Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi

[after being badgered in class by his students, according to tradition, Nevin produced a small pamphlet entitled the “Anxious Bench”] In this first edition he explained the difference between the “system of catechism” and the system of the “bench”, [sic.] the former informed by sound teaching, pastoral visitation, and congregational discipline and the latter by a moment of emotional excitement, but neglected the real and vital issues of the Christian life such as a genuine repentance and faith….

[Nevin] saw the Church not as a gathering of converted individuals but as a holy mother who imparts tne new life of Christ to all her children…. Christ lives in the church and the particular members receive Christ through her.

[Shaff] diagnosed the many diseases of modern protestantism. He argued that the tradition of the church was indespensable to the understanding of th emessage of Scripture, that denominational divisions were at war with the scriptural idea of the church as the body of Christ, that in the historic Church you can see a living development thorugh the successive periods of its history, and that Protestantism would not be fulfilled until the best features of it were united with the best features of Catholicism in the new synthesis called Evangelical Catholicism.

…The development of the papacy in the Middle Ages was [an expression of the Christian faith according to the given historical circumstances] - and a legitimate expression at that. Equally legitimate was the Protestant emphasis upon the freedom of th eindividual Christian. Yet all such trends are subject to correction according to Scriptures. Finally Schaff observed that each stage in this organic growth produces its own peculiar diseases. If there were malformations in the Middle AGes, how many more are there in modern Protestantism, which has degenerated into what Schaff called “unchurchly subjectivism.” He meant a type of religion in which the emotional replaces the sacraments, sound teaching and discipline, in which according there is avast proliforation of sects.