"As the right order of going requires that we should believe the deep things of God before we presume to discuss them by reason, so it seems to me to be negligence if, after we have been confirmed in the faith, we do not study to understand what we believe." St. Anselm, Cur Deus Homo.
In this word-processed edition spelling and Bible citations are in the American form. Excess punctuation has been reduced to leave only punctuation considered grammatically necessary or useful for clarity.
The subject of this book is not "apologetics" but "dogmatics": that is, it is intended primarily, not for those who are outside, but for those who are inside the Christian fold. It is our duty as Christians to try to bring all men to the knowledge of the truth; but we cannot do so, unless we ourselves know clearly what the Christian religion is.
The lectures on which this book is based were given, through many years, to Anglican candidates for ordination, and were at all times subjected to their criticism. Readers are warned, as they were warned, to take no statement for granted, but to check it for themselves. No belief is really ours until we have made it our own (St. John 4:42).
This book is intended chiefly for members of the Anglican churches, which, though they have no doctrines peculiar to themselves, have a standpoint and an emphasis of their own, which is given here without qualification or apology. For this reason, more space is devoted to Anglican authority, formularies, and organization, than might otherwise be justified. Readers who are not Anglican, if any, should bear in mind that the book is not addressed directly to them.
References to authorities, other than scriptural, have been reduced as much as possible in order to save paper. I am sorry if I have inadvertently quoted anyone without acknowledgement.
This book is dedicated to the students who listened to the lectures on which it is based, at the Scholae Cancellarii, Lincoln, and St. Boniface Missionary College, Warminster.
I should wish to withdraw anything in this book which is contrary to the teaching of the Catholic Church as it is interpreted by the Church of England.
CLAUDE BEAUFORT MOSS
For the purpose of linking, the chapters have been grouped as follows:
1. Presuppositions 1
2. The Sources of our Knowledge of God 6
3. The Christian Doctrine of God 10
4. The Transcendence and Immanence of God 15
5 The Arguments for the Existence of God 17
6. The Attributes of God 24
7. The Character of God 30
8. The Holy Trinity 35
9. Evolution of the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity 41
10. The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity Continued 47
11. The Incarnation 51
12. Arianism and Apollinarianism 56
13. Nestorianism 64
14. The Blessed Virgin Mary 71
15. Monophysitism 78
16. The Manhood of Christ 87
17. Practical Effects of the Defined Doctrine of the Incarnation 96
18. Miracle 103
19. The Virgin Birth of our Lord 108
20. The Resurrection of our Lord 115
21. The Doctrine of the Resurrection 120
22. The Ascension and Heavenly Session 123
23. God the Holy Ghost 128
24. Creation and Free Will 135
25. Angels and Devils 142
26. The Fall of Man 146
27. Pelagius and Calvin 154
28. The Atonement in the New Testament 165
29. The Old Testament in the New Testament 171
30. The Atonement in History 179
31. Propitiation and Forgiveness 186
32. Predestination and Election 189
33. Justification 193
34. The Nature and Importance of Right Belief 203
35. Revelation 209
36. Inspiration 214
37. The Work of God the Holy Ghost 220
38. The Holy Ghost in the Church 224
39. The Holy Ghost as the Inspirer of Scripture 231
40. The Holy Ghost as the Guide of Reason and Conscience 236
41. The Catholic Church 243
42. The Church and the Churches 253
43. The Anglican Communion 262
44. The Other Communions 268
45. Schism 279
46. The Continental Reformation 286
47. Undenominationalism 290
48. Authority in the Church of England 294
49. Episcopate and Papacy 301
50. Romanism 307
51. Church and State 318
52. Grace 324
53. The Sacramental System 328
54. Sacraments in General 331
55. Baptism 339
56. Confirmation 345
57. The Holy Eucharist (1) The Outward Sign 349
58. The Holy Eucharist (2) The Thing Signified 357
59. The Holy Eucharist (3) Speculative Theories 361
60. The Holy Eucharist (4) As Sacrifice 368
61. The Holy Eucharist (5) Reservation 375
62. Ordination (1) In the New Testament 381
63. Ordination (2) As a Sacrament 386
64. Ordination (3) Validity of Orders 395
65. Ordination (4) The Church and the Non-Episcopal Ministry 404
66. Marriage (1) 411
67 Marriage (2) 418
68. Marriage (3) 425
69. Absolution 428
70. Unction of the Sick 432
71. Death 434
72. The Communion of Saints 441
73. The Resurrection and the Judgment Day 447
74. Hell and Heaven 450
75. Creeds 456
76. The Thirty-Nine Articles 464
Indices (General & People by Name) 472 to END
Links repeated from above: Ch. 1-15 (below); 16-22; 23-36; 37-51; 52-65; 66-76; Index
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What is Theology? It is the science of God and the things of God, just as ornithology is the science of birds. Every science has something already given on which it works. Ornithology assumes that birds exist, and that we know what a bird is. Theology assumes that there is a God, and that it is possible to know Him.
There are people who deny that there is a God. If there were no God, there could be no Theology, except the history of what men have believed about their gods. But this is not the place to try to convince those who deny that there is a God. Genesis does not begin with a proof of the existence of God; it begins with the words, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth".
Christian Theology is the science of God as revealed by and in Jesus of Nazareth. It assumes, not only that there is a God, but that He is the God whom Jesus of Nazareth proclaimed to the world. Christians do not believe that there is or can be any other God.
If there is a God, and if He is such as the New Testament (and also the Old Testament) declares Him to be, there can be no kind of knowledge more important than Theology. For the nature of man, and the nature of the universe in which he finds himself, depend on the nature of God. It is possible to deny that there is a God, but it seems hardly possible to deny that the question whether there is a God is important; for the answer to this question makes the greatest possible difference to everything in the world. Therefore Theology is concerned with everything in the world and must be of supreme
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importance to every human being. For this reason it was formerly called the Queen of the Sciences.
Philosophy, or metaphysics, is concerned with the being of everything in the world. But metaphysics is concerned with the world as it can be understood by reason and the senses only. It does not assume the existence of God or the revelation of Him in Jesus of Nazareth. Therefore Theology possesses more given material than metaphysics.
Of all the things in the world there are some which can be seen, touched, weighed, and measured; which can or could, that is, be known by means of the senses, though not all of them can be perceived by all the senses (air cannot be seen, but it can be touched or weighed). We call these things "material". They are the subject of the natural sciences.
There are other things which cannot be seen, or touched, or weighed, or measured, not because they are too large or too small, but because their nature does not permit it. These things which cannot be perceived by the senses are called "spiritual".
(Some of these things are described as intellectual rather than spiritual. We must not use the word "spiritual" of what is merely intellectual, though some people do it. To draw an exact line between the intellectual and the spiritual is not easy.)
Some people deny that the spiritual world, which cannot be perceived by the senses, exists at all. Those who hold this theory are called materialists. But they have never been more than a minority, usually a small minority, of mankind. Most philosophers reject Materialism as an absurdity, on the ground that if a man is nothing but a piece of material like a stone, he cannot think or know, and therefore cannot form a theory. They are supported by the belief of the great majority of mankind that there is a spiritual world behind the material world.
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Note on the Theory of Values
(Some people call the spiritual world the world of values, as opposed to the world of facts. This seems to be a confusion of thought. If anything is a "value", it must be valued by someone. If there were no persons, there would be no values. If, for instance, the moon is quite dead, as we are told, there cannot be in it any values at all except for persons outside it. If, then, we say that God belongs to the world of values, we must mean that man is the valuer of God; that is, that God is merely a name for the highest ideals of man. But if God did not exist apart from man,s thoughts about Him, He would not be worth believing in. Christians, and indeed all who really believe in God, believe that He is a Fact. To say that Jesus "has the value of God" is not at all the same as to say that Jesus is God, which is what Christians believe. It is better, therefore, not to speak of the world of facts and the world of values, but of the material world and the spiritual world or, with St. Paul, of the things temporal and the things eternal.)
