systematic-theology

Theologians are to look to the _beyond_-community__ _beyond_ nationality; skin-color, gender; sexual orientation, citizenship, religious affiliation___ecause God, the Divine, who is the primary frame of reference for theologians, is for, with, in, among those individual human beings. It is to reaffirm the sheer truth: No one is better or worse, superior or inferior than any other; and, 'Ich bin du, wenn Ich Ich bin' [I am you, when Iam I.]

To illustrate the nature of this theandric reciprocity, Thomas invokes, as an example, the physical touch of Jesus__ hand: __e wrought divine things humanly, as when he healed the leper with a touch._ The touch of a human being is not in itself miraculous, and even in Jesus this human action is not humanly healing. The miraculous fact of the healing power of this human touch, rather, as Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange puts it, __roceeds from God as the principal cause and from Christ__ human nature as the instrumental cause._ Jesus works divine things humanly. More ultimately, Jesus wills the divine will of salvation humanly. And so he wills theandrically in the sense that what he wills has an __nfinite value_ that __erives from the divine suppositum that is the agent which operates_. The deifying effects of the Incarnation are thus contingent on the theandric fact of the interpenetrating unity of divine-human operations.

No one book of scripture can be understood by itself, any more than any one part of a tree or member of the body can be understood without reference to the whole of which it is a part.

To so many people, the Lord is in danger of being no more than a patron saint of our systematic theology instead of the Christ Who is our life.