Author: Williston Walker

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2017-10-21

Total Pages: 484

ISBN-13: 9780265553411

Excerpt from A History of the Congregational Churches: In the United States The great teachers of the medieval church had uniformly held that the Bible is the ultimate source of religious au thority. But it was not the Bible interpreted by the in dividual. No thought fundamental to the Roman Empire had been more impressed on the minds of men than that of visible, external unity-a unity finding expression in a uniform system of government, a uniform body of law, and a visible, earthly head. This great Roman imperial con ception had produced the medieval papacy; it produced also in the political world the far less efficient, but no less assertive, Holy Roman Empire. For such a body, char acterized by such external marks of unity, an authorita tive exposition of that which it claimed as its fundamental law, the Bible, was imperatively necessary. That expo sitiou was believed to be set forth by the church itself, speaking through tradition, the consensus of its fathers and doctors, the decrees of its popes, and especially through general councils. All these made a mass of authority which, though professedly subordinate to the Word of God and merely interpretative of it, really, if not theoret ically, put it in the background; and substituted for a direct appeal to its prescriptions, a mass of exposition, the slow growth of centuries, which buttressed an elaborate sys tem of doctrine, polity, and ceremonial. Itself the result of gradual accretion through nearly a millennium and a half of years. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.