[ p. 89 ]
WHEN ye pray say our Father : [1] “There is joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth ” :[2] “The love of Christ constraineth us.”[3] There is no need to give the source of these quotations : let us follow them with others which aro not so familiar. “ There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body parts, or passions ; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness ; the Maker and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible. And in unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity.” “The Holy Catholic Apostolic Roman Church believes and professes that there is one living and true God, Lord of heaven and earth, omnipotent, eternal, immense, incomprehensible, infinite in intellect and will in all perfection : who being One, Singular, Absolute, Simple, Unchangeable, Spiritual Substance is to be regarded as distinct really and in essence from the world.” The first is from the Articles of Religion of the Church of England, the second from the Decrees of the Vatican Council. When we place these quotations from dogmatic formulas side by side with utterances like those with which we began this chapter we are conscious of a profound difference. It is not so much that the one class appears to contradict the other as that they belong to different mental worlds and presuppose quite different attitudes of mind. The contrast of which we are aware is, of course, that between [ p. 90 ] religion and theology. All our quotations deal with the same subject matter, they are all from documents of authority in the Church: but there is a profound divergence in spirit. The one group is the direct expression of religious experience, the other an attempt to formulate that experience in abstract terms.
We need not dwell on the obvious fact that there is a real distinction between religion and theology, but just as it is an error to overlook the distinction it is a mistake to exaggerate it. For example, we should be wrong if we bluntly declared that whereas theology is concerned with the reason and aims at intellectual clearness, religion, as such, has not this concern. We have already seen grounds for believing that an intellectual element enters into all religious experience. It cannot rightly be described as mere feeling, as Schleiermacher sometimes tended to do, nor the satisfaction of a moral need, inducing, in Spinoza’s phrase, “ obedience rather than knowledge.” All religion, as Croce has powerfully argued, has implicit within it a view of the world and cannot therefore be radically distinct from philosophy. Still less can we maintain that there is an absolute distinction between religion and theology.
The main purpose of the present chapter is to call attention to some defects and difficulties in the traditional Christian theology in its dealing with the doctrine of God. The discussion will of necessity be somewhat general, since we are not engaged in a historical survey, and will be confined to those points which are specially interesting for our purpose of the construction of a doctrine of God in harmony with modern ways of thought. I would, however, expressly state that I have no sympathy with the ignorant contempt for the queen of the sciences which is so common at the present time. The intelligent [ p. 91 ] man does not interpret criticism of some of the accepted theories in any other branch of knowledge as an attack upon the study itself, and it should be no reproach to theology that some of its conclusions are open to revision. And it is indeed a melancholy fact that the despisers of theology should find allies within the household of faith itself. I have even heard the opinion expressed that candidates for ordination should be encouraged to give the greater part of their time to other subjects such as modern history or even biology and should acquire some smattering of divinity at the end of their course. Perhaps those who hold this view think of the study of theology as the “getting up” of the outline of the Catholic Faith or the Protestant Religion from textbooks. That indeed is no liberal education ; but theology nobly conceived and studied is the most far-reaching of intellectual efforts, for man’s thought of God concentrates in itself the history of human culture. We need at the present day not less but more and better theology. As Father Tyrrell has said: “False political and economic theories have led the way to truth at the cost of much evil that instinct and common sense would have avoided ; bad theologies have checked the spontaneous growth of religion, but the theological attempt must fail and do harm before it can succeed and do good.”[4] It may be that the way is now open for a theology more fully in touch with the religious life of Christendom than was possible in previous generations.
