"Many problems are now reserved for an ecumenical council. It would be better to defer questions of this sort to the time when no longer in a glass darkly we see God face to face....
Formerly, faith was in life rather than in the profession of creeds. Presently, necessity required that articles be drawn up, but only a few with Apostolic sobriety. Then the depravity of the heretics exacted a more precise scrutiny of the divine books....
When faith came to be in writings rather than in hearts, then there were almost as many faiths as men. Articles increased and sincerity decreased. Contention grew hot and love grew cold. The doctrine of Christ, which at first knew no hairsplitting, came to depend on the aid of philosophy. This was the first stage in the fall of the church....
The injection of the authority of the emperor into this affair did not greatly aid the sincerity of the faith....
When faith is in the mouth rather than in the heart, when the solid knowledge of Sacred Scripture fails us, nevertheless by terrorization we drive men to believe what they do not believe, to love what they do not love, to know what they do not know. That which is forced cannot be sincere, and that which is not voluntary cannot please Christ."
-----Desiderius Erasmus, from his preface to Hilary
2 comments:
You can almost say the opposite today. Faith has become so much a matter of the heart (at the expense of creeds and such) that there are now as many faiths as there are hearts. Truth and feelings have become the same thing, like in Rousseau.
It's all your fault, Desiderius. You fathered the Reformation, the Reformation fathered the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment fathered the modern ideologies and the destruction of Western Civilization.
I was reading this obscure German philosopher last night, man by the name of Johann Georg Hamann. Hamann was a contemporary and classmate of Kant, in fact, they were friends, but Hamann strongly disapproved of Kant's idea of "pure reason". Terribly interesting guy. Probably the father of modern linguistic theory and perhaps even the first post-modernist. He also happened to be a Christian, albeit a strange one.
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