| CHAPTER III. THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE OF GOD | Title page | CHAPTER V. THE THEOLOGICAL CONCEPTION OF GOD |
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THE Christian experience of God must not be identified with the religious experience of Jesus. Though the consciousness of God which the Apostolic Church possessed springs from the Messianic mission of the Lord and the ideas of God which it promulgated have all their roots in His words, the New Tetament religion is pot an attempt to reproduce quite simply the attitude of the historical Jesus to His Father in Heaven. Historical Christianity is not the religion of Jesus but the religion which centres upon the Person of Jesus. Those who seck for genuine Christianity in the supposed simple Theism of Christ and would exhort us to cut away all the beliefs which have grown round the Person of the Lord can find no support in the Apostolic writings. In fact the direct appeal to imitate the earthly life and to reproduce the piety of the man Jesus of Nazareth has little or no place in the earliest Christian literature and, we must assume, had little place in the life of the earliest Church. It may be that there were Christians who did not go beyond the thought of Jesus as the ideal rabbi, the exemplar of the true Judaism, and perhaps we possess a document of this circle of believers in the Epistle of St. James. But the creative line of development, that which has nourished the specifically Christian religiousness, is found in the Pauline and Johannine interpretations of the significance of Christ.
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The motive of imitation is not indeed absent. To have the mind of Christ is the mark of the genuine believer ; but the meaning of this imitation is significant. “ Have this mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus : who being in the form of God, counted it not a thing to be grasped to be on an equality with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men.”[1] The Christian must imitate the generosity of Jesus: “For ye know the kindness of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might become rich.”[2] The point in these passages is not the imitation of the human Jesus but the reproduction of the life of the pre-existent Christ who undertook the humiliation of the similitude of men and the death of the cross for us. “We shall be like him,”[3] says the Johannine writer as summing up the goal of Christian progress; Christ should live in us so that it is no longer ourselves but Christ who thinks and acts; but this Christ is the eternal and living Christ who was manifested in the flesh but who was always with God and now is alive forevermore. It is the supernatural life of Christ which is to be not so much imitated as reproduced in the believer. The cosmic drama of the redemptive death and resurrection repeats itself in the soul of the Christian. We were buried with Him in baptism,[4] we have died to our old selves, we are risen with Him and seek the things that are above, “ where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God ”.[5] These passages and many like them declare without possibility of question that the new life, the new experience of God, which is at the heart of the Christian gospel as it was preached to the pagan world, is something quite different from a [ p. 69 ] following of a human example however perfect: it is the participation in a personal Life which continues and which is divine.
For this new life “ in Christ ” is also a communion with God. The Apostolic writers do not depart from the Hebrew conviction that the end of man and his blessedness consist in knowing God. Eternal life is to know God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent.[6] The amazing fact is undeniable that there was no contradiction in the mind of St. Paul and St. John between their attitude to Christ and their inherited strict Monotheism. The Apostolic experience of God is mediated through Jesus Christ. It is not simply that Jesus has disclosed new views of the nature of God, He does not appear to them in the guise of the last and greatest of the prophets, He is the manifestation of God, in Him dwelt the fullness of the Godhead, in a bodily manner,[7] so that no longer do they seek for the knowledge of God through the Law or even through the Prophets save only as these spoke of Him. hey find God through Christ. God is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. This experience of God in Christ is the mainspring of what is called the Christology of the New Testament. It is a misleading word, for it suggests that the Apostolic writers were engaged in a scientific attempt to solve an intellectual problem. There is thought and even theology in the New Testament, there is an attempt to grapple with a problem, but it is not a problem posed in the dry, unimpassioned manner of the philosopher or the theologian, rather an emotional readjustment, a re-orientation of the religious personality to include within the inherited Jewish piety the fresh experience of God in Christ.
