[ p. 138 ]
THERE properly goes with God’s work as Creator a work as Saviour. God necessarily serves what he makes, and this applies to each least part as well as to the whole. God is everywhere and he is in everything. The method of his presence, and its significance, will differ according to the circumstance, but nothing can change the fact of his universal presence. The blacker the circumstance the more it calls for God, if we are to find any hope of it. God’s presence as metaphysically necessary with a given event does not, however, involve always his approbation. He may be a partner in enterprises that he profoundly disapproves or even hates. This requires that we think of his purpose as involving him in suffering, and of his universe as wearing for him a certain tragic aspect. The conception of a suffering God is admittedly difficult, but it throws a light on facts which are otherwise utterly dark. For by his serving and his suffering God purposes to save. His greatness is proved not by his remoteness from our human life but by his very nearness to it. He works in all and for all because he would save all. He pays the price of his own creation, and if he calls us to share in the price, it is only in order that we may share in the blessedness.
[ p. 139 ]
IF the significance of sin is such as has been stated in the last Chapter, we can hardly escape the conviction that from the divine standpoint the universe bears a certain tragic aspect. The poignant utterance of “the Lord” in Green Pastures conies very near to ultimate truth : “This business of being God is no bed of roses!” God is not only eternal Mind: he is eternal Heart as well. The moral shadow that lies across the world falls on him as the shadow of a cross. No one will deny that we are here talking of God in very human terms, but what of it ? Why is it a sign of philosophical ineptitude to “humanize” God but a sign of philosophical superiority to “mechanize” him ? If the mind of man reflects the mind of God, why should not the heart of man reflect the heart of God as well ? A mind too exalted to be interested in its own activities and their significance for other minds would also be too exalted for these other minds ever to care about. If we cannot on occasion speak of God as we speak of ourselves regarding him as acting and feeling in intensely personal ways then God may still be “a problem to us,” but the problem will fall largely in the realm of the theoretical. “Does God care ?” Why is that not a question as worthy of our consideration as the question, “Is God infinite or finite ?” God conceived simply as Creator is not sufficient. We want to know that he is Saviour as well [ p. 140 ] as Creator. It is altogether likely that much of the modern criticism of the idea of a Creator-God is due
to the failure of men to consider with it the idea of a Saviour-God. Religiously, Creator and Saviour go together, and there is no reason whatever why they should not go together philosophically. No philosophy is adequate, the world being as it is, which does not see God as at once the wearer of a crown and the bearer of a cross. [1]
God serves. The implicate of any part is the whole, and if the part must serve its whole, it is just as true that the whole must serve its parts. The entire tree serves its least twig and leaf, just as these help to make the tree what it is. If nothing could be but for God, then God is the servant of all that is. We shall not say that he is not Lord as well : we shall only say that his universal lordship and his universal service are inseparable. That is a strange idea of God which supposes him to be so great that he is not interested in details. We have not hesitated to adopt in these pages a philosophy which treats the parts from the standpoint of the needs and the purpose of the whole. But it does not follow from this that we are supposing the parts to be, as in Spinoza, so many passing incidents, or as in Hegel, so many “moments of the process,” and nothing more. One of the most hotly debated questions of the Middle Ages was whether the universal yielded the particular or the particular the universal; that is, whether the class-idea is the real cause of the individual members of the class, or whether the individuals are the real existences and the class-idea a mere abstraction therefrom. It is customary to regard the debate as largely a battle of [ p. 141 ] words, and to deplore the vast amount of intellectual energy that was wasted on it. But. the Scholastics had their finger on a real problem, as is easily seen if we state it concretely, in terms of, say, the relations between the individual man and Ms society. ‘To ask which is the more important of the two is to lose sight of the fact that there could be neither without the other. A given individual could, of course, be dispensed with, but not all individuals. In other words, the parts and the whole are supplementary. Yet so far as society is concerned, it is the parts individual men and women that are the specific centers of interest. The interest of the individual in society is always the interest of an individual. On the other hand, the interest of society in the individual is always wider than the individual himself: it involves a degree of social self-interest. It is therefore not at all a question of deciding which of the two is the more important the particular or the universal, the part or the whole. It is a question, rather, of recognizing the equal necessity of them both. If there cannot be the one without the other, any claim as to value made for the one will be equally valid for the other. The whole is real as a whole and the part is real as a part, and neither can be deprived of its own reality because it does not have the reality of the other. The truth is happily expressed in Smuts’ phrase, “a holistic universe,” by which he means that any whole is an organization of other wholes. [2] The universe is a universe of universes, and every universe, whether large or small, has its