Scope:
During the 14th and 15th centuries, Aquinas's theological vision was challenged, and the hold of Catholicism on European society was loosened. The factors responsible for these shifts included the philosophical conflict between nominalist and realist conceptions of reality, struggles between bishops and popes over ecclesiastical authority, calls for reform from inside and outside the Catholic Church, and major changes in European society and culture, such as increased urbanization, an emerging middle class, and the cultural flowering of the Renaissance. These changes helped make possible the Protestant Reformation, at the center of which is Martin Luther's challenge to the Catholic system of penance and salvation. Emphasizing faith over works, the Bible over tradition, and the individual's relation to God over the mediation of church and priest, Luther offered a radically new Christian vision.
Outline
I. During the late medieval period, Catholic thinkers and church officials debated a number of issues that exposed fault lines in the Catholic view of humanity, the church, and the world. Understanding these is crucial for understanding the religious and cultural revolution of the Protestant Reformation.
A. The philosophical and theological debate between realists and nominalists exposed significant differences regarding the ultimate nature of reality and God's power.
1. Realists, including Aquinas, understand ultimate reality to lie in universal ideas, such as "human being" or "horse."
2. For them, we participate, through our knowledge of universals, in the mind of God and, thus, have some real knowledge of God's workings in the world.
3. Nominalists view universal ideas as just names, ideas in the human mind but not reflective of ultimate reality, which exists in concrete things, such as particular human beings or horses.
4. Thus, nominalists see more of a gap between our knowledge of reality and God's will. In their view, God's power is unrestricted, not limited by the laws of nature or our power to understand ourselves and the world.
5. For nominalists, then, God's will is inscrutable.
B. The High Middle Ages was a period in which the popes consolidated power over the church and viewed themselves as the ultimate authority in all matters spiritual and temporal.
C. Much of the power of the church during the medieval period resided in the penitential system of absolution.
1. Penance is one of the major sacraments of the Catholic Church, the means by which God's grace is mediated to people.
2. It is accomplished through confession to a priest, who then imposes works of penance to complete the absolution of sins.
3. Thus, good works are tied to absolution, and the church controls a very important commodity, God's grace.
4. The system of penance was the root of the controversial sale of indulgences, in which one could pay to have sins absolved.
4. The system of penance was the root of the controversial sale of indulgences, in which one could pay to have sins absolved.
II. We also must note some of the wider cultural and social issues that characterized the late medieval period and helped set the stage for the Reformation, including the growing prosperity of European culture and the cultural flowering of the Renaissance.
A. After 1300, we see Western culture emerging from centuries in which European civilization was eclipsed by the Byzantine Empire and Islamic civilization.
1. The political power of princes and nations starts to challenge the power of the church.
2. Growing wealth and urbanization produce a middle class and weaken feudalism.
3. A communications revolution takes place with the invention of the printing press, which allows for more rapid and expanded transmission of ideas.
4. The Renaissance is characterized by an explosion of learning and creativity, in large part associated with a recovery of the Classical learning of antiquity, especially that of the Greeks.
4. The Renaissance is characterized by an explosion of learning and creativity, in large part associated with a recovery of the Classical learning of antiquity, especially that of the Greeks.
III. In 1517, in the midst of the Renaissance, the fuse of the Reformation is lit when Martin Luther (1483-1546) nails to the church door in Wittenberg, a small university town in southern Germany, his 95 Theses, beginning a process that splits European Christianity.
A. Luther's primary target was the penitential system of the Catholic Church.
1. Luther's major theological insight was that human beings were utterly powerless to effect their own salvation, that works of penance accomplished nothing.
2. We do not justify ourselves through works but only through faith in God's free gift of grace.
3. Luther's "justification by faith" does not mean that we effect salvation by having faith, as if the act of belief accomplishes what works cannot, but rather that we must learn to recognize our own powerlessness and to trust in God's power to save us and in God's great mercy.
B. The Reformers were influenced by nominalism.
1. Like the nominalists, they stressed God's power, in particular, God's free gift of grace and salvation, and God's inscrutable will.
2. In contrast to the Renaissance humanists, they stressed the deep corruption of human beings by sin.
3. Luther debated the Christian humanist Erasmus in arguing that sin so corrupted us that we have no free will when it comes to our relationship with God.
