But if the idea of eternal life be applied merely to our
state in the next life, then its content, too, lies beyond all
experience, and cannot form the basis of knowledge of a scientific kind.
Hopes and desires, though marked by the strongest subjective certainty,
are not any the clearer for that, and contain in themselves no guarantee
of the completeness of what one hopes or desires. Clearness and
completeness of idea, however, are the conditions of comprehending
anything--_i.e._, of understanding the necessary connection between the
various elements of a thing, and between the thing and its given
presuppositions. The Evangelical article of belief, therefore, that
justification by faith establishes or brings with it assurance of
eternal life, is of no use theologically, so long as this purposive
aspect of justification cannot be verified in such experience as is
possible now" (_Rechtfertigung und Versoehnung_, vol. iii., chap. vii.,
52). All this is very rational, but ...
In the first edition of Melanchthon's _Loci Communes_, that of 1521, the
first Lutheran theological work, its author omits all Trinitarian and
Christological speculations, the dogmatic basis of eschatology. And Dr.
Hermann, professor at Marburg, the author of a book on the Christian's
commerce with God (_Der Verkehr des Christen mit Gott_)--a book the
first chapter of which treats of the opposition between mysticism and
the Christian religion, and which is, according to Harnack, the most
perfect Lutheran manual--tells us in another place,[18] referring to
this Christological (or Athanasian) speculation, that "the effective
knowledge of God and of Christ, in which knowledge faith lives, is
something entirely different.
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