i8 7 4] WHAT TO SEEK IN THE BIBLE 209 



standards, the antithesis lies not between Scripture and 

 Tradition, as mere formal authorities, but between 

 Scripture as revealing God s goodwill to us, in Christ 

 Jesus, to be received by faith alone (Art. 5), and human 

 Traditions that lead us away from God and true faith. 

 That it was from this material side that the Swiss, no 

 less than the Saxon, churches first contemplated the 

 antithesis of Scripture and Tradition, we see clearly from 

 the Zurich articles of 1523, where value, independent of 

 the Church, and pre-eminent over all other doctrine, is 

 assigned, not to Scripture, but to the Evangelium, whose 

 sum is &quot; that our Lord Christ Jesus, very Son of God, 

 has revealed to us the will of the Heavenly Father, and 

 with his innocence has redeemed us from death, and 

 reconciled us to God.&quot; l 



You see then that the motive of the Reformers, in all 

 their symbolical utterances as to Scripture, was not the 

 theological motive of a desire to lay down more sharply 

 the nature of the authority to which Christian teaching 

 appeals, but the religious motive of a determination to 

 assert the divinely revealed way of salvation against the 

 corruptions and additions of men. I do not suppose that 

 the Roman Church would have objected to an attempt 

 to define more exactly the relative authority of Scripture 

 and Tradition. That question indeed was not new, and, 

 so long as men continued to be convinced that Scripture 

 and Ecclesiastical Tradition taught the same doctrines, 

 could not be regarded as dangerous. The theologians of 

 the Church, though practically their method of reasoning 

 put the Bible into a very secondary place, had no sus 

 picion that they were dealing unfairly with it. It is 

 most instructive to observe how Luther, in his earliest 

 polemical writings, appeals to Scripture with the fullest 

 confidence that in so doing he is following a line of argu- 



1 Artt. i, 2, cf. Zwingli, Uslegenund Griind der Artikel.(Werke, ed. 

 1828, i. 175 sqq.) 



