Autor: Crowe, Frederich E., S.J.

Buch: Theology of the Christian Word

Titel: Theology of the Christian Word

Stichwort: Geschichte: Wort Gottes -> Thomas v. Aquin; das Universum unter d. Herrschaft Gottes

Kurzinhalt: As God governs all history, so obviously he can use all history to convey his meaning. How do you control the meaning you give to history and to the word of God that you declare it to be?

Textausschnitt: 110a The Thomist position and argument are as follows: Scripture comes to us as words chosen by the author to communicate to us the truths necessary for salvation. However, the expression of truth may be achieved in two ways, either by words or by realities (rebus); that is, words can refer to realities, but also one reality can refer to another reality. Now it is the special prerogative of scripture, which has God for its author, that both the words of scripture and the realities to which they refer are subject to divine control and therefore to divine use of them as instruments of his meaning. Saint Thomas is shorter on examples than he is on the principle at stake, but he speaks of the Old Law as referring to and signifying the New, the synagogue as signifying the church, the twelve stones taken from the Jordan as signifying the twelve apostles. Thus, the literal meaning of scripture, when it speaks of the Old Law, is just that: the Old Law; but the spiritual meaning, the meaning of the reality referred to, is the New Law. (Fs)

110b Clearly, the specific contribution of Saint Thomas to the present question derives from his views on God's use of created realities to manifest his divine meaning, and that in turn is inserted in his larger view of the divine control of all events in the created universe. This latter is a complex question in which "we must have precise ideas [...] on the nature of operation, premotion, application, the certitude of providence, universal instrumentality, and the analogy of operation." On the complexities of this larger question I can only refer the reader to the classic study just quoted, but once that idea of the universal instrumentality of all creation under the operation of God is understood, it can be imported easily enough into the present area. That is, the whole of creation is as much under the dominion of God as pen or voice is under the dominion of human author. Add only the simple notion that the visible universe is as well qualified to be the expression of meaning as are vibrations in the air or ink marks on paper, and you have all the elements you need for the Thomist theory: God writes history by control of events just as men write human language by control of pen, and the resulting "language" of history expresses God's meaning, is God's word to us. (Fs) (notabene)

111a Saint Thomas was cautious almost to the point of being reactionary in the use of this idea. He invoked it only to explain certain instances of typology, and then only because scripture, in declaring specific Old Testament events to be types of the New, forced him to deal with the question. His primary sense of scripture was always the literal: We cannot base any argument on the "spiritual" sense, except, of course, where it is revealed to us later in the literal meaning of a passage. Nor do we need this "spiritual" sense, since anything found in it is also found elsewhere in the literal, if it is necessary for our salvation. (Fs)

111b My own concern now is to exploit the Thomist idea for a modern theology of the word of God, and that involves consideration of three points: generalizing Saint Thomas's idea, reversing his priorities in regard to the literal and spiritual senses of scripture, and taking account of the reasons for his reluctance to give the spiritual sense any prominence in his own thought or exegesis. The first point is quite simple: To generalize Saint Thomas is to conceive the whole of history, and not just certain specified events, as a word from God, as "uttered" by him with a meaning for us. And the possibility of such generalization is provided by Saint Thomas himself in his view of God's universal providence and activity: As God governs all history, so obviously he can use all history to convey his meaning. The second point is a little more complex: To reverse the priorities of Saint Thomas is to make the meaning of history primary and the (literal) meaning of scripture derivative, not the other way around. This is not provided for in the Thomist context of thought, but it is not difficult once we accept the modern view of prophecy and sacred writing as interpretations of the world around us and of the events of history. We have only to note that then we consider the universe not merely as possessing intelligibility, as the physicist may do, but also as possessing the meaning proper to language; this the believer who regards it as God's creation may easily do. Briefly, as the human sciences differ from the natural in that for them meaning is a constitutive part of the data, so the universe of the theologian differs from that of the physicist or philosopher in that it is constituted by meaning as well as by physical or metaphysical elements. Furthermore, we may say that this view is not so much contra Saint Thomas as it is praeter his views. That is, the viewpoint is different; Saint Thomas saw the matter quoad nos, and therefore for him scripture was primary, for he saw no way of getting at the meaning of events except through the scriptures that revealed that meaning. But our present viewpoint is that of the quoad se, and then there is a case for making history the primary word of God; whether there is any way for us to penetrate to that meaning, except where scripture reveals it, is another question that brings us to our third consideration. (Fs) (notabene)
112a The real question then is why Saint Thomas himself was so cautious in his use of what he called the spiritual sense, the meaning of history. Put more cogently still, the question is why the virtualities in the Thomist idea were not exploited long before this. My general answer would be that on one side there was no pressure to exploit them, and on the other there was the evident danger deriving from the lack of control over meaning in the field of history. Saint Thomas himself would certainly see no necessity for developing the views he had set forth on divine activity in history and divine use of history as a medium for the word. The pressure the allegorizers had once felt, to give an acceptable meaning to the Old Testament, had been reduced with the recognition of the New Testament as the word of God in its own right. The pressure arising from the varieties of culture, the genetic view of history, and the recognition that the biblical mentality differed notably from that of the modern Western world was still in the distant future. For Saint Thomas the word of Paul or John could be transported without difficulty across the centuries; after all, God was the principal author of scripture and he did not change with journeys across time and space. In any case causality interested Thomas more than meaning in the universe. (Fs) (notabene)

113a But all this is rather remote from what would prove to be the fundamental question; it explains only why the idea would hardly occur in the first place. More directly, the question for anyone who proposed a view of history as God's fundamental word would be, How do you control the meaning you give to history and to the word of God that you declare it to be? We seem to be back with the airy speculations of the allegorizers, who had no other justification to offer for their interpretation than that it made God more acceptable to the Western mentality. To bring interpretation of God's word in history under control, there was needed both the Thomist view of universal instrumentality, and, besides that, a theory, possible only in our times, of history. Even the Thomist understanding of universal instrumentality was not always understood by his immediate successors, and a theory of history was far in the future. We are coming presently to a discussion of that modern theory, but one very important factor in the theology of the word is intermediate between Saint Thomas and the 20th century. It is the profound conviction expressed in the theology of the spiritual masters that God speaks to the individual believer in the events of his personal life. This is the notion we have next to study. (Fs) (notabene)