Chapter XII (1)

_THE INFLUENCE OF THE DEEPENING SENSE OF THE VALUE AND SACREDNESS OF THE PERSON UPON THEOLOGY_

In the discussion of the influence of the social consciousness upon theological doctrine, we turn now to ask concerning the third element of the social consciousness, How does the deepening sense of the value and sacredness of the person affect theology?

And with this sense of the value and sacredness of the person, we may well include, so far as the influence upon theology is concerned, the remaining elements of the social consciousness--the deepening sense of obligation, and of love. For, as we have already seen, the sense of obligation and of love follow so inevitably from a deep sense of the value and sacredness of the person, that it would be a needless refinement, probably, to try to analyze out their separate influence upon theological thinking. We should find them all leading us to essentially the same great emphases.

When, now, through the social consciousness, the personal has become the supreme value for us, and regard for it our eternal motive and goal, we cannot fail to demand that theology give a real personality to God and man--a consciousness marked, in Professor Howison's language, with "that recognition and reverence of the personal initiative of other minds which is at once the sign and the test of the true person."[92]

I. THE RECOGNITION OF THE PERSONAL IN MAN

In the first place, the social sense of the value and sacredness of the person will emphasize the full personality of man.

1. _Man's Personal Separateness from God._--The sense of the value of the person cannot admit for a moment such a one-sided emphasis upon a universal cosmic evolution, or upon the immanence of God, as should make impossible a true personality in man. It seeks, in its view of both God and man, a really "_personal_ idealism." It does not forget, but earnestly asserts, the dependence of all other spirits upon God; and, consequently, looks for no metaphysical separateness in this sense from God. But a genuine recognition of the personality of man does require that man be conceived as separate from God in just this sense: (1) that he has a clear self-consciousness of his own, and (2) that he has real moral initiative, which makes his volition truly his own. These two factors constitute all of separateness that need be demanded for man. Possessing these, he is "outside of God" in the only sense in which a "personal idealism" feels concerned to assert separateness. But for these factors it is concerned; for without them, it believes, no truly ideal view, no moral world, no religious life, are possible.

2. _Emphasis Upon Man's Moral Initiative._--In particular, the application of the sense of the value and sacredness of the person in theology, means the emphatic recognition of the moral initiative of man--of the possession of a real will of his own. The whole social consciousness, especially in this third element of it, rests upon the assumption that man has worth, as a being capable of character as well as of happiness, and so deserves in some worthy sense to be called a child of God. If the social consciousness is, as we have seen, with any fairness to be called the recognition of the fully personal,[93] this reverence for the personal initiative of men cannot be lacking in it. Its influence upon theology at this point, therefore, is hardly to be doubted.

And theology itself is vitally concerned. For the whole possibility of the conceptions of government and providence requires this. These terms are words without meaning, having absolutely no place in theology or philosophy, if man has no moral initiative. Nor should it escape our notice, that we strike at the very root of all possible reverence for God, if we deny a real initiative to man. We have no possible philosophic explanation of either sin or error, consistent with any real reverence for God, if a true human will is denied.[94] In Professor Bowne's vigorous language: In a system of necessity "every thought, belief, conviction, whether truth or superstition, arises with equal necessity with every other.... On this plane of necessary effect the actual is all, and the ideal distinctions of true and false have as little meaning as they would have on the plane of mechanical forces.... The only escape from the overthrow of reason involved in the fact of error lies in the assumption of freedom." Moreover, if real human initiative is denied to men, we conceive God as having really less respect for persons in his dealing with them, than the most elementary ethics requires of men in their relations to one another. A one-sided doctrine of immanence, thus, degrades both man and God. It degrades man, in denying to him a true personality, and so making him simply a thing. It degrades God, in making him the real responsible cause of all sin and error, and in making him treat possible persons as things. The influence of the social consciousness, which leads us to measure the moral growth of a man and of a civilization by the deepening sense of reverence for the person, is fairly decisive at this point. It _must_ see in God the most absolute guarding of man's personality, and especially of his moral initiative.

3. _Man, a Child of God._--The Christian faith, that man is a child of God, is a faithful expression of the insistence of the social consciousness upon the recognition of the full personality of man. It expresses both man's entire dependence upon God for his being and maintenance, and at the same time his infinite value and sacredness as a spirit made in the image of God, capable of indefinite progress, and capable of personal relation to God. It voices thus Christianity's characteristic "humbly-proud" conception of man--humble in view of the eternal and infinite plans of God; proud, as "called to an imperishable work in the world." It is, indeed, but a concrete statement of that faith in love at the heart of things, and in the all-embracing plan of a faithful God, which we found required, if the social consciousness itself was to have any justification.[95]

II. THE RECOGNITION OF THE PERSONAL IN CHRIST

In the second place, under this impulse of the sense of the value and sacredness of the person, theology is likely to insist on the recognition of the personal in the conception of Christ.

