Apologeticae sive Theologiae Fundamentalis, Tomus II (Pars Altera): Demonstratio Catholica

From what has been said it follows that the principle common to all Protestant sects holds that revealed truth is to be learned from sacred Scripture by the private or subjective spirit of individuals, with no authority of the Church intervening. Thus Luther: “It is the office of Christians to judge and decide concerning doctrines ... Let everyone who has the care of his own salvation be certain what he believes and follows, and let him be the freest judge of all who teach him, taught within by God alone ... Therefore it is lawful for us not only to recover that office of judging ..., but unless we recover it, we deny Christ our brother.”¹ With similar utterances all Protestants express the same principle.²

But although all agree in fact, the older Protestants nevertheless define the aforementioned principle in one way, and the more recent ones in another. The former, trusting in pseudomysticism or false supernaturalism, claim a private inspiration by which God directs each individual reader of Scripture; the latter, favoring rationalism, boast of a private inquiry by which individual readers of Scripture direct themselves. Both forms of the Protestant principle must be refuted.

The Reformers, in order to vindicate for individuals the faculty of judging concerning faith, taught that a private inspiration, or subjective illumination, is granted by the Holy Spirit to each one who reads Scripture. For they said that the word of God, objectively inspired, by its inherent power, which is the power of the Holy Spirit, so illuminates each reader subjectively that they necessarily understand the genuine sense.¹

And so individual faithful are constituted judges of all dogmas and of all teachers, since they themselves immediately have God as interpreter and teacher, according to that saying of Luther: "Let everyone be the freest judge of all who teach him, taught within by God alone."²

Nevertheless, this private inspiration is refuted both by Sacred Scripture and by Protestant history.

1. Sacred Scripture. Nothing do the Protestants hold more solemnly than the assertion: that nothing is to be believed unless it is proved from Scripture. And necessarily indeed, since Scripture is for them the unique source of revealed faith, as they commonly affirm, e. g. in the „Formula concordiae" (1577): „We believe that the sacred letters alone are that unique and most certain rule, to which all dogmas must be referred, and according to which judgment must be passed on all doctrines and all teachers."³ But private inspiration cannot be proved valid by any testimony of Scripture, although the Protestants scrape together many texts of the Old and New Testament to support it.⁴

From the Old Testament they adduce the prophecies of Isaiah:⁵ „All your children shall be taught of the Lord"; of Jeremiah:⁶ „And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor ... saying: Know the Lord: for they shall all know me from the least of them unto the greatest, saith the Lord"; of Joel:⁷ „And it shall come to pass after this, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy." But by these prophecies it is only promised that in messianic times men will be given the perfect revelation of God — nay, that by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit even charisms will be conferred. But of private inspiration, insofar as it would explain Scripture to individual faithful to the exclusion of the authority of the Church, no mention is made.

From the New Testament they object the words of Paul: „But the sensual man perceiveth not these things that are of the Spirit of God ... but the spiritual man judgeth all things; and he himself is judged of no man",⁸ and also those of John: „You have the unction from the Holy One, and know all things ... you have no need that any man teach you".⁹ By these and similar words the apostles — without speaking of a subjective inspiration granted to readers of the Scriptures — warn the faithful not to lend their ear to private teachers, but to preserve intact the faith received through the help of the apostolic magisterium. Hence, having rejected the private norm, whether written or oral, they establish as the proximate rule of faith the one magisterium of the Church.

2. Protestant history demonstrates to the eyes that that private inspiration of the Holy Spirit is defended in vain, since Protestantism abounds in dissensions and contradictions. The „inspired" men had scarcely abjured the Catholic Church when they quarreled among themselves and at different times taught different and opposed things about one and the same matter. V. g. Luther was consistent neither with Zwingli, nor with Calvin, nor with himself. In the most serious heads of doctrine a truly Babylonian confusion soon prevailed; e. g. concerning original sin sixteen, concerning justification twenty, concerning the eucharistic words „Hoc est corpus meum" two hundred opinions were put forward. There is no absurdity so impious and so monstrous that it has not been evolved out of Scripture by force of that feigned private inspiration. Scripture left to the arbitrary judgment of individuals is rightly described by the Protestant theologian Samuel Werenfels († 1740) in verses:

„This book it is, in which each one seeks his own dogmas, And likewise each one finds his own dogmas."¹⁰

And thus gradually there arose almost innumerable sects, which, while they continually changed their own doctrines,¹¹ most bitterly attacked the opinions of others, devastating England, Belgium, Germany, and Scotland with fire and sword.

