Martin Fischer

WHEN we consider the life of Protestant Christians
in Germany we must first remember that the
Reformers did not intend to found a new church.
For the sake of the one, holy, apostolic Church they were drawn
into a struggle with Rome which ended with their exclusion
from the Roman church. It was in the name of this one holy
apostolic Church that they maintained their own ecclesiastical
existence, and concerned themselves with the return of the
heretical Roman church to the Gospel. They gloried in the free
word of the Holy Scripture which stood over against the
Church and made it into a creature of the Word. In all their
rejoicing over their own understanding, and the faithfulness of
their teaching and life, their decisive aim was to glorify Jesus
Christ. They understood their own way only as a means of
loyalty toward him who remains alone the Lord of truth.

It was in him that this Church, like every other, was filled
with promise. Wherever it tried to secure itself in other
ways these efforts became the basis of further tensions and
divisions. Where it gloried in the law it found the law, and
in human laws the destruction of unity. It maintained unity

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