Faith & Spirit Quote by William Ames

Ames is making a surgical strike on institutional gatekeeping: faith, he argues, is not ontologically dependent on “the church” as a mediating object. The force of the line comes from its lawyerly “therefore,” a signal that this is not devotional musing but a contested conclusion in a live argument about authority. He reaches for Abraham and “the other prophets” because they are the ultimate stress test: if anyone needed ecclesial supervision to believe, surely the patriarchs would. Yet the biblical timeline sabotages that claim. Their assent predates the institution, so the institution can’t be the necessary condition.

The subtext is early modern Protestant anxiety, sharpened into doctrine. Ames writes in a post-Reformation world where Rome’s case rests heavily on the church as interpreter, guarantor, and distributor of grace. By relocating the decisive moment in revelation itself (“revealed to them from God”), Ames elevates direct divine address over sacramental or hierarchical infrastructure. That doesn’t make him an anti-church individualist in the modern sense; it’s more strategic. He’s delimiting what the church can demand: respect, yes; metaphysical necessity, no.

Even the phrasing “not even for us today” is a jab at complacent presentism. If our era assumes it requires more scaffolding than the prophets did, that assumption flatters institutions and diminishes God’s agency. Ames’ intent is to free assurance from clerical dependency while keeping the argument safely inside Scripture’s prestige economy. He wins by making his opponents defend an anachronism.