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

them all, not only the one rule of faith, but she does what no other church
does: acknowledging the Bible as the only authority, she gives to her
various nationalities one confession of faith, the Augsburg Confession, of
which the most popular historian of the Reformation, a French Calvinist,
says: "It will ever remain one of the masterpieces of the human mind
enlightened by the Spirit of God," and which Bishop Bull calls "the
greatest, the most noble and ancient of all the confessions of the Reformed
Churches." This immortal document furnishes an integral defining term to
the Lutheran Church. Through all time and in all lands this is hers: it is her
grand distinction that she is the Church of the Augsburg Confession.
The Lutheran Church. The Radical Protestant Churches. The
Romish Church.
It has been said with some truth that the Evangelical Lutheran
development of Christianity is closely allied with that of Augustine, but it
is wholly remote from his fatalistic tendencies, and from his indeterminate
and often self-contradictory attitude toward many important points of
doctrine. The Romish Church makes divine things objects of sense, the
ultra-Protestant principle would make them objects of the understanding,
the Lutheran Church holds them as objects of faith. The Romish Church
too much confounds the divine and the human, as for example, in the
person of Christ, in Scripture, in the Church, and in the Sacraments. Ultra-
Protestantism separates them too much. The Evangelical Lutheran
Church holds herself alike remote from confounding and from separating
them, and maintains them as at once distinct in their essence, and
inseparable in their union.: 106 "Zwingle's labors were from the outward to
the inward, Luther's wholly from the inward to the outward. The
Reformed Reformation, like all the earlier efforts, would probably have
failed, if the Reformed had not received from Luther the internal element of
faith. It cannot be denied that that Reformation which was actually
brought to pass, was begun by Luther. With full justice, in this respect, he
is entitled to be called the first Reformer." 107 "The Lutheran Church is the
most glorious and most complete earthly image of the invisible Church.
106 Kurtz, Lehrb. d. K. G., ed 6th, 1868, ~ 140.
107 Goebel, 52.