1. _Christ a Personal Revelation of God._--This recognition of the personal in Christ will mean, first, that we are to conceive Christ as a _personal_ revelation of God, rather than as containing in himself a divine substance.[96] It cannot forget, that if God is a person, and men are persons, the adequate self-revelation of God to men can be made only in a truly personal life; and that men need above all, in their relation to God, some manifestation of his ethical will, and this can be shown only in the character of a person. A merely metaphysical conception of the divinity of Christ in terms of substance or essence, as these are commonly thought, must, therefore, wholly fail to satisfy. We must be able to recognize and bow before the personal will of the personal God revealed in Christ, if we are really to find God through him. A strong sense of the personal, then, such as the social consciousness evinces, must see in Christ, above all, a personal revelation of a person.

2. _Emphasizing the Moral and Spiritual in Asserting the Supremacy of Christ._--This implies that the dominant sense of the value and sacredness of the person will certainly tend to bring into prominence the moral and spiritual in asserting the supremacy of Christ, rather than the metaphysical or the simply miraculous. So far as these latter come into its representation at all, they will follow rather than precede, and be accepted because of the moral and spiritual, or as simply working hypotheses enabling us to bring into a thought-unity what we have to recognize in the moral and spiritual realm. If one faces the matter fully and frankly, is it not plain that Christians of all shades of belief are increasingly finding the real reason for their faith in Christ in his moral and spiritual supremacy? Many may choose to _express_ their faith in him, when once reached, in terms of the miraculous or metaphysical; but the miraculous and the metaphysical are not the primary _reasons_ for their faith. It is the inner spirit of Christ himself which really masters us and calls out our confident faith and our eager submission. And it is only when we have already gotten this sense of the stupendousness of his personality, that the so-called miraculous in his life becomes to our thought natural and fitting, and we are driven to think him standing in some unique relation to God and so requiring to be conceived in unique metaphysical terms.

It is easy, no doubt, to indulge in a false polemic against the miraculous and metaphysical. One of the surest bits of autobiography we have from Christ, the narrative of the temptations, implies, as Sanday has acutely pointed out,[97] the clear consciousness on the part of Christ of the possession of what we call supernatural powers. It is a far less simple problem to rid the gospels of the miraculous element, than our age, with its greatly exaggerated estimate of the mathematico-mechanical view of the world, is likely to think. The so-called miraculous in connection with Christ is not to be impatiently and dogmatically set aside.[98] So, too, the demand of thought, that we form finally some metaphysical conception of the great personality which we meet in Christ cannot be denied as wholly illegitimate. All this is to be freely granted and asserted.

But it is of the greatest importance for Christian thought, that it still keep Christ's own absolute subordination of both the miraculous and metaphysical to the moral and the spiritual. The same narrative of the temptation, that so clearly implies supernatural powers in Christ, has its whole point in Christ's answering determination absolutely to subordinate these supernatural powers to moral and spiritual ends. His whole ministry evinces the greatest pains upon this point. And he evidently thinks a theory of his metaphysical relation to God (as ordinarily conceived) of so little vital importance that even such slight hints as we get of it in the New Testament apparently do not come from him at all. The present tendency, therefore, naturally demanded by the social consciousness, to emphasize the moral and spiritual in Christ in asserting his supremacy, is quite in harmony with Christ's own insistence. He will be followed for what he is in himself.

The real supremacy of Christ, his truest divinity, we may be sure, comes out for our time in those statements which we are able to make concerning his inner spirit. Here, and here only, the real power of his personality gets hold upon us. What are these grounds of the supremacy of Christ? How is it that we come to God through him?

3. _The Moral and Spiritual Grounds of the Supremacy of Christ._[99]--(1) In the first place, _Jesus Christ is the greatest in the greatest sphere_, that of the moral and spiritual; and this, by common consent of all men. Both the depth and the consensus of conviction concerning Christ are profoundly significant. If our earth has ever seen one of whom it could be truly said, He is a moral and spiritual authority, preëminently the one great authority in this greatest sphere,--that person is Jesus Christ. Seeing the moral problem more broadly than any other ever saw it, tracing the motives of life more deeply than any other ever traced them, applying those principles of the life which he sees with a tact and delicacy and skill that no other ever approached, speaking with an authority in this moral and spiritual sphere to which no other can for a moment lay claim,--this man is easily the greatest in the greatest sphere.

It is, perhaps, to say only the same thing in a little different way, when one says with Fairbairn, that Christ is transcendent among founders of religion, "and to be transcendent here is to be transcendent everywhere, for religion is the supreme factor in the organizing and the regulating of our personal and collective life."[100] The present age is, more than any other, the age of the scientific study of religion. The last forty years, indeed, have seen such attention to the study of comparative religion as the world never saw before. What has been the outcome of that study? To make the relative position of Jesus among the founders of religion lower? I do not so understand it. No, the outcome is such that it is a manifestly inadequate statement to say, that he is transcendent among the founders of religion. The very most that we may hope to say about the founder of any other religion is, that in some single particular at a long distance he can be brought into comparison with Jesus. But let one think for a moment what it means for a man to be a founder of religion. We talk of leadership. Do we know what a founder of religion does? He makes the light, in which millions of men look upon all the events of their life, in which they see the past of the world's history, in which they look forward to the entire future. The very mood and atmosphere of men's lives are determined by these founders of religion; and among these preëminent leaders, Jesus, beyond all mistake, is transcendent.