Since the spiritual world cannot be perceived by the senses, we must have other ways of perceiving it. Christians believe that we have five means of access to the spiritual world.
a) Reason The reason, by which we can deduce from the things that we perceive by our senses the existence and the character of their Creator.
b) Conscience The conscience, by which we can distinguish between what is right and what is wrong.
c) Holy Scripture God,s Revelation of Himself to men, of which the Holy Scriptures are the record.
d) The Sacraments The Sacraments, material things ("outward and visible signs") by means of which God, according to His promise, bestows upon us His heavenly power, or grace.
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e) Religious Experience The religious experience (apart from the sacraments) of millions of Christians (and others), including such experience as we ourselves have shared. (The mystical experience, or direct vision of God, which is only given to some people, not to all, is one kind of this religious experience.)
But though we believe that the spiritual and the material orders are distinct from one another, we do not believe that they are quite separate. Each of us is partly spiritual and partly material, and each part profoundly affects the other part.
The spiritual "world" and the material "world" belong to one universe, created and directed by one God. They are governed by similar laws, as was shown by Bishop Joseph Butler in The Analogy of Religion. They are closely associated with one another, and it is sometimes hard to draw a sharp line of division between them.
Four different beliefs have been held about the material and spiritual.
The first which has been already mentioned is Materialism the denial that the spiritual world exists. This theory has been rejected by all the best philosophers for the reason already given. The system of Marxian Communism introduced by Lenin into Russia is based on what its supporters call "dialectical materialism". It appears, however, not to be materialism in the strict sense, for the Communists hold that the ultimate basis of existence is impersonal Tension or Struggle to be resolved at last in a synthesis. This seems to be a very crude form of Monism (see below). Marxians do not reject cultural and intellectual values, as strict materialists would; for museums, art galleries, and concerts are supported by the Communist Government. Marxian Communism, as preached and enforced by Lenin, has all the characteristics of a religion except an object of worship. It has its organized "church", its "heresies", its missionaries, and its martyrs. It is the most successful and the most dangerous rival of Christianity with which it is, of course, fundamentally incompatible, for it is based on the denial of God, freedom,
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and immortality, and on the duty, not of love but of hatred (the "Class War").
The second doctrine about the material and the spiritual is Idealism the denial of the reality of the material world. Unlike Materialism, this theory has very great philosophical and religious support. Many of the religions of Asia are based upon it; for instance, the most prevalent forms of Hinduism and Buddhism. Plato was an Idealist, and so were many modern philosophers. Some, like George Berkeley (Bishop of Cloyne, near Cork, 1734-53), and many Christian Platonists, have tried to reconcile it with Christianity.
The third doctrine is Monism the belief that there is no difference between the material and the spiritual, but that everything in the universe is of one substance. The chief teachers of Monism were Plotinus (204-70), Spinoza (1632-77), Hegel (1770-1831), and Schopenhauer (1788-1860).
The fourth doctrine is the Hebrew and Christian doctrine that matter and spirit both really exist, but that the spiritual world is more real than the material world. It is especially displayed in the Christian doctrines of the Incarnation and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the Resurrection of the Body.
No doctrine of the nature of the universe is satisfactory which does not regard personality as real, and as the highest form of existence known to us.
We need not define personality, for we have direct knowledge of what a person is. Everything is more real the more closely it is connected with a person.
Persons are more real than things. Things are real, but they owe their reality to persons. For this reason persons are more important than anything else in the universe. Quantity matters little in
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comparison with quality. A living baby is more important than a whole system of stars. The feeling that man is lost in a boundless creation (Ecclus. 16:17), which modern astronomy has raised as a bogey to haunt the imagination ("Must my tiny spark of being wholly vanish in your deeps and heights?"1), is an illusion. It is man and man alone who has the power even to know that there is a universe.
The supreme reality must be at least as personal as we are. To suppose that the existence of rational beings on this one planet is an accident, and has no relation to the general scheme of the universe, is to suppose what is more difficult to believe than that the universe is governed by reason.
We know nothing of causation except when we ourselves are the cause of anything. Apart from our wills, cause is merely an observed sequence. Primitive men believe that all causes are personal, that it is God (or the gods) who makes the rain to fall and the sun to shine. We find this belief throughout the Old Testament. Primitive men and the writers of the Old Testament are right. Everything that happens is caused by the will of some person, either by man, or by some other created being (as an angel, or a devil), or by God. There is no such thing as an impersonal cause. When we say that one thing causes another, we mean, or we ought to mean, that we have observed that the latter always follows the former, and that we believe that God has made them in such a way that it always will follow it. It is because God is a God of order that nature is uniform. If it were not uniform, natural science could not exist.
There are two principal kinds of theology, or perhaps two different standpoints from which it can be regarded: Historical Theology and Dogmatic Theology. (There are other departments of theology as well, Moral Theology, Ascetic Theology, Pastoral Theology, etc., which are applications of Dogmatic Theology and with which we
1 Tennyson.
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are not now concerned. Dogmatic Theology and its various applications make up what is called Systematic Theology.)
Historical Theology is the description and definition of beliefs which have been held by men of different religions, or Christians of different ages and denominations. It is, strictly speaking, a department of Comparative Religion.
Dogmatic Theology is the science, not merely of what has been held about God, but of what is true about Him. This book is chiefly about dogmatic theology. (See F. J. Hall, Dogmatic Theology, v. 1, ch. 1, part 3.)
The principal source of our knowledge of God is His revelation in the Person of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was the culmination of His revelation through the Hebrew prophets. Apart from this we have two main sources of our knowledge of God.
The first is the study of religious experience in all lands and ages, which is called Comparative Religion. It is a very modern science, in its present form little more than a century old, but it has made great progress and collected and classified a vast mass of facts of the most various kinds. From these facts the following general results have been obtained.
a) Universal Need of God The need of God, which is satisfied by religion, is universal. It is very doubtful whether any tribe has ever been discovered which had no religion at all. We may fairly conclude that since human beings everywhere need someone to worship, there must be a God the worship of whom will satisfy so universal a need.
b) Importance of the Consequences of Religion The consequences of religious belief and practice upon human life and conduct are very important indeed. The greatest differences between individuals, groups, and races are due to differences of religion. It is therefore absurd to assume, as is often assumed in English-speaking countries, that a man,s religion is entirely his own affair and is of no importance to anyone else.
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c) Religion is a Fundamental Activity of Man Religion is a fundamental activity of man; it is not a by-product of anything else. It is not merely a form of culture, or of philosophy, or of art, or of politics; on the contrary, all these are often rooted in religion.
d) Religion Involves Dependence on Non-Human Powers Religion always implies dependence on some non-human power or powers. (If Marxian Communism, as practiced in Soviet Russia, is to be regarded as a kind of religion, it is an exception to this rule.)
e) Religion is a Social, not Merely an Individual Activity Religion is always a social or communal activity. It is not "what a man does with his loneliness", but it is an activity of man as a social being. The worship of God cannot be fully practiced in solitude, any more than any other human activity.
The second source of our knowledge of God (apart from revelation) is the analysis of, or inquiry into, the nature of man and of his relation to the world around him. Man, alone among material things, is able to inquire into his own nature, the universe of which he is a part, and the relation between them because he alone is self-conscious.
He is therefore aware of four questions, to each of which God is the true answer.
a) The Problem of Nature The first is the question, Why was the universe made, and what is its purpose? The universe shows, as we shall see, many signs of having been made by design and with very great skill, which seems to show that it was made by Someone, and that He had a reason for making it.
b) The Problem of Mind The second is the question, What is the conscious self? We know of no other self-conscious beings in the whole vast universe of which natural science tells us. Are we to believe that the human race is a mere accident in a material universe, or that the universe itself has behind it a Person like, but infinitely greater than, human beings?
