There was another help for these poor people who had to swallow the doctrine of verbal inspiration – after they had swallowed it, they were saved; nothing could happen to them. But then the question was: :What about the many doctrines we find in the Bible? Are they all necessary for salvation ?” The Catholic church had a very good answer: You don’t need to know any of them; you only have to believe what the Church believes; only the ministers and studied people need to know of the special doctrines. The Catholic layman believes what the Church believes, without knowing what it is, in many respects. Protestantism could not do this. Since personal faith is everything, in Protestantism, the fides implicita and explicita was impossible for it.
Then an impossible task arose: “How can every little farmer, shoemaker, and proletarian in the city and country, understand all these many doctrines found in the Bible, which are more than even an educated man can know in his theological examinations?” The answer was that they distinguished between fundamentals and non-fundamentals – something which is popular even today, in your daily discussions. In principle this shouldn’t be, because if the Divine Spirit reveals something, how far can we say it is non-fundamental? And in any case, non- fundamentals proved later on to be very fundamental, when the consequences were drawn from non-fundamental deviations So it was a dangerous thing. But it had to be done for educational reasons, because most people are not able to understand all the implications of the doctrine. Here two interests were fighting with each other – and here I speak with all of you who will become Sunday school teachers, or in any other way religious teachers: – the one interest, to increase the fundamentals as much as possible; the interest of the systematic theologian; everything is important, not only because he has spoken about it! but also because it is in the Bible. This attitude of the systematic theologian is contradicted by the attitude of the educator. The educator shall have as little as possible, so that it is understandable, and to leave out all the many and different doctrines of secondary importance.