Let the nature of his kingdom, too, be his witness. He calmly aims to found a kingdom that shall be spiritual, universal, eternal. One must face the fact that this man of Nazareth in Syrian Galilee, purposes in coolness of deliberation to found a kingdom that shall be absolutely spiritual, that shall make no appeal to any of the lower elements of man; one must see that this man, in those temptations through which he passed concerning the form of his work, deliberately set aside the kingdom by bread, the kingdom by marvel and ecstasy, and the kingdom by force, and purposed to found a kingdom solely upon moral and spiritual forces. And observe that he confidently expects this kingdom to be universal--appealing to men of all races and of all times, and to be eternal--still standing when all else shall have passed away. And upon his belief in this character of his kingdom he stakes his life, and calmly gives to himself as the goal of his life the establishment of just such a kingdom; and remains to the end confident of his success. The mere vitality of will in such a purpose is hard to take in, and alone may well give us pause.

And because he is the greatest in the greatest sphere, transcendent among founders of religion, the founder of a kingdom spiritual, universal, and eternal, he becomes for us a "personalized conscience," a spiritual, moral authority for us even beyond our own conscience--an authority that grows upon us with our growth, and submission to which is earth's highest moral test.

(2) And there must be added to this first proposition, that Jesus is the greatest in the greatest sphere, a second: _He alone is the sinless and impenitent one._ And it is to be noticed that it is this man who sees more clearly than any other the moral and spiritual, who knows, as no other does, what character is and what moral life means,--it is he, who claims to be the sinless one. No other ever intelligently made this claim; for no other was it ever intelligently made. The words of the great historian Ranke seem to us to be simple truth when he says: "More guiltless and more powerful, more exalted and more holy has naught ever been on earth than his conduct, his life, and his death. The human race knows nothing that could be brought even afar off into comparison with it." Only such an one could intelligently make for himself the claim of sinlessness. And for no other was this claim of sinlessness ever intelligently made. Men know each other too well to make it for others when moral consciousness has fully awakened. But he fights his battle in the wilderness, and there is no record of failure so far as he himself can see it, and none that disciple ever ascribed.

And this claim of sinlessness for Christ is to be urged, not so much because of any special statements by Christ as because of that remarkable fact to which Dr. Bushnell has called attention,--his impenitence. Jesus alone among all good men is a man of "impenitent piety;" and by this he is marked off absolutely from every other good man. What happens in the life of any other good man is this: that, as he goes forward, the sense of sin grows upon him, the ideal rises before him and he feels increasingly that his own life is inferior to it. Of Jesus this is not true. He shows no sign of consciousness of failure. There is no evidence that he feels that he has fallen short in any degree. He is absolutely without that universal characteristic of all other good men, absolutely without penitence. Contrast him for a moment with the man, who perhaps all would agree was the greatest of all his disciples, the man to whose devotion there seems to be no limit--the Apostle Paul; and notice, that years after his persecution of the church and of the cause of Jesus, with growing sense of what Jesus is, and of his own inexhaustible debt to him, there comes over him with increasing, not lessening, power the sense of his sin, and he writes to the Ephesians, "Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, was this grace given me that I might preach unto the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ;" and in one of the very last letters that comes down to us from him, says again, "Faithful is the saying and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am chief." What evidence have we that Christ ever felt in the slightest degree such penitence?

(3) But more than this is true. _With the highest ideal, Jesus not only does not consciously fall short of it, but consciously rises up to it_, and, as Herrmann says, "compels us to admit that he does rise to it." It were very much that a man with any ideal, however inferior, should be able to say to himself, I have not fallen short of this ideal; but that one, who sees more clearly than any other in the realm of the moral and spiritual, and who has an ideal of simply absolute love and of unbounded trust in God,--that he should show not only no consciousness of falling short, but should consciously rise to his ideal and compel us to admit that he rises to it: this is a fact unparalleled in the history of the world. It is far more than mere sinlessness; there is here a positiveness of moral achievement so great--a fact so tremendous--that we seem able but feebly to take it in.

(4) And even that is not all. _Jesus has such a character that we can transfer it feature by feature to God_, not only with no sense of blasphemy, not only with no sense of his coming short, but with complete satisfaction. I do not now ask at all as to any man's metaphysical theory about Jesus Christ; I only ask that it be noticed that those who question common theories altogether still get their ideal of God from Jesus Christ; and that this is the wonderful thing that has happened on our earth: that there has once lived a man--daily moving about among men, a concrete circumstantial account of whose life in many particulars we have--the features of whose character one can transfer absolutely to God and say, That is what I mean by God. One simply cannot add anything to the character of God himself in the highest moments of his imagination, that is not already revealed in Jesus Christ. I take it that the words of Fairbairn are literally true: he was "the first being who had realized for men the idea of the Divine." When, therefore, Philip said to him, "Lord, show us the Father and it sufficeth us," he could only reply as he might any day to us, "Have I been so long time with you, and dost thou not know me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father."

