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St. Thomas on the Incarnation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2024
Extract
There is only one way of making supernatural truths manifest, only one way of showing such truths to be truths, and that is by showing them to be vouched for, and therefore revealed, by God. If they are really truths, before they were revealed, they were, as being supernatural, known to the Divine Wisdom alone, and we can come to the knowledge of them only by getting His word for them and taking them on His authority. Before, then, we can accept such truths as truths, the assertion of them must come to us clothed in some way with the light of His divine authority.
By adequate signs the Divine Wisdom showed His presence in the Christian Faith, showed that what was asserted in the preaching of that Faith originated from Him; from Him, too, the inspiration of those who preached it. These teachers of the Christian Faith taught, not only by the spoken, but also by the written word. This written word was later gathered together to form what we know as the New Testament. Hence what is taught in the New Testament comes to us invested with divine authority.
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- Copyright © 1929 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Cf. Blackfriars, December, 1928.
2 It is hardly necessary to point out that we are not here deducing the authority of the New Testament from its inspiration as defined by the Church, but, like St. Thomas in the Summa contra Gentiles, from the historical fact that it is part of the teaching of the first preachers of the Christian Faith, which teaching as a whole was visibly corroborated by God.
3 The Everlasting Man, p. 215 (cheap edition).
4 ‘Tradere’ means ‘to deliver, transmit, hand over,’ and hence, transferred to things of the mind, ‘to deliver, transmit, by teaching.’ This notion of ‘delivering, handing over,’ is prominent in St. Thomas's use of the word. But the emphasis is not on the transmission from one generation to another. What is essential is the notion of transmission from one mind to another. Those truths are ‘delivered’ which cannot be reached by reasoning, but have to be wholly given, i.e., which we have to be told of and to hold on the word of another, whether they be ordinary facts distant from us in time and space, or supernatural truths. ‘According to the traditin of Holy Scripture’ means, then, ‘according to what Holy Scripture delivers.’
5 Auctoritate divina tradente.
6 This refers back to v. II, in which Our Lord says: ‘Believe me (i.e., take my word for it) that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not take my word for it, believe it because of the works.’
7 The quotation is from Tract. LXXI in Joann.:‘What works did He then mean but the words He was speaking? The disciples heard and believed, and the fruit of those words of His was their faith. But when the disciples preached the Gospel, not just a few individuals like them, but nations believed.’Tract. LXXII: ‘Did not that rich young man go away from His presence sorrowful, when he asked for counsel about eternal life? He heard it, but refused it. Yet afterwards what one individual heard from Him and did not do, that many did, when the same good Master spoke through His disciples: contemptible in the eyes of the rich man to whom He gave counsel in person, He proved loveable to those whom, after being rich, He made poor by the agency of poor men. Behold, He did greater works when spoken of by those believing in Him than when speaking to those who heard Him.’
8 ‘Whom,’ not ‘of whom,’ is the meaning of the Greek. It is also the rendering of the original Rheims (1582): ‘How shall they believe him whom they have not heard?’ Which Challoner, apparently, changed to ‘of whom they have not heard?’
9 Cf. Grammar of Assent, pp. 457–9 (Ist ed. 1870).
10 It is absolutely evident that in the primitive Church the Faith was preached before there was any thought of writing anything, and the writings we possess themselves call for this supplement [from oral tradition]. The Gospels are hardly more than a part of the teaching given by the Apostles on the life and miracles of Christ, His Passion and Resurrection. These facts were interpreted in a certain way, they had a divine meaning which the Gospels do not draw out, and which the Epistles of the Apostles imply rather than state clearly. Take St. Paul, for example. He explains to the Romans at some length that the Gospel is the power of God to every one that believeth. But he simply alludes in a phrase to what is believed, known as it was to every Christian.'—Lagrange: Le sens du christianisme, p. 15.