Theology

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BY ROBERT F. HORTON In the Middle Ages, and while the spirit of the Middle Ages survived, it was customary, at least among theologians, to describe theology as the Queen of the Sciences. Since Grod is above the world, theology, as the science or knowledge of God, must be above the science or knowledge of the world. But in the restricted sense which the word "science" has now assumed, theologians themselves will be ready to admit that theology is not a science at all.

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THEOLOGY BY ROBERT F. HORTON

In the Middle Ages, and while the spirit of the Middle Ages survived, it was customary, at least among theologians, to describe theology as the Queen of the Sciences. Since Grod is above the world, theology, as the science or knowledge of God, must be above the science or knowledge of the world. But in the restricted sense which the word "science" has now assumed, theologians themselves will be ready to admit that theology is not a science at all. Science is the formulated knowledge of the contingent; theology is the quest of the absolute, which science despairs of knowing. Science is not concerned with causes or purposes, but simply, seeks to trace uniformities and successions in phenomena. Theology is concerned chiefly with the cause and the purpose, which Science deliberately excludes from her survey. It is therefore a confusion of terms to speak of theology as the queen of the sciences, if by " queen" is meant the science which is chief among the sister sciences. The description is only correct if the queen is recognized as belonging to a different
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order altogether, not the science which rules the other

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sciences, but the discipline, not itself a science, which must account for and justify all the sciences.

Theology is a discipline rather than a science; it is the orderly and rational attempt to know that which science confesses her inability to know. There is an advantage in Herbert Spencer's nomenclature : the sphere of science is the known or the knowable. But the explanation of the known is the unknown — that is, the scientifically unknown. But the imknown is so far known as that it is the cause of the known. The eCFects to some extent define the cause. Granting that science has no method or instruments for exploring the unknown, yet the human mind cannot cease to inquire. Phenomena themselves suggest much concerning the unknown, as, for in2

Stance, that it is not only powerful, but intelligent, that it has within it the love of, and the search for, beauty, and morality, and goodness. But the mind itself, which is engaged in the scientific quest, is sure, on self-examination, that it could not be the product of the phenomena that it is investigating. It, at any rate, knows that the imknown cause of itself is so far like itself, and imlike phenomena, as to be mental, spiritual, a cause of the same kind as itself. The imknown, therefore, of science cannot remain unsearched. Not only is the human mind impelled by its own constitution to search out the Mind of the world, but, by virtue of it own consciousness, it is possessed with an inalienable conviction that the Mind of the world can reveal itself, has revealed

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itself, does reveal itself. That universal characteristic of human life, religion, is the witness to this fact Apart from science, before science begms, where science has ended, the human mind recognizes,
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seeks, desires to know, God. The results of this search are embodied in theologies. Clearly a theology, to be true, must not only be a thought about God, but a self-communication of God to the human mind. For of what value would be a theory of God, however complete, an idea of the Intelligence which produced the human intelligence, of the Being which accounts for all being, including ours, if that intelligent Being were completely cut oflF from all communication with us? A God that does not or cannot reveal Himself is, therefore, a caput mortuum. Theology has no vital bearing upon us imless it is a theology of revelation, what can be known of, and from, a God that reveals.

The nature of the quest, then, is evident It is not scientific. Scientific people may excuse themselves from engaging in it But the human mind cannot be dissuaded from it. At one time the quest was pursued, not only without the sanction of science, but in defiance of it. Now the temper of the quest is changed. The theologian, knowing that Science cannot do his work, yet asks Science to aid him. He asks Science to teach him her spirit, which sets
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truth supreme over desire ; he asks her to lend him her method, her patience, caution, and candour; he asks her to afford him a critique, a critique of

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reason, that may at all points chasten him and test his conclusions. Since science declines to launch out into the sea to understand the Infinite, confining her interest to terra firma, the theologian, launching out fearlessly on the sea, requests Science to hold the ropes, and to bring him back if he is losing himself.

In this sense we may have, and ought to have, a scientific theology, a theology which heartily accepts science, and seeks to know that which science pre- * supposes but cannot know — Gk)d. Theology is not a science, but is in strict harmony with science, and offers itself as the solution of problems which science cannot solve.

This discipline has also a point in common with
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the sciences; it is always progressing. That is the common feature of the 'logies, whether they be of earth, or stars, or God. The knowledge of God, theology, must change, just as the knowledge of earth, geology, just as the knowledge of life, biology, just as the knowledge of man, anthropology, passes from stage to stage of advance. Here it comes into line, and takes its place with the sciences.

