Schaff - History of the Christian Church Vol. 8 - Media Sabda Org

92
find purer and holier men than St. Augustin and Calvin, the chief
champions of this very system which bears their name. The personal
assurance of election fortified the Reformers, the Huguenots, the Puritans,
and the Covenanters against doubt and despondency in times of trial and
temptation. In this personal application the Reformed doctrine of
predestination is in advance of that of Augustin. Moreover, every one who
has some perception of the metaphysical difficulties of reconciling the fact
of sin with the wisdom and holiness of God, and harmonizing the demands
of logic and of conscience, will judge mildly of any earnest attempt at the
solution of the apparent conflict of divine sovereignty and human
responsibility.
And yet we must say that the Reformers, following the lead of the great
saint of Hippo, went to a one-sided extreme. Melanchthon felt this, and
proposed the system of synergism, which is akin to the semi-Pelagian and
Arminian theories. Oecolampadius kept within the limits of Christian
experience and expressed it in the sound sentence, “Salus nostra ex Deo,
perditio nostra ex nobis.” We must always keep in mind both the divine
and the human, the speculative and the practical aspects of this problem of
ages; in other words, we must combine divine sovereignty and human
responsibility as complemental truths. There is a moral as well as an
intellectual logic,—a logic of the heart and conscience as well as a logic of
the head. The former must keep the latter in check and save it from running
into supralapsarianism and at last into fatalism and pantheism, which is just
as bad as Pelagianism.
3. Original sin and guilt. Here Zwingli departed from the Augustinian and
Catholic system, and prepared the way for Arminian and Socinian opinions.
He was far from denying the terrible curse of the fall and the fact of
original sin; but he regarded original sin as a calamity, a disease, a natural
defect, which involves no personal guilt, and is not punishable until it
reveals itself in actual transgression. It is, however, the fruitful germ of
actual sin, as the inborn rapacity of the wolf will in due time prompt him to
tear the sheep. f154
4. The doctrine of the sacraments, and especially of the Lord’s Supper, is
the most characteristic feature of the Zwinglian, as distinct from the
Lutheran, theology. Calvin’s theory stands between the two, and tries to
combine the Lutheran realism with the Zwinglian spiritualism. This subject
has been sufficiently handled in previous chapters. f155