Daily Inspiration Quote by Philip Schaff

Schaff is doing something quietly radical for a 19th-century theologian with one foot in old-world confessionalism and the other in modern scholarship: he’s treating a book as an incarnation event. By saying the New Testament “presents... the same union of the divine and human” as Christ himself, he collapses the usual distance between sacred text and sacred person. The intent is apologetic, but not in a crude “proof-text” way. He’s offering a theory of Scripture that can survive the era’s pressures - historical criticism, philology, the rising prestige of “objective” research - without surrendering the claim that God actually speaks.

The subtext is a tightrope walk. If the New Testament is both divine and human, then its humanity isn’t a defect to be explained away but the very medium of revelation: particular languages, fallible authors, messy history, competing voices. Schaff’s move dignifies those textures as the “flesh” of the Word. That’s a strategic reframing: critics can dissect sources and redactions, and believers can still insist the text “dwells among us” - not as a pristine dictation from heaven, but as something embedded in culture and time.

Context matters. Schaff, a German-Swiss scholar working in America, lived in a moment when Protestantism was fighting on two fronts: against rigid fundamentalism and against a modernity that wanted religion either privatized or disproven. His metaphor is a bridge. It turns vulnerability into authority: the New Testament doesn’t transcend history; it inhabits it, and asks to be encountered the way Christ is - as scandalously ordinary and, for faith, stubbornly more than that.