The Christian experience of God as we may apprehend it in the creative period of the Apostolic Church is always [ p. 70 ] experionce within the community. We shall misinterpret the facts if we isolate them from their social reference. The doctrine of God cannot be treated apart from the Church. Too often it has been thought that certain peliefs of individuals about God and Christ created the community and that the Church is a secondary element in the circle of Christian doctrine. One of the merits of Josiah Royce’s strange book, the Problem of Christianity, is that he has seized upon the fundamental importance of “the beloved community”. Though the religious life which finds expression in the New Testament is that of individuals, of St. Paul and St. John, it is conditioned by the faith of the Church, it could not exist apart from the Brotherhood. “The Church of the Living God, the pillar and ground of truth,” is the presupposition of every Apostolic writing. This Church was created by the Resurrection, and it differs from all merely human organizations in that it is the fellowship in which Christ is present, through the Spirit, His instrument and body for producing effects in the world,[8] so that every individual can regard himself as a member of Christ’s body having his appointed function in the redemptive work of God.[9] This is the background out of which the Apostolic doctrine of God emerges.
The phrase “ Christ-mysticiem ” has been coined to describe thereligion of St.Paul. Nodoubtitis specially appropriate when applied to him, since it indicates the peculiar intimacy of the personal contact with the exalted Christ which was the centre of his devotion, but in so far as it describes the type of religion which finds God in Christ it is equally applicable to the New Testament as a whole. The Johannine writings have a note of exclusiveness which [ p. 71 ] is not so strongly marked in St. Paul. Christ has revealed the unseen God in His true nature as Light, Life and Love, but the author of the Fourth Gospel puts into the mouth of Jesus words which seem to deny the validity of every previous revelation. “ All that came before me were thieves and robbers.”[10] This common faith, that Christ reveals the nature of God unknown in its fullness before, is the foundation of the Apostolic doctrine of God. To develop it and to guard against its minimization the various “Christological” conceptions are employed. It is not sufficient to think of Jesus as prophet ; though God has spoken in the past through the prophets, in these last days, says the writer to the Hebrews, He has spoken through His Son. It is not sufficient to think of Him as one of the Angels or Powers of God.[11] He is perhaps never explicitly spoken of by St. Paul as God, but His relation with God is one of identity of function with respect to men. He is the Son, He is the Word of God, He is the image of God,[12] He is the Spirit,[13] He is the heavenly Priest who opens the way to God.[14] All these and other images are various modes in which the earliest Christian experience strove to embody its common conviction that Christ is the supreme and final revelation of God, that God is fully known, and His grace received only through Jesus Christ.
We have already remarked that the new thought of God and experience of Him was held along with the Jewish conception of God. The idea of deity which lies behind the New Testament as a whole is Hebraic rather than Greek, and this is true even of those writers who, like St. John and the author of Hebrews, have incorporated Platonic modes of thought and phrase. Hellenistic [ p. 72 ] influence there is in the Apostolic writings, some effect was produced by the mystery cults upon the language of St. Paul, but it is certain that the conception of God remained Hebraic. The God of St. John and of St. Paul is first of all the Creator. We might almost say without being untrue to the Apostolic thought that it is in virtue of His creativenoss that God is God. “ His invisible things since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity.”[15] The prologue of the Fourth Gospel, which states the theme of the divine Word to be illustrated in the narrative which follows, begins with a phrase which recalls the opening words of Genesis. The Word is divine because associated with creation. The same thought is constantly recurring in St. Paul.[16] That God is first of all the Creator is a Jewish and not a Greek thought. For the New Testament God is not primarily an. object of intellectual contemplation but the living source of all things and of every new beginning. The idea of creation is not prominent in the Hellenistic conception of the Divine. It is well known that the philosophical tradition did not lay great stress upon this attribute of God. Plato doubts whether all things should be considered as created by God. Aristotle’s Deity, if he can be called creative at all, is so, as it were, by inadvertence, giving rise to the world not by an act of will but in the process of his eternal self-contemplation. The Gnostie mythologies with which Christianity was in contact and in conflict, represent the world as a prison-house in which the soul is confined, and some at least held that it is not the creation of the Supreme God but of an inferior and perhaps evil Demiurge.