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c) The Problem of Conscience The third is the question, What is the meaning of the difference, which we all feel, between right and wrong? Every human being possesses this power to distinguish between right and wrong, which we call the conscience; and it does not correspond to anything else in nature. Do the words "I ought" belong to something universal, or are they merely an accidental result of the development of life in this planet?
d) The Problem of Beauty The fourth is the question, What is meant by beauty? Is beauty merely something that gives pleasure to a particular person, or is it a permanent principle corresponding to something in the nature of the universe?
The right answer to these questions is:
a) God made the universe, for His own glory.
b) God has made us self-conscious beings after His own likeness; man is the crown of creation.
c) God has made us capable of knowing His will by means of our conscience, or sense of duty.
d) God is eternal and perfect beauty, and whatever is beautiful is a means by which He displays His beauty.
By these means men have been able to seek after God and to know something of Him. St. Paul blamed the pagans because, though without God,s revelation, they did not make use of the means of knowing God which they had, but fell into idolatry and abominable immorality (Rom. 1:20). But no one has ever attained to any clear knowledge of God unless God has revealed Himself to him. It is for this reason that the writer of the Epistle of Barnabas, an early second-century Christian book, claims for the Christians that they possess what no one else possesses, because God has revealed Himself to them alone. "It is our boast that we have found what all the philosophers have sought in vain."
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Comparative Religion shows us that there have been many different beliefs about God. But the Christian doctrine of God is distinct from all others and has a long history of its own.
It is not founded upon reason, or on the considerations mentioned in the preceding chapter, but upon a special revelation of God to the Hebrew people. Nevertheless, it is not contrary to reason. What man has learned about God by the use of reason agrees with what he has learned by revelation. But God has revealed many things about Himself which man has not discovered, and could not have discovered, by reason alone.
The history of the Christian doctrine of God begins with the Old Testament. God revealed Himself partially and gradually to the Hebrew prophets. The three great "theistic" religions (that is, religions which teach that there is only One God), Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all accept as their origin the revelation of God to the Hebrew prophets. According to the tradition recorded in Genesis, God revealed Himself first to Abraham. But as it is uncertain how far that tradition is historical, we had better be content to say that the history of God,s revelation goes back at least to Moses. Amos, the first of the writing prophets, lived about 700 years after Moses; but it is certain that long before his time the religious difference between the children of Israel and their neighbors was very strongly marked; and we cannot account for this or for their later history unless the story of Moses and the deliverance from Egypt is, at least in general outline, true.
The writers of the Old Testament never tried to prove the existence of God. They were prophets, not philosophers. They knew God by immediate experience. The philosophers of Greece, on the other
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hand, had no such immediate experience of God. The greatest of them arrived at belief in God by means of reason. It was because the Hebrews at that period were not philosophers, because their very language was extremely concrete, and contained hardly any abstract words, that they were more suitable than the much cleverer Greeks to receive the revelation of God.1
The revelation of God to the Hebrews was not made all at once, but "at sundry times and in divers manners" (Heb. 1:1). We can trace its development from the crude and primitive form which we find in the Book of Judges to its completion in Him who was at once the greatest of the prophets and the fulfillment of their prophecies, the Lord Jesus Christ. Modern study of the Old Testament, by enabling us to place the books of the Old Testament in something like the order in which they were written, has made this process much clearer to us that it was to our forefathers.
The final revelation, the full display of all that it is possible for man to know of God, was the Person of Jesus of Nazareth, who was both the Anointed King (Messiah, Christ) foretold by the prophets and the eternal Word of God, "the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person" (Heb.1:2). There can be no further revelation in this world. The revelation of God, partial through the prophets, complete in Jesus Christ, was unique. It did not occur in any other nation. It has not occurred since, and it will never occur again. Therefore we can never hope by any kind of psychological investigation, which can only be speculative, to understand fully or clearly the nature of revelation. We must presume that, as its results are unique, the revelation itself was unique. We are not to expect it to be continued, but we shall probably never cease to gain more light from it. Every generation and every race which accept Christ see the revelation in a fresh light and learn something new from it.
The doctrine of God revealed to us in this way is called Theism; we believe it to be the only kind of Theism which is true.
1 The contrast between the Hebrew prophet and the Greek philosopher is well brought out by H. F. Hamilton, The People of God, v. 1.
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A theist is a person who believes in One God who is personal, transcendent, and immanent; that is to say, that God is like us, a self-conscious rational Person though infinitely greater than we are; that He is above and outside of all other beings in the universe, and they all owe their existence to Him; that He is also inside His world, and that nothing could exist for a moment if it were not continually sustained by Him.
a) Widespread Only when Based on the Old Testament Christians, Jews, and Unitarians (who are not Christians, strictly speaking, because they do not believe that Jesus Christ is God) are Theists, though there is a strong element of Deism in Islam. These are the only theistic religions which have ever been widespread, and they are all based on the revelation of God through the Hebrew prophets.
The word Theist is derived from the Greek 1,`l (Theos), God. The word Monotheist from :`<@l 1,`l (monos Theos), one God only, means the same thing with special emphasis on the uniqueness of God.
b) Distinguished from Polytheism and Henotheism Opposed to Monotheism are Polytheism, belief in many gods, and Henotheism, belief in one God but not in one God only. This was a stage through which Israel and other nations passed, and during which they believed that they had one God of their own, whom alone they were to worship, but who could not be worshiped in other lands. Dagon was the proper god to worship in Ashdod, and Chemosh in Moab, as Yahweh1 was in the land of Israel; see I Sam 26:19; II Kings 5:17. In all other cases henotheism developed into polytheism through the combination of different cults. In Israel alone through the revelation to the prophets it developed into monotheism.
A Deist (from the Latin deus, God) is a person who believes that God is transcendent but not immanent; that God created the world and then abandoned it, and that He takes little or no interest in His creatures, and cannot be reached by their prayers.
1 The Hebrew name for God, wrongly represented by "Jehovah".
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a) Leads to Atheism in Practice In practice, this leads to atheism (denial of the existence of God), for man cannot long continue to believe in a God who does not love him and will not hear his prayer.
b) In Primitive Religions Many primitive peoples believe vaguely in the Great Spirit who made the world; but they are usually much more interested in keeping off the attacks of lesser spirits who will hurt men if they are not propitiated. The Great Spirit is kindly; therefore there is no need to pay any attention to Him. This is a primitive form of Deism.
c) In the Eighteenth Century The eighteenth century was the great age of Deism in Europe. Even Christian thinkers in that period were often inclined to Deism. Voltaire and many of the leaders of the French Revolution were Deists. In England Deism was checked by the work of Bishop Butler and others, and by the missions of John Wesley and his followers. The reason why Deism was prevalent at that period was this: educated men were beginning to think in terms of the scientific dogma of the uniformity of nature, which they did not attribute to the will of God but thought of as a mechanical process. God was supposed to have started the world, like a man winding up a watch, and then to have left it to run down. He was not thought of as Sustainer and Preserver. There is an element of Deism in Islam, but since Moslems believe in prayer, Islam is not strictly deistic.
The extreme opposite to Deism is Pantheism. A Pantheist, from B< (pan), all, and 1,`l, God, is a person who believes that God is immanent but not transcendent; that He, or rather it, is a hidden, impersonal force guiding from within all that exists. This force is indeed identified with the whole universe. Some forms of Hinduism and Buddhism are pantheistic. So were many European philosophers such as Spinoza and Hegel.
If God is to be identified with all that exists, all that exists is equally divine. There is no distinction between the personal and the impersonal. Therefore Pantheists cease after a time to attach any value to personality, or even to believe that it exists; which
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constitutes one of the greatest difficulties of missionaries in Buddhist countries. Still worse, there is no distinction between right and wrong, for good and evil are alike divine. Therefore the effect of Pantheism is to deaden the conscience.
Philosophers, both in India and in Europe, have often been attracted by the conception of the "Absolute", that of which nothing can be predicated; a conception well explained in the lines:
"Whatever conception your mind comes at,
I tell you flat,
God is not that."
