One of the most common caricatures of Protestantism is that sola Scriptura—the doctrine that Scripture is the church’s only infallible rule—was invented during the Protestant Reformation. Certainly, the term sola Scriptura was new, with the exact range of nuances it took on in the context of the battles of the 16th century. But the basic idea that Scripture is unique and unrivalled in its authority over the church—that it stands above the church her the uniquely infallible standard—was an ancient idea, with widespread attestation during the patristic and medieval eras.
In pre-Reformation church, there were multiple views developing about the relation of Scripture, tradition, and the church. The Protestant position was the organic outgrowth and continuation of one view, while the Roman Catholic as determined by the Council of Trent was another (and there were others besides those two). In other places I have discussed Augustine as an example: here I want to discuss medieval precedent for sola Scriptura, particularly the 15th century theologian, Wessell Gansfort. Wessel Gansfort was an important 15th century Dutch theologian (1419 – 1489). In his day, he was a theologian of great distinction, in close contact with highest authorities in the Church, including Pope Sixtus IV, with whom he had communication.
Sometimes Gansfort is called a “proto-Protestant” or a forerunner of the Reformation. The term proto-Protestant is a very general term: it is often used for those like the Hussites or the Waldensians who were formally separate from and persecuted by the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Other times it refers to people like Gansfort who lived and died in full fellowship with the Roman Catholic Church, and whose writings were only officially condemned several decades after he died, once the Reformation had happened and people were responding to it. Gansfort’s work was condemned in 1529, and this condemnation was then reaffirmed at the Council of Trent. (One of the reasons he is not better known is likely that his writings were burned.)
Gansfort anticipated many Protestant concerns: he denied purgatory, transubstantiation, indulgences and role of penance in the church; he affirmed something very close to a Protestant view of justification; and he criticized many aspects of medieval spirituality, such the role of pilgrimages, praying to saints, overemphasis emphasis on virginity, special observances and fasts, and various expressions of legalism. In this article we will focus on one issue: the question of how authority works in the church, particularly with a view to Scripture and tradition and the offices of the church (like the papacy).
Gansfort on Scripture and Church Authority
A good starting point will be Gansfort’s practical argument against the papacy as an essential institution. Practical arguments are often argued in favor of the papacy. People say, in essence, “how can you have unity without a guy on the top?” But this is an appeal that is easier to make in the modern age. Prior to contemporary technology and communication, one might more naturally ask, as Gansfort did: “how could you have one guy on the top?” His appeal is worth quoting at length here:
“The common belief in the absolute rule of the Roman Pontiff is untenable in view of the fact that it is impossible for one man to know the territory of the whole earth, which has never been included in the works of any cosmographer. For how shall he judge those whom he cannot know? For how shall he judge the faith of a man whose language he is not acquainted with? Hence we reach the conclusion that the Holy Spirit has kept for Himself the task of encouraging, quickening, preserving, and increasing the unity of the Church. He has not left it to a Roman pontiff who often pays no attention to it. We ought to acknowledge one Catholic Church, yet to acknowledge its unity as the unity of the faith and of the Head, the unity of the corner-stone, not the unity of its director, Peter, or his successor. For what could Peter in Italy do for those in India endangered by temptation or persecution except pray for them, even though he had greater power than his successors? Or what could be done during the fiercest persecution against the teachers of error in different parts of the world? What decrees of General Councils were able to hold the Church together even in external unity? Hence it is only the internal unity of its one essential Head that is implied in the words of the Apostles’ Creed. For To-day in accordance with the very word of the Lord the testimony of the Gospel has been received even at the ends of the earth, and Christians are actually to be found beyond the Hyperboreans, beyond the Indians and Scythians, beyond the Ethiopians, beyond the Tropic of Capricorn! To these Christians widely separated in land and tongue no decrees of a Roman pontiff or of our General Councils of Constance or Basel can be known by any human means. And, nevertheless, they together with us constitute one Catholic and Apostolic Church in the oneness of faith, piety, and true love, even if they do not know that there is a Rome or a Roman pontiff.”[1]
Gansfort is essentially making a practical argument in this passage: the Pope is not capable of governing a church spread out so widely and represented by so many different languages. Yet what stands out in this appeal is not only his argument against the papacy as the source of ecclesial unity, but his alternative vision of unity grounded in Christ himself. He calls Christ the church’s, “one essential head” and “corner-stone,” drawing from New Testament imagery (I Peter 2:6-9). Also evident is his emphasis on the active role of the Holy Spirit in preserving the unity of the church.
