The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

Episcopal" unites that nickname with a form of government older and
wider than Methodism. The name "Baptists" only indicates the doctrine
concerning the external mode and the proper candidates for a Christian
sacrament, and covers a great number of communions which have nothing
else in common. The name "Reformed" applies to a species that belongs to
a genus. There is, indeed, in every case, a history which explains, if it does
not justify, these names: nevertheless, every one of them, as the distinctive
name of a communion, is open to the charge of claiming too much,
expressing too little, or of thrusting an accident into the place of an
essential principle. The necessity of distinctive names arises from the
indisputable divisions of Christendom, and in the posture of all the facts the
name of Luther defines the character of a particular Church as no other
could. It has been borne specifically by but one Church; and that Church,
relieved as she is of all the responsibility of assuming it, need not be
ashamed of it. No name of a mere man is more dear to Christendom and
to humanity. It is a continual remembrancer of the living faith, the untiring
energy, the love of Christ and of men, on the part of one who did such
eminent service to the Church, that men cannot think of her without
thinking of him.
The name thus given her in scorn by her foes stands, for historical
reasons, in conjunction with the name she first chose for herself. As
distinct from the Romish Church, and all churches which obscure the
grace of the Gospel, or do not confess its doctrines in all their fulness, let
her consent to be called THE EVANGELICAL LUTHERAN
CHURCH, to testify, if God so please, to the end of time, that she is
neither ashamed of the Gospel of Christ, nor of Christ's servant who, in the
presence of earth and of hell, restored that Gospel, preached it, lived it, and
died in the triumphs of its faith.
Our age has been extraordinarily fertile in efforts at defining the
distinctive and antithetical characteristics of the Lutheran and Reformed
Churches. One age develops principles--another speculates on them. The
sixteenth century was creative--the nineteenth is an age of cosmogonies:
the one made worlds the other disputes how they were made. "The owl of
Minerva,”