pontificii, Protestants, and whatever other Christian parties remain today all acknowledge as Canonical the books our churches hold Canonical. Rome adds certain Old Testament books to its Canon; on the books we count Canonical it still agrees with us.

Those who denied or despised Scripture outright — as the Libertines are remembered to have done in our fathers' day — were few, obscure, and soon gone. Which Church is the true one is not settled the same way: each party claims to be it. The Greek, Armenian, and Ethiopian churches neither take Rome for God's true Church nor bind themselves to its authority.

105No pope, council, or gathering of pastors carries so many and so bright marks of its own authority as sacred Scripture carries of its divinity.

Earlier theses already listed what recommends Scripture: prophecies of things to come, the holiness, height, and force of its teaching, the majesty and plainness of its style, the harmony of Old and New Testament, miracles confirming it, the life of those who first handed it down, God's lasting care to keep it, the martyrs' constancy for its truth, the consent of peoples, and even hostile witnesses.

What council, or what crowd of pastors, presses its claim with notes so many and so strong? Ask the adversaries' own conscience: is it not plainer that Moses and Paul wrote divine, authentic books than that Florence, Trent, or the Lateran were legitimate councils led by the Spirit without fail?

106Scripture is also more certain for believers than the word of those who preside in the Church — so it does not borrow its authority from them.

Pastors today are not more certain for the faithful than the Apostles were for the first Christians. Yet while the Apostles still lived and preached, their testimony weighed less among believers than Scripture's — as Peter shows in his second letter (2 Peter 1). Speaking to people who already believed, after he told how he heard the voice from heaven say of Christ, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased," he adds that they have a firmer witness still: the Prophets in the holy Scriptures.

"We did not follow cleverly devised myths," he says, "when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. He received honor and glory from God the Father when that voice came to him from the Majestic Glory: 'This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.' We heard that voice from heaven while we were with him on the holy mountain. And we have the prophetic word made more sure, to which you do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place."

107Sacred Scripture also has, on every side, greater authority among believers than the Church's pastors do.

Their testimony today is no greater than John the Baptist's once was. Yet Scripture's testimony was greater than the Baptist's — as Christ our Lord teaches plainly (John 5), where he sets Scripture's witness to himself above John's. "You sent to John," he says, "and he has borne witness to the truth; yet I have a testimony greater than John's."

He then names a threefold witness greater than John's: first the miracles he worked — "the works the Father gave me to accomplish testify that the Father has sent me"; next the Father's voice from heaven — "the Father who sent me has himself borne witness of me"; and last sacred Scripture. He adds: "Search the Scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me."

108On their own showing, no Church testimony is brighter or more solemn than what Councils and papal Decrees give. Yet common Christian sense says no council matches sacred Scripture's authority. No one dares set Nicea, Chalcedon, Trent, or any other beside Moses and the Prophets. Even Rome's warmest friends have not yet hardened their faces enough to level papal letters with Paul's epistles and the four Gospels.

Roman practice itself proves it. When they rank the sources of theological argument, Scripture always comes first; Councils and papal Decrees come later. They so honor Scripture, as they should, that they grant no error can be found in it, even the least. Councils they want infallible on dogmas of faith — yet they admit many other slips: conclusions may be of faith while the arguments are poor; they may hold the question of right and still err on the question of fact.

Pastors and doctors also use Scripture's witnesses to recommend their own teaching — and that teaching can and must be tried by Scripture. So the Bereans are praised: after hearing Paul preach, they searched the Scriptures to see whether those things were so (Acts 17). If Scripture carries more weight with believers than the Church's pastors, it plainly does not take its authority from their word. What is greater cannot draw its authority from what is less. Nothing can give an authority greater than its own.

109How then could Scripture's authority for us hang on the Church's, when the Church's authority for us hangs on Scripture?

From Scripture we learn which Church is true, and what force it has. That authority cannot be proved with certainty from anywhere else. So the fathers once sent heretics who denied Christ's true Church back to the Scriptures, and held that the true Church must be shown from them. Augustine tells the Donatists: if they hold the Church, let them show it only from the canonical books of divine Scripture.

Rome itself today tries to prove its Church and its infallible authority against us from sacred Scripture, and thinks the work well done when it cites places such as "I am with you to the end of the age," "I have prayed for you, Peter, that your faith may not fail," "the Spirit will lead you into all truth," "Tell it to the Church," and the like, as foundations of the authority it gives the Church. Since, by their own confession, the Church's authority is known to us from Scripture, and no surer proof can be offered, it is clear the other way that our certainty about Scripture does not rest on the Church's testimony as its chief ground. Otherwise the circle is open: Scripture is proved by the Church, the Church by Scripture, and back again without end.

110Rome adds that Scripture in the Church's hands is like letters of credit: papers that accredit an envoy from a superior, and that send us back to that superior for a fuller account of his mind and will. So they want the Church to present Scripture as a diploma sealing its divine calling and authority, and remitting us to the Church to learn God's will more fully.

But letters of credit do not draw their force from the one who shows them. The opposite is true: the bearer's authority is known and confirmed by the letters. The one who brings the letters is not why we trust the letters; we trust him because of the letters that accredit him.

111Their reply to this argument is strange. Stapleton, who seems to have handled the controversy with the most care, grants that the Church's authority for us hangs on Scripture's. He denies that Scripture's authority therefore fails to hang in turn on the Church's — and he tries to prove it by instances.

Christ's authority for us, he says, hung on John the Baptist's, for John was sent to witness to Christ so that all might believe through him; yet the Baptist's authority in turn hung on Christ's witness, for Christ attested John and confirmed his calling. The instance — and others like it — does not reach the point. Mutual testimony can prove two things to each other. It does not show that the first's authority hangs on the second's, and the second's on the first's, for the same people at once.

The Baptist did point men to Christ. Those who came to Christ that way did not believe in Christ chiefly on the Baptist's word, nor was John greater or surer for them than Christ. We grant that John's authority hung on Christ's; we deny outright that Christ's hung on John's. Two authorities cannot each hang on the other for the same persons at the same time. Whatever hangs on another is less certain and less known to us than that on which it hangs. If the Church's authority depends on Scripture's, Scripture is more certain and better known for us. If Scripture's hangs on the Church's, Scripture is less certain and less known. Then Scripture would be at once more and less certain, better and less known, than the Church — a contradiction.

The question here is not merely whether Scripture can be proved by the Church and the Church by Scripture. It is whether Scripture's authority, properly speaking, hangs on the Church's as on a principle of faith more certain and better known for us.

112Stapleton's second reply grants that the Church's authority for us hangs on Scripture's, yet denies that the Church can be known only through Scripture. Apart from Scripture, he says, the faithful learn from the Creed that the Church exists and must be believed.

The Creed has no authority of its own. It draws its whole force from sacred Scripture, from which it is taken. It is simply the faithful's confession of what they believe according to Scripture. That already makes the Creed's authority better known to us than the Church's — which cuts hard against those who say the Creed's authority, like every other article of belief, hangs on the Church as on a better-known principle of faith.

On their own showing the Church is the body that frames Creeds and confers that authority. Yet in the Creed we confess one holy Catholic Church, and the Creed never tells us which Church that is — Roman rather than Greek or Ethiopian. No proof from the Creed settles it. If Scripture's authority is to be confirmed to us through the Church's, as Rome wants, bare knowledge that some Church exists on earth is not enough. We must know determinately which Church is the true one, clothed with divine and infallible authority.

113The certainty with which believers receive sacred Scripture as the rule of faith does not hang on some public, solemn Church decree that confirms Scripture's divinity like an oracle. For ages Scripture was publicly known and received as the Canon of faith with no such decree at all.

For several centuries after the Apostles, no council and no pope sealed a fixed Canon or drew up a catalogue of the sacred books. The first council to review the number of Canonical books was Laodicea — not before the three-hundredth year from Christ's birth, and still a particular council, not a general one. Yet before Laodicea the Canon was already certain, and Scripture's authority was certain to the faithful.

Neither Laodicea nor the later councils that listed the sacred books aimed to give those books some new authority. They only marked and declared which books were already Canonical.

114Nor may one fall back on some Church tradition, as if before the councils that fixed the number of sacred books tradition itself had been the foundation of faith concerning Scripture.

Rome grants that tradition is a means the Church uses in judging matters of faith. Yet on Rome's own terms tradition is as doubtful as the books of Scripture, and is no certain foundation of faith until a public Church judgment has proved it.

115Stapleton's further device helps no more. He distinguishes two kinds of Church testimony: one solemn and express, given in general councils and papal decrees; the other tacit and interpretative, by which the Church is said to approve whatever she lets her ministers teach and her people hold.

As if, before any council decided the Canon, the Church had already judged the Canonical books — not by a solemn sentence, but by this tacit reading: she let pastors hand the books to the faithful as Canonical, and did not reject the faith of those who received them.

That so-called interpretative judgment cannot found the faithful's belief, nor did Christian faith hang on it. It follows their faith; it does not precede it. What the Church allows to happen is already happening before she allows it. So I ask Rome: what grounded that early Christian faith which the Church merely tolerated and is said to have approved by her silence? A faith conceived as prior to that tolerance cannot rest on the tolerance and the tacit consent.

116Whatever one makes of that tacit testimony, Rome herself teaches that for a time the Church gave no sentence on certain Canonical books. Some New Testament books were once doubted, they say, because the Church had not yet made her mind clear enough about them.

Even so, while some doubted, most churches already received those books publicly and held them divine and authentic. Public Church testimony is therefore not required before a book's divinity can stand publicly and believers be sure of it. Before any Church determination of the disputed books, their authority was already certain and publicly owned across the greater part of the Christian world.

Jude and James seemed disputed (ἀντιλεγόμεναι) to some, as Eusebius says; yet on his own witness others acknowledged them (ὁμολογούμεναι) and received them publicly. Some rejected John's Apocalypse, yet the churches John had nursed, as Tertullian puts it, defended its authority. Hebrews stood the same way: though long doubted in the Latin Church, Jerome tells Dardanus that the Eastern churches had venerated it as divine and Apostolic.

117Go back to Old Testament times. When the Prophets published their books, those books already had authority by right, and in fact held it among Israel's faithful, before the priests then ruling the Church had approved them or declared them divine.

Most of the Prophets were sent chiefly to rebuke the priests' vices and sloth, so the priests were usually their enemies. Even so, against that resistance the Prophets' books were held and acknowledged as divine and authentic. Jeremiah makes it plain. In chapter 8 he rebukes Judah's rulers: How can you say, We are wise, and the Lord's law is with us? The lying pen of the scribes has wrought a lie; the wise are shamed and taken; they have cast away the Lord's word, and there is no wisdom in them — from prophet to priest they all work a lie.

In chapter 18 those same rulers plot against him: Come, let us devise devices against Jeremiah. The law will not perish from the priest, nor counsel from the wise, nor the word from the prophet. Come, let us strike him with the tongue, and ignore all his words. Far from approving his prophecies, they fought him. Yet Jehoiakim is charged most heavily for rejecting the authority of those prophecies that Baruch had written out, and for cutting them with a scribe's knife and burning them (Jeremiah 36). On Rome's principles, what great crime was the king committing in refusing as divine a writing the Church's judgment had not yet approved — a writing her rulers were then attacking?

118Finally, since by the Church on which Scripture's authority for us is said to hang Rome means the pastors and bishops who rule the Church, we ask: whence does Scripture's authority hang for the pastors themselves, and how do they know these books are divine and God-inspired?

They cannot appeal here to a Church judgment that founds the pastors' own faith in Scripture. The pastors and bishops are that Church whose testimony is in question. They would then learn from themselves which writings are true Scripture, and their faith would rest on their own word. To leave no escape, take those who first gave such a judgment: they could not lean on other pastors' rulings.

