I. THE UNKNOWN MELANCHTHON

It is well enough known that Philip Melanchthon's standing as a teacher of Protestant doctrine was controversial during most of his lifetime, and that it has remained so in the centuries since his death. As Robert Stupperich wrote in his book, Der unbekannte Melanchthon, it is a bitter irony that the “most peaceable man of his age” somehow became “the most embattled.”¹ So heavily did the endless controversies weigh upon Melanchthon that, by the end, he really did long to die, so that he might be set free from “the furies of theologians.”² Afterwards, however, he was not set free—not in name and reputation, anyway. Ferocious battles between “Philippists” and “Gnesio-Lutherans” divided the movement for the next three generations.³ In later times, historians waged intense debates over the interpretation of his doctrines and over the final legacy of his theology as a whole.

In his book, Melanchthon: Alien or Ally?, Franz Hildebrandt observed that what has made Melanchthon so controversial is the great extent to which he strove to integrate classical humanism into Protestantism.⁴ For it seems that the many controversies that burned all around him in his lifetime—on free will and predestination, on justification, the eucharist and the adiaphora, among others—were, at bottom, also (and perhaps even more deeply) about the nexus of “faith and reason” underlying his approach to those doctrines. Indeed, the debates that have raged among scholars of Melanchthon have been mainly over that delicate seam which he wished to sew into the whole fabric of his theology. In that light, the impassioned, perennial question of Hildebrandt's title is as much a comment on the nature of Protestantism as it is on Melanchthon.

Indeed, none of the other major framers of Protestant teaching was so thoroughly immersed in Greek and Latin letters as Melanchthon was. Nor was any so naturally disposed to love them as gifts from God, or so masterly in cultivating them, as he was. To put it in perspective, as E. Gordon Rupp suggested, in Melanchthon we get some inkling of what might have happened had Erasmus himself become an evangelical.⁵ But to invert the hypothesis, had Melanchthon remained Catholic, things would have been much easier for him. He might well have assumed one of those prestigious university chairs they offered him, and become known primarily as the successor to Erasmus as the foremost scholar of Europe. Historians would no doubt classify him, too, as one of those esteemed Catholic “reformers.” However, as it happened, his unexpected destiny as midwife to the birth of Luther's cause put him in an almost impossible position. For in the earliest throes of its nativity, the evangelical movement was prone to ominous anti-intellectual and (its twin) anti-nomian eruptions. Melanchthon understood better than anyone did (on his own side, at least) that these precipitous pitfalls were always just one misstep off the sheer precipice of Luther's teachings on justification and Scripture. He knew from history and by instinct that, unlike souls, traditions do not live by “grace alone.” To endure, and to become viable in the world, the “bread” of culture is needed. Melanchthon's burden thus was not merely to forge what was the first Protestant summary of the faith, as is commonly acknowledged. It was (more profoundly) to hammer out its very first model of human culture—in relation to that faith. Under the circumstances, then, we do not wonder that his thought has been so difficult to understand, or that it has been controversial for so long.

Making matters still more difficult, however, is the way in which Melanchthon's theology developed. From about 1527 onward, he began to make revisions that seemed to certain contemporaries to be dramatic departures from the original teachings of Luther and from his own earlier professions. These changes became manifest in his most important dogmatic work, the Loci communes theologici, which he subjected to successive revisions from the first edition in 1521⁶ to the last one in 1559.⁷ In the earliest one, Melanchthon came out boldly for the Wittenberg theology. In the introduction to that monumental work, a young and remarkably self-assured Melanchthon issued those now-famous and oft-quoted little manifestos against conventional methods in the schools: “the mysteries of heaven ought to be worshiped rather than investigated,” he wrote; and, again: “to know Christ is to know his benefits.”⁸ Moreover, his handling of that cluster of connected themes—original sin, election, law, grace and justification, was unequivocally in line with Luther's. And sprinkled throughout the work was a fresh recognition, on his part, of the pretense of philosophers, the limits of human reason and the grave dangers of transgressing them.⁹

When we turn to the last editions, however, it almost seems that another person wrote them. To begin, the author gives a rigorous argument for including the very doctrines of God, the Trinity and the Incarnation that he had so forcefully warned about early on.¹⁰ Moreover, his handling of predestination was modified now to bring human freedom, dignity and value into balance with the negative evangelical claims on the powers of sin, and on the bondage of the will.¹¹ Furthermore, he now stressed the value of philosophy on all sorts of levels—including proofs from nature that God exists.¹² And the entire style of the last writings is markedly more pedestrian, making its tone seem many years removed from those first high-spirited beginnings, when everything had seemed so fresh and full of promise.

Among scholars, the most common explanation for the changes has been that there was truth, more or less, in the objection of his critics that he had given away his first principles—that Melanchthon was neither a very strong man, nor thus a very great thinker. Historians have almost universally understood him as a person who never quite found his most basic place to stand, trying as he did (so they say) to straddle high fences. In the context of his biography, they have supposed (for various reasons) that his earliest humanism was straightforwardly Erasmian. Thus, his adoption of Luther's theology in the autumn of 1518 seems to have been a sudden conversion from one worldview to (at its core) the direct opposite. From this perspective, the natural explanation for the later changes is that he never quite really was the author of his own professed convictions. Rather, he inherited them from admired others—first Erasmus, then Luther—and he never really understood the dialectical conflict that thus existed deep inside him. Then, when things got difficult, as they did, Melanchthon resorted, as people often do, to older habits. The inner conflict became manifest in the ambivalence of his later thought.¹³ The title of Sperl's influential book, Melanchthon zwischen Humanismus und Reformation, summarizes the categories and general thesis of this common (and largely negative) assessment.¹⁴ It seems that Melanchthon lived in suspension “between” two antithetical realms, thus never finding rest in either one.

