R.C. Sproul

Well, actually, there's more than one consideration, though they're all interrelated.

In the first instance, one of the disputes at the 16th century level was the question of the source of divine revelation.

All Christians in the 16th century believed that Christianity is a revealed faith, that its content comes from God.

And both sides of the dispute, Rome and Protestantism in the 16th century, agreed that there were at least two distinct places where God gives revelation of himself.

One is in nature, which is called natural revelation or general revelation.

whereby the heavens declare the glory of God, and the other, of course, is the Bible.

Now, both sides agreed that the Bible was revelation, and both sides agreed that nature is also revelatory.

But the dispute over the alone was whether there was more than one source of what we call special revelation.

And the Protestant movement said there is only one source of what is called special or written revelation, and that is Scripture, where Rome confessed its confidence in two sources of special revelation, Scripture and Scripture.

and tradition.

I've gone over this in other courses, but I want to review the bidding on it now for the context of this study of the essence of Reformed theology.

At the Council of Trent in the 16th century, which was the Roman Catholic Church's response to Luther

and to Protestantism.

The Council was held in different sessions at different times, spread out over a few years.

And at the fourth session of the Council of Trent, the Roman Catholic Church declared that the truths of God are found in the Scripture and in tradition.

And the Latin word that is in the final text of the Council of Trent that links Scripture and tradition is the somewhat innocuous, simple Latin word, et.

that is simply the Latin word for and.

Well, this is a complicated discussion because an Anglican scholar in the 20th century was doing his research for his doctoral dissertation, and he was focusing on the fourth session of the Council of Trent, which session ended unexpectedly and abruptly because

of the outbreak of war on the continent, and there were some loose ends left dangling and some difficult things to explain from the discussions that went on at that time.

And what this Anglican scholar noted was that in the first draft of the fourth session of the Council of Trent, the statement was made in Latin that the truth of God is contained partly