Yet Rome will not have the Church's pastors driven by enthusiasms or taught Scripture by immediate revelation — for such enthusiasms and immediate revelations, they say, no longer have place in God's Church. Bishops and doctors reach that knowledge with the Holy Spirit teaching and leading, but also through their own study, diligence, careful reading of the books, and close weighing of the many arguments the Spirit uses to beget faith in Scripture in them. What absurdity is it, then, to say the faithful are led the same way by the Spirit into knowledge of sacred Scripture? At least this much follows plainly: Scripture can be established for us without enthusiasm or immediate revelation — and also without some authentic, infallible Church judgment.

119In the immediately preceding disputation we set out the state of this question and confirmed the true view with the arguments that seemed to us most fit. What remains is to sift the adversaries' arguments and show, as briefly and clearly as we can, how empty they are.

120Their first attempt is to prove that Scripture's authority hangs on the Church's. Scripture, they say, cannot be proved by Scripture. So for the faithful to be sure of Scripture, some divine and infallible testimony must prove it. That testimony, they claim, can only be the Church's — none more certain or august on earth.

If you answer that Scripture in many places asserts its own divinity, they retort that we would already have to be persuaded of that divinity from elsewhere before we could believe the assertion. Mere self-claim is not enough: most of the Apocrypha claimed to be divine and were rightly rejected.

And it seems plain that Scripture cannot prove Scripture, because every proof moves from what is better known — and the same thing cannot be both better and less known than itself. Nothing from Scripture proves anything to someone who does not yet grant Scripture's authority, or who still doubts it.

122To expose the cheat, reduce the argument to form. They must argue: whatever is not evident of itself and cannot prove itself is not a first principle of faith or supreme rule whose authority does not hang elsewhere — it must be proved through something else. But Scripture is not evident, nor can it prove itself. Therefore, and so on.

The major is plainly false. On the contrary: what is a first principle of faith must neither prove itself nor be proved through another — and yet need not be something evident. In the human sciences some principles are first: the rest hang on them and are proved through them, while they hang on nothing else in that order, or they would not be first, and win assent of themselves. Faith is the same.

Either admit a circle, or an infinite regress — both absurd — or stop at some principle on which the rest of faith hangs, proved by no prior principle and not by itself either, since the same thing cannot prove itself, yet winning immediate belief and assent of itself.

123Faith's principles and the sciences' differ here: the sciences' principles are self-known and evident, and by their own light compel the intellect to assent. Faith's principles, though they have some moral evidence, are — strictly and properly — inevident, and do not by their own light win the assent faith requires.

Yet they agree in this: as we assent to natural principles immediately by the natural light of the intellect, so we believe faith's principles immediately by the Spirit's illumination and impulse. And as nothing stops natural principles from sometimes being proved a posteriori, so faith's principles can be proved — but only a posteriori, and only ad hominem.

124So in the matter of faith we must come down to some principle that is neither evident of itself nor able to prove itself, yet hangs on no prior principle and of itself deserves authority and belief. Though Scripture is neither evident of itself nor able to prove itself, it does not follow that Scripture is not that first principle of faith which borrows its authority from nowhere else.

125Whichever way Rome turns, it must confess that the Church's testimony — which it offers as faith's first and supreme principle — is not evident of itself, and cannot well be proved by the Church's own voice. Yet they still want that testimony to hang on no prior authority and to hold among the faithful of itself. They fight themselves when, from Scripture's inability to prove Scripture, they conclude that Scripture's authority is not first and needs a superior testimony to establish it for us.

The sum of our reply comes to this: Scripture cannot indeed be proved by Scripture itself; yet it does not follow that its authority hangs elsewhere and must be proved to us by the Church as a principle prior and superior to Scripture. As faith's first principle, Scripture wins the faithful's belief and assent not by such a proof intervening, but immediately, by the Spirit's inward efficacy impressing a sure persuasion of it on our minds.

126These points, though, must be taken carefully. When we grant that sacred Scripture cannot be proved by Scripture itself, we mean only that the places where Scripture proclaims itself divinely inspired are not fit arguments to convince and persuade someone who already denies sacred Scripture's authority.

That does not stop us saying, in another sense, that Scripture proves itself: as the preceding theses showed, sacred Scripture bears many marks and arguments of divinity by which it asserts itself true and divine — just as heaven and earth proclaim and show God as their author, not by a bare spoken claim, but by the excellence of their nature and the traces of divine power and wisdom visible in them.

Or as a book claims Aristotle or Euclid as its author not from the title alone, but from the genius of the teaching, the sharpness of style, and the manner of argument — the sort that can belong only to those rare minds.

127Next, when we say we believe Scripture immediately by the Spirit's inward efficacy, not by some proof stepping in between, we do not mean that our faith about sacred Scripture is a blind persuasion with no reason of its own.

Nor do we deny that the person who believes Scripture as he should is led there by arguments that can persuade a prudent mind that Scripture is true and comes from God.

By that word immediately we shut out only the proofs the schools call de fide — proofs drawn from some principle of faith, that make a matter of faith, and that can by themselves found an article of faith — not every kind of proof whatever.

The arguments that urge sacred Scripture's divinity are not of that kind. They are not taken from any principle or rule of faith, but only from various notes and signs, and they consist wholly of moral arguments that cannot of themselves yield the certainty faith requires — for the certainty owed to faith equals, if it does not surpass, every certainty demonstration can produce.

So although those proofs are helps to faith and motives for believing, the full certainty by which we ought to embrace the sacred books is not to be referred to them as its proper and chief foundation, but rather to the Spirit's inward persuasion.

128But when we say the certainty of our faith about Scripture's divinity is to be referred immediately to the Spirit's inward persuasion, the adversaries press hard: things that belong to faith — that this or that book was written by divine inspiration — are no longer had by immediate revelations, but by God's ordinance must be learned and received from the teaching Church; otherwise a window opens to fanatics and Enthusiasts.

Reply. Saying something is believed immediately by the Spirit's illumination and impulse can mean two things.

First, it can shut out the work and ministry of people who explain and commend what is to be believed — the way Paul received the Gospel not from a man nor through a man, but was taught immediately by the Holy Spirit. Immediate revelation of that kind no longer has a place in God's Church. Nor does the Spirit, in the common and ordinary way, reveal to the faithful which books were written by divine inspiration. Faith about Scripture is generated in us through the Church's work and ministry as she hands down and recommends the sacred books.

Yet in another sense Scripture can be said to be believed immediately by the Spirit's inward testimony: namely, so that any foreign authority is shut out — whether some unwritten word, or the teaching Church — that would be the properly so-called argument of our faith by which the Spirit founds that faith.

So we believe Scripture immediately because the faith we give it, and which God's Spirit impresses on us, does not properly rest on any external argument or medium, nor is it founded on a word in the Church's mouth.

Likewise, on the Roman Doctors' own view, the faith given to the teaching Church as she proposes God's word (which they believe is in her mouth) does not rest on some alien authority different from that word's authority, nor even take the Church's own testimony and voice as its argument — that would be an argument of itself — but is immediately from the Spirit's illumination and instinct. He still, they say, uses motives that dispose people to trust the Church, which they call the Church's notes.

So by immediately we exclude the Church's authority as faith's foundation, not simply the teaching Church's work and ministry.

129But the adversaries keep pressing. If the faithful received Scripture immediately by the Spirit's inward illumination and persuasion, and not because of the Church's teaching and testimony as their rule of faith, then — they say — those who have God's Spirit could, without the Church's authority and testimony, infallibly and certainly tell divine books from ones that are not. Experience, they claim, says otherwise.

Before the Church judged and determined, many truly divine books were doubted — for example the Epistle to the Hebrews, John's Apocalypse, and several other New Testament books. Others that were not Canonical or divine were ignorantly taken as such even by pious people.

And to press harder: You Protestants, they say, who boast you have that Spirit of God by which sacred and divine books are told from the apocryphal, are not agreed among yourselves; Lutherans doubt the Epistle of James and some others that Calvinists admit.

To set the matter before the eyes and refute us among our own by experience, they read someone from our common people a chapter of an Apocryphal book and a chapter of a Canonical book with the author's and book's name hidden, then ask whether he can tell by the Spirit's help which is divine.

130Reply. It is true that God grants his Spirit to all the faithful and leads them into knowledge of his word, and that — as John says — they have an anointing from the Holy One that teaches them concerning all things.

Yet not all share that spirit of faith and wisdom equally. God does not dispense it to each by the same measure; he gives a greater supply to some and a lesser to others. Nor does that anointing teach every believer simply everything, but at least whatever suits each calling and is needed for each one's salvation and knowledge, according to state, condition, and place in God's Church.

So someone gifted with faith and knowledge of divine things enough for salvation may still err on some point of faith and fail to recognize some part of God's word.

That is why Paul in Philippians 3 wants those who are perfect to bear with those who think otherwise and keep brotherly communion while God reveals what they have not yet reached: As many of us as are perfect, let us think this; and if you think anything otherwise, God will also reveal this to you. Yet in what we have already reached, let us walk by the same rule and think the same.

131It is not necessary for anyone's salvation to receive and acknowledge every book of Scripture and every part of them.

So it is no wonder if all who have received the spirit of faith and revelation, even in some measure, still miss certain parts of Scripture — taking a truly divine book for human, or conversely taking a mere product of human wit for something written by divine inspiration.

It is plainly unjust, and against reason, to demand that any ordinary believer be able at once by himself to tell any scrap of a Canonical book from a scrap of an Apocryphal one. Salvation does not require that.

Yet it does not follow that those who embrace books some have rejected or not known, and take them on faith, do so only through the Church's testimony and authority as faith's foundation, and not immediately by the Spirit's inward testimony and illumination — with which they have been given a greater supply in this part.

132Plenty of people Rome itself counts as true believers are no better at spotting a forged church-testimony, an unlawful council, or adulterated canons than our ordinary hearers are at spotting Apocrypha next to Canon.

Even their own learned men quarrel over whether some councils bind, and they do not settle the question among themselves.

Still they insist their church's teaching and witness is faith's supreme rule, depending on no higher authority, and that the faithful must submit to it at once under the Spirit's impulse.

133The Roman doctors next try to prove that Scripture's authority for us hangs on the Church's.

Without the Church's authority and witness, they say, Scripture is doubtful and uncertain for us, and must be confirmed by that authority and witness.

They argue that without it we cannot know for certain which books are holy and divine: heretics and idle men have forged many writings under the Prophets' and Apostles' names; not everything Prophets and Apostles wrote earned divine authority (Solomon and others wrote things never numbered among the sacred letters); and scarcely any biblical book has escaped doubt or outright denial from professing Christians.

The Manichaeans rejected the Old Testament; the Ptolemaeans Moses; the Marcionites the Gospels except Luke alone — and so on. We still contest Rome over certain books they force into the Old Testament canon as Apocrypha. Even among the orthodox there was once doubt about many New Testament books, and there is still doubt among those who have left Rome in these later centuries — Jude, James, and some letters of John and Peter.

Add corruption, depravation, and interpolation by heretics, with additions and omissions; some still suspect the first part of John 8 and the story of the adulterous woman.

In so great a clash of opinions about the sacred books and their parts, they ask, how can truth be found without the Church's authority and judgment? How do you know those books are truly the Prophets' and Apostles'? And even if they are, how do you know they were written by divine inspiration rather than human care, and have reached us whole rather than variously corrupted?

They conclude that for faith about Scripture to rest on a firm base we must turn to the Church, which by a certain and infallible judgment tells divine books from Apocrypha and forgeries — a judgment the faithful may safely trust.

134They press and inflate this with a fine show; yet anyone who looks into the argument and weighs it carefully will see it is a mere sophism on a false presupposition.

To make that plain even to them, we can argue the same way against them and overturn the foundation they put under their own faith.

The Church's authority is doubtful and uncertain. Therefore its teaching is not faith's supreme rule, nor does the Church hold first authority for us.