The role of Melanchthon's theology in the great debate between Protestant Modernists of the nineteenth century and their antagonists is useful as a point of reference for our own proposals. For this debate typifies the general picture of Melanchthon that has become commonplace. Modernists like Albrecht Ritschtl appealed constantly to the early slogans on method as laying precedent for their own attack on the metaphysics of orthodoxy.¹⁵ They generally disregarded the older Melanchthon as having given way to the countervailing “intellectualism” that crept in from his pre-Lutheran past (and was indicative of his less-than-Luther-sized stature). As Troeltsch wrote, the final harvest of this fateful “first Protestant dogmatics” was really nothing more than to have offered “a theology of definitions.”¹⁶ As part of his powerful rebuttal of these theologians (and most deeply Schleiermacher, whom they followed), Barth ignored the obvious absurdity of the appeal itself and focused rather (again) upon the underlying hermeneutical problem of “faith and reason” in Melanchthon. Barth singled him out (in spite of the fact that Modernists appealed almost as often to Luther) as having implanted that deadly Ciceronian seed which now grew those twin deadly fruits of the modern age—“anthropocentricism” and “natural theology.” The theology of the older Melanchthon was, to Barth, thus merely evidence in support of his revived Gnesio-Lutheran argument.¹⁷ Melanchthon had corrupted the pure biblical Word by adding to it “the word of man.” In the wider literature, while historians appreciate Melanchthon's manifest contributions to church, school and society, their understanding of his theology as a whole has been, until quite recently, almost universally one or another version of that dialectical sort. His work in theology has been noticed considerably less for its normative power than for the perennial problems of “Christ and culture” that it provokes.

The obvious influence of humanism on his theology, with the apparently uneven course of his evolution, does make the evangelical integrity of the whole very difficult to discern, much less to clarify. However, when one considers just how disciplined, careful and scrupulous Melanchthon always was with language (that this was his genius, in fact), and how very dutiful he was as a person, it is perhaps not surprising that scholarship might make the progress it has been making toward a more favorable image. One element of this change is a renewed focus on Melanchthon's beginnings. For, contrary to the view that he adopted Erasmus's philosophy wholesale, it seems certain now that Melanchthon, during his years as student and teacher in Tübingen (1512-1518), had already forged his own unique brand of humanism. And while Erasmus inspired him in the broadest sense (as he did all the young scholars), the most fundamental influences came from others (as will be noted), whose ideas he used and shaped with an originality that was largely unnoticed by historians.¹⁸ But furthermore, this peculiar humanism was much more solidly on track with what he discovered Luther doing in Wittenberg than was previously understood. Although there was much in Luther's vision that was new and astonishing to him, it also seems that the substance of his Christian humanism (and not just the linguistics of it) prepared him, to an extent that is extraordinary, for receiving Luther's vision as his own. It thus also equipped him, without any lapse of time whatsoever, to begin giving Luther's insights the hermeneutical structure and theological form they were lacking. So it was that, in almost no time at all (which is otherwise impossible to explain), Melanchthon emerged as Luther's advocate, and the primary public voice of early Lutheranism, on an international stage.¹⁹

When one first becomes aware of these beginnings, a fresh image does begin to come clear. That “unknown Melanchthon” suggested by Stupperich's title emerges from the evidence as a figure of measurably greater vision, accomplishment and stature than he has generally been given credit for in the histories.

II. DIALECTICS AND HUMAN DISCOVERY

The most complete statement and application of this earliest philosophy is contained, not in a work of metaphysics or ethics, but in the books of rhetoric Melanchthon wrote while he was teaching at Tübingen. He had completed all but the final touches on his De rhetorica libri tres during his last year in Tübingen.²⁰ It came from the printer in January 1519.²¹ As with his formal dogmatic work, the Loci communes, Melanchthon revised his Rhetoric in successive editions. They constitute phases that are somewhat in parallel to the course of his development in theology.²² And there are, likewise, not dissimilar debates concerning what the progressive changes signified. Moreover, Melanchthon considered De rhetorica to be something much greater and more profoundly important than a mere lexicon, or manual of techniques and commonplaces on eloquence. The most complete recent studies agree that De rhetorica was in fact a systematic work of philosophy, or better, hermeneutics.²³ In its conception the writing was something very like what Ernesto Grassi deemed “rhetoric as philosophy,” in reference to Florentine humanists such as Mirandella and Ficino.²⁴ Like theirs, Melanchthon's rhetoric was a challenge to the abstract, foundational rational systems that flourished in the schools of his time.