own law, its own nature, its own rights and obligations. All of which is by way of saying that the God who, [ p. 142 ] because he is the Creator of the whole and therefore the Servant of the whole, is for the same reason the Creator and the Servant of the part. If the whole cannot be but for God, then the least detail cannot be but for God. The theist seems often to be afraid to carry out the logic of his own position. He properly makes certain great affirmations about God, affirmations concerning his universality, his sufficiency, his immanent activity, and the implication of these affirmations is that nothing can be wholly independent of the divine will and purpose. But while this is the theory of the theist, he in effect will disconnect God from great areas of the universal movement. Brightman, for example, is sure that God is “supremely creative,” and yet he feels compelled to concede the existence of that which cannot ultimately be related to God’s will, but has its roots instead in something that God cannot quite control. [3] If the sunset is the beauty of God, why is not the single beam of light ? If the thunder is the voice of God, why is not the single sound wave ? Speaking in terms of physics, the electron is just at present regarded as the ultimate form of being : then the theist, who believes that there is something “more ultimate” than the electron, will say that God is just as truly involved in single electrons as he is in any of their diverse forms of organization. How can he consistently say otherwise? As we have been seeing, there are forms of reality and there are aspects of our own experience which, looked at from the purely human and temporal standpoint, seem to be insoluble problems as existing in the universe of a God held to be almighty, wise, and good. But it must again be said, [ p. 143 ] that the common objection in face of certain dark facts of life, namely, “We would not do these things ; then how can God do them and still be good ?” quite overlooks the organic or systematic nature of existence. The “acts of God”-to quote the phrase which carries the sole reference to the Deity that “big business” ever makes are the issue of a total given situation; they are not so many isolated, independent, and arbitrary events. Hence the truth of Bowne’s observation, that in studying both nature and history we need to know, first, “the connection of events in an order of law” and, second, “their causality and interpretation.” [4] It takes courage to keep God everywhere, but without that courage the theist will hardly hold his position. Keeping God everywhere, however, is not incompatible with the claim, already considered, that there are forms of his acting which are under the determination of a purpose beyond themselves, and that such forms would therefore be different if his self-consistency did not prevent it. God is everywhere and in everything, or there is no God. Nothing can do without him. He is in the dens of iniquity as really (but not in the same sense) as he is in the temples of prayer. If but for him the saint could not be a saint, neither but for him could the sinner be a sinner although again it must be said that his co-operation in the two cases differs immensely in method and character. He is in the fire -that devastates the city as really as he is in all the tender ministries that follow in its wake. He is in the things that cause our tears as really as he is in the things that cause our laughter. To say that anything can happen without the co-operation of God in [ p. 144 ] some way and, deeply considered, without his will is to surrender under stress of a temporary practical situation of extreme difficulty that utter divine adequacy whose support we never need quite so much as we do “when the woes of life overtake us.” For if you take God altogether out of a situation, just because it is so bad, what have you done but made it even worse? When even the faithful are near to despairing, what shall the unbeliever do ? This circumstance that you would so wholly, separate from God what will you say about it ? Will you say that God is here suffering defeat ? Will you say that something has escaped his control? Will you say that there is that which can be explained without him? Will you say that a fact, an event, an experience call it what you will has crept into God’s universe that is so utterly alien to him that where it is he cannot be, but must perforce withdraw himself and confess that here he is impotent? Suppose you say that, what have you accomplished: have you not made things infinitely worse ? Have you not, indeed, made them hopeless? If God is defeated, how is he God? That situations exist which to us are heartbreaking, loaded down with a tragedy which creates in us an unutterable anguish of spirit this no man may or should deny. But the only hope we can have of such situations situations which seem to have crowded God out will be in our faith that they have not crowded God out after all. The truth here may be stated almost as a paradox: God serves even his enemies. It is by that continued service that directly or indirectly, sooner or later, he purposes to bend the enmity to his own ends. “He niaketh even the wrath [ p. 145 ] of man to praise Mm,” and he maketh even the terrors of nature to be “ministers of his, to do his will.” All this does not mean that God is incapable of moral discrimination. It does not mean that one thing, whether a human deed, a human condition, or a natural event affecting one life or many, is all the same, to him as any other: that would be a strange inference. “He maketh his rain to fall and his sun to shine on the just and the unjust alike,” not because 'it is a matter of indifference to him whether men are just or unjust, but because he is maintaining an order for the largest possible good of all. Not only so, but the unjust man is a potential saint, and God treats him not merely from the standpoint of what he is, but also from the standpoint of what he might be.