(5) And one cannot stop here. _Jesus is consciously able to redeem all men._ With such sense of the meaning of sin and of moral conduct as no other ever had, understanding, therefore, the sin and need of men as no other ever did, and having such a vision of what it is perfectly to share the life of God as no other ever had, still, facing the masses of men, he could say to himself, "I am able to take these men and lift them into the very presence of God and present them spotless before the throne of his glory." Have we taken in what it means, that, in the consciousness of a man in form like ourselves, there could be, even for a moment, the actual belief that he was the one that was to take away the sin of the world, and had power to redeem men absolutely unto God? In another's words: "Jesus knows no more sacred task than to point men to his own person." He is himself God's greatest gift, himself "the way, the truth, the life,"--not only fighting his own battles, but consciously able to redeem all men.

(6) This simply implies, as Dr. Denison has suggested, that _Jesus has such God-consciousness and such sense of mission as would simply topple any other brain that the world has ever known into insanity_, but which simply keeps him sweet, normal, rational, living the most wholesome and simple and noble life the world has ever seen. How are we to explain that fact? On the one hand, the sense of being of even a little importance in the kingdom of God proves singularly intoxicating to men. How often, when one is strongly possessed by the idea that he is a special channel of manifestation for God, do moral sanity, influence, and character all suffer! On the other hand, there is no burden of suffering that men can bear so great as suffering in the sin of one loved--thus bearing the sin of another. But here is one who can believe that, when men come to him and simply see him as he is, they catch their best vision of God; here is one who bears consciously the sin of all men, and who can believe that he has absolute power to revolutionize the lives of other men and make them what they were meant originally to be, children of God; and yet, believing this, can, under that consciousness, keep sweet and normal, wholesome and simple, energetically ethical and thoroughly rational,--can keep sane. Indeed, he lives a life so sane, that, to pass even from some of our best religious books into the simple atmosphere of the story of his life often seems like passing from the super-heated, artificially lighted, heavily perfumed and exhausted atmosphere of the crowded drawing-room into the open fresh air of day under the heaven of God. In the very act of the most stupendous self-assertion, Jesus can still characterize himself as "meek and lowly of heart," and we feel no self-contradiction--so completely has he harmonized for even our unconscious feeling his transcendent self-consciousness and his humble simplicity of life. Has the world anywhere a phenomenon comparable to this?

(7) In consequence of all this, _Jesus is in fact the only person in the history of the race who can call out absolute trust_. As little children, we knew something of what it meant to have complete trust. There were a few years when it seemed to us that there was nothing in either power or character that was not true of our fathers and mothers. We soon lost such trust, even as children. Is there any way back to the childlike spirit? Let us ponder these golden words of Herrmann: "The childlike spirit can only arise within us when our experience is the same as a child's; in other words, when we meet with a personal life which compels us to trust it without reserve. Only the person of Jesus can arouse such trust in a man who has awakened to moral self-consciousness. If such a man surrenders himself to anything or any one else, he throws away not only his trust, but himself." There has been one life lived on earth, in whose hands one may put himself with absolute confidence and have no fear as to the result. Jesus, and Jesus alone, can call out absolute trust.

(8) Moreover, _Jesus is the only life ever lived among men in whom God certainly finds us, and in whom we certainly find God_. And, once again, I am not now asking whether one is able to come to any theory of the nature of Christ. That is a matter of comparative indifference. The great fact is this: That there has been lived among us men such a life that, if a man will simply put himself in the presence of it and stay there, he will have brought home to him with unmistakable conviction the fact that God is, and is touching him and that he is touching God; that, coupled with such a sense as he never had before of his sin, there will be also the sense of forgiveness and reconciliation with God, and so, such evidence of the contact of God with his life as he can find nowhere else. So Harnack believes: "When God and everything that is sacred threaten to disappear in the darkness, or our doom is pronounced; when the mighty forces of inexorable nature seem to overwhelm us, and the bounds of good and evil to dissolve; when, weak and weary, we despair of finding God at all in this dismal world,--it is then that the personality of Christ may save us."

(9) And all this means, finally, that _Jesus is for us the ideal realized_. Let not the commonplaceness of the words rob us of their meaning. The fact is far enough from the commonplace. Philosophy must always tell us that we have no right to expect anywhere a realized ideal, except in the absolute whole of things. Certainly, we never find in any of the inferior spheres a fully realized ideal. What does it mean, then, that in this highest of all spheres, the sphere of the moral and spiritual life, we have the ideal realized; that our very highest vision is a fact? What is there that one would add to, what, that one would take away from, the life of Christ, that it might be more completely than it is the ideal realized?