If theology claims an absoluteness and finality, she discredits herself. She is best advised when she reviews her past and traces the progress hitherto, as a reason for expecting further progress in the futiu'e. Perhaps it is the claim to remain stagnant which has most discredited theology among the 'logies. Astrology advanced into astronomy; the visionary and fanciful uses of the stars, to forecast

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human fates, passed into the discovery of the vast sidereal systems in which our solar system is but a point of light, and men learnt to smile at the simplicity which could fancy the constant planets himg in the heavens and moved and combined, in order to determine the destiny of an infant bom on the earth. Alchemy passed into chemistry ; the attempt to transform the less precious elements into gold opened the door into that wonderland of the chemical elements which offers a treasure compared with which gold itself is worthless. The study of shells found in the rocks has advanced with giant strides, until within a century men have learnt to read the history of the earth and the evolution of life on the earth m those silent records. If the knowledge of earth and sky has thus advanced, we are likely to suspect a knowledge of God which shows no similar progress. At any rate, if any authority claims that theology is fixed by the Power that made the sciences, clearly and finally complete from the beginning, the claim must, by the scientific spirit which rules the human mind, be fearlessly questioned. At least it must be admitted that theology has changed in the past. Christian theology is an advance on
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Jewish; Christian theology itself is a record of advance. It is impossible in the light of experience to deny that theology may develop further, without and within, the Christian interpretation.

Thus, without identifying Theology with the sciences, we must assert the quality which she shares

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with them, the quality of advance, of growth, of progress. Let us admit that we live in a breathing, progressive world, in which knowledge is ever growing from more to more, and the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns. Let us catch the spirit of the s)rstem to which we belong, and we shall see that God must be revealing Himself progressively. As the human mind expands, as knowledge increases, as wider and deeper views are taken, (Jod, if He be (Jod, must become larger, richer, more wonderful, to the human mind. To say that we hold the theology of a former day, and to be uncon8

scious of the progress, is to strike ourselves out of the lists of life, and to write down our theology as dead, as a hartus siccus at the best

I have heard men in later life boast that their theology was fixed at the outset, and has never changed; but that did not seem to me a proof of the theology or a credit to them. But how much more beside the mark is it to hold the theology of the eighteenth century, or that of the seventeenth! If we have not gone beyond Butler, we shall get small good from reading him. If we are to be boimd by the theology of John Owen or Richard Baxter, we had better keep clear of them altogether.

Or what reason can there be in clinging to the theology of the Reformers, when the whole value of it was that it was presumably an advance on that of the Mediaeval Church? How can we remain fixed to Augustine, when we honour him only for his

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resistance to the narrower or less vital theology of his time? They who stick in the theology of the Fathers are not only involved in the meshes of contradiction, but they shift their point of view from the truth of Christ and His Apostles to an authority which had not yet learned to understand Him and had already got out of touch with them.

The theology of the Early Church is of value historically; it does not bind; it only suggests. The theology of the New Testament is more like a garden of burgeoning and shooting plants, which seem ever to live and to bear, than a neatly constructed s}^tem of cut and polished timber.

This point of contact between theology and science is not so much in danger of bemg lost as once it was. But we should accustom ourselves to it, and exercise our minds in the idea that theology, like all human knowledge, grows.

For is not a stagnant theology a denial of the living God, and of that law, which must be His, the law
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of development, the key and interpretation of the world and of life? The most interesting change in the modem view of the Bible has been the discovery of this progressive movement in it, of which apparently our Reformers were unaware. There is not only a progressive manifestation of God in Scripture, but there is an enlarging and deepening imderstanding of Him. This fact is hidden by the nonchronological arrangement of the literature; but when the dates are approximately fixed — when,

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for example, it is understood that the opening chapter of Genesis belongs to the latest and not the earliest theologies of the Old Testament, and that the primitive conceptions of God are to be sought in the Book of Judges and the Book of Samuel — we are able to detect the orderly and impressive development In the eighth century B.C., when Micah wrote, the idea still prevailed that Yahwd was Israel's God, and every nation had its own god (Micah iv. 5);
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but when the Old Testament closes, in the latest books, like Daniel or Jonah, Yahwd is the God of all the earth, God is one and His name one.

The New Testament is a new theology; it is an orderly development out of the Old; to it all the lines of Old Testament history and doctrine have led up, but it is like a new revelation. God, who has spoken by His prophets, now speaks by a Son. What formerly had been a Word about God, uttered by inspired men, is now the Word of God, manifested in the flesh. The theology of the New Testament, therefore, is a climax. To it everything led up, and nothing further could be achieved imtil it was mastered and understood. But this theology, even within the narrow spatial limits of the New Testament, is seen progressing. The theology of the Fourth Gospel is an advance on that of the Apocalypse. Nay, even in the epistles of St. Paul the curve of this progress can be distinctly traced.