Some Hindu philosophers have held that the Supreme and Unknowable is not only neither good nor evil, but also neither existent nor non-existent.
European believers in the Absolute have sometimes tried to identify it with the God worshiped by Christians. Probably all such attempts are bound to fail. The philosophy of the Absolute in all its forms is inconsistent with the Divine Revelation.
To believe that God is impersonal and non-moral, as Pantheists must, and to believe that man is personal and moral, is to believe that man is greater and more noble than God, which he certainly would be if Pantheism were true.
To sum up the contents of the last three sections:
Theism is the belief that God is transcendent and immanent. Deism is the belief that He is transcendent but not immanent. Pantheism is the belief that He (or it) is immanent but not transcendent.
Christian Theism differs from other kinds of Theism by extending belief in One God to belief in Three Persons in One God. Theism is incomplete without belief in the Holy Trinity a belief which man could not have discovered for himself but which has been revealed to him by God.
For if God were a single unrelated Person, it would be difficult to believe that He could ever have become related to anybody or anything. In that case He would be entirely beyond our reach. We could not pray to Him or love Him. We could not know anything about Him.
And if God had only His creatures to love, either He would be
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dependent on them, or He would not be eternally love. Those who reject the doctrine of the Trinity have sometimes been forced to assume that God,s creation is eternal.
But we have no need of any such assumption. God is not a single unrelated Person. He has all that is needed both for relation and for love within His own being; for He is Three in One, and One in Three; Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
The words "transcendent" and "immanent", which have already been used, must be explained more clearly.
God is transcendent; that is, He is above, beyond, outside, all that He has made.
The Old Testament draws a clear distinction between the Creator and created beings, a distinction which was not made by the other nations. God can never cease to be God, nor can anyone become God. The heathen belief in demi-gods is unknown to the Hebrew and Christian revelation. The theory put forward by some modern theologians that there is no difference in kind between God and man is inconsistent with Theism, and is really Pantheistic.
Belief in the transcendence of God has definite consequences in human character. It produces awe, reverence, humility. It finds its supreme literary expression in the Book of Job, which has the desert for its background. It is in the desert, or on the sea, in the presence of the overwhelming powers of Nature before which man is helpless, that he is most inclined to believe in the transcendence of God. It was in the volcanic region of Mount Sinai that the children of Israel first learned the lesson of the holiness of God. In modern times the sense of the transcendence of God was especially prominent in the Tractarians. We also find it in an exaggerated form in the teaching of Professor Karl Barth that God is the Absolutely Other.
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But God is also immanent. He is inside all that He has made as well as outside. He is the Sustainer and Preserver as well as the Creator. He is the source of all power and all beauty. Nothing could continue to exist for a moment if He were not continually keeping it in being.
It is easier to believe in the immanence of God than in His transcendence if one lives in the midst of a crowded city and in a mechanical civilization full of contrivances of every kind. The immanence of God was over-emphasized in the steaming plains and swarming cities of India. Modern Christians need to emphasize the transcendence of God rather than His immanence, especially as the decline of the importance of personality is such a dangerous tendency in the modern world.
God is immanent in man, as in all other created beings. But His immanence in all men must not be confused with His Incarnation in Jesus Christ. The Incarnation is entirely unique: only once did the Word become Flesh. To say, as some have said, that Jesus of Nazareth was the highest instance of the immanence of God in man is a deadly error. "I ascend", He said, "to my God and your God." Never once did He identify Himself with His disciples, or His relation to His Father with theirs, by using "our" of Himself and them (the Lord,s Prayer is put into their mouths, and is not the way in which He Himself prayed).1
The Transcendence and Immanence of God are what is called an "antinomy", a pair of necessary truths which must be held together and yet which appear to contradict each other. There are several such antinomies in Christian doctrine: God is Three and God is One; Jesus Christ is both God and Man; God is omnipotent, yet man has free will. Truth appears to consist of a balance of apparent opposites. To emphasize either side and neglect the other is to fall into serious error. To believe in God,s transcendence and to neglect His immanence is to fall into Deism. To believe in His immanence and to neglect His transcendence is to fall into Pantheism. History shows that either course has disastrous effects on human conduct.
1 Contrast St. Matt. 11:25; St. John 17; etc.
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Our belief in God is not founded upon argument. As St. Ambrose1 says, it was not God,s will to save His people by dialectic ("Non complacuit Deo salvum populum suum per dialecticam facere"). God,s revelation of Himself is accepted by faith which is itself a gift from Him. Faith is in no way contrary to or inconsistent with reason. It is not believing something which would otherwise be incredible. But it is the answer of the whole of our nature, the will and the emotions as well as the mind, to the love of God. A man may be intellectually convinced that his country is right in going to war, but that will not by itself make him willing to give his life in her cause. So it is not enough to be convinced that there is a God. We must give ourselves wholly to Him, and it is only faith that enables us to do this.
We accept the revelation of God in Jesus Christ as true, and the experience of the Church, including our own, confirms our acceptance. When Nathaniel doubted whether any good thing could come out of Nazareth (St. John 1:46), Philip did not try to convince him by argument. He said, "Come and see." This is what the Church says to the doubter today: "Come and see; try it for yourself." The witness of Christians is of supreme importance. What convinces men of the truth of the Gospel of Christ is the changed lives of those who have accepted it.
But though our belief is not founded upon argument, it is buttressed by arguments. We are quite willing to argue, and we believe that reason is on our side; but we do not think that reason by itself will make any man a Christian.
There are five traditional arguments for the existence of God. They are: the Argument from Consent, the Cosmological Argument, the Teleological Argument, the Ontological Argument, and the Moral Argument. The proof of the existence of God is what is called cumulative that is, it is the result of several arguments, drawn from different premises and different points of view, but all leading to the same conclusion.
1 De Fide, 1. 42.
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The first of these arguments can be dealt with briefly as it has already been mentioned. All races of men, with few or no exceptions, have had some god or gods whom they worshiped. We must suppose that there is in man,s nature a need for worship which requires to be satisfied. If this is true, it seems highly probable that the means of satisfying that need exists, that if all men need a God to worship, there must be a God, or that need would never have arisen, or at least would long since have become atrophied that is, perished for want of use. Creatures which live in permanent darkness end by losing their eyes. Man would not have continued for thousands of years to need God if no God had existed to satisfy his need.
The French critic, Ernest Renan, supposed that the Semitic people were specially religious, and that the Hebrew-Christian religion sprang from this special trait, as Greek philosophy sprang from the speculative ability of the Greeks. The answer to this suggestion is that it is not true. The Semites were not specially religious. The Israelites were continually rebuked for their failure to observe the covenant which they had made. The other Semitic nations appear to have practiced one of the most debased religions known to us, the worship of the generative powers of nature. The Phoenicians and the Carthaginians, who were closely akin to the Hebrews, were notably lacking both in religion and in morality. Renan,s suggestion is rubbish.
Since the human race has almost universally felt the need of God, it is for those who deny that there is a God to prove their case. The burden of proof lies on them, for the general opinion of mankind is against them.
The second argument is the Cosmological Argument, or Argument from a first Cause.
The old form of this argument was, that every effect must have a cause; the whole universe, which is certainly an effect, must have a cause which can only be found in God. Various objections have been raised to this form of argument which need not be discussed here.
