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By Archibald Robertson.
128 Pages (Part I)
Page 58
That the latter is true we do not dispute (see Newman's notes infra, p. 336, note 1, &c.). But before pronouncing the form of thought for that reason a false one, we must consider what the 'terms' are, and to what they are applied. To myself it appears that a religion which brought the divine existence into the compass of the categories of any philosophy would by that very fact forfeit its claim to the character of revelation. The categories of human thought are the outcome of organised experience of a sensible world, and beyond the limits of that world they fail us. This is true quite apart from revelation. The ideas of essence and substance, personality and will, separateness and continuity, cause and effect, unity and plurality, are all in different degrees helps which the mind uses in order to arrange its knowledge, and valid within the range of experience, but which become a danger when invested with absolute validity as things in themselves. Even the mathematician reaches real results by operating with terms which contain a perfect contradiction (e.g. ., and to some extent the 'calculus of operations'). The idea of Will in man, of Personality in God, present difficulties which reason cannot reconcile.
The revelation of Christ is addressed primarily to the will not to the intellect, its appeal is to Faith not to Theology. Theology is the endeavour of the Christian intellect to frame for itself conceptions of matters belonging to the immediate consequences of our faith, matters about which we must believe something, but as to which the Lord and His Apostles have delivered nothing formally explicit. Theology has no doubt its certainties beyond the express teaching of our Lord and the New Testament writers; but its work is subject to more than the usual limitations of human thought: we deal with things outside the range of experience, with celestial things; but 'we have no celestial language.' To abandon all theology would be to acquiesce in a dumb faith: we are to teach, to explain, to defend; the logos sophias and logos gnoseos have from the first been gifts of the Spirit for the building up of the Body.
Reference address : https://elpenor.org/athanasius/athanasius-life-arianism.asp?pg=58