We cannot, therefore, imagine that the new theology of Christianity was meant to be stagnant or

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Stereotyped. A line was registered from which theology could not legitimately recede ; but there was nothing to prevent, there was ever3rthing to promisei an advance beyond that line. Pol)rtheism was for ever impossible; God was one; Judaism was transcended; God was the God of all men. Deism was out of court; God is a living, present, immanent Spirit in the world that He has made. Theosophy, with its endless vagaries and vague relapses into mysticism, was guarded against its besetting danger by the historic Person of Christ. God's goodwill to the world and determination to save it were put beyond question as the starting-pomt of all further developments.

But there is no authority for maintaining that in the New Testament theology came to a stop, that there all that could ever be known of God is finally put down. The stagnation which has arrested Christianity in the old Churches, like the Syrian,
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the Coptic, the Armenian, the Nestorian, not to mention others, is due to this radical heresy of believing in an ancient, final, and unprogressive revelation. The Bible becomes a fetich, and essentially irreligious, if it blinds us to truth outside itself, or if it is set up to hinder the incoming of light from other quarters. The Bible never intended, and never could have intended, to establish such obscurantism. It is from first to last an appeal to truth and an incentive to discovery. The error has rested on an oddly misapplied text. In Revelation

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xxii. 18, 19, which happens in our Bible to come at the end, through chronologically it should come nearer the beginning, of the New Testament, there is a threat against any one who should add imto, or take from, the words of that mysterious book* The ignorance of past generations applied this threat to the whole Bible, which was not, and could not, have been in the writer's mind ; for this Apocalypse
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only attained a place in the Bible after running the gantlet of criticism and objections for two or three centuries. To quote this text, then, as a proof that the Bible is final, and as a warning against adding to or taking from the canonical Scriptures, is an example of sheer ignorance, such as becomes more and more impossible every day.

The Bible, if we may put it in this way, is not in the least anxious about its own integrity. Nor has it any need to be. Like the globe itself, which is spun out of the fringe of a nebula, and coheres by its intrinsic quality, not altered essentially by the exhalations or fragments which it casts into space, nor by the meteorites or accretions which it gathers out of the path of its orbit, the Bible holds together its parts by an inward principle, and can bear composedly the freest criticism. No power on earth can tear out of it a document that is in it or put into it a document that is outside. Its integrity and solidarity are vouched by time, the slow work of the compressing centuries.

But never does the Bible claim that its theology
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is final, or forbid its readers to receive new light or truth which may break out from it or break in to it. The better we have understood the Bible, and the more we have caught its spirit, the more we shall realize that widening knowledge must widen the theology which we have derived from its pages. It gives us a theology which has within it the potency of growth; it gives us this theology, not to press in a herbarium, but to plant in the world, that it may grow.

In times of swift expansion, when new fields of investigation open up to the human mind, and legions of new facts crowd in to enlarge the point of view, theology must widen too. Theology must always allow for all the facts that are discovered. The theology of every age must dwell, not only harmoniously, but cordially with all the knowledge of the time. Thus as Christianity was the new theology of the first century, it requires us to find the new
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theology of the twentieth. We shall not part with Christianity in this enterprise, for it is a permanent and verified truth with which the world must always reckon; we shall not be tempted to part with it, because of its own eager encouragement to press on to higher knowledge, and even to greater works than were possible at the beginning.

The search for a new theology is not only permissible, it is imperative. Unless theology is new it is not true; the theology of yesterday is not true for to-day. But experience shows, the Bible itself shows, that the new theology always grows out of

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the old, is the natural development of the old^ conserves and carries on all the vital power of the old. There is no breach. There is no razing to the ground, to build a new structure on the ruins. The old house is enlarged and modernized, but it is the old house still. A new theology which breaks with
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the past never succeeds in establishing itself. God is too orderly, His method of self-revelation is too continuous. His leading of the mind by steady progression is too settled to admit of revolutions. Evolution is His way. When therefore any one proposes to oflFer us a brand-new theology, in glittering and derisive antagonism to the old, we miss the Divine note in the oflFer; we know the thing will not prosper.

We remember that ingenious person who approached Talle)a:and with the complaint that he had a brand-new religion, much better than the old, but he could not induce people to accept it. What should he do ? "Be crucified, and rise again the third day," was the sagacious answer. We may surmise that no new theology will successfully establish itself which breaks with Him who was crucified and rose again the third day. The new theology must include and develop the best and greatest elements in the old.

