Chapter II. Material of Theology.
I. Sources of Theology.
God himself, in the last analysis, must be the only source of knowledge with regard to his own being and relations. Theology is therefore a summary and explanation of the content of God's self-revelations. These are, first, the revelation of God in nature; secondly and supremely, the revelation of God in the Scriptures.
Ambrose: “To whom shall I give greater credit concerning God than to God himself?”Von Baader: “To know God without God is impossible; there is no knowledge without him who is the prime source of knowledge.” C. A. Briggs, Whither, 8—“God reveals truth in several spheres: in universal nature, in the constitution of mankind, in the history of our race, in the Sacred Scriptures, but above all in the person of Jesus Christ our Lord.” F. H. Johnson, What is Reality? 399—“The teacher intervenes when needed. Revelation helps reason and conscience, but is not a substitute for them. But Catholicism affirms this substitution for the church, and Protestantism for the Bible. The Bible, like nature, gives many free gifts, but more in the germ. Growing ethical ideals must interpret the Bible.” A. J. F. Behrends: “The Bible is only a telescope, not the eye which sees, nor the stars which the telescope brings to view. It is your business and mine to see the stars with our own eyes.” Schurman, Agnosticism, 178—“The Bible is a glass through which to see the living God. But it is useless when you put your eyes out.”
We can know God only so far as he has revealed himself. The immanent God is known, but the transcendent God we do not know any more than we know the side of the moon that is turned away from us. A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 118—“The word ‘authority’ is derived from auctor, augeo, ‘to add.’ Authority adds something to the truth communicated. The thing added is the personal element of witness. This is needed wherever there is ignorance which cannot be removed by our own effort, or unwillingness which results from our own sin. In religion I need to add to my own knowledge that which God imparts. Reason, conscience, church, Scripture, are all delegated and subordinate authorities; the only original and supreme authority is God himself, or Christ, who is only God revealed and made comprehensible by us.” Gore, Incarnation, 181—“All legitimate authority represents the reason of God, educating the reason of man and communicating itself to it. … Man is made in God's image: he is, in his fundamental capacity, a son of God, and he becomes so in fact, and fully, through union with Christ. Therefore in the truth of God, as Christ presents it to him, he can recognize his own better reason—to use Plato's beautiful expression, he can salute it by force of instinct as something akin to himself, before he can give intellectual account of it.”
Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 332–337, holds that there is no such thing as unassisted reason, and that, even if there were, natural religion is not one of its products. Behind all evolution of our own reason, he says, stands the Supreme Reason. “Conscience, ethical ideals, capacity for admiration, sympathy, repentance, righteous indignation, as well as our delight in beauty and truth, are all derived from God.” Kaftan, in Am. Jour. Theology, 1900; 718, 719, maintains that there is no other principle for dogmatics than Holy Scripture. Yet he holds that knowledge never comes directly from Scripture, but from faith. The order is not: Scripture, doctrine, faith; but rather, Scripture, faith, doctrine. Scripture is no more a direct authority than is the church. Revelation is addressed to the whole man, that is, to the will of the man, and it claims obedience from him. Since all Christian knowledge is mediated through faith, it rests on obedience to the authority of revelation, and revelation is self-manifestation on the part of God. Kaftan should have recognized more fully that not simply Scripture, but all knowable truth, is a revelation from God, and that Christ is “the light which lighteth every man” (John 1:9). Revelation is an organic whole, which begins in nature, but finds its climax and key in the historical Christ whom Scripture presents to us. See H. C. Minton's review of Martineau's Seat of Authority, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Apr. 1900:203 sq.
1. Scripture and Nature.
By nature we here mean not only physical facts, or facts with regard to the substances, properties, forces, and laws of the material world, but also spiritual facts, or facts with regard to the intellectual and moral constitution of man, and the orderly arrangement of human society and history.
We here use the word “nature” in the ordinary sense, as including man. There is another and more proper use of the word “nature,” which makes it simply a complex of forces and beings under the law of cause and effect. To nature in this sense man belongs only as respects his body, while as immaterial and personal he is a supernatural being. Free will is not under the law of physical and mechanical causation. As Bushnell has said: “Nature and the supernatural together constitute the one system of God.” Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 232—“Things are natural or supernatural according to where we stand. Man is supernatural to the mineral; God is supernatural to the man.” We shall in subsequent chapters use the term “nature” in the narrow sense. The universal use of the phrase “Natural Theology,”however, compels us in this chapter to employ the word “nature” in its broader sense as including man, although we do this under protest, and with this explanation of the more proper meaning of the term. See Hopkins, in Princeton Review, Sept. 1882:183 sq.
E. G. Robinson: “Bushnell separates nature from the supernatural. Nature is a blind train of causes. God has nothing to do with it, except as he steps into it from without. Man is supernatural, because he is outside of nature, having the power of originating an independent train of causes.” If this were the proper conception of nature, then we might be compelled to conclude with P. T. Forsyth, in Faith and Criticism, 100—“There is no revelation in nature. There can be none, because there is no forgiveness. We cannot be sure about her. She is only aesthetic. Her ideal is harmony, not reconciliation. … For the conscience, stricken or strong, she has no word. … Nature does not contain her own teleology, and for the moral soul that refuses to be fancy-fed, Christ is the one luminous smile on the dark face of the world.”But this is virtually to confine Christ's revelation to Scripture or to the incarnation. As there was an astronomy without the telescope, so there was a theology before the Bible. George Harris, Moral Evolution, 411—“Nature is both evolution and revelation. As soon as the question How is answered, the questions Whence and Why arise. Nature is to God what speech is to thought.” The title of Henry Drummond's book should have been: “Spiritual Law in the Natural World,” for nature is but the free though regular activity of God; what we call the supernatural is simply his extraordinary working.
(a) Natural theology.—The universe is a source of theology. The Scriptures assert that God has revealed himself in nature. There is not only an outward witness to his existence and character in the constitution and government of the universe (Ps. 19; Acts 14:17; Rom. 1:20), but an inward witness to his existence and character in the heart of every man (Rom. 1:17, 18, 19, 20, 32; 2:15). The systematic exhibition of these facts, whether derived from observation, history or science, constitutes natural theology.
Outward witness: Ps.19:1–6—“The heavens declare the glory of God”; Acts 14:17—“he left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons”; Rom. 1:20—“for the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity.” Inward witness: Rom. 1:19—τὸ γνωστὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ = “that which is known of God is manifest in them.” Compare the ἀποκαλύπτεται of the gospel in verse 17,