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Part of Creation: 1. Theology 2. Genesis 3. Protology 4. Beginning and End 1. Beginning and end — in the concrete form of birth and death — are basic elements in human and hence religious experience. As a being with a history, man seeking to master consciously his destiny inevitably asks after his beginning and his end, since he recognizes that the action now possible to him and demanded of him is limited by previously existing conditions and is orientated to a supreme end — the goal of human existence. But …

Part of Devil: 1. Demons 2. The Devil 1. Hermeneutical problems. The particular way in which angels and demons figure in Old and New Testament revelation, and the indisputable use that is made there of modes of representation drawn from outside revelation, even though in Scripture these belong to the mode of expression, not to the content asserted, make it important to be cautious about the traditional method of harmonizing and systematizing the scattered indications of Scripture. This method worked indis…

God’s mercy is described as the readiness of God to come to the aid of his distressed creature out of free grace. Man’s primal experience of God as the God of mercies, compassion, and forgiveness is recorded in many ways in the books of the Old and New Testaments (on the biblical doctrine see Charity I, Grace and Salvation). In theology mercy is axiomatically predicated of God as one of his essential attributes, because being infinite in every perfection ( D 1782) his just and holy nature precludes all cruelty and unfair severity. Moreover, mercy is an actual attitude of Go…

Part of Society: 1. The Social Group 2. Fellowship 3. Common Good 4. Public Opinion 1. Notion. It is part of the primary experience of man to know himself comprised within a fellowship, by virtue of which and in view of which he exists (even if only by denying it). The essence of his finite “nature” is not only to be with and for himself (at least in self-consciousness) but also to be with others. Since therefore he is not capable of self-realization except in fellowship, fellowship is a basic concept in theolo…

A. The Theological Dimension 1. The theological question as regards “time” must be posed in the context of the coming (or offer) of salvation, when man is summoned to decision, to accept salvation in fact, in his freedom. Hence the theological question does not start from a notion of time derived from the natural sciences. It is concerned with man’s self-understanding as a being in need of and capable of salvation — an understanding which is prior to the view of man gained from science and technology: Hence when theology inquires into time and the temporal, it asks what are the co…

Part of Creation: 1. Theology 2. Genesis 3. Protology 4. Beginning and End 1. The Concept. Protology is a term formed on the analogy of eschatology to designate the dogmatic doctrine on the creation of the world and man, paradise and the fall, hence the doctrine of the origins. In the ordinary text-books of dogmatic theology the subject is generally treated under “De Deo Creante”, “De Deo Elevante”, “De Peccato Originali”. These seemingly disparate themes form a real unity. For protology describes in terms of …

Part of Eternity: 1. Biblical 2. Theological 1. The ОТ term for eternity, צןלם, is used for preference to describe the being of God, and given a certain emphasis, but always God’s being insofar as it is superior to man and his existence. God was already there before the world of man was created (Ps 90:2; 102:25–29; Job 38:4; Gen 1:1). A thousand years are as a moment in his sight (Ps 90:4). Thus he is the eternal in the first place as “the most ancient God”, later, from Deutero-Isaiah on, also expressly call…

A. The Problem The unity and difference in which faith and history combine have been thrown open as a problem only by the modern forms of thought which have made their explicit articulation possible. But the tension between faith and history in a general and fundamental sense is a basic characteristic of Christian existence in general and is therefore as old as Christianity itself. Indeed, in and through Jesus Christ it points back to the history of faith and salvation in the ОТ. With the modern opening up of the historical dimension of existence, to some extent in the wake of…

Part of History: 1. History and Historicity 2. Philosophy of History 3. Theology of History A. Terms and Concept The words used throughout Europe for history come through the Latin historia from the Greek ίστορεΐν, to know, investigate, except the German Geschichte. The former group indicates rather the study or science of history, while the German envisages rather the event itself, first the individual occurrence and then the individual life-process and the total world-process. The humanists used the German Geschichte in the definitely scientific sense of historia. But Geschichte …

Part of Religion: 1. Concept of Religion 2. Science of Religion 3. Theology of Religions A. The Plurality of Religions The fact that after vigorous discussions Vatican II on 28 October 1965 voted a Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to the Non-Christian Religions represents a very important event in the history of the Church. In view of the past history of the Church’s attitude to these religions (which cannot be gone into here), which for dogmatic, psychological, social and cultural reasons had been ent…

Part of Salvation: 1. Universal Salvific Will 2. Biblical Concept 3. History of Salvation (“Salvation History”) 4. Theology A. Theological Analysis 1. Biblical approach: The genesis of “history of salvation” as a scriptural concept. a) An exegetical investigation of the concept of “history of salvation” must examine the relationship of a purely political interpretation of events to a theological one, in the various biblical traditions. No event is “chemically pure”, but presents itself with various meanings. Since this is so, in…