Unless, therefore, you wish to call the Holy Spirit the author of these absurdities, it must be conceded that the Protestants, in explaining the Scriptures, were led not by private inspiration but by private caprice.

In truth, the more recent Protestants, rejecting that pseudo-mystical inspiration, judge that one's own natural endowment fully suffices for the reason of any private individual, by conducting an inquiry into the biblical text, to arrive at the genuine understanding of revelation. In place of private inspiration, therefore, they introduce a merely subjective scientific inquiry. Now if these Protestants affirmed by their principle only that private inquiry, or the scientific study of the Bible, is lawful for all, they would say nothing but the truth. They err, however, insofar as they contend that everything, and only that, is to be believed which each individual draws out of the Bible by private inquiry. Private inquiry, understood in this sense, is refuted both by human reason and by Protestant history.

1. Human reason perceives without difficulty that private inquiry into Scripture is not a rule of faith suited and sufficient for all men. For the Protestants wrongly teach that Scripture explains itself to all, or at least can be explained and understood by all with certainty and ease.¹ In truth, nothing is more difficult to understand than the Bible, if it must be understood by private inquiry alone. The original codices of the Bible have perished; the Hebrew and Greek languages, in which the sacred books were first written, are unknown to most; the ancient and vernacular versions are imperfect; the canon of sacred Scripture is drawn out only by long study; many texts are obscure in themselves:² countless historical, archaeological, and philological questions must be solved if the sacred books are to be understood at all.

Hence the unlearned are unequal to the private inquiry into Scripture. Nor can the knowledge of the learned be commended to them, as the adversaries infer. For uncultivated men cannot grasp the critical-scientific demonstrations of the scholars. Moreover, the learned neither deserve faith nor are able to win it for themselves. For even they are found in that worst condition, that they agree on no truth of Scripture and believe none to be certainly revealed. Hence both unlearned and learned Protestants must recall that word of the Lord: „But if a blind man give guidance to a blind man, both fall into the pit."³ Certainly:

2. Protestant history leads the principle of private inquiry ad absurdum. For it shows that Protestants, swearing by this one principle, are forced either to have recourse again to the authority they spurned or to slide into bare unbelief.

Luther himself, the father of the principle of private inquiry (for we know that his pretended inspiration was nothing but private inquiry), soon attempted to rein in the much-vaunted „freedom of the spirit" by the authority of the ecclesiastical magisterium. Indeed, when the necessity of curbing the rebellious peasants and teachers pressed upon him, he attributed to himself and to his church properly an authentic or divine magisterium.⁴ Nay, while the reformers were still living, Protestants began to compile the „Confessions" (the Augustan, the Belgic,⁵ the Helvetic, the Scottish, etc.) or „symbolic books", which they prescribed to their people as norms of believing and preaching. And even down to our own times the „orthodox" are driven to announce the gospel according to the rule of the symbolic books or of other ecclesiastical „Confessions".⁶ For without the authority of the Church, they confess, the whole faith and the Church itself would necessarily perish.⁷

And indeed those Protestants who have sincerely used the principle of private inquiry have fallen into bare unbelief, that is, into a rationalistic negation of the whole revelation. This needs no proof, since it is known to all that modern Protestantism is almost the same as rationalism. For whoever sets up the subjective inquiry of reason as the norm and judge of revealed truth, by that very fact contends that revelation contains nothing that does not belong to the sphere of pure reason. Behold crass rationalism! And moreover, with tradition and the authority of the Church denied, there perishes also the only source of revelation admitted by the Protestants, namely Scripture inspired by God. For the inspiration of Scripture is not sufficiently established except by Tradition and the authority of the Church, as will be shown.⁸ Hence the Protestant principle of faith leads by logical necessity to the total destruction of the Christian religion.⁹ The Christian religion cannot be preserved, unless the revelation once given by God is always proposed through the magisterium ordained by God.

The truth of the Catholic principle, therefore, is already discerned from the falsity of the Protestant principle, just as, conversely, the falsity of the Protestant principle clearly shines out from those things by which we shall presently prove the truth of the Catholic principle: