Encyclopedia of sacred theology - pagina 504

480

§ 81.

UNITY AND MULTIPLICITY

[Div. Ill

any difference between the He had a face like tlesh and blood of Christ and ours. our face, an eye like our eye; and he only who took his stand at the proper distance, and who himself had received light in the eye of his soul, was able at length to see the shining out of the Divine nature in that Rabbi of Nazareth. Hence, from the attention bestowed upon the human phenomenal in the Holy Scripture, you must never promise This rather leads many yourself the impression of faith. it stands in the way such and as unity, the from away your duty to study that it is much however And of faith. curate, could have discovered

multiplicity

and

pai-ticularity in the Scripture (both materi-

and formally), yet from that multiplicity you must ever come back to the view of the unity of the co7iception, if there is, indeed, to be such a thing for you as a Holy Scripture.

ally

The Scripture does not exist otherwise than after the "divers portions and divers manners " of Heb. i. 1, but in this diversity the principal thing is ever the far, therefore,

So

word of God.

as the representation of the secondary

authors (auctores secundarii) as amanuenses of the Holy Spirit, or also as an instrument played upon by the Holy Ghost, exclusively tended to point to that unity of conception, there is

nothing to be said against

it.

In that sense,

one can even say that the Holy Scripture has been given us from heaven. If, on the other hand, one goes farther, and for the sake of maintaining that unity of conception closes

and multiformity of the Scriptand the organic way in which it gradually came into ex-

the eye to the many-sidedness ure,

istence as a sum-total of

many

factors, then

nothing remains

but a mechanical lifelessness, which destroys the vital, orThis was certainly not intended by our older ganic unity. theologians. They, indeed, pointed, and sometimes even with

much

detail, to the differing origin of the books, to the dif-

ference of style and content, to the difference of character of the authors and of the vicissitudes of their lives, and also to

But the different tendency of the parts of the Scripture. themestablished had yet it can scarcely be denied that they selves too firmlv in the idea of a logical theory of inspira-

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