Rick Phillips posts a great quotation from Schaff on Roman Catholicism. While it may seem simplistic, it think it is quite reasonable to see Trent as the birth of a new church–moreso than anything resulting from the Reformation. Reading this post from Rick reminds me of Peter Leithart’s excellent review of The Principle of Protestantism
Schaff is an excellent writer especially for Evangelicals who might be tempted to defect from Reformation denominations.
Mark,
There have been some who have said that we should look at those who have followed Schaff and the outcome of the Mercersburg theology:
RCUS + Evangelical Synod of North America –> Evangelical and Reformed Church + Congregational and Christian Churches –> United Church of Christ
Their argument is that Mercersburg theology leads to liberalism.
Thoughts?
pax,
Dale
my thought is “That’s not much of an argument”. And alot of traditions have ‘gone liberal’. Puritanism probably earlier than anybody else.
Several of the Radical Orthodoxy guys argue something similar about Roman Catholicism, suggesting that certain shifts in late medieval thought marked a break with the catholic faith and led to both the emergence of “Romanism” (with Trent and in the wake of nominalism) and “modernism” (with philosophers such as Lessius, Bodin, Machiavelli, etc.).
Of course, unlike Schaff, they would also see various aspects of Protetantism as partaking of the same overall break with the catholic faith.
That view of things is not without its difficulties, but part of the upshot of this would be that any return to the catholic faith cannot be something as simplistic as a “return to Rome” since post-Tridentine Rome itself is in need of recovering its catholicity.
Whether the developments of the past century of Roman Catholicism (particularly the nouvelle theologie) represent the beginnings of such a recovery is a further question. And it is a yet further question whether those developments represent any new possibilities of openness toward Protestantism.
Dale: you could make the same genealogical argument re: Princeton seminary. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is still a logical fallacy. Historical causation is mighty difficult to establish.