R.C. Sproul

parting, partly in Scripture and partly in tradition, which would indicate clearly that there were two separate distinct sources for the church's doctrine, one from the Bible and the other from the historic tradition of the church.

Now, when that first draft was presented to the council, two priests who were delegates to the council stood up and protested the language.

I don't know why I remember their names, but their names were Bonuccio and Nacchianti.

These two Italian priests protested this language, saying that it undermined the sufficiency of Scripture.

And there the record stops, and we don't know what then transpired in the further debates about their objection.

All we know is that the final draft exhibited a change, and the words partum partum, which clearly taught a dual source of special revelation, were crossed out, and in their place was the word et.

which may or may not mean two separate sources.

The word and here is a little bit ambiguous, isn't it?

Because if you said to me, where would you find the Reformed faith?

I would say, well, you can find it two places.

You can find it in the Bible,

or you can look at the confessions that appear in church history that try to give a summary of the Reformed doctrine.

As in so far as those creeds are consistent with the Bible, they are repeating it, and it's just another place that you could go to find it.

And so the church may have meant simply to say that we find the truth of God, first of all in Scripture, and then as it is represented to us in the historic councils or the decrees of the church, that's the other place you can look, which somebody could say and still hold to sola scriptura.

And now that debate continues to this day among contemporary Roman Catholic scholars as to whether their church is committed to two sources or one.

Unfortunately, there are those conservatives in the church who said that the change from partum partum to et

was not a substantive change, but merely a stylistic change, and that the church clearly was meaning to affirm in the 16th century two sources of written revelation.

Now, that debate, though it continues, was more or less settled by a papal encyclical of the 20th century, which unambiguously refers to the two sources of revelation, and that has been

the mainstream of thinking within the Roman church since the sixteenth century that truths that are founded in the tradition of the church are just as binding upon the consciences of believers as the truths of Scripture, whereas in Protestant heritage

The principle of semper reformanda is embraced by virtually all Protestants.