- OUR interest in the orthodox doctrine de Christo mediatore would be materially lessened were we to omit to confront it, in the form it assumed in the seventeenth century, with the deliberate and determined resistance offered to it, with the help of all scientific appliances, by the Socinians. For in this polar opposition of the contending parties—both of which alike claimed to be loyal to Christ and Scripture, but which in fact had no points of contact except in the controversy about Christian truth—is seen the entire compass of the influences of that Christianity which at that period had separated itself from the political unity of the Western Church. The dispute, however, between the orthodox party and the Socinians was fruitless, because neither on the one side nor on the other was the root of the controversy laid bare. Lutherans and Calvinists maintain the idea of atonement as a whole, and Socinians deny it, because Christendom is regarded by the former as a religious community, by the latter as an ethical school.1 The conception of the Church as the fellowship which logically and really comes before the individual believer, and outside of which no subjective religion and no religious knowledge of God are possible, stands in immediate reciprocal connexion with the thought that Christ has reconciled men with God, and thereby founded the Church, and within it opened up to sinners access to God. The Socinians deny this idea, having no need for it, because in Christ, as the Founder of a school of morality, they merely look for that guidance and impulse towards moral self-culture which each one appropriates to himself as he may be able, without previously having been joined in fellowship with others of his kind. But this fundamental practical opposition remained obscure. And in fact the Socinians were on their side persuaded that they were, as men then expressed it, building up the Church, while they were only making a school. Still more unfavourable to the clearing up of the controversy was the circumstance that the tendency of Church progress amongst the successors of the Reformers was impeded, and all proper insight into the conditions of the existence of a Church rendered impossible to them by the growth of an excessive devotion to a theology of the schools. It is indeed true that on their side the true idea of the Church was never allowed to fall out of sight; but as the school element in the Church and the theological element in religion were over-valued, they came to present too close a resemblance in point of form with Socinianism; so that it was not possible to recognise the fundamental error of the merely scholastic view of Christendom which characterized the latter system. The Socinians who valued the theoretical side of Christianity only as instrumental for the ethical guidance of the individual subject, acquired in consequence of this a large-hearted toleration for theoretical aberrations, which resembles the normal universalism of a truly churchly consciousness. The orthodox party, on the other hand, appeared to have lost all interest in the universal Church in that narrowness of sympathy which characterizes a theoretical school. Thus the two tendencies produce a superficial impression precisely antithetic to their essential character; and thus insight into the contrast of their principles is made all the more difficult.
The construction of the Reformation churches was originally guided by the thought of the unity of the Church. Only, in opposition to the political form which that thought had assumed in the Roman Catholic doctrine and practice, it came to be requisite to define it as a necessary object of faith by means of characteristic marks, in which the Divine origin of the fellowship of the redeemed should be recognisable; and at the same time, in opposition to Anabaptism, to secure an orderly constitution in the Church. With respect to the former point, the fellowship of persons set apart by God was connected with the preaching of the word of God “according to its simple meaning,” and with the administration of the sacraments as these had been instituted; while, with reference to the other point, the office of preacher was recognised as that which is ordinarily intrusted with the administration of these divine means of grace. The champions of Catholicism also laid claim to the word of God; and in order to secure its authenticity as conveyed through human instrumentalities, the whole constitutional structure of the Romish Church was postulated. But the Reformers denied to their opponents the “simple meaning” of the word, establishing it in a much simpler way. For in a dissertation by Luther among the Articles of Torgau, which served as basis for the Augsburg Confession, the following is the explanation given wherefore the word of God is regarded as one of the conditions of the Church’s existence:—that “in it is clearly, properly, and rightly taught and set forth what Christ is and what the gospel; what is true repentance and fear of God; how forgiveness of sins is to be attained; what the authority and power of the keys in the Church is.”2 In the other document from which the Augsburg Confession was compiled—the Articles of Schwabach, to wit—the Church had been described as consisting of all believers in Christ who accept and teach all the preceding articles of doctrine, and also the objective saving efficacy of the Sacraments;3 but in the seventh Article of the Augsburg Confession the pura doctrina evangelii is restricted to a narrower range of fundamental articles of faith.4 And if, along with the due administration of the sacraments, only the pura doctrina evangelii in the already defined sense of that word was demanded as the human guarantee of God’s saving operation towards the founding of the Church, it follows that a theoretically defined representation of the supper was not included, but only recognition of the objective value of the sacraments presupposed. This fundamental religious doctrine of the Church has been explained by Melanchthon in the Apology for the Confession, and repeated in the 2d edition of the Loci Theologici (1535).