Encyclopedia of sacred theology - pagina 371

Chap.

BY PRIXCIPIUM

II]

This has made

3-47

customary to seek the proper principium Holy Scripture, by which was meant of course simply the material principium of knowing (principium cognoscendi materiale). Tlie knowledge of God, which God Himself had communicated by numerous facts and revelations, and which under his o-uidance was embodied in the Holy Scripture, was the gold which theology was to delve from the mine of the Holy Scripture. it

of theology immediately in the

:Meanwhile this could not be intended otherwise than as an abbreviated manner of speech. principium is a living agent, hence a principium of knowledge must be an agent

A

from which of necessity knowledge the Bible as such

not.

flows.

And

The principium

this of course

knowledge had emerged from this principium, and consequently before the first page of Scripture was written. When, nevertheless, the Sacred Scripture is is

of

existed before knowledge

called the sole principium of theology (principium unicum theologiae), then the Scripture here is taken as a plant,

whose germ has sprouted and budded, and has unfolded It is not, therefore, the naked principium, but the principium together with what it has brought forth. Speaking more accurately, we should say that the material those buds.

principium

is the self-rev elation of Grod to the sinner, from which principium the data have come forth in the Holy Scriptures, from which theology must be built up. Since,

however, theology can only begin when Revelation is completed, we may readily proceed from the ultimate cause (principium remotum) to the proximate (proximum), and say that theology sprang from the completed revelation, i.e. from the Scriptures, as itself

the proximate cause, while that revelation originated from the ultimate cause of the self-revela-

tion of God. It is unfortunate, however, that in olden time so little attention was paid to the formal principium. For now it seemed altogether as tliough the still darkened understand-

ing was to investigate entirely similar

way

standing threw

itself

the

Scripture as

its

object, in an

which this same underon plant and animal as its object.

to

that in

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