If the Reformers Believed in Sola Scriptura, Why Quote the Church Fathers?

The title of this article might surprise some. What reason would the Reformers—Martin Luther, John Calvin, and their colleagues—have to use the Church Fathers? Wasn’t their approach what William Chillingworth famously stated in 1637: “The Bible, I say, the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants”?¹ Didn’t they hold to the principle of sola scriptura?

Table of contents

The meaning of sola scriptura
Reformed Catholics
1. An apologetic use of the Fathers
2. A foundational use of the Fathers
3. Patristic scholarship
Summary

The meaning of sola scriptura

Yes and no. While Luther was already using the slogan sola fide (“by faith alone”) in the 1510s, sola scriptura was not used as a slogan by either Luther or Calvin, but originated after their time.

What does that slogan mean? Does it mean that the theologian needs no resource other than the Bible, and that the Bible needs no interpreter? No. Even those making such a claim will usually have books other than the Bible on their shelves. Does it mean that the Bible is the sole authority for Christian belief? Some Reformation confessions of faith state something like this, but those confessions were themselves seen as authoritative, and people were required to assent to them. For the Reformers, the Bible was not the sole authority but the final authority, the one by which all other authorities must be tested.²

For the Reformers, the Bible was not the sole authority but the final authority, the one by which all other authorities must be tested.

At the Reformation, Protestants and Roman Catholics disputed many different points, such as justification, purgatory, and the meaning of the Lord’s Supper, but the most fundamental dispute concerned authority. For neither the Reformers nor the Roman Catholics was tradition the final authority. For Rome, the interpretation of Scripture and the teaching of tradition were alike subject to the final authority of the Church, as represented in the teaching of the popes and general councils. For the Reformers, by contrast, tradition and the teaching of the Church were all subject to the final authority of Scripture.

This is the basic meaning of sola scriptura. The Reformers did not invent the slogan but, thus understood, it accurately summarizes their teaching. It is not to be confused with nuda scriptura, the idea that all we need is the Bible and nothing else.

Reformed Catholics

The Reformers’ complaint was not against the Catholic Church, but against the Roman Catholic Church, the papacy. Their aim was to reform the existing Catholic Church, not to found new churches from scratch. Thus Calvin, for example, never refers negatively to the Catholic Church, but repeatedly affirms the statement in the Apostles’ Creed about “the holy Catholic Church.”³ So all the Reformation churches, whether Lutheran or Reformed, held considerable elements of continuity with the past in their buildings, their liturgy, and their beliefs, even while many things changed in the process of reform.

Others sought more fundamental reform. Radical groups, like Anabaptists, claimed that the church had fallen, whether with the imposition of infant baptism in the fifth century, or the alliance of the church with the Roman Empire in the early fourth century, or even (in its most extreme form) with the deaths of the apostles. The Anabaptists saw themselves as starting the church anew.⁴

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By contrast, the Reformers, as the name implies, saw their role as reforming the Catholic Church, correcting abuses, not as starting a new church. They did hold that at some point in the middle ages, the church had strayed from the truth, but not to the extent that it had ceased to exist or was beyond hope of repair.

The Reformation occurred in the context of the Renaissance, which took place in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Western Europe. This was based on the principle of ad fontes (“to the fountainhead”), which meant going back to the original sources. Initially, in Italy especially, this meant going back to the pagan Greek and Latin classics. For Desiderius Erasmus, the leader of the Renaissance in northern Europe, it meant renewing theology and the Church by going back to the Bible (in the original Hebrew and Greek) and to the teachings of the early Church Fathers, especially those from the first five centuries of Christianity’s history. Almost all of the Reformers (excepting Luther) and most of their Roman Catholic opponents were to greater or lesser extents disciples of Erasmus.

1. An apologetic use of the Fathers

So what use did the Reformers make of the Church Fathers in their theology (as opposed to their exegesis, which is a topic for another occasion)?

