The Founding of the Church by Christ and His Apostles.
§ 12. CHARACTER OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEGINNINGS.
The propriety in a treatise on general church history of separating
the Times of Jesus and the Times of the Apostles, closely connected
therewith, from the History of the Development of the Church, and
giving to them a distinct place under the title of the History of the
Beginnings, rests on the fact that in those times we have the germs and
principles of all that follows. The unique capacity of the Apostles,
resulting from special enlightenment and endowment, makes that which
they have done of vital importance for all subsequent development. In
our estimation of each later form of the church’s existence we must
go back to the doctrine and practice of Christ and His Apostles as the
standard, not as to a finally completed form that has exhausted all
possibilities of development, and made all further advance and growth
impossible or useless, but rather as to the authentic fresh germs and
beginnings of the church, so that not only what in later development is
found to have existed in the same form in the beginning is recognised as
genuinely Christian, but also that which is seen to be a development and
growth of that primitive form.