That doubt is plain: people dispute what authority the Church has — whether some infallible divine authority, as Rome wants, or, as we hold, great yet human and open to error. Among Christians it is not even settled which church is true; Christianity is split into many parties, and each claims to be the true Church.

So we ask them: amid so many Christian sects, by what argument do you prove that yours is the true Church and its authority infallible? They cannot fall back on Scripture, whose authority they also put in doubt and make to hang on the Church as better known and higher. Still less can they plead their own church's witness, which is the very thing under dispute.

They must either fall silent, or turn to those marks of the true Church by which they think it only probable that Rome is the true Church. But what we need here is not mere probability — it is a lawful foundation for faith that proves the matter to be of faith.

Scripture, moreover, bears far clearer and brighter marks of divinity than the Church does, and there is no lack of strong persuasive arguments — short of strict demonstration — many of which were already set out in the first part of these Theses.

135When Rome's doctors locate that church authority chiefly in councils and popes, the same argument turns on them.

I prove that papal and conciliar authority is not first and supreme by the same token: it is doubtful and uncertain.

Some popes were intruders, irregularly created. Often several antipopes excommunicated one another and branded one another Antichrists. Councils that called themselves ecumenical and gathered in Christ's name favored heretics and were not lawful — Ariminum for the Arians; the second Ephesine for the Eutychians.

Second Nicaea and Frankfurt under Charlemagne cannot both be lawful: one banned the worship of images, the other commanded it under anathema — so one of them erred.

In the later Roman Church of these past centuries many councils have each styled themselves ecumenical, yet some were rejected, some approved, some half accepted and half refused. Their own doctors quarrel sharply over certain ones.

Bellarmine signs the Lateran under Leo X; the Gallican Church refuses its decisions, because it set the Roman pontiff above the whole Church and a universal council. Constance, which many in France receive whole, Bellarmine and others reject as to its first canons, because it set the council above the pope. Some Roman doctors revere Basel; others brand it a mere conciliabulum.

136We may fairly ask them in turn: how do you know this or that council is lawful, or that this pope is not an intruder created by defect — like many others whose successors cancelled their acts and stained their memory?

By what certain argument do you prove Trent was truly gathered in Christ's name? Because it says so? Nothing proves itself; and many wicked councils have boasted the same Spirit. Because the Roman pope approved it? He also approved that Lateran whose authority not all Romanists will bind themselves to.

By what certain argument of faith can you prove the approving popes were lawful and did not seize the see by force or simony? At best you have historical and moral certainty, which does not suffice for faith.

How will anyone trust that copies of councils and papal decrees are uncorrupted, with nothing added or cut, when it is certain many decrees were fastened on popes and many councils' acts corrupted and spoiled?

A fresh papal or conciliar declaration will not end the doubt: the same difficulties rise against the latest council as against the earlier one, and so without end.

If their case against Scripture's certainty and authority stands, the authority of church, councils, and popes falls with it — and no foundation of faith is left.

137I dare say one cannot even imagine a foundation of faith against which the same cavils would not be lawful.

Whatever is offered as faith's first rule must be something logically inevident and not properly demonstrable. Theologians and scholastics agree: the principles of faith are inevident and indemonstrable.

Nor can it be proved from other, prior, better-known principles of faith — or it would not be first, and some earlier rule would take its place.

So the first rule of faith, whose authority for us is supreme, cannot be proved by arguments of faith a priori, nor can the questions of irreligious men be met about it by demonstrations and strictly necessary, evident reasons.

138To see the sophism's emptiness more clearly, note how many false things it assumes.

First it assumes that whatever many deny, or many doubt, is doubtful and uncertain for us. Admit that, and nothing certain remains. Almost nothing so certain and evident has escaped doubt — or flat denial — from many.

Then it would not be certain from the sight of heaven and earth that God is, because Epicureans and atheists deny it. First principles of the sciences would not be certain, because Pyrrhonians who suspended all assent doubted them too. And Rome's own church authority would not be certain for Romanists, because the rest of Christians deny it.

What is doubted without desert, and denied without reason, does not cease to be certain for those who judge rightly. The error and doubt of idle, perverse, foolish people about things certain in themselves do not touch the certainty of sound minds rightly disposed.

139Next the argument assumes that what cannot be demonstrated by necessary and evident proofs cannot be certain for faith, or a sure rule and foundation of faith among believers. That is utterly false.

Whatever first rule of faith you set must be something that cannot be proved by evident — and, speaking logically, strictly necessary — arguments.

Such proofs would have to come from its own testimony, from other principles of faith, or from human reason. It cannot prove itself from its own witness. It cannot be proved from other faith-principles, because as first rule it is already supposed the best-known principle — so weaker ones would be useless except perhaps ad hominem. And it cannot be proved from human reason: a rule of faith is properly inevident, and so can only be urged by moral arguments, not demonstrated by necessary ones.

140Third, the argument assumes that doubts human reason can raise against Scripture are cleared by the Church's authority. That too is false.

To someone asking how we know circulating books are the Apostles' and Prophets', or that there ever were Apostles and Prophets, it is not enough to say the Church so teaches — he will ask with equal right how we know the Church speaks truth and is led by the Spirit.

With so many Christian sects, how do we know this rather than that is the true Church — or that any Church of God is on earth at all? Then they have nothing left against such an inquirer but those marks and prejudices that make Rome's authority look credible to them.

But what we need here is not that kind of probability — it is what proves the matter to be of faith and can bear faith as its foundation. And if we did have to go there, we are ready to show that Scripture's authority is recommended by far more and surer arguments and marks than any Christian church's.

141But to deal more closely now, apply this to the argument on the table. It runs like this: what is doubtful and uncertain to us of itself cannot be firmly believed unless some higher authority confirms it; Scripture of itself is doubtful and uncertain to us; therefore some higher authority must confirm it — and that can only be the Church.

I answer that something can be called doubtful and uncertain to us in two respects: with respect to faith, and with respect to human reason.

Uncertain for faith is what God has not revealed and inspired. Uncertain for human reason is what cannot be shown by necessary and evident proofs. So distinguish the minor: Scripture of itself is doubtful and uncertain to us. Said of human reason, that can be granted; said of faith, it must be denied.

Scripture can of course be urged on human reason with many good, weighty arguments. Because those arguments are not logical or mathematical demonstrations, we allow that Scripture may be called uncertain to human reason. But it is false that what reason finds uncertain and indemonstrable cannot be certain for faith. What can be demonstrated is, to that extent, not a matter of faith at all.

143As for the confirmation of the minor — that Scripture's books are doubtful apart from the Church because many books were foisted on the Apostles and genuine writings were doubted — the reply is that what is doubtful to the ignorant, the perverse, or the poorly taught can still be certain for the faithful and devout who are well taught and enlightened by the Holy Spirit.

Rash, unjust doubt from some people does nothing to shake the certainty of those with sound judgment.

144As for those importunate questions — How do you prove the Apostles existed and wrote by divine impulse, and that the circulating books are truly theirs? — something unjust is being demanded of us: that we demonstrate what is indemonstrable.

We freely admit that we cannot demonstrate those things mathematically or logically. We deny that it follows that those books cannot be faith's certain first rule. It belongs to faith's principles to be non-evident and not provable by philosophically necessary and evident arguments.

That does not mean we have nothing to answer profane objectors. We have arguments enough for a prudent person — that the Apostles and Prophets wrote by divine impulse, and that we hold their genuine books — many of which we already set out in Part I of these theses; there is no need to repeat them here.

We only grant that those arguments lack logical or mathematical evidence, and so leave the matter "uncertain" if one chooses to call the non-evident and undemonstrable (anapodeikton) uncertain. Even so, whatever uncertainty they leave cannot be cleared by some church judgment or determination — as we have just proved.

145Enough on that argument. On to another. The Roman doctors also try to prove that Scripture's authority for us hangs on the Church's from the Church's use and practice.

Apocryphal books, they say, which impostors published under Prophets' and Apostles' names and tried to pass off as sacred, were rejected and exploded by the faithful — and that was by the Church's authority and judgment, which wisely separated those forgeries from the divine books and struck them from the Canon, or at least never judged them receivable.

They pile up Fathers for this. The synopsis attributed to Athanasius, explaining why the Gospels of Thomas, Peter, according to the Hebrews, and the like are not approved, says the Canons of the holy Catholic Church sanctioned four Gospel books for us; besides those it is not safe to have another.

Augustine likewise rejects a Gospel of Thomas the Manichees were offering: We need not believe this Scripture, because it is not in the Catholic Canon; and again, The ecclesiastical Canon rejects these Scriptures. They add Eusebius, who in the Ecclesiastical History often calls such writings Apocrypha because the ancients never mention them, and no church writer cites them or bothers to record them.

146When even among the orthodox some truly divine and Apostolic books were sometimes doubted — Hebrews, James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2–3 John, and the Apocalypse — they claim this was because the Church had not yet given its judgment, and that the doubt was finally lifted by church determination: at Laodicea, the third council of Carthage, and the decrees of Popes Innocent and Gelasius.

By those, they say, not only the New Testament books just named, but also the Old Testament books still disputed between us and Rome, were received into the Canon — as they would have it.

For confirmation they cite Jerome on James: though it was being put about as written by someone else under his name, little by little it gained authority. On Jude: though most rejected it, antiquity and use earned it authority.

In the same vein Jerome writes to Dardanus on Hebrews and John's Apocalypse: We receive both, following not present custom but the authority of the ancient writers, who usually cite both not as they sometimes do the Apocrypha, but as Canonical and Ecclesiastical.

147Finally, when heretics rejected or doubted many books whose authority was always sure among the Orthodox, many Roman doctors try to show that the Fathers refuted them from the Church's authority, consent, and testimony, by which they vindicated those books' divinity and authority.

So Augustine on Acts, which the Manichees denied: I must believe this book if I believe the Gospel, since Catholic authority recommends both Scriptures to us alike. And against the same: The authority of our books, strengthened by so many nations' confession through the successions of Apostles, bishops, and councils, stands against you; yours has none, being put forward by so few.

From this and the like they conclude that our faith about sacred Scripture hangs on the Church's judgment, and that its authority, testimony, and consent are the rule and plumbline by which all Scripture must be tested so we can be sure of it — citing Augustine's famous line, I would not believe the Gospel unless the Catholic Church's authority moved me.

And elsewhere the same holy man: The faithful mind will keep this measure in the Canonical Scriptures — prefer what all Catholic churches receive to what some refuse; and among books not received by all, prefer what more and weightier churches receive to what fewer churches of lesser standing hold.

149But by "present Church" the Pontificians mean the Church of each age.

Even then they do not mean the community of the faithful living in one and the same age. They restrict the name "Church" to the overseers and pastors of the Church.

So when they claim that the authority of Scripture depends on the authority of the Church, they mean that the faith by which the faithful people receive the books of Scripture as true and divine rests on the testimony of the pastors then in office, and settles on that testimony.

Why? Because in the pastors and prelates of the Church there always resides a certain infallible, divine authority by which they can decide the truth and divinity of a book, so that their sentence and judgment bind our faith.

They even hold that those pastors have power to make authentic a book that until then was of doubtful authority, and about which either side might be held, so that after their determination it must be ranked with the other sacred and canonical books.

150Among the older scholastics some did restrict that power of deciding Scripture infallibly and with certainty to the Apostolic Church. They taught that it belongs to the present Church only insofar as that Church is counted one body with the Apostolic — as an old man truly did what he did as a boy, though as an old man he can no longer do those same acts.

That was the view of Durandus, of Thomas Netter of Walden, and in the previous age of Driedo. Today that view is commonly judged wrong, and the doctors of the present Roman schools yield to the earlier opinion instead.

So the question is whether from the Church's practice, and from the ancient Fathers' arguments recited above, one may conclude that the pastors who govern the Church in each age have authority so great that it is our rule of faith about Scripture — more certain and better known to us than Scripture itself — and the chief foundation of our faith in sacred Scripture.