This involution of a good God with all that exists and with all that happens has the result of making him a partner in enterprises which, because they are evil, he must profoundly disapprove. He co-operates with men at the same time that he is purposing to “confound their fell designs.” It is to be admitted that the thought is highly speculative, but it is a speculation to which we seem to be irresistibly led by Wr belief as to God on the one hand and the facts of life and experience on the other hand. It is impossible but that God should be present in some sense in everything, and it is incredible that he should be approvingly present in everything. We are therefore necessarily led to some such distinction as that between what might be called God’s natural co-operation with men in all their enterprises and his moral co-operation. [5] He must be everywhere present and active for the purpose of the cosmos conceived as the [ p. 146 ] instrument by which he seeks his ends. If he is present in the ends, he must also be present in the means. The one will be his as much as the other. But, as we have seen, involved in these purposes are contingencies, to be inevitably converted into actualities by the very nature of man as free, growing, and learning intelligence; and while these actualities may be utterly at variance with God’s holy nature, he will not deal with them in any arbitrary fashion. What he helped man to create he will also help man to destroy, but he will demand the same freedom in the destruction that was present in the creation. What came by freedom must go by freedom if it goes. Of necessity there are certain issues of the plans and actions of men, and these issues also are of the divine ordaining. The causal law is universal; it is God’s law; and events illustrate it, are even impossible without it, whatever their character. In this sense, therefore, God ordains the harvest of sin the harvest, too, of men’s mere errors, the unintentional as well as the intentional. Motive is significant in the moral order, but it has no significance in the order of material consequences. The content of the harvest of sin and error does not represent God’s ideal it is not what he fain would have ; but it does represent his method, and to a greater or less degree it reveals his attitude. Therefore God is not equally seen everywhere. We can be moved deeply by the solemn strains of Swinburne’s “Hertha,” but its fundamental fallacy is just here in the assumption that the basic Reality is as much operative at one point as at another. Even Tennyson, in “The Higher Pantheism,” with its line, “For is not He all but thou,” does not [ p. 147 ] sufficiently protect the differences of quality in the divine activity. Both poem^ need to be read in the light of Streeter’s caution that since creation is characterized by qualitative distinctions, not all things are to be regarded as equally expressive of the divine nature. [6] Therefore, although the dark deed could not be but for God, and although its dark consequences likewise could not be but for God, it does not follow that the deed and its consequences have his approval just as they would if they were of a radically different character. While the consequences may show what he thinks of the deed, he may be far from rejoicing in them or in their cause. The Hebrew prophet conceived God under the figure of a potter, who smashes the pots which do not come up to the requirements. Man is a potter too, but he does his work, as Browning has it in “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” nedged about with the “dance of plastic circumstance.” He is caught in what seems to be the whirl of vast machinery but the machinery is “just meant to give his soul its bent.” Presiding over all is One who “planned a whole,” who seeks “the perfect cup,” and who to change the figure and the allusion will not hesitate, as the Pope in “The Ring and the Book” said respecting Guido, to unmake a soul if that is necessary to its remaking. [7] The Great Potter works with us; we are his “prentice hands”; we do our work under conditions which he prescribes; the very faults we commit arise out of these* conditions ; yet while he continues to bear with us, and, as Paul says, to be our colaborer, he makes us feel the pressure of his hand; he does not hesitate to unmake our work, and to throw it out as “broken earthenware” while [ p. 148 ] yet on every shard he writes his name beneath our own. He shares the -responsibility for our blunder, the surest evidence he can give us that the blunder need not be irretrievable. It is again admitted that in all this we are speaking of God in a very human way committing what to some is the unpardonable sin philosophically, namely, “anthropomorphism” but there can be no objection to that when it brings home to the mind a great truth. Indeed, we are satisfied to take our stand with Streeter, and affirm that when we individualize and personalize God, we follow a more truly philosophical procedure than we do when we treat him as a mere impersonal Absolute. [8] God suffers. God being what he is his involution with the order of life will further mean that his service is a suffering service. We meet here one of the most difficult of all problems. Men who reflect on the nature of God may be classified in many other respects according as they do or do not believe that God suffers. It must be granted at the outset that apparently insuperable metaphysical objections may be offered to the idea of a suffering God, and the more so as the total view of God approaches adequacy on every other count: yet it will still be contended here that without the idea of a suffering God there is no way of moralizing the cosmic movement conceived as the steady expression of a benevolent creative Will. Was it not William James who once said that when the claims of metaphysics and the claims of ethics appeared to clash, he cast his vote for ethics? What he meant was that metaphysical theory must take note of ethical fact and requirement. We may not be able to trace all our convictions about life and [ p. 149 ] experience to a point where they meet in a perfect coherence and unity, but we can at least believe that all convictions that grow naturally and of proper right out of life and experience do have such a meeting point: our inability to find it is rather, as Seeberg says, a limitation on our reasoning powers than an evidence of either the falsity of our convictions or the irrationality of the universe. [9] With due modesty we confess our inability to state clearly the process whereby suffering can be an actual experience for a being such as we conceive God to be; but this inability is no sufficient reason for the conclusion that therefore he cannot suffer. It is much more important that our view of God shall be morally satisfactory than it is that it shall be metaphysically unimpeachable. But having said that, we must add that the view will not be unimpeachable even metaphysically if it requires us to regard God as a wholly unmoved spectator of the world’s travail. Better, because far truer, that we should say that the world’s travail is also Ms travail that “in all our affliction he too is afflicted.” [10] The question, “How can this be so ?” is not the first question. The first question, rather, is “Is it so ?” and we can affirm the fact even if we are uncertain respecting the process. A similar uncertainty is common enough elsewhere, and it does not make us skeptics. There is nobody but believes more than he can understand or that knows ‘more than he can explain. A God who “cares” and to whom we can therefore go in confidence, is a religious necessity, and how can he “care” and at the same time be quite passive, quite unmoved ? It is by much tribulation that man enters the kingdom of [ p. 150 ] God: may we not regard it as the obverse of that truth that it is by much tribulation that God enters the kingdom of man ? In a writer like Brightman, it is the firm determination not to obscure the fact of this divine tribulation that is the real reason for his unsatisfactory metaphysics. [11] The fact, however, may be given its full value without any surrender of the divine all-sufficiency. Knudson achieves the synthesis, as did Bowne before him, and while “the modern temper” is against it, there are many other contemporary thinkers who follow this high and difficult road in preference to the lower and easier one.