In the search for a new theology we have many advantages. We are firmly persuaded of the inductive method of inquiry as the best and the only
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valid way. A theologian of the past generation would start out with the cheerful assurance that

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theology was a subject confined within definite limits. If he was a Catholic he had only to interpret the creeds, the encyclicals, the infallible utterances of the Church, to exhibit what the Church teaches, and there was the theology complete and authoritative. If, on the other hand, he was a Protestant, since ''the Bible, and the Bible alone, is the religion of Protestants," his only task was to arrange the Scripture texts in an orderly system, and there was his theology, definite and decisive, more compact and more authoritative than the theology of the Catholic Church itself.

It has been complained that the theologies produced in this way are dull. They must necessarily be so. They are mechanical, formal, completely out of touch with life, with fact, with knowledge.
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Thomas Aquinas or John Calvin can be read with pleasure, because they were men of genius and masters of literary style. But their theologies, the one a deductive system from the Papal Church, the other a deductive system from an infallible Bible, cannot possibly grip the modem mind. Their logical cogency, as deductions from the premisses, is admirable and fascinating, but the premisses, unless granted, cannot be established. And all our knowledge, our conscience, our moral development, our intelligence dispute, and will always dispute, the validity of those premisses.

The theologian of to-day will not think of walking this "high priori" road. He will not dream of

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admitting papal infallibility as the bar to the discovery of God; nor will he start with the Bible as the hortus inclusuSf from which his discoveries are to be derived. The modernist spirit has discredited those
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fatal fountain-heads of dulness, improved and imquestioned authorities, endowed beforehand with infallibility, so that that quality may flow into the remotest deductions drawn from them.

The interest is returning to theology, the charm of the pursuit begins to captivate ardent minds again, because we no longer slart from the Creeds, from the Bible, from the Church, but from premisses which are verified or verifiable. The Creeds, the Bible, and the Church must find their place and their justification in the advancing inquiry: we may arrive at them, and may find them justified, but they do not impose their authority on our theology. On the contrary, the theology revives the authority in them which had decayed and was passing away.

Now, what are the assured premisses from which the theologian starts to-day? What is it that aCFords hope of a new theology which can grip and hold the modem mind? We start now, as St. Paul suggests in Rom. i., from the known. "The invisible things of Him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are
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made, even His everlasting power and divinity." Our first conception of God is that of the Maker of this mystic frame. That wild spirit of revolt the late Professor Clifford was, though he was not recog-

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nized at the time, the herald of a new theology. He believed that Cosmic emotion would take the place of religion; the thrill and awe of the universe, as its wonders and powers are imveiled to the inquirer, will be the worship of God.

Here is the first guarantee of a theology which will be real and vital, and therefore interesting. There is a second guarantee in the modem interest in psychology. The hiunan mind is explored: its aspirations, and faiths, and experiences furnish a rich and verifiable material. In the human mind is the idea of God, the search for Him, the discovery of Him. Here is a fruitful field of inquiry. What is the Being that is discovered there in the soul's
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depths? What is the experience which the soul has of the Being with which it is in contact ?

Now, the modem theologian moves along these two assured lines of inquiry. There are two worlds, but they are correlated and indivisible. There is the world of phenomena, the world which science explores and reveals; and there is the world of the investigating and discovering mind. We are bent on finding the Being who is the Author of these two worlds; we cannot doubt that the Being is One; for to suppose that the two worlds are out of relation, and that they spring from diflFerent causes, is to make all inquiry futile and all discovery meaningless.

Our theology will be the best and most demonstrable account we can obtain of that Being which

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is at once the cause of the universe as we know it
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and of us who know it, the cause of the intelligible and of the intelligence. We start with the known, with the world we know, and with ourselves who know, not divided, for, to us, they have no existence apart. Here is an intelligible, a rational universe, and here am I exploring it, living in it, and yet over against it, related to it as subject to object. This whole, given in experience, which by abstraction may be conceived of as apart from me, selfexistence, but in introspection appears only as the sum total of my perceptions and conceptions, and therefore in a sense existent only in my knowledge of it — this whole, of subject and object combined, exists. What is the cause of it, what the purpose of it? Granted that the name we give to the cause and the purpose is God, what is God? what is known of Him ? what relation have we with Him ?

We start straight away from the facts which are before us, the most indisputable facts within oiu: reach, facts which are certain, or certainty can be predicated of nothing. We start with ourselves and the imiverse, and we endeavour to answer the question, If God is the Purpose and Cause of all, what
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or who is God?