C. Luther's view of faith and salvation has important ramifications for his view of the role of the church.
1. The priest, for Luther, does not mediate God's grace; rather, the individual relates directly to God through God's word, that is, through Scripture. The Bible is the sole Christian authority and the route to salvation.
2. Churches are, of course, still important, but as the site of the sermon rather than the site of the sacraments. The sermon is the preaching of God's word and, thus, functions in a way similar to the reading of the Bible.
3. The two mottos of the Reformation, then, are "Sola Scriptura"—Scripture alone—and "the Priesthood of all believers"—each of us encounters God on our own in reading or hearing the word.
Suggested Reading:
Chidester, Christianity.
Luther, Grimm, and Leo, "On the Freedom of a Christian," in
Christian Liberty.
Taylor, Sources of the Self.
Questions to Consider:
How do the nominalists differ from Aquinas and other realists on the issue of nature and grace?
What does Luther mean by "justification by faith"?
Lecture Three—Transcript From Catholicism to Protestantism
In our previous lecture, we explored the theology of Thomas Aquinas as a way of introducing the central Christian concepts of Creation, Sin, and Salvation—and as a way of considering how, for Aquinas, God's grace infused the natural world and made intelligible the relation between creator and creation. In this lecture, I want to talk about a series of changes that took place in Western theology, culture, and society between 1300 and 1600—culminating with the Protestant Reformation. I want to consider how these changes helped undermine Aquinas's view of the relationship between God and his creation—and made possible the emergence of a view of the cosmos based in a sharp distinction between the natural and the supernatural.
There are, however, other reasons that it is important for us to address this period, and especially the Protestant Reformation, in preparation for our examination of religion and modernity. First, because the Catholic Church played such an enormous role in all aspects of medieval European society, politics, and culture, the Reformation was not simply a religious event, but a social and political one as well, and it helped to reshape all aspects of life in Europe after the 16th century. The Reformation is also important to these lectures because, by and large, most of the early modern thinkers who set the agenda for modern thought on religion were either Protestants or came out of a Protestant background.
We will be talking about Jewish and Catholic responses to modernity, but it is hard to overstate the importance of Protestantism, not only for bringing to Western society and culture a new form of Christian life and thought, but, more generally, a new understanding of religion— one that is less traditional, less institutional, and more individualistic.
The lecture will proceed as follows. I'll begin by considering pressures for change and reform within the Catholic Church in the two centuries prior to the Reformation—that is, between 1300 and 1500. There are four issues that are particularly important here. First, and most important for understanding the new view of the cosmos that will emerge in the post-Reformation context, I'll discuss the philosophical distinction between realism and nominalism. Second, I'll talk about how the Catholic popes of the Middle Ages succeeded in gaining more and more authority in the Church—to the point where many thought that the papacy was too powerful, and that more power should be shared with the Councils of Bishops. Third, I want to look at the penitential system through which the Catholic Church absolved sins. This was a system that was much criticized within the Church before the Reformation, and it was one of the main targets of Martin Luther's theological revolution. Finally, I want to talk about some of the wider cultural and social issues that characterized the late medieval period and helped set the stage for the Reformation, and this includes the cultural flowering of the Renaissance and the growing prosperity of European culture. This is a lot that we need to cover in mis lecture, and we'll do something similar in the following lecture, as I'm trying to lay the groundwork for modernity. At that point, once we get through the next two lectures, we will slow down and focus a little more, but we need to get this background.
In this lecture, after the discussion of late medieval Catholicism, I'll turn to the Protestant Reformation to consider some of the central theological and ecclesiastical innovations at the heart of this new form of Christianity. So, let me begin with the philosophical discussions about realism and non-realism. As we've seen, the dominant Catholic view of the medieval period has, at its center, a God whose power is visible in the laws of nature and in the acts of human beings. This is Aquinas's world-view. This meant for Aquinas mat nature ultimately could not be understood apart from grace.
It was recognized by most thinkers, including Aquinas, that we cannot save ourselves from sin—mat we are only saved by the power of God's grace. On the other hand, though, there was a sense that human beings could cooperate with God's grace—that although our good works reflected God's grace working in us, our efforts to do good works were important. As we'll see, this question of grace and works will be at the center of Luther's attack on the Catholic Church.