Melanchthon came to his philosophical position naturally. Fatherless at ten, his male mentors were all scholars who venerated Italian letters, and who passionately believed that ancient models of composition were linked inseparably to the discovery of truth. But furthermore, these “forerunners of the Reformation,” to use Oberman's phrase, were all convinced that such models were the structures which enabled truth to take shape in the form of truly human civilization.²⁵ For all of them, to bring these arts to society north of the Alps was less a career in studies than it was a spiritual mission. It even included re-charistening—a kind of scholars' baptism. When the boy Philip Schwarzerd (who learned the Latin and Greek languages as if he had been born to them) brilliantly performed a play (Henno) at the Pforzheim grammar school in the presence of his famed great-uncle John Reuchlin, the esteemed man renamed him “Melanchthon.”²⁶ Now he, too, was an apostle of this missionary movement that wished to hitch Pegasus, as it were, to the oxcart of the world.

Of all the many stimuli and influences upon him at this formative time, two stand out as by far the most powerful (and neither was Erasmus). The one was a book on dialectic, by the Dutch humanist John Agricola (1444-1485), which his older acquaintance Joachim Oecolampadius, no doubt sensing its timeliness and propriety for the younger man's formation, presented to him sometime in 1516.²⁷ Agricola (known as “the educator of Germany”) named the work, De inventione dialectica, and we shall discuss its provocative title just below. The second influence, however, was an early Medieval commentary on the philosophy of Aristotle by one Themestius.²⁸ Melanchthon discovered this text while taking a course in dialectics from his colleague and mentor Franz Stadianus. The theories advanced in both these works were similar in substance, and Melanchthon made them the foundations on which he would erect a theory of his own—a rhetorical theory which he believed would revolutionize the art as it was taught in the schools.

The principal element of Agricola's book, as the title indicates, was that the art of dialectics must be formally reconnected with the art of rhetoric.²⁹ The main point of that linkage, which he believed was crucial to the great chain of ancient civilization, was the concept of “invention.” Of course, as every student of rhetoric knows, “invention” is what one does in the initial stages of composition. It is a matter of “finding” the right forms for expressing whatever it is that one deems worth writing or speaking about. Agricola's point, however (and the notion that shaped Melanchthon forever after), was that “invention” is even more fundamentally the business of dialectics and dialecticians. This was most directly a challenge to colleagues in his own discipline, and only indirectly to rhetoricians. (Melanchthon would take up the torch in that realm.) In brief, the message was that dialecticians must not allow their craft to deteriorate, as they were prone to let it do, into disconnected games of logic. They must remain centered instead on the universal and perennial questions of meaning and purpose in human life. For the professor of dialectics, moreover, the proper place to begin was with the conventional method of applying standard “categories” of definition to one's chosen topic or theme. That way one forged something more than just a definition, and in doing so created the elementary stuff of a powerful oration—on death, for instance, or virtue. We cannot elaborate here, but the main idea of Agricola's humanism is clear enough. The use of traditional “categories,” or “topics” in dialectics was envisioned as “invention” for building the framework of great composition.³⁰ Of all the ideas that shaped Melanchthon's early understanding of the world, before meeting Luther, this one was of absolutely first importance to the building of his own humanism and later theology.

But before going on, there was the influence of Aristotle also, through the commentary of Themistius. Melanchthon's letters and other written comments on this approach convey the sense of real astonishment he felt at believing he had uncovered something momentous.³¹ In his inaugural speech at Wittenberg in 1518, he proclaimed, in contrast to the common understanding, that Aristotle's interest was not really in metaphysics at all, nor in abstract analytics and logic. On the contrary, his metaphysics, analytics, logic, ethics, politics—everything he wrote—served the aim of his rhetoric, which was to put truth in literary forms that would at last shape individuals and societies in the image of wisdom and virtue.³² So captivated by these thoughts was Melanchthon, that when he came to Wittenberg his next major project was to have been to gather a team of experts—Reuchlin and Stadian among them—to manufacture a newly edited and glossed publication of Aristotle's writings.³³ Alas, the projected work never got going, for his life was rudely interrupted in 1519 by that small matter of his destiny with Luther. Nonetheless, the philosophical substance of his plan did come forth in his own rhetoric.

III. DIALECTICS AND RHETORIC: THE HERMENEUTIC'S HUMAN PURPOSE

We can but briefly look at the texts written by Melanchthon which give some light upon his progress on the way to his mature rhetoric. The main one is a very obscure declamation that it seems he gave in Tübingen sometime in 1517. Published in that year as De artibus liberalibus, it stands as a fairly comprehensive statement of his educational theory to that time.³⁴ For our present purpose, the declamation contains two key statements—one about dialectic, the other about rhetoric. The statements are important, because what would distinguish Melanchthon's rhetoric from all other models in his time (and perhaps in any time) is the thoroughly systematic integration of dialectics into it. The statement Melanchthon made about dialectics in the early oration, adumbrating his later method, was simply that it was “the mother of all the arts.”³⁵ Secondly, though (no doubt making some brows furrow, not least his professor of rhetoric Heinrich Bebel), Melanchthon proceeded to state that rhetoric, on the other hand, was but “a part of dialectics.”³⁶ We cannot go into the discussions that have begun on the course of his developmental path in these matters. It should be noted, however, in view of certain opinions to the contrary, that the statements in the declamation of 1517 are not in the least inconsistent with the views Melanchthon would advance in De rhetorica, and thereafter.³⁷ For assuming, as one must, that the “rhetoric” he disparaged in the speech was none other than the “rhetoric” which he would in his own works disparage in the schools, nothing changed but the terms. In truth, the hallmark of his theory (as will be clear) was that dialectics (as understood by Agricola) was philosophy in its most concentrated, seminal form, and then that rhetoric must grow from them.³⁸ He simply restated these very points in the inaugural address he was to give at Wittenberg only a year or so later.³⁹ And all together, they remained at the innermost core of his rhetorical theory to the end.⁴⁰

