Problems of Immanence: studies critical and constructiveWarschauer, Joseph
Religion
Problems of Immanence: studies critical and constructive
Warschauer, Joseph
Immanence of God
thrilled through and through by one Life, but we are also enabled to
discern something of the august Purpose which progressively realises
itself in all the phases of the cosmic process. That the God revealed
by the universe must transcend the universe in order to be in any real
sense its Creator, is self-evident; but that it is His own Energy which
pervades it, a present Power operating from within--in other words,
that He is immanent in the world, as well as transcendent--is a thought
from which we cannot legitimately escape.
When we speak of the immanence of God in nature, therefore, we mean
principally immanence of Power; and due weight should be given to this
qualification, since its effect is to remove the obstacles we have
enumerated above. For it ought to be plain, though in popular
discussion it is constantly overlooked, that God cannot be _ethically_
present in the unethical, nor _personally_ present in the impersonal.
And here, it seems to us, we go to the root of our present problem,
_viz._, by re-emphasising what is indispensable to a right conception
of this whole doctrine--that immanence is of necessity a matter of
degrees. Nature is not moral, {37} and hence does not reveal God's
moral character to us; nature is not personal, and therefore, while its
operations point with irresistible cogency to personal directivity,
does not show forth the Divine Personality as indwelling.
As soon as we grasp this obvious truth, we shall be led to find the
answer to that question which, as we saw, presents a stumbling-block to
many minds, namely, in what sense it is permissible to affirm the
Divine immanence in the animal world. How can God be in the denizens
of the jungle, we ask, feeling that to make such an statement
concerning Him is to empty the idea of God of all its meaning.
Natural, however, as such reasoning is, reflection will show it to be
faulty. To use a simple, if necessarily imperfect, illustration,
something of man's own being is in all his organs, but not all that
makes him man is in every one of them; certainly, his higher faculties
are not displayed in the organs designed to fulfil the lower functions
of the organism. To proceed to the obvious application--animals are
not moral beings, but act, with the occasional exception of such of
their number as have been humanised by contact with men, from instinct
and not from conscious choice; and for that reason we are not called
upon to reconcile the loving-kindness and tender mercy of God with the
habits and general behaviour of the lower creation. In ascribing all
sorts of moral qualities to animals we simply exhibit the same {38}
tendency which leads children to endow lifeless objects both with life
and purposiveness. Moral attributes, however, whether good or bad,
presuppose conscious choice, a faculty of weighing and if necessary
repelling motives; and with such a faculty we have no reason for
crediting animals. No doubt, our incurable habit of reading the facts
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