God, the Invisible KingWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Religion
God, the Invisible King
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
God (Christianity)
But current Christianity, modern developments of Islam, much Indian
theological thought--that, for instance, which has found such delicate
and attractive expression in the devotional poetry of Rabindranath
Tagore--has long since abandoned this anthropomorphic insistence upon
a body. From the earliest ages man’s mind has found little or no
difficulty in the idea of something essential to the personality, a soul
or a spirit or both, existing apart from the body and continuing after
the destruction of the body, and being still a person and an individual.
From this it is a small step to the thought of a person existing
independently of any existing or pre-existing body. That is the idea
of theological Christianity, as distinguished from the Christianity
of simple faith. The Triune Persons--omnipresent, omniscient, and
omnipotent--exist for all time, superior to and independent of matter.
They are supremely disembodied. One became incarnate--as a wind eddy
might take up a whirl of dust. . . . Those who profess modern
religion conceive that this is an excessive abstraction of the idea
of spirituality, a disembodiment of the idea of personality beyond the
limits of the conceivable; nevertheless they accept the conception that
a person, a spiritual individual, may be without an ordinary mortal
body. . . . They declare that God is without any specific body, that he
is immaterial, that he can affect the material universe--and that means
that he can only reach our sight, our hearing, our touch--through the
bodies of those who believe in him and serve him.
His nature is of the nature of thought and will. Not only has he, in his
essence, nothing to do with matter, but nothing to do with space. He is
not of matter nor of space. He comes into them. Since the period when
all the great theologies that prevail to-day were developed, there have
been great changes in the ideas of men towards the dimensions of time
and space. We owe to Kant the release from the rule of these ideas as
essential ideas. Our modern psychology is alive to the possibility of
Being that has no extension in space at all, even as our speculative
geometry can entertain the possibility of dimensions--fourth, fifth, Nth
dimensions--outside the three-dimensional universe of our experience.
And God being non-spatial is not thereby banished to an infinite
remoteness, but brought nearer to us; he is everywhere immediately at
hand, even as a fourth dimension would be everywhere immediately at
hand. He is a Being of the minds and in the minds of men. He is in
immediate contact with all who apprehend him. . . .
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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