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Friday, July 31, 2026

The Faith, More or Less

Adolf von Harnack was a German Lutheran theological and ecclesiastical historian in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  In the last decades of the nineteenth century he wrote a multi-volume work the English title of which is The History of Dogma.  In this work he maintained, among other things, that the Church had gone wrong from pretty much the first generation, that Jesus had preached a simple Gospel of universal love under the universal Fatherhood of God but His followers had buried this under layers of foreign ideas taken from Greek philosophy and so created dogma – the authoritative teachings of the Church in the ancient Creeds, especially the Nicene – and that these layers needed to be stripped away and the simple Gospel recovered.  Harnack believed that in his liberal revisionism he was merely taking Dr. Luther’s Protestant Reformation principles to their logical conclusion.  Apologists for the Roman Catholic Church jumped to agree with him on this last point.

One of Harnack’s better known students – I would say his best known except that Dietrich Bonhoeffer also studied under him – the Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth later came to disagree with this idea that the Trinity and the other basic tenets – dogmas if you will – of Christian orthodoxy were foreign to the essence of the Christian message and rejecting the liberalism that he had been taught found his way back, for the most part, into Christian orthodoxy. 

In the meantime, orthodox Anglican scholars such as the Venerable A. E. Burn, Dean of Salisbury and the Right Reverend E. C. S. Gibson, Bishop of Gloucester, in their works on the history of the ancient Creeds, tore Harnack’s theory to shreds.  Two centuries earlier another orthodox Anglican scholar, the Right Reverend George Bull, Bishop of St. David’s in his Defensio Fidei Nicaenae (1685) had defended Nicene orthodoxy by showing that the truths affirmed in the Ecumenical Councils were consistent with those taught by the Ante-Nicene Fathers.  A rebuttal of Harnack had to go further than this, however, and Burn and Gibson persuasively demonstrated that what was defined, unfolded, and explained in the ancient Creeds was present in the teachings of the Apostles themselves.  While we in the West are accustomed to thinking of the Apostles’ Creed as the baptismal Creed and the Nicene Creed (the expanded version affirmed at Constantinople) as the Eucharistic Creed, both developed out of Western and Eastern baptismal Creeds.  The fourth section of the second chapter (on the Apostles’ Creed) of Gibson’s The Three Creeds (1908) directly addresses Harnack and shows that the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity is inescapably present in the baptismal formula of Matt. 28:19. (1)

As mentioned earlier, Roman Catholic apologists in the twentieth century regarded the liberal revisionism of Harnack, Freidrich Schleiermacher and Albrecht Ritschl as being the developed form of the doctrines of Dr. Luther and Calvin thus agreeing with Harnack’s own assessment.  See, for example, Joseph Wilhelm’s entry “Protestantism” in volume 12 of the 1911 The Catholic Encyclopedia.  This could be regarded as the reverse side of the coin to the idea articulated by John Henry Newman in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine that the late medieval Roman theology to which the Reformers objected on the grounds that it was not found in the Scriptures (or, the English Reformers at least would add, the writings of the Fathers of the early centuries) was the natural evolution of Scriptural and Patristic teachings.  Newman came to look at it this way just prior to his crossing the Tiber into the Roman Church. 

There is a sense in which Harnack was right in regarding revisionist liberalism as an extension of ideas that played out in the Reformation.  Not the doctrines for which Dr. Luther, Zwingli and Calvin became known, but the Renaissance humanist principles that informed them (as they did others who remained in communion with Rome such as Erasmus and More), in particular the principle of ad fontes, (back to the font or source).  The problem was that Harnack and company wanted to go back to a “source” that existed only in their imagination, a “simple” message that predates that of the ancient Creeds and the Scriptures that back them.

