Encyclopedia of sacred theology - pagina 581

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THE WITNESS

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THE HOLY SPIRIT

of the Scripture, to our personal ego.

They did not

557 call it

an internal (internum) but an external proof (argumentum externum), for the reason that it did not rise from our ego., but from without us, from God, it moved itself toward our ego. It has often, however, been wrongly represented that by this witness was meant in a magic sense a certain '• ecstasy " or ^' enthusiasm," and that it consisted of a supernatural communication from the side of God, in which it was said to us, "• This Scripture is my Word." Thus it has been represented by some who were less well informed, but never by our theologians. On the contrary, they have always protested against this representation the more since experience taught that all such interpretation led at once to a false mysticism, and thereby undermined the authority of the Scripture. For then, indeed, the revelation of God, which one imagines and declares himself to have received, is placed above the Scripture, and in the end the Scripture is rejected. No, tlie representation of the Reformers was this, that this witness is to be taken as " light so irradiating the mind as to affect it gently, and display to it the inner relations of the truth that had hitherto been concealed." Hence it was a subdivision of the enlightening, but in this instance directed immediately upon the Holy Scripture, and not upon its inspiration, but its Divine quality. First one stood before the Holy Scripture as before a foreign object which did not suit his world of conceptions, and over against which, in his worldconsciousness, one assumed essentially not merely a doubtful, but a hostile attitude. If meanwhile the change of our inner being has taken place by palingenesis, from which there has gradually sprung in our sense and in our consciousness a modified view of ourselves, of the things of this world, and of the unseen world, which withdraws itself from our natural eye, this enlightening of the Holy Spirit creates ;

discord between our deepest life-consciousness and the consciousness of the world, which formerly ruled and still presses

upon us. And in this struggle the Holy Spirit opens our eyes, that in the Holy Scripture we may see a representation of our ego., of the world and of the eternal things,

itself

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