Sacred Theology as Special Revelation

'In the fullness of time, God sent His Son born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law" (Galatians 4). Sacra Doctrina emerges most specifically as 'holy doctrine' out of the Revelation of God. God 'reveals' Himself to us in a special way. Judaism and Christianity together share the notion and truth of Divine Revelation - God has personally revealed Himself to mankind via the covenants of the Old and the New Israel, the Jewish people and the Catholic Church. The Lord Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word of God, is Himself the fulfilment and fullness of all revelation; the Incarnation of God as the full revelation of the Father presupposes prior revelation of God to man. The Revelation given to man by God uses various stages which can be reduced to 1) vocation, 2) covenant, and 3) law.

In the Old Testament, God called Abram (Abraham) from Ur of the Chaldees to the promised land; YHWH then established His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, Jacob, and finally with Moses at Mount Sinai; at Horeb God constitutes His people by revealing His righteous will in the Law. Jewish tradition allows for a reinterpretation of the Word, the possibility of redaction, revision, and re-application to man of the divine Word. In the New Testament, Our Lord calls His Apostles and trains them; He institutes the New Covenant in His Blood in the Mass at the last supper and gives the promise of His Spirit; Jesus then pours out His Spirit in fulfilment of the new law of love at Pentecost. The three elements of vocation, covenant, and law are durable, a sign or image of the 'lastingness' of God Himself - divine faithfulness. The Divine Revelation of God is given to man by communication, by divine speech translated into human speech. God speaks by His Word, the Word of God which is translated into human language. This special revelation given by God to His People, primarily in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, is extended through space and time in the Church which is His Body. The special revelation of God is uniquely contained in written form in Holy Scripture, and is handed-down in the reality of the Spirit, the Church, through the guidance of Apostolic Tradition.

Revelation is primarily God as first truth speaking, communicating Himself to mankind via the instrumentality of human realities and agents. The Word of God is shared, as Word, with men - and therefore demands or requires that human beings be able to receive the divine Word, appropriate the Word to human life, and return it to God in lived faith, in response and reaction to the Word given. The Word made flesh in the Incarnation is spoken to man through Holy Scripture and Tradition. Incarnation: This revelation is enfleshed in the reality of the Incarnation of the Word, Jesus Christ. God's being, and the divine truth, reconfigure themselves, taking-on the reality of this world without losing the divine reality, without losing the self. The Incarnation, in sacra doctrina, means a joining, a coming-together, the 'addition of being' one to another, the effects of which are unleashed on the created side. For God the Incarnation is condescension, accommodation, descent, suffering, offering, self-abasement, kenosis, gift of self towards us. For man the Incarnation is theosis, deification, divinisation, 'being touched by God and touching God,' being raised to the divine life. 'God became man so that man might become God.' This is the principle of sacra doctrina - God reveals Himself out of love to raise man up to live in His life. Sacra doctrina engages the human person in the reality of the Enfleshment of the Divine Word, His suffering and glorification, and the suffering and transformation which must result on our side.

The Incarnation really stands out as the principle of sacra doctrina, as is noted in this author's paper, Strong Meat or Milk. Sacra Doctrina demands the full role and implementation of the human mind and reason, just as the reality of the Incarnation contains the reality of the human mind of the human nature of Jesus Christ. As Our Lord possesses both a divine nature and a human nature, complete with human mind, body, and soul, so does the theological enterprise possess the role and proper place of the human mind and reason. The heresy of Appolinarianism taught that in Our Lord the Divine Word or Logos replaced the human mind and soul of Jesus, rendering Christ fully divine but not fully human. For sacra doctrina to be a fully divine reality given in reality to human beings by divine revelation and appropriated by faith and reason, it is necessary that the human person be integrally involved by virtue of wisdom, mind, intelligence, reason, and skill in the process of explicating, elucidating and applying theological truth. Sacra doctrina is fully divine and fully human, an Incarnation in its own right. Sacra Doctrina is itself an image of the Incarnation of God; it is an Incarnation process.

God united Himself to the created order and to human nature by being born of the Blessed Virgin Mary; in the womb of Mary God joined Himself to man and to His own created reality: revelation, in sacra doctrina, is united to human nature, and most specifically, to human reason and understanding. Sacra doctrina repeats the pattern of the Incarnation within human life. God becomes man so that man might become God. We become by grace what God is by nature - in the Incarnation. Thus God perfects and completes nature by adding grace to it. And this process of the Incarnation, in which God assumes human nature and unites it to divinity, is fulfilled in sacred doctrine; in theology, the natural knowledge and sciences of man are raised up to God as human nature is raised by grace to the life of God. Faith responds to grace, and the human intellect and will are completed and perfected in an exercise prompted, carried-through, and finished by God's own gift of God's own life. In the end, theology or holy doctrine becomes for the believer the Incarnation in microcosm.

The Christian is the microcosm of the Incarnation as he is a hypostatic union - he unites in himself the natural, knowledge of the world, with the supernatural, divine grace. In the hypostatic union of sacra doctrina, the human assumes the divine, the natural knowledge of man is perfectly united to and therefore glorified by divine revelation. In the believing Christian, the created order is united to God by revelation humanly and intellectually appropriated by faith through divine grace. The Incarnation is continued. Thus, grace perfects nature and man is divinised by God in the mystery of Jesus Christ.