The main function of theology is to act as an intermediary between philosophy and religion. The direct impact of science upon religion is not great, though indirectly the advance of science must produce profound effects upon statements of the faith. In general, however, [ p. 92 ] the changes of scientific theory produce their first reaction in philosophy and hence ultimately upon religious thought. For example, the idea of evolution s0 long as it remains a biological hypothesis comes into contact only with the less fundamental elements in the Christian system ; it raises the question of the authority and interpretation of Genesis. But when evolution is adopted as a philosophical conception and a general theory of Reality is based upon it we are confronted with probloms which go to the root of our belief in God and His relation with the world. The theologian is not engaged upon precisely the same problems as the philosopher nor does he follow the same method. He starts with some data and is concerned primarily with their interpretation. He begins with a “revelation”, an experience of God which he accepts as giving the law to his thinking, But like all data and all experience it needs to be understood, to be thought out and brought into some harmonious relation with the rest of accepted truth. Knowledge, experience or data which are unconnected with the general body of our thinking are bound, in the long run, to be ineffective and transitory; and the work of theology is not, therefore, an unnecessary exercise but a permanent need of religion itself. Without it a religion can scarcely survive. Justas.a “ purely spiritual ” religion, in the sense of an unorganized religion, cannot hope to maintain itself as a considerable social force but must take to itself organization in order to adapt itself to its social environ ment, s0 a religious experience completely unformulated and unrationalized cannot survive as an element in human culture,
It is of course a priori possible that the thought of any age should be inadequate to the task of formulating the spiritual reality—the revelation—with which theology is [ p. 93 ] concerned. We may go further and add that, if by revelation we mean the self-disclosure of God, this inadequacy is not only possible but certain. Nevertheless theology has to work with the materials which are at hand ; it must be affected by the current system of ideas and must use them for its purpose. The main thesis of this chapter may be stated quite simply. We are perhaps almost too familiar with the cry that there is a need for the restatement or the transformation of Christian theology, and in particular that our doctrine of God needs to be enlarged and deepened. It is usually added that the restatement is called for by our new outlook upon the physical universe which has arisen from the unexampled progress of natural science. No one would be so foolish as to question the truth in this; but Christians appear frequently to regard it as a regrettable necessity that our theology should be revised. It is supposed that we should be better off if we could remain securely fortified in the old dogmatic fastness. 1 wish to suggest that this is not really true. The theological construction has always been inadequate, and its imperfection has been due not simply to contradictions which may have been discovered between it and modern knowledge, but to some more general cause. It has never in fact succeeded in doing justice to the data which it had to interpret.
Christian thought as a whole presents a curious spectacle, which, so far as I know, has no parallel elsewhere. It is infected by a kind of creative restlessness which is due to a tension within itself. The cause of this tension is the incommensurability between the religious affirmations on the one hand—the experience which is the centre of the Gospel—and theological statements on the other. The New Testament itself is at once the foundation and the solvent of Christian doctrine; the source [ p. 94 ] from which it springs and the source also of its continual refashioning.
Three elements have contributed to the structure of Christian theology. First, the element with which we have already dealt—Christian experience, loyalty and devotion to Christ and the felt assurance of the love of God through Him. his is the “given” of Christian theology, and it is being constantly renewed from generation to generation as human spirits thrill again, through the medium of the Scripture, with the creative emotion of the first days of the Christian faith. Secondly, the written word of Scripture entered into the structure of Christian doctrine as a distinct element. The Church inherited from Judaism a dogma of the verbal inspiration of the Bible which was extended to the canon of the New Testament and played in many respects a disastrous part in Christian history, nowhere more deplorable than in its influence upon the idea of God. Though to some extent the theory of a “ mystical” meaning of Scripture, allowing an allegorical interpretation of passages which were difficult to reconcile with the teaching of the New Testament, mitigated the evil, it was at the expense of suggesting a mechanical and almost magical conception of revelation which even now has not wholly vanished from the Church. We must never forget that the authors of the traditional doctrine of God were, for the most part, under the dominion of the dogma of an infallible book and were therefore compelled to accommodate within their theological construction the acts and commands of the tribal deity of Israel.[5]
The third element, in which we are here chiefly interested, is the philosophical—the intellectual presuppositions [ p. 95 ] and concepts which have, to a considerable degree, determined the form of the theological system.
