Before speaking in public, you always want to clear your throat, so that you can breathe easier, project further, and speak more clearly.
In the spirit of throat clearing, this post is meant to introduce “Reading CCF.” The idea is this: I’ve been working for some months on a translation of Jerome Zanchi‘s De religione Christiana fides (usually translated as Confession of the Christian Religion [CCR]), which was first published in 1585. I’m enjoying myself tremendously.
One of my motivations for doing this translation (in fact, I might even call it a conviction) is that I want to see the riches of classical Reformed theology made accessible to as many people as possible. Unfortunately, I’m a slow translator and this is going to take a while, so I thought it would be useful (to borrow one of Zanchi’s favorite terms) to post some of what I find as I go.
I’ll share more about the (fascinating!) history of the CCR some other time, but for now just a couple words about what it is. Short answer: a formal confession of faith written in the last third of the 16th century by one of the great Reformed scholastic theologian at the height of his powers.
Because it’s a confession, it’s meant to contain an entire system of doctrine, but it’s not a textbook of systematic theology. It’s less a tool for teaching than a statement of belief. He didn’t say everything that he could have said. Rather, Zanchi addressed critical topics that the church had faced in the past and was facing in his day so that everyone—friend and foe—would know where the confessors of this confession stood.
Now, unlike the Belgic Confession, Second Helvetic Confession, or the Westminster Confession of Faith, no church or group of churches formally subscribed to Zanchi’s confession. In that sense it was merely “personal” (or better “familial,” since he wrote it on behalf of his whole family), but it was also intended to be catholic (little “c”) in the sense that his aim was to confess what the universal (“catholic”) church confesses.
The CCR is pretty long for a confession, coming in at over 500 pages of Latin text. (Although, just to give you some sense of Zanchi’s productivity, it only comprises about 65 dense double-column folio pages in the eighth “tome” of his collected works. That tome alone is about 850 folio pages in length.)
CCR begins with a long dedication to Zanchi’s friend, Ulisse Martinengo, followed by a somewhat shorter one “to the reader.” It then proceeds along what we would think of as a pretty typical ordering of the heads of doctrine, beginning with Scripture and ending with a chapter on eternal life. He divides the work into thirty chapters, which are further divided into numbered subsections that address specific issues and topics within that head of doctrine. At the end of the book, he has included several appendices (his “observations,” an “appendix” proper, and a series of “theses”).
Consider the throat cleared.
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