The motive for the conception of God that entirely precludes the thought of his being able to suffer is ordinarily metaphysical. It is found chiefly in writers of marked powers of abstraction. God is set forth as the wholly transcendental, lifted above all distinctions of time and place, the Absolute, the Unconditioned, the Wholly Other, and the like. It is found in Western thought where the Platonic influence has been strongly felt; it is much more widely spread in the East, where also it is much older. [12] Any conception we form of God, so we are told, is so completely relative to our own limited point of view, that it can have nothing more than a merely pragmatic value. In the phrase made famous by Vaihinger, we think and talk about things als ob “as if” although actually they are otherwise than we think and talk. So also of God. We talk of him “as if” . he were this, that, and the other, but we must believe \ that in himself he is quite different from what we for ! our own purposes, or under the compulsion of our [ p. 151 ] own necessities, say about Mm. Is not God the one being who is sui causa the cause of himself? Is he not without beginning and without ending ? Are not all other things but so many “appearances” of him who is the one supreme “reality” ? Is he not beyond the power of any mind to compass? Is not all language helpless to describe him adequately ? In so far as he may be supposed to “contemplate” anything, what can it be but “his own perfection”; and in so far as he can be “loved,” how otherwise can it be than in a purely “intellectual” way ? Suffering, since it involves some kind of inescapable limitation, is necessarily as foreign to such a being as darkness is to light. Such a view has always had a fascination for minds of a certain quality. The modern theory of a “finite” God is to be understood largely as a reaction from this severe metaphysical conception. The familiar words in Mr. Britling express what to many is a far more comforting and defensible idea: “A finite God who struggles in his great and comprehensive way as we struggle in our weak and silly way” is the need of the human heart and at the same time the best explanation of the course of life. [12:1] If thei choice were confined as it is not to a suffering finite God on the one hand and a non-suffering infinite God on the other hand, religious faith could not hesitate in choosing the former.
Sometimes, however, this conception of a God who not only does not suffer but is not even able to suffer an “impassible” being is the expression of a profoundly religious motive. This must be allowed in the face of what has just been written. In the writings of Philo, Plotinus and the early Christian NeoPlatonists, [ p. 152 ] of John Scotus Erigena, and of many of the medieval mystics, we find presented a view of God as a being of ineffable blessedness, the profound depths of whose existence contain in themselves the inexhaustible source of their own eternal calm. Inge, discussing this view, points out, however, that it is quite different from “the blind unconscious Will” of Von Hartmann and Schopenhauer. [13] No one in our own time has attempted more valiantly to join together the idea of God’s complete blessedness with the idea of his steady love for 'men and his unfailing interest in them, than Friedrich von Hugel. He regards the word “suffering” as connoting a certain deprivation of bliss which cannot be consistently attributed to God. He would therefore speak instead of the divine “sympathy,” although he can maintain his point only by ignoring the derivation of the word. A God who suffers is said thereby to endure a loss of his complete perfection, and this cannot be. A God who sympathizes does not endure this loss: at the same time he is saved from that utter lack of feeling for men which, if the lack were actually there, would in its turn be the evidence to an imperfection of another sort. [14]
It is difficult to see why a suffering God should be held to experience a certain imperfection while yet he retains his perfection only as he sympathizes. There can be sympathy without suffering that is clear enough. When we “rejoice with them that rejoice,” we are showing a form of sympathy. So are we when we “weep with them that weep.” The sympathy of joy does not involve suffering, but the sympathy of tears does : otherwise it is hardly sympathy [ p. 153 ] in any real sense. One thinks of the words of Coleridge:
“Sweet is the tear that from some Howard’s eye Drops on the cheek of one he lifts from earth; And he that works me good with unmoved face Does it but half: he chills me while he aidsMy benefactor, not my brother man !” [15]
Even so austere a thinker as Matthew Arnold, contemplating the life and work of Heine, could entertain the fancy that “the Spirit of the world,” moved by the vaunts of men, allowed for a moment “a sardonic smile” to play upon his lips. And then he adds : That smile was Heine! The God who rebukes or encourages men, even though he does it’ through the words and actions of another man, is not only not indifferent to the human scene, but he has a stake in it, and whoever has a stake in anything, even although he be God, must on occasion watch with anxious eyes. Von Hugel is trying to conserve a great truth, but he conserves it at an unnecessary cost in both logic and fact. He does, indeed, as a devout Romanist, provide for a suffering Lord by the doctrine of incarnation, conceived as the means whereby the Eternal Son qualified himself to be “touched with the feeling of our infirmities.” Assuming the doctrine, we may allow that there would be possible to the Son as incarnate experiences which would not be possible to him as not incarnate. But that is going a long way around to arrive at a truth which may be reached much more directly. Not only so, but on Von HugePs own theological presuppositions concerning the Trinity and the Incarnation, it could be shown that divine suffering is called for to [ p. 154 ] make the presuppositions intelligible. Is not the Incarnation to be viewed as an activity of the total Godhead, and is it not through the divine activity that we are to arrive at our understanding of the divine nature? How can God be revealed in Jesus if the God we see there is not, after all, God as he really is? However much we may disagree with Ames’ final conception of God, he is surely right in holding that God must be interpreted through his functioning, on the principle that “a thing is what it does” [16] Why set up this dualism between a God who is called for by the facts of life and experience, and a God who, whatever religious use may be made of the conception, is, after all, called for by more purely speculative interests ? It ought to be possible so to cleanse the word “suffer” of all derogatory connotation (if it can have that) when applied to God as to remove Von HugeFs objections to the word, and at the same time include in it all that he means by “sympathy.”