It appears to be more satisfactory to say that we do not know what
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we mean by a cause except when it proceeds from a personal will. Causality is another name for will. It is reasonable to assume that as the only movements of which we know the cause those of our own bodies proceed from will, all other movements proceed from will also. God is not only the First Cause, but the Only cause, indirectly the cause of what we and other rational beings do because He has made us rational, and directly the Cause of everything else that happens.1 If this is true, we learn by it not only that there is a God, but also certain truths about Him. He is self-existent and self-determined, for He who is the Cause of everything else must be Himself uncaused. He is personal, for an impersonal being cannot be the cause of personality, and indeed cannot be a cause at all. He possesses free will because the causes which we know have their origin in our free will, and therefore the Cause of everything must have free will too. Since the universe constitutes a single order in which all events are connected causally, the Cause of it must be One, and Infinite, for He cannot be limited by anything but His own nature.2
The third argument is the Teleological Argument, or Argument from Design, sometimes called the Plain Man,s Argument. We find it implied in many passages of Scripture: e.g. Ps. 19:1-4; Job 37-41; St. Matt. 6:25-32; Acts 14:15-17, 17:23-28. The universe displays to us a vast system connected in all its parts and developing in a particular direction. There are innumerable instances of the ingenious ways in which the different parts fit into one another, and the more we learn from the natural sciences, the more instances we find. One very striking example is the elaborate devices by which some of the orchids contrive to be fertilized by one particular species of insect, and no other. Another is the immense complication of the human body, each portion of which is adapted for its purpose. Such a vast and ever-growing system cannot have come into existence without Someone to design it. The chance that a number of letters of the alphabet, thrown together by accident, would produce one line of one of Shakespeare,s plays is small beyond imagination. The chance that the universe could have taken its present form by a chance coming together of atoms is incalculably smaller still. The amazing beauty which nature so often displays
1 J. H. Beibitz, Belief, Faith, and Proof, ch. 4.
2 F. J. Hall, Dogmatic Theology, v. 3, pp. 147-192.
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leads us to believe that the Designer of it is not only the greatest of engineers, but also the greatest of artists.
Our modern belief in evolution, far from destroying the force of this argument, makes it much stronger than before. We no longer believe that God made the world, just as it now is, by a single act, and created each species separately; but that He created the universe in its original form, whatever that may have been, and guided each step in its development in accordance with His plan. We know from astronomy that the whole universe is one system that the elements, for instance, which are found in this earth are found also in the sun and the stars and this itself is an argument for belief in one God who designed the vast whole. If it be objected that there are some things in the universe of which we cannot see the use, and others which appear to be badly suited to their purpose, we reply that our knowledge of the universe is still small, and that as we do not know clearly what God,s plan is, we cannot say that this or that detail is out of harmony with it. In any case such details are very few when compared with the vast number which are admirably suited to their purpose. Darwin,s theory of natural selection that is, that the differences between different species are entirely due to the survival of those features most suitable to the environment in which each animal found itself is not universally accepted. But even if it is true, it does not in any way weaken the force of the argument that so admirably designed a scheme must have had an intelligent Mind behind it.
This is probably the easiest and most convincing of the traditional arguments for the existence of God. It shows us that the Designer of the universe is a single personal Being of supreme wisdom and supreme beauty, for if created Nature is so beautiful, how much greater must the beauty of its Creator be!
The fourth argument for the existence of God is the Ontological Argument, sometimes called the Philosopher,s Argument. It is a very difficult argument and can hardly be understood without some training in metaphysics.
Perhaps the simplest way to state it is that the idea of God is necessary to our reasoning. If there is nothing in reality corresponding to this idea, our reasoning is all deceptive, and further argument is
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useless. Dr. F. J. Hall says that any form of this argument is open to objections in formal logic. St. Thomas Aquinas rejected the argument altogether. However, there is this important element of truth in it, that if anything proves to be necessary to our power of reasoning, we must accept it as true, for we refuse to believe that the universe is an irrational and meaningless chaos.
The fifth argument for the existence of God is the Moral Argument, which has already been referred to as the argument from the existence of the conscience. All men possess a sense of the distinction between right and wrong which we call the conscience. This is a fact, however we may choose to explain it. We do not find this peculiar fact anywhere else in the material universe, but we place greater value upon it than upon anything purely material. Now, if this fact exists in human nature, as it does, we cannot believe that it is found only in human nature. There must be something in the nature of the whole universe which accounts for it. As the beauty of the universe leads us to believe that its Designer is the supreme Artist, so the presence of conscience in man leads us to believe that there must be in the universe some permanent and universal standard of goodness.
This belief is supported by the evidence of moral government in human affairs.
a) Virtue Rewarded and Vice Punished The evidence is not easy to summarize, and many deny its existence; but on the whole it is true that in the long run, sometimes the very long run, virtue is rewarded and vice is punished, although if one takes a short view, the wicked are often successful in this world and the just perish miserably. (The optimistic view to the contrary, maintained by Job,s three friends and the author of the Books of Chronicles, is shown by experience to be false.) But sooner or later families and nations which persist in disobeying the laws of God come to grief.
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b) Moral Progress in History It is also true that the human race has made some moral progress. It is easy to exaggerate and to misrepresent this truth, as the Victorian Liberals did. There is no such thing as necessary progress. Perpetual vigilance is the price not only of liberty but of all progress. There is, however, good reason for holding that moral progress depends on the power of the Incarnation of the Word of God; that before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth the human race was morally degenerating, and that it still degenerates wherever the power of the Incarnation is unknown or impeded. (The power of the Incarnation works far beyond the boundaries of the Christian Church, and profoundly influences many who are not Christian, and even believe themselves to be anti-Christian. An instance is Voltaire,s campaign for justice, the spirit of which was Christian, though directed against Christians.) But even so, moral progress is by no means straightforward. There are so many setbacks and eddies that it is easy to argue that moral progress does not exist.
Three objections have been raised against this argument.
a) That the Human Will is Not Free The first is that the human will is not really free. This objection is based usually upon the assumption that as the material universe, apart from man, is, as far as we know, without free will, man himself is also without free will. But if we have no free will, there is no such thing as morality and no such thing as intention. I can no more help writing these words than the apple can help falling from the tree. Most of us cannot possibly believe this. That we are really free to choose (though not, of course, completely free), is a fact of direct experience. As the great German philosopher Kant taught, it is one of the three assumptions (the other two are God and immortality) which are necessary to thought.
b) That the Conscience Developed out of Non-moral Origins The second objection is that the conscience has developed out of non-moral origins, and that for this reason the evidence of the conscience is an illusion. But it is by no means certain that the conscience has developed out of non-moral origins. It is a theory which has not been and perhaps cannot be proved. Whatever the
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researches of the anthropologists may tell us about the skull, the food, the arts, the weapons, and the mode of burial of prehistoric man, they cannot tell us much about his conscience. Even if the theory is true, the value of ideas, as of organisms, is not to be judged by their origin. Because the oak was once an acorn, it is not any the less an oak. Our ancestors may have once been fish-like creatures without reason or conscience, but that does not in the least lessen the achievements of man. The basis of the argument is not what our conscience was once (which, in any case, nobody knows for certain), but what it is now.
c) That Moral Systems Contradict One Another The third objection is that there are many different systems of morality, so that some people think right what others think wrong. Herodotus tells us that Darius, King of Persia, once called before him some Indians from the eastern frontier of his kingdom, and some Greeks from the western frontier. He said to the Greeks, "What price would you take to eat the dead bodies of your fathers?", and they answered that nothing on earth would induce them to do so. He then asked the Indians what price they would take to burn the bodies of their fathers, as the Greeks did, and the Indians, to whom fire was a sacred thing not to be defiled by a dead body, were equally horrified.1
It is true that there are enormous differences among men about what is right and what is wrong. Even within Christendom different nations and communions hold different opinions. The British Government discourages sweepstakes but permits divorce and contraception. The Irish Government encourages sweepstakes but forbids divorce and discourages contraception by every means in its power.
But human beings are agreed on this, that there is a difference between right and wrong, though they are not agreed about what is right and what is wrong. This universal agreement, that right is one thing and wrong another, is the basis of the argument.
The moral Argument is supported by the fact that we only reach our highest and fullest development when we follow the guidance of our conscience. To obey his conscience makes a man strong, free, and happy. To disobey it makes him weak, enslaved, and miserable.
1 Herodotus 3. 38.
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This seems to show that self-control under the guidance of the conscience is the means of true development, and that conscience is not a mere accident but is directly connected with the Power by whom the whole universe including man is guided and governed.
