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An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant by Edward Caldwell Moore
page 76 of 282 (26%)
the unseen. In reality, they were but fetches from out the world of the
known into the world of the unknown.

The point of interest is this:--In all possible combinations in which,
throughout the history of thought, these three objects had been set, the
one with the others, they had always remained three objects. There was
no essential relation of the one to the other. They were like the points
of a triangle of which any one stood over against the other two. God
stood over against the man whom he had fashioned, man over against the
God to whom he was responsible. The consequences for theology are
evident. When men wished to describe, for example, Jesus as the Son of
God, they laid emphasis upon every quality which he had, or was supposed
to have, which was not common to him with other men. They lost sight of
that profound interest of religion which has always claimed that, in
some sense, all men are sons of God and Jesus was the son of man. Jesus
was then only truly honoured as divine when every trait of his humanity
was ignored. Similarly, when men spoke of revelation they laid emphasis
upon those particulars in which this supposed method of coming by
information was unlike all other methods. Knowledge derived directly
from God through revelation was in no sense the parallel of knowledge
derived by men in any other way. So also God stood over against nature.
God was indeed declared to have made nature. He had, however, but given
it, so to say, an original impulse. That impulse also it had in some
strange way lost or perverted, so that the world, though it had been
made by God, was not good. For the most part it moved itself, although
God's sovereignty was evidenced in that he could still supervene upon
it, if he chose. The supernatural was the realm of God. Natural and
supernatural were mutually exclusive terms, just as we saw that divine
and human were exclusive terms. So also, on the third side of our
triangle, man stood over against nature. Nature was to primitive men the
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