Having Two Legs: Schaff

Showing posts with label Schaff. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

The Temporary Historical Necessity of Protestantism

Schaf insists that Protestantism earns its right to exist only for as long as we offer to the rest of the Church significant correction in areas that need it. A sect, if we are willing to admit the title, "loses its right to exist, in the same degree in which the body from which it is a secession has corrected the faults that led to it... If sects would be true to themselves, they must as soon as they have fulfilled their commission unite themselves again with the general life of the Church, that they may thus as organic members of the body acquire new vital energy; and the Church, on her side, should make special efforts to gather once more under her motherly protection and care, the children that have forsaken her and are now estranged from her bosom. To this duty the Reformed Church is specially called, as the largest part of these modern separatist movements have sprung from her communion." (134-135)

Episcopacy and the Leaven of the Pharisees

Schaf also takes the Anglo-Catholic Oxford movement to task: He suggests that many who are in this school are attracted to it by a "feeling of poetical romance" and not a few of them have aspirations to the hierarchy inherent in an episcopal system. And for all their insistence on history, Schaf says that this is the glaring hole in their system. The "utter misapprehension of the divine significance of the Reformation, with its consequent development, that is of the entire Protestant period of the Church." They have no conception of historical development, much less the great blessing of the Reformation to the broader Church. He calls their "external, mechanical conception of the Church and episcopacy" nothing more than the "old leaven of the Pharisees." He bases his assertions on the fact that there is no scriptural authority for such a rigid apostolic succession as is commonly held in those communions that insist upon it. There is not high priestly caste in the Christian Church, clergy are servant-leaders of the flock, but are in an important sense still members of the priesthood of all believers. Their's is a specific calling in the body of Christ which includes real authority, but it is not a hierarchical system of automatic authority. Finally he scoffs at those who would think that merely returning to an episcopal polity would fix all the problems of Protestantism: "Preposterous imagination! Can the Church be renovated, by putting on a new coat?" (122-126)

The Prostitution of Protestantism

Schaf decries the multiplication of denominations and sects in Christendom and insists that this is not inherent in the Protestant principle: "If such were the fact, the Reformation must stand in direct contradiction to the holy scriptures, and be adjudged by its own umpire to condemnation, as a sinful work of man... Teh sect-system, like Rationalism, is a prostitution and caricature of true Protestantism, and nothing else... Away with human denominations, down with religious sects! Let our watchword be: One spirit and one body! One Shepherd and one flock!... Rationalism and Sectarianism are the most dangerous enemies of the church at the present time. They are both but different sides of one and the same principle, a onesided, false subjectivity, sundered from the authority of the objective. Rationalism is theoretic Sectarianism; Sectarianism is practical Rationalism." (119, 121)

Monday, August 25, 2008

Get Rid of Your Own Popery First

Schaf identifies rationalism as a problem that has infected both Protestant and Roman Churches. Of course keeping in mind that Schaf was writing in the mid nineteenth century, this is still fairly prophetic as things have tended. But whatever the case, he suggests that whatever common enemies and problems we have ought to be solved first. Before taking aim at eachother there ought first to be a concerted effort to eradicate common philosophical problems. He says, "Luther and Calvin, if they should make their appearance now, would act very differently, in the altered state of things, from what they did three hundred year ago. Their main zeal would be directed no doubt against such purely negative pseudo-protestantism [Protestant Rationalism], as something altogether worse than popery itself..." And turning to the Protestant problem with rationalism he exhorts us: "Let us first with united strength expel the devil from our own temple, into which he has stolen under the passport of our excessive toleration, before we proceed to exorcise and cleanse the dome of St. Peter." (p. 104-5)