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For thirteen hundred years the church had been endeavoring to harmonize on a Bible by permitting the bishops and ecclesiastics to settle the matter generally among themselves, and it had resulted only in violent clashing of opinion. An ominous revolt was breaking out in the North. Luther was pushing the claim of the right of private judgment to its utmost through his "priesthood of the believer" theology. And as the Bible was the key of the situation, the church, which had been growing more and more restrictive and had thus accumulated precedent for its proposed step, took the whole questions of the canon in hand, fixed it once for all, and forbade any individual to have anything further to do with it.
The council of Trent met Dec. 13, 1545, and on Feb. 12, 1546, where the question of the canon was brought forward. Luther had declared that the Bible alone was the source of authority. Luther declared that the universally accepted books of the Old and New Testament, without any of the apocryphal or disputed books, should alone constitute the Bible. The church, in opposition to Luther, wanted the apocrypha admitted. The questions were discussed in the council by about thirty ecclesiastics in four sessions. For the second time in the history of the book came a compromise. Four fractions were contending for the adoption of different views. All were agreed that tradition, hearsay, and rumor was of equal authority with written records.
The grotesque misnomer of calling such men "great," or "scholars," is quite apparent. On the subject concerning which there should have been division, there was unity; and on the one on which there should have been unity; there was division:
As is generally the case in a religious council where "spiritual insight" is permitted to rule, stupidity gained the day. The first and second parties combined about March 8th, but notwithstanding this, on the 15th the third party secured a majority, and the following decree was adopted:
" The holy ecumenical and general council of Trent,...following the examples of the orthodox Fathers, receives and venerates all the books of the Old and New Testaments, ...and also traditions pertaining to faith and conduct,...with an equal feeling of devotion and reverence...The synod though proper, therefore, to annex to this decree a catalogue of the sacred books, lest any doubt might arise concerning those that were approved of. They are the following: [Then are given the names of the books exactly as they stand in the Catholic Bible today, and the decree proceeds.] Now, if any one reading these books in all their parts, as they are usually read in the Latin Vulgate edition, does not hold them for sacred and canonical [observe "canonical," not "inspired"] and, knowing the aforesaid traditions, does industriously condemn them, let him be anathema (cursed by God)" (Westcott, Canon, p. 472; Schaff's Creeds of Christendom, ii. p. 79).
Answer for yourself: Why is this adopted by the council of Trent curse so important?
This is where the doctrine originated that we must believe the New Testament or be damned. More than one thousand five hundred years after Jesus Christ was supposedly crucified, this superstition arose. And the Catholic Church does not yet insist on inspirations, for it hold to the authority of tradition, and gossip and inspiration do not always agree.
Answer for yourself: But who were the men that established this damnation theory of the Bible?
"This fatal decree, in which the council, harassed by the fear of lay critics and 'grammarians,' gave a new aspect to the whole question of the canon, was ratified by 53 prelates, among whom were not ...one scholar distinguished for historical learning, not one who was fitted by special study, for the examination of a subject in which the truth could alone be determined by the voice of antiquity" (Westcott, Canon, p. 474).
That was the character of the men who said that their work was the work of God. For, let us remember, the books in the Catholic Bible are not what God said should be there but what these men said should be. God had nothing to do with it! Furthermore, this was the first time in the history of the church that anything which had been before simply a matter of custom and opinion, was made a belief to be accepted on pain of eternal damnation (Westcott, Canon, p. 474), and it has been the unfortunate parent of a most numerous and hideous progeny. Having once a precedent for declaring endless punishment a penalty for non-belief in dogmas not taught in the Bible, a whole brood of superstitions followed and have been current to this day.
This practically settled the question of the canon in the Catholic Church (Davidson, The Canon of the Bible, p. 237). A few men, later, protested, and endeavored to revise the list (Westcott, Canon, p. 475), but the struggle was useless.