Certain thinkers, it has been said above, have objected to the idea of an infinitely transcendent God just because it seems to make him too remote from the hard realities of life as we know them. There can be nothing but respect for the feeling here revealed. A God so remote as to be untouched by life’s realities would also be so remote that those realities could be related to him in no way at all. On the other hand, in order to be religiously adequate God must be adequate also to the total range of existence. The great defect of Hoffding’s brilliant treatment of the philosophy of religion is in his assertion, everywhere expressed, that it is not possible, nor need it be attempted, to find for the “facts of existence” and the [ p. 155 ] “values of religious faith and experience” a common ground. [17] To make God a permanent metaphysical question-mark in order to make him a permanent moral power is simply to sustain a loss in return for no gain : it is as bad as conceiving him so abstractly as that he becomes religiously unavailable which is Walter Lippmann’s pointed criticism of the God of such philosophies as Whitehead’s. [18] Mere belief in a God who is wholly on the side of the good is not in itself sufficient to give us a sense of security in the world, confidence that the universe is “friendly to moral values,” and a conviction of the sure triumph of our God’s cause. We need besides that a belief in a God who himself initiates and sustains all that is. Then only have we a guarantee that “there shall never be one lost good.” He who gives the law to the moral universe must also give the law to that wider system of relationships within which the moral universe is set, and to which the moral universe is seen finally to give the meaning. But the God who is the guarantee of his own triumph does not secure that triumph simply by a series of arbitrary decrees. Most of the criticisms of the idea of omnipotence unfortunately and wrongly assume that this is what he is supposed to do. [19] Instead, he secures it by being himself on the side of the geed ; by being in every bit of endeavor, by whomever made, to make good prevail ; and by so constituting his world that sooner or later it shows evil to be evil, and works against it. What valid reason is there for supposing that a God so occupied is not, in a very real sense, a Sufferer? What gain is there, for either philosophy or religion, in a God conceived on the Aristotelian pattern, re- 5 [ p. 156 ] gar ding life with eyes that do not see and with a heart that does not feel? Besides, why are the great sufferers of history not to be allowed to speak at this point ? Have they not as much right to be heard as the armchair philosophers ? Are not men who have known life in the raw entitled to make a demand on the Final Fact such as will give some meaning to their experience and does not the belief, that the suffering that falls on this side of the veil has a counterpart in Whoever or Whatever is behind the veil, do this very thing ? Was there not a man named Hosea, and another one named Jesus of Nazareth, and are we to discount their testimony and their conviction at the behest of some metaphysician whose chief objection to the idea of a Suffering God is that it is “gross anthropomorphism” ? Well, if it comes to that, how completely is anthropomorphism escaped even by the metaphysician ? It is to be assumed that the most abstract and detached of metaphysicians is still a human being. Can he think otherwise than as a man? Can he invent categories for which he owes nothing to his own experience ? Is there anywhere an idea of God which did not originate in a human mind? Why is not Wieman’s or Whitehead’s “Principle of Concretion” just as anthropomorphic as Sabatier’s “Divine Father” ? Why is not Ames’ “Idealized Reality” just as anthropomorphic as Augustine’s “Sovereign Will”? The conceptions themselves differ, but this does not change the fact that they are all alike relative to the human mind, and that they result from the processes of human thinking directed toward material supplied by human experience. If the conception of God as Personality is to be rejected [ p. 157 ] on the ground that it represents nothing at all but a self -projection on an eternal background, it will be replied that every other conception^ of God is open to a similar criticism. Matthew Arnold’s definition of God as “the enduring Power, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness,” depends absolutely on the human mind being as it is. [20] In other words, the mere charge of anthropomorphism proves nothing either way. What is significant is not the process by which the conception of God is reached, but the intrinsic worth of the conception actually arrived at. As between God conceived as at once Creative Will and Suffering Love and conceived as mere Pattern, or Form, or Process, or Ideal, the greater worth belongs to the former. It explains more; it does more; it means more and for every serious objection that can be laid against it, another objection, equally serious if not more so, can be laid against the suggested substitutes. And certainly for religious purposes, a God utterly adequate in power and holy love, who uses his power to produce other beings, and who leads them, as they are willing to be led, to holy love on their own account, becoming thereby their fellow sufferer for religious purposes, such a conception has nothing to be said against it and everything for it. Nor do we make his suffering love more significant by lessening the range of his power. The greater God is in power, the greater he is in love. If H. G. Wells had identified his “Veiled Being” with his “God who suffers,” he would have gained both philosophically and, religiously. If a suffering God is the source of hope for mankind, then the greater the God who suffers the more potent his suffering. A God too great [ p. 158 ] to suffer would not be great enough to be God, the world being as it is.