Connected with this Hebraic thought of God as creative [ p. 73 ] Will is the rathen remarkable_absenoo of ny. Theodioy or even suggestion that the problem of evil exists except as a practical challenge. St. Paul is indeed concerned to “ justify the ways of God” in history and to show the divine Wisdom, though “unsearchable”, as turning the defection of Israel to His ultimate glory.[17] The question of God’s justice when we are confronted with the inequalities of human lot, the pains and struggles of the common life, constitute for modern men one of the gravest obstacles to belief in God. In rather a different form they did also constitute a problem for the Gentile world, and it would be true to say that Gnosticism is a sustained attempt to solve that problem in the terms of mythology. To St. Paul the problem had little or no meaning. There are two reasons for this. He believed with the Old Testa ment that evil was due to the sin of man and that God’s love was fully vindicated by His saving act in Jesus Christ. But his ultimate answer is the inscrutable will of God. “Who art thou, O man, that repliest against God ? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why didst thou make me thus?”[18] These words which have been the subject of controversy concerning the Christian doctrine of man and his freedom are of primary importance for St. Paul’s idea of God. They reveal the persisting Hebraism of the Apostle of the Gentiles. God is sovereign, creative Will.
God in the New Testament has not lost that attribute of Holiness which is characteristic of the Old Testament belief in God throughout its development. In the earliest religion Holiness was akin to taboo, the feeling of the separateness of the Divine, of its danger and awefulness. The Prophetic reform of religion gave to the idea of holiness an ethical content, and taught at least the higher [ p. 74 ] minds of Israel that Jahveh’s separateness was essentially one of moral purity; Cod is “of purer eyes than to behold iniquity ”.[19] But the Hebrew consciousness of God never became a mere moralism and was always far removed from the modern theory which has been suggested by Kant and Matthew Arnold in their various manners that religion is one way of taking moral experience, and God, it would seem, almost a device to get us to do our duty. Hebrew reflexion upon God is always religious, and consequently never leaves behind that feeling of the divine transcendence, which in. primitive form appears as taboo, and in the higher reaches of religion as the sense of the Holiness of God. This combination of two elements in the thought of the Holiness of God is reproduced exactly by St. Paul, who stands here in complete harmony with the prophetic religion. God’s holiness is manifested in His righteousness and in His reaction against sin, but He is no mere personification of the Moral Law, nor even its guardian. The law is holy and good because it is the law of God.
The Holiness of God is closely connected with the wrath of God. This concoption, which is perhaps little in accordance with our modern habits of thought, is of primary importance for the Pauline experience of God. Nor can it be said to be peculiar to St. Paul. Though St. John tells us that “ perfect love casteth out fear”, yet it is only those who are made perfect in love who escape from wrath. “He that obeyeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him.”[20] The same intuition of the holiness of God has the same consequences in the teaching concerning wrath in the Epistle to the Hebrews. For those who fall away after having received the knowledge of the truth there remains a fearful [ p. 75 ] expectation of Judgment. “ It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”[21] Modern theology has interpreted this phrase, the wrath of God, as the reaction of perfect goodness against every kind of evil, and that is without doubt an essential note in the New Testament thought; but the interpretation is too intellectual and too impersonal to do justice to the vivid experience of the New Testament writers or, we may add, to their daring anthropomorphism. We have only to read the great passage in Romans to feel that there is more here than a “moral Governor of the Universe ”. “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold down the truth in unrighteousness ; because that which may be known of God is manifest in them, for God manifested it unto them . . . wherefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts unto uncleanness.”[22] The most adequate comment on this passage is that of Professor Otto : “ We recognize directly the jealous, passionate Jahweh of the Old Testament, here grown to a God of the Universe of fearful power, who pours out the blazing vials of His wrath over the whole world.”[23]