Harnack and the other liberal revisionists, in other words, sought to streamline the Christian faith by removing from it that which belonged to it from the very beginning but which conflicted with nineteenth and twentieth century Modern rationalist thought.  This was not, after all, as Barth (and later and more completely, Methodist theologian Thomas Oden) was to discover, a more thorough application of the Renaissance/Reformation ad fontes principle.  Rather than returning to the source for clarity, it involved recreating from no evidence whatsoever a “source” that matched the liberals’ idea of what a source, a primitive original version of the Christian faith, should look like.  While it is understandable that Roman apologists would try to argue that Dr. Luther and the other Reformers were doing something similar, in reality liberal revisionism was a form of extreme reductionism.  A more legitimate charge against the Reformers – one which could also be levelled against the Roman Church – would be that of doing the opposite of this.

Harnack and company thought that the original faith as delivered to the Apostles by Christ must have been something much simpler than the faith as confessed in the ancient Creeds.  In reality, however, the ancient Creeds are about as simple as the Christian faith can get.  Jesus, at the end of St. Matthew’s Gospel, which according to the consensus of ancient writers was the first Gospel written, instructed His disciples to make other disciples of all the nations by baptizing them.  In doing so, He borrowed a rite that the rabbis of late second Temple Judaism had introduced for Gentile converts and adapted it as the rite of entrance into His Church by instructing that the baptism was to be in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.  This was not just a prescription of the words to be said over the person baptized but the content of the faith into which that person was being baptized.  The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost – the Three Persons manifested in His own baptism – as the content of that faith, are divine Persons. The fact that Christianity is a continuation and fulfilment of the Old Testament faith “Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God is one Lord” along with the fact that Jesus spoke of a singular name of the Three Persons tells us that the Three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, are but One God.  This is the Trinity, God as confessed in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds.  The first part of the Athanasian Symbol unfolds this truth so as to protect it against pretty much any conceivable error, while the second half like the Definition of Chalcedon (2) does the same for doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ that of necessity belongs to the Trinitarian faith, i.e., that the Eternal Son in the Incarnation, without ceasing to be God, took a full and perfect human nature formed from that of His Virgin Mother and united it with His Eternal Person so that from the moment of the Incarnation, He, remaining the same Person in the Trinity that He always had been, had two complete natures, being fully God and fully Man. Apart from these truths the ancient Symbols contain a brief narrative account of Gospel, the historical events of Christ’s earthly life and ministry from His Incarnation to His Ascension, especially His death for us on the cross and Resurrection, and the most basic of the truths auxiliary to those of the Trinity and the Person of Jesus Christ such as the Second Coming, the Church, and the promise of forgiveness of sins and everlasting life.

The history of how these ancient Symbols of the faith came to be in the form in which we have received them is the history of how the basic truths of the faith as entrusted to the Apostles by Christ were defined and unfolded in response to the numerous heresies that arose as Jesus and the Apostles had warned they would.  The process involved the development of precise theological meanings for certain terms.  The Greek words hypostasis and ousia, for example, virtually identical in meaning in the first century had to be differentiated so that hypostasis (person) could indicate what the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are as distinct from each other whereas ousia (essence, substance, being) indicates how they are One.  This enabled the word homoousios (of one being, essence, or substance) which had been used with heretical intent by Paul of Samosata whose teachings blended a Trinitarian heresy similar to that of Sabellianism (modalism) and an Adoptionist heresy regarding the Person of Christ, to become the safeguard of Christ’s true deity against the Arian heresy in the Nicene Creed in the fourth century.  Nothing ended up in these Symbols which did not belong to the “faith once delivered unto the saints” as believed in the Church “everywhere, always, and by all”.