The preface to De rhetorica—a dedication to his fellow student Bernhard Maurus—made this theoretical purpose—and Melanchthon's sense of its historic significance—as clear as could be. As he put it, in recent decades the two arts have become separated, so that the one, dialectics, is now “artless,” “a maimed and paltry thing.”⁴¹ The once-noble art of rhetoric, likewise, has become little more than a supercilious tool of politicians, a means for “writing insincere praises of princes.”⁴² Concerned about this disintegration of the academic mind, a very young Melanchthon now aimed to bring dialectic and rhetoric back together, and thus salvage education in the schools. His main premise was obviously derived from Agricola: the two arts are essentially the same, differing only on the methodological surface. As he phrased it: “the one [dialectic] navigates with its sails more tightly drawn; the other [rhetoric] meanders more freely.” But otherwise, he wrote, “the argument is the same.”⁴³

Added to this intuition, Melanchthon demanded complete focus upon the “common causes,” as he called them.⁴⁴ Again, in carrying Agricola's vision forward, he thus strove to keep education firmly linked together with the deepest experiences his students would have in life.⁴⁵ For in Melanchthon's view, when rightly formed by language, human reflection on these human causes (caussae rather than mere res) gave otherwise mere speaking (verba) the power of true speech (oratio). It was in this context, primarily, that he also expressed his debt to Erasmus, who wisely trained students to keep a store of commonplaces, or loci communes, on hand to assist in this noble purpose.⁴⁶

As is useful to note, in the introduction to his own dialectics (published in 1520), Melanchthon (following convention) summed up the essential elements of that discipline as being three: definition, division and argumentation.⁴⁷ The primary concept, again, was that of the “categories” or “topics” that one used as the framework for all three operations. Explicitly following Agricola, he noted that the first parts of this work were a kind of “invention.”⁴⁸ In listing the “topics” to be used, we note the deliberate progression from terms of “essence” to those of “effect” in the world. As Agricola and (so he believed) Aristotle did, he thus understood both the “topics” and this natural progression as basic sources, from which all composition ought to flow, “as it were from springs.”⁴⁹ Melanchthon imported all these ideas, most basically the last one, into the methods of his rhetoric.

The main receptor in rhetoric for the techniques of dialectics was his revised notion of the classical genus demonstrativum, which he indicated was to be the model for the other types. From this one, so reformed into an incarnation of dialectics, he wrote: “the others draw their waters.”⁵⁰ Going into some detail on Aristotle's “categories” (expanding them for his rhetorical purposes from three to nine), he laid the groundwork for what was to follow. To summarize: using these “topics” in their progression to define and otherwise work up a truly meaningful subject (such as his example, “justice”), a writer could not but produce a natural flow in composition from logical clarity to logical power. What is more, however, the aforesaid logical forces served the larger purpose of the theme, whose power was human. For the imperative when all three elements—dialectic, rhetoric and the world order—meshed perfectly was, all at once, cognitive, affective and moral. It was in that comprehensive sense that he wrote, “thus, the entire oration is absolved.”⁵¹

Two other interrelated items in his rhetoric must be noted: the concept of the scopus dicendi, and his theory of confirmatio. These of course are ordinary rhetorical concepts. What is remarkable, however, is the way Melanchthon shaped them. Writing on the genus deliberativum, he explained that the scopus (or status caussae) was “the principal and chief theme of which the controversy consists, and to which all the arguments of the oration have to be referred.”⁵² Erasmus, likewise, was well known for stressing the importance of having a scopus, or main “sighting,” as he sometimes called it, in view at all times.⁵³ However, for Erasmus this was not a dialectical technique as it entirely was for Melanchthon.⁵⁴ Indeed, the latter believed the scopus must be more than just a point of orientation for the whole. For him, it most generally was the thesis, the terms of which must be handled dialectically, its proposition then placed within a rhetorical structure that made it the inference of one or more arguments. To Melanchthon, the best way of proving one's thesis—the most powerful technique of confirmatio—was to make it come out as the conclusion of a syllogism. Hence, for him, the traditional practice of disposition might best be shaping an entire speech into an expanded syllogistic form.⁵⁵ That way (so he believed) one achieved, through perfect logical clarity and arguments, absolute certainty of truth.

With these ideas in view, we can now turn to the emergence of Melanchthon's evangelical hermeneutics, and to the controversial levels of his theology.