What I find amazing is that the absurdity of the Eastern Church, which had for one thousand three hundred years declared persistently that the book of Revelation was not written by John and was not entitled to a place in the Bible, wheeled squarely about, and in a council held in Jerusalem in 1672 A.D., adopted the decree of Trent (Davidson, The Canon of the Bible, p. 246). Today the Easter Church considers Revelation as much the word of God as any other book (Westcott, Canon, p. 487).
The Protestant Church today is a book-worshipper. It makes a fetich out of a book. The Catholics are not as strong worshippers of the Bible as their Protestant children. The say, "Take away the whole book if you like, and the church will still remain in all its power. The book is the creation of the church, not the church the creation of the book." The Protestants, finding themselves confronted with an infallible church, had to oppose it with an infallible book. And they made a book infallible, which before had not been considered so. And well they might for they were compelled to. It is commonly the case that the overthrow of one superstition is only accomplished by the establishment of another in its place. The Catholics had the prestige of antiquity, and of being considered the only true Church of God, and they threatened with eternal damnation every man who followed Luther. The masses of the people of the North, ignorant and superstitious, were naturally terrified by the awful threat, and the only wonder is that they ever challenged this religious juggernaut. To meet the challenge, Luther, Calvin, and others said that the Bible was "supernaturally inspired." The origin of the books having been forgotten (as most Christians today do not possess such knowledge as well), men, credulous and in trouble, came to think that because the books were written of God they were written by God. The reformers declared that the Bible and not the church (in particular the Catholic Church) was the sole source of authority. This succeeded, and the decrees of the Vatican were answered by such reasoning by the Protestants. The doctrine of the divine and infallible inspiration of the New Testament spread as did the military advances through Europe.
That this is so, and that the idea arose with men who were deluded, is illustrated by the following ridiculous decree, adopted by the Calvinistic council of Switzerland in 1675 A. D.:
"Almighty God not only provided that His word, which is the power of every one who believes, should be committed to writing through Moses, the Prophets, and Apostles, but also has watched over it with a fatherly care up to the present time, and guarded it lest it might be corrupted by the craft of Satan or any fraud of men...The Hebrew volume of the Old Testament, which we have received from tradition of the Jewish church, to which formerly the oracles of God were committed, and retain at the present day, both in its contents and in its vowels, the points themselves, or at least the force of the points, and both in its substance and its words is divinely inspired, so that, together with the volume of the New Testament, is the single and uncorrupted rule of our faith and life, by whose standard, as by a touchstone, all versions which exist, whether Eastern or Western, must be tried, and whenever they vary, be made conformable to it" (Neimeyer, Collection Confessionum, p. 730). Nothing could be further from the truth!
Three things indicate the grim ferocity of this dogma:
The Belgian Confession is just another curious illustration of the highly wrought mental condition of that time. It says: "We embrace the Holy Scripture in those two volumes of the Old and New Testament, which are called the canonical books, about which there is no controversy" (Neimeyer, Collection Confessionum, pp. 361-363, Art. 3-7).
Answer for yourself: What do they mean by saying "about which there is no controversy?"
Then follows a list of the books of the Bible as we receive them now, including also the books which, as you have seen, had been in controversy for 1500 years and were even then. And notwithstanding these facts the italicized words were subsequently changed to read "about which there never was any controversy" (Ibid.). What a lie!
The creed proceeds, "And we believe these things contained in them...because the Holy Spirit witnesses to our consciences that they emanated from God" (Ibid., pp. 361-363). We are told by theologians that we cannot trust our reason, that we must "experience the testimony of the spirit" to believe the doctrines of the church, and that this testimony can be relied upon. Yet here we find a people offering the "testimony of the spirit" to the truth of a thing which we now know to be false!!! The "testimony of the spirit" is a mental delusion. The Christian no doubt thinks he has it. He is honest in it to the best of his ability, but he is mistaken. There is no such thing. His imagination supplies the facts, just as it the case with a man suffering from delirium tremens, who thinks he sees various hideous creatures. Righteous enthusiasm, such as says that "every word in the blessed New Testament was inspired by God", is a mental and moral delirium tremens.