The error of the liberal revisionists was to subtract from the deposit of faith.  In the sixteenth century those on both sides of the Reformation controversy had little interest in subtraction.  The Apostles and Nicene Creeds both consist of the same twelve articles, usually worded more elaborately and precisely in the Nicene version.  The Lutheran Augsburg Confession of 1530 contains twenty-eight articles and the Reformed Belgic Confession of Faith of 1561 contains thirty-seven and it is not a matter of their having both merely added the difference between these numbers to the twelve of the Creeds.  The truths of the Creeds are affirmed but summarized in these Confessions and take up considerably less than twelve of each of their sets of articles.  Our own English Articles of Religion, in their final Elizabethan form of 1571 are thirty-nine in number, down from the Edwardian forty-two. (3) The eighth article affirms the ancient Creeds, many of the truths of which were also restated in the articles preceding, but everything after the eighth pertains to other matters either not covered in the ancient Symbols or merely briefly mentioned. 

Meanwhile on the other side, in 1564 after the Council of Trent (1545-1563) Roman Patriarch Pius IV published a Creed which, while technically consisting of twelve articles like the earlier Creeds, includes the entire Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed as its first article, then goes on to add eleven others which include such fun and exciting things as “that there are truly and properly Seven Sacraments of the New Law, instituted by Jesus Christ our Lord, and necessary for the salvation of mankind, though not all for every one”, “that in the Mass there is offered to God a true, proper, and propitiatory sacrifice for the living and the dead”, “that there is made a conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the Body, and of the whole substance of the wine into the Blood, which conversion the Catholic Church calls Transubstantiation”, “that there is a Purgatory, and that the souls therein detained are helped by the suffrages of the faithful”, “that the saints, reigning together with Christ, are to be honored and invoked, and that they offer prayers to God for us, and that their relics are to be venerated”, “that the images of Christ, of the Mother of God, ever virgin, and also of other Saints, ought to be had and retained, and that due honor and veneration is to be given them”, “that the power of indulgences was left by Christ in the Church, and that the use of them is most wholesome to Christian people” and “the Holy Catholic Apostolic Roman Church as the mother and mistress of all churches”.    

By including these items in a new Creed, the making of which was forbidden by the Council of Ephesus, the third of the general Councils that the same Creed claims to “receive and profess”, Rome declared them to be de fide, that is to say, to be of the essence of the faith and so required to be believed for salvation.   Now, the question of whether any or all of these things are de fide is different to that of whether they are true.   For a doctrine to be de fide it must also true, but a doctrine does not have to be de fide to be true.   To go through each of the additional articles of the Profession of Pius IV and examine them as to their truth value would be a too lengthy diversion here.  One of them is clearly false from a historical point of view – the Church from which all other churches after the persecution following the martyrdom of St. Stephen are descended, was situated in Jerusalem not Rome, so if any Church deserves the honour of being called the Mother of all Churches it is the Church of Jerusalem.  We do not need to show that the others are similarly false to show that none of them are de fide.  At least two of them, Purgatory and Indulgences, fail the Vincentian test of Catholicity (believed “everywhere, always, and by all”) and have never been confessed by any of the other ancient Churches whose communion with Rome was broken prior to the second millennium and while the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist does pass the test of Catholicity, the account of the Real Presence to which the term Transubstantiation refers does not, owing far more to the Medieval rediscovery of Aristotle than to the Scriptures and the Fathers of the first millennium.   At an even more fundamental level, none of these things can be shown to have belonged to the original deposit of the “faith once delivered unto the saints” either explicitly or implicitly in the same way as the Eternal Generation of the Son or the consubstantiality of the Father and the Son.  That Rome was willing to declare these things to be de fide, as in later Councils she would declare such other things as the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary and the infallibility of the Roman Patriarch, lends much weight to the accusation that the authority she claims for herself goes way beyond the Catholic truth that the Church has authority to define the faith by explaining the original deposit in such a way as to protect it against heresy and that she believes she has the power to just add to the deposit of faith by her own fiat.