IV. THE RHETORIC OF PAUL, HOLY SCRIPTURE AND CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE

In 1519 Melanchthon committed himself to theology in earnest. He began writing commentaries based on lectures—on Genesis, Matthew and, of course, Romans. Indeed, his dogmatic work grew directly from study of this epistle. Lectures matured into what was at first to become a commentary on Lombard's Sentences. However, the work ripened quickly into an introduction to Christian doctrine. The Loci communes theologici came out in 1521.⁵⁶ Careful examination of this work in context reveals the extent to which his rhetoric supplied the framework for his hermeneutics on every level. This is most apparent in the brief outline of Romans that he used in writing the dogmatic work. The mechanical details appear most conspicuously in the rhetorical delineation of Romans, which he had prepared as the skeleton for the Loci communes. First published by Ernst Bizer in 1966, it reveals in detail how he was using his rhetoric to construe and interpret this crucial text.⁵⁷

Melanchthon deemed the epistle was itself a work of rhetoric—in the genus didacticus (demonstrativum)—offering an “argument” by means of which to understand (dually) “what the Gospel is, and what is the use of Christ.”⁵⁸ Paul thus forged a “status or proposition,” which is that “the highest righteousness is faith,” and thus, following an exordium, he used scores of conventional devices to set up his argument.⁵⁹ In the fourth chapter, Paul clinched his thesis with a “confirmation” consisting of a deduction in seven parts.⁶⁰ In a later, similar draft, Melanchthon classified the epistle as belonging rather to the genus iudicale and as thus comprising “an exordium, narration, confirmation—aptly composed.”⁶¹ The narrative (chapters one through three) established axioms on sin, law and righteousness out of sacred revealed tradition. The “confirmation” (mainly chapter four) contained “six arguments,” each one being a simple deduction from the axioms given to prove the thesis in question, that we are justified by faith, apart from works of the law.⁶² As a teacher of doctrine, then, Melanchthon thus clearly believed that Paul followed the very same rules of composition that shaped the traditions of antiquity.

In the preface that Luther invited him to write for his Operationes in Psalmos (1519), Melanchthon made the larger hermeneutical implications of this view clear.

I am not saying this: that not all the sacred and canonical books are to me of the same rank. But certain ones are generally read more often, and such is their composition that they are able to act as interpreters, or commentaries on the rest. For example, among the Pauline epistles, the one to the Romans is a scopus—an Attic Mercury—which points the way into the rest.⁶³

By Paul's method, then, his status caussae in Romans created a kind of scopus for understanding the sense of Scripture as a doctrinal whole.

In two orations on Paul, which the faculty appropriately invited him to give in 1520, he developed these ideas further.

For since, some volumes prescribe laws, others narrate the history of past deeds, our Paul, by a certain methodological disputation, examines those loci without which it will not have profited at all to have learned laws. Neither the predictions of prophets nor the Gospels' histories can be entered into unless you follow his commentaries … serving as a method.

In brief, for the sake of our redemption, indeed, we would not have known Christ himself, had God withheld Paul from the world.

In vain you will have learned the evangelical history, unless you observe the scope and use of the history as demonstrated by him. [For] what else does he do but bring light to all Scripture as by a certain method?⁶⁴

These passages indicate (besides much else) that in 1520 Melanchthon had already received and shaped Luther's doctrinal notion of Scripture in rhetorical terms. He did not imagine Scripture, conceptually, as a single, uniform writing, but as being a kind of purposeful literary tradition (similar to that of the classics), the deepest meaning and purpose of which was illumined by its greatest orators. Melanchthon's notion of Scripture (in the relevant doctrinal senses), then, had Paul's rhetoric as the literal scopus of the whole. In that deeper sense, it was the whole. But it also had the rest—the diverse laws, histories, sayings and songs—as parts that were always in a dynamic relation to the center. Thus Melanchthon gave quite a remarkable account of the sense, unity and diversity of the canon (we shall encounter his notion of Scripture's uniqueness in a moment). But furthermore, the passages also show that as a diverse but rhetorically unified whole, Scripture achieves that total complex of human purposes we encountered moments ago. Through Paul, it confronts human beings with both the scope (the “what”) and the use (the “effects”) of its great message. Further examination of Melanchthon's earliest theological writings reveals that this general vision of Scripture as oration (in his peculiar sense of that term)—oration that was sacred—was uppermost in his understanding of himself as a commentator and theologian. Both these ideas must now be kept in view as we seek to show their relevance to his principles of “faith and reason” in forging Protestant theology.

V. UNDERSTANDING MELANCHTHON'S THEOLOGY IN THE CONTEXT OF HIS RHETORIC

Melanchthon's use of these rhetorical thought-forms as a kind of first Protestant hermeneutics is immensely important as context for understanding the contested parts of his theology. In this last section, but briefly and in outline, we shall focus on questions about the integrity (with regard to the fundamental of sola scriptura) of his dramatic decisions to expand his doctrines as he did, and to begin stressing the virtues of philosophy to Christians. We shall also suggest an approach to disputes (with regard to the fundamental of sola gratia) over revisions he made in handling the doctrine of election. And, to conclude, we shall make some observations about his (rhetorical) theory of truth and how it illumines his vision of theology and his final legacy as a teacher of Protestant doctrine.