We are frequently told by such writers as Dr. Inge that Platonism is the loving nurse of Christianity, and if we mean by Christianity Christian theology, the statement is historically true. Even though we may be inclined to think that the time has now arrived when the services of the nurse can be dispensed with, not without due expressions of gratitude, we cannot deny that Platonism furnished the general conception of the universe into into which the Christian message was fitted and to which it was early adapted. The attempt to enlist Plato in the service of revealed religion had already been made by Philo, who thought that he had found in the Platonic system a philosophical basis for Judaism. Within the New Testament itself there are clear traces of a mode of thought which, if not precisely Platonic, is under the influence of the same circle of ideas. The Epistle to the Hebrews, for example, is a strange mixture of Old Testament imagery interpreted in a Platonic manner. The Apologists, among early Christian writers, were naturally the foremost in claiming support for their faith from the recognized philosophical teachers of Greece, and of those there was none who in authority and profoundly religious outlook could compare with Plato. Clement of Alexandria and Origen were the teachers who pursued this line of thought in the most systematic manner. To them Christianity in its highest form was a kind of γνωσις, or rather the γνωσις to which all others were approximations, and in their hands the idea of God was, when properly understood, that of a Deus philosophorum.
The alliance of Christian thought with the more spiritual tradition in Greek philosophy was doubtless inevitable and had consequences of the greatest value. Without this [ p. 96 ] alliance the Gospel could never have commended itself to the educated classes, But its consequences in the doctrine of God were perhaps not wholly admirable, and were at least a source of confusion. The parts of the Platonic teaching, which had entered into the current philosophy and were adopted by the Christian Platonizers were not those in which the philosopher speaks as an ordinary heist, as in the Laws, but those parts in which he develops his transcendent metaphysic of the ideal world and of the supreme idea of the Good which is έπέκεινα της ούσιας.
In Neo-Platonism these aspects of Plato’s thought were partly amalgamated with Aristotle’s equally transcendent metaphysic; and in Plotinus there comes into the world a closely compacted system of philosophy in which the divine Source of all existence is the eternal and ineffable One from which there proceeds by emanation every grade of being. This system did not wholly originate with Plotinus. Its main tenets were already commonplaces in Platonic circles when Plotinus produced his mystical philosophy, according to which the supreme Being, the One, is beyond knowledge so that no affirmation can be made about it; only in ecstasy can the human spirit unite with it. A conception of the nature of God which in essentials differs hardly at all from this can be found even in Clement of Alexandria, For him no less than for Plotinus God is the infinite and unnameable One, the unthinkable who is beyond even abstract unity. It is of course true that Clement and Origen, since they are Christians, hold that the unknowable God has been revealed through the Word of God and in the Person of Jesus ; but the Christian tradition and living experience and the philosophical concept of deity are never fused together. They run side by side in the thought of the [ p. 97 ] Christian Platonists like sundered streams or are mixed like oil and water never forming a real whole. Ifthey are asked what God really is they must reply in terms of Platonic transcendence not of Christian personalism. In the words of a distinguished American writer, “God is not for Clement really the Jehovah He is represented to be in the Law and the Prophets, capable of love and sympathy and indignation, not really the Father as He was known to Jesus . . . these feelings are only attributed to him by a kind of economy in condescension to human weakness, while in fact He is eternally and absolutely atreptos, without motion or emotion of any sort.”[6]
It is a fact of supreme moment in the history of Christian thought, that from its first appearance as a system of belief which could be accepted by reasonable and educated men, it necessarily adopted from the intellectual environment a conception of the essential nature of the Divine which is derived from a very important but still special type of philosophy, and has no direct connexion with the Hebrew and Christian experience of God. The personal or, in Dr. Schwartz’s words, the “ psychological” idea of God which comes from the Hebrew Bible is accompanied by the Deus philosophorum, the abstract concept of Deity. It is a presupposition of this philosophical conception that Deity can be defined in and for itself. The characteristic qualities of Deity are the opposite of human qualities. The Divine is the eternal in contrast with the temporal, the self-sufficient in contrast with the dependent and incomplete. God is the