Behind this view of God's power, as manifested in nature and in human nature, was an ancient philosophical conception of reality and of our knowledge of it called "realism." Realism goes back to the Greek philosophy of Plato, and the basic point is this: The representations of the world that we have in our minds, our concepts, are in some sense actually united with—or participating in—the objects in the world mat they represent There is, then, a direct link between our ideas and the world, and we can say mat our representations, our ideas, are not just mental constructs, but are, in fact, real in that they exist independently of us—and hence the term "realism."
Let's make this more concrete by thinking about a particular concept—let's say the concept of "horse." One way of thinking about this concept, and one that makes sense to a lot of us today, is that it is an abstraction or a generalization from the reality of particular horses. Human beings—in observing lots of tall, fast, four-legged creatures with manes and long heads—have classed these creatures together under the concept "horse." Hie concept does not refer to any particular horse or to anything that exists outside of our minds, but to the idea of "horseness." Concrete, actually existing horses have a reality independent of our concept of horse, and the concept only has reality as an idea in our heads.
For philosophers such as Plato and theologians such as Aquinas, however, this "idea" of horse does have reality independent from us and is, in fact, ultimately more real than any particular horse. Plato argued that ultimate reality consisted of what he called the "forms," or the ideas, and that all concrete things in the world existed only by participating in these forms. In other words, each particular horse gets its reality by participating—though never fully, never perfectly—in the idea of horseness. Each horse, then, is only a derivative—or a kind of copy—of the form of horseness, and as a derivative, it has less reality than the form or the idea.
In the long process by which Christian thinkers integrated this Platonic scheme into Christian theology, they came to view the Platonic forms as the ideas of God that were realized in God's creation of all that is. So, the basic point of realism is mat our concepts, particularly our universal concepts, reflect the ultimate nature of things—and so, we can say that our intellectual capacities, through which we articulate these concepts, are themselves participating in the ultimate structure of reality and of God.
During the medieval period, after Aquinas, an alternative way of thinking about reality and our knowledge of it emerged called "nominalism." Nominalists began questioning the link between our mental representations and the world and came up with a different way of thinking about our concepts. Where for the realists, concepts such as horse are real, for the nominalists, they are just names—and hence the term "nominalism"—just words that we use to gather together like things under one idea. The idea of horse is not real in
itself—there is no form or idea of horse existing independently of our minds—there's only a word, a name, we use in order to point to me commonality we perceive between different concrete horses.
Ultimate reality for the nominalist lies in the concrete, not in the universal. Where for the realists our knowledge of the world and the way we categorize and conceptualize reflect the ultimate nature of things and so is a kind of mirror of the mind of God, but for nominalists our intellectual categories do not necessarily reflect the shape or nature of ultimate reality. Rather, they reflect the way that we organize the world, with our ideas and our categories.
There were many factors involved in the emergence of nominalism in the Late Middle Ages, but one of the most important for the Christian theologians that defended it was that it helped them make sense of the idea of God's omnipotence, God's absolute power. In the realist scheme, as I've said, God's power is understood to work, in large part, through the workings of the world and human beings. A realist, for example, would believe that the regularities of nature reflect God's mind—and, therefore, that God would not contravene these regularities; or the realist would believe that human actions that we call good are intrinsically good—that is, good in the mind of God.
Those who defended nominalism, however, thought that these ways of looking at things limited or restricted in some sense God's power. Doesn't God's omnipotence mean that, should God want to, God could interrupt the regular workings of nature, or even change the laws of nature? Doesn't it mean that God could decide whether a person will be saved or damned, regardless of how that person behaved in his or her life? If so, then we cannot take for granted that we could read God's will from nature or from our thoughts and feelings about what is good. In other words, the more the nominalists emphasized God's power, the more they made God's will inscrutable to human beings.
So, the workings of God's grace became for many theologians influenced by the nominalists much more mysterious than it had been for thinkers such as Aquinas—even to the point where some claimed that God saved people, regardless of whether—in human terms, that is, in terms of visible behavior—they deserved it or not A second consequence is that God and nature become separated to the point that nature was more and more viewed as a self-sufficient reality—something that could be understood without reference to God. I'll return to this issue when we discuss the Reformation, and we see some of the implications of nominalism being worked out with reference to notions of justification and salvation in a thinker like Martin Luther. At this point, though, it is important to note that nominalism had not replaced realism as the dominant Christian view of God and reality. But the door was opening to a very different way of understanding God's redemptive grace.