First, let us consider the issue of the expansion of topics. As noted, Ritschl, Barth and many others (for different reasons) have judged this expansion as indicating a disunity of clear principle, and a trend of degeneration in Melanchthon's theology as a whole. Some scholars, such as Wolf and Fraenkel, working carefully with the theological texts, have disputed this judgment.⁶⁵ Our understanding of the hermeneutical principles that Melanchthon used in forming these texts strongly supports their defense. For very simply, in 1521 he was obviously quite affected by the fresh realization that theology had lost its topical compass. In his terms, scholastic theologians had lost sight of the scopus of theology—Paul's teaching on the “benefits of Christ.” To Melanchthon's way of thinking, no greater formal error was imaginable, for without knowing the scopus (of any oration, much less God's) we are left completely clueless. In that circumstance, focusing on this or that part of the speech only makes matters worse, for we see them as fragments rather than as the parts of a larger whole that they are; and we import all the wrong meaning into them. In respect of the doctrines of God, Trinity and Incarnation, what could be more harmful than teaching about them (Deus in se) without reference to the very truths of our human purpose and destiny that this very God is most concerned to make known? It would be rather like studying one's benefactor's molecular composition instead of being interested foremost with his purposes. As Fraenkel rightly observed in Melanchthon, “the loci praecipui are the way to understanding the whole of Christian doctrine. They are not identical with the whole,” and thus, on the eventual expansion to include the other topics: “This is an expansion within, not a transformation of the original doctrinal scheme.”⁶⁶ Another way of stating the matter is that Melanchthon simply corrected the “invention” of theologians' rhetoric at the first, and completed its full “disposition” at the last. There was certainly nothing in the beginning to give warrant to Ritschl's appeal (to principles opposed to a real metaphysics), and Barth ought rather to have found in the ending something very like a precedent for his own Christ-centered Christian realism. It seems that Melanchthon's expansion of his dogmatics was not at all confused, or degenerative. It was rather the outgrowth and application of his very first principles toward completeness and maturity in doctrine.

Let us similarly consider the contrast between Melanchthon's earlier and later writing on philosophical wisdom and proofs of God's existence. In the early stages, he indeed placed his emphasis upon the failings and deadly dangers of philosophy, in contrast to Scripture and its Gospel. One could pick sentences like this one from almost any page of his essays of that time: “they are straying entirely from the path who think that the doctrines of the Christian life are helped by the literature of the philosophers.”⁶⁷ He wrote with discernible passion that philosophers were “blind,” that their writings were ineffective, and that he had personally incurred much damage to his soul in reading them.⁶⁸ In contrast, one could pick sentences like this second one from almost any page of his essays on the subject less than ten years later: “how great is the magnitude and power of the arts in doctrine.”⁶⁹ That there was a reversal of his earlier strategy is obvious enough, but did the later statement also signify a contradiction of the evangelical principle underlying the earlier one? We think not.

For one thing, careful examination reveals that even in his most severe criticisms of philosophy were not as exclusionary as they might sound. For example, in his Declamatiuncula on Paul (1520) he wrote this typical statement: “Philosophers also [our emphasis] placed beatitude in perfect virtue and perpetual tranquillity of the soul.”⁷⁰ In other words (in undertone) they had the right questions and larger sense of purpose. Furthermore, as he often noted (disparagingly), philosophers understood many good “laws for living,” and they had among them many “fine examples.”⁷¹ What they did not understand was “whence they might find such a soul,” for they did not have revealed to them, “the mystery hidden for so many ages—the benefits of Christ.”⁷² At first, Melanchthon's purposes clearly were to define precisely what it was that made philosophy inferior to Scripture, and then, in that light, to discriminate clearly between them. However, we see that both the definition he gave and the distinction he made left the way open, in principle, for that later strategy of integration. For the claim contained in his metaphor that philosophy was “blind” (rhetorically powerful as it was to his fellows) actually entailed the secondary one that philosophy “saw” basic things, especially in ethics, remarkably well. In view of his rhetorical concepts, it is not very hard to understand the agility of his thinking on the matter. Again, it was the scopus of Christian doctrine that counted as its essence, gave Scripture its qualities of unity, clarity and force—in sum, the most basic qualities contained in the expression, sola scriptura. Once made, however (especially once the uniquely Christian oration was expanded to completion), there could be no principled objection to placing the “orations” of human culture in (emergency) service of Christ.

More complex and difficult to discern, however, is coherence of principle (sola gratia) in Melanchthon's last teachings on predestination. For his earliest handling of the subject seems to have been straightforwardly deterministic and dialectical enough. In contrast, by the latest editions, Melanchthon had expanded things to include an entire chapter in qualified defense of belief in human freedom in that context.⁷³ In this discussion Melanchthon is careful to reject two extremes—a kind of Stoicism (which he feared was incipient in the growing influence of certain forms of Calvinism), and an ancient Pelagianism (the trend in Rome).⁷⁴ In sum, Philip affirmed the sovereignty of divine grace, but also warned that however it all happens a human being is no “piece of wood or a stone,” which God merely acts upon.⁷⁵ He liked to cite the words of Chrysostom: “God draws, but he draws the one who is willing.”⁷⁶ In this fashion, Melanchthon believed he was clearly in line with the best authorities that had written on the matter (including Luther).⁷⁷

The criticism that Melanchthon was a “synergist” (and closet Erasmian) has been widely argued, and the intricate particulars of that debate cannot detain us here. Nevertheless, if we consider merely that Melanchthon imagined divine communication as rhetoric, and if we also consider what he supposed rhetoric in this instance was, perhaps we can gain some understanding of why he saw no conflict with his earlier notions, or with Luther's. Very simply, to Melanchthon, successful rhetoric (with its dialectical core) did two things with respect to the human will. First it made the moral realities of a person's circumstances perfectly clear. At one and the same time, however, it also persuaded and (in a word) compelled the person, by intuition of judgment, to believe, and then to act. (Belief of this sort already was, in fact, the beginning of the action.) All this is wrapped together in Melanchthon's concept of truth, as actualized in rhetoric. The integration of dialectics thus spelled differences between him and Erasmus, not just in their humanism, but in the manner in which their respective humanisms would give shape to the intricacies of their doctrines of election. And it perhaps explains why he believed to the last that his position on human freedom was not, in the end, a departure from Luther's.

