Notes
place de facto through a contract between the congregation and the candidates. For that was formally the case in the Dutch Reformed communities (as a result of the original political situation) in accordance with the old Church constitution (see v. Hoffmann, Kirchen-verfassungsrecht der niederl. Reformierten, Leipzig, 1902).
On the contrary, it was because such a religious community could only be voluntarily organized as a sect, not compulsorily as a Church, if it did not wish to include the unregenerate and thus depart from the Early Christian ideal. For the Baptist communities it was an essential of the very idea of their Church, while for the Calvinists it was an historical accident. To be sure, that the latter were also urged by very definite religious motives in the direction of the believers' Church has already been indicated. On the distinction between Church and sect, see the following essay. The concept of sect which I have adopted here has been used at about the same time and, I assume, independently from me, by Kattenbusch in the Realenzyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche (Article Sekte). Troeltsch in his Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen accepts it and discusses it more in detail. See also below, the introduction to the essays on the Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen.
174. How important this symbol was, historically, for the conservation of the Church communty, since it was an unambiguous and unmistakable sign, has been very clearly shown by Cornelius, op. cit.
175. Certain approaches to it in the Mennonites' doctrine of justification need not concern us here.
176. This idea is perhaps the basis of the religious interest in the discussion of questions like the incarnation of Christ and his relationship to the Virgin Mary, which, often as the sole purely dogmatic part, stands out so strangely in the oldest documents of Baptism (for instance the confessions printed in Cornelius, op. cit., Appendix to Vol. II. On this question, see K. Müller, Kirchengeschichte, II, 1, p. 330). The difference between the christology of the Reformed Church and the Lutheran (in the doctrine of the so-called communicatio idiomatum) seems to have been based on similar religious interests.
177. It was expressed especially in the original strict avoidance even of everyday intercourse with the excommunicated, a point at which even the Calvinists, who in principle held the opinion that worldly affairs were not affected by spiritual censure, made large concessions. See the following essay.
178. How this principle was applied by the Quakers to seemingly trivial externals (refusal to remove the hat, to kneel, bow, or use formal address) is well known. The basic idea is to a certain extent characteristic of all asceticism. Hence the fact that true asceticism is always hostile to authority. In Calvinism it appeared in the principle that only Christ should rule in the Church. In the case of Pietism one may think of Spener's attempts to find a Biblical justification of
