When the Church affirms that
revelation was closed with the death of the Apostles, this must not be
understood in the sense that the content of revelation was ended then, but only
in the sense that God brought to a close the manifestations or the propositions
of the teaching. The revealed propositions, the revealed teaching came to an
end with the death of St. John; but revelation, that is, the thing or reality
revealed continues to grow in the Church without interruption. In the Church
there are ceaselessly new revelations, there is a constant communication of the
mysteries of the divine life.
Theology is embedded in the
Church in such a way that it grows apace with the growth of the revealed
reality in the Church. Theology is not a dialectical, but an experimental
knowledge whereby we are given to know not only the formulae revealed by God in
the Scripture and in the divine-apostolic Tradition, but also and above all the
divine mysteries that manifest themselves day by day in the life of the Church,
of which theology itself is a part.
In this conception of theological
science three characteristics are clearly discernible. In the first place, its
vitalist or mystical character. Theology is, indeed, formally a natural
science; nonetheless, its vitalist or mystical90 character may not be ignored
since its foundation or starting point is to be found in the infused virtue of
faith which is a virtue of the intellect with roots in the will, and thus with
affective elements of great significance in its make-up. The defect, then, does
not consist in affirming the vitalist character of theology but in stressing it
exclusively by assuming that it is an arational knowledge. In the second place,
Theology’s starting point is not the revelation that was brought to an end with
the death of the Apostles, but the revelation that is constantly made in the
Church; that is to say, not the kind of revelation that is formulated and
proposed, but the kind that is communicated and lived, or rather, the revealed
reality that is constantly being communicated in the Church. And, in the third
place, the pointlessness of theological reasoning and of authentic theological
conclusions arrived at through study and reasoning. (Francisco Marín-Sola, The
Homogeneous Evolution of Catholic Dogma [trans. Antonio T. Piñon; Manila,
Philippines: Santo Tomas University Press, 1988], 55-56)
