Systematic Theology (Volume 1 of 3)Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Religion
Systematic Theology (Volume 1 of 3)
Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Baptists -- Doctrines; Theology, Doctrinal
It has been charged that the doctrine of monism necessarily
involves moral indifference; that the divine presence in all
things breaks down all distinctions of rank and makes each thing
equal to every other; that the evil as well as the good is
legitimated and consecrated. Of pantheistic monism all this is
true,—it is not true of ethical monism; for ethical monism is the
monism that recognizes the ethical fact of personal intelligence
and will in both God and man, and with these God’s purpose in
making the universe a varied manifestation of himself. The worship
of cats and bulls and crocodiles in ancient Egypt, and the
deification of lust in the Brahmanic temples of India, were
expressions of a non-ethical monism, which saw in God no moral
attributes, and which identified God with his manifestations. As
an illustration of the mistakes into which the critics of monism
may fall for lack of discrimination between monism that is
pantheistic and monism that is ethical, we quote from Emma Marie
Caillard: “Integral parts of God are, on monistic premises, liars,
sensualists, murderers, evil livers and evil thinkers of every
description. Their crimes and their passions enter intrinsically
into the divine experience. The infinite Individual in his
wholeness may reject them indeed, but none the less are these evil
finite individuals constituent parts of him, even as the twigs of
a tree, though they are not the tree, and though the tree
transcends any or all of them, are yet constituent parts of it.
Can he whose universal consciousness includes and defines all
finite consciousnesses be other than responsible for all finite
actions and motives?”
To this indictment we may reply in the words of Bowne, The Divine
Immanence, 130-133—“Some weak heads have been so heated by the new
wine of immanence as to put all things on the same level, and make
men and mice of equal value. But there is nothing in the
dependence of all things on God to remove their distinctions of
value. One confused talker of this type was led to say that he had
no trouble with the notion of a divine man, as he believed in a
divine oyster. Others have used the doctrine to cancel moral
differences; for if God be in all things, and if all things
represent his will, then whatever is is right. But this too is
hasty. Of course even the evil will is not independent of God, but
lives and moves and has its being in and through the divine. But
through its mysterious power of selfhood and self-determination
the evil will is able to assume an attitude of hostility to the
divine law, which forthwith vindicates itself by appropriate
reactions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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