1. Every period of the church and of theology has its particular
oe Ole General Summary:
Theses for the Time 'THE FOLLOWING THESES have been added by the author, not for the purpose of presenting any new matter, but simply to furnish a clear synopsis of the leading thoughts exhibited in the treatise itself. Of course, to be fully understood, each proposition must be examined in the light of the connections in which it comes forward in the general work. If any should choose to disregard this admonition and undertake to hold up single propositions to reproach, according to the sound simply which they may carry to the ear of popular prejudice, in their separate form, it will be quite easy to fix upon the author the charge of heresy, in the most opposite directions. This low polemic trick can be practiced here without even the small amount of cleverness it calls for in ordinary cases. The author has himself furnished to its hand in these theses all the opportunity it could wish to do him wrong in this way. Can the trick itself, however, in such circumstances, cease to be either dishonorable or immoral?—rTRANSLATOR
INTRODUCTION
1. Every period of the church and of theology has its particular problem to solve; and every doctrine, in a measure every book also of the Bible, has its classic age in which it first comes to be
The Principle of Protestantism fully understood and appropriated by the consciousness of the Christian world.
2. The main question of our time concerns the nature of the church itself in its relation to the world and to single Christians.
THE CHURCH IN GENERAL
3. The church is the Body of Jesus Christ. This expresses her communion with her Head, and also the relation of her members to one another.
4. In the first respect, she is an institution founded by Christ, proceeding from his loins and animated by his Spirit, for the glory of God and the salvation of man; through which alone, as its necessary organ, the revelation of God in Christ becomes effective in the history of the world. Hence out of the church, as there is no Christianity, there can be no salvation.
5. In the second respect, she is, like every other body, a living unity of different members; a communion in faith and love, visible as well as invisible, external as well as internal, of the most manifold individualities, gifts, and powers, pervaded with the same Spirit and serving the same end.
6. The definition implies further that as the life of the parents flows forward in the child, so the church also is the depository and continuation of the earthly human life of the Redeemer, in his threefold office of prophet, priest, and king.
7. Hence she possesses, like her Founder, a divine and human, an ideal and a real, a heavenly and an earthly nature; only with this difference, that in her militant stage, freedom from sin and error cannot be predicated of her in the same sense as of Christ; that is, she possesses the principle of holiness and the full truth, mixed however still with sin and error.
8. 'To the church belong, in the wider sense, all baptized persons, even though they may have fallen back to the world; in the narrower sense, however, such only as believe in Jesus Christ.
9. The relation of the church to the world, with its different spheres of science, art, government, and social life, is neither one of destruction on her part nor one of indifference; but the
Philip Schaff ZZ object of it is that she should transfuse the world with the purifying power of her own divine life, and thus bring it at last to its true and proper perfection.
10. 'The ultimate scope of history accordingly is this, that Christianity may become completely the same with nature, and the world be formally organized as the kingdom of Christ; which must involve the absolute identity of church and state, theology and philosophy, worship and art, religion and morality; the state of the renovated earth, in which God will be All in all.
11.
In relation to single Christians, the church is the mother from which they derive their religious life and to which they owe therefore constant fidelity, gratitude, and obedience; she is the power of the objective and general to which the subjective and single should ever be subordinate.
12. Only in such regular and rational subordination can the individual Christian be truly free; and his personal piety can as little come to perfection apart from an inward and outward communion with the life of the church, as a limb separated from the body or a branch torn from the vine.
13.
Christianity in itself is the absolute religion, and in this view unsusceptible to improvement.
14. We must not confound with this, however, the apprehension and appropriation of Christianity in the consciousness of mankind. This is a progressive process of development that will reach its close only with the second coming of the Lord.
15.
All historical progress then, in the case of the church, consists, not in going beyond Christianity itself, which could only be to fall back to heathenism and Judaism, but in entering always more and more (materially as well as formally) into the life and doctrine of the Redeemer and in throwing off by this means, always more and more, the elements of sin and error still remaining from the state of nature.
16.
It is possible for the church to be in possession of a truth and to live upon it, before it has come to be discerned in her consciousness. So it was, for instance, with the doctrine of the Trinity before the time of Athanasius, with the doctrine of divine grace and human freedom before Augustine, and with the evangelical doctrine of justification during the Middle Ages.
The Principle of Protestantism Thus the child eats and drinks long before it has the knowledge of food, and walks before it is aware of the fact, much less how it walks.
17. The idea, unfolded in comprehensive and profound style particularly by the later German philosophy, that history involves a continual progress toward something better, by means of dialectic contrapositions
(Gegensaetze), is substantially true and correct.
18.
It must not be forgotten however, in connection with this, that there is a corresponding movement also on the part of evil toward that which is worse. Light and darkness, the wheat and the tares, grow together till their development shall become complete.
19. We must distinguish in the church accordingly between idea and manifestation. As to her idea, or as comprehended in Christ, she is already complete; in the way of manifestation, however, she passes—like every one of her members—outwardly and inwardly, through different stages of life, until the ideal enclosed in Christ shall be fully actualized in humanity and his body appear thus in the ripeness of complete manhood.
20. Such a process of growth is attended necessarily with certain diseases and crises, as well theoretical, in the form of heresies; as practical, in the form of schisms.
21. These diseases are to be referred partly to the remaining force of sin and error in the regenerate themselves, and partly to the unavoidable connection of the church with the still unchristian world, by means of which the corrupt elements of this last are always forcing their way into her communion.
22. 'They can never overthrow however the existence of the church. 'The church may fall down, sore wounded, divided and torn, without ceasing for this reason to be the Body of Christ.
Through her humiliation gleams evermore the unwasting glory of her divine nature.
) 23. In the wise providence of God, all heresies and schisms serve only to bring the church to a clearer consciousness of her true vocation, a deeper apprehension of her faith, and a purer revelation of the power included in her life.
24. But the presence of disease in the body requires to the
Philip Schaff
Same extent a remedial or curative process, that is, a reformation.
25. Protestantism consequently, in the true sense, belongs indispensably to the life of the church; being the reaction simply of her proper vitality, depressed but not destroyed, in Opposition to the workings of disease in her system.
THE REFORMATION
26. Protestantism runs through the entire history of the church, and will not cease till she is purged completely from all ungodly elements. So, for instance, Paul protested against Jewish legalism and pagan licentiousness as found insidiously at work in the first Christian communities; the Catholic Church of the first centuries, against the heresies and schisms of Ebionitism,
Gnosticism, Montanism, Arianism, Pelagianism, Donatism, etc.
27. The grandest and most widely influential exhibition of Protestantism is presented to us under the formal constitution of a special church, in the Reformation of the sixteenth century, as originated, and in its deepest inward, and truly apostolic form, carried out and consummated by the German nation.
28.
It is a jejune and narrow conception of this event, to look upon it as a restoration simply of the original state of the church, or a renewal of Augustinianism against the Pelagian system by which it had been supplanted.
29. Such a view proceeds on the fundamentally erroneous supposition that the religious life revealed in the person of Christ primarily, and by derivation from him in his apostles, has been fully actualized also from the beginning in the general mass of the church.
30.
Rather, the Reformation must be viewed as an actual advance of the religious life and consciousness of the church, by means of a deeper apprehension of God's word, beyond all previous attainments of Christendom.
31. As little is the Reformation to be regarded as a revolutionary separation from the Catholic Church, holding connection at best perhaps with some fractionary sect of the Middle Ages, and only through this and the help of certain desperate historical leaps besides, reaching back to the age of the apostles.
The Principle of Protestantism 32. This contracted view of Protestantism is not only unhistorical and unchurchly altogether, but conscious or unconscious treason at the same time to the Lord's promise that he would build his church upon a rock, and that the gates of hell should not prevail against it; as well as to his engagement: "Lo I am with you always even to the end of the world"; and to the apostolic word: '"The church is the pillar and ground of the truth."
33. Rather, the Reformation is the greatest act of the Catholic Church itself, the full ripe fruit of all its better tendencies, particularly of the deep spiritual law conflicts of the Middle Period, which were as a schoolmaster toward the Protestant doctrine of justification.
34. The separation was produced, not by the will of the Reformers, but by the stiff-necked papacy, which like Judaism at the time of Christ, identifying itself in a fleshly way with the idea of the absolute church, refused to admit the onward movement.
35. Thus apprehended, Protestantism has as large an interest in the vast historical treasures of the previous period, as can be claimed rightfully by the Church of Rome. Hence the arguments drawn by Romanists from this quarter, and particularly from the Middle Ages—the proper cradle of the Reformation—have no application against our standpoint.
36. Equally false finally is the view, whether popular or philosophical, by which the Reformation is made to consist in the absolute emancipation of the Christian life subjectively considered from all church authority, and the exaltation of private judgment to the papal throne.
37. This view confounds with the Reformation itself the foul excrescences that revealed themselves along with it in the beginning, and the one-sided character of its development since.
38. On the contrary, it-is quite clear from history that the Reformers aimed only at such liberty of faith and conscience and such independence of private judgment, as should involve a humble subjection of the natural will, which they held to be incapable of all good, to God's grace, and of the human reason to God's word. Indeed their opposition to the Roman traditions was