(_e_) Internal revelations thus recorded, and external revelations thus interpreted, both furnish objective facts which may serve as proper material for science. Although revelation in its widest sense may include, and as constituting the ground of the possibility of theology does include, both insight and illumination, it may also be used to denote simply a provision of the external means of knowledge, and theology has to do with inward revelations only as they are expressed in, or as they agree with, this objective standard.
We have here suggested the vast scope and yet the insuperable limitations of theology. So far as God is revealed, whether in nature, history, conscience, or Scripture, theology may find material for its structure. Since Christ is not simply the incarnate Son of God but also the eternal Word, the only Revealer of God, there is no theology apart from Christ, and all theology is Christian theology. Nature and history are but the dimmer and more general disclosures of the divine Being, of which the Cross is the culmination and the key. God does not intentionally conceal himself. He wishes to be known. He reveals himself at all times just as fully as the capacity of his creatures will permit. The infantile intellect cannot understand God's boundlessness, nor can the perverse disposition understand God's disinterested affection. Yet all truth is in Christ and is open to discovery by the prepared mind and heart.
The Infinite One, so far as he is unrevealed, is certainly unknowable to the finite. But the Infinite One, so far as he manifests himself, is knowable. This suggests the meaning of the declarations: _John 1:18--_"No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him"; _14:9--_"he that hath seen me hath seen the Father"; _1 Tim. 6:16--_"whom no man hath seen, nor can see." We therefore approve of the definition of Kaftan, Dogmatik, 1--"Dogmatics is the science of the Christian truth which is believed and acknowledged in the church upon the ground of the divine revelation"--in so far as it limits the scope of theology to truth revealed by God and apprehended by faith. But theology presupposes both God's external and God's internal revelations, and these, as we shall see, include nature, history, conscience and Scripture. On the whole subject, see Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:37-43; Nitzsch, System Christ. Doct., 72; Luthardt, Fund. Truths, 193; Auberlen, Div. Rev., Introd., 29; Martineau, Essays, 1:171, 280; Bib. Sac., 1867:593, and 1872:428; Porter, Human Intellect, 373-375; C. M. Mead, in Boston Lectures, 1871:58.