Encyclopedia of sacred theology - pagina 603

Chap.

Ill]

§ 89.

RELATION TO SPIRITUAL REALITY

The preaching

Christ.

of the

Word

579

joins itself to this spir-

becomes conscious of its inspiration, imparts to it a conscious form, and the Church, as it actually appears, is not merely the product of the Word of God, but at the same time of this spiritual reality. Not as an institution, but as an organism is she a house of the living God. The purer itual reality,

a revelation the instituted

Church

spiritual life, the greater

the authority in the spiritual sense

is

is

of her hidden, organic,

exercised by the Church upon the consciousness of the theo-

But that which on the other hand

logian.

importance to the method of theology,

is

also

spiritual reality alone provides that affinity to the

which

is

is

of great

the fact that this

Divine

life

indispensable to the knowledge of God.

The "knowledge

God"

of

here taken as naturally com-

is

municated knowledge, but not in the exclusively intellectual In our self-knowledge and in our knowledge of our fellow-men there is also a component part, which is not obtained by observation and reasoning built on this, but which is of itself revealed in us. Without this working of the sense-of-self and of sympathy, abstract intellectual knowledge sense.

would be unable

of ourselves or of others

And

to grasp the reality

manner, on the ground of our creation after the Divine Image, a holy affinity and a spiritual sympathy with the life of God must be manifest in our spirit, of its object.

if

in like

the revelations of the

and

Holy Scripture

are to be real to us

an object grasped by us as a real object. Both together are the constituent parts of our knowledge of God. to refer to

Spiritual affinity to the life of

"things of

God"

revelation of the

as

real

God

enables us to grasp the

in our deepest perception.

Holy Scripture

Tiie

interprets that reality to our

no conscious knowledge without a is no mystic knowledge Avithout the light of the Scripture that shines in our consciousness. Alas, that these two should be so rudely separated. For this gives on the one hand an intellectualism, which can do nothing but construe theoretical systems from the Scripture, and on the other hand a mystical attempt to attain unto a vision of God outside and above the Scripture. Violence is done consciousness.

There

is

mystic knowledge, and there

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