Defining Confessional Terms

I’ll just sit this here.

Authoritas Divina Duplex: “twofold divine authority; a distinction between (1) the authoritas rerum, or authority of the things of Scripture, the substantia doctrinae (substance of doctrine); and (2) the authroitas verborum, or authority of the words of Scripture arising from the accidens scriptionis, the accident of writing.”

“The authority of the substantia, or res, is a formal, inward authority that belongs both to the text of Scripture in the original languages and to the accurate translations of scripture. The authoritas verborum is an external and accidental authority that belongs only to the text in the original languages and is a property or accident lost in translation. Thus the infallibilitas of the originals is both quoad verbum and quoad res, where as the infallibilitas of the translations in only quoad res.”

Textus Receptus: “Textus Receptus: the Received Text; i.e., the standard Greek text of the New Testament published by Erasmus (1516) and virtually contemporaneously by Ximenes (the Complutensian Polyglot, printed in 1514 but not circulated [i.e., published] until 1522), and subsequently reissued with only slight emendation by Stephanus (1550), Beza (1565), and Elzevir (1633).”

“The term was adopted as a standard usage only after the period of orthodoxy, although it does refer to the text supported by the Protestant scholastics as the authentic text quoad verba, with respect to the words of the text.”

Richard Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms: Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2017