Clearly the thought of the Holiness of God thus understood carries with it a dualism between God and that which is opposed to Him. The metaphysical doctrine of dualism is, of course, far from the thoughts of the New 'Testament writers who are not concerned with the problems of speculation, but there is a practical and religious dualism at the very centre of their experience of God. As we have seen, the human world is alienated from God, the object of His wrath; though dependent upon God as the Creator, it has, through its sinfulness, become the realm [ p. 76 ] hostile to Him. This opposition is by St. Paul and perhaps also by St. John conceived as extending beyond the sphere of human nature and includes the whole natural order. “The whole world lieth in the evil one.”[24] Thus the natural man has no good thing within him. The “flesh” is opposed to the spirit, the mind of the flesh is enmity against God.[25] To mind the things of the flesh is to be immersed in the natural order which is opposed to God. And therefore the transition by which the Christian enters the Kingdom is no gradual process of coming to a fuller knowledge of the truth: it is an abrupt passage from the darkness to light, from death to life, from being a child of wrath to being an adopted son. This spiritual dualism is again one of the elements in the New Testament doctrine of God which are strange to our modern minds dominated as they are by the notion of evolution, and on any philosophical view is obviously difficult to reconcile with a monotheistic faith ; but we shall miss the driving force of the Christian experience of God if we pass it over. It is no relic of an unenlightened age which can be eliminated from the Christian doctrine without injury to its value. Because of this dualism the Christian consciousness of God separates itself off from all pantheistic religiousness and has little in common with the piety which finds in God first of all a rest and a refuge. “There remaineth a Sabbath rest for the people of God ”,[26] but it is in the future. The Apostolic faith is one for a Church militant. The mystical character of the Johannine writings, with their emphasis on eternal life here and now, might be expected to abolish this note of contrast and conflict, and we must confess that the sound of the trumpet is not the prevailing tone of the Fourth Gospel ; but it is [ p. 77 ] precisely in these writings that the dualism of life and death, light and darkness, church and world, reaches the most absolute form. The Christian must keep himself free from all love of the world and the things within it.[27] God is Spirit, the very antithesis of flesh.[28] The language of militancy, of sustained effort, is the common strain in the Pauline epistles, We are to fight the good fight of faith, we are to run the race.
But this idea of conflict introduces us to another aspect of the New Testament dualism. The wrestling to which St. Paul refers is not, he tells us, against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers, against the worldrulers of this darkness.[29] The Ephesian Christians before their conversion had been dead in trespasses and sins, not simply as the natural consequence of their “ fleshly ” nature, but because they were under the influence of the Prince of the Power of the Air who now works in the sons of disobedience.[30] There can be no doubt that the dualism of the Apostolic world-view is something more than a contrast between the creation without God and the creation with Him, The sphere of Spirit is itself invaded by dualism, Belief in evil spirits and in Satan was a part of the common tradition of popular Judaism, and Jesus seems to have accepted the current opinion that disease was caused by their agency. In the mind of St. Paul popular demonology had a larger place, and probably his ideas on the subject were not unaffected by the luxuriant mythology of non-Jewish beliefs. Such titles as the Prince of the Power of the Air suggest that he shared the idea that the atmosphere was full of spirits, many of them malignant. Though it is true to say that the Gospel delivered men from fear of demons [ p. 78 ] and was a great emancipation from superstition, it is not true that the Gospel delivered men from the need to struggle with unseen powers of evil. It did not deny their existence, it intensified the sense of conflict ; but it inspired a great conviction that the battle was already won. The demons could not prevail against the power of God. “ All that opposition—here was the difference—all barriers, all distance, were annihilated by the love which, reaching down from the highest, held the redeemed man in an immediate grasp. ‘I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord ’.”[31]
The dualism which is thus so important in the Apostolic world-view must not, however, be taken as an absolute and final dualism. It is an attitude which is, as it were, forced upon the earnest seeker after God and righteousness in his pilgrimage and warfare. But though real it is not the complete truth, and it does not in the smallest degree detract from the foundation faith in God as the supreme Will and sovereign Creator. That the world alienated from Him should exist and that forces hostile to Him should have power over men are part of the mystery which lies hidden in the inscrutable wisdom of God. In one phase at least of his thought, St. Paul conceived this dualism as temporary, a part of the confused state of the creation prior to the great consummation of the purpose of God. At last the dualism shall be done away and even Christ, the Leader in the conflict and the Victor, shall be subject to “ Him who did put all things under him, that God may be all in all.”