transcendent, self-sufficient, eternal Unity. The consequences of this transcendent conception of God, with its implication that the Divine is primarily [ p. 98 ] that which is other than the human and temporal, are most plainly seen in the controversies concerning the Person of Christ. Beyond question the religious interest in these disputes was the supreme issue. Nothing less was at stake than the preservation of the foundation of Christian life and worship—God in Christ and redemption through the cross. We need not question that, given the problem as it was stated in the terms which were then available, the answers of the Catholic Church were right and did in fact preserve the substance of the Gospel. The problem was to find some statement of the Church’s belief about Christ which would be in harmony with Monotheism. Even the most conservative historians of dogma, however, admit that the value of the decisions of the great Couneils is chiefly negative.[7] They rule out solutions of the problem which would have stultified the central Christian faith and in the end would have destroyed the characteristic Christian experience, but they do not sueceed in producing a really coherent doctrine of the nature of the Incarnate Word; they state more clearly the conditions of the problem, but they do not solve it. The cause of this failure is obvious. The problem, as it presented itself to the minds of the first Christian centuries, was inherently insoluble ; for if we begin with a conception of the Divine which regards God as, in His own nature, utterly distinct, disparate from and even contradictory of humanity, no subtlety of dialectic can fuse the Divine and human together into the unity of a personal life.[8] In the strange and powerful mind of Augustine the two streams, the Gospel of the Love of God and the Platonic conception of ultimate Reality, flowed together and [ p. 99 ] mingled in a manner which was to be of decisive importance for the Christian thought of the West. “ Augustine,” writes Mr. Hanson, “in a supreme spiritual experience fused Platonism and Paulinism, identified as the ground of his own spiritual being the Ultimate Being of the Platonic-Aristotclian tradition with the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”[9] The “fusion ”, however, of which Mr. Hanson speaks was one achieved in religious experience and by no means successfully carried through in the region of thought. Augustine came to Christianity from Manichsism via Neo-Platonism, and his respect for Plotinus remained after he had completed the journey ; so much did he rely on the essentially Christian nature of the new Platonism that he believed Plotinus and his friends, had they lived a little later, would have “changed a few words and phrases” and become Christians.[10] Few who have read the section of the Znneads which deals with “ Gnosticism ” will share Augustine’s belief ; and in his own system the two elements were less harmoniously combined than he supposed. The conception of God as creative activity which Augustine took from the Christian tradition and experience consorted uncomfortably with the Platonic-Aristotelian concepts. The great treatise on the Trinity shows us the man of Christian experience and the Platonic philosopher as it were living in the same book side by side. As the one Augustine thinks of God in terms of personality and must conceive the Divine Life under the analogy of self-consciousness, as the other he thinks of the Divine as the absolutely “simple”, unmoved, and unchanging One, When we consider Augustine as dogmatic theologian we are constrained to agree with the dictum of Dr. [ p. 100 ] Schwartz, “in Augustine all the disharmonies of the inherited idea of God resound again”. The Augustinian doctrine of God left for subsequent thinkers not a solution but a problem.[11]
The Christian doctrine of God based on the PlatonicAristotelian philosophy reached its most systematic expression in the Scholastic theology of the thirteenth century. The movement of thought of which Bonaventura and Thomas Aquinas are the greatest representatives is one of the most considerable achievements of the human mind. Thomism, with its dual foundation of Aristotelian logic and Biblical revelation, presents us with a magnificent synthesis of material unified by a coherent metaphysical theory. It is, moreover, a system of thought which is still living and effective in the modern world, for the Roman Church has installed St. Thomas as the greatest Doctor Ecclesiae, and a vigorous school of writers is engaged in defending, elaborating, and adapting his thought. Great claims are made for it as both philosophia perennis and the only Christian philosophy. Even the sectarian narrowness of professional philosophers has in some measure been vanquished by the weight and enthusiasm and learning of neo-Scholastic scholars such as M. Gilson and M. Maritain, and they have begun to admit that Thomism is a system which must be taken into account. Certainly no part of the Christian Church has any speculative doctrine of the divine nature which can be compared with the massive structure which Aquinas built on Aristotle and the Bible.
