[ p. 223 ]
THE Christian belief about God, as we have seen, is not primarily belief in the personal Creator, but the conviction that this creative God is love. In this affirmation we may rightly discern both its distinctive character and the source of its greatest theoretical difficulty. Though other religions have conceived the Divine as including within its nature qualities of compassion, no other faith has carried out the thought of the lovingkindness of God with such consistency or held so definitely that love is the fundamental quality of the divine Being. A dispassionate and objective consideration of the universe, apart from the spiritual consciousness of man, would give little ground for the conclusion that it was the production of a benevolent Creator. The case is indeed altered when we allow its proper weight to the moral experience of the human race; and a philosophy which bases itself upon the inner life of the spirit and the judgments of value which proceed from that life, might entertain the hypothesis of divine love as a probable conjecture. At any rate, it is clear that the Christian belief in the love of God did not originate in philosophical reflection or an estimate of probabilities. For the New Testament writers the love of God is revealed in Jesus Christ. Because we find God in Christ, we discover that Godislove. “ One of the surprising results yielded by any close study of Christianity as revealed in the New Testament”, [ p. 224 ] says Dr. Moffat, “is that apart from the redeeming action of the Lord Jesus Christ the early Church evidently saw no ground whatever for believing in a God of love.”[1]
The revelation of the Father in the experience, Person, and saving work of Jesus does not, however, remain an isolated word without context. It obtains increasing corroboration through the experience of those who have found that trust in the love of God is the way to successful dealing with life. But though we may hold that this faith is abundantly justified by its works, it remains faith. We cannot hope to demonstrate that God is love according to the methods of the scientific or deductive reason, nor can we remove completely the objection which life no less than philosophy suggests. In this chapter, then, we are not attempting to prove the love of God as a proposition which can be defended on abstract principles. Basing ourselves on the Christian experience, we are to grapple with a smaller problem, but one sufficiently formidable, We must try to reach some understanding of the meaning of love in God, and deal, so far as may be, with that standing contradiction, as it seems, to our faith—the fact of evil.
The central insight in which the Gospel is founded is that the Holy One who laid down His life for His friends is not only the supreme example of heroic human goodness, but the most complete revelation of the character of God. But the precise meaning of love as it exists in God is nowhere defined in the New Testament. One conception of supreme importance has been touched upon in an earlier chapter. From the words of Jesus we may collect that love in God is to be understood by analogy with human affection and good will. The divine love is, so to speak, [ p. 225 ] continuous with human love in such a way that from the one we may begin to apprehend the other. Indeed the Johannine writer makes the love of the brethren a requisite condition of the knowledge of God.[2] God, in the teaching of Jesus, is like a patient and forgiving father who longs for the return of his ungrateful children, and (a touch which transcends all other faiths) goes forth to seek them. His generosity must far exceed the effects of the natural human impulse which leads even evil men to give good gifts to their children. The Apostolic church found its analogue of the divine love in the sacrifice of Jesus, which was indeed, for its thought, not separable from the love of the Father.
It need scarcely be said that the divine Love is not conceived after the pattern of a natural emotion or a passing sentiment. Nor is the love which Christians are expected to bear one to another of this nature. Love is a settled and permanent disposition of the will, so that only he that “ dwelleth in love ” dwelleth in God.[3] Nor again is the love of God to be equated with a readiness to remit penalties, for the New Testament proclamation of the love of God is consistent with a steady conviction of the sternness of the divine righteousness ; it is not incompatible with the wrath of God against sin—and against sinners. The conception of the love of God must be combined with that of an awful and mysterious Holiness. The love of God is holy. And finally, we must not take the saying, “ God is love,” as if it were, in the language of logicians, a simply convertible proposition. It is not equivalent to the statement that “ love is God”. This remark is of some importance, for the Johannine text has sometimes been used as the support of a vague sentimentalism which loses hold of the truth that God is [ p. 226 ] holy and creative Personality. God is a personal life whose fundamental quality is love, whose acts and purposes are to be interpreted in the light of this conviction. Love is not God but “ of God.”[4]
The attempts of theologians to explain the doctrine of the love of God and to draw out its consequences, have not been among the most successful achievements of their science. The systems of an Augustine or a Calvin impel us to Teflect that, if God be love, His love must be quite different from what we call by that name in human beings. The terrible doctrine of predestination to endless torment lies like a sear over the face of much traditional Christian theology, which has too often succeeded in interpreting the Christian message in such a way as to explain away the original creative intention of the Father in Heaven. No small part of this failure of theology has been due to the disaster that, from the first, it was dominated by the dogma of the infallible book, When every part of the Bible was supposed to be equally the utterance of the Holy Spirit, inevitably the proportion of the faith was lost, and the imperfect conceptions of the Old Testament and the figurative expressions of the New had to find their place in the system of Christian doctrine. But there has been another cause at work. The abstractive and rationalist method has here produced its greatest havoc. Love has been made a matter of logical definition, and the concrete apprehension of the pristine experience of God in Christ has been dissolved in Aristotelian intellectualism,
In the Aristotelian system, the love, which in some measure animates all finite beings, is a tendency towards God. But Aristotle did not leave any room for the belief that God himself loves. God does not move towards [ p. 227 ] anything, but being in His nature self-sufficient, cannot love any object other than Himself. When Aristotle was enlisted in the service of Christian theology, the recruit became the general and the philosopher prevailed over the evangelist. The Scholastic theology could not, of course, deny that God is love; but it succeeded in representing the love of God as so different from the love of human beings that the terms “love of God” and “Jove of man” have very little in common.
