Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 12, 2025
For this is required by the excellency of the sacrifice they offer, the frequency of prayer, and liberty and purity of spirit, that they care how to please God, according to the teaching of St. Paul. And because this is manifestly the ancient heresy of Jovinian, which the Roman Church condemned and Jerome refuted in his writings, and St.
Now does any one mean to maintain that Aerius, Jovinian, or Vigilantius, held justification by faith only in the sense of John Wesley, or of John Newton?
He is the preacher against bishops. Jovinian was bound by a monastic vow, and he protests against fasting and coarse raiment. Vigilantius was a priest; and, therefore, he disapproves the celibacy of the clergy.
They ridiculed one usage, and showed the ill consequence of another. All this might be very cogent in itself, but it was the conduct of men who stood by themselves and were conscious of it. If Jovinian had known of writers of the second and third centuries holding the same views, Jovinian would have been as prompt to quote them as Lutherans are to quote Jovinian.
Because they are not ignorant of this, they were unwilling to exhibit to us a copy of their Apology, lest this falsehood and these reproaches might be exposed. Our opinion, however, as regards the case of Jovinian, concerning the comparison of virginity and marriage, we have expressed above.
But Jovinian was far in advance of his age, and it was many years before the truth of his view gained any considerable recognition. He was severely attacked by Jerome, who called him a Christian Epicurean, and was condemned as a heretic by a synod at Milan, in 390. Thus the reformers were crushed for centuries.
Even among the Christians there were hostile as well as friendly critics of monasticism; Jovinian, whom Neander compares to Luther, is a type of the former. Although a monk himself, he disputed the thesis that any merit lay in celibacy, fasting or poverty. He opposed the worship of saints and relics, and believed that one might retain possession of his property and make good use of it.
Here perhaps they will exclaim that, according to the manner of Jovinian, marriage is made equal to virginity. But, on account of such clamors we shall not reject the truth concerning the righteousness of faith, which we have explained above. Nevertheless we do not make virginity and marriage equal.
There is one chance for it, not in the second and third centuries, but in the fourth; I mean in the history of Aerius, Jovinian, and Vigilantius, men who may be called, by some sort of analogy, the Luther, Calvin, and Zwingle, of the fourth century.
And in 1 Tim. 4,1.3 Paul calls the prohibition of meats a doctrine of devils; for it is against the Gospel to institute or to do such works that by them we may merit grace, or as though Christianity could not exist without such service of God. Here our adversaries object that our teachers are opposed to discipline and mortification of the flesh, as Jovinian.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking