45. Respect for the Reformation as a divine work in no way
Philip Schaff 220, itself based on the conviction that they were the product of such reason sundered from the divine word.
39.
'The material or life principle of Protestantism is the doctrine of justification by grace alone, through the merits of Jesus
Christ, by means of living faith; that is, the personal appropriation of Christ in the totality of the inner man.
40.
'This does not overthrow good works; rather they are rightly called for and made possible only in this way—with dependence however on faith, as being its necessary fruit, the subjective impression of the life of Christ, in opposition to Pelagianism which places works parallel with faith, or even above it.
41. The formal or knowledge principle of Protestantism is the sufficiency and unerring certainty of the holy Scriptures as the only norm of all-saving knowledge.
42.
'This does not overthrow the idea of church tradition, but simply makes it dependent on the written word, as the stream is upon the fountain—the necessary, ever-deepening onward flow of the sense of scripture itself, as it is carried forward in the consciousness of the Christian world; contrary to the Romanish dogma by which tradition, as the bearer of different contents altogether, is made coordinate with the Bible or even exalted above it.
43.
'These two principles, rightly apprehended, are only different, mutually supplementary sides of one and the same principle, and their living interpenetration forms the criterion of orthodox
Protestantism.
44. Opposition to the Roman Catholic extreme, according to the general law of historical progress, led the Reformers to place the strongest emphasis on justification and faith, scripture and preaching; whence the possibility of a one-sided development in which holiness and love, tradition and sacrament, might not be allowed to come to their full rights.
45. Respect for the Reformation as a divine work in no way forbids the admission that it included some mixture of error and sin; as where God builds a church, the devil erects a chapel by its side.
46.
In any view moreover the Reformation must be regarded as still incomplete. It needs yet its concluding act to unite what