Rather, this philosopher, if he is a Christian and sees Scripture telling us that infants have faith, does not allow himself to be drawn into the debate of the Scholastics, whether this children’s faith is an act or a potential or an ability, but will think roughly as follows:
Holy God, you have said in your word that you have not manifested the mysteries of faith to the wise of this world, but to the foolish and those who believe that all of wisdom is of no use in understanding even the smallest point of the mysteries of faith; you have through your elected vessel reminded humans that in matters of faith they should not allow themselves to be deceived by philosophy. See, almost the entire world has come to the point that it wants to measure the incomprehensible mysteries of faith with some sort of Scholastic theology, which is nothing other than a chaotic mixture of reason with your revelation. But help me
[print edition page 41]
to prefer the authority of your word to the authority of humans, however great they may be, and if I see in matters pertaining to faith your words before me, which are either wholly clear or can be interpreted by reference to other parallel passages, help me to believe these by simply assenting to them, even though I do not understand how the predicate is connected to the subject, and not to try to express your ineffable mysteries with metaphysical distinctions or other useless subtleties of this kind. Therefore, if your word teaches me that infants, who do not have the use of reason, believe in Christ, I believe this, even though I cannot form a distinct concept of this for myself, because I know that your word does not lie. But I do not know what this “faculty” [habitus] is which the Scholastics, who want to explain Scripture from philosophy, intruded into Scripture, and which they insist is neither a potential nor an act. And so, while they want to be understood clearly, the effect is that they themselves do not understand what they want, and nor do others who hear them… .
§47. In the same chapter 2, §65, I aim to prove that divine positive law must be derived from divine revelation and I refer to the passage by the Apostle, Romans 7:7: “I would not have known that concupiscence is a sin if the law had not told me: thou shalt not desire.” This passage I interpreted to mean that the Apostle here professes that he, if left to the devices of his natural reason, would not know that concupiscence is a sin unless the divine positive law had told him: thou shalt not desire. But later I noticed that not all of the theologians shared that opinion, that this law, “thou shalt not desire,” is positive law, but some considered it to be natural. Based on this opinion one could argue against my doctrine as follows: the law on concupiscence rests on creation itself, and this requires from us that we are as we have been created, and that is without any desire for evil; therefore this precept is such that if God’s justice and truthfulness are to remain intact he cannot do anything other than demand that man is such as he in his holy counsel had destined him and made him to be. For the law on which creation rests is natural, not positive. From what has been said it follows that the difference we looked for between natural and positive law in §64 does not cover the whole question, because the knowledge of natural law must be sought from right reason, positive law, however,
[print edition page 42]
from revelation. This would be valid if our reason itself had not been obscured: while it recognizes and detests the more obvious vices, it does not extend to the deeper and more subtle ones, which it would, however, have recognized equally well in the state of innocence, even though we would have known the positive laws only from revelation. And therefore it is the result of the corruption of nature, which the Apostle himself deplores, that he does not even realize his own illness except from the renewed promulgation of the law, etc. But though I placed this periphrasis of the passage from Paul into my Institutes, I did not do so without consulting our theologians, and above all I looked to the words of the late Scherzer in his Systema theologiae, locus 7, §9, page 154: “Innate concupiscence is prohibited in the Decalogue; therefore it is a sin. In Romans 7:7, concupiscence is discussed, the lawlessness of which cannot be recognized on the basis of the law of nature.”75 And if you compare these words of the blessed Scherzer with my Institutes or my exegesis of this passage, I am certain that I will not have diverged from his meaning in the least way, and that this doctrine is one that will not cause any unrest in the church, even though other theologians favor a contrary opinion. I do not want to argue with them, but it does seem to me that—leaving other things aside—this disagreement can be easily resolved by distinguishing between the law of nature in the primordial state and that in the state after the fall, so that the objection against our opinion is relevant to the former, but we, following the blessed Scherzer, speak of the latter. And I believe that with this distinction the dispute can be resolved better than if you distinguish as follows: it is one thing for something to be prohibited by natural law, another for the prohibition to be recognized by reason alone in its present state. For, first, Scherzer not only says that the sin of concupiscence cannot be recognized by reason, but he says notably that it cannot be known from the law of nature. Second, I suspect that this distinction can be attacked on the basis of the passage from Paul, Romans 2, verses 14 and 15. While this testifies that the laws of nature are inscribed on the hearts of all nations, this passage according to the common interpretation means that the pagans also knew the law of nature after the fall, without the aid
[print edition page 43]
of revelation, and that therefore natural law at this time is nothing other than that which can today be known by humans from the light of reason, be it through certain ideas present from birth or through acquired ideas. Nor will the fact that the law of nature is unchanging and does not admit dispensation remove the distinction between the law of nature of the state of innocence and that after the fall, as long as you make the following distinction: the variation of the law itself, in which there is a proposition representing the intention of the legislator, is one thing, and another is the variation of the degree of knowledge of the same law, inculcating the same proposition in the state of innocence and in the state of corruption.
§48. I think the matter is clear, but to make sure you do not believe that I, who am not a theologian, have improperly tried to judge a dispute among theologians, I cannot but cite Osiander. Though he is a little long-winded, he will not only confirm my argument, but will absolve me from the accusation of introducing theological innovations. This eminent man says in his Typum legis naturae, pages 167ff., §§44 and 45:
The law of nature considered in the state of innocence and that of corruption after original sin are quite different from each other by their nature, condition, and effects… . For the law of nature in the primeval state requires the rectitude of all faculties, which tolerates no crookedness; it looked toward the divine image and was founded on justice, sanctity, and truth. For God created man morally good, not with infantile imperfection, as Josephus claims,76 and not just simple and free from evil, as the Photinians77 believed, but positively morally good in terms of the intellect, the will, and the passions… . See the passage in Deuteronomy 9, verse 5. Thus Augustine in his sermon on the truth of the Apostle, chapters 2 and 14,78 says that man is made just and that nature has been created good by God. But the law of nature in the state of corruption is but a shadow of the primeval rectitude and a vestige of the divine image,
[print edition page 44]
faded letters from a clear type, because it exists with the completely corrupt condition of all faculties, the blindness of the intellect, the perversity of the will, the depravity of the passions, on which see Ephesians 2, verses 1, 2, 3. Second, the primordial law of nature forbade all concupiscence; it showed that all discord between the faculties was bad, and not only obliged a person to an active justice, as Molinaeus79 believes, but even nature itself to intrinsic rectitude, as creation itself teaches us. See the passage in Genesis 1, verse 31, and compare Genesis 2, verse 25, and Genesis 3, verses 6 and 7. Augustine said correctly that the first man was created without guilt or vice in his nature (sermon 11 on the Apostolic Truth, chapter 2).80 The law of nature after the fall, however, does not eradicate concupiscence, nor does it draw attention to this profound evil in the innermost