Lo criticize this body of teaching as it deserves would demand a treatise as large as the Summa itself. If we proceed to make some critical remarks on it and point [ p. 101 ] out some respects in which its conception of God seems grievously defective we must in justice make mention of its merits. It is in intention and inspiration profoundly Christian. It adheres to the Biblical revelation with perhaps undiscriminating loyalty, but it does not question the supreme authority of the life and words of Christ. The corporate experience of the Church has entered into its structure—perhaps again sometimes in questionable form, since it accepts the dogmatic decisions of the Councils without criticism. But with whatever imperfections this theology has grown up in an atmosphere of worship, and, at least in the case of its greatest minds, has been thought out by men whose inner life was directed towards God as the goal of all their endeavour. It is at the same time splendidly rationalist. In the form which has had the imprimatur of the Roman Church, it asserts that the existence and the fundamental attributes of God can be demonstrated by the reason unassisted by revelation. It is magnificently insistent upon the divine transcendence. In definite antagonism to any theory that the Divine is the order of the world, or the immanent reason, or the qualities of value or sublimity which the world displays, it affirms that God is “distinct really and in essence from the world ”, its Source and Creator.
"The defect of this noble construction, worthy to stand beside the cathedral of Chartres, lies still in the imperfect coalescence of the philosophical concepts with the religious content. The philosophy, which is in theory the preparation for theology, in effect threatens to neutralize the doctrines of which it should be the support. There is still the presupposition that the nature of Deity is given to us, in principle, through the analysis of concepts which are in the end abstractions. God is in essence the infinite First Cause, the Pure Activity of Aristotelian metaphysics. [ p. 102 ] It is, of course, quite consistent with this standpoint that the being of God should be treated in this system before the doctrine of the Trinity and the so-called “ metaphysical ” attributes before the “ moral”. Revelation is not for this theology an indispensable pre-requisite for the knowledge of God. On the contrary, Revelation comes to complete the knowledge which reason had by itself acquired. Doubtless Revelation is necessary that man may know the truths which concern his salvation, but not to impart the thought and disclose the reality of God. We must confess that the Scholastic doctrine of God is not in intention abstract. On the contrary, the thought of God as Actus Purus, the conception that in Him all “perfeotions” or values are realized without limit, is concrete, But the determining ideas are those of infinity, unity, simplicity, perfection—the “ metaphysical attributes” which are defined as “ the perfections of God considered in Himself independent of all relation with the world”.[12] Sublime audacity which elevates the created mind to assume a knowledge of God “in Himself”!
But this sublime audacity has its nemesis. The metaphysical attributes which are taken as fundamental, as giving us the nature of God “in Himself”, threaten when they are rigorously considered, to bring to nothing those qualities and acts of God which form the burden of the Christian Gospel. Unity, infinity, and perfection are the attributes of God “in Himself,’ and these qualities are conceived in an abstract manner so that it is assumed that we have a logically accurate notion of what in principle they mean. The two concepts of infinity and perfection are of special importance. It seems to follow from the abstract idea of infinity that all the concrete qualities of God must be different from [ p. 103 ] those which we know in finite being in so great a measure that we can form no idea of them except of a negative kind. The divine Knowledge and the divine Will, being those of an unlimited Being, must be quite different from Imowledge and will as they occur in our experience. But the will of God which the Prophets announced and which Jesus fulfilled was not a will unrelated with time ; it was a will concerned with events, like a human will, only holy and wise. But it is the closely related conception of “perfection” which, by its abstractly logical interpretation, has produced the strangest consequences. It seemed evident to the Scholastic writers that the meaning of perfection is capable of being accurately defined. It means, or it implies, the self-sufficient. A perfect being would be one who finds the completion of his nature in himself, whose satisfaction can neither be increased nor diminished. Closely connected with this is the idea that change must be completely foreign to the perfect Being. That which is perfect cannot change.
