Encyclopedia of sacred theology - pagina 280

256

§ 59.

DEPENDENT CHARACTER OF THEOLOGY

remembered that we can mutually come heart, but

[Div. Ill

close to each other's

can never penetrate each other's inner selves

;

while the door to the secret and innermost recesses of our is open to God. was entirely correct, therefore, when in olden times was additionally stated that ectypal Theology reveals

being It it

to us the self-knowledge of

God

according to our human

and that the necessity was felt in the eighteenth century (see De Moor, Comm. in Marck., Vol. I., p. 29) of limiting archetypal Theology to that self-knowledge of God, quam creaturae manifestare decreverat, i.e. which he had decreed to reveal to the creature.^'' In itin order to preserve the self this was correctly viewed image of the type, the ectypal must be equal in extent and form to the archetypal. And yet this further explanation has not made the matter itself more clear, but more both mechanically and intellectually. In the confusing, self-knowledge of God there are not ten parts, six of which he has decided to reveal unto us but, though only " as in a glass darkly," the ivhole image has been reflected to us in Neither will it do to interpret the revelation Revelation. of God's self-knowledge as a merely intellectual communicafor this tion, independent of Creation and the Incarnation would cut in Revelation itself the main artery of religion. capacity;

^'-

;

—

;

;

Rather, therefore, than lose ourselves in this intellectual-

we adopt the names of Archetypal and Theology in the originally fuller sense, i.e. as standing in immediate relation to the creation of man after As man stands as ectype over against the image of God. God, the archetype, man's knowledge of God can therefore This is what we meant when we called be only ectypal. a knowledge which is Theology a dependent knowledge not the result of an activity on our part, but the result of an action which goes out from God to us and in its wider istic

abstraction,

Ectypal

—

;

sense this action

is

God's self-revelation to His creature.

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