Neither the Lutherans nor the Reformed officially made such claims for the extra-Creedal doctrines in their Confessions, although sometimes in practice certain of their theologians and preachers have acted like they did.  Calvinist preachers of various denominational stripes have been known to say that the “doctrines of grace”, by which they mean the doctrines of the Synod of Dort (1618-1619) – total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints -, are the Gospel, as if a rigid predestinarianism in which God has arbitrarily picked out a handful of people to receive His mercy and nobody else ever has any real opportunity to escape condemnation could possibly be accurately described as “Good News.”  The Lutheran claim that “justification by faith alone is the article upon which the Church stands or falls”, while more defensible than the Calvinist equation of predestinarianism with the Gospel, (4) makes a doctrine about Christian faith more important that the truths that are the essential content of Christian faith.

Although our English Articles of Religion are, in terms of article count, longer than either the Lutheran Augsburg or Reformed Belgic Confessions, there is no extra-Creedal doctrine that defines Anglicanism the way TULIP defines Dortian Calvinism or Sola Fide defines Lutheranism (not in the sense that it is distinct to Lutheranism – the Reformed and Anglican Churches also affirm it – but it is more associated with Lutheranism, in the theology of which it is more central).  In part this is because the Articles of Religion – in their final, Elizabethan form at least, if the same cannot exactly be said about such predecessors as the Henrician Ten Articles or the Edwardian Forty-Two – were formulated with the end in mind of achieving the peace and unity in the English Church that Queen Elizabeth and Archbishop Parker sought rather than in the polemical spirit that drove the Continental Protestant Confessions (and, for that matter, the Creed of Pius IV and the Council of Trent).  In part it is because the English Reformers, much more so than their Continental counterparts, were determined to preserve the Catholicity of the English Church, to remove only the blatant late Medieval abuses in their reforms, and, while affirming the supremacy of the Scriptures as the Word of God above ecclesiastical authority and tradition like other Protestants, to look to the Fathers of the early centuries and Councils for the orthodox interpretation of the Scriptures.  This is reflected in all the formularies to come out of the English Reformation of which the Articles are but one.  These define the Anglican faith as the Catholic faith of the ancient Creeds. (5)  The (interrogative) Apostles’ Creed is the faith into which one is baptized in the service of the Book of Common Prayer.  The Apostles’ Creed is also the faith confessed in the daily offices of prayer (except on those to which the Athanasian Symbol is assigned), the Nicene Creed is the faith confessed in the service of Holy Communion.  To avoid any confusion on this matter, the Articles are entitled Articles of Religion and not Confession of Faith.

The English Reformers had it right, I believe.  The twelve articles which comprise the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, developed in the same early centuries in the West and East respectively out of the baptismal Creeds of Rome and probably Jerusalem, arguably themselves variants of a proto-Creed perhaps dating back to the Apostles, certainly ultimately derived from the formula with which Jesus Himself commissioned His Church to baptize the nations, are the Christian faith.  The Definition of Chalcedon provided further clarity on the Person and Two Natures of Jesus Christ to guard against latter heresies, the Athanasian Symbol provides the fullest exposition of the Trinity, but everything in the Definition of Chalcedon and the Athanasian Symbol is either explicit or implicit in the Creeds, just as everything in the twelve articles of the Creeds is either explicit or implicit in the original deposit of the “faith once delivered unto the saints” as recorded in the Scriptures.  To subtract from this faith the way liberal revisionists like Harnack did is to create a new religion that is less than Christianity.  To add to it by declaring other things, true or false, that are neither explicit nor implicit in the ancient Creeds to be of the essence of the faith in the way Pius IV and the Council of Trent did is to arrogantly claim authority far in excess of that given to the Church.  Nothing else resembles this error of the papacy so much as the attitude of those who treat the doctrines of the Reformation, or worse of five-point Calvinism, as if they were on par with the truths of the ancient Symbols. 

 (1)   Gibson’s book is part of the Oxford Library of Practical Theology edited by W. C. E. Newbolt and Darwell Stone.  Burn contributed separate volumes on each of the Creeds to the same series.  The material in these naturally overlaps that in his earlier An Introduction to The Creeds and the Te Deum (1899).