Gansfort’s reference in this passage to the Apostles’ Creed’s affirmation of “one, holy, catholic and apostolic church” can be clarified with reference his understanding of the doctrine of the communion of saints. For Gansfort, true Christian unity is not dependent on institutional organization under church leaders:
“All the saints share in a true and essential unity, even as many as unitedly hold fast to Christ in one faith and hope and love. It matters not under what prelates they may live, or how ambitiously these prelates may dispute or disagree or wander from the truth or even become heretical. It matters not what distances in space or intervals or years may separate them. It is of this fellowship that we say in the Creed: ‘I believe in the communion of the saints.’ Hence all our forefathers have shared in it with us, being baptized with the same baptism, refreshed with the same spiritual food, and revived by the same spiritual rock as ourselves. This unity and fellowship of the saints is in nowise destroyed by differences or advanced by agreements among those who rule them, for neither the impiety or even heresy of their rulers can injure godly men. On the other hand, it is acknowledged that a truly pious Greek at Constantinople, subject to his schismatic patriarch, may possibly believe everything that a Latin at Rome believes. How then does the heretical perversion of his rulers harm him? The unity of the Church under one pope is, therefore, merely accidental. Though it may contribute much to the communion of the saints, it is not essential to it.”[2]
Gansfort’s reference to Christian unity among the “Greeks at Constantinople” (i.e., Eastern Orthodox Christians) anticipates the later Protestant belief that the Eastern Orthodox were genuine Christians, over and against various Roman Catholic claims that only those in submission to the Pope can be saved. As chapter 2 explored, this was the historic view of the Roman Catholic Church, prior to modern changes.
Gansfort’s other noteworthy claim here is that the Pope is merely “accidental” rather than essential for the unity of the church. For Gansfort, the papacy, as with other church offices, was entirely pastoral rather that not judicial. They serve an important role, but need and should not be obeyed when they stray from the truth and from godliness. As he puts it elsewhere: “the canons and statutes of prelates have no more authority than they contain wisdom.”[3] Here is how one study of Wessel’s thought on church authority puts it:
The unity of the church under the Pope is accidental and by no means necessary. The church spread throughout the world into a world-wide unity of faith, piety and love before Rome or the Roman Pontiff was known. With such pre-suppositions, Gansfort reduces the significance of the Pontiffs to little more than practical administrators of the church.[4]
Gansfort often describes the relationship between the hierarchy and the laity of the church in terms of a compact or agreement between a doctor and a patient. Thus, in his treatise Concerning Ecclesiastical Dignity and Power, the first section is entitled, “that the subjects of the Pope are not bound to believe him unless he is Right in his Belief.” Here he emphasizes the danger of placing one’s ultimate trust in the hierarchy of the church. Gansfort quotes Galatians 2, where Paul had to resist Peter in order to be faithful to the gospel, and identifies this passages as a paradigm for the rest of the church to be mindful of: “it was done not merely on Peter’s account, but by the grace of God plenarily for the comfort of the entire Church in every age…. From Peter the wise all learned what should be done with the salt of the earth, if it should happen to lose its savor.”[5]
On this exegetical basis Gansfort articulates his theory of church hierarchy: “all ecclesiastical authority is as a compact between the physician and patient, i.e. it depends upon an agreement between both.”[6] The point made over and over is that if the doctor is not healing the patient, but only making him more sick, the patient need not keep treating him as a doctor. In Gansfort’s context in the 15th century, this kind of pastoral abuse was sadly common. This is why Gansfort so frequently compared the 15th century prelates to the Pharisees, whose authority he also made conditional on faithfulness: “those who sit in Moses’ seat are to be honored and obeyed only so far as their teachings accord with those of Moses.”[7]
But this raises a concern: but what about the keys that were entrusted to the church? Didn’t Christ promise to guide the church hierarchy by the Holy Spirit? Gansfort anticipates this objection but counters that the church’s guidance by the Holy Spirit is conditional on her faithfulness and her piety. Furthermore, the exercise of spiritual authority, reflected in the imagery of keys, is conditional on piety, which he regards as the “greater and truer key:”
“The Lord Jesus delivered the keys of the kingdom of heaven to Peter and the apostles; but there is a wide difference between them and our prelates…. However much they may strive for the key of authority—and for this they rightly strive since indeed it is a key,—there is the greater and truer key of piety, without which the key of authority is of no avail. And wherever it is, it always finds the key of authority joined with it.”[8]
Implicit in this vision of spiritual authority is the idea that piety is its own kind of authority (hence the claim that piety always finds the key of authority joined with it). If you have piety, you have spiritual authority; if you lack piety, spiritual authority is impossible. At its heart, this conception of church leadership is a protest against the abuse and maltreatment of the laity, tragically common in Gansfort’s day. Just as the wife who has been cheated on and abused need not remain married, so the sheep of Christ need not submit to shepherds that are ravaging them.
Also reflected in Gansfort’s vision is a pastoral concern against cruel and arbitrary exclusion of the laity from the church. For Gansfort, excommunication from the Pope does not and cannot override the spiritual reality of membership in the body of Christ based on personal calling.