That is what we deny. The proofs already brought do nothing to establish it.

151We gladly grant that the doctors of the ancient Church rejected the apocryphal books heretics had forged and pushed as divine on this ground: those books were never in the Church's Canon, nor acknowledged, held, and cited as divine by the Church's doctors.

We treat that argument as sound, and we use the same kind of argument against the books Rome adds to the Old Testament beyond the Jewish Canon — because the Jewish Church never acknowledged them, even while it was still God's true and only Church.

Nor did the primitive Christian Church: its doctors, by common consent (a very few perhaps excepted), remove those books from the Canon, though they allow them to be read in churches as useful for the people's edification.

Many apocryphal books do carry marks of vanity and traces of human weakness that show they are not God-inspired. Still, speaking absolutely and in general, we judge no argument more fit to break their authority than this: the true Church of God never held them as divine.

152For that argument to stand, the pastors of the present Church need not have a divine, infallible authority better known to us and superior to Scripture itself.

The argument does not simply rest on their authority. Its force is this: if those apocryphal books were truly divine, and written by the prophets and apostles to be a perpetual rule of faith in the Church, the prophets and apostles themselves would without doubt have handed them down and recommended them as such — like the other canonical books, and sealed with the rest of Scripture's Canon.

Had that happened, the apostolic men and the Church next after the apostles, which received their other books with such reverence, would without doubt have received these too — if not among all the faithful, at least among the greatest or a notable part.

That the ancient Church doctors do not even mention them is a clear sign that the apostles, when they sealed Scripture's Canon, did not admit such books, but rejected and cast them out.

It is in no way likely that God by His singular providence moved a prophet or apostle to write so that his book would be a rule of faith and serve the faithful's instruction and comfort — and yet allowed His Church neither to receive nor to acknowledge that book.

153Next, their second proof from books once doubted — as if certain divine books were once of doubtful authority because the Church had not yet spoken, and all doubt later fell by the Church's judgment and definition.

I say first: the authority of books that are truly divine and canonical was never so doubtful that it was once lawful to doubt them and later unlawful, which is what the Pontificians claim.

Those who doubted Hebrews, John's Apocalypse, and other New Testament books did so rashly and without just cause. Just as today anyone who denied or questioned those books' authority would not be blameless, so those who once stripped them of authority or tried to make them doubtful deserved blame.

But as for the other books Rome wants in the Old Testament Canon, about which they themselves grant it was once lawful to doubt: as they were rightly doubted then, so we contend they may rightly be doubted still.

154Second: no truly divine book's authority was ever so doubtful that everyone everywhere doubted it. The doubt belonged only to some; among the rest their authority stayed certain.

Hebrews, James, and John's Apocalypse were indeed suspect to some, and by some treated as spurious — yet among most churches they always kept their authority. No time can be named when they were not received in a large part of the Christian world and held divine and authentic.

The very passages the adversaries quote as favoring them show this. Against Arians who denied Hebrews, Theodoret says they ought at least to reverence the long stretch of time in which the truth's pupils had continually read that epistle in the churches.

So Tertullian defends the Apocalypse against Marcion: we also have John's foster-churches; though Marcion rejects his Apocalypse, the line of bishops traced back to the origin will still stand on John as author.

As for James, the same Eusebius who says some thought it νόθον — spurious — also testifies that it was publicly received in very many churches.

155Third: those who doubted those books did not doubt because they failed to see them received by the churches and recommended by the ancient Fathers' tradition naming the apostles as authors.

They doubted because, without weighing the matter enough, they thought those books contained things that did not savor of the divine Spirit and did not cohere well enough with the faith taught in the other books.

So the Latin Church doubted Hebrews, because chapters six and ten seemed to favor the Novatians, who cut off all hope of pardon from those who fell after baptism.

The Apocalypse was also suspect because of the Millenarians, who misused certain places that seemed to favor them.

Jude was rejected by some because it seems to cite an apocryphal book that once circulated under the name of Enoch the patriarch.

156Finally, those books were later received by common consent — not because some new Church decree sanctioned their authority.

What had raised scruple in them gradually came into the light and was rightly understood; at last the doubters ceased, and all conceded to the ancient Fathers nearest the apostles, who recommended these books to later ages as received from them and confirmed them by frequent use and reading.

This cannot be credited to the Synod of Laodicea or the third council of Carthage: those synods were provincial, and on the adversaries' own view could not properly bind the faith.

In fact doubt about those books remained after Laodicea. In Jerome's day — later than that synod — some still doubted.

Above all, neither Carthage nor the decrees of Popes Gelasius and Innocent removed doubt about the Old Testament books they call canonical and we call apocryphal: right up to Trent, many inside the Roman Church itself rejected those books' authority.

157As for that supporting point — that the Church's doctors, when they answered heretics who rejected certain books of Scripture, kept using the Church's testimony and consensus to prove those books' authority — I answer that this does not yield what the Pontificians want, or what is actually in dispute.

It does not show that the pastors who govern the Church in each age have, for us, an authority greater and better known than Scripture's, or that our faith about Scripture rests on the testimony and judgment of the pastors now in office as on a divine, infallible, chief, and proper foundation.

Those fathers were not simply arguing from the authority of the bishops of their own day as if that were a rule of faith binding every church member.

The heretics they opposed rejected certain sacred books as falsely ascribed to the apostles or apostolic men and as inventions of Catholic teachers. Against that charge the Fathers set the perpetual consensus of bishops and of the faithful who, from the apostles' time on, have received those books as handed down and recommended by the apostles as true and divine.

Only a shameless, stubborn person can refuse that consensus. Anyone today who denied that the books of Aristotle, Demosthenes, and Cicero belong to the men named on them could be answered from the continuous judgment of the learned who have always ascribed them so — and would be thought mad for refusing so constant a fame.

By equal — indeed by far greater — right, then, is the person mad who dares to oppose a tradition and fame still more constant, celebrated, and continuous, which refers the books we hold sacred to the apostles as their authors and approvers?

158That the early Church doctors put their chief force here when they defended the authority of the canonical books from the Church's authority is plain from Augustine.

In books 32 and 33 against Faustus the Manichee, when Faustus asks how Augustine knows those letters are the apostles', Augustine answers: from the same kind of public knowledge by which Faustus knows other letters are Mani's, by which everyone knows certain books are Varro's, Plato's, or Aristotle's, and by which later ages would know the books Augustine was then writing were his.

After heaping up more such examples he concludes: That being so, who is blinded by such madness — unless overturned by consenting to the malice and deceit of lying demons — who would say the apostles' Church, so faithful and so numerous in brotherly concord, could not have deserved to hand their writings faithfully to later ages, when they have kept their chairs by most certain succession down to the bishops now sitting, and when even ordinary men's writings, inside or outside the Church, fare so well?

159So when a book of Scripture is disputed — whether it is truly prophetic and apostolic, and was sealed with the rest of the canon by the apostles or apostolic men — we grant that the best argument is the Church's perpetual, constant consensus and testimony, which has always referred that book to the apostles as authors or approvers.

Faith cannot be withdrawn from that witness without great shamelessness and stubbornness. We know no fitter argument for answering a sectarian or a heretic.

Yet the argument is human, not divine. Its force does not lie in some infallible, divine authority residing in the Church's overseers. That is not required for the argument to stand.

In literary questions no such infallible judging-authority can even be invented; yet the continuous consensus of the learned that ascribes certain books to Aristotle, Plato, or Galen is enough for full confidence, and anyone who fought it would rightly be thought shameless and mad.

How much more, then, does the Church's consensus — which no one doubts is ruled by God's special providence and the Spirit's help — give us confidence that this or that book was written by an apostle or prophet and recommended as divine.

160However good and valid an argument may be drawn from the Church's consensus and testimony to prove a sacred book's divinity, we deny that Scripture's authority therefore depends on the Church's as on something better known and superior.

We can force this even from unwilling adversaries. Just as the Fathers answered heretics who denied Scripture from the Church's authority and testimony, they also sent schismatics who would not own Christ's true Church back to the Scriptures, and held that the true Church must be shown from them.

So Augustine with the Donatists: whether they hold the Church, let them show it only by the canonical books of the divine Scriptures. Today the Pontificians try to prove their Church and its authority from Scripture, and think they do that office well.

Yet they refuse to allow that, for us, the Church's authority is less known and certain than Scripture's — which is exactly the point under inquiry: we affirm it; they deny it.

So from the fact that a disputed book of Scripture has no fitter or surer defense against heretics than the Church's consensus and testimony, they cannot conclude that the Church's authority is for us more certain and better known than Scripture's.

They themselves must admit that a heretic who does not acknowledge the true Church cannot be answered by any firmer argument than Scripture's authority — and yet they most of all shrink from saying that sacred Scripture's authority is for us prior to and better known than the Church's.

162In short, then: we grant that the sacred books' authority is rightly and validly proved by the Church's consensus and testimony.

We deny what the adversaries infer — that the Church's testimony is a rule of faith better known to us than Scripture itself.

Not every sound proof is taken from a rule and principle of faith, or even from what is simply better known and more certain. Often we must prove the point to the person before us, and a posteriori.

163The Churches that left Rome in the last century hold this steadily: sacred Scripture sufficiently contains everything that belongs to faith and salvation — so that we do not need another word of God to fill what Scripture supposedly lacks.

Rome’s doctors and champions attack that claim fiercely. The dispute is serious; we take it up in these theses and a few that follow.

For clarity we will first state our Churches’ view as plainly as we can, then compare the adversaries’ view with ours so the real question stands out, and finally confirm the truth briefly and undercut the opposite case.

164First our theologians distinguish what is necessary to salvation from what is not.

They hold that Scripture contains what is necessary to salvation. What is not necessary need not, on their view, be in Scripture at all.

165‘Necessary to salvation’ is said in two ways.

First: no one may be ignorant of it without losing salvation, and no one is saved without express knowledge of it.

Second: no one may reject it, or have the Church teach its contrary, without sinning against his own salvation.

166So also ‘necessary to faith’ has two senses.

Either it is required for each person’s faith — no one without explicit faith in it should be counted a believer — or it belongs in general to faith’s object and binds the Church’s public faith.

167When our Churches say Scripture has everything necessary to faith and salvation, they mean necessary in both senses — not the first alone.

We do not only claim that nothing outside Scripture is such that without explicit faith and knowledge of it no one can be saved. We also claim that no one should be judged to sin against Christian faith and his own salvation merely for rejecting and attacking what sacred Scripture does not teach.

So our case is not proved by listing only what explicit faith for salvation needs. Faith’s scope is wider than that minimum — yet we still hold that nothing belongs to faith that Scripture does not contain.

168To cut ambiguity, some of our theologians prefer a clearer distinction.

They separate what is the substance — the body of Christian religion — necessary by divine institution not only for faith but for morals and church order, from mere appendages and ornaments of that body.

Those ornaments are not necessary by nature or divine institution; they are indifferent, kept for order and decency: many disciplinary canons, and rites and ceremonies universal or particular — freely observed, yet not to be despised or dropped by private authority alone.

169We say Scripture contains the former kind — the substance — not those accidental appendages of church faith, morals, and discipline.

Many circumstances of worship and church polity are not set out item by item in Scripture; they are left to the prudence of church overseers under the general rule that all things be done decently and in order in God’s Church.

So Rome’s doctors waste their shot when they press old Jewish or Christian rites, statutes, and ceremonies — still kept among us in worship and polity — as if their absence from a Scripture catalogue refuted us.

170From the above it is clear what we say Scripture contains. Next: how it contains them.

Dogmas and precepts may stand in a book in two ways — first κατὰ λέξιν, in the same words; second in substance, in equivalent words.

