Philip Schaff defines the formal and material principles of the Reformation thus:
the material of life principle (principium essendi) of the Reformation [...] is no other than the great doctrine, which is presented by Paul especially as the entire sum of the gospel - the doctrine of the justification of the sinner before God by the merit of Christ alone through faith [...]
the formal or knowledge principle [...] consists in this, that the word of God, as it has been handed down to us in the canonical books of the Old and New Testaments, is the pure and proper source as well as the only certain measure of all saving truth.
(italics original, p.80-98, The Principle of Protestantism)
Martin Luther may be everyone's go-to guy for the material principle, but would we point to the person who called James an 'epistle of straw' as a great exponent of the formal principle? A lot could be written about Luther's doctrine of Scripture, but I think Oswald Bayer gets to the heart of why Luther doesn't fit into the standard neat distinction of formal and material principles. For Luther the 'authority of Scripture is not formal but is highly material and is content driven' (p.69, Martin Luther's Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation). This means that we don't follow a two step plan to knowing the truth of God:
- Step 1: Establish source of revelation
- Step 2: From that source derive knowledge of God and how we relate to him
This is the way that many Protestant confessions seem to proceed (at least post-Reformation), and it is the way many systematic theologies are organised. Oswald Bayer certainly does not like to do things that way though:
one does not arrive at the solution to the question [of the authority of Scripture] "in the passionless calm of a knowledge which is in the element of pure thought alone" [Hegel]; instead, it includes a change in the existence of the reader and interpreter. The Holy Scripture verifies itself, in that it awakens faith. As has been stated already, it does not work for one to take the so-called scriptural principle and try to differentiate between a "Protestant formal principle" and a "Protestant material principle," which states the teaching about justification; one certainly ought not to treat them as separate. Both are one and the same: wrapped up in the event that takes place when the righteousness of God is actually given as a gift, at the moment the promissio is articulated, one encounters the authority of Scripture, its efficacy and clarity - its ability to enlighten - as well as its sufficiency: its power to bring one to salvation - if indeed Scriputure is given "for the salvation" of human beings (2 Tim. 3:15). The question about the significance of the reformational turning point in Luther's theology and the question about Luther's understanding of biblical authority are the same; they are one and the same question.
(p.75-76, ibid)
I think this is related to what Mike Reeves is getting at when he says when you treat revelation as 'the ladder to get you up into the actual playroom of Christian theology, you tend to treat revelation and scripture in a non-Christian way because it is outside the room' (beginning of talk 2 here). Mike Reeves concern here is with the relation between Christology and revelation, but one thing I have begun to see lately is that Christology, revelation and salvation are all so bound up together that you cannot really separate them without doing some serious harm. John Calvin's Geneva Catechism, 1541, exemplifies that:
1. Minister. What is the chief end of human life?
Child. To know God
[...how do we know?...]
C. By His Word, in which He declares His mercy to us in Christ, and assures us of His love toward us
14. M. Then the foundation for true reliance upon God is to know Him in Jesus Christ (John 17:3)?
C. That is true
(pp.5-7, Trans. and ed. TF Torrance, The School of Faith: The Catechisms of the Reformed Church - that is the beginning and end of the introduction section prior to the section on the Apostles Creed)
This may seem to be the height of obscure theological discussion, but if you think that just meditate a while on what this means for how you try and witness to the truth of the Gospel to non-Christians.
Really important. And really well articulated here Dave, Thanks.
ReplyDeleteIt's one of those (admittedly shrinking!) number of things Anglicans can be proud of - the 39 articles don't begin in the abstract with revelation but with the trinity. Cranmer must have been a Barthian I reckon.
And this is not obscure theological discussion. This is the only real safeguard that discussion will actually be Christian.
hmm. i guess this is right. Is there then a hierarchy in the solas?
ReplyDeleteThis seems to be right at the heart of whether NT Wright is "reformed". - finding Vanhoozer helpful on that.
It's also related to discussions I'm having with my friend (on uccf staff team with me) on Orthodoxy - whether scripture/tradition is the rule of truth in the church down the ages by the spirit. I was wanting hoping to get into Goldsworthy's Gospel Centred Hermeneutics this summer. If you want to meet & talk that through this summer, we'd both value it.
ps enjoyed finding this via google search for "formal principle, material principle, reformation"!!
ReplyDeleteI thank God for you Dave
Establishing the source of revelation needs some kind of feedback, though, doesn't it?
ReplyDeleteI mean, let's say you established the Book of Mormon, together with the Bible, as your source of revelation.
This would naturally produce a lot of different results than establishing the Bible alone as the source of revelation. Those results would be "correct" in the sense of following logically from your source of revelation; but they would not, in reality, be "the faith delivered once for all to the apostles."
My question is this: How do you authenticate that your source of revelation is (a.) complete, not leaving anything out (c.f. the Catholic and Orthodox "sacred/apostolic tradition"), and (b.) pure, not including anything erroneous (e.g. the Book of Mormon)?
I think you can't just start from a source of revelation, picked however carefully at the outset, and then just blindly accept what comes of it.
If you do that any omission or wrong inclusion at the outset will never get corrected down the road.
Instead, you have to look at the results which are produced and ask yourself, "Are these results consistent with having started from an entirely correct source of revelation?"
For example, you could start with the observation that the canon of scripture was not settled until 400 A.D. or thereabouts.
(Don't worry, I'm not about start citing the Gospel of Thomas or any of that gnostic rot. Everyone knew that those were spurious, just like they knew that Marcion's chopped-up gospel of Luke wasn't the real deal. But Hebrews and Revelation and Jude were considered dubious by some for a long time, and the Didache and Hermas' The Shepherd and Clement of Rome's Letter to the Corinthians were all so orthodox that the early Christians thought them plausibly "Scripture," and considered them good "devotional reading" even when they didn't consider them Scriptural.)
Anyhow, as I was saying...you could start with the observation that the canon of scripture was not settled until 400 A.D. or thereabouts.
Then you could say, "Any source of revelation which, followed to its logical ends, produces outcomes that clearly contradict what most Christians practiced and held to be true in the earliest years when the words of the apostles still rang in the ears of their hearers and the canon of Scripture wasn't yet settled, is an incorrect source of revelation."
That would allow you, for example, to reject any outcome that rejected Nicean Christology: Not an unimportant detail! Mormonism and Jehovah's Witnesses would be excluded.
So that's one way.
Another would be to ask, "If I adopt this source of revelation, will it allow us to exercise Church Discipline in the fashion clearly envisioned by Christ in Matthew 18?" Whatever your source of revelation, it has to produce an ecclesiology that'll allow Christians to take a dispute "to the Church," and the church to render a decision (presumably with reference to that source of revelation!) which will be binding on the believer.
(This naturally includes doctrinal disputes: If one Christian calls another Christian a heretic, and the second claims the first is falsely accusing him of heresy, and they "take it to the church," the church will obviously need to be able to judge what is heretical in order to judge the case.)
Anyway, those are two possible "tests" which the OUTCOME of a particular source of revelation must pass in order to validate that you have the right source of revelation.