I will now turn to a different issue as we continue to explore Catholicism in the centuries leading up to the Reformation: the authority of the Catholic Church. From the end of the 6th century until the Reformation in the 16th—1,000 years—the Catholic Church was the most powerful social, political, and cultural force in Europe. This power reaches its height from about 1000 to 1300, a period called the High Middle Ages.
Starting with Augustine already in the 5th century and in the centuries leading up to the High Middle Ages, the Church had developed an ideology that allowed them to justify this increasing power. Augustine had argued that the Catholic Church should be the absolute authority in both spiritual and secular affairs, and that it was the duty of the Church to transform, absorb, and perfect all human bonds, and to regularize every aspect of human life. But as the Church got wealthier and more powerful, this power was more and more centralized in the person of the pope. In the early centuries of the Church, the bishops had played a very powerful role in the Church—especially when they gathered in councils. Many of the central creeds of the Church, for example, were decided on and articulated in gatherings, such as the Councils of Nicea and the Council of Chalcedon.
But by the High Middle Ages, the popes had succeeded in wresting power from the bishops—making the Church essentially a state with the pope as king. With Gregory VII, who became pope in 1073, popes start to make the claim of papal infallibility—mat is, the idea that Christ is the only authority over the pope. We'll come back to this later because it doesn't become an official doctrine with Gregory, but only until much later, but popes start asserting that they are infallible at this early point. In 1296, Pope Boniface VIII commented on the proper way to understand the relation between
what he called "earthly power," the power of kings and governments, and spiritual power, the power of the Church. He writes:
If the earthly power deviate from the right path, it is judged by the spiritual power, but if a minor spiritual power deviate from the right path, the lower in rank is judged by its superior; but if the supreme power [the papacy] deviate, it can be judged not by man but by God alone. And so the Apostle testifies, "But this authority, although it be given to a man, and though it be exercised by a man, is not human but a divine power given by divine word of mouth to Peter and confirmed to Peter and his successors by Christ himself whom Peter confessed. Whoever therefore resists this power so ordained by God resists the ordinance of God.., Furthermore, that every human creature is subject to the Roman pontiff, we declare, say, define, and pronounce to be altogether necessary to salvation.
In the late medieval period, however, more and more Catholics became critical of this kind of perspective, critical of the power of the pope, and started to push for reforms—such as giving more power to the bishops and their councils. The third area that I want to talk about here, the third aspect of medieval Catholicism that became a concern for many thinkers and many people in the Church, was the system of penance—a system that was the source of a great deal of the Church's power and authority during the medieval period. Penance is one of the Catholic Church's seven sacraments. A sacrament most simply is a sign of a sacred thing—for example, wine is the sign of Christ's blood. But when we talk about the Church's seven sacraments, we are talking about ritual acts that represent God's grace—in fact that are the means by which God's grace, God's salvific power, is communicated. In addition to penance, the Church's sacraments are baptism, confirmation, Eucharist, matrimony, the ordaining of clergy, and extreme unction (or last rites).
In the medieval period, penance was particularly important. On the Catholic view, sins are absolved only through the mediation of the priest in a process that includes the confession of one's sins to the priest, and then the priest's absolution of the sins on the condition that one performs acts of penance—that is, good works dictated by the priest. In other words, there is a sense in which we can earn God's forgiveness by doing certain works of satisfaction, such as saying prayers or performing acts of charity.
I want to note three things about this system of penance. First, although from the theological point of view, the idea is that the ritual act itself is effective in conveying God's grace, we might also think about how such a process, such a ritual, is a discipline in which one undertakes self-examination, reconciles with others, and learns from that experience and has a real impact on one's life and one's propensity to do certain sins. The second point, though, is that penance involves the idea that good works performed by human beings—these acts of penance—do play some real role in a person's salvation. Third, this is a radical form of submission to the Church and to the Church's control of a valuable commodity: the sacraments, and here particularly penance, are people's only access to grace and salvation.
So, I use this economic metaphor, this idea of commodity, intentionally—for it was only a small step from the idea of good works to the idea that one could absolve one's sins in advance by contributing money to the Church. These were called "indulgences" and were a major source of Church income—and for many a source of the corruption of the Church and, therefore, another target for reformers.
