History of the Development of the Church under
Modern European Forms of Civilization.
§ 121. CHARACTER AND DISTRIBUTION OF MODERN CHURCH HISTORY.
In the Reformation of the sixteenth century the intelligence of
Germany, which had hitherto been under the training and tutelage of
the Romish church, reached maturity by the application of the formal
and material principles of Protestantism,--the sole normative authority
of Scripture, and justification by faith alone without works of merit.
It emancipated itself from its schoolmaster, who, for selfish ends,
had made and still continued to make strenuous efforts to check every
movement towards independence, every endeavour after ecclesiastical,
theological, and scientific freedom, every struggle after evangelical
reform. Yet this emancipation was not completely effected in all the
purely German nationalities, much less among those Romanic and Slavonic
peoples which had bowed their necks to the papal hierarchy. The Romish
church of the Reformation not only adhered to the form and content of
its former unevangelical constitution, but also still further developed
and formally elaborated its creed in the same unevangelical direction,
and the result was a split in the western church into an Evangelical
Protestant and a Roman Catholic church. Then again the principles of
the Reformation were set forth in different ways, and Protestantism
branched off into two divisions, the Lutheran and the Reformed. Besides
these three new western churches and the one old eastern church, which
all rested upon the common œcumenical basis of the old Catholic church,
a variety of sects sprang out of them. Through these greater and lesser
divisions, modern church history, where, with some advantages and
some disadvantages, one church is pitted against another, possesses
a character entirely different from the church history of earlier times.
Modern church history naturally falls into four divisions.
The distinguishing characteristic of each is found partly in
the opposition of particular churches to one another, partly
in the antagonism of faith and unbelief. The transition from
one to another corresponds generally with the boundaries of
the centuries. The =sixteenth century= forms the Reformation
period, in which the new Protestantism, parted from the old
Roman Catholicism, cast off the deformatory elements which had
attached themselves to it, and developed for itself a system
of doctrine, worship, and constitution; while the Roman Catholic
church, from the middle of the century, set to work upon a
counter-Reformation, by which it succeeded in large measure
in reconquering the field that had been lost. The =seventeenth
century= was characterized on the Protestant side as the age
of orthodoxy, in which confessionalism obtained undivided
supremacy, deteriorating however in doctrine and life into
a frigid formalism, which called forth the movement of Pietism
as a corrective; but, on the Roman Catholic side, it was
characterized as a period of continued successful restoration.
In the =eighteenth century= begins the struggle against the
dominant church and the prevailing conceptions of Christianity
in the forms of deism, naturalism, and rationalism within
both the Protestant and Catholic churches. The fourth division
embraces the =nineteenth century=. The newly awakened faith
strives vigorously with rationalism, and then, on the Protestant
side, splits into unionism and confessionalism; while, on the
Roman Catholic side, it makes its fullest development in a
zealous ultramontanism. But rationalism again renews its youth
under the cloak of science, and alongside of it appears a more
undisguised unbelief in the distinctly antichristian forms of
pantheism, materialism, and communism, which seeks to annihilate
everything Christian in church and state, in science and faith,
in social and political life.