The Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 2

I. Stegmann of Germany—Dead Restored to Life Through Resurrection

In 1628 a Capuchin friar, writing under the name of Valerian Magni, published a work at Prague on the consciousness of the soul in death. It was entitled De Acatholicorum regula credendi (“Concerning the rule of believing of non-Catholics”). ¹ This was answered on the Continent by JOACHIM STEGMANN (fl. 1630), German scholar and publisher of Brandenburg, and author of some sixty tractates, who had previously produced a new translation of the Greek New Testament into German. ² So again we see the caliber of some of the Continental Conditionalists. Stegmann’s reply to the friar, written under the pen name of Alesius, was called Brevis Disquisitio. ³ First published in 1628, it had three editions by 1651, with an English translation by Biddle in 1653. CFF2 176.3

The English title reads Brevis Disquisitio: or, a brief Inquiry touching a better way than is commonly made use of, to refute Papists, and reduce Protestants to Certainty and Unity in Religion. Fortunately, this translation is preserved in The Phenix (1708), Vol. II, No. XXII. For a time it was thought to have been written by the learned Canon John Hales of Eton. ⁴ But Historian Blackburne declares that to be a “mistake.” It was assuredly by Stegmann, and bears the confirmatory date of the Biddle translation. CFF2 177.1

The purpose of Stegmann’s tractate was to show that Protestants, by adhering to fallacies in the “peculiar systems of Luther, Calvin,” et cetera, had in many instances offered weak and ineffective arguments against the positions of the Papacy, which “laid them under needless difficulties.” Stegmann’s specific counsel was to “discard all human authority, and stick to the Scripture only, as explained and understood by right reason, without having any regard to tradition, or the authority of the Fathers, Councils, etc.” ⁵ CFF2 177.2

Dr. Samuel Ward, in a letter to Archbishop Ussher, referred to Brevis Disquisitio as stating that “souls do not live till the resurrection.” ⁶ Bayle had contended that Stegmann’s treatise tended to “disparage the reputation” of the early Reformers by breaking in upon their “several systems.” But the learned Archdeacon Blackburne asked: “Could more seasonable or wholesome advice be given to Protestants? Was this not the very method afterwards adopted by our incomparable Chillingworth” (that the Bible and the Bible only is the religion of Protestants)? the weighty effects of which contention were felt by the Papacy. And Blackburne adds, “Chillingworth’s method will remain an impregnable bulwark” against all papal fallacies. ⁷ CFF2 177.3