The arguments for the existence of God, stated briefly in the preceding chapter, are based upon reason, apart from revelation. Reason, like revelation, is the gift of God. No one can know anything about God without His help. But our knowledge of God is derived not only from reason, but also from revelation, which confirms what we learn from reason, and adds to it what we could not have discovered by the aid of reason alone. We must know not only that there is a God, but also what sort of God He is.
All our knowledge of God is partial and finite. The language that we use cannot express fully Divine truth and is therefore symbolic. Nevertheless, it expresses Divine truth as clearly and fully as human language can express it. But because it is symbolic, we must be very cautious before using it as the premise of an argument.
The attributes of God have been divided into three classes: primary, quiescent, and active. We may well follow this classification.
The first of the primary attributes of God is personality, by which we mean that He is a self-conscious, intelligent Being with the power of choice; for it is by these adjectives that we distinguish ourselves as persons from all that is impersonal. The Cosmological Argument shows us that God is personal, for otherwise He could not be the Cause of personality. The Teleological Argument shows it because if He were not personal, He could not have designed the universe. The Moral Argument shows it because if He were not personal, He could not be moral. It is unnecessary to prove that the
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Bible, from beginning to end, refers to God as personal. Indeed, the Old Testament often refers to Him as if He were a man and had a body.
Unbelievers in ancient and modern times have often attacked "anthropomorphism" (from <2DTB@H (anthropos), human being, and :@DNZ (morphé), form) the habit of thinking of God in human form. (One ancient skeptic, Xenophanes, said that if the oxen had a god, they would think of him in the form of an ox; and Rupert Brooke, in his scoffing poem "Heaven", applies the same idea to fish:
"And there, they trust, there swimmeth One
Who swam ere rivers were begun,
Immense, of fishy form and mind,
Squamous, omnipotent, and kind.")
No intelligent believer in God now thinks that God is really in the form of man (whatever the early Hebrews may have thought). We only think and speak of Him in human terms because we have no higher terms that we can use. Anthropomorphism cannot altogether be avoided, but we know that God is infinitely greater than we are; and when we say that He is personal, we do not mean that He is subject to the limitations of human nature.
The second primary attribute of God is that He is infinite (in Latin immensus, without measure). His limitations are entirely within Himself. He is not unlimited in the sense that there is nothing He is not; "it is impossible for God to lie" (Titus 1:2; Heb. 6:18). He cannot do what is contrary to reason or what is contrary to love. His own nature forbids it.
Such a God as this is required by belief in a universal cause, in the Designer of the universe, and in the Source of all goodness. And He is the God who is revealed in Jesus Christ, the eternal Word, and the Love who gave himself to die for us.
The word infinite (immensus) is represented in the Athanasian Creed by "incomprehensible", which does not mean "unable to be understood", but "without limitation".
The third primary attribute of God is that He is not dependent on anyone else. We need Him, but He does not need us. See Isa. 40:13 and many other passages in the Old Testament.
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"When Heaven and Earth were yet unmade
When time was yet unknown,
Thou, in Thy bliss and majesty,
Didst live, and love, alone."
F. W. Faber
English Hymnal, 161; Hymns Ancient and Modern, 162
It would be very difficult to believe that God is both self-dependent and personal if the existence of the Holy Trinity were not revealed, but this doctrine tells us that God possesses within His own being those relations (in the philosophic sense of the word) which are necessary for love.
The fourth primary attribute of God is that He is One, and that in three ways:
a) Numerical Unity There is in fact only one God. This was believed by most pagan philosophers who believed in God at all, and was the first doctrine of the religion proclaimed by the prophets of Israel: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God is one" (Deut. 6:4).
b) Uniqueness There can be only one God. No second God is possible. For this reason the adoption of men into the Godhead, a common belief among the pagan Greeks, is utterly detestable to Jews and Christians. The belief that there can be only one God excludes national religions, such as were widespread before the coming of Jesus Christ, and are now again being preached in some countries. No religion can be true unless it is universal and claims the allegiance of all human beings.
c) Indivisibility God is indivisible: He has no parts. The "Persons" of the Holy Trinity are not parts of God. Each is the whole of God. The first Article of the Church of England follows the traditional language when it says that God "has no body, parts, or passions".
The first of the "quiescent" attributes of God is Self-Existence. God has no cause; He is the Source of all being. This is required by the Cosmological Argument and is implied by the words "In the beginning" (Gen. 1:1; St. John 1:1).
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The second "quiescent" attribute is Eternity. God is outside time, for He is the Creator of time which is a relation between finite beings and events but does not limit Him who is infinite. The eternity of God is proclaimed by many of the writers of Holy Scripture. See, for instance, Exod. 3:14; Deut. 33:27; Psalm 90:24; Isa. 57:13; Rom. 1:20; Eph. 3:11; I Tim. 1:17; Rev. 1:8, 22:13.
The third quiescent attribute is Immutability or freedom from change. Because He is self-existent and outside of time, He cannot change; and also because, as Aristotle taught, the very existence of change implies that there is something that does not change. The changelessness of God is clearly taught in Holy Scripture. See Mal. 3:6; Psalm 102:26, quoted Heb. 1:12; Eccles. 3:14; Rom. 11:29; Heb. 13:8; St. James 1:17.
The fourth quiescent attribute of God is that He is pure Spirit. Since He is infinite, He is not subject to the limitations of a body. This is taught by our Lord: "God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth" (St. John 4:24); see also Deut. 4:15 (and other Old Testament passages), Acts 17:29. Because God has no body or material form, He cannot be seen or perceived by any of the senses; and for this reason we are forbidden to represent God by any picture or image. The Hebrews were forbidden by the Second commandment to worship even the true God under any visible form. The breach of this commandment was the sin ascribed by the prophetic writers to Jeroboam the son of Nebat (I Kings 12:30, etc.). This prohibition applies also to Christians, but is qualified by the Incarnation to the extent that we may make pictures and images of our Lord Jesus Christ as Man, and pay to them, not the worship which is due to God alone (8"JD,\", latria), but the proper respect (*@L8,\", dulia). Pictures representing God the Father are forbidden by the custom of the Church of England. They are sanctioned by the Roman Communion on the ground that God the Father is sometimes described in the Old Testament as appearing in human form (e.g., Dan. 7:9), but we cannot accept either primitive anthropomorphism or apocalyptic vision as justifying
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a practice which has been expressly forbidden both by Scripture and by the earlier tradition of the Church. (See pp. 88-91.)
The fifth quiescent attribute of God is that He is the Source of all life, both material and spiritual. This is required by the Cosmological Argument, and is taught by Holy Scripture in such passages as Gen. 1, 2:17; Ezek. 37; St. John 1:3-4, 14:6; etc. Hitherto no one has been able to make a living being, nor is any living being known which did not come from some previous living being. The origin of life on this planet is still unknown. But it is a mistake to suppose that any possible discovery of a method of making a living being artificially in a laboratory would affect our belief that God is the Source of all life. For every discovery that is made by man is made by means of reason which is a gift of God. Whatever God gives man the power to do, God may be said to do Himself indirectly (unless it is something which God has forbidden).
The "active" attributes of God are His omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence.
God is almighty (omnipotens, B"<J@6DVJTD, pantocrator): which means, not that He can do anything, but that He is Lord over everything. This follows from His infinity and is taught constantly in the Bible. See Gen. 17:1, 18:14; Job 42:2; Isa. 40:12 ff.; Ps. 66:7; St. Matt. 19:26; St. Luke 1:37; Eph. 3:20; Rev. 4:8.