The main object of the Scholastic thinkers was to disengage the conception of love in God from the taint of “passio”, from the suggestion, that is, that God needs anything or can be affected by anything outside Himself, To follow the admirably clear exposition of a modern Scholastic writer : human love is “ an instinctive tendency or impulse which impels us towards a good which we know”. Love in man, however, is subject to imperfections ; chief among them that blindness or lack of insight into the nature of good, which causes him to love things which are unworthy of love and not to love things which are truly deserving of love. In God these imperfections are absent. God loves the supreme Good—i.e. Himself. “Being the infinite good and knowing Himself as such, He loves Himself necessarily with a love adequate to the object, that is, with an infinite love.” It follows from this that God loves other beings only in so far as His own perfections are found in them, each in proportion to its value ; and, since the different degrees of perfection in finite beings are gifts of God and imitations of His essence, everything in them which God finds worthy of His love is a reflection of His own infinite perfection.[5]
This is surely very near to a rejection of the belief [ p. 228 ] that God loves the world or human persons at all. On this view, in the proper sense the divine Love is self-love. God loves me only in so far as He finds me good, that is, only in so far as He finds Himself in me. The world is, as it were, a mirror in which God perceives dimly reflected His own perfection. We must admit that there is an element of truth in the contention that the highest love is necessarily concerned with good; but it can hardly be questioned that this view runs counter to both the New Testament’ revelation and the noblest expressions of human love. There is awe and wonder in the Apostolic faith in God because of His boundless generosity. It is precisely because God loved us when we did not deserve it, because while we were yet sinners Christ died for us, that there is any good news of God to proclaim.[6] And the love of God, if we interpret it after the Scholastic fashion, falls short of the best human devotion. It lacks the heroic note. A love nicely proportioned to the merit of the object seems too coldly reasonable to engage our admiration. That is given to a love which is not daunted by the imperfections of its object, but rather stirred by the defect and need to more unlimited giving. We should not feel any great respect for a son who, when his mother became a drunkard, carefully reduced his affection in proportion to the degeneration of her character.
The truth is, perhaps, that a strictly logical account of love is impossible. It is not “reasonable” in any intellectualist sense, and can be justified only by that Reason which is larger than the logical understanding. Accounts of it such as that which we have been criticizing fall short in at least two respects. They ignore what is manifestly the primary and essential characteristic of love—that it is a relation between persons. Only by a [ p. 229 ] species of metaphorical transference can we speak of loving that which is impersonal, whether that object of metaphorical love be chocolates or the idea of the good. Any account of love which puts down the proper object of love as a general term has gone wrong from the boginning. A second source of error is that the relation of love is thought of in too static a manner. Love fixed upon an immutable abstract idea becomes itself frozen into immutability. But when we realize that love is in essence a personal relation, we can see that it must be a relation constantly changing, preserving its identity through change.
We shall be on safer ground if we cease to argue what love must be, whether in man or God, and confine ourselves to asking what, in our experience, it is, There is no need to dwell here on the very various meanings of the word “love” and the different levels of personal activity to which they belong. We may take for granted that our best guide to a not unworthy conception of the love of God will be that human love which is most “ spiritual ” and least dependent directly upon physical impulse and instinct. This is not to deny that in human life the most exalted states of consciousness have some instinctive basis, nor to reject altogether the persuasion that in passionate love some touch is felt with a super-individual Reality, which must in the end be divine. But clearly we have to take our examples from those experiences where the connexion with, and dominance by, the body is most effectually transcended. Now it is evident that the most refined and effectual love is much more than a mere emotion. Nor can we find the greatest type of human love if we pass to the opposite extreme and consider it to be a principle of benevolence. We are in search of something warmer than a “ maxim”.