The best thought of our time recognizes that the only explanation of a imiverse is intelligence. There would be no order or cohesion, no uniformity on which scientific conclusions could be built, no intelligible system, imless the whole were the outcome

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of intelligence. The informing mind of things is not our mind, nor the sum of himian minds. It preceded them and produced them. The discovery of a law of evolution nmning through things does not dispense with, but only serves to exhibit, the mind. Those minute adaptations of means to ends in Nature, interesting and important as they are, were far too narrow a basis for the teleological argiunent. It is not that in Nature innumerable instances may be discovered in which a piupose is betrayed, but it is that the whole of Nature, in sum and in detail, betrays a purpose. Millions of years ago the coal
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measures were stored, the continents formed, the seas shut within their limits, the atmosphere thrown roimd the globe. An abode for life, for human life, was prepared. In every part of this abode, which is open to our examination, there is an Intelligence at work, which makes the life that is produced possible, which sustains with food the living creature, and maintains, not only the comfort, but the beauty of the dwelling. This intelligence is in the mosses which clothe the hoary rocks with filigree of porphyry, and in the obscure worms that by their ploughing give to the soil its fruitfulness. We find no point, whether in the galaxy or in the electrons which form the atoms, where the Intelligence is not at work. In the standing miracle of our own bodies, with their complicated arrangements and adjustments, we carry about with us an exhibition, directly we come to reflect, of an Intelligence, far other than

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our own, which gives us life and being. Behind all
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particular wonders which open as we investigate and reflect there is the supreme wonder of the Being which produces and orders all, the Mind, which is to our mind as the imiverse is to our body. The Anima Mundi is not outside, but within the world. It is in the world as the life is in our body. The Being we are ever in search of is inmianent.

"The direction is from within, the Cosmos was already in the nebula, there never was any chaos at all, there is nothing in the end which was not also in the beginning. And if you like to add, *In the beginning was the Logos,' science has no word to say against it." ^

God, then, to the modem mind is much nearer

than He used to seem. He is in the heavens, but

not exclusively there. He is in the earth just as much

as He is in the heavens. He is in us as much as He

is in the intelligences which piety placed about His
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distant throne. In Him we live and move, and have

our being. Novalis felt that in touching a human

body he touched God. By God we now all mean a

Being —

"... far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man"

The starting-point of our theology is the immanent God.

* Prof. J. Arthur Thomson, "The Bible of Nature," p. 88.

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We are thus led to move out from our own minds
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which aflFord us our most certain knowledge to the knowledge of God, whom once men described as the Unknown. We are not now alarmed by the inane charge of anthropomorphism. We aknost smile at the crudity of the judgments in the last generation, as, for example, that while the Bible declares man to be made in the image of God, as a matter of fact God is made in the image of man. How completely has the standpoint shifted 1 We do not make God in our own image, but our own image, or personality, is the mirror in which He is reflected. Nay more, our consciousness is God welling up within us. The mind of the world emerges in our finite minds, not affirming that our finite minds contain the Infinite, but showing that they are or should be in contact with the Infinite. We do not make God in our own image, but in our image we are on the sure tracks of finding and knowing Him.

When Hume and Mill dissolved causality into a mere imvarying sequence, and tried to make us believe that by a cause we meant only an antecedent which was followed by a consequent, they did an
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unconscious service to our theology, for they led us to see how definite the idea of cause is, and how totally distinct from what they would have it to be. They prepared us for the capital discovery of modem psychology, that the idea of causation comes from the fact that we are ourselves causes. Our will is

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the fundamental fact in our experience through which we interpret everything else. We are, therefore, depending as we must on our own personality, obliged to conclude that what is not caused by ourselves, by the sum total of human wills, including oiu^elves, is caused by will not ourselves. The intelligence of the imiverse is will, and one will, otherwise there would be only a multiverse; and will is of course personal, not necessarily limited, as our own personality is, but, considering the vastness and complexity of the stupendous whole, more properly described as infinite.

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We conclude, with a confidence which grows with every further effort of thought and every extension of knowledge, that the Cause of all things is an infinite Personality, a Will, an Intelligence — God.

At this point in our search we are Pantheists. God is the indwelling Reason, or Logos, that makes the whole. God is in the world what the soul is in the body. But here, in the investigation of our own personality, which is the one clue we have for the discovery of God, we light upon the fact of conscience. What is right and what is wrong is a matter for ethical research, and the idea of right and wrong must grow with the growth of the human organism, or society; we find, and are likely to find, in that no finality. But what is fimdamental and invariable is the distinction between right and wrong as such. We are all far too definitely aware of seeing the better and approving it, and yet following the worse, to

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admit of any question on this point And in this factor of the soul, the ethical, we gradually learn to recognize that the good is what agrees with God and the bad is what does not. We escape Pantheism through the door of the moral sense. The escape, as we saw in the chapter on Morality, is only gradual and imperfect, but it is sure. If we may say so, God, in spite of our reluctance, ultimately makes it plain. God is the author of everything except evil; God is in everything except the resistance to good. Slowly we make the capital discovery that evil is the resistance to God in our own or other wills, but that good is God.

