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THE

ANDOVER REVIEW:

A RELIGIOUS AND THEOLOGICAL MONTHLY.

VOL. III. FEBRUARY, 1885.- No. XIV.

REFORMATION THEOLOGY.

I. HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS.

THE theology of the Protestant Reformation, using the term theology in the broad sense, is soteriological rather than Christological. Its principal roots are to be traced back to Augustinian ideas.

Augustine, by his rare endowments, his scholarship, his manifold experiences, his hearty acceptance, after intense struggles, of the Christian religion, his rich originality, and especially by his controversies with the Donatists and the Pelagians, forms a momentous epoch in the history of Christian doctrines.

In his time, and chiefly through his influence, began a powerful reaction of religious thought from theology, taken in its specific sense, to anthropology, from Christology to soteriology.

The reaction, in the course of several centuries, gained the ascendency. Anthropology, and particularly soteriology, swayed the sceptre in scholasticism, in cultus, in the practical religious life both of the church catholic and of most heretical sects throughout the mediaval ages. The sceptre is still held by the same hand.

With the reign of the negative soteriological ideas of the preReformation period, amid the decadence of scholasticism and the revival of religious life, the dogmatic systems of both branches of the great Reformation of the sixteenth century are as to import and method internally connected.

Rightly to estimate the scientific worth of the Confessions of that node in ecclesiastical history it is important, therefore, to reflect on the distinguishing features of Reformation theology in relation to their historical antecedents.

1. The object which, above all others, addressed the spiritual

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perception of the Evangelists and Apostles was the unique person and the personal history of Jesus. He filled the eye and He absorbed the contemplation of all the writers of the New Testament. Of themselves they do not speak, except by way of incidental reference. Nor do they set forth the words and deeds of the Jews on their own account. These are noted for the purpose of bringing into prominence the words and deeds of Jesus. Nor do the writers set in the foreground the apostasy of Adam, the guilt and miseries of our race. Paul is no exception. Christ has central significance no less truly in his Epistles to the Romans and Galatians than in the Epistle to the Colossians, being in the former the antithesis to a false Jewish righteousness, in the latter the antithesis to false conceptions of God, the Creator, of worship, and of the material world. There Christ is related to the errors of Judaism, here to speculative errors derived from neo-platonic philosophy.

The extraordinary dignity of Jesus, including the spotless purity and positive holiness of His human nature no less than the manifestations of deity in the events of His history on earth as in his ascension and mediatorial reign in the glory of the Father, held the believing gaze and incited the profoundest rational inquiries of the post-apostolic church. Whom do men say that I, the Son of Man, am? was the question put by our Lord, directing the searching inquiry of His disciples to Himself. It was the same question, in substance, that the fathers of the post-apostolic age put: What think ye of the Christ? They did think chiefly on the Christ, and endeavored to give a rational answer. In this endeavor they aimed at affirming the whole truth and at the denial of all error. The Catholic faith saw in Him the Son of God, saw the Son of Man, the crucified Lord, the first born from the dead, the only conqueror of sin and Satan, the Beginning and the End of creation, the Head over all things unto the church. Of Him from whom so many contrary predicates radiate what were thoughtful men to think? What rational conceptions were commensurate with the wonderful reality affirmed by faith?

As one unsatisfying answer after another was given, widespread controversies arose, which both adorn and mar the history of sev eral centuries. They adorn the church because they are a testimony to the genuine Christian perceptions prevalent in the primitive age, but mar her beauty because of the violence of religious passion that arrayed party against party. The written word and the quick instincts of faith-life, a unity in Christian conscious

ness, were the guide in the search after sound doctrine and the corrective to erroneous tendencies.

Questions concerning God, His constitution, His relation to the natural world, may seem to have been parallel questions of equal importance. In reality, however, they were not. The idea concerning Christ, the Son of God, was necessarily correlative to the idea of God as God. The pagan conception of deity, whether pantheistic or deistic or dualistic, and the traditional monotheism of the Old Testament were felt to be at issue with the implied presuppositions of Christianity as to God's being and attributes. These deficiencies in all pre-Christian conceptions of God were to be superseded, and the truth latent in them asserted and rewrought. Old things in theology had to pass away. A new idea of God had to be constructed, an idea answerable to the postulates of Christ. Theology and Christology acted and reacted on each other, but the idea concerning Christ was the central plastic force. Whilst the idea of God at every stage in the process conditioned Christology, and whilst Christology could make valid progress only in the proportion that the idea of God was logically adjusted to such progress, yet the principle and the type of growth was in the Christ-idea. The Nicene Creed, for example, presupposes a definite perception of distinctions in the constitution of the Godhead, yet neither the doctrine of the Holy Ghost nor the doctrine of the Trinity was, nor could it have been, formulated by the Council of Nice. Time, profound thought, and earnest discussion were necessary after the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father had been affirmed by this Council before the church was qualified either to complete the Nicene Creed or to give rational expression to her faith in Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

So exclusively were faith and thought fastened on these Christological and theological questions that inquiries into the ethical life of man, the fall, sin, and its consequences were not pursued with corresponding earnestness. Opinions on all these subjects were, indeed, current, but prior to Augustine no doctrine in anthropology or soteriology had been authoritatively pronounced and enforced. There was the sense of real difference between sound views on sin and unsound views; but the question respecting the nature of sin had not then become a test question of orthodoxy.

The Greek Church maintained the freedom of man, as before the fall so also after it. The will, as such, was indifferent both to the good and to the evil. Man became evil by doing the evil. He became good by doing the good. The transgression of Adam

entailed evils, especially natural death, on the whole race; but these evils were not positive and radical. The more common opinions on the consequences of Adam's transgression were, in the main, equivalent to the subsequent doctrine intermediate between Augustine and Pelagius, as developed and held by the mediaval Roman Church.

Superficial views about man's apostasy did not, however, poison nor enervate positive faith in Christ. For Christian doctrine did not begin with man, much less with sin, and pass from man back to Christ. The conception of the Adamic fall was not the starting point, not the fundamental premise, from which Christian reflection proceeded. Hence, there was no occasion for an adjustment of the idea of Christ and His mediatorial work to the current superficial views of sin and depravity; for Christianity was not primarily a redemption, but life-communion with God in the person of his Son. The idea of Christ was developed from the contemplation of the personal Christ himself; and to this idea the opinion concerning man and his needs had to be adjusted. Hence, defective views on the nature of sin, of an apostate human race, and of the atonement, did not work constructively in the sphere of Christology; but Christology asserted its own independent primordial dignity. Speculative thought as it passed from Christ to God, so it passed from Christ to man, and, as regards his misery and his needs, was the spontaneous effort of rational inquiry, so far as speculation on this subject deserves to be recognized, to obtain a conception of the fall, of sin, and of redemption, which would be consistent with faith in the Son of God incarnate.

2. Pelagius initiated the opposite or contra-Christological process of religious thought. Instead of reasoning from Christ, the fundamental premise, as had been the prevailing habit of the Greek Church, the point of observation for reflection on Adam's transgression and the moral status of the fallen race was man himself; not the race, however, in its organic unity, but the individual man as a separate unit. Failing to recognize the vital connection of each individual member with the generic constitution of humanity, and failing equally to discern the vital connection of voluntary acts with a voluntary or ethical nature, Pelagius resolved the solidarity of the race into a conglomerate of ethical atoms, and resolved the moral status of the individual into a resultant of atomic volitions. Accordingly, there was for him no organic connection between the wrong volition of Adam and Adam's personal life and history, and no organic connection be