[ p. 230 ]
Mr. P. Elmer More has indicated one of the two primary ingredients of the best type of human love in a striking phrase : love is “that outreaching power of the imagination by which we grasp and make real to ourselves the being of others”.[7] This emphasis on the imaginative quality of love seems to me of great importance. The imagination is the link between intellect, emotion, and will. The will is set in motion through the imagination, and through the same means an emotional state is translated into action. The power of the imagination to “make real” to the self what is already real in the outer world is one of its functions which is overlooked by those who agree with Bishop Butler that it is a “ delusive faculty”. The man without imagination lives in an illusory world, for he apprehends no part of his environment as it truly is, but only through the symbolical abstractions of the intellect. The loving spirit is the true realist. He alone sees his fellows, not as shadows, but as concrete persons, since for him they are not simply factors of the conditions in which he lives or units of a crowd ; they are persons with an inner life not Jess vivid than his own.
The quality of imaginative insight is not, however, alone sufficient for the existence of love. In some degree it is possessed by the “ good haters,” and it seems that we cannot greatly love or hate without this “ outreaching power”. We must add to our description that, in love at its best, there is a settled will for the good of the beloved. And it is plain that here too the sympathetic imagination plays an indispensable part. For it is not enough to have a theoretical grasp of the general meaning of good or a rational conception of the logic of values ; in order effectively to love anyone we must apply our [ p. 231 ] ideas of value to the concrete case and condition of the individual. Is not this the cause of the ineffectiveness of much preaching? In so far as it is concerned with the moral life it is perforce largely a general statement of the principles of goodness, and is in danger of becoming a wearisome elaboration of the truism, “it is good to be good”. Rarely perhaps can words spoken at large come home to the special need of the individual and throw a gleam of light on the path which he is treading alone. Thus it is that the love of a friend is the great instrument of progress, and the grace of God is normally mediated through the fellowship of the brethren, But this creative love is itself the exorcise of the creative imagination. Only through insight into the present nature of our friend can we perceive the good which is potentially his; and, we may add, only in the same way can we perceive the good which is potentially ours, and attain a self-love which is not deadly, but the means of advance. Here, surely, we have come upon the clement of truth in the doctrine that the good is the sole proper object of love. As it stands it is false, for persons are the objects of love ; but it is true that the purest love sees, in some measure, the good which may be for the person loved, and wills that it should become actual.
In a previous chapter we were led to apply the analogy of the imaginative work of pootry and art to the divine activity of creation. If what was there said may be accepted, we have reached a position in which we can conceive the divine Love as the perfection of that highest Jove which human beings may exhibit. In all human loving, the imaginative insight into the nature and possibilities of the object must always be restricted. There is an impervious core which resists our penetration. Being fallible and sinful as we are, we should scarcely [ p. 232 ] wish that it were not so; but the gulf which still separates the reality of the person from the keenest loving imagination implies the necessary limitation of human love. We may almost say that we cannot love another perfectly because we have not created him. But the creative imagination by which God upholds the world is not so bafiled and His insight is perfect.
The second element in love again, the will for the highest good of the object, in the divine Experience must be conceived as free from the limitations which make us sometimes spoil or hinder our dearest friend. God “searches all hearts”, not with the hostile or censorious intent of the judge, but with the love which consists of a perfect knowledge of our being and of our possibilities. We misunderstand the love of God if we think of it as a general desire for the welfare of the human race or of the world. The love of God is individualized. It is a relation with persons. The good which God wills for me is one prepared for me and not identical with the good of any other, though the good for me is not wholly separate from the good for others. Each must form a part of that Kingdom of God, which is God’s general will, but within the Kingdom there is a special place for each individual and a special activity. “He calleth his sheep by name.”
In this last respect the Christian faith in a living and holy God differs from idealistic views of the world which dispense with the idea of a personal Deity. Many philosophies have put forward a spiritual view of the world, based upon the deliverances of man’s conscience, and have been able to reach the conception of a common good towards which we aspire, in which, when attained, each separate soul will find satisfaction ; but so long as they leave out the central Person and think of a Kingdom of [ p. 233 ] Good rather than a Kingdom of God, they must lack the joy and consoling power which arise from the conviction that there is a unique series of “ good works prepared for me to walk in ”,[8] that there is a unique good for me to attain, and that there is a loving thought and sympathy which knows and enters into every detail of my outward lot and inner experience.
