The legalistic attitude, through which Church discipline is put theoretically on the same level as the preaching of the Gospel is one that cannot but result in the end in the subverting of the Gospel and the prevalence of Pharisaism.
“In our own country, George Washington has been written down to the level of a common, coarse, and unworthy humanity. Cheap side-lights thrown upon the framing of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States…”
Creeds are born, not made. They are wrung in the agony and anxiety of a Confession at an epoch fraught with the possibility of perilous consequences to the confessors.
The Apostles' Creed, the Athanasian Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Sixteenth Century Confessions of our Church are each and every one of them the product of the greatest upheavals and the most intense crises in the Church of Christ.
In this passage from great Christian teacher Theodore Schmauk, we see a large part of the underlying conflict going on around us in America.
The false choice between authoritarianism or romanticism is no choice at all.