It is when these pious opinions [about Mary's bodily assumption] are elevated to the status of dogmas which must be believed under pain of eternal condemnation that we declare this kind of constraint—rather than the opinions themselves—to be antichristian and diabolical.—A. C. Piepkorn,
The Church, p. 330.
... and also when such pious opinions, e.g., Mary's bodily assumption, are elevated to the status required as a confessional Lutheran teaching. Or as Johann Conrad Dannhauer (1603-1666) wrote in his Hodosophia christiana sine theologia positiva (11, p. 667):
ReplyDelete“An article of faith is not a gloss, assertion, or opinion for which there is no clear and definite passage in Holy Scripture. Such, for example, are the questions concerning the time of the world’s creation, whether it took place in spring or in fall; the day and year of Christ’s birth; the perpetual virginity of the blessed Virgin after His birth; the soul sleep, and other matters in which men might exercise their wits. But these dare not be forced upon others as sacred teachings of the church. Such excrescences occur in scholastic theology by the wholesale, where one tries to milk a he-goat, while another endeavors to catch the milk in a sieve.”