We do not claim every orthodox dogma and life-precept appears in Scripture in so many words. Some modern wranglers pin that on us: because we take up nothing outside Scripture in religion, they demand every sentence we teach be shown syllable by syllable in the text.

For us it is enough that Scripture contain the dogma in substance. Scripture nowhere says the bare words ‘God is one and three’; yet we believe it firmly, because Scripture says what comes to the same — three in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and these three are one — and in many places that God is one, while the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are each God.

171Beside the last distinction stands another close to it. One thing is to contain a teaching expressly and immediately; another is to contain it mediately, by consequence.

On our view Scripture does not hold every dogma of faith in that immediate, express form. Still nothing that necessarily belongs to faith and religion fails to follow from Scripture by a good, open consequence.

Scripture never says in so many words that Christ has two natures, or two wills in him. Both still belong to the truth of faith, because they follow openly from what Scripture teaches in many places — that Christ is true God and true man.

172So today's Sophists wrong us when they chide us for drawing a dogma from Scripture by good consequence — as if we broke our own law that Scripture alone is the rule of faith and religion, with nothing added or taken away.

To deduce from Scripture is not to add to it, nor to put another rule in its place. It is to unroll what Scripture already holds and to open its hidden stores.

In Acts the Prophets are said to testify of Christ that whoever believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name. Those bare words are not set down expressly in the Prophets; the Prophets are said to testify what follows from their witness.

175Since everything that belongs to faith is in sacred Scripture in the way already shown, Scripture is a perfect and sufficient rule of faith.

That sufficiency does not cancel the Church's ministry. By God's order, heavenly teaching is drawn from Scripture and given to the faithful through their pastors and teachers. It also does not cancel the Spirit's inward teaching, by which believers come to know the doctrine drawn from Scripture and set before them — without which they cannot discern it or embrace it for salvation.

Scripture's perfection and sufficiency shut out only one thing: the need of another rule that must be joined to Scripture before we have the whole doctrine of faith.

So Rome's doctors gain nothing when they argue that Scripture is not enough for salvation because otherwise the Church's ministry would be useless. Scripture itself urges that ministry.

176For a fuller grasp of the question, note what our schools treat and our public confessions set out. Some of it is admitting the true principles of faith and religion, and rejecting what is falsely pushed forward as such. The rest is the doctrine drawn from those true principles.

We say Scripture contains the principles of faith because those principles are Scripture itself. Our Churches admit no principles of faith beyond the inspired books that make up the body of Scripture.

177The fullness and sufficiency we give sacred Scripture do not require that Scripture prove its own principles — for example, that this or that book is divine and canonical.

Any rule is perfect when it measures everything else of its kind. It need not be the rule of itself.

No science asks its first principles to prove themselves; that is absurd and impossible. Principles are perfect enough in their kind if from them everything belonging to that science can be proved.

178In every human art and science there are first principles proper to that field. From them every conclusion belonging to the art is drawn and proved. The principles themselves are certain in that kind and cannot be demonstrated. They are, as it were, the rule on which the rest hangs — though they neither can nor should prove themselves.

Divine teaching is the same. When its theorems are examined and we ask for their foundation, we must come to principles beyond which, in that kind at least, we cannot go.

Those principles cannot be proved by other principles of faith, and no one should demand that they prove themselves — nothing proves itself. Yet they must be held as a sufficient and perfect rule of faith, because everything else that belongs to faith is proved by them.

179Theologians commonly mark this difference between the principles of faith and the principles of the sciences. Science axioms are known in themselves, evident, and by their own light compel assent from natural reason. Faith principles do not have that same evidence. So, as is right, they cannot be believed and received except through the Holy Spirit's inward illumination.

Yet they agree in this: we assent to natural principles at once by the mind's natural light, not through other better-known principles that prove them. In the same way we believe faith's principles immediately through the Spirit's illumination — not by some intervening proof drawn from other principles more known in that order.

180Faith's first principles must bear marks and characters of their divinity and truth, and arguments that recommend them. But they cannot, directly and properly, prove themselves. Nor do they lean on other faith principles from which they would borrow authority.

That first rule of religion — the principles of Christian faith — is for us the divine Scriptures, a fixed set of God-breathed books (θεοπνεύστων).

So on our view Scripture's authority should not be proved from Scripture itself. All Christians receive it immediately, and for its own sake.

181If a contentious man denies a science's first principles, you do not prove them from themselves. You must leave that science's bounds and seek proofs elsewhere — or even use weaker, a posteriori arguments aimed at that man. That does not lessen the principles' perfection or sufficiency.

So if Gentiles and profane men call Scripture's divinity into doubt, it must be proved — yet not from Scripture's own testimony, nor from any other faith principle. The proofs called de fide (drawn from faith principles properly so named) no longer apply.

Other proofs must be used: various marks, inward and outward, by which Scripture's divinity can be known and confirmed. That still leaves Scripture, for believers, the fullest and most perfect rule of religion and faith.

182Here is how to meet the argument Rome loves: that Scripture is not a full and sufficient rule of faith because Scripture cannot be proved by Scripture.

A rule need not prove itself to be perfect and sufficient. It is enough that by it everything else of the same kind can be examined and proved.

In analyzing faith, unless you allow a circle or an infinite regress — both absurd — you must stop at some principle that cannot be proved by another better known in that order, and that cannot prove itself. Nothing proves itself.

183Scripture's perfection does not require that it prove itself. Neither must every false pretended principle of faith be rejected by direct, express proof-texts.

We believe true faith principles immediately through the Spirit's inward illumination and persuasion. He sweetly draws people to them — not by another faith principle, but by motives and marks that make their divinity known.

So to refuse what are falsely counted as faith principles, it is enough that they lack the true marks of true principles, and that traces of human ignorance and weakness show in them.

184Scripture's perfection is not hurt if it cannot demonstrate that this or that book, falsely presumed canonical, is really apocryphal.

Even if unwritten traditions were granted for the sake of argument, it should be enough for rejecting them that their authority cannot be shown by fit arguments as divine Scripture's can.

It is not our job to prove they are not divine. Those who press and defend them must prove that they are.

186So we can answer adversaries who attack the sufficiency we give Scripture. They object that our churches hold and teach some things not drawn from Scripture by consequences open and necessary enough to bind the people's faith unless some other divine authority props them up — for example, that those once baptized among heretics are not to be baptized again.

That teaching, and some others, our churches do hold and teach as agreeing with Scripture, and as confirmed by long use and the common vote of the faithful. It is rash to condemn and reject them.

Yet we do not give them such necessity that they bind Christian faith as such — as if whoever thinks otherwise must be struck from the faithful and counted a heretic. We would never want Cyprian so numbered: a holy man and martyr of Christ, who did not hold the same view of heretics' baptism that our churches hold.

187From what we have already set out, it is plain enough in what sense we praise Scripture's fullness and sufficiency, and press that it contains everything necessary to faith and salvation.

We do not give that perfection only to Old and New Testament Scripture as the Apostles and apostolic men handed it down to us. From the moment God saw fit to put his word in writing, we hold that Scripture always contained all that God's people and the Church needed to worship him rightly and to reach salvation — and that they did not need to go elsewhere to draw the teaching of faith and salvation.

188It does not count against this that Scripture as we now have it holds not a few things needful for salvation that are missing from Moses' five books — which alone made up sacred Scripture for a time.

The same things were not necessary for salvation in every age. Much that now belongs of necessity to faith and religion under the New Testament did not always have that necessity.

God did not unveil all the mysteries of heavenly wisdom at once. As the Apostle says in Hebrews, he spoke πολυμερῶς καὶ πολυτρόπως — in many parts and in many ways (Hebrews 1:1). From the first consigning of heavenly teaching to writing, the light of divine revelation grew little by little, until in the last times Christ brought the fullness of that teaching and announced to us the whole counsel of our salvation.

189As heavenly teaching grew clearer and wider, the body of the Scriptures grew with it.

When God, along the Church's changing courses, revealed something new to the Prophets and Apostles, they put it down in writing in summary. So as time went on, the Canon of Scripture was enlarged.

190The more God revealed, and the more distinctly, the fuller and more distinct faith he required of men.

When revelation was thinner and darker, faith reached fewer things as well. Divine revelation is the measure of faith: for salvation we need not know and believe more than God has revealed.

191So although Scripture, when first given through Moses, did not contain everything now necessary for us, it still sufficiently held what the people of Israel then needed.

Divine Scripture always had that perfection: it took in all the Church needed to do and to know.

193But after those men were taken from the earth and translated into heaven — whose mouth and pen God was pleased to use to hand his mysteries to the Church — nothing is to be counted as belonging to faith and salvation that is not found in the writings they left and entrusted to the faithful as the Church's norm and rule of faith.

Their teaching cannot be sought or found safely and certainly anywhere but in their writings.

195Yet we hold this tightly: the sum of what holy men, moved by the divine Spirit, taught and spoke — so far as suffices for salvation and faith — is contained in sacred Scripture.

They taught nothing of any weight for religion that has not been handed down abundantly in the sacred letters.

196We also assert that what the Apostles instituted about rites of divine worship and circumstances of church government — where sacred Scripture is silent — was left to the Church's power.

She may change those things variously for times and places, under this general rule alone: that all things be done in order and decently in the Church of God (1 Cor. 14:40).

197The chief point — from which the rest follow — is this: of what the Apostles taught or instituted, we hold nothing as fully certain except what is handed down and set in sacred Scripture.

After the Apostles and apostolic men, the Church had no more ἀδιάπτωτοι men set beyond every danger of error. So whatever of their sayings and deeds reaches us outside the Canonical writings comes only on the credit of weak men, who could both err and deceive.

198So there is no unwritten tradition that should be matched in authority with the divine and Apostolic writings.

Scripture is the sole rule of faith; nothing else can be joined to it with the same power to bind conscience and constrain faith. If Scripture were not enough and did not hold all that belongs to faith, the Church would lack a sufficient rule, and her salvation would not have been adequately provided for.

199Hence we argue negatively from Scripture's authority.

Of what God revealed through the Prophets and Apostles, nothing certain has reached us except what they themselves divinely committed to writing. To reject something as not belonging to faith, it is enough that it has no foundation in Scripture and cannot be proved or drawn from it.

201From the preceding theses on Scripture's plenitude and sufficiency — as clearly as we could — we have set out our Churches' teaching.

In short: once God willed his word consigned in writing, the Church in the sacred books had all that each age and God's varied dispensation made so needful to salvation that no one could teach, defend, or hold the contrary without loss of salvation.

Or the same point: sacred Scripture has always held all that belongs to the body and substance of religion and is necessary by God's institution — though many circumstances of worship and church discipline were left to the Church's power, not prescribed one by one in Scripture.

202We do not claim every necessary point stands in Scripture word for word.

It may stand in equivalent words, or at least so that each item can be drawn from Scripture by a necessary and clear consequence — without needing another principle of faith to which Scripture would send us for fuller knowledge.

203The principles of faith are contained in Scripture because they are Scripture itself — not something outside it — and not because they must or can be proved from Scripture.

Everything else in religion and sacred doctrine either is proved by express texts, or drawn from Scripture by open, near consequences (what properly count as dogmas of faith), or only fetched by more remote, less plain consequences from Scripture's deeper store (many theological truths taught in the Orthodox schools).

204Our Churches also hold tightly: what is necessary to salvation cannot be sought elsewhere than from Scripture — with certainty and without fail.

Besides Scripture there is no word of God by which the things of faith can be confirmed. Sacred Scripture is the sole rule of faith; nothing of equal authority can be joined to it.

205We turn next to the Roman doctors on this question.

First they teach that Scripture was not given so the Church would have it as the sole rule of faith, or so that religion's institutes and the dogmas of faith would have to be sought from it alone. So not everything that belongs to faith and morals need be proved from sacred Scripture.