If the fact of sin is neglected or slurred over, thought swiftly relapses into Pantheism. But that fact is so palpable, and emerges so definitely and necessarily from the moral nature which is ourselves, that Pantheism is sure of ultimate refutation. Thus the soul leads to God, the infinite Intelligence and Will that produced and sustains all things; but sin leads to the discovery of a Holy God, whose will is thwarted in our finite limitations and perverse resistance. To be rid of sin, to come back into per32

fect and conscious harmony with the will that is holy, must be the one aim and struggle of religion.

Here what is called natural theology comes to a stand. It does not appear how we can ever draw our foot out of the flux of things and arrive at any firm standing groimd, how we can distinguish between the Holy Grod that is infinite and our finitude

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which resists Him, unless God, the Holy One, the Infinite Being, communicates with us, and defines, unless He shows us Himself over against us, as the Holy over against the unholy, and yet as the Holy bent on making us holy, by reconciling us to Himself.

Here, then, we come to a stay in theology, or we become Christian. As Christianity enters into our theology a new vista opens out; much may be dbcovered that seemed beyond our reach. Theology must turn aside to establish the proofs of Chris33

tianity, a whole discipline of apologetics develops itself, reasons are given for believing that Christianity is a revelation of God, not merely the human speculation about God, but God's own self-communication to man. The growth and preparation of the Christian truth are traced embryonically in the religion of Israel. The coming of Christ is established historically. His life and teaching are studied. His cross and resurrection and ascension are recognized as the starting-point of an evangel. The New Testament writings are examined as the foundation of a new theology which results from these facts. Into all this we cannot enter. But, assuming that theology has now become Christian, we go on to tread the opening vista, and to make the fresh and rational discoveries.

The most general and illuminating dogma of the Christian revelation is that the Logos — the reason in the whole Cosmos, the cause of the Cosmos, the sustaining principle of the imiverse — the reason

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which is in God, and, indeed, is God, which was in God and was God, from the lDeginning,was incarnate in Christ. This is the dogma which must either be believed or rejected. Only if it is believed on in the world does it become the light of the world.

We assume that it is believed, we take our stand with those who believe it and proceed to trace out the theology of the Incarnation.

The first and the last, the alpha and the omega, of Christianity, considered as a revelation, b that it establishes the simple proposition, God is love. It makes clearer than ever before that God is good It identifies goodness with God in such a way that evil is shown to be in radical opposition to Him, and He is seen to be the declared foe of it. That emerges from the teaching of Christ, from His Person, and, above all, from the Cross, for there the evil in the world assails with malignant fury the incarnate Good, and overwhelms it with anguish, shame, and death.

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But much more remarkable than the demonstration that God is good is the argument which shows that He is love. Christ asserts it on the ground of His own intuitive and eternal knowledge of God; He manifests it by His own character and conduct as the expression in human life of God's Spirit and nature; making no compromise with evil. He yet loves human beings that are stained with sin and sunk in guilt; but, above all, in the cross He dies to deliver men from evil ; He bears the sin of the world in His body on the tree; God in Christ is seen as self-sacrificing

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love, which suffers even the death of the cross in the love that would save the world.

The argument by which Christianity establishes its capital conclusion, that God is love, is cxunulative, and grows in strength with every fresh understanding of the sources and every deepening experience of life. Into our theology has come the most illu36

minating and the most pregnant idea.

Let us pause to get this into line with the truth of God which we reached, or might have reached, apart from Christianity, and then let us mark the lines of thought which radiate from the central truth.

The immanent reason in things, the soul of the world, that Intelligence which contrives and that Will which executes the whole, God, is holy love. In the forum of the conscience, where the eternal pleading proceeds between right and wrong. He is on the tribunal imiformly deciding for the right But in the chambers of the heart, where love and selfishness are at eternal feud. He is the love. He has produced a universe which admits of something alien from Himself, but only in order that the alien may return to Him in deliberate and convinced devotion. He will ever devise means that His banished may return. While, therefore, the concrete world of our human existence appears to traverse the idea that God is love, or at any rate to suggest that, if He is love. His power is limited, the clue that
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we have obtained leads us to the correction of this

246 GREAT ISSUES

impression. The impression is due to the eyes on which it is made, the eyes of human beings that, being out of harmony with God, see things in the distortion of their own lovelessness and resistance to Him.