Since the time of Aristotle, philosophers have debated whether moral goodness can be ascribed to God in any sense which is really analogous to human ideas of virtue. It must be admitted that the problem is a formidable one, for it is not easy to see how such cardinal virtues as courage and temperance can be ascribed, in any intelligible way, to the Creator. But the difficulty disappears if we can hold that all the cardinal virtues are different facets of one principle of goodness, and if this can without absurdity be attributed to God. The Christian ethic finds the root of virtue in the quality of love. St. Paul asserts that love is the fulfilling of the law, and, in the same way, love is the source of every virtue.[9] We have found reason to hold that love can be predicated of God in a sense which is quite intelligible, and can be seen to be the same quality as that which we know in human persons, without its imperfections. There is, therefore, no difficulty in principle in asserting the goodness of God with a meaning not essentially different from that which the term has in human life. A further consequence waits to be observed. It would follow that there can be no ultimate distinction between the divine Holiness and the divine Love, for the holiness of God is His love, viewed from the angle of the good which He wills for His creatures.
One great omission still remains in our discussion of divine Love. We began by insisting that the faith of the [ p. 234 ] primitive Church in the love of God was founded on the sacrifice of Christ, and we have proceeded to try to understand what the love of God may mean by considering the best human love. Evidently, in our experience, the most decisive expression of love is sacrifice. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” The question presents itself, can this be predicated of God and, if so, in what sense? Is sacrifice, involving perhaps suffering, an clement in the divine Experience? To this question we must return when we have said something on that which makes sacrifice necessary—evil.
II
The problem of evil is the salient difficulty in the mind of the ordinary man when he asks himself whether he believes in God; and we can scarcely dispute the reasonableness of his feeling that evil is a kind of crux, which may determine our belief about the world. Unless something can be said on the subject which goes some way to abolish the surface impression of the discrepancy between our faith in a loving Creator and the world of cruelty and sin, we could hardly resist the impulse to seek an alternative belief about the world. For the facts of suffering and sin are not a difficulty for every kind of religious or philosophical creed. They are no theoretical stumbling block to a whole-hearted dualism. For the Christian doctrine of God, however, the problem is acute, because it has held that God is love, and that He is “ omnipotent”, Even some types of Theism escape the full pressure of this difficulty. If we could be satisfied, for example, to hold that God existed but was not loving, there would be no special mystery about evil, and we might readily conjecture ways in which the errors and [ p. 235 ] misfortunes of men would harmonize with the purposes of a world created by a Deity who was not benevolent. They might even afford him amusement. Those theistic theories again which have frankly abandoned belief in omnipotence in any possible meaning have outflanked the problem, for we might still hope that God was doing His best to overcome evils for which He had no responsibility. Both these types of Theism, however, escape the problem of evil at a cost ruinous to the interests of religion. In the first case, we should have a God who was not the Most High, in the sense of the best we can conceive; in the second case we should have a God on whom all things did not depend.
But though many theologies and philosophies evade the problem of evil, they have to meet the obverse of the same problem—that of good. In all our judgments of value, and in all our striving to realize values in life, there seem to be two postulates implied ; that the good is “ objective ”, not depending on any finite mind’s thought or preference, and that our practical effort to attain good and to order our lives in accordance with objective values is an activity which brings us nearer to Reality and is in harmony with the meaning of the world. Obviously, Christian Theism can justify both these postulates ; but it may be doubted whether any other theory of existence can ; and at least it must be required of them that they should show, either that the postulates can be maintained on other grounds than Theism, or that they are not in fact necessary for the life of moral goodness. Theistic philosophers are accustomed to conclude their treatises with a chapter, admittedly unsatisfactory, on the problem of evil; it is surely greatly to be desired that non-theistic philosophers should be equally candid and provide us with a chapter on the problem of good. Too easily do they assume that [ p. 236 ] it is possible to put forward a theory of the nature of the universe and leave the assumptions on which the life of goodness rests unaffected.
The attribute of omnipotence, like the other attributes of God, has too often been discussed as if it were merely a question of the logical definition of a term. Schleiermacher’s abiding contribution to theology is to have translated the so-called “ metaphysical attributes ” back into the universe of discourse of religion. Our first preoccupation as Christian thinkers is to maintain the reasonableness of what Christian experience has found God to be. Religion, as such, is concerned with maintaining the ultimate dependence of all things upon God, so that faith in the trustworthiness of Reality, and its full responsiveness to our deepest aspirations and values, may be sustained. It is obvious that a belief which fell short of the strictly logical definition of the literal meaning of the word “ omnipotence ” might satisfy the requirements of religion. We may perhaps excuse ourselves, therefore, from entering in detail into the various interpretations which omnipotence has received. Plainly, we cannot mean that God can do anything whatever that we can imagine, for we can imagine His doing irrational and evil things. But in doing such things He would be contradicting His nature. God’s action must be limited by His character as Rational and Love. Moreover it follows from this, that the created order cannot attain two contradictory ends at the same time. It cannot, for example, be both a sphere in which free spirits are at liberty to seek good and attain fellowship with God, and also a sphere in which no mistakes are possible and every hardship and disaster is eliminated. It cannot be both a scheme for the production of the greatest possible amount of pleasurable feeling and also a “ vale of soul making ”.
