Scripture & Authority

Natural / general revelation

Does revelation outside Scripture — creation, conscience — truly and clearly reveal God, and what can it accomplish?

Objectively clear and sufficient to le…Rejected as a real path to knowledge o…No stance

15 FIGURES · 13 QUOTED · 5 WITHOUT A STANCE

Objectively clear and sufficient to le…

Objectively clear and sufficient to leave everyone without excuse; the failure is moral suppression, not insufficient evidence — though it cannot itself save

Rejected as a real path to knowledge o…

Rejected as a real path to knowledge of God apart from Christ and special revelation

Martin Luther1483 – 1546AFFIRMS°PRIMARY SOURCE❝ QUOTED

Figures who hold no stance here

These are not gaps in the table. Each group below says which kind of blank it is — searched and not found, held open on purpose, never framed in these terms, or deliberately unassigned because no stance fits.

NO STANCE FITS3 FIGURES

Researched, and deliberately unassigned — every available stance would misdescribe the figure.

Zwingli1484 – 1531DISPUTED READINGNO FIT“ QUOTED Philip Melanchthon1497 – 1560DISPUTED READINGNO FIT°“ QUOTED M. Heiser1963 – 2023DISPUTED READINGNO FIT°“ QUOTED

NO POSITION FOUND2 FIGURES

Searched and not located. An honest gap in the corpus.

Justin PetersLIVINGNOT LOCATEDNOT FOUND°The Church of Eleven22 Statement of FaithUNDATED (READ 2026) · DOCUMENTNOT LOCATEDNOT FOUND°

How to read a cell — sourcing tiers, blanks, and why some figures are never quoted

PRIMARY SOURCEread in a primary source

STANDARD ACCOUNTstandard scholarly account

DISPUTED READINGdisputed among scholars

NOT LOCATEDnot located in a source

A cell marked quoted carries the figure's own words — 285 of 402of them, about 71%. Where there is no quotation the claim is still sourced, and the tier says how far. 4 figures carry no quotation at all, for reasons that differ: a living author cannot be quoted at length under copyright where Calvin can, and a figure at the standard account tier has simply had no primary-source pass yet. 4 of them state their own reason on their page.

A state label ending in ° was read from the stance, tier and note rather than stated by the corpus. See themethodology.

John Chrysostom

C.347 – 407 · GREEK FATHER

AFFIRMSREAD IN A PRIMARY SOURCE

Objectively clear and sufficient to le…

Creation is God's own teaching, addressed to everyone without distinction — "both wise, and unlearned, and Scythian, and barbarian." The knowledge of God was placed in men from the beginning; what went wrong was that they spent it on idols and "trusted everything to their reasonings." The failure is moral, not evidential, and it is what leaves them without excuse.

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IN THEIR OWN WORDS

But what was able to draw them to Him more than a voice, that He did, by putting before them the Creation, so that both wise, and unlearned, and Scythian, and barbarian, having through sight learned the beauty of the things which were seen, might mount up to God.

Homily 3 on Romans, on Romans 1:19-20 (NPNF1-11)

WORTH CORRECTING

He is careful about the purpose, and the care is easy to miss: creation was not given in order to remove excuses. "For it was not to bereave them of all excuse, that He set before them so great a system of teaching, but that they might come to know Him. But by not having recognized Him they deprived themselves of every excuse." Inexcusability is what refusing it produces, not what it was for. On the suppression itself: "They trusted everything to their reasonings," and, of the same men, "having destroyed the light from their own selves, and, in lieu of it, trusted themselves to the darkness of their own reasoning."

SCRIPTURE

Romans 1:19-21 Psalm 19:1