They do not deny that what is simply necessary to each person's salvation is found in Scripture — see Bellarmine, De verbo Dei 4.11 (last section). Answering Augustine's line our side cites (In what is openly set down in Scripture are found all things that contain faith and the way of life), he limits it to dogmas simply necessary for all, such as the Apostles' Creed and the Decalogue, and presses Augustine's further point about ignorance that would cost promised salvation.

206Roman doctors do not deny that Scripture contains the whole necessary doctrine of faith or morals — not simply for each person, but somehow for the whole Church. They only deny that it is contained expressly (Bellarmine, De Verbo Dei 4.3 section 2).

Stapleton (Controv. 5 q.5 art.1) offers modes by which the whole saving doctrine is in Scripture: first, Scripture points to the true Church and through that Church teaches all that is needed; second, from dogmas openly set in Scripture the rest can be firmly drawn — as two natures in Christ from the Son's incarnation. Even in that sense, he says, the Fathers teach that all faith needs is comprehended in Scripture.

207Roman doctors do not all speak alike here — some seem to grant Scripture more, some less.

Yet they all agree: everything necessarily required for eternal salvation is in sacred Scripture explicitly or implicitly, expressly or by virtue, and as in seed — if Scripture is read in the sense the Holy Spirit intends.

208Yet they all deny that everything the Church needs for the doctrine of faith and morals is so contained in Scripture that it can be sufficiently sought and drawn from there alone.

They still require the help of tradition and of an unwritten word deposited in the Church's heart.

209Roman doctors agree: Christ and the Apostles taught and set up many points of faith and worship that sacred Scripture neither states expressly nor yields sufficiently when mined alone.

Christian and Apostolic doctrine, on their view, rests partly on Scripture and partly on an unwritten word passed along by mouth.

210That unwritten word, they say, was placed in the charge of the churches' rectors and overseers.

Hand to hand it was then passed down, and through unbroken succession of bishops and pastors it has reached us pure and unspoiled.

211What they label unwritten traditions are dogmas and religious institutes never lodged in the canonical books.

Even Pontificians grant that tradition as a word is broad: any teaching one person communicates to another, in writing or outside Scripture. Handing on equals teaching; tradition equals a teaching.

Church writers, however, usually narrow the term to teaching given by living voice rather than writing — and that is how the Pontifician schools use it.

They do not mean a doctrine that exists nowhere in writing, but one the first author never wrote — or, more carefully, one absent from the Canonical books of Prophets and Apostles.

212Traditions get many partitions. The one that matters here turns on the authors to whom each kind is traced.

Roman doctors name three: Divine, Apostolic, and Ecclesiastical.

Divine are those Christ himself taught and instituted ἀγράφως (without writing), yet nowhere appear in sacred Scripture.

Their stock case is the oil-and-balsam anointing in confirmation, counted among the new-law Sacraments — for they grant every new-law Sacrament must come immediately from Christ.

213Apostolic traditions, in the proper sense, are commands and institutes they ascribe to the Apostles even when the Apostolic writings are silent.

Under that head they place the Quadragesima (Lent) fast, which they claim the Apostles founded.

Often they blur the labels: what only the Apostles (not Christ) instituted they still call Divine, because those institutes came with the Spirit's breath; and what they tie to Christ they also call Apostolic, since nothing of Christ's teaching reaches us except through Apostolic writing and preaching.

Ecclesiastical traditions are old customs begun by prelates or peoples that, by gradual tacit consent, took on the force of law.

214Authority is not equal across these kinds.

What they call Divine is given the same force as precepts and dogmas written in the Gospels.

What they call Apostolic is ranked with the Apostolic writings themselves.

Ecclesiastical traditions sit lower — on a level with the Church's written canons and laws.

215They therefore confine Trent's Session 4 rule — receive unwritten traditions with the same piety as the Canonical books — to the first two kinds alone (Divine and Apostolic).

The Council says: seeing Gospel truth and discipline live in written books and in unwritten traditions received from Christ's mouth by the Apostles, or passed from the Apostles under the Spirit's dictation as if by hand down to us, the Synod, following the orthodox Fathers, receives and venerates with equal piety and reverence every Old and New Testament book (one God their author) and those faith-and-morals traditions spoken by Christ or the Spirit and kept by continual succession in the Catholic Church.

216Roman doctors offer several tests for sorting true Divine and Apostolic traditions from fakes; they boil down to three.

First: whatever Rome believes as de fide, yet is not clearly in Scripture, must itself be a Divine or Apostolic tradition — because Rome cannot err, and because she is not ruled by fresh revelation but only by what she learned from Apostles and Prophets.

217Second rule, on the same two foundations: what Rome keeps that only God could lawfully institute, yet Scripture never shows God instituting, must have come from the Apostles.

218Third rule: whatever Roman doctors by common consent say descends from Apostolic tradition is to be treated as Apostolic — even when the Church herself could have set it up.

They class the Quadragesimal (Lenten) fast under this head.

219The three rules fold into one: whatever Rome proposes as Divine or Apostolic tradition must be taken as such without doubt.

As they hang the authority of long-known books on the present Church's witness, so they will have true traditions sorted from false ones only by that same judgment — and that with certainty and infallibility.

220From the foregoing, the controversy's state is clear: where Reformed churches agree with Rome, and where they do not.

First concession: polity and public external-worship ceremonies need not be fetched from Scripture; they are left to Church power and her overseers' prudence.

221Further concession: the substance and body of faith and religion are not always in Scripture verbatim, expressly, or immediately.

Many faith dogmas come only by good and lawful consequence from Scripture.

222Rome concedes in turn: whatever is simply necessary for every person's salvation, and whose explicit faith each believer must hold, stands clear and open in Scripture.

They also grant that whatever is needed for faith-and-morals doctrine is at least in Scripture virtually and implicitly, and can be drawn by good consequence.

223The real split: Reformed hold that everything needed for faith and religion can be drawn and proved from Scripture alone — no second faith-principle to which Scripture remits us for fuller teaching, and no rule of faith outside Scripture.

Roman doctors deny that faith dogmas and religion's institutes can be proved sufficiently from Scripture without intervening Church doctrine and tradition, which they take as another part of the divine word equal in authority with sacred Scripture.

224The whole question therefore turns on two points.

First: Did the Apostles teach or institute necessary things not sufficiently contained in sacred Scripture?

Second: Can apostolic teaching and institutes be had with certainty and infallibility from somewhere other than Scripture — namely from the tradition of post-apostolic Church doctors, owed equal faith-obedience with Scripture itself?

Rome affirms both. All Orthodox (Reformed) theologians deny both.

225Two affirmations follow.

First: everything belonging to the substance of faith and religion is fully and sufficiently in sacred Scripture.

Second: besides Scripture there is no word of God that is our faith's principle and rule — so no unwritten traditions equal Scripture's authority, and least of all Rome's so-called Apostolic and divine traditions.

The first follows from the second: if there is no divine word outside Scripture, Scripture must hold all that faith and salvation require, or we already lack necessities and have no sure path of salvation.

So, without rehearsing Scripture's own fullness-texts, the main proof target is this: no living-voice-only word of God stands as a certain faith-rule alongside Scripture.

226First argument: when Jewish Scripture was only the Old Testament, the whole salvation-doctrine was in Scripture, with no unwritten traditions equal to it.

A fortiori today: Scripture now includes the New Testament books that set out Christ's and the Apostles' teaching, so all the more must salvation-doctrine be contained in Scripture.

That Judaism had no equal-authority unwritten traditions follows because any such would have been the very traditions the Jewish teachers pressed — yet Christ shows those empty human inventions (Matthew 15; Mark 7).

When scribes and Pharisees (then the Jewish Church's doctors) charged the disciples with breaking the elders' tradition by unwashed hands (Matthew 15:2; Mark 7:5), Christ answered that they break God's commandment by their tradition and make God's word void (Matthew 15:3, 6; Mark 7:8-13).

He does not merely rebuke hypocrisy; He rejects their traditions as vain in general and draws no line between true and false extra-Scriptural traditions — citing Isaiah: This people honors Me with lips while the heart is far; in vain they worship Me, teaching human commandments (Isaiah 29:13 via Matthew 15:8-9; Mark 7:6-7).

Paul likewise warns against human tradition (Colossians 2:8) and recalls his own former zeal for ancestral traditions (Galatians 1:14).

So if Christ and the Apostles treat Jewish extra-Scriptural traditions as human doctrines, Rome's traditions fall the same way — they come with no greater authority.

227Rome replies: Christ condemned only later, empty, or Scripture-contradicting Jewish traditions — not Mosaic/Prophetic ones — and Rome's traditions come from Christ and the Apostles.

Counter: the traditions Christ attacks as human doctrines were sold as Mosaic and Prophetic. Rabbis call them thorah shebbal peh (oral law), claiming Moses received them viva voce on Sinai equal in authority with the written law.

In Christ's day those Jewish doctors were the Church's only teachers — there was no true Church of God except among the Jews.

Yet Christ still rejects their extra-Scriptural traditions as human doctrines despite ancient/Mosaic pedigree. So why trust today's Roman doctors when they claim hand-to-hand receipt from Christ and the Apostles?

Church teachers can err and push merely human dogmas as divine; therefore no certain word of God stands outside sacred Scripture — for any such word would still have to come through fallible overseers, with no greater warrant.

228Church teachers' delivery can be rejected as human tradition only because it stands outside Scripture.

If God's word were not bounded by Scripture and an unwritten divine word also existed, teachers could rightly claim their teaching is that word — and if we needed an unwritten word, where else would we take it?

Yet Christ shows Church doctors can propose mere human invention as God's word.

Therefore whatever can be proposed outside Scripture's substance counts as human doctrine, and Scripture is the rule for examining all things — otherwise magisterial precepts could never be rejected as human traditions.

229Note Rome's own concession: Christ rebuked traditions from teachers later than Moses and the Prophets.

By the same right, so-called Ecclesiastical traditions fall — rites and worship practices invented by later pastors and doctors, not by Christ or the Apostles — and those make up much of Rome's system.

They are no less human commandments than the Jewish elders' once were.

Isaiah's words, cited and confirmed by Christ, fit them equally: In vain they worship Me, teaching doctrines and commandments of men (Isaiah 29:13; Matthew 15:9; Mark 7:7).

230Rome says Jewish traditions contradicted Scripture, but theirs do not.

Many Jewish traditions were not evil or directly anti-Scripture by nature — only unlawful as additions, since divine law forbids adding to itself.

Hand-washing before meals looks harmless and not directly against Scripture — yet that is the very tradition Christ specially targets.

Calling it empty helps Rome nothing: their traditions are no less empty, and by mere human wisdom Jewish washings look no less wise than most Roman institutes.

Christ's verdict is broader: He damns them not only as empty or contrary, but in general as human commandments and doctrines — and that charge fits Rome's traditions equally.

231Most Roman traditions are not only beside Scripture (already a kind of conflict as unlawful additions) but often fight Scripture directly.

Example — communion in one kind: Rome says it is lawful and expedient to give the Eucharist under bread alone; yet Christ instituting the sacrament said of the cup, Drink from this, all of you (Matthew 26:27).

Example — images: the second commandment forbids religious worship of any image, and Scripture often forbids fashioning a likeness of God; Rome teaches placing and religiously venerating images of God, angels, and the dead in churches.

Example — the Mass: Rome holds Christ is offered daily as a true and proper sacrifice though He suffers nothing there; Hebrews teaches Christ's offering is once for all and He does not offer Himself repeatedly, because He cannot suffer repeatedly (Hebrews 9:25-28; 10:10-14).

Therefore Rome's supposedly Apostolic and divine traditions are not God's word or a certain faith-rule: God's word cannot contradict itself, and what contradicts undisputed Scripture must not be held as God's word.

232Scripture alone is a certain rule of faith; traditions proposed outside it are doubtful and uncertain.

