Justice & Law Quote by Philip Schaff

Schaff is trying to thread a needle that still pricks modern Christianity: how to honor a faith that begins as lived encounter without letting it dissolve into vibes, and how to defend Scripture without turning it into a dead statute book. His opening move is deliberately organic. The "living Church of the redeemed" as Christ's "book" frames Christianity as embodied memory, a community that carries meaning in practices, sacraments, and moral formation. It’s a quiet rebuke to purely text-bound religion, sharpened by the contrast to the "Mosaic law", shorthand for a written code that can harden into legalism.

Then Schaff pivots, because he’s not romanticizing oral tradition or ecclesial charisma. "Yet" does heavy lifting. He insists the words and deeds of Jesus are "recorded" by witnesses who are "honest and reliable" - a 19th-century historian-theologian’s answer to the era’s rising biblical criticism. Schaff wrote when German higher criticism and modern historiography were pressuring the Gospels: were they late, embellished, theologically motivated? His phrasing borrows the courtroom: witnesses, pen to paper, credibility. He’s building a bridge between spiritual vitality and evidentiary respectability.

The subtext is an internal Protestant debate, too. He affirms a living church without ceding primacy to an infallible institutional tradition; he affirms reliable texts without collapsing Christianity into mere "code". The intent is reassurance: Christianity is neither a bureaucratic law nor a fragile myth, but a historical faith whose life in the church and record in Scripture mutually stabilize each other.