[32] This [ p. 79 ] overcoming of dualism is to be the result of two processes, on the one hand the extension of the reign of God through the triumph of the Church,[33] and on the other the annihilation of the evil who receive the wages of sin, which is, quite bluntly, death.[34] The essentially historical imagination of St. Paul pictured the end of dualism in dramatic form as the end of a process and a warfare. The Johannine writings are most different from St. Paul in that they have little historical sense and hence scarcely any suggestion of a development in time. Perhaps for this reason the dualism in the Johannine world-view is more profound and ineradicable than in St. Paul. The evil world remains over against the divine life and light, like its inseparable shadow. It may be that we can no more eliminate dualism from St. John than from Plato. But on the other hand, it is possible to hold that St. John had conceived a more profound overcoming of dualism—one not projected into the future but real now. Just as eschatology falls into the background and the coming Kingdom is translated into the present eternal life, so the conflict and the opposition are not ultimately to be done away in some future consummation, but are already abolished in that sphere of reality to which the faithful spirit rises when it turns away from the unreality and the darkness to the true life and light.[35]
The necessary emphasis upon the Holiness of God, upon the wrath of God and the dualism inherent in the Apostolic experience must not be allowed to confuse our apprehension of the fact that the central thought is the love of God. That is the heart of the Gospel.[36] Without it there would be no good news. But it is important to treat this in relation with the divine Holiness. The love of God is [ p. 80 ] not in the least degree analogous with the easy-going complaisance which often passes for love in human beings. Though God is Love it remains true that without holiness no one shall see the Lord. The demands of the righteous God have not diminished. On the contrary, their scope and depth are now fully disclosed, The love of God is that of the Holy One who by His act of redemption lifts man out of the condition of sin and alienation to the condition in which he is forgiven and set upon the way of sanctification. Nothing could be further from the New Testament conception of God than that of the “good fellow” of Omar, or of the deity whose métier it is to forgive, of the dying Heine. It is only safe to approach the doctrine of the divine Love through the doctrine of the divine Holiness.
The fatherhood of God, which was part of the preaching of Jesus, is in the Apostolic writings generalized into the conception of the love of God. There is another and more important difference. For Jesus the divine Fatherhood rested upon an immediate intuition ; in speaking of it He seems to refer to a truth of which He was conscious in His inner life and one which needed no proof.[37] He does not argue in favour of it—He illustrates it.[38] For the earliest Christian experience the love of God is known through Jesus Christ. Only through Him are we able to be assured that this love is real. Apart from Him we are a prey to fear. But how does the fact of Christ reveal the love of God? Much well-intentioned modern apologetic seems here to be very imperfectly in harmony with the New Testament. We are often told that the essential meaning of the Incarnation is that “ God is like Jesus,” and therefore the divine Being must be love. Doubtless [ p. 81 ] the New Testament does, in some sense, hold that God is like Jesus. In the Fourth Gospel the words, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father ”[39] certainly suggest this aspect of the truth that God was in Christ, and something of the same idea may be indicated in the saying of St. Paul concerning the “knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”[40] But the primary foundation for the belief in the love of God is not the character of the human Jesus (though of course that is a necessary part of the revelation) but the act of Godin Jesus. The passion of Christ is the revelation of the love of God, and this because it is the act of the Redeemer God who has thus made clear His compassion and His generous sacrifice. The wonder of God’s love is dependent upon something more than a history of a personal life : it rests upon an act in the unseen. “ He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him freely give us all things.”[41] “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.”[42] Vainly do we seck to purge the Apostolic faith in God of the element of theology or mythology or even dogma. The person of Christ Jesus brings to the Apostolic community the assurance of the love of God, but only because that person is interpreted in terms of a supernatural and divine act. Jesus of Nazareth dying on the cross has no message of the love of God to give : Jesus the Son of God in His passion is the assurance that God so loved the world.