If any part of Christian doctrine had been left by the Apostles only viva voce, committed to memory and never written, it either would not have reached us, or would have reached us thick with corruptions — so that pure truth could hardly be separated from human inventions.

Men's perversity, ignorance, and negligence easily bury, erase, or adulterate what is trusted only to care and memory. Writing is needed for a sure and accurate record.

What is not written soon vanishes from memory or is tangled in fables until true and false cannot be told apart.

Philosophers' opinions and commonwealth institutes left only to memory have perished, except scraps someone happened to write. Of past deeds and sayings we have nothing certain except what books kept as faithful custodians.

If writing is needed anywhere, it is needed most in religion and worship — where people are by nature forgetful and quick to invent.

Ask Rome where the Jews' alleged Mosaic and prophetic oral traditions are now: even Rome cannot say what they contained. Of Jewish religion and worship we know nothing certain except from Moses and the Prophets in writing.

233Rome replies: from creation to Moses, heavenly doctrine was kept by oral tradition alone — so why not apostolic traditions for sixteen hundred years?

Answer: before Moses sacred teaching did survive unwritten for a while — but only among very few.

Among most it was soon corrupted and wrapped in absurd fables; God's covenant and saving doctrine nearly remained in Abraham's family alone while the rest of humankind turned to idolatry and invented cults.

What Scripture later supplied was then filled by frequent divine appearances and familiar talk with the Patriarchs, by which God repeatedly restored the viva-voce teaching and called it back to purity.

Those extraordinary appearances and conversations have long ceased in the Church.

234Press harder: why did God finally will His law written, and the rest of sacred Scripture composed?

Rome cannot deny the twin aims — to help human weakness and to block the frauds of the ungodly — and that God's counsel was to rescue the doctrine in those books from oblivion and corruption, and keep it safe against negligence and imposture.

Then why not the same care for the whole of sacred doctrine? Why write one part and leave another equal part unwritten?

Is the unwritten part somehow less open to diabolical fraud and forgetfulness than the written part?

Worldwide experience says otherwise: where Scripture was missing, Father-handed vestiges remained, but ruined by fables, foreign sacrilegious rites, and idolatry.

Rome itself counts later doctors' writings among providence's means of keeping traditions. If traditions needed writing to survive, why leave that writing to fallible common authors instead of Prophets and Apostles — and why seal Scripture on authentic tables while parking equal-weight traditions in ordinary men's books?

235Rome adds: their traditions survived intact by continuous use among Christians — like vernacular languages, which endure even without grammars because a people keeps speaking them.

Experience says the opposite. People are inconstant; whatever lives only in use keeps changing, often slowly and unnoticed — unless something else holds it fast.

Their own analogy proves it: vernaculars continually shift until, after centuries, they look like another dialect. Ancient customs diverge from today's for the same reason.

Church history shows the same: set the second- and third-century Church beside Rome's present rites and discipline, and the gap is obvious.

So the Church needs a firm, stable rule that does not hang merely on memory and good faith — a rule by which creeping abuses can be corrected. That rule is sacred Scripture alone, not unwritten tradition.

236Unwritten traditions are wrongly leveled with Scripture: Scripture's inspired writers, beyond error's reach, tell us what Christ taught and instituted.

Outside Scripture, sayings and deeds of Christ and the Apostles reach us only through early post-apostolic witnesses — the Fathers whose monuments remain.

Those Fathers were fallible, confessed it, and asked that their writings be measured by Scripture — not received ἀθεωρήτως and without examination.

Roman doctors themselves mark many errors and blemishes in the Fathers — not only in lone opinions, but even where many agree.

Examples Sixtus of Siena collects: most Fathers denied the saints the beatific vision before the resurrection; ancients held no creature incorporeal as a received Catholic rule; many forbade all oaths; chiliast hope of an earthly fleshly reign (Papias, Irenaeus, and others); and a purifying world-fire for all except Christ on judgment day — which even Jerome and Augustine hesitate to condemn outright.

If early doctors could hug false dogma as divine truth, later-age traditions learned only from their witness cannot stand as certain beside what God consigned in the Prophets' and Apostles' books — nor can fallible men's testimony claim equal Church authority with God's own.

237If unwritten apostolic traditions ever had certainty, it should have been strongest while apostolic memory was still fresh.

Yet already in the first centuries they were so uncertain and various that Church doctors fought over them, and good men were taken in by the name of tradition.

Eusebius: Papias, living next after the Apostles, leaned hard on traditions and wrote five books of the Lord's sayings from unwritten tradition — stuffed with fables.

Pascha dispute: Asian bishops (Polycrates) alleged John and Philip's tradition for Nisan 14; Victor of Rome and the West claimed Peter and Paul for the Sunday after — Eusebius and Socrates record the clash.

On fixed apostolic fasts, ancients disagreed; Augustine to Casulanus and Socrates deny the Apostles fixed fasting rules at all.

Augustine on Sabbath fasting: Rome alleged Peter's tradition; other churches alleged other apostles — an interminable fight proving unwritten tradition yields no certainty on fasting.

Tertullian and Basil list standing prayer, no Sunday fasts, Pascha-to-Pentecost customs as apostolic — later ages dropped them even while still calling them apostolic.

238Still stronger: for many ages, especially in the Roman and African churches, infants received the Eucharist as soon as they were baptized, and it was held necessary to their salvation.

Witnesses: Cyprian On the Lapsed; Innocent I to Milevis; Gelasius to the Picene bishops; Augustine in many places — not as a private whim but as the common Church view descending from apostolic tradition, and used as conceded ground against the Pelagians.

No contemporary writer objects. Roman doctors admit it: Vasquez and Maldonatus note Augustine's and Innocent's view held about six hundred years.

Yet Rome long ago abolished the custom, and Trent condemned it.

If unwritten traditions were already so uncertain and various in the first Christian centuries — and often deceived even good doctors — what certainty can sixteen later centuries add?

How unsafe, then, to take them as a rule of faith and set them equal in authority with sacred Scripture.

239Rome objects: forged 'apostolic' writings once circulated, and even true apostolic books were doubted among the faithful — so if that undercuts unwritten tradition, Scripture's authority falls too.

The objection fails on our side. We do not hang Scripture's authority on Church doctors' testimony. The faithful receive Scripture immediately, for its own sake, because it carries the marks of its divinity in itself.

Old doubts about certain books therefore do not prejudice Scripture among us.

We reject Rome's traditions not merely because some doubted them, but because they fight Scripture and have nothing in them that can claim divine authority.

Rome, by contrast, makes both written and unwritten 'word of God' hang on doctors' testimony. If those early doctors — the only chain by which later ages learned 'apostolic' traditions — were themselves uncertain, various, and often deceived, then on Rome's own principles those traditions have no certain authority.

240Rome replies: when ancients disagree and apostolic tradition looks uncertain, the Church has a living authority that can settle true vs false traditions for the faithful, certainly and infallibly.

Ask who holds that authority now that prophets and apostles are gone, and Rome splits.

Most say the Roman Pontiff is Christ's infallible faith-judge — yet even inside Rome that claim is not a settled de fide dogma; many Catholics in communion deny it.

Others put infallibility in a general Council of overseers — still less settled; many Roman doctors, and the popes themselves, fight it, and denying it is not treated as heresy.

The fallback — Councils safe once the Pope confirms them — collapses into a circle: if Councils can err before confirmation and the Pope is not infallible, how can he infallibly judge whether the Council erred?

241Neither Pope nor Council can show a lawful title-deed for the authority they claim.

What they offer with any color is Scripture twisted off its sense.

Example — Luke 22:32 ('I have prayed for you… that your faith may not fail'): Christ promises Peter, about to deny Him, that heart-faith would not be snuffed out and he would rise again — not Roman episcopal infallibility.

Councils lean on Matthew 18:20 ('two or three… in my name'): Christ does not absolutely underwrite every general pastors' council; He promises Spirit-help to any council that uses His means, seeks God's and Christ's glory and the Church's building up, and is not dragged by its own passions.

No pastors' meeting can be known infallibly to have met that condition.

242If only a present, infallible Church authority can certify true Scripture and tradition against the false and apocryphal, that authority must be known first — before Scripture and tradition, and without leaning on their witness.

So ask Rome to prove papal or conciliar authority from somewhere other than Scripture and tradition.

They say they defer to Scripture and traditions as divine because Pope or Council so moves them — which leaves the question: what finally makes them believe the Church is infallible when it judges Scripture and tradition?

243Even Rome's best grant: the Church is not run by new revelations, and neither Pope nor Council learns immediately from God what the Apostles taught.

Their only remaining answer: hand-to-hand testimony of doctors back to hearers of the Apostles.

But we have already shown — and Rome's own history admits — that the earliest doctors often erred in receiving 'apostolic' traditions, and by common consent held as apostolic what Rome now condemns.

How then can that chain give later Councils and popes certain faith, or serve as a rule equal to Scripture for settling controversies?

The uncertainty of conflicting Father-witness is exactly what still needs removing. Augustine, in the place already cited: when the fight turns on apostolic tradition itself, the contention is interminable — it breeds quarrels and does not end questions.

244If any tradition deserves to be true, it is one marked by the perpetual, constant consensus of Christians.

Rome's traditions fail that test: they stand outside Scripture, often against it, and many were unknown in the ancient Church and contrary to its faith and practice.

Examples: papal indulgences; saint-canonization; public worship in a tongue the people do not share; bans on vernacular Scripture without special leave; communion in one kind; and religious image-making and image-worship — easy to show absent, even opposed, in the primitive Church.

So they are human inventions, and it is impious to set them equal in authority with the writings of Apostles and Prophets.

Pars II closes here; Pars III opens next.

245Pars III opens by splitting the fight into two questions that travel together but are not the same.

First: are all things necessary to faith and religion fully and sufficiently in Scripture?

Second: is there, beside Scripture, another word of God in the Church, equal in authority, handed down only by unwritten tradition?

Rome denies the first and affirms the second, and piles arguments on both.

246Rome's opening move: if Scripture were enough, either the whole Canon together would be enough, or each book by itself would be enough.

Neither works. Single books, cut off from the rest, do not hold every saving dogma — not every OT prophecy, not every NT epistle.

So sufficiency would have to belong to the whole Canon. Missing books would mean missing doctrine.

They claim many sacred books have perished: Nathan and Gad, Ahijah and Iddo, Solomon's songs and parables, plus a Laodicean letter and perhaps another Corinthian letter.

From today's incomplete Canon, they say, salvation's doctrine cannot be drawn sufficiently.

247We never meant: every single biblical booklet by itself teaches every dogma.

Sufficiency belongs to Scripture's body taken as a whole — indefinitely, and at least in its chief parts.

Rome assumes that dropping any one book instantly guts doctrine. That is not our claim.

Today's corpus holds salvation's teaching not only enough, but richly; many books only explain or apply what others already teach.

Even if some authentic divine writings had perished, the remaining Scripture could still hold the full saving doctrine — those lost books need not have carried any dogma missing from what survives.

248We also doubt the premise: it is not likely any properly divine, authentic writing has truly vanished.

Providence is injured if God had a book written only to let it vanish useless to the Church.

Among books providence did keep, some are tiny and of no obvious necessity — so why invent larger lost equals?

Rome, which credits the Church with ἀδιαπτωσία and exalts her, still shames her if she let many God-given norm-books perish through neglect.

249For the cited lost books: either they did not perish, or they were never canonical immediate inspiration.

Gad and Nathan we count prophetic and canonical — but still extant as Samuel, Vulgate 1-2 Kings.

Samuel alone cannot be full author: his death falls mid-1 Samuel, so he stops around chapter 16.

The rest, and 2 Samuel, fit Gad and Nathan, who lived the story and are named beside Samuel as its writers and continuators.

250Same move for Iddo and Ahijah in 2 Chron. 9: Solomon's acts credited to Nathan, Ahijah, and Iddo's vision.