Let me just talk briefly here about some of the more genuine historical factors that help us understand the centuries leading up to the Protestant Reformation—centuries in which, as I've just suggested, many Catholics saw the need for broad reforms in the Church. But the pressure for change also came from beyond the Church—from some of the broad transformations occurring in European society and culture of the time. Let me consider some of these transformations.
As I indicated in the previous lecture, in the High Middle Ages Europe really started to emerge as a powerful cultural, political, and economic unit. Although the Church exerted a great deal of power in this Europe, it also during this time faced increasing challenges to this power from secular leaders and institutions. We see in this period the beginnings of an economic revolution as the medieval feudalistic economy weakens and new pre-capitalist forms of economy start to emerge.
One consequence of this is that more wealth is concentrated in cities, and urbanization starts to accelerate. A middle class starts to emerge that demands more social, political, and intellectual freedom. There is a communications revolution taking place in the Late Middle Ages, primarily through the invention of the printing press. This allows for more rapid and expanded transmission of ideas, and this helps spark an intellectual and cultural revolution that we call the "Renaissance." The Renaissance is characterized by an explosion of learning and creativity, and it's in large part associated with a recovery of-—and new methods for—translating and interpreting the classical learning of antiquity, especially of the Greeks.
I've already mentioned the importance of the recovery of Aristotle for Aquinas, but beyond Aristotle the Renaissance rediscovered the Greek world-view that tended to be much more positive about human capacities and creativity than medieval Christianity had been. Accordingly, we find a new appreciation for the ability of the human subject to understand the world—to shape and to have some control over life, to imagine new possibilities. This confidence marks what has come to be called "Renaissance humanism."
Unlike much modern humanism, however, this is a religious, Christian humanism. It sees God's grace at work in human knowledge and creativity. So, inspired by the Greeks and by the growing wealth and vitality of European society, figures such as Chaucer, Dante, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Erasmus, and Montaigne produce some of the greatest thought, literature, and art of Western culture during this period.
In one way or another, all of the changes we have been discussing so far in this lecture—the philosophy of nominalism, the desire on the part of many Catholics to reform the institutions and practices of the Church, the social and cultural revolutions of the Late Middle Ages, and the Renaissance—all contributed to the upheavals of the 16th century that centered on the Protestant Reformation.
The fuse of the Reformation was lit in 1517, when an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther nailed a document to the Church door in Wittenburg—a small university town in southern Germany where Luther was a professor. The document was entitled "Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences." This began a process that splits Western Christianity into Catholicism and Protestantism—and helps to reshape the political, social, and cultural landscape of Europe and give birth to modernity. Luther posted his 95 theses to protest the practice of selling indulgences, but this theological criticism of the Catholic Church had a broader target: the penitential system of which the sale of indulgences was just a part.
As we've seen, this system was based on the idea that individuals needed the mediation of the Church, in the figure of the priest, in order to be saved. This salvation also depended on people doing works of penance. Luther's major theological insight, however, was that God's grace is not earned, but is a free gift Luther thought that human beings were utterly powerless to effect their own salvation— that works of penance accomplished nothing except to lead people deeper into sin by fostering the sense that they had some autonomy vis-a-vis God. In short, Luther thought that human beings cannot justify themselves through good works. We are, as he put it, "justified through faith alone."
It's important, though, to note, what this means—for Luther and for other major reformers, such as John Calvin—is not that we effect salvation by having faith, as if the act of belief accomplishes what works cannot, but rather that we must learn to trust in God's power to save us, and in God's great mercy. This act of trust is the faith. God does not wait for us to do things that will help him decide whether we deserve to be saved, but rather gives us salvation—it is a gift and has nothing to do with desert. What we need to do is trust that God gives us this gift—that is faith.
In crucial ways, reformers like Luther and Calvin were influenced by nominalism. Like the nominalists, they placed a strong emphasis on the absolute power of God, especially with respect to the question of salvation. The idea of justification through faith centers on a God who has all the power to grant justification, and a humanity that can only receive the gift but cannot act so as to deserve it or have any impact on God's will. Justification is thus imputed by God to human beings, not won or earned by them.