[ p. 237 ]
Leibnitz, in his monumental Theodicée, set out to show that this is the “ best of all possible worlds”, in the sense that all the evils in it are necessary for the production of the greatest possible amount of good. The phrase has been an easy prey for satire by Voltaire and lesser men, who scarcely took the trouble to understand it; but any theistic belief would, it seems, be bound to hold that the creation is adapted to purposes which, if they are understood, must be recognized as good. The general outlines of the world, and the conditions of life which they necessitate, do not support the belief that the world is the “ best possible ”, if we mean by that one adapted to the production of the greatest sum of pleasure and a minimum of pain.
The debate between optimism and pessimism has generally been conducted on this assumption, and we must, confess that it has been singularly futile. According to our view, however, value is not identical with pleasure, and the best possible world would be one which fulfilled the purpose of giving scope and opportunity for the development and progress of moral selves. I do not say that this is the sole purpose of creation, but that it is a partofthatpurpose. Inthemain, wemayhold that aworld such as that which we are called upon to live in is adapted. to that end. No reflective person who had grasped the conception of the development of free personalities as a good greater than any degree of satisfactory feeling, would desire that existence should be freed from all obstacles, that everything should be given without effort, or that man should be endowed with happiness in such a way as to deprive him of his status as a self-determining and responsible being. As J. S. Mill remarked, no one would really choose to become a cow, even if he could be sure that he would be a perfectly happy cow : still less [ p. 238 ] would any one really wish to become an automaton, however contented.
These general considerations, that the best possible world must include within it the possibility of hardship and difficulty and the opportunity of moral evil, do not, of course, in any full measure “ solve ” the problem of evil. We may still ask questions to which there can be no conclusive answer. We may wonder, perhaps, whether the amount of suffering in the world is not more than is needed for its higher ends, and we may point to instances of pain which séem to have no possible spiritual purpose. But beyond these problems, which are in their nature insoluble by us, there is another which affects profoundly our thought of God and His relation with His creatures.
Clearly evil, in its various forms of error, sin, and pain, exists: it has some kind of status in reality, and we cannot avoid the question of its relation with the Source of all being. The problem is most acute when we are considering moral evil and error, for any belief that these extend as elements into the divine Experience would seem to be contradictory of our faith in the supreme Wisdom and Goodness. A view which has had a long and honourable history in Christian thought would remove the difficulty by a denial that evil has any status in reality in the proper meaning of the term. According to the principles of the Scholastic theology, evil has no positive existence ; its nature is to be a defect of being, and as such can raise no question about its ultimate cause, and give no ground for the inference that evil may have some place in the nature or experience of God. We may, without disrespect, dismiss this view very shortly. Surely it is the strangest expedient for getting out of a difficulty. Even if we could plausibly maintain that every evil is associated with a defect, the absence of some “ perfection”, [ p. 239 ] it is far from true to say that the evil is that defect. My toothache may be due to a defect in the tooth, to an absence of a perfection, but the pain itself is positive, a vivid experience. In the same way, it may possibly be true that every sin is a failure to realize some good, which the impulse or instinct which the sinner follows was adapted to attain, that every transgression is a missing of the mark; but the sin itself is an actually occurring act, flowing from a thought which is just as much a positive event as the thought of the devout heart when raising itself to the contemplation of God. The question remains, What is the relation of these positive events, mental and physical, to the being and mind of God ?
Perhaps we can present the problem in the most definite way if we take the case of an evil imagination. At any moment there are in the world a great number of nasty, malicious, and degrading thoughts. The vindictive man is rejoicing over the thought of some misfortune which is overtaking his enemy, or his friend. The lascivious man is gloating over the anticipation of some deed of darkness. In what way, if any, do these real facts of the world form part of the divine Experience ? Can we say that God thinks these thoughts, or that He is the cause of their being thought? The Christian conception of God certainly compels us to assume that they are not entirely unrelated to Him, since all things, in the end, depend on Him ; but, on the other hand, we are not committed to the view that God is all in all at the present moment—our faith is that He shall be all in all.
The affirmation that God is good and not evil must preclude us from holding that evil thoughts, as such, form part of His experience. The attribute of omniscience, however, is not to be thrown aside without consideration of its implications. From the standpoint of religion, [ p. 240 ] omniscience is another aspect of the fundamental faith that all things depend ultimately upon God; and we cannot, therefore, maintain that even the evil thoughts are unknown to God. To Him “all hearts are open, all desires known.” We seem to be led to @ position in which we must maintain that God knows the evil of the world without experiencing it as it actually is.
