(In response to a friend)
The “we” would be Protestants.
Most Protestant confessions look like chick tracts for Augustinianism. So that would be neither of the possible answers provided. Neither one person alone deciding their way nor another tradition or another authority. What we have within the Protestant tradition is highly respected exegetical theologians whose teachings are taken as authoritative, though fallible.
If you get into a fist fight in a Presbyterian church for example, being able to quote Calvin ends most of the discussions. Why? Because he is a plaster saint with little chiffon wings that we relent to in every particular? No, but because he is a father in our theological lineage and we all know that there are some people that if we are wise, we will be very slow to argue with. It is about honor. It is about respect.
We would have seen the same thing in a Lutheran church until recently when Luther was shown the door. They said, “Thank you Doctor Luther for Lutheranism and all the nifty property, but we’re going our own way.” No one has been able to figure out quite what that way is yet but they were last seen headed towards the Tiber.
Calvin and Luther were obviously the two most influential Protestants and should have been. Luther was an Augustinian monk that tried and succeeded in bringing about a strong revival of Augustinianism when the Church had swerved away from its historic roots and doctrinal policies toward the Aristotelian reinterpretations of Thomas Aquinas. Thomism was new, behavioristic, Empiricistic, and sacramentalist. Augustinianism was old, personalistic, idealistic, and signatory. And as we notice from Calvin’s “Institutes of the Christian Religion” there is no one that he quotes more there than Augustine, almost always with approval and affection. The second most quoted source is Aquinas, for the most part negatively. This was a war of theologies and philosophies that the Reformers won handily, but as the roots of it all are now covered with sophistical brush we are defensively fighting our way back to our proper ground, which is scripture alone.
All this to say, if Calvinism and Lutheranism are part of Protestantism and Calvin and Luther are traditional authorities in Protestant faith and practice, then so is Augustine, even though he is rarely named because of the darkness of the days is which we live.
As for someone bringing new information I’d like to deal with the old information first. Everything new is not bad, only almost everything. These days every theologian needs to have some new crackpot idea in order to get their thesis from divinity school published and establish a career as a budding theological genius. The books multiply unending; the genius is sorely lacking. And just about everything being written is old heresies in new packaging. The undying cult of the “new”, but newness is harder to get than people make it out to be.
I would take a dozen C.S. Lewis’ over a million of the theobabblers any day.
As for new clarity, I must be missing it. Sometimes you need to go backward before you can move forward. Most are just moving… no direction in particular. Going home to Rome, slipping toward Unitarianism, stumbling toward Atheism, falling into whateverism.
But really, when you say, can’t we ever agree with one person on everything, we can. But consciously recognizing human fallibility in all these things. I don’t have any theologian that I agree with on everything but if you can find one more power too ya. I find that everybody has their 10% goofball somewhere deep inside so I put great faith in God and little in men. Give a man long enough, he will blow it for you. But God is faithful.
(This is not an opening for you to explain my 10% to me. Some things are better left unsaid.)
When you write about depending upon a consortium of voices, that’s exactly what we do. We have a consortium of voices in Scripture infallibly telling us the truth. Then a fallible consortium of voices telling us things after. We are duty bound to agree with the first, and duty bound to be careful of the second. That is why we have the official creeds and Confessions of the historical Church. Always useful; always fallible.
There is nothing wrong with finding people that agree with you about something. It is always and everywhere wrong to agree with something because other people agree about something. That is not faith, it is ignorance. We read the Bible and then when people argue about what it means we go with the best argument. That’s the way Jesus and Paul handled things, and it’s good enough for me.
Christopher Neiswonger