The most obvious and visible use was apologetics. They used the Fathers to defend their theology, most notably against their papal opponents. That said, their apologetic use of the Fathers was not confined to polemic against Roman Catholics. The Reformers also disputed with one another, especially on the subject of the presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper, and in doing so appealed to the evidence of the Fathers as well as Scripture.⁵

Defense against the charge of novelty

If Scripture was the final authority, why did the Reformers need to appeal to the authority of the Fathers? From the beginning, they faced the charge of novelty. At the Diet of Worms (1521), the Emperor Charles V stated that “a single friar who goes counter to all Christianity for a thousand years must be wrong.”⁶ Calvin faced charges that his evangelical teaching was “new” and “of recent birth”.⁷ They all faced the question, “Where was your church before Luther?”⁸

It is hard for us today to appreciate the force of this argument. We can look back on five hundred years of Protestant history in which a significant proportion of worldwide Christianity has been and is Protestant, with much to celebrate as well as low points to lament. Additionally, we live in an age which is mostly (but not entirely) looking for what is newest and best. By contrast, the Reformers had no Protestant history to look back on, and they lived in an age where it was almost self-evidently true that “nothing new can be true.” Even the most radical innovators sought to construe their position as a “return” to the truth given in the deep past (especially the Bible), rather than as a claim to brilliant new insights.

Theoretically, the final authority of Scripture would have allowed the Reformers to say that the whole church since the apostles had been mistaken until they arrived. But such a stance was highly implausible, which is why they appealed to the support of the Fathers for their theology. While this was not formally necessary—since the Fathers can all err and Scripture alone is normative—it was practically and apologetically essential because a theology contrary to the unanimous interpretation of the Christian church since apostolic times would seriously lack credibility.

The Reformers believed that they were not founding a new church, but reforming the old church, and that they stood in continuity with the church of the early Fathers and even, to a lesser extent, with the church of the middle ages. This claim needed to be substantiated.

2 examples: John Calvin & John Jewel

All of the Reformers to a greater or lesser extent used the Fathers apologetically. Yet two examples illustrate this well.

The first (1536) edition of Calvin’s Institutes begins with a “Prefatory Address to King Francis.” Against the charge that evangelical teaching is “new,” he responds: “I do not at all doubt that it is new to them, since to them both Christ himself and his gospel are new.” But he goes on to bolster his case by appealing to the Fathers. To summarize, he makes two points:

1. The Fathers do not support the heresies of Rome, which are contrary to the teaching of the early church.
2. The teaching of Calvin and the Reformers is very close to that of the sounder teachers in the early church, especially Augustine.

Of course, he does not claim complete identity with patristic teaching. The Fathers made mistakes, which is only to be expected. Indeed, the Roman Catholic Church of the Reformers’ day is the result of these errors, whereas the Reformers represent (they believe) the right teaching of the Fathers: He accuses them of “gathering dung amid gold.” By contrast, “We do not despise the Fathers; in fact, if it were to our present purpose, I could with no trouble at all prove that the greater part of what we are saying today meets their approval.”⁹

The other example is Bishop John Jewel’s famous “Challenge Sermon,” preached in November 1559, shortly after the re-establishment of the Reformation in England with the accession of Queen Elizabeth I (1558). In this sermon, he lists fourteen Roman Catholic “errors” and offers to convert to Rome if any one of them could be proved from the first six hundred years of the church.¹⁰ There is an element of rhetorical exaggeration in this, but it dramatically illustrates the Reformation’s claim that Rome had departed from the pure teaching of the early church.¹¹

2. A foundational use of the Fathers

The apologetic appeal to the Fathers is the most visible way in which the Reformers used them. But there is also a second, less visible, but more significant function which the Church Fathers played in the Reformation.

Just as the Reformers aimed to reform the Catholic Church, not to found a new church, so also they aimed to follow the theology of the early Church Fathers—reformed and corrected where necessary. The Reformers did not set out to reboot theology from scratch, but to reform the theology of the early church (ending roughly AD 500), to build on it while correcting any errors.

Building on the Fathers

For example, they accepted the teaching of the early ecumenical councils (Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon) on the doctrine of the Trinity and the person of Christ. By contrast, some of the Anabaptists, like Menno Simons, had no time for tradition and ended up reviving the crude second-century heresy that Mary was only the host-mother of Jesus, not his biological mother. The Reformers gladly accepted what was good from the past and saw no need to reinvent the wheel in every generation.¹²

The Reformers gladly accepted what was good from the past and saw no need to reinvent the wheel in every generation.

