§ 38. The Evangelical Confessions of Faith.
The Evangelical Confessions of faith date mostly from the sixteenth century (1530 to 1577), the productive period of Protestantism, and are nearly contemporaneous with the Tridentine standards of the Church of Rome. They are the work of an intensely theological and polemical age, when religious controversy absorbed the attention of all classes of society. They embody the results of the great conflict with the Papacy. A smaller class of Confessions (as the Articles of Dort and the Westminster Standards) belongs to the seventeenth century, and grew out of internal controversies among Protestants themselves. The eighteenth century witnessed a powerful revival of practical religion and missionary zeal through the labors of the Pietists and Moravians in Germany, and the Methodists in England and North America, but, in its ruling genius, it was irreligious and revolutionary, and undermined the authority of all creeds. In the nineteenth century a new interest in the old creeds was awakened, and several attempts were made to reduce the lengthy confessions to brief popular summaries, or to formularize the doctrinal consensus of the different evangelical denominations. The present tendency among Protestants is to diminish rather than to increase the number of articles of faith, and to follow in any new formula the simplicity of the Apostles' Creed; while Romanism pursues the opposite course.
The symbols of the Reformation are very numerous, but several of them were merely provisional, and subsequently superseded by maturer statements of doctrine. Some far exceed the proper limits of a creed, and are complete systems of theology for the use of the clergy. It was a sad mistake and a source of incalculable mischief to incorporate the results of every doctrinal controversy with the confession of faith, and to bind lengthy discussions, with all their metaphysical distinctions and subtleties, upon the conscience of every minister and teacher. There is a vast difference between theological opinions and articles of faith. The development of theology as a science must go on, and will go on in spite of all these shackles.
As to the theology of the confessions of orthodox Protestantism, we may distinguish in them three elements, the oecumenical, the Augustinian, and the evangelical proper.
1. The oecumenical element. In theology and Christology the Protestant symbols agree with the Greek and Roman Churches, and also in the other articles of the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds from the creation of the world to the resurrection of the body.
2. The Augustinian element is found in anthropology, or the doctrines of sin and grace, predestination, and perseverance. Here the Protestant confessions agree with the system of Augustine, who had more influence upon the reformers than any uninspired teacher. The Latin Church during the Middle Ages had gradually fallen into Pelagian and semi-Pelagian doctrines and practices, although these had been condemned in the fifth century. The Calvinistic confessions, however, differ from the Lutheran in the logical conclusions derived from the Augustinian premises, which they hold in common.
3. The Evangelical Protestant and strictly original element is found in soteriology, and in all that pertains to subjective Christianity, or the personal appropriation of salvation. Here belong the doctrines of the rule of faith, of justification by faith, of the nature and office of faith and good works, of the assurance of salvation; here also the protest against all those doctrines of Romanism which are deemed inconsistent with the Scripture principle and with justification by faith. The papacy, the sacrifice of the mass, transubstantiation, purgatory, indulgences, meritorious and hypermeritorious works, the worship of saints, images, and relics are rejected altogether, while the doctrine of the Church and the Sacraments was essentially modified.
§ 39. The Lutheran and Reformed Confessions.
Literature.
Max. Göbel : Die religiöse Eigenthümlichkeit der luther. und reformirten Kirche. Bonn, 1837. (This book started a good deal of discussion in Germany on the peculiar genius of the two churches.)
C. B. Hundeshagen : Die Conflicte des Zwinglianismus, Lutherthums, und Calvinismus in der Bernischen Landeskirche von 1522-1558. Berne, 1843. (The esteemed author died in Bonn, 1872.)
Merle D'aubigné (d. 1872): Luther and Calvin, translated into English, New York, 1846.
Alex. Schweizer : Glaubenslehre der reformirten Kirche. Zürich, 1844, Vol. I. pp. 7-83.
M. Schneckenburger : Vergleichende Darstellung des luther. und reform. Lehrbegriffs. Stuttgart, 1855, 2 vols. (Very acute and discriminating.) Comp. the introduction by Güder, the editor.
Philip Schaff: Germany; its Universities, Theology, and Religion. Philadelphia, 1857, Ch. xviii. and xx., Lutheranism and Reform and the Evang. Union, pp. 167-185.
Essays on the same subject by Lücke, in the Deutsche Zettschrift, Berlin, for 1853, Nos. 3 sqq.; Hagenbach, in the Studien und Kritiken for 1854, Vol. I. pp. 23-34.
Jul. Müller (Professor in Halle): Lutheri et Calvini sententiæ de Sacra Coena inter se comparatæ, Halle, 1858. Also in his Dogmatische Abhandlungen, Bremen, 1870, pp. 404-467.
Catholicism assumed from the beginning, and retains to this day, two distinct and antagonistic types, the Greek and the Roman, which represent a Christian transformation of the antecedent and underlying nationalities of speculative Greece and world-conquering Rome. In like manner, but to a much larger extent (as may be expected from the greater liberty allowed to national and individual rights and peculiarities), is Protestantism divided since the middle of the sixteenth century into the Lutheran and the Reformed Confessions. To the former belong the established churches in most of the German States, in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, and all others which call themselves after Luther; the Reformed--in the historical arid Continental sense of the term [384] --embraces the national evangelical churches of Switzerland, France, Holland, some parts of Germany, England, Scotland, with their descendants in America and the British colonies.
