Some (usually Baptist groups now; once it included German Reformed before Philip Schaff arrived to teach them better) Protestants insist that there was a “historical line” of the “true church” that persevered “underground” and was never affiliated with the Western Church centered in Rome. Pretty much everyone who studies the issue acknowledges that this is not history but wishful thinking driven by a perceived (but mistaken) necessity.
But B. B. Warfield’s dictum that the Reformation is the triumph of Augustine’s soteriology over his ecclesiology is no less a fantasy. It does no justice to Augustine (whose theology, for good and ill, simply cannot be divided that way) or Calvin (who learned both from Augustine with modifications to both) or the Reformed confessional heritage all the way to Westminster (which is true to Calvin on this point).
Benjamin Warfield was a great scholar who has helped the Church in many ways, but this insight doesn’t represent his giftedness.
It is the perversity of history that men get remembered for their faults rather than their gifts. John Owen’s extreme anti-liturgicalism and his nominalistic version of limited atonement are remembered while his stellar preteristic interpretations of NT texts are forgotten. Even Kline’s best work, Images of the Spirit, gets neglected in favor of a lot of stuff that we would be better off without. John Gerstner gets lauded for teaching Presbyterians that it is presumptuous to allow their small children to pray the Lord’s prayer (and address God as Father). His loud and very recent insistence that obedience is necessary for salvation (that works can be necessary without being meritorious) is already down the memory hole.
And thus Warfield’s extremely optimistic post-millennialism and his excellent work on inerrancy all gets virtually forgotten while his completely baseless historical analysis has become the touchstone of orthodoxy.
> the Reformation is the triumph of Augustine’s soteriology over his ecclesiology
When I’ve heard that said before (and I don’t know the context in which Warfield said it) I’ve always taken “triumph” to be ironic… that these things shouldn’t be separated, and it’s sad that we’ve lost a sense of catholicism, but that’s the way things went.
Do you know if the context for this was actually rejoicing in this “triumph”? If so, then … yikes.
Yikes! Did Gerstner really teach that about Children and the Lord’s prayer?
The Warfield allusion comes from his “Calvin and Augustine.” He writes, “”It is Augustine who gave us the Reformation. For the Reformation, inwardly considered, was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine’s doctrine of grace over Augustine’s doctrine of the Church.” It’s clear that Warfield sees this as a good thing.
Elsewhere, Warfield says, “When Augustine comes to speak of the means of grace, i.e., of the channels and circumstances of its conference to men, he approaches the meeting point of two very dissimilar streams of his theology — his doctrine of grace and his doctrine of the Church — and he is sadly deflected from the natural course of his theology by the alien influence.”
It might not be fair to label Warfield’s claim concerning the Augustinian roots of Reformation soteriology as in tension with Augustinian ecclessiology as “completely baseless.” Jaroslav Pelikan argues that such a strong tension did exist in Augustine and that subsequent generations of Augustinians were understandably and maybe even necessarily forced to emphasize one at the expense of downplaying the other. But you may not have had this in mind when you wrote that about Warfield.
It might not be fair to label Warfield’s claim concerning the Augustinian roots of Reformation soteriology as in tension with Augustinian ecclessiology as “completely baseless.” Jaroslav Pelikan argues that such a strong tension did exist in Augustine and that subsequent generations of Augustinians were understandably and maybe even necessarily forced to emphasize one at the expense of downplaying the other. But you may not have had this in mind when you wrote that about Warfield.
As Jed points out, Warfield’s caricature is rooted in actual tensions within Augustine. Consider, for instance, how Augustine paints himself into a theological corner concerning the fate of infant children of Christians, if they die apart from baptism.