“Would I suffer for Mm that I love? So would’st thou so wilt thou!
So shall crown thee the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost crown —
And thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up nor down
One spot for the creature to stand in! It is by no breath,
Turn of eye, wave of hand, that salvation joins issue with death !
As thy Love is discovered almighty, almighty be proved
Thy power, that exists with and for it, of being Beloved !
He who did most shall bear most. . . ” [21]
To undertake to describe the process of suffering within the divine experience would be to assume an intimacy with deep matters greater than any man can have. We can believe things to be true about God even though we cannot explain that they are so. God creates: on that we have no doubt. But how he creates the most we allow ourselves there is an occasional surmise. But respecting the divine suffering, we are not wanting entirely in some analogy. We know, for example, that life brings the deepest suffering to the finest natures, and it brings it because these natures see others in distressing circumstances. But theysdo not merely look on: they try in various ways to save those for whose sake they suffer, and these very efforts only add to their sufferings. And yet they find a gladness in their very [ p. 159 ] sufferings a gladness arising from the knowledge that what is being endured promises to help those whose condition leads to the suffering. Josephine Butler suffered for the sake of the fallen girls and women of London. Infinitely above them herself, she suffered because of their condition; and then because her suffering love led her to associate herself with them in the most intimate way that so she might save them, the very contact of her holiness with their impurity only added to her suffering. Is it too much to say that God suffers as he looks at men and sees them as what they are; and that his suffering is deepened by his personal association with them in all the experience of their life ? The fact that in all this he purposes a good does not change the character of the immediate situation nor of his relation to it. Would a mother’s sufferings for her child’s woes be any less real even if she could know absolutely that they were to have a happy issue ? Even if universalism be the true doctrine, and there is to be a final “restitution of all things” a return, as Origen taught, of all things to the God whence they derive, so that again God shall be “all and in all” even if this be so, the difficulties necessarily attending the process of the return, must be believed to be seen by God as difficulties, and not to mean the same thing to him that the blessed consummation will mean. Because God sees the whole process at once does not mean that he does not discriminate. Out of evil good may come, but his knowledge of that fact does not make the evil less real. And a holy God cannot be implicated in a process of evil without suffering. Indeed, if it be really so that, in circumstances such as [ p. 160 ] ours, the good can come to be only as there is evil, what does that do but introduce a tragic element into the very nature of things, making the divine suffering to appear at last as self-inflicted suffering ? That jis to say, if God freely wills a creation such as this, jhen he freely wills for himself the suffering that he knows it will entail. So great is his love! All the divine smiting of man f or God does smite him ! is at the same time a divine self -smiting. All the severe disciplines of life which, deeply considered, are the wisely chosen methods of a loving Father whereby he seeks to bring many sons into glory^ are disciplines which the Father shares with the children. Again it is admitted that we have here been engaged in the most unabashed anthropomorphism. We have compared the divine to what is universally recognized to be the noblest characteristics of the human selfgiving at self -cost. It can be wrong to do that only if God is unaffected by the human story. And if it be that the God who is responsible for the story is not affected by it, then man is greater than the God who made him. The paradox carries its own denial. The greatest in man is the likest God. Philip Sidney, General Gordon, Abraham Lincoln, in actual history in fiction, Jeannie Deans, Sidney Carton, Adam Bede these trod the wine press in the power of a suffering love. Love made them strong, and suffering made them great. Through them we can believe in God ; yes, in them we can see God God “manifest in the flesh.” The dying Pompilia has said it for us :
“. . . . Through such souls alone God stooping shows sufficient of his light For us i’ the dark to rise by. And I rise.”
