Until now the great restoration within the Roman-Catholic world has carried along the restoration within the bosom of German Protestantism. Since 1815, under the banner of so-called conservative interests, one party in the Protestant Church has gradually seized almost complete power – a party that lives with modern culture in a state of the greatest tension, and whose efforts are aimed at nothing less than disconnecting German theology and the church from their cultural links with the great achievements of modern scholarship, and subjecting them absolutely to the authority of biblical literalism and the confessional creeds handed down from the age of the Reformation. The party that is pursuing this goal calls itself “believing”; but it does not believe in the living God who reveals Himself in history and for that very reason does not bind the truth to dead letters; instead, it believes in its allegedly exclusive claim, in its absolute dominion over conscience. But precisely in this it has in fact left the ground of Protestantism. For the latter draws its life force not from dogma handed down in the church and not from the conventional institutions of the church. It draws this force from the spirit of Evangelical truth and freedom. Whoever elevates tradition, dogma, and historical origins to be the decisive authority within the Protestant church returns thereby to the Roman Catholic position. You are speaking of the apostasy that is currently taking place within the Protestant church. Look into the mirror! If you put the Protestant conscience under obligation to the allegedly infallible letters of the Bible, if you imprison it within the articles of the Augsburg Confession, if you seek – through intimidation and threats – to prevent younger scholars from subjecting the documents of Christianity to a conscientious examination – by such conduct you show yourself to be apostates from the principles of the Reformation, which grew out of the spirit of the freest examination; then you yourself deny the foundations on which the church, to which you belong, has built itself for more than three centuries.
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The talks in Eisenach quickly led to complete agreement about the principles of the association. According to this agreement, the Protestant Association stands on the ground of Evangelical Christianity. This foundation is laid by Jesus Christ himself, and for that very reason is not formed by traditional dogma or confession; for Christ neither established dogmas nor placed his disciples under obligation to any kind of creedal formula. Christianity is a principle of faith and life within the world, a source of spirit and power, a historical revelation of the immediate relationship between humanity and God. The Protestant Association professes its allegiance to the principles of the Christian faith and life, and thus to the person of Jesus Christ himself, who revealed the truth and the life out of God in a way that is eternally authoritative, and implanted it into humanity through his holy spirit. Our Association leaves it to theologians to determine the teachings and rules in which these principles find doctrinal expression; they may quarrel about them or agree on them, that is not a matter for the Association. What it strives for is not agreement on some kind of dogma; as centuries of experience have taught us, such striving has always led merely to greater division and fracturing among fellow believers. It seeks “the renewal of the Protestant Church in the spirit of Protestant freedom and in harmony with the entire cultural development of our time.”
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