Systematic Theology (Volume 1 of 3)Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Religion
Systematic Theology (Volume 1 of 3)
Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Baptists -- Doctrines; Theology, Doctrinal
We have here suggested the vast scope and yet the insuperable
limitations of theology. So far as God is revealed, whether in
nature, history, conscience, or Scripture, theology may find
material for its structure. Since Christ is not simply the
incarnate Son of God but also the eternal Word, the only Revealer
of God, there is no theology apart from Christ, and all theology
is Christian theology. Nature and history are but the dimmer and
more general disclosures of the divine Being, of which the Cross
is the culmination and the key. God does not intentionally conceal
himself. He wishes to be known. He reveals himself at all times
just as fully as the capacity of his creatures will permit. The
infantile intellect cannot understand God’s boundlessness, nor can
the perverse disposition understand God’s disinterested affection.
Yet all truth is in Christ and is open to discovery by the
prepared mind and heart.
The Infinite One, so far as he is unrevealed, is certainly
unknowable to the finite. But the Infinite One, so far as he
manifests himself, is knowable. This suggests the meaning of the
declarations: _John 1:18—_“No man hath seen God at any time; the
only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath
declared him”; _14:9—_“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father”;
_1 Tim. 6:16—_“whom no man hath seen, nor can see.” We therefore
approve of the definition of Kaftan, Dogmatik, 1—“Dogmatics is the
science of the Christian truth which is believed and acknowledged
in the church upon the ground of the divine revelation”—in so far
as it limits the scope of theology to truth revealed by God and
apprehended by faith. But theology presupposes both God’s external
and God’s internal revelations, and these, as we shall see,
include nature, history, conscience and Scripture. On the whole
subject, see Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:37-43; Nitzsch, System Christ.
Doct., 72; Luthardt, Fund. Truths, 193; Auberlen, Div. Rev.,
Introd., 29; Martineau, Essays, 1:171, 280; Bib. Sac., 1867:593,
and 1872:428; Porter, Human Intellect, 373-375; C. M. Mead, in
Boston Lectures, 1871:58.
B. That many of the truths thus revealed are too indefinite to constitute
the material for science, because they belong to the region of the
feelings, because they are beyond our full understanding, or because they
are destitute of orderly arrangement.
We reply:
(_a_) Theology has to do with subjective feelings only as they can be
defined, and shown to be effects of objective truth upon the mind. They
are not more obscure than are the facts of morals or of psychology, and
the same objection which would exclude such feelings from theology would
make these latter sciences impossible.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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