All through the world, rightly understood, nms the principle of love, the principle which is God. The power is recognized by science, the love by theology. And yet when it is recognized, science itself confirms the conclusion. Dnmmiond, as we saw, in his "Ascent of Man," brought evolution and the struggle for existence, with the survival of the fittest, to show that love r^ through it all; for the struggle for the life of others, with its attendant sacrifices, is the concomitant of all the apparent struggle of egotism. Such unlikely writers as Prince Kropotkin and Karl Pearson are the witnesses of the
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truth which theology establishes. The former, in his "Mutual Aid," traces the principle of co-operation, of love, running all through the animal world and the earliest communal arrangements of mankind. The Divine element in our humanity is illustrated by a fact mentioned in a note.^ A prisoner escaped from a French prison. He managed to conceal himself, though the hue and cry were up against him. Lying in a ditch, he saw a fire break out in a village, and heard a woman cry to some one to save her child in the upper story. But no one responded. The prisoner's humanity made him forget his personal

* "Mutual Aid," by Prince Kropotkin, p. 278.

THEOLOGY 247

danger. He dashed out, made his way through the fire, and with scalded face and burning clothes presented the rescued child to the agonized mother. The prisoner was thus arrested and restored to prison. Humanity is drenched with love, the love that sac39

rifices, the love that saves. The fierce competition of the modem world, thinks the Prince, is due to a mistaken doctrine ; it fancies itself a law of nature. Darwinism, a great half-truth, has dominated the world ; it was thought that tfie struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest were the secret of the imiverse. The himgry generations tread each other down with the heroic thought that they are co-operating with Nature, that great power which, for the modem mind, replaces God.

But the other half of the truth must be brought out — nay, more than half, the whole truth which dominates the fragment called "struggle for existence." As Karl Pearson, the other writer referred to, says, the struggle as we see it is rather the struggle of nations than of individuals, and for that, co-operation and mutual aid within the nation are absolutely necessary. For the moment, the aspect of the world is a solidarity of mutual life imder the name of nationalism, supported by patriotism, involving antagonism and suspicion between nations ; but presently nation will learn to help nation, as man helps man, the area of patriotism will be humanity, and the
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imited struggle of mankind will be to dominate the forces of Nature and to provide for the welfare of each

248 GREAT ISSUES

human unit That is the kingdom of Grod, as conceived by Jesus Christ

Even men who do not recognize Grod are thus discovering the neglected factor in the being of God, the truth which it was the object of Christianity to supply.

"From the first Power was, I knew, Life has made dear to me. That, strive but for closer view.

Love were as plain to see. When see? When there dawns a day,

If not on the homely earth, Then yonder worlds away.
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When the strange and new have birth, And power comes full in play."

But if a Christian theology has enabled us to apprehend the love that runs through things, and to find in love the ultimate principle of the world and of life, it will push on to further conquests, imtil it transforms all other theologies and realizes that triumph of love which is involved in the conception that God is love, for God must be all in all.

When we have learnt to detach certain principles from the whole and to identify them with God, so that we are no longer imder the paralyzing spell of Pantheism, we have a clue which leads us to a totally new conception of the world and to a fruitful practique. When once the clue is grasped it is wonderful, as the modem mind begins to see, how good and gracious the imiverse is; the warring influence is foimd to be in ourselves, in our jaimdiced minds and

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THEOLOGY 249

warped views, and the practical life resulting therefrom. "Strive but for closer view," get the survey of the universe which we may reverently call Christ's, and what do we see ? There is the beneficent Father of men, God, makmg and maintaining His human family in a world which is an abode for them, marvellously constructed and adapted. His impartial benevolence gives life, and food, and opportimity to all. His Sim rises on the good and on the bad. The suflFerings and limitations of the creature are vastly overbalanced by the joys and delights. The balance of pleasure over pain is incalculably great. The pain is a spur to higher good. It makes character, it elicits help, human benevolence. The greatest and best in human life is the Cross by which it is redeemed.

It is no lazy optimism which reaches a conclusion of this kind, but rather a frank and full survey of the facts of human existence, released from the warping view of the mind in a morbid or perverted state. The theory that God is love brings out a world of
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love, where much seemed forbidding and perplexing, as a burst of April simshine suddenly shows an earth beautiful with promise and a blue sky bending over it in tenderness. This transformed earth is the real earth, and lasts just so long as we maintain the illuminating sim, the love of God.

There is a tendency to-day to regard God as the author of good and evil, and even to imagine that God suffers the evil with us, and is battling against

250 GREAT ISSUES

it as we do.^ This kind of Pantheism secures unity at too great a price. It is better to rest in an unexplained dualism than to compress the contradictory facts into a forced monism. Whatever may be the explanation or the origin of evil, for practical purposes — and it is only for such purposes that theology is of any use — we get the best point of view by maintaining absolutely that God is good, and nothing but good, love and nothing but love. Whatever is
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counter to good or to love is not God, but the obstacle which God is overcoming, and will some day completely overcome. We take our part, however small, in His victory in proportion as we succeed in realizing and in bringing to bear on the facts of experience the imflecked purity, the immodified goodness, the mastering love that is God. Omnia vincU amor.