The designation Reformed is insufficient to cover all the denominations and sects which have sprung directly or indirectly from this family since the Reformation, especially in England during the conflict of the Established Church with Puritanism and nonconformity; and hence in English and American usage it has given way to sectional and specific titles, such as Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Wesleyans or Methodists, etc. The term Calvinism designates not a church, but a theological school in the Reformed Church, which in some sections allows also Arminian views. Puritanism, likewise, is not a term for a distinct ecclesiastical organization, but for a tendency and party which exerted a powerful influence in the Anglican and other Reformed Churches on questions of doctrine, government, discipline, and worship.
Among the original Reformed Churches the Anglican stands out in many respects distinctly as a third type of Protestantism: it is the most powerful and the most conservative of all the national or established churches of the Reformation, and retains the entire basis of the mediæval hierarchy, without the papacy; it is a compromise between Catholicism and Protestantism, cemented by the royal supremacy, and leaves room, for Romanizing high-churchism and Puritanic low-churchism, as well as for intervening broad-churchism. But its original doctrinal status was moderately Calvinistic, and for a time it made even common cause with the ultra-Calvinistic Synod of Dort.
The doctrinal difference between Lutheranism and Reform was originally confined to two articles, namely, the nature of Christ's presence in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, and the extent of God's sovereignty in the ante-historic and premundane act of predestination. At the Conference held in Marburg, Luther and Zwingli agreed in fourteen and a half articles, and differed only in the other half of the fifteenth article, concerning the real presence. [385] The Swiss reformer saw in this difference no obstacle to fraternal fellowship with the Wittenbergers, with whom, he said, he would rather agree than with any people on earth, and, with tears in his eyes, he extended his hand to Luther; but the great man, otherwise so generous and liberal, who had himself departed from the Catholic Church in much more essential points, felt compelled in his conscience to withhold his hand on account of a general difference of 'spirit,' [386] which revealed itself in subsequent controversies, and defeated many attempts at reunion.
The internal quarrels among Christian brethren, which are found more or less in all denominations and ages, [387] are the most humiliating and heart-sickening chapters in Church history, but they are overruled by Providence for the fuller development of theology, a wider spread of Christianity, and a deeper divine harmony, which will ultimately, in God's own good time, spring out of human discord.
The two great families of Protestantism are united in all essential articles of faith, and their members may and ought to cultivate intimate Christian fellowship without sacrifice of principle or loyalty to their communion. Yet they are distinct ecclesiastical individualities, and Providence has assigned them peculiar fields of labor. Their differences in theology, government, worship, and mode of piety are rooted in diversities of nationality, psychological constitution, education, external circumstances, and gifts of the Spirit.
1. The Lutheran Church arose in monarchical Germany, and bears the impress of the German race, of which Luther was the purest and strongest type. The Reformed Church began, almost simultaneously, in republican Switzerland, and spread in France, Holland, England, and Scotland. The former extended, indeed, to kindred Scandinavia, and, by emigration, to more distant countries. But outside of Germany it is stunted in its normal growth, or undergoes, with the change of language and nationality, an ecclesiastical transformation. [388] The Reformed Church, on the other hand, while it originated in the German cantons of Switzerland, and found a home in several important parts of Germany, as the Palatinate, the Lower Rhine, and (through the influence of the House of Hohenzollern since the Elector Sigismund, 1614) in Brandenburg and other provinces of Prussia, was yet far more fully and vigorously developed among the maritime and freer nations, especially the Anglo-Saxon race, and follows its onward march to the West and the missionary fields of the East. The modern Protestant movements among the Latin races in the South of Europe likewise mostly assume the Reformed, some even a strictly Calvinistic type. Converts from the excessive ritualism of Rome are apt to swing to the opposite extreme of Puritan simplicity.
Germany occupies the front rank in sacred learning and scientific theology, but the future of evangelical Protestantism is mainly intrusted to the Anglo-American churches, which far surpass all others in wealth, energy, liberality, philanthropy, and a firm hold upon the heart of the two great nations they represent.
2. The Lutheran Church, as its name indicates, was rounded and shaped by the mighty genius of Luther, who gave to the Germans a truly vernacular Bible, Catechism, and hymn-book, and who thus meets them at every step in their public and private devotions. We should, indeed, not forget the gentle, conciliatory, and peaceful genius of Melanchthon, which never died out in the Lutheran Confession, and forms the connecting link between it and the Reformed. He represents the very spirit of evangelical union, and practiced it in his intimate friendship with the stern and uncompromising Calvin, who in turn touchingly alludes to the memory of his friend. But the influence of the 'Præceptor Germaniæ' was more scholastic and theological than practical and popular. Luther was the originating, commanding reformer, 'born,' as he himself says, 'to tear up the stumps and dead roots, to cut away the thorns, and to act as a rough forester and pioneer;' while 'Melanchthon moved gently and calmly along, with his rich gifts from God's own hand, building and planting, sowing and watering.' Luther was, as Melanchthon called him, the Protestant Elijah. He spoke almost with the inspiration and authority of a prophet and apostle, and his word shook the Church and the Empire to the base. He can be to no nation what he is to the German, as little as Washington can be to any nation what he is to the American. [389] And yet, strange to say, with all the overpowering influence of Luther, his personal views on the canon [390] and on predestination [391] were never accepted by his followers; and if we judge him by the standard of the Form of Concord, he is a heretic in his own communion as much as St. Augustine, on account of his doctrines of sin and grace, is a heretic in the Roman Church, revered though he is as the greatest among the Fathers.