"But Thee, but Thee, O Sovereign Seer of time,
But Thee, O poet's Poet, wisdom's tongue,
But Thee, O man's best Man, O love's best Love,
O perfect life in perfect labor writ,
O all men's Comrade, Servant, King or Priest,--
What _if_ or _yet_, what mole, what flaw, what lapse,
What least defect or shadow of defect,
What rumor, tattled by an enemy,
Of inference loose, what lack of grace
Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's, or death's,
Oh, what amiss may I forgive in Thee,
Jesus, good Paragon, thou crystal Christ?"

4. _Christ's Double Uniqueness._--It seems hardly possible to do justice to the facts now passed in review, without recognizing, at least, that they point to a double uniqueness on the part of Christ in his relation to God, reflected in his own language concerning himself and in the spontaneous confessions of his disciples in all times. He alone, in the emphatic sense, is _the_ Son. The contrasts between Christ and other men, which the simple facts of the life and consciousness of Christ have compelled us to make, naturally, then, demand recognition from thought. The recognition of the facts _is_ the vital matter, but thought can hardly see them unmoved. How are we to _think_ of Christ? With clear remembrance, now, that Christian teaching itself insists upon the kinship of God and men; that absolute barriers, therefore, cannot anywhere be set up; that a revelation unrelated to all else could be no revelation; and that Christ himself often pointed out the likeness between his own life and work and those of his disciples;--still we may not ignore actual differences, and must honestly strive to do justice to them in our own conception of Christ. One may not forget that there is much here that we can hardly hope ever to fathom; and that into this secret of Christ's relation to the Father theology has often tried to press with a precision of statement that was quite beyond its possible knowledge, and that damaged rather than helped the religious consciousness; but one may try to think in simple, straightforward fashion what the facts mean. Now these actual and momentous moral and spiritual differences already pointed out seem, at least, to assert, I say, a genuine double uniqueness in Christ. Christ's relation to God is absolutely unique, that is, in two senses: in the absolutely unique purpose of God concerning him; in the absolutely perfect response of Christ to that purpose. If one chooses to use the language, he may say, that the first uniqueness is metaphysical; the second, ethical.[101]

First, then, God has a purpose concerning Christ, that he has concerning no other, for he purposes to make in him his supreme self-manifestation. This sets him apart from all others. His transcendent sense of God and sense of mission only correspond to the absolute uniqueness of this eternal purpose of God concerning him. We are utterly unable to see that they could be borne by any being that we know as man. He is the manifested God--"the visible presentation of the invisible God." This cannot be said, in the same sense, of any other. Now, our only adequate statement of the inner reality--the essential meaning--of any being, can be given only in terms of the purpose which God calls that being to fulfil. To see, then, that God's purpose concerning Christ is absolutely unique, and that God's purpose is, to make in Christ the completest possible personal manifestation of himself, is to see that Christ's essential relation to the Father is absolutely his own, unshared by any other. And, it may be added, there is no reason why this purpose of God concerning Christ should not be regarded as an eternal purpose, eternally realized.

But Christ is as clearly unique in his simply perfect response to this purpose of God. Our facts seem to point directly to the conclusion, that in him there was no moral hindrance to the fullness of the revelation God would make through him. His life is perfectly transparent, allowing the full glory of the character of God to shine through it. The harmony of his will with God's will is complete. If it be said that this last uniqueness is, after all, only difference in degree from other men, it must be answered, first, that degree here is so vast as to be practically kind. This is the perfect of Christ set over against the varyingly imperfect of all other men. Moreover, to ask here for difference in kind in any other sense, is probably to make an unintelligent and impossible demand; for, in the nature of the case, the relations involved are spiritual and personal, and there cannot be, in strictness, in the fulfilment of such relations any real differences in kind.

5. _The Increasing Sense of Our Kinship with Christ, and of His Reality._--Side by side with this recognition of the nature of Christ's uniqueness, there deserves to be set, as another outcome of the emphasis upon conceiving Christ as a personal revelation of God, the increasing sense of our kinship with Christ and of his reality. The connection here is by no means accidental, though it may seem almost paradoxical. We have plainly come in our day to our clearest recognition of the divinity of Christ through the sense of his transcendent character. But revelation in character requires the reality of his human life. The very route, therefore, by which we have most certainly reached our sense of Christ's divinity, leads also to an increasing sense of kinship with Christ, and so of his reality. So long as we seemed driven to conceive the divinity of Christ in terms that had no relation and no meaning for human life, just so long must he seem to us to be really moving in another world and to take on the unreality of that other world quite hidden from us. But now Christ's life has meaning; we can enter into it and feel that it is real. With all its transcendence, the life does not move now simply in the sphere of the mysterious. It is no unreal drama, no play-struggle,--utterly failing to meet our real moral and spiritual needs. Least of all, in this supreme work for man, can the revealing life be only a show. It feels real. It is real. And, with clear sense of the inevitable inadequacy of the analogy, we still rest confidently in the conviction that God's relation to Christ may be best conceived after the analogy of the relation of the Spirit of God to our spirits; and that, when we try to press beyond that, we are attempting to rise into that sphere of a supposed supra-personal, for which we have no possible organ of vision, and where, therefore, we are thinking not more, but less, truly.[102]