[ p. 161 ]
God saves. God serving God suffering: is that all ? No. The Universal Servant who is the Universal Sufferer beeomes thereby also the Universal Saviour. If there is a God at all, and if the universe is the free work of his hands, and if this work is such that it provides for the emergence of facts to which he must utterly oppose himself, then there is needed for that work nothing less than a divine justification. Can we find it ? Can we justify the cosmic travail ? It were temerity to say that we could do it completely. And yet in a sense the cosmic travail is justified in the very fact that it is travail. Travail is the promise of new life. “When she is delivered of the child, she remember eth no more the anguish, for the joy that a man is born into the world.” Dare we use the figure? creation is the birth-pangs of Deity. God would produce that which is like unto himself, and to bring forth children he must travail even he. In Mm the paternal and the maternal combine. Himself begets what himself fosters. “O God, our Father, and our Mother too !” Because he is love, he would share, and if he would share, he must suffer, because only as he suffers can the sharing proceed and at last be complete. God is self -complete : therefore nothing needs to be. If, however, something is besides God, it is because God wills it; and if he wills it he must pay its price. And what a price! All the long ages of biological preparation; vast destruction as the concomitant of natural processes; forms of life monstrous, and, by our standards, repulsive and dangerous ; all the pain of the world, all its suffering, all its sin and selfishness and blindness and folly until the mind wearies of contemplating it and is near to fall [ p. 162 ] ing from its throne. What a price! one exclaims. Yes, but what a purchase! The bare fact of life itself, with all that that means; all lovely things; all the high pomps and glories of day at dawn; all the tenderness and grace that may at any time be “the harvest of a quiet eye” bent on God’s handiwork; all the long story of man’s incredible achievement in the realms he has been equipped to enter art and literature, science and song ; above all, the wisdom born of the struggle against ignorance, the unselfishness born of the struggle against selfishness, the new forms of goodness called forth by the appearance of new forms of evil; the patriot’s self-sacrifice, the mother’s devotion, the laughter of little children; all the tender ministries of love, all holy awe, all reverence, all worship, all prayer this, and as much more, is the purchase of that dire price. And are not such things intrinsically good in a far deeper sense than their opposites are intrinsically evil? The insight of Josiah Eoyce, that every evil thing because of which a good thing comes to be finds in that good its “atonement,” impresses one as being much profounder as a reading of the facts of life and experience than the view that the existence of evil disproves the existence of a God almighty and good. [22] Nature as it is or no nature at all; history as it is or no history at all ; human life as it is or no life at all so far as we can see, these are the only alternatives we need to consider. And considering them, what shall we say? We shall say that God can justify his choice. We shall say that God can justify his method. We shall say that the disvalues that necessarily go with the method cannot discount the values: the joy of the [ p. 163 ] gain and the sadness of the loss are parts of the same organic whole and the whole is worth while.
But that is not all that we shall say. We shall say also that God has never been defeated, that the world has never been lost: it was, indeed, saved before it was made. The purpose to make is not one thing, and the purpose to save another. Traditional theology sadly failed of clear thinking at this point, and Milton popularized the misconception in the majestic descriptions of “Paradise Lost.” There is one divine purpose, one divine motive, one divine act. Creation is a drama with a single theme. Nowhere has God changed his mind or altered his plan. [^24] What he is now he always was, and what he always was he always will be. There is a saying in the New Testament about “the Lamb of God slain from the foundation of the world.” [23] What is meant by it but that the world’s foundations were laid in sacrificial love the sacrificial love of God ? The deepest law of any life is sacrifice. There may be something austere about the fact, but if God has made it the law of his own life as well, the austerity is not without relief. There is a cross at the heart of the world, and there is a cross at the heart of Deity, and the two may not be separated. “We are fellow laborers, fellow sufferers, with God.” The God who ordains that life shall live by life is the God from whose life all other life draws. He who himself needs nothing becomes the Great Giver, and by his giving constitutes himself the Great Sufferer, and by his suffering becomes the Great Saviour. This is grace indeed, sovereign grace: not the grace of one whose limitations vest his gift with uncertainty not that. But the grace, rather, of one . [ p. 164 ] who knew what tragedy his gift would mean to himself, and who, although he did not need to make it, nevertheless made it because his sole concern was with what his gift would sooner or later make possible for others. So that God himself is the world’s sacrificial Lamb, and not only so, but he is Priest and Altar as well. “He offers himself daily.” For every pang of man he too feels a pang ; our woe a woe for him ; our tragedy a tragedy for him ; most of all, our sin a burden for him and such a burden that it is only the reticence born of deep awe that stops us from saying (if we do stop) that he can bear it at no less a cost than that of a broken heart.
The paradoxes involved in what has been said are freely admitted, but we are not in the least inclined to apologize for them. Doubtless there are those who will regard such paradoxes as so many “sick men’s dreams.” Whether certain radically different “modern” interpretations of life and God are, however, any less paradoxical, is a nice point. [24] It is obvious enough that the language we have been using is intensely human, but how else shall we express our deepest thoughts about God save in such ways as we express our deepest thoughts about ourselves? And is it not better that one should say what one thinks, crude and realistic and “old-fashioned” though his thought may be, and say it so that it cannot be misunderstood, than that one should so qualify one’s thought as to rob it of all directness and power. God suffers to be God, and he would not be God otherwise: even the wayfaring man can understand what is meant by that, and perchance appreciate it too. If it does not please the metaphysician, let him say [ p. 165 ] it in a better way only, let Mm say it. For a God who cannot touch the heart of man cannot hope finally to win man’s will. It stands written : “Whosoever would become great among you shall be your minister (servant) ; and whosoever would be first among you shall be your servant (bondservant) : even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many” (Matt. 20. 26-28). That is the law of the kingdom of God, and it is the law of the kingdom of God because it is the law of that God whose the kingdom is, and the interior movement of whose life finds in the increasing life of the Kingdom its own increasing embodiment and expression.
