The Interior Testimony of the Holy Spirit: A Critique of Calvinist Doctrine

THE INTERIOR TESTIMONY OF THE HOLY SPIRIT A CRITIQUE oF CALVINIST DocTRINE INTRODUCTION IN THE FOUR centuries which have elapsed since the Reformation, the dialogue between Catholics and Protestants has evolved through several distinct phases. In fact, it is possible to distinguish :five literary genre of this dialogue. The first reaction of Catholic theologians toward the doctrines of the Reformers was to engage in a point by point refutation. St. Robert Bellarmine's Disputationes de controversiis Christianae fidei adversus hujus temporis haereses is the chef d'oeuvre of this type of literature. Taking the Apostles' Creed as the point of departure, Bellarmine noted that in the first two centuries of the Church's history the first article of the Creed was the disputed point. In the following period the mystery of Christ had to be defended, while in the ninth century the heresy at issue concerned the mystery of the Holy Spirit. Finally in the second millenium heretics erred concerning the last articles of the Creed-the Church, the communion of Saints, and the remission of sins. In this category Bellarmine places the Reformers of the sixteenth century. For this reason his work is divided into three parts: (I) the section in which he refutes the Protestant doctrines concerning the Church, Christ her invisible head, the Pope, Christ's vicar, and, finally, the members of the Church, taken either collectively (under this head he treats the subject of the ecumenical council) or individually; (2) a section dealing with the communion of saints and the seven sacraments; (3) finally, a treatise on the remission of sins, including a discussion of grace, Christian liberty, and justification. It is interesting to note that Bellarmine places at the head of these sections the 140 THE INTERIOR TESTIMONY OF THE HOLY SPIRIT 141 more fundamental question concerning the Bible, its interpretation , and oral tradition. In retrospect, it is possible to see that this minute refutation, which proceeded according to a scholastic method, lacked a global or synthetic view of the Protestant position and failed to examine the dialectic at the origin of the Protestant theses. Nevertheless, especially in the work of Bellarmine, there is a presentiment of the organic unity of the Protestant dogmatic. This particular author actually attempted to reduce all the differences between Catholic and Protestants to a primary disagreement in the manner of conceiving the Eucharist-1 A second genre in the field of Protestant-Catholic literary contact is exemplified by the work of L. Bouyer, Spirit and Forms of Protestantism. Here polemics are put aside, and the accent is placed upon the common spiritual heritage of Catholics and Protestants. The attempt is made to place in the best possible light the positions of non-Catholic brethren. One can justly name this literary genre, the " Concordances." 2 A third distinct tendancy of the interconfessional dialogue is that of the "critical history." This genre of literature is characterized by the intuition that every religious community is a dynamic reality, the subject of development, based upon fundamental principles. In this regard the work of the seventeenth century Oratorian, Richard Simon (1638-1712), is remarkable. He was interested mainly in the reunion of the East and the West, and he saw clearly that much of the misunderstanding between Rome and the Eastern Dissidents was based on a lack of comprehension, rooted in tum in a centuries-long inde1 Another author of this same period, Thomas Stapleton, had a remarkable insight in this same direction. In his De principiis doctrinalibus fidei (1579) and Relectio principiorum fidei scholastica (1596), he expressed the opinion that the lack of success of the interconfessional polemic was due to a concentration on particular problems and a negligence of general, fundamental questions. According to Stapleton these questions can be reduced to one: the authority of the Church. See M.-J. Le Guillou, 0. P., "Des controverses au dialogue oecumenique," lstina, 1958, no. 1 (January-March), p. 86. • Le Guillou (op. cit.) notes that this type of work is more evident in the dialogue between Rome and the Eastern dissident Christians. '142 MAURICE B. SCHEPERS pendent development of doctrine and cult. He applied his principle to the relationship between Catholics and Protestants in...