With this sense of the reality of the personal, spiritual life of Christ, there naturally comes home to us the appropriateness and _practicability of his ideals_. They are seen to belong to us more surely, and properly to make demands upon us. It is, probably, not too much to say that, under the influence of the social consciousness, there has been a definite, growing approach to Christ's way of thinking, and to his ideal of life. This means a consciousness increasingly Christian in tone, and, therefore, in turn, increasingly better able to interpret the teaching and life of Christ, and so to give promise of a more Christian theology. None of us, probably, are fully conscious of the more subtle inconsistencies of even our best theological thinking, when measured by a completely Christian spirit. At least, with the insistence upon Christ as a personal revealer of a personal God, it must become more true that the meaning of all terms for the work of Christ shall be more clearly reasonable, more consistently ethical, and more completely spiritual; and then the immediate rooting of Christian theology in the Christian religion can be seen and felt.

III. THE RECOGNITION OF THE PERSONAL IN GOD

The sense of the value and sacredness of the person must lead to the special recognition of the personal not only in man and in Christ, but also in God. We have already seen reasons for believing that the social consciousness is peculiarly bound strongly to emphasize the personality of God, as in the end absolutely essential to its own justification. The social consciousness represents an ethical movement that can live only in the atmosphere of the personal.

1. _The Steady Carrying through of the Completely Personal in the Conception of God. Guarding the Conception._--This pressure of the social consciousness toward an imperative faith in the fully personal God is most valuable, as offsetting the tendency in many quarters toward a scientific or even idealistic pantheism or monism that is quite impersonal. "For," in the language of Professor Howison, "the very quality of personality is, that a person is a being who recognizes others as having a reality as unquestionable as his own, and who thus sees himself as a member of a moral republic, standing to other persons in an immutable relationship of reciprocal duties and rights, himself endowed with dignity, and acknowledging the dignity of all the rest."[103] As this is preëminently the spirit of the social consciousness, it is plain that we have in the social consciousness an increasingly powerful motive for guarding the full personality of God.

It needs particularly to be noted, that we know no _definite_ "supra-personal." Pantheism or any impersonal monism is forced, therefore, when it leaves the personal conception of God, to take a lower line of development, not a higher. The result is, that it is obliged to deny the highest attributes to God, and then, as Browning is fond of arguing, man steps at once into the place of God. Men cannot permanently remain satisfied with a philosophical view, of which that is the logical outcome. Certainly, such a view can get no support from the social consciousness, with its deep conviction of the supreme value and sacredness of the person.

Moreover, it is not to be forgotten, in estimating the value of a cosmic monism, that what the cosmological really means, ethically and religiously, to a people, must always depend upon their social ideals. The natural in itself contains no command. For any effective vital interpretation, therefore, even of its impersonal Absolute, pantheism is constantly thrown back upon the personal.

Only a clear, steady carrying through by theology of the completely personal in its conception of God can ultimately satisfy this sense of the value and sacredness of the person. Professor Nash does not speak too strongly when he says: "To fulfil her function the church must develop the doctrine of a Divine Personality. She has not always been true to it in the past. Too often, by her sacraments, by her theology, by her theory of inspiration, she has glorified the impersonal."[104]

Now, such an attempt, it is perhaps worth saying once more, is not to be thought of as a running away from a thorough-going metaphysical investigation. It rather takes the ground, indicated in the earlier discussion, of what may be called, in Professor Howison's language, personal idealism; and holds that spirit, person, _is_ for us the ultimate metaphysical fact: the one reality to which we have immediate access; the reality from which all our metaphysical notions are originally derived; and, in consequence, the one reality which we can take as the key to the understanding of all else. And it believes that even essence and substance, the great words of the old metaphysics, can be really understood only as they are interpreted in personal terms. Ultimately, theology would hold, this would mean the interpretation of the essence of things in terms of the purpose of God concerning them--what he meant them to be.

In the attempt, then, clearly and steadily to carry through the conception of God as completely personal, theology may well guard carefully certain points. In the first place, theology does not mean to transfer to God human limitations; rather, it conceives him to be the only complete personality with perfect self-consciousness and full freedom, no part of whose being is in any degree foreign to himself. Nor, in the second place, does it mean to forget that the personal relations in which God stands to other persons are unique, and that, in three definite respects: that conviction of the love of God, as of no other, must underlie, as a great necessary assumption, all our thinking and all our living; that God is himself the source of the moral constitution of man, which must thus be regarded as an expression of the personal will of God, and the personal relation to God so have universal moral implications such as no other personal relation can have; and in that God is such in his universal love for all, that it is impossible to come into right personal relation to God, and not at the same time come into right relation to all moral beings.[105]

2. _God is Always the Completely Personal God._--If, now, theology is to do justice to the demands of the social consciousness for a full recognition of the personal in God, it must see clearly that God is _always_ the completely personal God. Certain conclusions, not always admitted, are believed to follow from this position.

