Philip Melanchthon on Authority of Scripture

Scripture alone is the final, only infallible authority

THE POSITION

Scripture stands over the church's teaching office: bishops may judge doctrine, but only by the Word, and a bishop who teaches against the Gospel is to be disobeyed by divine command. Melanchthon puts the argument as a limit on jurisdiction rather than as an abstract principle — the question at Augsburg was whether the churches owed obedience to bishops, and his answer is that they owe it only so far as the bishops teach the Gospel.

18 OTHERS HOLD THIS

ABOUT THIS FIGURE

Luther's colleague at Wittenberg and the Reformation's systematizer. He wrote the first Protestant systematic theology (Loci Communes, 1521), drafted the Augsburg Confession (1530) and its Apology (1531), and then revised his own work far enough that the Formula of Concord condemned the later version seventeen years after his death. This entry rests on the Augsburg Confession read in Latin and English — Part I less Articles VI-VIII and XIV-XVI, plus Part II Articles XXII-XXIV and XXVIII — on the opening articles of the Apology in English, and on the successive editions of the Loci through Latin sentences preserved by Schaff and Bente; no edition of the Loci itself was read.