Fatherhood Quote by Martin Chemnitz

Chemnitz is doing something sly: he’s smuggling tradition back into a Reformation project that was often caricatured as “Bible only, everyone else shut up.” The sentence performs a careful balancing act. “Therefore” signals this isn’t a vibe, it’s an argument with stakes: a method for deciding what counts as legitimate Christian teaching. The verbs are telling. He “examines” antiquity with “considerable diligence” - not nostalgia, not submission, but audit. Tradition is treated less like a throne and more like a paper trail.

The key phrase is “the consensus of the true, learned, and purer antiquity.” Chemnitz isn’t appealing to whatever happens to be old; he’s curating a particular past, a pre-medieval, pre-scholastic “purer” era. That adjective is a polemical knife. It implies corruption happened later, and it quietly authorizes the Reformers to bypass recent Catholic authorities while still sounding deeply historical.

Then comes the conditional that makes the whole thing Lutheran: he loves and praises patristic testimony only “which agree with the Scripture.” The fathers are witnesses, not judges. That move deflates Rome’s claim to an independent magisterial tradition without turning Christianity into a solo reading project. In the context of 16th-century confessional warfare, this is strategy as much as piety: Chemnitz wants to show that the Reformers aren’t innovators but heirs, and that Catholic opponents are the ones out of step with the early church - on the Reformers’ terms, with Scripture as the court of final appeal.