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Thus by "erroneous" is meant, according to Viva, a proposition which is not immediately opposed to a revealed proposition, but only to a theological conclusion drawn from premisses which are de fide; "savouring of heresy," when a proposition is opposed to a theological conclusion not evidently drawn from premisses which are de fide, but most probably and according to the common mode of theologising, and so with the rest.
He lasted, however, but a short time; Zeno was able to return, and occupied the throne again during fourteen years, from 477 to 491. These two men, Zeno and Basiliscus, criminal in their private lives, in their public lives adventurers, who gained the throne by the worst Byzantine arts, opened the line of the theologising emperors.
This kind of theologising leads straight to the conclusion that God is to all intents and purposes quite distinct from His creation, although He possesses a full and accurate knowledge of all that goes on in it and reserves to Himself the right to interfere. In what sense language like this leaves room for the divine immanence it is difficult to see.
But if not, what becomes of the whole fabric of popular Protestant theology concerning the plan of salvation, the Judgment Day, and the atoning merits of the Redeemer? No, this kind of incoherent theologising will not do. No one really believes it, and the churches will have to give up professing to believe it.
Surely any ordinary intelligence can see that this kind of theologising puts an impassable gulf at once between Jesus and every other person who has ever been born of an earthly mother. Certainly it does, the theologian may declare, and rightly so, for that gulf exists; He assumed human nature, but He was eternally divine before He did so, and we are not.
Its connotations are endless, and range from the aggressively man-like deity of the primitive savage up or down to the abstract force of the mathematical physicist and the shadowy "Absolute" of the theologising metaphysician.
Hence in speaking of the Atonement, whether in preaching or in theologising, it is quite unnecessary to raise any question about the inspiration of Scripture, or to make any claim of 'authority' either for the Apostles or for the Lord.
Popular theology usually assumes, or appears to assume, that every individual is a perfectly free agent able at all times to distinguish and to choose between the higher and the lower, and as liable to choose the one as the other. There is another kind of theologising, of course, which speaks of the weakened or corrupted will due to our fallen nature, that I must let alone for the present.
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