authority, itself its own interpreter, attesting, judging, illuminating all things.”94
This emphasis upon a literal reading of the Scriptures, which had earlier been stressed in Judaism over against a christocentric reading of the Old Testament, did not immediately produce any critical-historical approach to the Bible. Even Luther retained a prophetic-christocentric attitude towards the Old Testament. The idea of the divine inspiration of Scripture or the Bible as the word of God halted the reformers short of any really critical approach, although Luther relegated Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation to an appendix in his New Testament translation primarily because of theological reasons, which he buttressed with an appeal to the dispute over these documents in the early church.95 Matthias Flacius Illyricus’s Claris scripturae sacrae (1567), one of the first handbooks on biblical hermeneutics, is representative of Protestantism’s stress on the importance of the literal or grammatical sense, but warns that there are no contradictions in Scripture and that exegesis must be in agreement with faith.96 This emphasis on the literal reading of the biblical materials was ultimately to make literary-critical analysis not only possible but also necessary.
A second contribution of the reformers was an iconoclastic attitude towards tradition. This phenomenon was widely current in many circles during the times as previous examples have shown. The reformers sought to restore the purity of the church and return to the origins; components and traditions that appeared to have intervened extraneously could be repudiated. Such attitudes, however, fostered a sense of criticism although it was much easier to be critical of post-biblical than biblical traditions. An example of a significant critique of an ancient and venerated tradition is represented by Carolus Sigonius who challenged the traditional Jewish view of the origin of the synagogue. An expert on Greek and Roman institutions, Sigonius, in his De republica Hebraeorum libri VII (1583), argued as follows regarding the antiquity of the synagogue:
The origin of the synagogue is by no means an old one. We find, indeed, no mention of it [in Scripture] either in the history of the Judges or in the history of the Kings. If it is at all admissible to venture a conjecture in this kind of antiquity, I would surmise that synagogues were first erected in the Babylonian exile for the purpose that those who have been deprived of the temple of Jerusalem, where they used to pray and teach, would have a certain place similar to the temple, in which they could assemble and perform the same kind of service.97
Many concepts, positions, and traditions, however, were taken over uncritically by the reformers. Both Luther and Melanchthon accepted the four monarchies approach to world history. The Frenchman Jean Bodin, in his Method for the Easy Understanding of Histories (1566), thus sensed he was breaking new ground when he included an essay on the “refutation of those who postulate four monarchies and the golden age.”
A third contribution of the Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation can be seen in the fact that the history of the church became a dominant issue in the struggles within the church in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Historiography was a major weapon in both arsenals. Protestants argued that the teachings of Jesus and the faith of the primitive church had become distorted by the hierarchy of the church. (They differed among themselves as to the precise date at which the apostasy began.) Catholics sought to prove that the church at the time was the true successor of primitive Christianity and that the church was basically the same as it had always been. Luther and Calvin’s writings reflect the general Protestant view of church history,98 although Luther wrote in the introduction to Robert Barnes’s Vitae Romanorurn pontificum (1535) that it was a wonderful delight and the greatest joy to see that history, as well as Scripture, could be used to attack the papacy. In Eusebian fashion, historians on both sides turned again to the extensive study and employment of documents, to even a greater extent than many humanist historians, who, especially in Italy, were more interested in literary form than documentation, being strongly influenced by the rhetorical tradition.99 The greatest monuments to this historical controversy are the thirteen-volume Historia ecclesiae Christi (1559–74) produced by the Magdeburg Centuriators, under the leadership of Matthias Flacius, and the twelve-volume rejoinder, Annales ecclesiastici, by Caesar Baronius.100 As a result of this use of historiography as a battlefield, ecclesiastical history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries displayed a greater erudition, a more minute analysis of sources, and a more historiographic sophistication than secular history. Unfortunately none of this energy and insight was applied to the study of Israelite and Judean history, although the issue established history as an important element in religious controversy.
The fourth significant development that grew out of the Reformation was religious freedom that allowed for enormous theological diversity. The rejection of authoritarianism in tradition, priesthood, and religious practice permitted an increased appeal to private judgment, often, of course, uncompromisingly certain that it reflected the true biblical and Christian point of view. Thus theological positions were capable of absorbing modernity while claiming to be founded upon true antiquity. This permitted significant shifts on the questions of authority and revelation, which made biblical criticism not only possible but sometimes desirable. “The exercise of private judgment permitted the Protestant not so much to avoid as to conclude compromises: he could come to terms with the new ideas around him.”101 Protestantism thus had a built-in flexibility that made accommodation possible. “It is to Calvin’s great credit that he recognized the discrepancy between the scientific world system of his days and the biblical text, and secondly, that he did not repudiate the results of scientific research on that account.”102
The Italians Lelio (1525–62) and Faustus Socinus (1539–1604), with their moderate unitarian theology and their assumption that the veracity of Scripture should be subjected to rational judgment, were among the first to formulate a view of religion whose modernity even antagonized the reformers.103
Following the Council of Trent (1545–63), which reaffirmed the Vulgate canon and text of the Bible but recommended the latter’s revision, a long debate ensued between Catholics and Protestants and among Protestants themselves over which Old Testament text—Latin, Greek, or Hebrew—was authoritative. Even the inspiration of the Hebrew vowel points became involved.104 The attempts to decide such issues led to heated controversy and, though perhaps not widely recognized, to humans sitting in judgment over the text.
The reformers had argued that a person could interpret the Scriptures aided by divine light or fides divina. Luther, at the Diet of Worms (1521), had spoken of being “convinced by the testimony of the scriptures or by clear reason.”105 Gradually the fides divina had to give more and more to ‘clear reason’ and the divine or inward light tended to become “really the Lumen naturale under a mask.”106 The seventeenth century witnessed the dethronement of the Bible as the authoritative source of knowledge and understanding and saw biblical interpreters and historians utilizing the products of the lumen naturale.107
The heliocentric theory in astronomy, expounded in Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium and opposed by Luther and Melanchthon, was undergirded by Kepler’s mathematical work and Galileo’s theory of dynamics and his invention of the telescope. Kepler suggested that science should be used in understanding the Bible and proposed (in 1606) that the Bethlehem star was due to the unusual conjunction of Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter in the sign of Taurus in 6 BCE. The discovery and exploration of new lands brought to attention the existence of peoples beyond the purview of the biblical texts. Travel accounts reported on the life and customs of distant lands. For the first time—in the writings of figures like Pietro della Valle and Michael Nau—reports on monuments, sites, and life in Palestine became known. The scientific revolution possessed its philosophical counterpart in the thought of Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes. Based on an empirical and critical approach to all knowledge, the new philosophy sought, as Bacon stated, “a total reconstruction of sciences, arts, and all human knowledge, raised upon proper foundations.” The establishment of history as an independent discipline in the major universities necessitated the self-consciousness of the field as a ‘science’: the earliest professors of history were primarily commentators on the writings of ancient historians. The first professor of history at Cambridge University was dismissed in 1627 because