There is no difficulty in finding an analogy in human Imowing which would illustrate this distinction. Recently philosophers have distinguished between knowledge of “ enjoyment ” and “knowledge about,” by which they mean to discriminate between that which comes by direct experience and that which is mediated through other experiences. Thus I know my own pain in a way which is open to no other person. I know it by “enjoyment”, in the technical meaning of the word. But the doctor may know my pain through my description and by his equipment through training and practice. His knowledge about my pain can never be the actual experience of it, but the “Imowledge about” may be more detailed and have more possibility of producing favourablo results than my more direct knowledge. In fact, the doctor’s efforts to help me would not be furthered but hindered if he were actually to feel the pain which he is attempting to remove. We may conceive then that God’s knowledge of sin is knowledge about. It is not part of His experience. He distinguishes Himself from it, and stands in opposition to it.
An important conclusion follows from this concerning our human thinking and willing. Not all our thoughts and determinations of will are the thoughts and will of God ; but some may be. We need not suppose that the shameful thoughts and the trivial ones are shared by God, though He knows them, When we decide to have marmalade [ p. 241 ] for breakfast, God is not willing in us. But we may think and will at a level which is above evil and triviality. When we are thinking sincerely, and when we are pursuing the values which are beyond our small self-interest, and when we are dwelling in love, we may be said to think and will in the Spirit. Doubtless even when we are so thinking and willing, our judgments and our decisions are not wholly good or true. They need to be supplemented before they can be supposed to be identical with the mind and will of God; but they are imperfect, not inherently false or evil, and they can form a part in that perfect whole which is the divine Thought and Will.[10]
We have not yet, however, finished with our problem of moral evil, even in outline. There still confronts us the primitive difficulty of the divine foreknowledge. We may perhaps agree that the conception of creation carries with it the belief in a real freedom for created selves, and that the omnipotence of God does not mean that He is the direct cause of all events; but we should gain little help from this in the problem of evil if we were compelled to hold that every event was foreknown, though not predetermined, by God. It has indeed been argued that foreknowledge does not imply determinism or fatalism, and that we may in fact foresee an action which is nevertheless free. These reasonings carry little conviction to the plain man. They are beside the point. Though I may predict with some accuracy the action of a friend whom I know very well, I never imagine that my prediction is more than probable, and if I could predict with absolute certainty what my friend would do, it could only be because his actions were completely determined in advance. It seems to me that we cannot escape the same conclusion when we are considering [ p. 242 ] divine Foreknowledge. If this is absolute, the course of events must be predetermined, either by the will of God or in some other way. I see no escape from the dilemma : either we must hold that all events, including acts of evil will, are determined by the will of God, or we must hold that God’s foreknowledge is not absolute.
We have, of course, to recognize that the term “ foreImowledge ” may be so misleading that we can form no opinion on the relation of the divine Knowledge to temporal events. If it is held that God is “ timeless ” or “ aboye time ”, there is no meaning in foreknowledge ; all knowledge for God must be simultaneous. About the conditions of such experience we can know nothing, and certainly cannot conceive its relation to events which happen in the time series. This very difficult question must be deferred to a later chapter: but we can at least deal with the question of foreknowledge on the assumption that it really has some meaning when applied to God. Ifthereis a real distinction in the divine Experience between “now” and “not yet”, it seems that, if we wish to preserve some self-determination for finite selves and to have some possible solution of the problem of moral evil, we must conclude that the prescience of God is not absolute; for Him the future is not completely determined.
When this statement is made, it is frequently met by the question, Can God be surprised ? as if an affirmative answer were a reductio ad absurdum of the whole position. Tam not convinced that to hold the possibility of surprise in the divine Experience is absurd. We must distinguish between kinds of surprise. One type of surprise is associated with the feeling of frustration ; it is a revelation of the inconsistency of our purposes with the conditions of the world. A surprise which means a definite bafiling of the divine Will cannot be attributed to God: but [ p. 243 ] surprise need not have this association, Solong as we hold that there can be no event which God cannot overrule for His purposes, we have committed ourselves to no absurdity or irreverence. To compare the very great with the trivial, we can gain some help from the analogy of the master chess-player. He cannot foretell the moves of his unskilled opponent, and they may often cause him astonishment; but his confidence is unshaken that, whatever they may be, he can meet them and turn them to the advantage of his plan. So we may hold that there can be no thread however dark which God cannot weave into the pattern of His vast tapestry, there can be no note however discordant which cannot be taken up with the divine harmony.
