46. In any view moreover the Reformation must be regarded
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
The Principle of Protestantism has fallen asunder, to bring the subjective to a reconciliation with the objective.
47. Puritanism may be considered a sort of second reformation, called forth by the reappearance of Romanizing elements in the Anglican Church, and as such forms the basis to a great extent of American Protestantism, particularly in New England.
48.
Its highest recommendation, bearing clearly a divine signature, is presented in its deep practical earnestness as it regards religion, and its zeal for personal piety, by which it has been more successful perhaps than any other section of the church, for a time, in the work of saving individual souls.
49. However, it falls far behind the German Reformation by its revolutionary, unhistorical, and consequently unchurchly character, and carries in itself no protection whatever against an indefinite subdivision of the church into separate atomistic sects.
For having no conception at all of a historical development of Christianity, and with its negative attitude of blind irrational zeal toward its own past, it may be said to have armed its children with the same right and the same tendency, too, to treat its own authority with equal independence and contempt.
THE PRESENT STATE OF THE CHURCH
50. Protestantism has formed the starting point and center of almost all important world movements in the history of the last three centuries, and constitutes now also the main interest of the time.
51. 'The history of Protestantism in the spheres of religion, science, art, and government, especially since the commencement of the eighteenth century, may be regarded as the development of the principle of subjectivity, the consciousness of freedom.
52. In this development, however, it has gradually become estranged to a great extent from its own original nature, and fallen over dialectically into its opposite, according to the general course of history.
53.
Its grand maladies at this time are rationalism and sectarism.
Philip Schaff B27 54. Rationalism is one-sided theoretic religious subjectivism and its fullest and most perfect exhibition has taken place accordingly in Germany—the land of theory and science—and in the bosom of the Lutheran Church.
55. Sectarism is one-sided practical religious subjectivism and has found its classic ground within the territory of the Reformed
Church, in the predominantly practical countries, England and America.
56. These two maladies of Protestantism stand in a relation to it similar to that of the papacy to Catholicism in the Middle Ages; that is, they have a conditional historical necessity and an outward connection with the system to which they adhere, but contradict nevertheless and caricature its inmost nature.
57.
'The secular interests—science, art, government, and social life—have become since the Reformation always more and more dissociated from the church, in whose service they stood though with unfree subjugation in the Middle Ages, and in this separate form are advanced to a high state of perfection.
58. This is a false position, since the idea of the kingdom of God requires that all divinely constituted forms and spheres of life should be brought to serve him in the most intimate alliance with religion, that God may be All in all.
59. The orthodox Protestantism of our day, with all its different character in other respects, is distinguished in common with rationalism and sectarism, particularly in this country, by the quality of one-sided subjectivity; only with the advantage of course of a large amount of personal piety.
60.
Its great defect is the want of an adequate conception of the nature of the church and of its relation to the individual Christian on the one hand, and the general life of man on the other.
61. Hence proceeds, first, indifference toward sectarian, or at least denominational divisions, which are at war with the idea of the church as the Body of Christ.
62. Second, a want of respect for history, by which it is affected to fall back immediately and wholly upon the Scriptures without regard to the development of their contents in the life of the church as it has stood from the beginning.
The Principle of Protestantism pare 63. Third, an undervaluation of the sacraments as objective institutions of the Lord, independent of individual views and states.
64. Fourth, a disproportionate esteem for the service of preaching, with a corresponding sacrifice in the case of the liturgy, the standing objective part of divine worship, in which the whole congregation is called to pour forth its religious life to God.
65.
Fifth, a circumscribed conception of the all-pervading leavenlike nature of the gospel, involving an abstract separation of religion from the divinely established order of the world in other spheres.
66. To this must be added in the case of a number of denominations the fancy of their own perfection, an idea that their particular traditional style of religion can never be improved into anything better; which is a rejection of the Protestant principle of mobility and progress, and a virtual relapse accordingly into the ground error of the Romish Church.
67. From all this it is clear that the standpoint, and with it the wants of our time, is wholly different from that of the sixteenth century.
68. Our most immediate and most threatening danger is not now from the Church of Rome, but from the in part heterodox and antichristian, in part orthodox and pious, but always onesided and false subjectivism, by which the rights of the church are wronged in our own midst; which however must itself be considered again as indirectly the most alarming aspect of the danger that does in fact threaten us on the side of Rome, since one extreme serves always to facilitate the triumph of another.
69. 'The redeeming tendency of the age therefore is not such as looks directly to the emancipation of the individual and subjective from the bonds of authority, as at the time of the Reformation, but it is that rather which regards the claims of the objective in the true idea of the church.
70. Not until Protestantism shall have repented of its own faults and healed its own wounds, may it expect to prevail finally over the Church of Rome.
71. As this duty has been thus far in a great measure neglected,
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it is to be taken as a divine judgment in the case that popery has been enabled to make such formidable advances lately, especially in England and the United States.
