Christian Dogmatics; A Compendium of the Doctrines of Christianity

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: church, like the Catholic, confesses that the Spirit of the Lord is with the Church unto the end of the world, leading it into all truth; but that perfect union of the Spirit of God and man, which is called Inspiration, and which constitutes the essence of the apostolate, it assigns exclusively to the beginning of the Church, to the period of its foundation; and, although it admits the relative validity of tradition, it yet regards the Holy Scriptures of the New Testament as the only perfect, authentic and absolutely canonical expression of the original fulness of the apostolic spirit. But the difference here indicated rests on another which lies still deeper a difference in the conception of the essence of Christianity itself. The Evangelical Church views Christianity as a Gospel; as glad tidings of the new life and the new creation in Christ, offered to men as a free gift of heavenly grace; whereas the Catholic Church for the most part regards faith as a new law, and Christ as a new lawgiver. Hence, representing the Gospel merely as an external authority to which the believer must yield, and not recognizing the principle that the gospel is to be freely accepted, and to be developed anew in every believer's inner experience, the legal church, for this very reason, cannot be satisfied with a canon of faith which, like the Holy Scriptures, contains what the church needs for the preservation of the true doctrine only in an undeveloped though completed form. It requires a canon in which every particular element is developed; it requires a hierarchy endowed with power to expound the law with infallible authority in all its single precepts. Catholicism does not inquire after any internal canon found in the Christian experience of believers, but lays all the more stress on the exter...