Epilogue

Summary

The meaning of ‘belonging’ – i.e., the element of tradition in our historical-hermeneutical activity – is fulfilled in the commonality of fundamental, enabling prejudices.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method

You, in the first place, touch upon justification by faith, the first and keenest subject of controversy between us. […] you very maliciously stir up prejudice against us, alleging that by attributing everything to faith, we leave no room for works.

Jean Calvin, ‘Calvin's reply to Sadoleto’, 1539

Wherever we have religious differences, the problem of prejudice, it seems, rears its head. In the later years of the 1530s, Protestant Geneva was in the midst of much turmoil, due in large part to the conflict that arose between the civil authorities and Calvin and his fellow Reformer Guillaume Farel. Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto (then Bishop of Carpentras in southern France) saw the in-fighting as an opportunity to weaken Protestantism's grip on Geneva. In March 1539, Sadoleto wrote to the city's magistrates and citizens, seeking to persuade them to return to Rome. At the time, Calvin was living in Strasbourg, having been expelled from Geneva (along with Farel) almost a year earlier. Nevertheless, the powers that be decided that Calvin was the person most able to respond to Sadoleto. He did, after some persuasion.

Calvin identifies ‘the first and keenest subject of controversy’ between himself and Sadoleto as justification by faith, the critical issue which had impelled Luther's full-blooded challenge of the church that had, until then, been his haven. In his letter to the Genevans, Sadoleto paints the Reformers as ‘inventors of novelties’ on the pressing question of how a person is justified before God and thus attains eternal salvation. That is, if the Fall ruptured the divine-human relationship, by what mechanism can fallen human beings once more know and be known by God? Reflective of Rome's theological position, the Bishop contends that divine grace, Christ's crucifixion specifically, is the basis of ‘the first access which we have to God; but it is not enough’. One must also contribute a pious mind and a willingness to do ‘whatever is agreeable’ to God. In contrast, according to Sadoleto, the Reformers’ doctrine of faith alone promoted ‘a mere credulity and confidence in God’ that excluded ‘charity and the other duties of a Christian mind’.