(2)   Although the Athanasian Symbol and the Definition of Chalcedon are both sometimes called Creeds, neither begins with “I/We believe” and so these are not Creeds in the proper sense.  Symbol is the Anglicization of the Greek word that was first used for these sort of faith formulations.  The Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds are, like the Athanasian Symbol and Definition of Chalcedon, Symbols, but the Athanasian Symbol and Definition of Chalcedon are not properly Creeds.

(3)   The very Calvinistic Irish Articles of Religion of 1615, drawn up primarily by Archbishop Ussher (at the time Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College, Dublin and not yet a bishop), number 104.  This is the longest in terms of article number of which I am aware. Longest in terms of article number does not translate into longest in in terms of total content.  The Presbyterian Westminster Confession of Faith, which is not organized into articles, is longer. In 1523 Zwingli put out “The Sixty-Seven Articles”.  This however, was not the same sort of thing as either the English or Irish Articles or the Lutheran and Reformed Confessions but a personal statement, drawn up as part of his defence before the Zurich city council after he had been charged with heresy and many of the sixty-seven are short sentences joined together in larger divisions which in other Confessions would constitute a single article.  The last of the sixty-seven is an invitation to ask him questions about various topics.

(4)   The best defence of the statement would be to examine how St. John uses St. Peter’s Confession in his Gospel.  St. Peter’s Confession was that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of the Living God” in His response to which Jesus said “thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” (Matt. 16:16, 18)  That the confession and not St. Peter personally, is this foundation rock, is evident in the Greek of rock which is feminine whereas St. Peter’s name is masculine.  In St. John’s Gospel, this very Confession is identified by the Evangelist as what one must believe to have everlasting life (Jn. 20:31).  Earlier in his narrative, Martha makes the same confession in response to Jesus’ asking her if she believed His statement “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” (Jn. 11:25-26, Martha’s answer in 27).  What Dr. Luther called “justification by faith alone” is the truth explained by St. Paul in the fourth chapter of Romans that being right with God is not something that we earn by works, but is a gift given by grace in Jesus Christ and received by us by faith.  St. Paul did not use the word “alone” in expressing this and many objected to Dr. Luther’s use of it on the grounds that St. James did use it  (Jas. 2:24) and negated it, although these failed to note that in doing so St. James asserted that justification was by precisely the thing St. Paul said it was not by and that the only reasonable way of harmonizing the two is to recognize that St. James was not talking about justification by grace (a word conspicuous by its absence from his second chapter which incorporates all of the other main terms of the fourth chapter of Romans) which is more or less what St. Paul himself said in the second verse of Romans 4 (frequently those who point to James 2:24 in this way claim that it is the only occurrence of “faith alone” in the Scriptures, ignoring or ignorant of Mark 5:36 in which it is stated by Jesus Himself positively in the imperative mood as a command).  All that the doctrine means is that for salvation to be a free gift of grace – which all Churches, even the Roman, acknowledge it to be – then faith must perform its role as the hand which receives that gift with no assistance from works.   The best Roman Patriarch of living memory, Benedict XVI, acknowledged that Dr. Luther was right about this.  At any rate, outside of St. Paul’s epistles, this is most emphasized in the Johannine writings, especially the fourth Gospel in which Jesus Himself and the Evangelist repeatedly promise everlasting life to everyone who believes in Jesus.  The exchange in the eleventh chapter between Martha and Jesus, associates Jesus’ being able to make this promise with His being Whom St. Peter confessed Him to be, which brings us back to that confession being the rock upon which Christ would build His Church and upon which it stands.

(5)   To be fair to the Reformed, one of their Forms of Unity (formularies), their Heidelberg Catechism of 1563, primarily the work of Zacharias Ursinus also clearly identifies the Gospel and the Christian faith with the faith of the Apostles’ Creed in Q and A 22 and 23. — Gerry T. NealM