But a very remarkable conclusion follows from all this. We are told in the Scriptures, that God is angry with sin, that He loves the world and desires the salvation of sinners, that He spared not His own Son. The appeal of the Gospel to our hearts depends upon the belief that these expressions denote something real. We can scarcely attach any significance to them at all which does not imply that there is a need in the divine Experience, a going forth on the part of God to the creatures, a desire that they should become in full reality His children. But on the Scholastic view of the meaning of the divine Perfection nothing of this kind can be really true. There is no need in the heart of God, for His utter self-sufficiency precludes that He should require the love or the repentance of any creature to satisfy His desire.
[ p. 104 ]
This consequence is particularly important in connexion with the two central Christian doctrines of creation and redemption. The logical deduction is explicitly drawn. that the creation of the world makes no difference to God : it cannot add to the satisfaction of the divine Experience nor could its degeneration or annihilation diminish the fullness of the divine bliss. All the sources of God’s perfect Life are found within His own being. We aro here far indeed from the Biblical picture of the sons of God shouting for joy and the Creator rejoicing over all His works. It is surely a curious result of Christian philosophy that it should lead to a doctrine of God which, through anxiety to preserve His real divinity, excludes from His experience any real care for the world which He has created. In the same way, we are precluded by this philosophical conception of the nature of Deity from believing that the phrases in which religion expresses its thought about the meaning of sin and the reality of redemption have anything more than a merely metaphorical or “economic ” truth. The eternal satisfaction and self-sufficiency of God suffers no hurt through the sin of man, nor can it be increased by the turning again of the prodigal and his restoration to communion with his Creator. We are far away in this circle of ideas from the central Christian affirmation that “ there is joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth ”.
Mr. Hanson in his eloquent and witty defence of Scholastic theology[13] suggests, perhaps half seriously, that the revolt of modern men against this system of thought is due in part to the self-conceit which makes it intolerable to think that God can do without us. Doubtless the motive is not absent, but there is a deeper and more respectable one. This Deus philosophorum is not [ p. 105 ] the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Those who thought out the system, in spite of their profoundly Christian experience, did not succeed in fusing the Aristotelian metaphysic with the Christian Gospel. We cannot believe in the Deity who emerges from their logic, not because He is too high but because He does not really sustain the Christian values.
We might have expected that the Reformation theologies would have produced a drastic change in theological ideas, and this expectation is to some extent fulfilled in the sphere of the doctrines of redemption, man and the Church ; but the effect of the Reformation on theology in the narrow sense, on the doctrine of God, was singularly small.[14] The Reformation movement was, it is true, partly the reassertion of the mystical experience of God which had pursued its course side by side with the rationalist theology and had indeed often found a home within it. Luther in particular marks a return in experience and teaching to the living, “ anthropomorphic ” and “ psychological ” God of the Old Testament and St. Paul. Vague and incoherent as Luther’s theology was, it had the signs upon it of the depths of inner struggle from which it sprang. In his chapter on the Numinous in Luther, Professor Otto has collected some remarkable passages in which the Reformer embodies an idea of God as Life and Power which is profoundly different in spirit from that of the Scholastic. But on the whole the formal theology was content to remain in the old paths. “The philosophical element in the new Scholasticism,” writes Dr. Franks, (namely the doctrines of God and the world) “ was practically taken over bodily from Mediavalism, and in reality presents no new growth when compared with its [ p. 106 ] predecessor. The bold speculative outlook of the Middle Ages is lost. There is no longer the same independent interest in the philosophical problems of epistemology and metaphysics in their religious application. We have merely a statement of what may be called in modern phrase the approved results’ of the earlier scholastic investigations, and of these alone. All is calm and cautious and dull, as compared with the vigour and freedom of the Middle Ages.”[15]