Melanchthon's concept of truth, in this form, is also very important as context for one last issue of concern. That is the reputation his theology has earned for what we may call its sense of vision and purpose—Melanchthon's understanding of himself and his mission. Troeltsch's phrase, “theology of definitions,” sums up the general attitude of historians toward Melanchthon's place in history. He was to Luther what Boswell was to Johnson—a secretary and organizer of his master's ideas—but little more. Against this perception, it should suffice to consider again what Melanchthon's notion of definition was. For it was hardly that of a “Luther's lexicon,” but was rather a dialectical and rhetorical notion with immense implications for human life. Properly formed “definitions” tapped into the greatest cosmic powers in the universe, and they unleashed those powers in the most perfect and humanly momentous manner possible. This rhetorical supposition was almost certainly behind what might otherwise seem a bland and pedestrian method in his Loci communes, particularly later on. Beginning always with the “what is it?” (quid est?), he progressed dutifully to the “What power?” (quid vis?) on each doctrine. While the result may have been excessively pedestrian, repetitive and a little dull (compared with the literary extravagances of a Luther or Calvin), we ought at the very least appreciate the vision at work. In its own terms, it was successful, and a good many people (including Luther and Calvin) found its harvest invaluable as a resource for their own lives and works.

In conclusion, in the context of his rhetoric, the general integrity of Melanchthon's theology as a whole begins to come into clearer light than otherwise. And his stature as a theologian of Protestantism and as a man of great ability and character only grows.

Notes

1. Robert Stupperich, Der Unbekannte Melanchthon: Wirken und Denken des Praeceptor Germaniae in neuer Sicht (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1961), 9.

2. See text of the poem found near Melanchthon's deathbed, given in translation and discussed by E. Gordon Rupp, “Philip Melanchthon and Martin Bucer,” in Hubert Cunliffe-Jones with Benjamin Drewery, eds., A History of Christian Doctrine (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), 378.

3. Robert Kolb, “Philip's Foes, but Followers Nonetheless,” in M. Fleischer ed., The Harvest of Humanism in Central Europe: Essays in Honor of Lewis W. Spitz (St. Louis: Concordia, 1992), 159-78.

4. Franz Hildebrandt, Melanchthon: Alien or Ally? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946).

5. Rupp, 374.

6. In Latin we recommend the edition in [Phillip Melanchthon. Melanchthons Werke in Auswahl. [Studienausgabe]. Edited by Robert Stupperich. 7 vols. Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1951-75. Hereafter referred to as] MSA II/1, 15-185. For the 1521 edition in translation, see William Pauck, tr./ed., Melanchthon and Bucer, The Library of Christian Classics, XIX (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1959).

7. For the 1559 edition in Latin, MSA II/1, 186-388. For the 1555 edition in translation, Clyde L. Manschreck (ed., tr.), introduction, Hans Engelland, Melanchthon on Christian Doctrine: Loci Communes of 1555 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1965).

8. See Pauck, 21, translation of Melanchthon's oft-cited words: “Mysteria divinitatis rectius adoraverimus, quam vestigaverimus.” Also, 21: “cognoscere Christum, eius beneficia cognoscere est” (italics ours).

9. See, for example, ibid., 19-20.

10. See Manschreck, xlv-li.

11. Ibid., 51-69.

12. Ibid., 5-10.

13. On this view of Melanchthon's development being marked by “conversions” and sudden “breaks” and syntheses (rather than deliberate reflection), see Timothy J. Wengert, Philip Melanchthon's Annotationes in Johannem in Relation to its Predecessors and Contemporaries, Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance 220 (Geneva: Droz, 1987), 56-57.

14. Adolf Sperl, Melanchthon zwischen Humanismus und Reformation: Eine Untersuchung über den Wandel des Traditionsverständnisses bei Melanchthon und die damit zusammenhängenden Grundfragen seiner Theologie, Forschung zur Geschichte und Lehre des Protestantismus, 10, XV, (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1959).

15. For appeals to Melanchthon's principles as anti-metaphysical, see Albrecht Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation (Clifton, NJ: Reference Book Publishers, 1966), 396.

16. Ernst Troeltsch, Vernunft und Offenbarung bei Johann Gerhard und Philip Melanchthon (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1891), 59.

17. Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1973), 76, 579.

18. On the very basic differences between Melanchthon and Erasmus, see especially Manfred Hoffman, “Rhetoric and Dialectic in Erasmus's and Melanchthon's Interpretation of John's Gospel,” in Timothy Wengert and M. Patrick Graham, eds., Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560) and the Commentery (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 48-78.

19. John Schneider, Philip Melanchthon's Rhetorical Construal of Biblical Authority: Oratio Sacra Texts and Studies in Religion. vol. 51, (Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press), 1990, 97-99.

20. See Schneider, “The Hermeneutics of Commentary: origins of Melanchthon's Integration of Dialectic into Rhetoric,” in Wengert and Graham, Melanchthon and the Commentary, 20-47, esp. references on 22-23.