Even though some aspects of Luther's thought suggest that he did see God as working, through grace, to sanctify the sinner—that is, to effect a real change on the sinner—all the real work of salvation and sanctification is done by God, Because our actions cannot justify us, it becomes unclear why God would save some and not others. As with the nominalists, then, not only is God all-powerful, but God's will—for the Reformers—is inscrutable. We see in Reformation
thought, then, as in nominalism, a kind of what I'll call "theological dualism," a sharp separation between God and nature, God and human—where an emphasis is placed on God's radical transcendence of everything natural, and mat God's power and grace is only ever visible as an interruption of the natural order of things. We are again taking a step closer to the modem cosmos.
Another point to make about Reformation thought is that in many respects it is a radically pessimistic view of human beings—of a humanity utterly corrupted by sin. Even those who have faith, Luther thought, are never free of this corruption. As he put it, the faithful are always simultaneously sinners and saved. One place we can see this is in Luther's debates with perhaps the foremost Catholic humanist thinker of his time, Erasmus. Erasmus was dismayed and disgusted by the corruption of the Church and was a proponent of real reform, but he also had a lot of confidence in the power of human beings and believed that human beings had some freedom to effect their salvation. Luther, though, as I've suggested, saw the corruption of the Church not just as an incidental effect of too much power, but a manifestation of the human condition and of the human propensity to hide the corruption of sin behind wealth and power. He thought that we certainly do have the freedom to behave in certain ways or not, but when it comes to our relationship with God and our corrupt sinfulness, we are—according to Luther—-utterly powerless.
So, Luther, as he tended to do with all his opponents, viciously attacked Erasmus and his ideas about freedom—at one point characterizing Erasmus's book, Discourse on Free Choice, as
so cheap and paltry that I felt profoundly sorry for you, defiling as you were your very elegant and ingenious style with such trash, and quite disgusted at the utterly unworthy matter that was being conveyed in such rich ornament of eloquence, like refuse or dung being carried in gold and silver vases.
For Luther, this vivid image of dung in gold vases applied not just to Erasmus's book, but to those views of the human being that stressed human freedom and creativity, power and beauty, without acknowledging our deep sinfulness. For him, faith is only possible if we first recognize our unworthiness before God.
One last point to make about the Reformation is that Luther's rejection of the theology of the penitential system had important consequences for his understanding of the role of the Church as an institution and community. His is not just a theological intervention, but an ecclesiastical one as well—for not only does he reject the idea that works of penance are necessary for salvation, but in doing so he also rejects central aspects of the sacramental system of which penance is one part.
For Catholicism, the sacraments—administered by the priests—are the means by which God's grace is communicated to Christians. Priests, and thus the Church, mediate God's grace. Luther, however, offered a Bible-centered, rather than a Church-centered, view of Christian life in which human beings can encounter God's grace directly through the scripture, which is the Word of God. Catholicism had deemphasized the importance of individuals reading scripture—indeed, rejected the idea of translating the Bible from Latin into vernacular languages that people could actually read.
But in the period leading up to the Reformation, the Bible had been translated into a number of languages, and Luther himself had translated it into German. For him, the Bible is the sole authority and the sole route to salvation, not the human institution of the Church. The individual believer encounters God in God's word, standing alone before God. Luther thus takes from the Church its role as mediator of grace—though this certainly is not to say that for Luther the Church does not continue to play an important role as a community of believers and as the site of the proclamation of the Word of God in the sermon.
Let me just summarize this lecture, and I'll emphasize two broad themes. The first is the move away from Aquinas's view of the relation between nature and grace toward the view—found to varying degrees in both the nominalists and the Protestant Reformers—of a radically transcendent God isolated from nature and inscrutable in his absolute power. This dualism of nature and grace makes it virtually impossible for theologians to claim that God's will and God's power are visible in the workings of the natural world and in the behavior of human beings. The second theme is that the Reformation offers a radically new vision of Christian life and Christian community. We can summarize this view by noting three slogans articulated by Luther to express his views. The first we discussed as justification by faith, the idea that salvation comes not through works, but only through God's free gift of grace—a gift apprehended, though not caused, by faith. The second is "the priesthood of all believers," the idea that the individual stands alone before God and does not require the mediation of Church or sacraments in order to receive God's grace. The third is sola scriptura, or "scripture alone"—the idea that the Bible is the primary authority for Christians, sufficient unto itself as a ground of Christian doctrine and something that each individual is capable of interpreting. This means that Protestants do not place nearly as much weight as Catholics on the early Church traditions as an authoritative guide for reading and understanding scripture.