His Omnipotence Limited in Three Ways
God is not limited by anything outside His own nature; for if He were, He would not be infinite. But He is limited by His own nature, especially in three ways.
a) He Cannot Act against Reason He cannot act against reason, for He is Himself Eternal Reason. He cannot act capriciously. He cannot, as far as we can see, make anything be and not be the same thing at the same time in the same way. His will cannot make nonsense.
b) He Cannot Act against Love. He cannot act against love. He cannot be false, or cruel, or impure "It is impossible for God to
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lie" (Titus 1:2). "He is light, and in Him is no darkness at all" (I St. John 1:5). He is love and cannot show hatred or cruelty; and those who say He can (as even some of the writers of the Old Testament do) have not understood His revelation. He does indeed hate sin, but sin is not a person nor, in all probability, a substance.
c) He has Limited Himself by Creating Free Will He has limited His own power of choice by creating beings with free will. He did not make sin or intend that there should be sin; but He has made men able to sin because He could not have made them able to serve Him freely without also making them able to disobey Him. Hence, when we are asked, "Why does not God stop war?", we reply, "He could only do so by destroying human free will; and that would be contrary to His purpose, and would be a greater evil than letting war continue. It is man who is to blame for war, not God."
The second active attribute of God is omniscience, the power of knowing all things. His knowledge is not limited by time for He is outside of time, and all times are alike to Him.
It is because He is omniscient that we can accept His judgment as final. He knows not only what has been and what is, but also what will be; which does not mean that He completely controls what will be, for He has given us freedom of will. He knew that Judas Iscariot would betray our Lord (St. Mark 14:21; etc.), but He did not make him do so. Judas was free to resist the temptation. He knew that the Blessed Virgin Mary would accept her vocation (St. Luke 1:38), but He did not make her do so. She was free to refuse, and that is why we honor her.
Since God,s nature is changeless, He cannot cease to be omniscient. For this reason I cannot accept the theory of the Kenosis as a satisfactory explanation of the limitation of our Lord,s knowledge as Man. (See p. 94.)
The third active attribute of God is His omnipresence. As He is outside of time, He is also outside of space. Presence, however, does not mean simply being in a particular place. It implies a relation to someone who is there. Therefore, though God is everywhere, yet because we are finite and different from one another, His presence with us is of various kinds according to our need. Thus we distinguish His
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presence in glory to the angels in heaven; His presence of efficiency in nature; of providence in general human affairs; of attentiveness to those who pray to Him; of judgment in our consciences. He is present bodily in the Incarnate Son (St. John 1:14); mystically in the Church (Eph. 2:12-22; St. Matt. 28:19-20); and sacramentally in the Holy Eucharist (St. John 6:56).1
Hitherto only those attributes of God have been mentioned which refer to His existence and His power. But there is another class of attributes which belong to His character and which are of such supreme importance that they are placed in a separate chapter. For it is of little use to believe that there is a God, unless we know what sort of God He is.
The Moral Argument (see Chapter 5) teaches us that God is perfectly good, and this is confirmed by revelation. But there is probably no Christian doctrine more difficult to accept. Human history is full of evil and misery; and though this may be ascribed to the misuse of free will, it may still be asked why God has bestowed on man a gift which has led to such terrible results. A greater difficulty still is that the world, apart from man, appears to be full of cruelty and fear. Volcanic eruptions and earthquakes and other natural forces, which cannot be the result of human free will, cause an immense amount of misery to human beings and to animals. It may be asked whether the Creator of such a universe can be a Being of perfect justice and love.
We must admit frankly that we cannot answer this question completely. The origin of evil is a mystery which no one has ever yet solved. But there is no satisfactory alternative to the belief in the goodness of the Creator, which is held not by Christians only but also by Jews, Moslems, and all other Theists.
(a) An Evil Creator It is possible to believe that the Creator is an evil being who delights in the misery of his creatures. But in that case we cannot
1 F. J. Hall, Dogmatic Theology, v. 3, p. 288.
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account for the goodness, order, and beauty of the world. Belief that the evil in the universe exceeds the good is probably due to some nervous or other internal disorder.
(b) An Indifferent Creator Or one might believe, with the ancient Epicureans and modern Deists, that God is indifferent to His creatures. In that case man is better than God, and it is hard to see how conscience and morality ever came to exist.
(c) Two Creators, One Good, the Other Evil Or one might believe that there are two gods, a good one and an evil one Ormuzd and Ahriman, as the Persians called them constantly struggling for the mastery. This was the teaching of the religion of Zoroaster or Zarathustra, which survives in the Parsi community in India, and of the two religions which sprang from it, Mithraism and Manichaeism (the former was widely spread among the Roman legions; the latter, founded by Manes in the third century, extended from Carthage, where St. Augustine was for a time one of its adherents, to Chinese Turkestan, and sprang up again in Southern France in the thirteenth century as the Albigensian heresy). But Dualism makes it impossible to account for the unity of the material universe which natural science has proved on a vast scale.
(d) A Finite Creator Or one might believe, with the ancient Gnostics, in a finite God who created the world but was not able completely to subdue the evil forces opposed to him. This belief is confronted by all the difficulties of dualism in a more acute form.
The Bible teaches that God who created all things is perfectly good, and that His character is most clearly displayed by Jesus Christ, who, being the express image of His Person, came down, and became man, and died in agony on the Cross because He loved us and wished to save us. It is supported by the spiritual experience of millions of Christians, and of Jews, Moslems, and other Theists. Some have thought that the misery in the world, apart from man, is caused by a revolt against God in the spiritual world before the appearance of man, and that the Devil (who is, according to Christian belief, not a rival god but a created being and, like all other creatures,
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created good) has more power over the animal and material world than we are accustomed to think. But this is mere speculation.
According to the Christian revelation, God is absolute moral perfection. "Every virtue proper to the Supreme Being is to be found in Him. No limit can be placed upon the perfection of any Divine virtue. The Divine virtues harmonize with each other, so that His character is perfectly consistent" (Hall, Dogmatic Theology, v.3, p.293). Because He is supreme, the virtues of humility and obedience, which are necessary to human perfection, cannot exist in the Divine nature, though they were perfectly displayed in the human nature taken by the Incarnate Son (Phil. 2:8; Heb. 5:8).
God is by His nature morally perfect. Goodness is not something different from God to which He conforms, nor does He, by making it His purpose, make anything good which would not otherwise have been good. On the one hand, His perfection arises from His own nature, not from anything outside it. This follows from our belief in God as infinite and as Creator. On the other hand, God cannot either do, or command us to do, what is contrary to His own nature.
This will become clearer if we contrast it with the traditional Moslem doctrine of God. According to that doctrine the will of Allah (God) is completely unlimited. He could make right wrong, and wrong right. Right is right solely because it is His will. Wrong would become right if He commanded it. The God proclaimed by Muhammad is therefore a kind of supreme oriental monarch, benevolent but capricious. Christians, on the other hand, believe that God,s character and purpose do not change because they are based on His unchanging nature.
The fullest and deepest understanding of God,s character is found in the portrait of Jesus Christ drawn for us by the New Testament writers. It makes a profound appeal to the consciences of many who do not believe that He is God incarnate. It is not indeed the only moral ideal placed before men, as the Victorian Liberals thought. Many opponents of the Christian religion reject its moral ideals at least as strongly as its dogmas. Still we can fairly claim that our Lord Himself called upon His hearers to test His teaching by their own consciences (St. Luke 10:36, 12:57). It is because no human
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being is wholly without the Divine gift of conscience that we can proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ by showing that it satisfies the demands of conscience. The same God who became incarnate in Jesus Christ has not left any man without a witness to Himself.1
The Divine virtues which are most emphasized in the Old Testament are holiness and righteousness. The beliefs of the heathen nations about their gods represented those gods as conspicuously lacking in just those two qualities. The gods in Homer were subject to the same vices as men, but they were pure and just in comparison with the gods worshiped by most of the Semitic nations!
The prophets of Israel proclaimed the absolute holiness and purity of God. The original meaning of holiness is separation. Objects which are "holy to the Lord", such as Mount Sinai (Exod. 19:12) or the Ark (II Sam. 6:7), may not be touched. Israel is the holy nation separated from all other nations by God,s choice. Everything that belongs to God or to His service is separated from common things by strict tabus (prohibitions which are apparently irrational).