In maintaining that surprise may enter into the divine Experience, we are at least keeping in touch with the utterances of the religious teachers of our faith. We shall be able to attach some real meaning to the word of the Lord through the Prophets speaking of the children who, against expectation, have become a rebellious house, and to the Word of God lamenting over Jerusalem the oft-repeated rejection of divine compassion. Is there not something unreal in the reproaches addressed to the rebellious in the name of God, if the rebellion was foreknown and the surprise a mere figure of speech ? [11]
There is no reason why a line of argument which is used with general approval with respect to other human qualities should not be equally applicable in the case of the capacity for surprise, We must understand the nature of God by analogy with our own nature. Those qualities, it is argued, which are found to constitute man’s higher nature must have their counterpart, though in a [ p. 244 ] more perfect manner, in the nature of God. I can see no ground for applying these principles to the faculties of reason and conscience and refusing to apply them to the sense of humour and the capacity to be surprised. Clearly a human being is imperfect who lacks a sense of humour, and without irreverence it may be supposed that the ground of this good gift is in God.
“But when they have proved that man is wholly clay
And God a dream—listen, and far away
From far beyond the utmost star whose light,
Dark in the Distance, shines still out of sight,
You'shall hear gentle laughter, soft as tears,
Such as wells up from human love that hears
And watches understandingly beguiled,
The simple, brave complacence of a child.”[^12]
That we can find fresh interest in the world, and need never feel a prey to the deadly monotony of the given and familiar, is surely no less a good gift than that of humour, and indeed is closely related with it. It would seem, therefore, that we should rightly hold it to be represented eminenter in the experience of God.
When we have said all that can be said on the problem of evil, we have done no more than show that, in general, the existence of evil in its various forms is no fatal objection to the faith that God is love. No candid thinker could dismiss the problem as solved and done with. There remain instances of evil which will not fall into our scheme. The pressure of the fact of evil will bear differently on different minds. The suffering of animals has doubtless been exaggerated by sentimentalists, who transfer, in the childish manner, human feelings to subhuman beings ; but when every deduction has been made and rhetoric has been discounted, there remains the [ p. 245 ] sombre truth that the development of species and the process of evolution itself are bound up with the struggle for existence and the preying of creatures one upon another. The pain involved in this is, perhaps, less a problem to the sensitive mind than the impression that “nature ” is indifferent to human values and that its business is conducted on principles which are almost the opposite of our conceptions of good. No one, again, can look upon the vacant or terrible face of the idiot or the maniac without being conscious of a mystery in evil which eludes us in the end and covers our “ best possible world” with confusion. We are forced to confess that creation is at the best “a scheme imperfectly comprehended ”.[12] Though the development of free moral persons and their perfecting is part of the purpose of the world, it is not the whole. We need not abandon our faith that creation is “ rational” in the senso that it subserves some end which, if we could know it in full, would appear to us to be supremely good, but the full comprehension of that end is beyond our grasp. We mistake the nature of our cosmic environment when we interpret it exclusively in terms of human good or moral progress. In the overwhelming sense of the sublimity of Reality, in which tragedy and darkness have their part, we catch a glimpse of the end which is beyond human thought or language, and are reminded that the revelation of God must always be the revelation of a Being whom we can know only in a mirror, in a riddle.? [13]
III
In the final section of this chapter we must bring together the two topies with which it has been concerned. When we considered love, we noted that it could not be [ p. 246 ] understood, at least in man’s experience, apart from sacrifice ; and we left for further reflection the meaning of sacrifice in the divine Experience. When we considcred evil, wo felt bound to maintain its positive existence and its relative independence of God’s thought and will. Evil is real but overruled. But the overruling of evil suggests the problem of divine sacrifice and suffering. In our human world, sin and pain are transmuted into good and become elements in an experience which is no longer simply evil, through heroic love. Love repairs through sacrifice the devastation of selfishness, and the community does not disintegrate because the ravages of the self-assertive persons are in some degree met by the service of the self-devoted. Even evil in the form of error is overruled by an impulse which is akin to love; the ruinous misunderstandings are overcome by those who are stirred by a motive which leads them to “scorn delights and live laborious days.”
