The Roman church would keep men in perpetual childhood—coming to her for truth [pg 034]instead of going directly to the Bible; “like the foolish mother who keeps her boy pining in the house lest he stub his toe, and would love best to have him remain a babe forever, that she might mother him still.” Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, 30—“Romanism is so busy in building up a system of guarantees, that she forgets the truth of Christ which she would guarantee.” George Herbert: “What wretchedness can give him any room, Whose house is foul while he adores his broom!” It is a semi-parasitic doctrine of safety without intelligence or spirituality. Romanism says: “Man for the machine!”Protestantism: “The machine for man!” Catholicism strangles, Protestantism restores, individuality. Yet the Romanist principle sometimes appears in so-called Protestant churches. The Catechism published by the League of the Holy Cross, in the Anglican Church, contains the following: “It is to the priest only that the child must acknowledge his sins, if he desires that God should forgive him. Do you know why? It is because God, when on earth, gave to his priests and to them alone the power of forgiving sins. Go to the priest, who is the doctor of your soul, and who cures you in the name of God.” But this contradicts John 10:7—where Christ says “I am the door”; and 1 Cor. 3:11—“other foundation can no man lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ” = Salvation is attained by immediate access to Christ, and there is no door between the soul and him. See Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 227; Schleiermacher, Glaubenslehre, 1:24; Robinson, in Mad. Av. Lectures, 387; Fisher, Nat. and Method of Revelation, 10; Watkins, Bampton Lect. for 1890:149; Drummond, Nat. Law in Spir. World, 327.
II. Limitations of Theology.
Although theology derives its material from God's two-fold revelation, it does not profess to give an exhaustive knowledge of God and of the relations between God and the universe. After showing what material we have, we must show what material we have not. We have indicated the sources of theology; we now examine its limitations. Theology has its limitations:
(a) In the finiteness of the human understanding. This gives rise to a class of necessary mysteries, or mysteries connected with the infinity and incomprehensibleness of the divine nature (Job 11:7; Rom. 11:33).
Job 11:7—“Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty to perfection?” Rom. 11:33—“how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!” Every doctrine, therefore, has its inexplicable side. Here is the proper meaning of Tertullian's sayings: “Certum est, quia impossible est: quo absurdius, eo verius”; that of Anselm: “Credo, ut intelligam”; and that of Abelard: “Qui credit cito, levis corde est.” Drummond, Nat. Law in Spir. World: “A science without mystery is unknown; a religion without mystery is absurd.” E. G. Robinson: “A finite being cannot grasp even its own relations to the Infinite.” Hovey, Manual of Christ. Theol., 7—“To infer from the perfection of God that all his works [nature, man, inspiration] will be absolutely and unchangeably perfect: to infer from the perfect love of God that there can be no sin or suffering in the world; to infer from the sovereignty of God that man is not a free moral agent;—all these inferences are rash; they are inferences from the cause to the effect, while the cause is imperfectly known.” See Calderwood, Philos. of Infinite, 491; Sir Wm. Hamilton, Discussions, 22.
(b) In the imperfect state of science, both natural and metaphysical. This gives rise to a class of accidental mysteries, or mysteries which consist in the apparently irreconcilable nature of truths, which, taken separately, are perfectly comprehensible.
We are the victims of a mental or moral astigmatism, which sees a single point of truth as two. We see God and man, divine sovereignty and human freedom, Christ's divine nature and Christ's human nature, the natural and the supernatural, respectively, as two disconnected facts, when perhaps deeper insight would see but one. Astronomy has its centripetal and centrifugal forces, yet they are doubtless one force. The child cannot hold two oranges at once in its little hand. Negro preacher: “You can't carry two watermelons under one arm.” Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, 1:2—“In nature's infinite book of secresy, A little I can read.” Cooke, Credentials of Science, 34—“Man's progress in knowledge has been so constantly and rapidly accelerated that more has been gained during the lifetime of men still living than during all [pg 035]human history before.” And yet we may say with D'Arcy, Idealism and Theology, 248—“Man's position in the universe is eccentric. God alone is at the centre. To him alone is the orbit of truth completely displayed.... There are circumstances in which to us the onward movement of truth may seem a retrogression.” William Watson, Collected Poems, 271—“Think not thy wisdom can illume away The ancient tanglement of night and day. Enough to acknowledge both, and both revere: They see not clearliest who see all things clear.”
(c) In the inadequacy of language. Since language is the medium through which truth is expressed and formulated, the invention of a proper terminology in theology, as in every other science, is a condition and criterion of its progress. The Scriptures recognize a peculiar difficulty in putting spiritual truths into earthly language (1 Cor. 2:13; 2 Cor. 3:6; 12:4).
1 Cor. 2:13—“not in words which man's wisdom teacheth”; 2 Cor. 3:6—“the letter killeth”; 12:4—“unspeakable words.” God submits to conditions of revelation; cf. John 16:12—“I have yet many things to say into you, but ye cannot bear them now.” Language has to be created. Words have to be taken from a common, and to be put to a larger and more sacred, use, so that they “stagger under their weight of meaning”—e. g., the word “day,” in Genesis 1, and the word ἀγάπη in 1 Cor. 13. See Gould, in Amer. Com., on 1 Cor. 13:12—“now we see in a mirror, darkly”—in a metallic mirror whose surface is dim and whose images are obscure = Now we behold Christ, the truth, only as he is reflected in imperfect speech—“but then face to face” = immediately, without the intervention of an imperfect medium. “As fast as we tunnel into the sandbank of thought, the stones of language must be built into walls and arches, to allow further progress into the boundless mine.”