The authority of the text.

It was Luther's contention that the Church could play a part in the salvation of the individual only through her ministry of the Word, and that the ministry of the sacraments stood under that ministry and was salvific only by the power of the Word. He and other reformers were trying to redress an imbalance which had made the sacramental ministry of the Church in the later Middle Ages so prominent as almost to obscure the ministry of the Word altogether. This had been a matter of practice, not dogma. The saving power of Scripture was a commonplace of mediaeval discussion. Peter Lombard, for example, in his preliminary discussion of those signs which not only ‘signify’ but also ‘justify’ in his twelfth-century Sentences, considers the question of the relationship of the Church's ministry of the sacraments to the ministry of the Word. The opening question of Aquinas' Summa Theologiae a century later is whether the study of ‘holy learning’ (sacra doctrina) through Scripture is ‘necessary to salvation’. For the majority of mediaeval authors there was no question of separating Scripture from the Church in its saving work. The ministry of the sacraments could not take place outside the community of the Church; the ministry of the Word belonged there in the same way. Yet in practice that ministry came to be somewhat neglected in the late mediaeval Church. Stephen Langton's Constitutions of 1222 require parish priests ‘to feed the people with the Word of God’, but local priests rarely preached, and many were insufficiently educated to attempt it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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