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Inferential Theology

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Many pious minds of the Christian Church have earnestly opposed the opinion of the more liberally inclined orthodox theologians, that the Christian theology is in some respects "inferential.' Liddon adroitly puts this question in his Bampton Lecture of 1866 (Our Lord's Divinity, p. 441, 442): "No one would deny that in all ages of the Church the field of theology has been the scene of hasty, unwarrantable, and misleading inferences. False conclusions have been drawn from true premises, and very doubtful or false premises have been occasionally assumed, if not asserted to be true… But if this should be admitted it would not follow that theology is in no sense ‘ inferential.' Within certain limits, and under due guidance, ‘ inference' is the movement, it is the life of theology. The primal records of revelation itself, as we find them in Scripture, are continually inferential, and it is at least the business of theology to observe and marshal these revealed inferences, to draw them out, and to make the most of them. The illuminated reason of the collective Church has for ages been engaged in studying the original materials of the Christian revelation. It has thus shaped, rather than created, the science of theology. What is theology but a continuous series of observed and systematized inferences respecting God in his nature and his dealings with mankind, drawn from premises which rest upon God's authority? If we reject conclusions drawn professedly from the substance of revelation, but really enlarging instead of explaining it, it does not follow that we should reject inferences which are simply explanatory, or which exhibit the bearing of one revealed truth upon another. This, indeed, is the most fruitful and legitimate province of inference in theological inquiry. Such ‘ inference' brings out the meaning of the details of revelation. It raises this feature to prominence, it throws that into the shade. It places language to which a too servile literalism might have attributed the highest force in the lower rank of metaphor and symbol; it elicits pregnant and momentous truths from incidents which, in the absence of sufficient guidance or reflection, may have been thought to possess only a secondary degree of significance.'