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The confessions, therefore, as well as the subsequent writings of Melanchthon and the dogmaticians, and the entire history and development of the Lutheran churches must be read in the light of this two-fold antagonism. The system which the Reformers controverted must have had features acceptable to the natural man or it would not have prevailed for so many centuries.
By the by, my dear friend, do you not think it would have puzzled these ancient dogmaticians to have determined by which of their two roads it was that the most important and most sublime of all their truths was, in effect, attained? I mean the truth of Gravitation. Newton owed it to Kepler.
We are not advocating extravagant ideas of conversion, or requiring a religious experience from children of fourteen years which in the nature of the case they cannot have. But have we a right in this crisis in the history of the child to overlook that infinitely important experience which our dogmaticians termed regressus ad baptismum?
Followed as he was in support of his views by the dogmaticians, the Lutheran Church acquired that distinctive character which has marked her history as an educating and training force. This position is still further explained from the fact that the Lutherans, unlike the Reformed, were placed in charge of nations and peoples, and had to be responsible for their Christian guidance and training.
The antinomian and synergistic controversies, Osiander, Major and Flacius, the Philippists and the Crypto-Calvinists are names that still remind us of the theological carnage of the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century came the reign of the dogmaticians. The eighteenth century was the age of Pietism and this was followed by Rationalism.
Doctrine, defined in the Confessions, modified by Melanchthon's later writings and by the dogmaticians of the 17th century, considerably influenced also by Spener and the Pietists, while not a little has come to us from the Rationalistic period.
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