(1) _The Consequent Relation of God to "Eternal Truths."_--In the first place, there can be no sphere of eternal truths, thought of as either created outright by the will of God, or as existing of themselves independently of God and only to be recognized by him.

The difficulty is not merely that at least one of these views would put God in the same dependent relation to truth as we finite beings, and thus practically put a God above God. Nor is the difficulty merely that it is impossible to think the real existence of such a sphere of eternal truth, since truths or laws can be said to exist only in one of two ways: either as the actual mode of action of reality, or as the perception and formulation in an observing mind of that mode of action. And these difficulties are both sufficiently serious.

But, from our present point of view, the great difficulty is, that trying to conceive God as either creating or coming to the recognition of truth, assumes, as Lotze points out, a _fragmentary_ God, a God for whom truth is _not yet_. It assumes an action of the will of God apart from his reason, that is, a God not yet completely personal, not yet the full God of truth and character. A God for whom truth and duty are not yet, is certainly no true person. Most, if not all, of our metaphysical puzzles connected with the relation of God to what we call eternal truths, seem to me to grow out of this thought of an essentially fragmentary God.

We are driven, consequently, to a denial of both the Scotist and Thomist positions, as ordinarily conceived. It is true neither that the truth is true and the good is good because God wills it, nor yet that God wills the true because it is true and the good because it is good. Both views alike assume the possibility of a fragmentary God, a God for whom at some time truth and goodness were not yet. But God has _always_ been the completely personal God of truth and love, never a bare will and never a bare intellect. Hence, neither as an independent object to be recognized, nor yet as the external product of his will, can we think of the realm of eternal truth and goodness. We must rather say, God alone is the eternal being and absolute source of all, always complete in the perfection of his personality; and, therefore, what we call the eternal truths are only _the eternal modes of God's actual activity_. This alone seems to the writer to give a thorough-going theistic view, free from self-contradiction.[106]

(2) _Eternal Creation._--But, further, if God is to be thought as _always_ the completely personal God, we are led, also, immediately to the doctrine of eternal creation.

If God has had always a completely personal life, his entire being must have been always in exercise. Can we really think of such a God as simply quiescent, and not as always active? Is not his activity involved in his complete personality? The thought of his possible quiescence arises probably out of an unconscious, but nevertheless unwarranted, transfer to God of our finite separation of will and act. But God is here, too, no fragmentary God; he has always been the completely personal God, always acting.

A second consideration carries us to the same conclusion. Theologians have felt that they have made a distinct step in advance in tracing creation to love in God, as, for example, Principal Fairbairn does. But this gives no real help as an explanation of creation as _beginning in time_; for one must at once ask, Was not the love of God eternal, and if this were the real reason leading to creation, must not, then, creation be eternal?

So far as I am able to see, there is nothing to lose and much to gain in clearness and satisfactoriness of thought in a frank acceptance of the doctrine of eternal creation. Not, of course, in the sense of an eternal dualism, in the sense of the thought of an eternity of matter set over against God, but in the clear sense of the eternal creative activity of God. And to such a doctrine of eternal creation, the social consciousness, in its emphasis on the completely personal, seems to me to lead.

(3) _The Unity and Unchangeableness of God._--And, once more, if God is always the completely personal God, we shall conceive his own unity not as monotonous self-identity, but only as consistency of meaning. We shall not, therefore, transfer to God, pluming ourselves meanwhile upon a highly philosophical view, the mechanical unchangeableness of a rock; but we shall be rather concerned with the consistency of his character and the unchangeableness of his loving will, which would be the very reasons for his changing, adapting attitude toward his changing children. From this point of view, too, the sphere of law and the sphere of the actual, will seem to us, necessarily, to root in the sphere of the ideal; the _is_ and the _must_, to rest in the _ought_; though we may not hope to trace the connections in detail. In a God, then, who is a completely harmonious person, never acting in fragmentary fashion, whose will and whose reason and whose love are never at cross purposes--only in such a God can the world find its adequate and unifying source. The world itself has real unity only in so far as it is the expression of the consistency of meaning of the purpose of God concerning it.