The Protestants, however, through convinced that the Bible was infallibly inspired, had their difficulties in determining what the Bible really was. And the fierceness with which they insisted on their views ended in the suppression of all historical criticism (Westcott, Canon, p. 465). Erasmus (1467-1536 A.D.), a classical scholar, although he remained a Roman Catholic throughout his lifetime, was critical of what he considered the excesses of the Roman Catholic Church. He said that Hebrews was not written by Paul, nor Second John and Third John by the Apostle, but by another John; nor Revelation by John (Westcott, Canon, p. 467). Let us not forget that Erasmus was the literary leader of the Reformation. While he was still a Catholic, an attack was made upon his views by the Sarbonne, the theological faculty of Paris; censure was placed on his doubts, and it was declare that, no matter if the genuineness of certain books had been disputed in ancient times, the fact that the church has since accepted them made it wrong for any Christian to dispute them (Westcott, Canon, p. 470).
Bodenstein, the reformer, and great friend but finally the persecuted enemy of Luther, divided the books of the Bible into three classes. In the first he placed the Four Gospels; in the second of "less authority" he placed the "acknowledged" Epistles of the New Testament (i.e., thirteen of Paul, First Peter, and First John); and in the third class, as of least authority, Hebrews, James, Second Peter, Second John, Third John, Jude, and Revelation. He omitted the book of Acts entirely.
Luther said that Hebrews was written by neither Paul nor an apostle but did not place it on equality with the epistles written by the apostles. He thought it was a compilation for pre-existing records, and while it had much in it that was good, it also had "wood, straw, or hay" in its composition.
The Epistle of James was, he said, an epistle of straw, with no character of the Gospel in it; it was not written by any apostle, and was not a true Bible book (Pref. Epis. Jacobi). The Epistle of Jude was, he declared, a reprint from Second Peter (compare the second chapter of Second Peter and the first part of the third chapter of the Epistle of Jude, and having done so one will see that they closely resemble each other) and therefore it did not, in his opinion, belong among the canonical books (Pred. Epis. Judae). Revelation he considered neither prophetic nor apostolic, and though that it was almost on a level with the fourth book of Esdras, which last he proposed to throw into the river Elbe (Davidson, The Canon of the Bible, p. 216). He modified this view twelve years later so far as to say that it was a dumb prophecy, and that there was no objection to any one believing it to have been written by the Apostle John, who desired to do so (Westcott, Canon, p. 479). As for himself he did not believe it. He placed Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation in an appendix to his New Testament, as of inferior authority (Westcott, Canon, p. 477).
Zwingli declared that he took no account of Revelation, for it was not a book of the Bible (Works, ed. Schuler II, i. 169). Colampadius (1531 A.D.) said that the Protestants of Switzerland did not compare James, Jude, Second Peter, Second John, Third John, and Revelation, with the other books of the Bible (Epis., i. 3, c., ed. 1548). Calvin, on the other hand, said that though Hebrews was not written by Paul, it was through a Satanic device that its authority had been questions (Pref. Heb.), and that Second Peter, though not written by Peter, was written by some disciple at his command (Pref. Epis. as Heb.). He passed over Second John, Third John, and Revelation, without any notice in his commentary.
Luther and his successors, it will be seen, made the same distinction between the New Testament books that had been made between those of the Old Testament, classifying them according to the "generally received" and the "controverted." It was the council of Trent which obliterated the distinction between the books of the Old Testament, and the Calvinists who obliterated it between the books of the New (Davidson, Canon, p. 217). The Lutherans also discarded subsequently Luther's views, and accepted all the books as of equal authority, and thus all over the Protestant world the books of the canon were placed on the same level.
So as you can see there is no unity among the 16th century Church Fathers concerning what is and what is not to be included in the New Testament nor what is Sacred Scriptures. Think with me. It has been one thousand six hundred years and there is no agreement as to what should be in or out of the New Testament; 1,600 years and still division. That should make you wonder just where in the world is the "unity of the Faith" of which we read. We are almost done with these studies so let us continue at we end this study looking at events of the 17th century; only 300 years ago mind you!