21. Philippi Melanchthonis De rhetorica libri tres, Wittenberg, 1519.

22. The best survey of the editions, if not the substance of their evolution, is in Joachim Knappe, Philipp Melanchthons ‘Rhetorik’, Rhetorik-Forschungen, 6 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993).

23. See esp. Wengert, Annotationes, and Schneider, Oratio Sacra.

24. Ernesto Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980).

25. On Melanchthon's first teachers, Schneider, Oratio Sacra, 13-50.

26. On this episode and its spiritual significance, Maurer, Der junge Melanchthon zwischen Humanismus und Reformation (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967-69), I, 20-21.

27. Schneider, Oratio Sacra, 34.

28. Ibid., 29; on Themistius, Peter Mack, Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric and Dialectic (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 135.

29. Mack, Renaissance Argument, esp., 320-33.

30. Ibid.

31. Discussion and references in Schneider, Oratio Sacra, 45, 56.

32. Melanchthon's inaugural speech, in MSA, III, 29-42.

33. Ibid., 35-36.

34. This speech occurs in full, ibid., 17-28. See discussion in Schneider, Oratio Sacra, 38-43.

35. Ibid., 21.

36. Ibid., 22. On Melanchthon's view of Bebel, Schneider, Oratio Sacra, 29 and refs., n.31.

37. Knappe, Melanchthons ‘Rhetorik,’ 6, in our view is entirely mistaken, because Knappe's view is typically (in regard to Melanchthon) semantically presumptive in judging this part of the speech as “völlig unhumanistisch.” “Un-Erasmian” would be a better term for it, but that illustrates the underlying error, here.

38. Knappe's comment that “Mit seinem Wechsel nach Wittenberg änderte Melanchthon seine Auffassung,” ibid., is entirely unwarranted and only exemplifies the casual manner in which such dramatic shifts are attributed to Melanchthon with changes of climate and heroes.

39. MSA, III, 35-37.

40. Contrary to Wilhelm H. Neuser, see Schneider, Oratio Sacra, 69 and refs., n. 50.

41. Philippi Melanchthonis De rhetorica libri tres, Wittenberg, 1519.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid. brackets ours.

44. Ibid., B1r.

45. Ibid., Hans-Jörg Geyer somewhat usefully compares these “common causes,” which Melanchthon here lists as including “virtues, fortune, death, wealth, letters and the like,” to the “existentials” of Heidegger, for the idea is not only ethical, it is about the whole scope of human meaning and purpose. Geyer, Von der Geburt des wahren Menschen: Probleme aus den Anfängen der Theologie Melanchthons (Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag des Erziehungsvereins, GmbH, 1965), 52.

46. De rhetorica, E3r-E4v.

47. Compendaria dialectica, [Philip Melancthon. Corpus Reformatorum. Philippi Melanchthonis opera quae supersunt omnia. Edited by Karl Bretschneider and Heinrich Bindsell. 28 vols. Halle: A Schwetschke and sons, 1834-60. Hereafter referred to as] CR 20, 711.

48. Ibid., Also Mack, Renaissance Argument, discussion of Melanchthon's loci dialectici, 327-33.

49. CR 20, 749.

50. De rhetorica, A5r. Almost all of the book (84 percent) was devoted to integrating dialectics into the invention and disposition of rhetoric. See Knappe, Melanchthons ‘Rhetorik,’ 30.

51. De rhetorica, A3r.

52. Ibid., F1v.

53. M. O'Rourke Boyle, Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology (Toronto/Buffalo: [University of Toronto Press], 1977), esp. 76-78.

54. Ibid., on Erasmus's way of relating parts to the whole: “[not] a progressive mathematics of meaning, as in dialectics.” Also, M. Hoffman, “Rhetoric and Dialectic in Erasmus's and Melanchthon's Interpretation of John's Gospel,” esp. 75-78.

55. De rhetorica, B1r; and esp. E5v-E5r, and G2v.

56. On the early outlines of the Loci communes, see esp. Ernst Bizer, ed., Texte aus der Anfangzeit Melanchthons (Neukirchen/Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag des Erziehungsvereins, 1966).

57. Bizer, Texte, 20-30.

58. Ibid., 20.

59. Ibid., 20-23.

60. Ibid., 23.

61. Ibid., 97.

62. Ibid., 98-99.

63. [Martin Luther. Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtasugabe.[Schriften]. 65 vols. Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1883-1993. Hereafter referred to as] WA 5, 24. On this preface, Schneider, Oratio Sacra, 99-104.

64. CR XI, 38. On these orations, given in 1520, Schneider, ibid., 163-87.

65. See Peter Fraenkel, Testamonia Patrum: The Function of the Patristic Argument in the Theology of Philip Melanchthon (Geneva: Droz, 1961), esp. 43-51 on the factors underlying the expansion, and for an analysis that independently supports our argument.

66. Ibid., 45.

67. MSA I, 34.

68. Ibid., 34-35; 41.

69. MSA III, 90.

70. MSA I, 32.

71. Ibid., 30.

72. Ibid., 32.

73. See Manschreck, 51-69.

74. Ibid., 51 (on Stoicism), 58 (on Pelagius).

75. Ibid., 60.

76. Ibid.

77. Ibid., 68.