The work of the Holy Spirit - pagina 13

PREFACE OF THE AUTHOR

xiii

should have supposed the Church as a community as an domain it should have vindi-

It

objective power, and in this objective

cated the significance of the individual spiritual

life

and

of the

subjective confessing.

But

it

From

failed to do this.

vindicating the subjective rights

soon passed into antagonism against the objecThis resulted dogmatically in the tive rights of the community. controversy about the objective work of God, viz., in His decree

of the individual

it

and His election, and ecclesiastically in antagonism against the obIt gave supremjective work of the office through the confession. acy to the subjective element in man's free will and to the individual element in the deciding of unchurchly conflicts in the Church. And so it retained no other aim than the conversion of individual sinners; and for this work it abandoned the organic, and retained only the mechanical method. As such it celebrated in the so-called Reveil its most glorious triumph, and penetrated nearly all the Protestant churches, and even the Episcopal Church under the name of Evangelicalism or

Low

Churchism.

As a second

reaction against the second decline

of the Protestant churches of that time this

triumph undoubtedly

brought a great blessing.

But when the necessity arose to reduce to a definite principle,

upon

this to construct

and world-view in opposition

and

to the essentially pantheistic life it,

new

spiritual life

a Protestant-Christian

to the unchristian philosophies

life

these position and to maintain

this

and world-view, and

to give

pitiably failed.

lacked

then

it

It

conscious, sharply defined principles; with its individualism

subjectivity of its

it

complete lack of organic unity

dependent life and world-view; yea, stacle to such formations.

For

and

could not reach the social questions, and by reason it

could not formulate an in-

it

stood everywhere as an ob-

this reason it is absolutely necessary to teach the Protestant

churches clearly to see this dark shadow of Methodism, while at the same time they should continue to study its precious signifi-

cance as a spiritual reaction.

Hence

my

contending with Methodism and

my

persistent point-

ing to the imperative necessity of vindicating over against and alongside of the purely mechanical subjectivity the rights of the

organic social in

power

all

human

life,

and of satisfying the need of the

of objectivity in presence of the extravagant statements of

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