The only Reformation system of theology which can claim to approximate to the originality and systematic unity of Scholasticism is that of Calvinism. Calvin was, before all else, a Biblical theologian, and his conception of God is not a rationalist one in the same degree as that of Thomas; but he, too, has in effect taken an abstraction and treated it as constituting the essence of Deity. Calvinism is built up round the idea of sovereignty considered as a logical notion. The God of Calvinism may perhaps be less remote than the God of the Aristotelians, but He is the presiding genius of a terrific tyranny. By abstracting the concept of sovereignty or power and making God practically equivalent to this idea, Calvin really destroyed the validity of moral distinctions. He is logically bound to deduce them from the arbitrary will of God and to hold that they depend solely on that will. The issue is a practical agnosticism which in the end is more devastating than the veiled agnosticism of the Medisval Scholastic, for it implies that God Himself is beyond values. He is not the Sustainer of Values in any intelligible senso, for they have no ground in His nature. They are the arbitrary choice of a Being who is beyond comprehension. It follows that God in Calvinist theology [ p. 107 ] is even more remote from human experience than in the rival systems of medisval philosophy. Two quotations taken from Dr. J. K. Mozley’s book on the Impassibility of God may suffice to illustrate this statement. Commenting on Genesis vr. Calvin writes, “'The repentance which is here ascribed to God does not properly belong to Him ; that repentance cannot take place in God easily appears from this single consideration that nothing happens which is by Him unexpected or unforeseen ; the same reasoning and remark applies to what follows, that God was afilicted with grief. Certainly God is not sorrowful or sad but remains for ever like Himself in His celestial and happy repose : and yet because it could not: otherwise be known how great is God’s hatred and detestation of sin, therefore the Spirit accommodated Himself to our capacity.” And commenting on Isaiah nxur.: “In order to move us more powerfully and to draw us to Himself the Lord accommodated Himself to the manner of men by attributing to Himself all the affection, love, and compassion which a father can have . . . not that He can in any way endure anguish, but by a very customary figure of speech He assumes and applies to Himself human passions.”[16]
Professor Pringle Pattison has summed up the matter in a passage which puts clearly one side of the truth. “The traditional idea of God may be not unfairly described as a fusion of the primitive monarchical idea with Aristotle’s conception of the eternal Thinker. The two conceptions thus fused are, of course, very different ; for power which is the main constituent of the former has in the ordinary sense no place at all in Aristotle’s speculative ideal, but there is common to both the idea of a self-centred life and a consequent aloofness from the [ p. 108 ] world.”[17] We may make two reservations. The two ideas of which Pringle Pattison speaks have never been “fused”: they have existed side by side ; and his summary statement does not remind us of the fact, which we should never forget, that the traditional doctrine of God has been accompanied by an overtone of mystical experience and evangelical piety flowing from the New Testament, which has softened the lines and neutralized, at least partially, the mistakes of the theological systems. The God of the simple Christian who loves Jesus has always been greater than the theological God. The idea of deity which we have been criticizing, says Mr. Paul Elmer More, revives in a more subtle form an ancient heresy. “This conception of God as seeming to have qualities which He really has not is precisely an extension of the docetic heresy which reduces the humanity of Christ to mere appearance and the fact of His Incarnation to a moral make-believe.”[18]