The Reformers turned especially to Augustine in their appeal to the Fathers. About half of the patristic citations in all of Calvin’s writings are from Augustine.¹³

There are two reasons for this. First, at this time Augustine was a theological trump card. His theological support outweighed that of all other Fathers. This was a good reason for giving him pride of place in apologetic arguments.

Yet this preference was not merely a matter of expediency. The Reformation was in many ways—though not in quite so many as it claimed—a revival of Augustine’s teaching. Though the Reformers had reason to cite the Fathers explicitly when mounting apologetic appeals, their influence operated all the time, in that so much of Reformation theology builds on the achievements of the first few centuries, especially as synthesized by Augustine.

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Correcting the Fathers

Of course, the Reformers did not agree with all of the teachings of the Fathers. There were places where they disagreed with the views of one or another Father, and other places where they disagreed with the teaching of all of the Fathers. The “errors” of Rome that they opposed were sometimes the flowering of seed ideas planted in the early church.

For example, the Reformers opposed contemporary teaching on purgatory and the need to offer satisfaction for sins committed after baptism. According to Roman Catholic teaching, eternal punishment for these (hell) was remitted, but there was a temporal punishment that remained. Tertullian and Cyprian in the third century had already taught the need for satisfaction of post-baptismal sins.

The Reformers were also aware that the Fathers did not support all of their own teaching.¹⁴ This was true in particular of the doctrine of justification by faith. Luther and Philipp Melanchthon were aware that, while Augustine supported their teaching on grace and election, support was less clear on their doctrine of forensic justification. Calvin likewise acknowledged that on this issue Augustine’s teaching (or at least his way of expressing it) was not entirely acceptable (Inst. 3:11:15). This was a euphemistic way of conceding that on this particular question, Augustine was closer to the Council of Trent than to the Reformers.

3. Patristic scholarship

The major Reformers all made extensive use of the Fathers, but their main concern lay elsewhere. Some Reformation leaders, by contrast, devoted themselves to the study of the Fathers and, in particular, to the composition of anthologies with extracts of their teaching on the whole range of theology.¹⁵

Two of these stand out. First, the Lutheran Andreas Musculus produced a whole series of patristic anthologies from 1552, culminating in 1563 with a massive two-volume Loci communes theologici covering fifty-three different topics (loci) answering multiple questions for each topic.

Then in 1565, the Reformed printer Jean Crespin printed a massive three-volume Bibliotheca studii theologici. The first volume contains extracts from Augustine alone, the second from Jerome alone, and the third from a wide range of Fathers.¹⁶

Summary

The aim of the Reformers was to reform the Catholic Church, not to start a new church. They did this by returning to the original sources of the Christian faith—primarily the Bible, but also the teachings of the Fathers of the first few centuries. They cited the Fathers, especially Augustine, in opposition to Roman Catholic teaching, and also as evidence that their own teaching was not some novelty. This teaching was built on the foundation of patristic teaching, though they recognized that the latter was not infallible and sometimes needed correction.

Tony Lane’s recommended resources for further study

• Irena Backus (ed.), The Reception of the Church Fathers in the West, vol. 2, (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 1997), chs. 14–17
• Günter Frank, Thomas Leinkauf, Markus Wriedt (eds), Die Patristik in der frühen Neuzeit: Die Relektüre der Kirchenväter in den Wissenschaften des 15. Bis 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2006)
• Leif Grane, Alfred Schindler, Markus Wriedt (eds), Auctoritas Patrum. Contributions on the Reception of the Church Fathers in the 15th and 16th Century (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1993)
• Leif Grane, Alfred Schindler, Markus Wriedt (eds), Auctoritas Patrum II. New Contributions on the Reception of the Church Fathers in the 15th and 16th Centuries (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1998)
• R. Ward Holder, Calvin and the Christian Tradition: Scripture, Memory, and the Western Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022)
• Anthony N. S. Lane, John Calvin: Student of the Church Fathers (Baker, 1999)
• Anthony N. S. Lane, John Calvin: Student of the Church Fathers, vol. 2, (Brill, forthcoming)
• Arnoud S. Q. Visser, Reading Augustine in the Reformation: The Flexibility of Intellectual Authority in Europe, 1500–1620 (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)

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