Where Erasmus viewed the Scripture in terms of salvation history and placed Jesus' sayings and the Gospels at the center (ad fontes! [= "to the sources"]), Melanchthon found the scopus [goal] of the Scripture in Romans and justification by faith alone. Where Luther and Melanchthon both distinguished between law and gospel in the Scripture, Erasmus consistently constructed a grand unity between the two, culminating in the philosophia Christi, an overarching moral construal of the gospel in which Christ provided the Christian with an ideal example. Thus Erasmus centered his description of the gospel in the creation of a Christian people, not in the forgiveness of sins. His appeal for harmony and concord reflected the very center of Christ's gospel for him.
Sound familiar?
Of course the big danger in reading about church history is that you start off deciding who is orthodox before you even find out what was being taught. Before you know it instead of being concerned to be looking through biblical eyes, you start looking through Martin Luther's, Philipp Melanchton's, or whoever your Christian hero is.
So I have to be careful. By stating that X thought something does not mean that we should pre-judge anything. As Erasmus and the Reformers said, ad fontes!
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