Editorial Introduction To "German Theology And The Church
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION TO "GERMAN THEOLOGY
AND THE CHURCH QUESTION"
This article appeared originally in German in the September 1852 issue of the Kirehenfreund.
It was the concluding essay of a series of articles written by Philip Schaff concerning the thought of distinguished contemporary theologians of Germany which appeared in four installments beginning in May of the same year.
The Ktrchenfreund was founded in 1848 by Philip Schaff who served as its editor for six years.
It was a monthly publication that supplied German readers with a periodical that was more than a weekly religious newspaper but less than a scholarly theological journal.
Its purpose was to counteract the too exclusively unhistorical individualism of American Protestantism.
Although it was written for German readers it had a large following of American churchmen of all denominations, many of whom were not German and regretted that it was not also published in English.
The "Church Question" was the central theme of the Mercersburg Theology.
What is the church historically, how are we to understand it in our day, what are its theological foundations and how are believers united with it and nurtured by it, were the pressing questions that both John Williamson Nevin and Philip Schaff attempted to answer.
The Mercersburg movement began with Nevin's The Anxtous Bench published in 184 as an answer to the kind of churchmanship that resulted from the revivalistic techniques of Finneyism and "New Measures."
In this essay Schaff points out the difference between the conception of the church held by the Evangelical school of Germany and American Protestantism.
The former saw Protestantism as the result of the flowering of the ancient and medieval
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church in the Reformation through historical development while the latter blinded by an unhistorical view of Christianity, saw it as an entirely new creation or restoration of the New Testament church.
This is the same theme that Schaff defended in The Principle of Protestantism published in 1845 and What Is Church
Htstory? published the following year.
In a time when much American thought was anti-Popery, he maintained that the Roman Catholic Church dared not be "unchurched."
The church of the Middle Ages was not the great apostacy, the anti-Christ, but the bearer of true Christianity.
Protestantism is "a new and advanced position" and "Romanizing tendencies are retrograde movements."
Schaff admits that this view held by Evangelical German theology "involved an enormous concession to Catholicism and a fatal blow against a bigoted ultra-Protestantism" but a correct reading of church history leads to this position.
The testimony of both Scripture and history promises that the church of Christ shall have "an indestructible continuation and an uninterrupted presence of her divine Head, even to the end of the world."
The understanding of what the church is must be built on this position, not on privatized interpretation of Scripture, unhistorical theories, and blind fanaticism.
Schaff emphasized that in this essay he is speaking only of the theological and scientific defense of Protestantism.
The "plain practical Christian" ought not to be troubled by historical difficulties for his faith as a Protestant rests properly on the Word of God, his own religious experience and the practical fruits of the faith he embraces.
However, he cannot be indifferent to what Christianity has been, what it is in his day. and what it shall be.
When he thinks of history, he must think of development in life and not be led astray by mechanistic or static views.
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Protestantism has its foundations in Apostolic and Medieval Christianity.
Historical development was leading the church into a new stage in which the great truths of Catholicism and Evangelical Protestantism, excluding their mutual errors, | would become united in "a higher union and harmony."