Thus, where Christ has welcomed you, no pope can exclude you:
“The communion of saints is an article of faith, from which the pope can exclude no one against his will; nor should he do so…. Each man in the degree of his own love and calling in God and the Lord Jesus has his measure of communion or exclusion, and it is through no decision or decree of the pope that he has more or less communion with the saints or excluded from it.”[9]
Gansfort’s View in Historical Context
Some of the similarities between Gansfort’s convictions and later Protestant views are already evident. These similarities are all the more remarkable in light of the fact that Luther did not know about Gansfort until around 1520, well after his reform initiatives were underway. Yet so great was the harmony between Gansfort and later Protestant theology that Luther could write, upon finding his writings, “if I had read his works earlier, my enemies might think that Luther had absorbed everything from Wesel, his spirit is so in accord with mine.”[10] Luther took comfort in the fact that despite living in a completely different context, they had nearly the same theology, even down to the very wording at points: “he, living at so different a time, under another sky, in another land, and under such diverse circumstances, is so consistently in accord with me in all things, not only as to substance, but in the use of almost the same words.”[11]
The Reformed theologian Martin Bucer, another early Reformed, actually preferred Gansfort to Luther. He followed Gansfort closely in his views on church authority, often repeating virtually the same arguments. He gave the same prudential argument for the decentralization of pastoral care. Bucer also upheld Gansfort’s conviction that if the shepherd stops feeding the sheep, he forfeits his rights to function as a shepherd: “If the bishops of Rome want to be seen as the successors to the apostle Peter], they must demonstrate and prove this by grazing Christ’s sheep.”[12] In his study on Gansfort’s influence on Bucer, Marin Dr Kroon, a Dutch scholar, notes that Bucer doesn’t even go as far as Gansfort in this conviction: “Wessel is even more radical than Bucer in the demands he makes on the functioning of ecclesiastical office, as he views all power in the church in terms of reciprocal relationship. ‘Power in the church is like an agreement between a physician and his patient, i.e., it consists of a contract between two parties.’ This idea is absent in Bucer’s thinking.”[13]
As much as later Protestants would draw upon Gansfort’s relativization of church offices, Gansfort was himself drawing upon and developing earlier medieval views. While Gansfort went further than many others, his essential conviction that church authorities need not be obey when they departed from Scripture was not novel. Most immediately, this prioritization of Scripture over the church represented one side in a medieval era about how to interpret Augustine’s views on church authority. Gansfort was not alone in interpreting the Augustinian position as that the church is a necessary witness unto the Word of God while nonetheless subordinate under it. Marin De Kroon offers six examples of this medieval position: William of Occam, Hermann von Schildesche, Gregory of Rimini, Pierre d’Ailly, Thomas Netter Waldensis, and Gabriel Biel.[14] Margaret Ovligie summarizes: “Gansfort, for the most part, expresses views which circulated in reform-minded circles in the fifteenth century and as such are hardly new…. Although he was unoriginal and as far as we know unread by the early reformers until after 1522, Gansfort provides yet more insight into the intellectual environment from which the Reformation arose.”[15]
What emerges from this historical backdrop is that sola Scriptura should not be seen as a 16th century innovation. On the contrary, its articulation in the context of the Protestant Reformation had an organic relationship from earlier medieval views, and the essential conviction that Scripture was uniquely authoritative had precedent all the way up to the dawn of the Reformation. Whether sola Scriptura is correct or not, it was not a novelty.
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[1] Wessel Gansfort: Life and Writings, ed. Edward Miller, trans. Jared Scudder, vol. 1 (New York: G.P. Putman’s Sons, 1917), 138-39. In Greek mythology, the Hyperboreans were a mythical people who lived in the far northern parts of the known world. The Tropic of Capricorn is the circle of latitude that goes through the southern part of Africa. The Ethiopians and Indians and Scythians were in the East in Africa and Asia.
[2] Wessel Gansfort, vol. 1, 139-40.
[3] Wessel Gansfort, vol. 1, 144.
[4] Margaret H. Oglivie, “Wessel Gansfort’s Theology of Church Government,” Dutch Review of Church History 55.2 (1975), 136.
[5] Wessel Gansfort, vol. 2, 153.
[6] Wessel Gansfort, vol. 2, 157.
[7] Wessel Gansfort, vol. 1, 136.
[8] Wessel Gansfort, vol. 2, 179.
[9] Wessel Gansfort, vol. 2, 251.
[10] Wessel Gansfort, vol. 1, 232.
[11] Wessel Gansfort, vol. 1, 232.
[12] As cited in Marin Dr Kroon, We Believe in God and in Christ. Not in the Church: The Influence of Wessel Gansfort on Martin Bucer, trans. Maria Sherwood Smith (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009), 78.
[13] Marin Dr Kroon, We Believe in God and in Christ. Not in the Church, 78.
[14] Marin Dr Kroon, We Believe in God and in Christ. Not in the Church, 1-26.
[15] Oglivie, “Wessel Gansfort’s Theology of Church Government,” 149-50.
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