But the overruling power of love extends beyond the effects of evil will; it is by the appeal of a love which shrinks from no sacrifice that the evil will is most potently prevailed upon to forsake its evil ways. At least it is true that there is no agency which can compare with this in bringing good out of evil. This is beyond question the central thing in the Christian view of life, the ground for its title to be a “new way”, that we must lose our immediate selves in order to find our full selves in a loving service which has left behind the self-centred life of claims. The power of the Gospel to transform the characters of evil men and to awaken the careless comes from the cross of Jesus. It does not rest upon any doctrine of the atonement, for the saving grace of the cross has proved its efficacy when interpreted in all the various ways which theologians have devised, and [ p. 247 ] not less when no explicit theory has been held at all. “ Jesus died for mo ” has been the simple statement of the essential creed. This does not imply that we need have no doctrine of the atonement ; but it indicates that the point from which any doctrine must set out is the direct apprehension of the true values of human life which comes through the contemplation of the most heroic sacrifice. The reasons which have led Christian theologians, on the whole, to reject the idea that suffering can enter into the divine Experience are complex. They have come partly from the tradition, inherited from the Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, that the essential nature of the Divine is to be immutable and self-sufficient. It has been argued that suffering can only be attributed to beings whose lives are passing and temporal, and, by their finitude, are subject to want. There is, however, a consideration which does not dopend upon any philosophical presupposition, but which must present: itself to any Christian thinker. Does not suffering imply that: there is frustration in the sufferer? Dare we assert that: the divine Experience is not invariably triumphant ? Von Hiigel has put the real case against divine suffering when he asks, must we not for the sake of religion itself hold that there is one Being who is beyond the reach of failure? Shall we not destroy religion if we hold that God, like ourselves, is subject to pain?[14] Dr. Robert Mackintosh has asserted the dangers of a too facile acceptance of the “ passibility” of God with even greater vehemence. An unhappy God would mean a bankrupt universe, a demonstrated pessimism, a doomed faith”[15] We must take heed of these warnings. The [ p. 248 ] attribution of suffering, as such, to God, the assertion that the divine Experience had pain as its dominant note, would indeed have the consequences suggested, and would be an expression of utter pessimism. It is not, however, necessary to hold that suffering is the predominant note in the life of God, if we assert that God suffers. Pain may, even in our human life, enter into an experience which, taken as a whole, is triumphant and joyous, The faith that God suffers in and with the creation, and is withont ceasing bearing the labour of redemption, is not a faith in an “unhappy God”. For the power is adequate to the emergency. There can be no evil which, in the end, will frustrate the divine redeeming Will. The suffering of God is transfigured by the vision of the travail of His soul in which is His satisfaction.
The reasons for holding that suffering enters into the divine Experience aro of greater weight than those against the belief. The incarnation of the Son and His redeeming sacrifice are, for the Christian, the supreme revelation of the divine Nature. Must we not, therefore, conclude that the cross is no merely historical event, however full of influence for the future, but a sacrament of the life of God ? In the sacrifice “once offered” we have, projected into timo, the very heart of the divine Life and Activity. I do not see how otherwise we can present any doctrine of the atonement which does justice to the New Testament experience. Nor can we eseape from our conclusion by an interpretation of the doctrine of the Trinity which would confine sacrificial love and redemptive suffering to the Second Person of the Trinity and deny that it entered into the Godhead. Such a conception would be utterly out of harmony with the view of the Trinity to which we have been led, and, I would add, with any conception which gould, in the long run, be compatible with Monotheism. [ p. 249 ] We must dare to accept the full implications of the Gospel. God is like Christ. “The deepest insight into human life is the open secret of the universe,” and the Christian God is “no God or Absolute existing in solitary bliss and perfection, but a God who lives in the perpetual giving of Himself, who shares the life of His finite creatures, bearing in and with them the whole burden of their finitude, their sinful wanderings and sorrows, and the suffering without which they cannot be made perfect.” [16]
J. Moffat, Love in the New Testament, p. 5. ↩︎
St. John IV. 20. ↩︎
St. John IV. 16. ↩︎
1 St. John IV. 7. ↩︎
G. Sortais, Traité de Philosophie II, pp. 695-6. ↩︎
Romans V. 8. ↩︎
Christ of the New Testament, p. 123. ↩︎
Ephesians II. 10 ↩︎
Romans XIII. 10. ↩︎
Cf. Miss May Sinclair’s discussion in The New Idealism, pp. 305 ff. ↩︎
Isaiah XXX. 1-9: LXV. 2; Jeremiah V. 23; Ezekiel V; St. Matthew XXIII, 37. St. Luke XIII. 34. ↩︎
Joseph Butler, Analogy, Pt. I, Ch, vii., and Sermons xv. ↩︎
1 Cor. XIII. 12. ↩︎
F. von Hügel, Essays and Addresses, 2nd Series, pp. 167 ft. ↩︎
Historic Theories of Atonement, quoted by J. K. Mozley, Impassibility of God, p. 171. ↩︎
Pringle Pattison, Idea of God, p. 411. ↩︎