Daily Inspiration Quote by Philip Schaff

Schaff writes with the confidence of a system-builder, the kind of theologian who wants to make Christianity feel less like a set of scattered devotions and more like a unified map of reality. “Beginning, the middle, and the end” is deliberately totalizing: it borrows the cadence of biblical “Alpha and Omega” language, but compresses it into a narrative formula. Not just cosmic sovereignty, but storyline dominance. Christ isn’t merely important; he is the plot.

The next sentence performs a careful doctrinal balancing act. By stressing that Jesus “walks in human form upon the earth,” Schaff signals orthodox incarnational Christianity against any purely symbolic or mythic reading. Yet the human detail is not there to invite sentimental identification; it functions as theological scaffolding. The point of embodiment is teleological: Jesus becomes human in order to “accomplish” redemption. The verb choice matters. “Accomplishes” frames salvation as completed work, not an open-ended moral project, and it subtly polices the boundary between Christianity as ethics and Christianity as atonement.

Context sharpens the intent. Schaff, a 19th-century church historian working amid modern critical scholarship and confessional disputes, is asserting a center of gravity. Higher criticism was probing the Gospels as texts; Protestant modernity was tempted to reduce religion to uplift. Schaff’s subtext: you can analyze sources, argue denominations, modernize institutions - but if Christ stops being the organizing principle of history and the engine of redemption, you no longer have Christianity, just cultural residue wearing church clothes.