As we saw in the last chapter, the Pauline and Johannine idea is not fundamentally different from that which governed the actions of Jesus Himself. For Him, too, the passion was not a human execution, it was the offering [ p. 82 ] of the needed tribulation, by one who represented God, for the sake of the Kingdom. The Pauline and Johannine theology of redemption is simply a more elaborate way of saying that Jesus was right. There are modern writers of the liberal school who deprecate the theological and dogmatic strain in the Gospels and still more in the Epistles. They would prefer to adopt St. Paul’s belief that God is mereiful and St. John’s that He is love while leaving on one side the theories or series of pictures in which the Apostles expressed their belief that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. Let us, they say, have the Apostolic religion without the Apostolic mythology. Perhaps the programme is possible. The conception that God is love appears, as a conjecture at least, in Plato; but the difficulties suggested by the appearances of the world are so overwhelming that to most minds the conception must remain on this level, as no more than a conjecture, The ideas and images of the Apostolic Church lack, let us admit, the clearness and distinctness which we desire in metaphysical doctrines ; but after all metaphysics have not so far produced any conclusion about the universe which can be regarded as both certain and cheerful. If, driven by the impulse to identify the highest value with the supreme Reality, we would adhere to the faith that love is ultimate, we seem to be confronted with two alternatives. On the one hand, we might suppose that the world with its appearances of evil, failure, and cruelty is an illusion, the origin of which must be problematical: or on the other hand, if we are not willing to make this astonishing and really useless denial of reality to what seems most real, we may suppose that the world, clearly permeated by evil and in opposition to the expectations which we should form concerning a creation of love, is no illusion ; it really exists, created [ p. 83 ] by God yet now alienated ; but we might add, the Living God by an act of sacrificial love has undertaken the salvation of this world. In contemplating this act we are assured that God is love, and reach a faith which in very truth overcomes the appearances of the world. Such was the position of the Apostolic Church. It is mythological and dogmatic, neither scientific nor philosophical ; whether it is less logical than that of those who would believe that God is love without believing that God is in Christ is open to question.
The Christian faith and the Christian experience of God are inextricably bound up with history. The supreme revelation of God has taken place in time: it began openly “in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Cesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judwa, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Iturea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, in the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas.”[43] This elaborate dating of the opening of the ministry is one of the most significant things in the New Testament. The Christian revelation of God is not a system of truths which remain independent of the Person who enunciated them or the time in which they were first announced. he revelation is a Person who has His place in history and appears in the “ fulness of time”. Thus there is implicit in the Christian experience of God a doctrine about the relation of God to history. It is not perhaps greatly different from that of the Prophets. Dr. Wildon Carr has claimed for St. Paul the distinction of being the father of the philosophy of history, and the claim is justified in that the Apostle has in the Epistle to the Romans worked out a theory of the significance of the fortunes of the Jewish race in the [ p. 84 ] providential plan. But the principle which St. Paul here applies to a particular problem is not new. In the vision of the Prophets events in the history of Israel manifested the judgment and the purpose of God, so that even the rise and policy of heathen nations were factors in the fulfilment of the divine purpose. Even more completely the Eschatological writings conceived the course of the world as determined by the divine Will. The relation of God to history does not seem to be, according to the New Testament, one of complete determination. Even though St. Paul uses language which can be interpreted as indicating absolute predetermination, he does not appear to think of the failure of Israel to respond to the offer of the Gospel as having been inevitable. His point is that, having occurred, it is overruled by the wisdom of God for His greater glory through the admission of the Gentiles.[44]
