Systematic Theology (Volume 1 of 3)Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Religion
Systematic Theology (Volume 1 of 3)
Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Baptists -- Doctrines; Theology, Doctrinal
Seth, Ethical Principles, 440—“Hegel conceived the superiority of
his system to Spinozism to lie in the substitution of Subject for
Substance. The true Absolute must contain, instead of abolishing,
relations; the true Monism must include, instead of excluding,
Pluralism. A One which, like Spinoza’s Substance, or the Hegelian
Absolute, does not enable us to think the Many, cannot be the true
One—the unity of the Manifold.... Since evil exists, Schopenhauer
substituted for Hegel’s Panlogism, which asserted the identity of
the rational and the real, a blind impulse of life,—for absolute
Reason he substituted a reasonless Will”—a system of practical
pessimism. Alexander, Theories of Will, 5—“Spinoza recognized no
distinction between will and intellectual affirmation or denial.”
John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 1:107—“As there is no
reason in the conception of pure space why any figures or forms,
lines, surfaces, solids, should arise in it, so there is no reason
in the pure colorless abstraction of Infinite Substance why any
world of finite things and beings should ever come into existence.
It is the grave of all things, the productive source of nothing.”
Hegel called Schelling’s Identity or Absolute “the infinite night
in which all cows are black”—an allusion to Goethe’s Faust, part
2, act 1, where the words are added: “and cats are gray.” Although
Hegel’s preference of the term Subject, instead of the term
Substance, has led many to maintain that he believed in a
personality of God distinct from that of man, his over-emphasis of
the Idea, and his comparative ignoring of the elements of Love and
Will, leave it still doubtful whether his Idea was anything more
than unconscious and impersonal intelligence—less materialistic
than that of Spinoza indeed, yet open to many of the same
objections.
We object to this system as follows:
1. Its idea of God is self-contradictory, since it makes him infinite, yet
consisting only of the finite; absolute, yet existing in necessary
relation to the universe; supreme, yet shut up to a process of
self-evolution and dependent for self-consciousness on man; without
self-determination, yet the cause of all that is.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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