Mercersburg theology makes accordingly proper account of the ancient faith of the Church as embodied in the Creed; as well as of the Church itself in all ages. Hence its invaluable productions in the department of Church history (vide Dr. Schaff’s Church History). While it takes the position that Protestant theology is an advance over Catholic theology, it yet maintains that it is the reproduction of the latter under a deeper and profounder apprehension of its truths, and not the production of a new theology. So with the faith of the Church, and the Church itself. The Church of the Reformation, with its faith and doctrines, was not the product of any individual or number of individuals, who started fresh from the Bible in reconstructing the Church and its faith and doctrines. It was the result of the best life of the Catholic Church itself, which was tending and struggling toward this end for centuries, until it reached its culmination in the Great Reformation.
Modern theology has no sense and appreciation for any such organic connection with the past history and life of the Church. Its study and labor in Church history is rather to find cause to be confirmed in its theory, the very opposite to this. The Reformation was, accordingly, not the result of a life-process, or historical development; but merely the work of individual men, who, finding the Church not to their idea, left it as the synagogue of Satan, and reconstructed a new one on what they considered to be the plain sense of the Bible, much in the same style in which this is attempted by modern sects. But this theory wrongs the Reformation in its most vital parts. It is virtually giving up the Reformation as a falling away; as the anti-Christian power that arrays itself against the mystery of the incarnation, of which the Church in all ages is its continuation in the world.
According to Modern theology, these teachings of Mercersburg would lead the Church back to Rome. But how, it has never been made to appear. Certainly not by the process of organic development, which never goes backward. Only individuals who are not comprehended in this organic process, go backward. The Church as an organism can never retrograde. All organic life is bound to go forward; and if Protestant Christianity is what Mercersburg theology contends for, ti can never lead us back to Rome. The great danger lies precisely in the modern theory here brought to view. Earnest minds, who accept it as the true exposition of Protestantism, are inevitably carried over to Rome, to escape its logical consequences, that would ingulf them in the abyss of infidelity. The successful vindication of Protestantism depends, therefore, upon the successful refutation of this modern theory of the Church.
Samuel Miller, A Treatise on Mercersburg Theology; or, Mercersburg and Modern Theology Compared pg. 54-57