72. Puseyism (with which of course we must not confound the spurious afterbirth of fantastic, hollow-hearted affectation, always to be expected in such a case) may be considered in its original intention and best tendency a well-meant, but insufficient and unsuccessful attempt to correct the ultra subjectivity of Protestantism.
73.
In this view we have reason to rejoice in its appearance, as indicating on the part of the Protestant world a waking consciousness of the malady under which it labors in this direction, and serving also to promote right church feeling.
74. By its reverence for church antiquity it exerts a salutary influence against what may be viewed, as the reigning error of our time, a wild revolutionary zeal for liberty, coupled with a profane scorn of all that is holy in the experience of the past.
75.
So also its stress laid upon forms exhibits a wholesome reaction against the irrational hyperspiritualism so common among even the best Protestants; which the doctrine of the resurrection alone, as taught in the Bible, is enough to prove fallacious.
76. Church forms serve two general purposes: first, they are for the lower stages of religious development conductors over into the life of the spirit; second, they are for the church at large the necessary utterance or corporealization of the spirit, in the view in which Oetinger's remark holds good: "Corporeity is the scope of God's ways."
77. All turns simply on this that the form be answerable to the contents and be actuated by the spirit.
A formless spiritualism is no whit better than a spiritless formalism. The only right condition is a sound spirit within a sound body.
78. The grand defect of Puseyism, however, is its unprotestant character in not recognizing the importance of the Reformation and the idea of progress in the life of the church since.
79.
It is for this reason only half-historical and half-catholic, since its sympathy and respect for the past life of the church stop short with the sixteenth century.
80.
Its view of the church altogether is outward and mechani-
The Principle of Protestantism cal, excluding the conception of a living development through the successive periods of its history.
81. This character appears particularly in its theory of episcopal succession, which is only a new form of the old pharisaic Judaism, and moreover makes the apostolicity of the church dependent on a historical inquiry (in the case of which besides no absolute certainty is possible), resting it thus on a wholly precarious human foundation.
82. Puseyism is to be viewed then as nothing more than a simple reaction, which has served to bring to light the evils of ultra pseudo-Protestant individualism, but offers no remedy for it save the perilous alternative of falling back to a standpoint already surmounted in the way of religious progress.
83. The true standpoint, all necessary for the wants of the time, is that of Protestant Catholicism, or genuine historical progress.
84. This holds equally remote from unchurchly subjectivity and all Romanizing churchism, though it acknowledges and seeks to unite in itself the truth which les at the ground of both these extremes.
85. Occupying this conservative historical standpoint, from which the moving of God's Spirit is discerned in all periods of the church, we may not in the first place surrender anything essential of the positive acquisition secured by the Reformation, whether Lutheran or Reformed.
86. Neither may we again absolutely negate the later development of Protestantism, not even rationalism and sectarism themselves, but must appropriate to ourselves rather the element of truth they contain, rejecting only the vast alloy of error from which it is to be extracted.
87. Rationalism and sectarism possess historical right, so far as the principle of subjectivity, individuality, singleness, and independence can be said to be possessed of right; that is, so far as this comes not in contradiction to the principle of objectivity, generality, the church, authority, and law, so far then as it continues subordinate to these forces.
88. Rationalism was a necessary schoolmaster for orthodox theology, destroying its groundless prejudices and compelling it
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both to accept a more scientific form in general, and also in particular to allow the human, the earthly, the historical, in the theanthropic nature of Christ and the church, to come more fully to its rights.
89. While however the earlier historico-critical rationalism has promoted a right understanding of the natural and historical in Christianity, this understanding in its case remains still but half true, since it has no organ for zdeas, the inward life of which history after all is but the body.
90. The later speculative rationalism, or pantheistic mythologism, or the "Hegelingians'" as they have been deridingly styled
(Strauss and his colleagues), which from the Ebionitic standpoint of the old system has swung over to the opposite extreme of docetic
Gnostic idealism, fails to apprehend the idea of Christianity in its full truth and vitality, and substitutes for it a phantom or mere shadow, since it has no organ for historical reality, the outward life without which after all the idea must perish.
91. As in the first centuries, the theology of the Catholic Church gradually developed itself through scientific struggles with the two ground heresies—Ebionism or christianizing Judaism, and Gnosticism or christianizing heathenism—so now also we are to look for a higher orthodoxy, overmastering inwardly both forms of Protestant rationalism, which shall bring the real and the ideal into the most intimate union and recognize in full as well as the eternal spirit of Christianity as its historical body.
92. The germs of all this are at hand in the later movements and achievements of the believing German theology, and need only a further development to issue at last in a full dogmatical reformation.
93. Separation, where it is characterized by religious life, springs almost always from some real evil in the state of the church, and hence sectarism is to be regarded as a necessary disciplinarian and reformer of the church in its practical life.
94. Almost every sect represents in strong relief some single particular aspect of piety, and contributes to the fuller evolution of individual religious activity.
95. Since however the truths of the gospel form an inseparable unity, and the single member can become complete only along