Systematic Theology (Volume 1 of 3)Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Religion
Systematic Theology (Volume 1 of 3)
Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Baptists -- Doctrines; Theology, Doctrinal
Pope wrote: “All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body
nature is and God the soul.” But Case, Physical Realism, 193,
replies: “Not so. Nature is to God as works are to a man; and as
man’s works are not his body, so neither is nature the body of
God.” Matthew Arnold, On Heine’s Grave: “What are we all but a
mood, A single mood of the life Of the Being in whom we exist, Who
alone is all things in one?” Hovey, Studies, 51—“Scripture
recognizes the element of truth in pantheism, but it also teaches
the existence of a world of things, animate and inanimate, in
distinction from God. It represents men as prone to worship the
creature more than the Creator. It describes them as sinners
worthy of death ... moral agents.... It no more thinks of men as
being literally parts of God, than it thinks of children as being
parts of their parents, or subjects as being parts of their king.”
A. J. F. Behrends: “The true doctrine lies between the two
extremes of a crass dualism which makes God and the world two
self-contained entities, and a substantial monism in which the
universe has only a phenomenal existence. There is no identity of
substance nor division of the divine substance. The universe is
eternally dependent, the product of the divine _Word_, not simply
_manufactured_. Creation is primarily a spiritual act.” Prof.
George M. Forbes: “Matter exists in subordinate dependence upon
God; spirit in coördinate dependence upon God. The body of Christ
was Christ externalized, made manifest to sense-perception. In
apprehending matter, I am apprehending the mind and will of God.
This is the highest sort of reality. Neither matter nor finite
spirits, then, are mere phenomena.”
3. It assigns no sufficient cause for that fact of the universe which is
highest in rank, and therefore most needs explanation, namely, the
existence of personal intelligences. A substance which is itself
unconscious, and under the law of necessity, cannot produce beings who are
self-conscious and free.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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