It is worth while to point out that the Scholastic method of approach and the Scholastic doctrine of God did not close their career with the Reformation and Renaissance. We have been taught to date the beginning of modern philosophy with Descartes; but the writings of Professor E. Gilson and his pupils have abundantly shown that this division is arbitrary and misleading. There is a continuity of thought from the Middle Ages to Spinoza, and the system builders of the seventeenth century were not the philosophical Melchizedeks one would suppose from many textbooks of the history of philosophy. Many of the leading ideas of the medieval theologians reappear in slightly modified form as the central concepts of Descartes, Malebranche, and Spinoza. We hear still of substance, first cause, infinity, [ p. 109 ] perfection, simplicity. Why is it that the philosophical movement of the seventeenth century issued not in a transcendent idea of God but in the pantheistic system of Spinoza? The answer to this question is both interesting in itself and significant of the real tendencies of the traditional theology. Philosophers who had shaken themselves free from ecclesiastical authority and revelation were gradually led to abandon the dogma of creation which had been already recognized by Augustine and Aquinas as singularly intractable by reason. The conception of creation, involving as it does a sphere of finite existence which is somehow outside of and distinct from the infinite Being, suggests obvious difficulties ; but it was solely this dogma of creation which maintained any ultimate distinction between God and the world. Once this has beon given up the next step is to identify, as Spinoza does, God and the order of the universe, to think of the Eternal Substance as natura naturans and to speak of Natura sive Deus, It is no fancy that finds a new era of theological construction opening with Kant and taking the first great forward step with Schleiermacher. The metaphysical structure which Kant undermined in his attack on “rational theology” and “rational psychology” had seemed a necessary bulwark of the Christian life and faith, but in fact it was not so. Its Deus philosophorum was not the Christian God, though He had been robed in some of the majesty of Yahweh and the loving kindness of Christ. His removal from the apex of metaphysies left the way clear for a doctrine of God based upon the moral and religious consciousness.
I will try to sum up the contentions of this chapter. We have argued that the effort to form a speculative doctrine of God is necessary and that the demand for religion without theology is the cry of ignorance or despair. [ p. 110 ] The actual attempt which was made to meet this need, extending over all the Christian centuries, up to and ineluding the seventeenth, is one of the most impressive monuments of the human intellect. No one who understands the problems which were under discussion or the human interests which were at stake could speak without reverence of this theological heritage. Yet it did not wholly succeed in its purpose. The construction which it was able to make with the material to its hand was inadequate to the Christian experience of God and even, in fact, issued in a contradiction of that experience. This partial failure cannot be attributed to lack of intellectual power on the part of those who contributed to the theological structure nor to their lack of personal acquaintance with actual religion. The fault lies rather with the intellectual tools which were available. Philosophy, as they were acquainted with it, was incapable of fulfilling the task which they imposed upon it. Created in a milion which was not Christian, it remained in some measure alien to the Christian view of the world. From whatever causes, however, the imperfection may have arisen, it consisted in this—that the heart of the Christian Gospel was not taken up into it. It remains to ask with what hope of success we in the present age may address ourselves to the same task, and in view of changed philosophical presuppositions and enlarged knowledge approach from our standpoint the eternal problem of God.
St. Luke XI. 2. ↩︎
St. Luke XV. 7. ↩︎
2 Cor. V. 14. ↩︎
Christianity at the Cross Roads, p. 251. ↩︎
See, however, a surprising statement of Agobard, quoted by R.L Poole: Illustrations of Mediaval Thought, p. 46. ↩︎
P. E. More: Christ the Word, p. 72; ep. H. Schwartz : der Gottesgedanke. Teil I, pp. 153 ff. ↩︎
Cp. C. Gore: Belief in Christ. See Chap. VII. ↩︎
Cp. my essay on “The Doctrine of Christ” in the Future of Christianity. ↩︎
“ Medieval Scholasticism ” by R. Hanson in Dogma in History and Thought (Nisbet), p. 107. ↩︎
W. R. Inge: Plotinus, Vol. I, p. 21. ↩︎
H. Schwartz: der Gottesgedanke in der Geschichte der Philosophie. Teil I, pp. 229 £1. ↩︎
Eg. Gaston Sortais: Traite de Philosophie. Tome IL, p. 577 ↩︎
Op. cit., p. 107. ↩︎
R. S. Franks: “Dogma in Protestant Scholasticism” in Dogma (Nisbet), pp. 115. ↩︎
R. S. Franks: “Dogma in Protestant Scholasticism” in Dogma (Nisbet), p. 115. ↩︎
Impassibility of God, p. 120. ↩︎
Idea of God, p. 407. ↩︎
Christ the Word, p. 72. ↩︎