This is common in primitive religions, but the special mark of the Hebrew religion was that holiness became moralized. The prohibitions were no longer irrational. They all had the effect of increasing enormously the reverence of the people for God and the fear of displeasing Him.
The Hebrews were taught that nothing was more hateful to God than any kind of sexual impurity, which was to be punished with the severest penalties; and the result was that the sexual standard of Israel came to be incomparably higher than that of any other ancient nation.
This is why our Lord gave little teaching about sexual purity, in comparison with St. Paul. Our Lord was addressing Jews whose standard of purity was the standard of the Law. St. Paul,s corre-
1 H. Rashdall, Conscience and Christ, ch. 1.
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spondents were Greeks, or Jews living among the Greeks, who were infected by the low standards of the heathen world, and who had still to be taught that no sin separates men from God more completely than sexual impurity (I Cor. 6:18) on the ground that the body is not, as the Greek philosophers taught, a thing of little value, the mere raiment of the soul, but the Temple of the Holy Ghost, which is a necessary part of man not only in this world but in that which is to come (I Cor. 15:35 ff.).
And yet the religion of Israel was not ascetic. Virginity was not regarded as an honor but as a misfortune. No sadder fate could befall a man than to have no son to keep his name in remembrance, or a woman than to die in her maidenhood.
Beside the holiness of God we find in the Old Testament His righteousness or justice. Unlike the gods of the heathen, He had no favorites. His chosen people were not bound to Him by physical descent (many other nations claimed to be descended from their gods) but by covenant. If they forsook His covenant, He would forsake them. The righteousness of God consisted in the fulfillment of His will which could not be other than perfectly just. As has been already said, it is only because He is omniscient that He is perfectly righteous.
Righteousness is entirely consistent with love. There is no difference between the character of God revealed by the prophets, and His character revealed in the New Testament, except that the latter marks a further advance. Many modern people have failed to recognize this because they have lost the Scriptural hatred of sin.1 The Bible teaches that sin in every form is utterly hateful to God. Those who do not accept this teaching can never understand what is meant by the Divine righteousness.
It was necessary that Israel should completely accept the conception of God as perfect holiness and righteousness before His most profound attribute, love, could be revealed.
In the Old Testament God is describe as merciful (as also in the Koran). Hosea goes further, comparing the love of God for Israel
1 And because their knowledge of the Old Testament is superficial.
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to his own love for his unfaithful wife. But the love of God is not revealed as His chief attribute until the New Testament.
St. Paul tells us that love is greater than faith and hope (I Cor. 13:13), and St. John, that God is love (I St. John 4:8). We are never told that God is holiness or righteousness1 but that He is holy and righteous. From this we see that Love is the greatest of the Divine attributes because it is that one in which God,s nature is most profoundly revealed. The supreme example of the love of God is the death of Jesus Christ on the Cross; for Jesus Christ is God, and the God in whom we believe is the God who became Man and died because of His love for us. This love is not a weak sentimentalism. It is more than good-nature or benevolence. It is not even the §DTH (Eros) of Plato, the desire of beauty for that which is beautiful in the loved one. It is agapè ((VB0), self-offering love, which desires nothing for itself. God does not love us for anything in us that deserves love; "while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Rom. 5:8).
St. Augustine taught that sin is not positive but negative, the absence of love. All the other Divine attributes are included in this, "the love that moves the sun and the other stars" (Dante, Paradiso, 33, 245).
To believe rightly about God is supremely important. Every error in religion and in morals can be traced to some mistaken belief about God. For a man,s conduct and his whole outlook on life depend on the kind of God that he really believes in (not necessarily the kind of God that he says, or even thinks, he believes in). If he believes in a national deity, he will despise or hate men of other nations. If he believes in a God of infinite good-nature, he will spoil his children. Because it is so important that men should believe rightly about God, and because they cannot discover for themselves
1 Jer. 23:6, 33:16, "The Lord is our Righteousness", comes near it.
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all that they need to know about Him, God has revealed to them truths about Himself which are beyond the reach of reason, though not inconsistent with it.
The chief of these truths is the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. It is a truth of revelation, not of reason. But having been revealed, it helps us to solve the problem which confronts every Theist: if God is eternal and unchanging, how can He enter into relations with His creatures? If He is Love, what eternal and infinite object can there be for His love? Before the universe was made, who was there for Him to love? The Christian replies that there are relations and an Object for Divine Love within God Himself.
No philosopher has ever discovered the doctrine of the Trinity without the aid of revelation. (Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, who are sometimes called the Hindu Trinity, are merely aspects of the impersonal Brahm, and have nothing to do with the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Other "pagan trinities" are merely groups of three gods chosen out of many.)
Since the doctrine of the Trinity is revealed, it must be proved by Scripture which is the record of revelation. It is not explicitly stated in Scripture, but has been worked out by the Church as the only possible conclusion from the evidence given in Scripture.
Nothing may be said to be revealed unless it can be found in or proved by Scripture. The canon or list of the books of the New Testament was first drawn up in the second century expressly in order to exclude unauthorized traditions. The Greek and Latin Fathers (writers of the early Christian Church) were agreed that all necessary doctrine must be found in or proved by Scripture; and this doctrine has been given special emphasis, for reasons which will be explained later, by the Anglican Communion.
When we say "proved from Scripture", we mean from the general sense of Scripture. We must not take particular passages out of their context or apply to them far-fetched or allegorical
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interpretations. Mystical or allegorical interpretation was used by the Apostles (e.g., Acts 1:20; I Cor. 9:9), and has its place, but it is not to be used as a proof of doctrine.
The Scriptural evidence for the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is summed up in the following nine propositions:
(a) There is one God. (St. Mark 12:29; etc.)
(b) The Father is God. (St. John 6:27; etc.)
(c) The Son is God. (St. John 1:1; etc.)
(d) The Holy Ghost is God. (St. Mark 3:29; etc.)
(e) The Three are separate from each other. (II Thess. 3:5; St. John 3:26.)
(f) The Father is personal. (St. John 15:9; etc.)
(g) The Son is personal. (St. Mark 14:62; etc.)
(h) The Holy Ghost is personal. (Rom. 8:26; etc.)
(i) The Three are One.1 (St. Matt. 28:19; etc.)
There is no real revelation of the Holy Trinity recorded in the Old Testament. The Hebrews had to be thoroughly taught that God is One before they could go on to the further truth that He is Three. The passages which the older apologists used to quote from the Old Testament as evidence of the doctrine of the Trinity must be interpreted otherwise, though we may claim that they would not have been written as they were if there had been no doctrine of the Trinity still to be revealed. The use of the plural in Gen. 1:26, 3:22, 11:7, Isa. 6:8 may refer to the court of the angels by whom God is surrounded (which is the meaning given by most Jewish commentators), or may be (except in Gen. 3:22) what Driver called the "plural of majesty". In Gen. 3:22 it is perhaps a survival from an older form of the story which was polytheistic. The usual Hebrew word for God, Elohim, is plural in form and may be explained in the same way.
The later Jewish writers had so much reverence for God that they did not venture to represent Him as coming into direct relations with
1 A. C. Headlam, Christian Theology, p. 430.
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men. Earlier writers had not hesitated to say that God spoke directly to men. But later writers preferred to say "the angel of the Lord", "the word of the Lord", "the wisdom of the Lord", "the spirit of the Lord".
We find many passages in which the Word or the Wisdom of God is almost regarded as a separate person; almost, but not quite. Such passages as Prov. 8:22-31, Wisdom 7-8, were regarded by Christian theologians as referring to the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. But their authors had no such idea in their minds. The Word or Wisdom of God was not really regarded as a separate person.
Again, the heavenly Messiah of Daniel and others (Dan. 3:25, 7:13) appears to Christian eyes as a clear referenc