The relation of God to the historical process is not simply external, The realization of the divine purpose in the world is attained through the co-operation and inspiration of God. As Dr. J. K. Mozley has said: “The idea of immanence which is implied is one which derives its cogeney from the belief that as God is the Creator and the Final Cause, so in the process which lies between the beginning and the consummation God is the Agent within the process, whereby its highest possibilities are made actual, and its explanation is seen to lie in the moral response to God and in the spiritual fellowship with Him which God Himself inspires. Not only ‘of’ and ‘to’ Him, but ‘through’ Him are all things.”[45] This immanence of God in the general historical course of events is one aspect of that immanence which is generally spoken of as the activity of the Spirit of God and of Christ. The Spirit who knows the things of God, bears witness with [ p. 85 ] our spirit, creates new faculties and powers, realizes in us the higher possibilities.[46] Immanent in a supreme degree in the believer, it is through the Spirit that the sinner turns to the Redeemer, while at the summit it is through Eternal Spirit[47] that the Redeemer offers His sacrifice. The distinction which may be drawn between the in dwelling of the Spirit and the presence of the Exalted Christ is one which we need not dwell upon here. It may be doubted whether St. Paul intended to make any difference and does not use the two phrases indifferently. The point on which we wish to insist here is clear enough. The immanence of God is a part of the Christian experience of God. It is, however, if the phrase may be allowed, an immanence which admits of degrees.[48] The divine presence is within all creation, but in fullness and in power with those who, responding to the divine initiative, have become joined with Christ in affection and will.
To conclude a chapter on the Christian experience of God without some reference to the doctrine of the Trinity would be impossible, but only a few remarks can be made here on a topic which, from another point of view, will come before us later. The only matter with which we are directly concerned here is the basis in the original experience and the teaching of the Church of the New Testament for the later doctrine of the Trinity. It is sometimes said that the trinitarian dogma is the characteristic feature of the Christian doctrine of God. There is a sense in which this is true. Those special features in the Christian experience of God out of which the doctrine arose are indeed peculiar to and form that element in Christianity which marks it off from other religions. But of course the doctrine itself is no part of the original gospel. The [ p. 86 ] Athanasian Creed and even the Nicene would have been strange in the ears of St. Paul and St. John. Nevertheless the experience, to preserve which the dogmas of the Incarnation and the Trinity were formulated, is plainly expressed in the New Testament, and is the spring of the propagandist energy as well as of the specific character of Christian Theism. The central point of that experience, as we have seen, is that of God in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.[49] Christ, in some way variously defined, represents and mediates the Divine life and the redemptive action of the Creator.[50] This conviction, growing out of the deepest spiritual life, is held within the framework of an uncompromising Jewish Monotheism. Moreover, through the experience of God in Christ there arose a vivid feeling of the immanence of the Divine power in human life and particularly in the fellowship of those who are called by Christ’s name.[51] Thus the thought of the Spirit of God, deeply rooted in Old Testament religion, takes on an added definitenoss, being now the Spirit. of God and of Christ. The fullness of the Christian experience of God is summed up in the Apostolic benediction : “ The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit” ;[52] it is through the favour of the Lord Jesus Christ that we know the love of God and are partakers, in full measure, in the fellowship of the Spirit.
No attempt will here be made to summarize the discussion of the Christian experience of God with which these two chapters have dealt, but we must refer in conclusion once more to the salient feature. The experience of God shown in the life and words of Jesus forms the apex of the prophetic consciousness of God. That [ p. 87 ] experience, as we have argued, was in its nature a development of the higher type of anthropomorphism almost exclusively in its aspect of the satisfaction of the need for a Sustainer of Values. Jesus’ experience of the Heavenly Father expresses itself in the form of a concrete idealization of human personality. Abstract ideas are absent from His thought of God. But further, He thinks of Himself, under the titles of Messiah and Son of Man, as the means of the supreme intervention of God in the world. This anthropomorphism, if so it may be called, is carried further in the Apostolic religious life ; for that experience is built on the affirmation that God is the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Creator is revealed as love through the Person and work of the Redeemer. The doctrine of the Incarnation, or rather the religious attitude for which it stands, is the completion and crown of the anthropomorphic religion of the Prophets and the Messianic consciousness of Jesus.
