Encyclopedia of sacred theology - pagina 691

Chap. V]

DEVELOPMENT OF MULTIFORMITY

§ 104.

6G7

In the seventeenth century Syncretism appeared as a natural reaction against the multiformity of churchly

And

life.

cannot be denied that George Calixtus was actuated by motive. The controversy and the separation in spiritual a churchly life had caused the instituted churches to lose too much from sight their unity in Christ and their sodality as it

revelations of the body of Christ,

and

Calixtus raised his irenical voice.

was against the

this that

other hand,

it

was accompanied by a certain humanistic the points of dogma which were in question

must be said that indifference to

it

On

this

between the churches.

A man

like Calixtus did not under-

stand that one could really be concerned because of a controversy about Transubstantiation, Consubstantiation,

negation of Substantiation.

And what was

or

the

worse, he was

not sufficiently acute as a theologian to construct his irenics theologically, so that he saw no other means than to go back

Hence his effort could crowned with success. This irenical wave went down Not, however, without reminding as rapidly as it had risen. theology of her vocation to maintain more faithfully the essential unity of the Church in the midst of her multiform Holding itself too closely to the instituted tendencies. Church, theology had departed too widely from the spiritual life of the Church as an organism. This last fault avenged itself in the movement of the PieTheology had become too abstract. She had found tists. her foundations in the Holy Scripture, but she had taken that Holy Scripture too one-sidedly as a revelation of doctrine, and had thereby lost too much from sight the spiritual reality, and had forgotten that if Luther had found the rock-foundation on which he stood in the Scripture, he had also clung with both hands to that rock. In the end, the inspiring motive for theology must always come from the subject. Without the spiritual alliance between the theological subject and the spiritual reality of which the Holy Scriptto the councils of the first centuries.

not be

ure brings us the revelation, a barren Scholasticism

is

con-

ceivable, but no vitalized and living theology. This was hence the reaction that went forth from hmx felt by Spener ;

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