The Christianity of to-day is as yet only halfdeveloped. It is far too precious a truth to surrender. Its theology is far too original and valuable to admit of being superseded. We cannot give up our theology in order to become philanthropists, for it is not shown that we can love men consistently and redemptively except by faith in God who loves. But the Christian truth must push on to its conclusion, and the theology must be recast to express the rounded whole. The half-development, broadly speaking, insisted that we should personalize God, and Satan, and should dwell on the two as opposing

1 "The Living Word," by EUwood Worcester.

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THEOLOGY 25 1

forces. Whether it was an echo of Zoroastrianism, or simply a reflection of the stubborn facts of the world, a dualism resulted, and we had our Ormuzd and Ahriman, two contending world-powers, and the victory hanging in the balance. No one can deny that this dualism is reflected in the Bible, and that Christianity in its early stages accepted it But Christianity, fully developed, cannot admit this kind of dualism. It turns wholly from the darkness towards the light; it does not spend its strength in personalizing God and Satan, but it devotes all its strength, its mind, its heart, to personalizing God and loving Him. It conceives the task of religion to be the realization of the living God, who is truth and love and goodness, as omnipresent, mastering evil of all kinds. The Christian is one who sides only with God, with truth and love and goodness, and so resists the devil that the devil flees and fades into thin air. Christ's way of putting it, a picturesque and forcible way, was that the prince of this world
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came and found nothing in Him. So He would have it be with His followers. The prince of this world, the Satan of the Dark Ages, should find nothing in us, not even the image, or the terror, of him. Love should have driven out fear, and light darkness.

But is it not a tour deforce, a will to believe carried to the excess of blindness? Is it not making God what we desire, and insisting that He is, because we have formed this idea of Him ? Does it not involve

252 GREAT ISSUES

shutting our eyes to many of the most obvious and certain facts of life, and wrapping ourselves in an optimistic illusion? The answer is, No! We are driven along a line of rational argument to the discovery of what God is. Surely, then, we are bound to side with God against what He opposes. We cannot stand disputing how these His enemies became His enemies, or how these facts of concrete
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experience fell out of harmony with His will ? That course of conduct is intelligible if we are not convinced what God is, what He must be. But the Christian is convinced. God in Christ is truth and goodness and love, nothing else, in spite of all appearances, that and that alone. Into that scale, therefore, as essentially the winning side, the Christian throws his whole weight. He, too, will be truth, and arise to smite the lies which vex the labouring earth. He, too, will be goodness, and flame with a steady fire against all that is not good. He, too, will be love, vanquishing hate in all its forms, not by hating, but by loving. When the objection is made: But look at the sin and suffering of the earth, the irrational calamities which overwhelm the good, the cruelty of man to man, the moral evil which persists and frequently triumphs; how can there be a good, an all-powerful God? his answer is imhesitating : There is a good and all-powerful God, and therefore I trust Him where I cannot see, and I go out with Him to soothe, to comfort, and to save the world. But if the objector urges : How do you know there

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THEOLOGY 253

is such a God? the answer comes, and it is surely irresistible : If I groan over the sin and the sorrow of the world, and if I suflFer in the catastrophes which crush my fellow-men, what right have I to think that this sympathy, this saving sympathy, is my creation? How dare I suppose that there is in me a virtue which I deny to the Soul of the World, the Creative Intelligence, God?

Is it said : That is reasoning in a circle; you agree that God is good because you are, and then that you are good because God is ? Well, in matters of this kind the argument, to be complete, must be a circle. The circle is its own evidence. For who can deny that it is good? What better conclusion can faith or practice reach than this : I must be true and good and loving, because God is truth, goodness, and love ? This is the vision of our desire, the self-evidencing reality which carries conviction.

"I saw Eternity the other night
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Like a great ring of pure and endless light, All calm as it was bright:

And round beneath it Time, in hours, days, years, Driven by the spheres,

Like a vast shadow moved, in which the world And all her train were hurled."

That vision is the true theology.

•We may, then, vindicate the name of theology as queen of the sciences, imderstanding by it, not that theology is one of the sciences, but that it is a knowledge or a discipline which must explain and

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justify the sciences, and in its turn be justified and recognized by them.

This knowledge of the Cause and the Purpose,
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to which science as such cannot attain, is as necessary as anything to which science can attain. For if God is not, or if we cannot know Him, a doubt and a fear will inevitably steal over the human spirit, What use or joy or satisfaction can there be in any other knowledge?

1. 68 FREE BOOKS http://www.scribd.com/doc/21800308/Free-Christian-Books

2. ALL WRITINGS http://www.scribd.com/glennpease/documents?page=1000

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