Cf. Sellar’s remark, in Religion Coming of Age, p. 299, that man’s compensation for the loss of a “Cosmic Companion” is in his being at the same time freed from “supernatural terrors.” What Sellars overlooks, as he thus repeats the ancient criticism of Lucretius (see the opening passages of De natura rerum), is the fact that the surrender of God makes men subject to still other “terrors” which, while they may not cause men to “writhe on the floor,” are no less real than those which did. The conclusion neither of Krutch, The Modern Temper, nor of Bertrand Russell, A Free Man’s Worship, seems to indicate that very much of relief or assurance is born of the surrender of God. ↩︎
The Problem of God, p. 113 ; cf . pp. 182-186. ↩︎
The Immanence of God, pp. 50-51. ↩︎
Cf. F. J. McConnell, The Christlike God, chap, viii, on “The Divine Immanence.” Immanence is held to mean that “God is in all things,” but God being what he is, “he is in some things differently from the way he is in others” (pp. 141-142). ↩︎
Reality, p. 141. [ p. 167 ] ↩︎
The Pope has refused clemency to Guido, and has ordered his execution to proceed. He recalls a dark night in Naples, nothing visible, until a sudden lightningflash momentarily reveals the whole city:
“So may the truth be flashed out by one blow, And Guido see, one instant, and be saved. Else I avert my face, nor follow him Into that sad obscure sequestered state Where God unmakes but to remake the soul He else made first in vain : which must not be.” ↩︎
Op. cit., p. 137. Cf. Galloway, Faith and Reason in Religion, pp. 35-36, and more fully his Philosophy of Religion., pp. 492-504. ↩︎
Cf . Seeberg’s remark, in his Fundamental Truths of Christianity., on the antithesis of “the all-operativeness of God” and our own “consciousness of freedom.” He says : “We will neither lower the flag of the divine power to half-mast, nor will we reduce to an illusion the consciousness of freeedom” (translated from the fifth German edition). ↩︎
Isaiah 63. 9. ↩︎
Op. Git., chap, vii, on “God and Human Suffering.” Cf. Streeter’s chapter on “Creative Strife” in Reality; Henry Jones, A Faith That Enquires, lects. x and xvi; Koberts, The Christian God, chap, vi; and Knudson, The Doctrine of God, chap, ix, for a similar view, but with more satisfactory presuppositions. ↩︎
Op. Git., vol. ii, pp. 109-116. ↩︎
See Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion, second series, pp. 204-213; cf. the discussion on “Christianity and Suffering,” first series, pp. 110-116. ↩︎
Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement, stanza iii. ↩︎
See Religion, chap. xii. Cf. Haydon, The Quest of the Ages, p. 109. ↩︎
Philosophy of Religion, pars. 10 and 55. Cf. W. P. Paterson, The Nature of Religion, pp. 377-380 ; Galloway, Philosophy of Religion, p. 467. Religious faith, says Galloway, “will not be satisfied with a purely mundane Deity.” Its Object must rule the world while working in it. ↩︎
p re face to Morals, pp. 26-27. Lippmann says categorically that for the purposes of religion such a God is “no God at all.” ↩︎
Cf . Huxley, Religion Without Revelation, pp. 18-19 ; Joad, The Present and Future of Religion, chap, vii ↩︎
Literature and Dogma, 4th ed. (Macmillan), pp. 5758. Note the curious similarity to Arnold’s definition of fifty years ago of the result of Overstreet’s recent attempt to “rethink the problem [of God] in modern terms,” in The Enduring Quest, p. 261. Cf. Montague, Belief Unbound, sec. iii. ↩︎
Browning, Saul, stanza xviii. ↩︎
Royce’s thesis is that the world in which evil deeds are transformed by the deeds of love which they call forth is a better world than a world would be in which evil deeds could not be done. See The Problem of Christianity, vol. i, pp. 306-310. Contrast with Royce the “argument” of Joad, The Present and Future of Religion, that although this evil world could not have originated with a God of absolute perfection (p. 133) , it nevertheless is moving toward such a God as “the goal and end of its pil [ p. 169 ] grimage” (p. 277). Cf. the notion of S. Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity, vol. ii, p. 361, that such God as now actually exists is “straining toward deity,” since if he really possessed it he would be “finite and not infinite” ! ↩︎
See Glover, Jesus in the Experience of Men, chap. viii. ↩︎
Cf. Harris, Pro Fide, 4th edit., p. xxxvi, for remarks on such fantastic theories as those of S. Alexander, and other “finitists.” Harris, speaking of Alexander’s claim that “God is not a creator but a creature,” says that he finds it difficult to treat seriously “a theory which not merely violates but actually reverses the Law of Causation.” ↩︎