And this same thought of the consistency of the meaning of the purpose of God, I have elsewhere argued,[107] saves us from the necessity of a self-contradictory conception of the miraculous or supernatural, by its recognition of the dominant spiritual order. It also enables us to see, with Professor Nash, if the word personal is given sufficient breadth, that "the true supernatural is the personal, and wheresoever the personal is discovered, whether in the life of conscience or the life of reason, whether in Israel or Greece, there the supernatural is discovered. Upon this conception of the supernatural as the personal, apologetics must found the claims of Christianity. The divine and the human personality stand within 'Nature,' that is, within the total of being. But they both, the human as well as the divine, transcend the scope and reach of visible Nature."[108]

(4) _The Limitations of the Conception of Immanence._--Indeed, it ought to be clearly recognized on all sides by those who believe in religion at all, that we cannot so exclusively emphasize the immanence of God, as many are now doing, and have a God at all, beyond the finite manifestations. When the matter is so conceived, there is no real personal God with whom there can be any personal communion. Religion, thus, in any ordinary sense of it, is by this process made simply impossible; Positivism is the only logical result, and Frederic Harrison becomes the one sole, clear-sighted prophet among us, a lone voice crying in the wilderness. Such an outcome is possible for any, because, and in so far as, they are not true to the social consciousness in its demand for the completely personal God, who, in Martineau's language, is a genuinely "free spirit."[109]

3. _Deepening the Thought of the Fatherhood of God._--But the influence of the social consciousness in its deepening sense of the value and sacredness of the person, of obligation and of love, not only tends to insist upon the completely personal in the conception of God, but also tends to deepen our thought of the Fatherhood of God.

(1) _History no Mere Natural Process._--No mere on-going of an unfeeling Absolute, whatever name be given it, will ever satisfy the social consciousness. The new sense of the sorrow and ethical meaning of the historical process demands, in the first place, that history shall not be regarded as a mere necessitated development, but a movement in which men effectively coöperate, never more consciously and clearly than to-day; and secondly, it demands a _God_ who cares, who loves, who guides. History cannot be a mere holocaust to God.

(2) _God, the Great Servant._--Rather, as we saw in the fourth chapter, the social consciousness requires a God whose purpose shall completely support its own purpose, and so requires us, with Fairbairn, to put Fatherhood before Sovereignty, not Sovereignty before Fatherhood, and requires us definitely to conceive God after Christ, as self-giving ministering love. It is one of the anomalies of Christian history, that the church has been so slow to cast off a pagan conception of God, and to come to a truly Christian view. We can hardly take in Christ's own revelation of God without some sharing in his sympathy for men. Some experience of our own is needed to unlock the revelation. And, so, the steady deepening of the social consciousness, both as to the value of the person and as to the sense of obligation, has certainly helped us to see that if God is to be highest, he must be love, and thus the great servant, with transcendent obligations, entering really and sympathetically into all our life.

(3) _No Divine Arbitrariness._--With such a conception of God, every trace of arbitrariness disappears. Calvinism, however strenuously insisted upon, means a far different thing for any man who really feels the pressure of the modern social consciousness, who has come to some real sense of the value and sacredness of the person, that is, who really sees God in Christ. The great truth of Calvinism, that God is the ultimate source of all, was perhaps never more secure than to-day; but that God, who is the absolute and ultimate source of all, is the fully personal God, whose will is never divorced from his reason and love, who knows no such abstraction as a bare and empty omnipotence without content or direction, but who is himself always living love. The bane of much so-called Calvinism is in this supposition of a fragmentary God, like a motion without direction or rate of speed. Arbitrary decrees are conceivable only from such a fragmentary God, not yet full and complete in his reality and personality.

(4) _The Passibility of God._--It would seem, also, that any vital defense of the Fatherhood of God, required by the social consciousness, involves further the frank admission of the passibility of God, whether it has the look of an ancient heresy or not. We must unhesitatingly admit that, without which God can be no real God to us. "Theology has no falser idea than that of the impassibility of God. If he is capable of sorrow, he is capable of suffering, and were he without the capacity for either he would be without any feeling of the evil of sin or the misery of man. The very truth that comes by Jesus Christ may be said to be summed up in the passibility of God."[110] With the growing sensitiveness of the social consciousness, the problem of suffering and of sin presses increasingly, and itself almost compels the assertion of the passibility of God. Nothing less can satisfy our hearts, nor indeed allow us to keep our reverence for God.

Certainly, with the increasingly clear vision, which the social consciousness is giving us, of sympathetic, unselfish, definitely self-sacrificing, loving leadership even among men, we shall not rest satisfied with less in God. We must have a suffering, seeking, loving God; because our Father, suffering in our sin, bearing as a burden the sin of each, and not satisfied while one child turns away; no mere on-looker, but in all our afflictions, himself afflicted. The cross of Christ, then, is only an honest showing of the actual facts of God's seeking, suffering love.

4. _As to the Doctrine of a Social Trinity._--One inference for theology widely drawn from the social consciousness, it ought in fairness, perhaps, to be said, seems to me unjustified,--the doctrine of a so-called "Social Trinity." One must question the constant cool assumption made in these discussions of a social Trinity, that this view is the only alternative to what is called an "abstract simplicity." In any case, one would suppose, we must have in God all the richness and complexity of a complete personal life, freed from the limitations of finite personality. Something of the much that that involves we have been trying to point out. Here certainly is no "abstract simplicity."