Problems of Immanence: studies critical and constructiveWarschauer, Joseph
Religion
Problems of Immanence: studies critical and constructive
Warschauer, Joseph
Immanence of God
The attitude of Christianity to our question is perfectly clear.
Christianity, in teaching each frailest, poorest human unit to address
God as Father, affirms in unmistakeable accents the Eternal's personal
interest in and care for the individual soul, and by so doing ennobles
every human life that falls under the sway of the Gospel. It is
Christianity's master-thought that to the Father from whom all
fatherhood is named each one of His children is personally dear, and
that His desire is for the salvation of each one. To the cheap and
ugly sneer that God has a "queer way" of manifesting His concern for us
as individuals, the Christian consciousness has its own answer; how, in
any case, such a sneer could come from the same source from which we
previously quoted the statement that "nothing can happen to any of
God's children which is not in some way the sacrament of God's love to
us," we do not profess to understand. We are not mere individual
organ-stops, each without use or significance apart from the rest,
waiting for our mutual dissonances to be swallowed up in some "music of
the whole," but members of a family, each with a place in the Parent's
heart and thought. Finally, to the Christian there is one last, {73}
crowning proof of the soul's value for God, and God's yearning for the
soul; that proof is Calvary. To the Christian there is one experience
which settles this problem fully and finally for him; it is the
experience which Paul embodied in the cry, "He loved me, and gave
Himself for me."
For Monism the individual is a mere surface ripple on an infinite
ocean, alike impermanent and impersonal; for Christianity the soul is a
child of the Father of all souls, loved with an everlasting love.
Between these two conceptions we have to choose, remembering that each
utterly excludes the other. There is no third alternative.
{74}
CHAPTER V
THE DIVINE PERSONALITY
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