The Church of Rome made the ridiculous claim to infallibility. With this claim the entire system of the Roman Catholic Church stands or falls. But this highest principle, the infallibility of the Pope, is like the highest principle of most philosophical systems: it is merely asserted, but never proved.It forms the proton pseudos, the grand falsehood, on which the whole system rests; and at the same time its central sin: creature deification, making itself identical with the universal Church, yea, with the absolute kingdom of God, out of which all are heretics only and children of perdition.Schaff believed that Protestantism had shaken this foundation of infallibility from its place. Protestantism maintains that infallibility belongs to Christ and his word alone, and to all else so far only as it may be joined to him in an organic union. In this present world, this union is progressive, and hence always incomplete. The Church has error along with the truth, and although this error may not cast out the truth, ti does frequently obscure the truth. Concerning the Protestant Church, Schaff believed that it carries its heavenly treasure in earthen vessels. The Church is subject to all the imperfections of finitude and hence grows in appreciation of the truth of the gospel.
Schaff was not naive enough to eliminate tradition from the Church altogether. He merely stated that the forms of ritual, together with historical and dogmatic tradition, occupy a secondary place, and are always to be measured by the extent of their agreement with the scriptures. Schaff believed that the reformers went too far at times in opposing ritualistic forms. Protestants should reject all those forms which conflict with the true life of the Church and serve merely to promote a dead mechanical religion, but they should retain all forms that suitably embody and express the Christian spirit.
The historical traditions of the church fathers should be accepted as historical testimony and not as infallible dictation, suggested Schaff. The credibility of the individual writer and his connection with the apostolic age determine the value of his writings. “Respect for them [the church fathers] is not to shackle the farther progress of exegesis, as in the Church of Rome.”
The Protestants therefore should reject all those dogmatic traditions which cannot find warrant in the scriptures: e.g., worship of the Virgin Mary and the saints, purgatory, and indulgences. These doctrines are to be regarded as arbitrary human inventions. These doctrines are to be regarded as arbitrary human inventions; but, Schaff stressed, Protestants must not do away with the great ecumenical creeds.
Tradition in this sense is absolutely indispensable… This tradition therefore is not a part of the divine word separately from that which is written, but the contents of scripture itself as apprehended and settled by the Church against heresies past and always new appearing; not an independent source of revelation, but the one fountain of the written word, only rolling itself forward in the stream of Church consciousness.
With this view firmly in mind, Schaff felt, we can escape the insuperable difficulties which face those Protestants who invest the Bible with the most abstract, isolated character. The Bible is beheld only through the medium of tradition, and it is understood only as mirrored in the present consciousness of the particular Church to which one belongs.
from Luther J. Binkley, The Mercersburg Theology pg. 56, 57
I’ve enjoyed studying Schaff and Nevin’s proposed liturgy… they make find use of the Book of Common Prayer, the Catholic Apostolic Liturgy, the historic Palatine Liturgy and the Mayer German Reformed Liturgy. It is interesting to see them weave these resources together as exactly the kind of exercise in the appreciative adaptation of tradition to the reformed cause. While I like the work, I think most modern people would find it (as most liturgies from the Reformation) much more “didactic” and not as participatory for the congregation as I might like these days
.