Those writings look like 1 Kings, Vulgate 3 Kings — anonymous, yet best ascribed to the prophets of that age.

So again: not vanished canonical books, but books we still read under other titles.

251Yes, much of Solomon's writing is gone — but not everything a God-breathed man writes is divine Scripture.

Augustine in City of God 18: prophets can write as historians by human diligence, or as prophets by inspiration; only the latter bind as God's word.

Solomon's inspired share is what entered the Canon: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs.

The rest — plant-lore from cedar to hyssop, extra parables, five thousand songs — can be brilliant human work without being lost canonical revelation.

252Apostles could write other pious letters that never rose to canonical, immediately inspired authority.

1 Cor. 5 may point to an earlier Corinthian letter — if so, a holy but non-canonical piece, not a lost rule of faith.

Many Reformed and Roman scholars instead read 'in this epistle,' pointing back to Paul's words already in the same letter about the incestuous man.

Either way, Rome gains no vanished second Canon equal to Scripture.

253Rome's 'lost letter to Laodicea' rests on a Latin ambiguity in Col. 4, not on a vanished Canon.

The Vulgate's 'epistle of the Laodiceans' is read as a letter to them; the Greek says a letter from Laodicea.

τὴν ἐκ Λαοδικείας means written from Laodicea — anyone with a little Greek can see it.

So the lost-Laodiceans proof for an incomplete Canon falls with the mistranslation.

254Rome's next move: if Scripture alone were the Word, Christ would have plainly ordered writing.

They want an explicit 'write this' parallel to the explicit 'teach the nations' mandate.

Because they find no such vocal command on the page, they say the Word outruns the book.

The claim sets up the reply: inspiration itself is the stronger mandate.

255Agreed: they would not make writings the rule of faith without a divine mandate.

Denied: that they lacked one — Augustine says Christ ordered the Apostles to write what we should read.

Even without a spoken 'Write!', inspiration and the Spirit's extraordinary impulse are the stronger command.

2 Tim. 3: all Scripture is God-breathed — once that stands, a further vocal warrant is needless.

256John's Apocalypse repeatedly records a heavenly order to write — including the seven Asian letters.

Bellarmine's split between 'teach' and 'write' fails: teaching includes the pen.

Matthew's closing 'Teach all nations' is not viva-voce-only; writing is one teaching mode.

Christ wants the nations filled with the Gospel by speech or by calamus.

257Bellarmine lists occasions: Matthew's memorial, John's anti-Ebionite request, Luke vs uncertain tales.

He infers they wrote casually, not by office or divine order.

Occasions do not cancel mandate — inspiration is the strongest mandate of all.

They seized those occasions for the Church's perpetual use, not for one private fix.

258Bellarmine wants a catechism; he finds only Gospels and letters that touch dogma in passing.

Reply: God wrote through their hands — not bound to school method.

Pious readers can still gather faith and life-precepts from the books as written.

Moses had an express write-order yet left precepts scattered in narrative — same pattern.

259Bellarmine: if God meant a written Gospel, every Apostle — or a joint council — would have issued a full body of doctrine.

Reply: a few inspired writers suffice for the whole Church's use.

No need for an Apostles' committee — God inspires persons as well as assemblies.

Sacred books arise from God's immediate breath, not from human planning.

260Rome's third attack: many things we must know are missing from Scripture.

Under the Old Testament women needed a cleansing from original sin as much as men — yet circumcision is only for males, and Scripture names no parallel rite for women.

Nor is it believable that males who died before the eighth day had no remedy, though circumcision could not yet be given — and Scripture is silent here too.

261If the silence proves Scripture incomplete, it equally proves Scripture-plus-tradition incomplete — tradition is silent too.

Let Rome name the Old-Testament remedy for women and for boys who died before day eight from her unwritten word.

If she says the tradition perished, her own lost-books attack against the Canon rebounds on her.

One could as easily stash the missing remedy in the prophetic books she claims are gone.

262The whole attack hangs on a false hinge: that grace must ride on outward signs.

On that hinge Rome wonders how women were saved without circumcision — yet she forgets her own teaching.

She grants New-Testament sacraments alone that grace-working force; Old-Testament rites she calls shadows without power to work grace.

Stand by that, and circumcision itself was no remedy of original sin.

263With Paul we call circumcision a seal of the righteousness of faith (Rom. 4), not a rite that by outward application wiped original sin away.

Adults — men and women — were set right by faith in the divine promises.

Abraham's promise, I will be your God and of your seed, covered women as well as men.

By that promise God remitted original sin to covenant infants who died before reason, circumcised or not — including girls and boys before day eight.

Male circumcision sealed the promise for the whole household.

Even Lombard (and Gregory) taught Bellarmine that women and pre-circumcision infants were saved by faith — their own or their parents' — without a bodily sacrament.

264Bellarmine offers that Old-Testament silence as a specimen of something necessary yet unwritten.

He then piles New-Testament instances of faith-matters he says Scripture cannot teach.

First: Mary always a virgin against Helvidius — Church-wide belief, he says, with no Scriptural witness.

265Faith requires Mary's virginity in bearing Christ our Savior.

Basil: what comes after does not belong to the reason of the mystery — to pry is curiosity.

We piously hold her perpetual virginity and count Helvidius rash.

We will not rank it among articles of faith or press it as necessary to salvation.

266Bellarmine's Pascha instance — Sunday, not the fourteenth moon, though Scripture is silent — has no more force.

We grant the silence; we deny the stake: the day is indifferent, a church rite, not a salvation hinge.

Second-century Rome and Asia even excommunicated each other over it.

Rome's custom may look wiser, yet both sides sinned in the heat.

Irenaeus rebuked Victor for rupturing charity over a light cause.

Fathers' catalogs list Quartodecimans as heretics, but they often brand as heresy any view they dislike — even on trivial points.

267They next call infant baptism necessary yet unwritten — or at least not proved enough from Scripture.

We deny the silence: our theologians prove infant baptism from Scripture against the Anabaptists.

This is not the place to rehearse those arguments.

Stranger still: Rome herself routs Anabaptists from Scripture — Bellarmine boasts his baptism arguments cannot be escaped (On Baptism 1.9).

The same Bellarmine, attacking Scripture's sufficiency, then says paedobaptism cannot be proved from Scripture.

We appeal from partisan Bellarmine to Bellarmine elsewhere convinced by the truth.

268Rome presses hardest the rule against rebaptizing those baptized by heretics — as if it were necessary faith we cannot deny, yet cannot prove from Scripture.

Cyprian died holding the opposite view the Church later repudiated — yet who would say that martyr fell from salvation?

Their dodge that nothing was yet defined in Cyprian's day fails: if the dogma is Apostolic tradition, a later Church decree adds nothing to Apostolic authority.

Stephen of Rome condemned Cyprian while he lived; Cyprian refused and answered him.

We share the Church's settled practice — no rebaptism of heretics' baptism — but will not urge it as simply necessary to salvation.

We hold it not by unwritten word, but because Augustine's Scripture arguments make it highly probable — and it would be shameless to reject universal practice Scripture does not oppose.

269Some also press the Filioque — procession of the Spirit from the Son — as if Scripture cannot show it.

We will not list it among truths that cannot be denied without losing salvation.

We prefer Rome's reading, yet would not damn the Greeks for this alone or break communion over it.

The mystery is hard, but we deny it cannot be proved from Scripture: Spirit of the Son, sent by the Son as by the Father.

Rome herself piles Scripture texts against the Greeks — Lombard, Bessarion, Bellarmine — so she must admit either Scripture proves the Filioque or her anti-Greek case is sophistic.

270Graver still: they say Moses alone never contained all needful to salvation — immortality and resurrection are missing.

Immortality every religion presupposes: if souls die like cattle, piety is vain — eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.

Moses' whole scope is religion and worship; soul-immortality is presupposed and openly drawn from that scope.

Particular Mosaic texts also prove resurrection: Christ vs the Sadducees cites I am the God of Abraham... — God of the living, not the dead.

He blames their ignorance of the Scriptures; if resurrection was only obscure then, clear distinct faith of it was not yet required for salvation.

272Harder still: they say Scripture cannot be a sufficient faith-rule because we must know which books are inspired.

Even if Scripture calls the Prophets' and Apostles' books divine, no one trusts that claim until he already trusts that Scripture is divine.

So, they argue, some unwritten word of God must teach us that Scripture is God's word — or faith has no divine ground.

273Answer: however showy, the argument is a mere sophism.

Rome admits God could have put His whole word in writing and ordered the Apostles to write all the Church must know — and then our thesis would be true.

Yet the same objection would still run: that this complete Scripture is inspired and these are its books is itself a faith-matter Scripture cannot prove, since nothing proves itself.

That would again demand an unwritten witness — a conclusion false under the hypothesis — so the argument that yields it is sophistic.

274Ask Rome: if Scripture is not the whole sufficient rule, what is?

They answer: written plus unwritten word in Rome's mouth — the total rule outside which there is no other word of God.

Retorsion: that mixed rule also cannot prove what is most necessary — that Rome's Scriptures and traditions are the divine ones, and that her witness is infallible.

Scripture's self-claim and Rome's boast do not settle the point until one already believes God speaks through Rome.

So their rule demands yet another word beyond Scripture, tradition, and Rome's testimony — or faith rests on no word of God.

No faith-rule escapes a similar charge.

275The sophistic fallacy assumes what is false: that a sufficient faith-rule must prove everything including itself.

No rule of faith can prove itself by its own testimony — proof is from what is better known, and a thing is not better known than itself.

Yet embracing the rule is itself necessary to faith.

A perfect sufficient rule is one that, once supposed, proves all else of faith — not one that proves itself.

Scripture's inability to prove itself by bare self-testimony does not strip its sufficiency.

Saying otherwise is like saying the sky does not cover all because it does not cover itself — or that science's first principles are no rule because principles do not prove principles.

276The objection assumes faith accepts only what another divine word proves — true for revealed things, not for the word itself.

Things revealed are believed because God testifies in his word; the word itself cannot be propped by infinite regress of further words.

Faith must finally rest in a word received for its own sake, made known by implanted signs and notes under the Spirit's light.

Scripture needs no second word to witness its divinity — it is still faith's proper object.

Rome's own faith likewise bottoms out in some word accepted by motives, not by yet another divine word.

277Bare self-assertions in Scripture do not convince those who already doubt its authority — in that sense Scripture cannot prove Scripture.

Yet another sense holds: Scripture carries many innate notes of divinity by which it shows itself true and divine.

As heaven and earth prove God by excellence and wisdom's traces — not by a spoken certificate.

As a book claims Aristotle or Cicero by genius of doctrine and style, not by the title page alone.

Scripture's books likewise bear divine wisdom so deeply that inspiration and divine authorship appear.

278Faith-analysis allows neither a circle nor infinite regress — the mind must stop in a word received immediately for itself.

That word is sacred Scripture (a fixed number of God-breathed books), known by implanted signs, not by another divine word's bare certificate.

Self-knowledge by innate notes does not strip Scripture's perfection as faith-rule.

A rule need not prove itself the way it proves everything else — first principles are supposed, proved at most ad hominem / a posteriori.

279Rome adds: we must know not only that Scripture's books are Spirit-dictated, but that they remain sincere and uncorrupted in our hands.

That integrity, they say, cannot be learned from Scripture itself — so another divine word seems required.

Hence their claim that Scripture alone is not a sufficient faith-rule.

280Same demand hits oral tradition: we must know Apostolic deliveries reached us intact across ages — yet tradition cannot certify its own integrity.

So Rome would need yet another divine word beyond Scripture-plus-tradition to guarantee both arrived uncorrupted.

That falsifies Bellarmine's claim that the Church needs no new revelations and only keeps what Apostles and Prophets delivered.

Appealing to an infallible Church's testimony does not help — whence does the Church itself learn, and on what does its faith rest?