5. The Reformation and the Council of Trent

Both Martin Luther and John Calvin agreed that there is knowledge of God apart from revelation such as the knowledge drawn from the divine creation. Nevertheless, this kind of knowledge is practically not beneficial to our salvation. What is crucial to our salvation is the revelation from God that can only be known through Jesus Christ. For Luther, the Word of God is Jesus Christ as is indicated in the Fourth Gospel but this Word can never be separated from the Spirit. The Word is the sole content, centre, and unity of scripture but the Spirit is "required for the understanding of scripture, both as a whole and in any part of it." 17 Luther made his interpretation of revelation mainly from the Pauline epistles, particularly from the Letters to the Romans and Galatians. Making use of the Pauline distinction between the "righteousness of faith" and the "righteousness of the law" (Rom 4, Gal 3), he argued that the center of scripture and the true meaning of revelation is the gospel of Jesus Christ, as constituted by the Word and the Spirit, and everything else must be understood in connection with the gospel. For Calvin, scripture is the only means for the attaining proper knowledge of God. The words of scripture remain external to the listeners and will not become revelatory and salvific unless they receive the Spirit's inward testimony that confirms the authority of scripture. From this viewpoint, the Church is not a sound testimony to revelation as it pretends to be.

At the Council of Trent (1542-1563), the Church declared that saving truth and moral discipline "are contained in the written books, and the unwritten traditions which, received by the Apostles from the mouth of Christ himself, or from the Apostles themselves, the Holy Ghost dictating, have come down even unto us, transmitted as it were from hand to hand." 18 Accordingly, the Church has the sole authority to interpret scripture:

“No one, relying on his own skill, shall, -- in matters of faith, and of morals pertaining to the edification of Christian doctrine, -- wresting the sacred Scripture to his own senses, presume to interpret the said sacred Scripture contrary to that sense which holy mother Church, -- whose it is to judge of the true sense and interpretation of the holy Scriptures, -- hath held and doth hold; or even contrary to the unanimous consent of the Fathers; even though such interpretations were never (intended) to be at any time published.”19

The emphasis on tradition and its relation to scripture in the divinely inspired Church is obviously contrary to the protestant viewpoint that God is the author of scripture and that everything necessary for faith and life can be found in scripture or deduced from it. Despite this major difference, both Catholic and protestant models of revelation hold that the content of revelation is truths about God, Who is transcendent and related to the world externally. God is outside the created cosmos, whose order and very existence are contingent upon God. Yet all statements about God have the same cognitive status as human statements about other empirical realities. During the Enlightenment period, the metaphysical view concerning the relation of God to the world and the epistemological view concerning the attributes of God became problematic and received many attacks.