The Christian experience of God may thus be regarded as the highest form, the logical outcome by a kind of spiritual dialectic, of that anthropomorphic tendency which we have described as the line of upward movement of the religious consciousness of the race. But this anthropomorphism in the doctrine of God is rounded off and counterbalanced by Theomorphism in the doctrine of man. “ Let us make man in our image”; the Son of Man the express image of the invisible God : upon these two conceptions turn the Christian doctrine and experience of God.
Obviously this complex of thoughts and pictures concerning the Unseen needs more than mere statement to be recognized as true. The task of fitting it into the framework of our modern world may seem to be beyond the power of the Christian thinker, and the possibility is [ p. 88 ] suggested to us that a view which was tenable in the infancy of knowledge when the scientific revolution was still far off is patently absurd in the setting of the twentieth century. Tam convinced that this is not the case. Doubtless details of exposition and illustrative images which were forcible in the Apostolic Age may be almost useless for our own. The faith of the New Testament may sometimes best be embodied for our age in language which is not that of the New Testament, but in essence there is no inherent incompatibility between the modern conception of the Universe and Christian experience. This thesis will be defended in subsequent chapters: but before we approach the constructive statement of the doctrine of God we must take a general view of the course which Theology has taken in grappling with the idea of God.
| CHAPTER III. THE CHRISTIAN EXPERIENCE OF GOD | Title page | CHAPTER V. THE THEOLOGICAL CONCEPTION OF GOD |
Phil. II. 5, 6. ↩︎
2 Cor. VIII. 9. ↩︎
1 John III. 2. ↩︎
Rom. VI. 4; Col. II. 12. ↩︎
Col. III. 1-3. ↩︎
St. John XVII. 3. ↩︎
Col. II. 9. ↩︎
Eph. I. 22, 23; III. 10; IV. 11, 12. ↩︎
1 Cor. XII, 4-11, 27-30. ↩︎
St.John X. 8. ↩︎
Col. II. 18. ↩︎
Col. I. 15; 2 Cor. IV. 4 ↩︎
2 Cor. III. 17. ↩︎
Heb. X. 9. ↩︎
Rom. I. 20. ↩︎
Col. I. 16; III. 10; Eph. II. 10; III. 9 ↩︎
Rom. XI. 19. ↩︎
Rom. IX. 25, 26. ↩︎
Hab. I. 13. ↩︎
John III, 36. ↩︎
Heb. X. 26-31. ↩︎
Rom. I. 18-24. ↩︎
Idea of the Holy, E.T., p. 89. ↩︎
1 John V. 19. ↩︎
Rom. VIII. 5-7. ↩︎
Heb. IV. 9. ↩︎
1 John II. 16-17. ↩︎
Cf. Otto, Idea of the Holy, p. 96. ↩︎
Eph. VI. 12. ↩︎
Eph. II. 2 ↩︎
Edwyn Bevan, Helleniem and Christianity, p. 88. ↩︎
1 Cor. XV. 28. ↩︎
Eph. IV. 11, 12. ↩︎
Rom. VI. 23. ↩︎
1 John V. 4,5; 11,12; 20. ↩︎
St. John III. 16. ↩︎
St. Matt. XII. 26-27; St. Luke X. 21, 22. ↩︎
St. Luke XV, 11-23. ↩︎
St. John XIV. 9. ↩︎
2 Cor. IV. 6. ↩︎
Rom, VIII. 32. ↩︎
St. John III. 16. ↩︎
St. Luke III. 1, 2. ↩︎
Rom, XI. 25-35. ↩︎
Doctrine of God, pp. 91, 92. ↩︎
Rom. VIII. 16, 17. ↩︎
Heb. IX. 14. ↩︎
Cf. however p. 219 on this point. ↩︎
2 Cor, V. 19. ↩︎
Acts IV. 10-12; Rom. III. 23-26. ↩︎
2 Cor. I. 21, 22. ↩︎
2 Cor, XIII. 14. ↩︎