No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
Daniel Lamont, I think it was, once remarked that theologians should read more poetry. This insight into the nature of theological language has profound relevance for our contemporary concern with the problem of communicating the Gospel to modern man. Theology, as language about God, may be regarded in one sense as faced with an impossible task: ‘The maker and father of this Universe it is difficult to discover; nor, if he were discovered, could he be declared to all men.’ This hiddenness of the divine being is reflected even in the historical beginnings of the biblical revelation, in the cryptic tautology, ‘I am that I am’ (Exod. 3.14). Yet the fact of revelation was taken to mean, within Israel at least, not that the divine aseity was now compromised, but that this very self-sufficiency was revealed in terms of a purpose of love towards this people. The revelation was instrumental to the fulfilment of that purpose: the divine condescension used creaturely forms to communicate its truth and life to men. Therefore the theological language which sets forth this communicative revelation will be proportionately indirect or analogical.
page 13 note 1 Plato, , Timaeus, 28c.Google Scholar
page 13 note 2 As Gilson now happily calls the pseudo-Dionysius (History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, Random House, p. 81).
page 14 note 1 De div. nom., I.5 (Migne, P-G 3).
page 14 note 2 De myst. theol., V.
page 14 note 3 Moreover, Denis accepts the Platonic teaching that ‘the Good’ most nearly names God. His two works on the Celestial and Ecclesiastical Hierarchies describe this world ordered by the circulation of the Good.
page 14 note 4 ‘Est item divinissimae Dei notitiae, quae per nescientiam accipitur …’ (De div. nom., VII.3).
page 15 note 1 One of the most striking passages in Calvin about this concept of revelation as accommodatio is quoted by T. F. Terranee (Kingdom and Church, Oliver, and Boyd, , p. 127Google Scholar): ‘God comes down to earth that He may raise us up to heaven.… He condescends to our ignorance. Therefore when God prattles (balbutit) to us in Scripture in a rough and ready style, let us know that this is done on account of the love He bears to us’ (Comm. on John, 3.12).
page 16 note 1 Short Treatise on the Holy Supper of 1541.
page 16 note 2 The True Partaking of the Flesh and Blood of 1561.
page 16 note 3 In Martyr, 's Dialogas de Utraque in Christo naturaGoogle Scholar, 1561, fol. 40, 75D.
page 16 note 4 Cf. Calvin, , True PartakingGoogle Scholar: Heshusius ‘sharply rejects what he terms the physical axiom, that one body cannot be in different places.… This is to dismember the body, and refuse to lift up the heart.’
page 17 note 1 Exomologesis, sive confessio … de s. Euch., 1560, in the Scripta Anglicana, pp. 538–45.
page 17 note 2 Letter to Calvin on the Consensus Tig.—Corp. Ref., XLI, Ioan. Calv. Op., vol. XIII, pp. 350ff.
page 17 note 3 In this less passionate age we may agree that both sides were after the same goal, as Bucer himself had maintained until his dying day. Karl Barth regards the whole Lutheran-Reformed controversy as an unhappy emphasis of each side of the unio hypostatica, or rather of its positive and negative principles (Kirchliche Dogmatik, I.2, 1938, section 15.2, ‘Wahrer Gott und Wahrer Mensch’, pp. 145–87).
page 17 note 4 New Testament arid Mythology (in Kerygma and Myth, ed. Bartsch, , tr. Fuller, , S.P.C.K., 1953), p. 10Google Scholar, note 2: ‘Mythology is the use of imagery to express the otherworldly in terms of this world and the divine in terms of human life, the other side in terms of this side.’
page 17 note 5 ibid., p. 14.
page 17 note 6 ibid., p. 34; cf. p. 110, On Thesis IVB.
page 18 note 1 Bultmann Replies to his Critics (Kerygma and Myth), p. 196.
page 18 note 2 Cf. Baillie, John's thesis in Natural Science and the Spiritual Life, Oxford, 1951Google Scholar, concerning the relationship between the change in the doctrine of God and His relation to the world, and the revolution that gave birth to modern science.
page 18 note 3 Kerygma and Myth, p. 4.
page 18 note 4 Inst., 2.16.9—Calvin's alternative would probably be classified by Bultmann as remythologising: ‘Therefore it is no wonder, if He be said to have descended into hell, since He suffered that death which the wrath of God inflicts on transgressors.’
page 18 note 5 Inst., 2.16.15.
page 18 note 6 op. cit., p. 22.
page 19 note 1 An Existentialist Theology, S.C.M., 1955, p. 244; cf. p. 220. But cf. Bultmann, op. cit., p. 204, note 2: ‘The love of God is not a phenomenon whose apprehension leaves a man the same as he was before. Hence even the apprehension itself must be attributed to the o~erationo f the Holv Ghost.’
page 19 note 2 op. cit., p. 211.
page 19 note 3 Not merely ‘historical’ data, for their character as Kleinliteratur begs the question of the objective-historical ‘event of Jesus Christ’ in terms of the lifesituations of the primitive Christian communities. But just how do we get back to the Sitz im Leben of Jesus Himself?
page 19 note 4 In the Fragments and PostscriPt.
page 20 note 1 As E. Bevan describes Bultmann's picture of Jesus: Symbolism and Belief, p. 273. Yet in fairness to Bultmann we must point out that his concern is to distinguish the reporter from the herald, and that he does not equate demythologisation with dehistoricisation: he wants the history of God ‘to take place in itself (an sich) instead of conceiving it (sich vorstellen) in accordance with the subject-object pattern’ (Gogarten, F., Demythologising and History, p. 67).Google Scholar
page 20 note 2 Pascual Jordan, quoted by Heim, , Christian Faith and Natural Science, p. 162.Google Scholar
page 21 note 1 ibid., p. 177—cf. the more basic inquiry in God Transcendent, Nisbet, 1936.
page 21 note 2 The Transformation of the Scientific World View, p. 148.
page 21 note 3 The doctrine of analogy itself assists us here, for it demands (according to St. Thomas) a ‘likeness of proportion’ along with a ‘difference of proportion’, so that this new dimension is not simply identical with a fifth dimension, but is like (and unlike) a fifth.