Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation,: 10th Edition, 1890
Religion
Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation,: 10th Edition, 1890
Christianity; Incarnation
This doctrine of the omnipresence of God, as conceived by religion,
had however yet to be fused with the philosophical doctrine of
immanence. And here again the fusion was effected by the Christian
doctrine of God, as Trinity in Unity. The earlier Apologists concern
themselves first with the vindication of the Divine attributes. God's
separateness from the world as against Greek Pantheism, His
omnipresence in it as against a Judaising deism. But the union of
God's transcendence with His immanence, and with it the fusion of the
religious with the philosophic idea of God, is only consciously
completed by the Doctrine of the Trinity[124]. The dying words of
Plotinus, expressing as they did the problem of his life, are said to
have been,--'I am striving to bring the God which is within into
harmony with the God which is in the universe.' And the unsolved
problem of Neo-Platonism, which is also the unsolved problem of
non-Christian philosophy in our day, is met by the Christian doctrine
of God. All and more than all that philosophy and science can demand,
as to the immanence of reason in the universe, and the rational
coherence of all its parts, is included in the Christian teaching:
nothing which religion requires as to God's separateness from the
world, which He has made, is left unsatisfied. The old familiar Greek
term ΛΟΓΟΣ which, from the days of Heracleitus, had meant to the
Greek the rational unity and balance of the world, is taken up by
S. John, by S. Clement, by S. Athanasius, and given a meaning which
those who started from the Philonian position never reached. It is the
personal Word, God of God, the Only Begotten of the Father, who is one
in the Holy Spirit with the Father. 'The Word was God.' 'By Him all
things were made.' 'He the All-powerful, All-holy Word of the Father
spreads His power over all things everywhere, enlightening things seen
and unseen, holding and binding all together in Himself. Nothing is
left empty of His presence, but to all things and through all,
severally and collectively, He is the giver and sustainer of life....
He, the Wisdom of God, holds the universe like a lute, and keeps all
things in earth and air and heaven in tune together. He it is Who
binding all with each, and ordering all things by His will and
pleasure, produces the perfect unity of nature, and the harmonious
reign of law. While He abides unmoved for ever with the Father, He yet
moves all things by His own appointment according to the Father's
will[125].' The unity of nature is, thus, no longer the abstract
motionless simplicity of Being, which had been so powerless to explain
the metaphysical problems of Greece. It is the living Omnipresent
Word, coeternal and consubstantial with the Father, and the
philosophical truth becomes an integral part of that Christian
doctrine of God, which, while it safeguarded religion and satisfied
reason, had won its first and greatest victories in the field of
morals.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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