Systematic Theology (Volume 2 of 3)Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Religion
Systematic Theology (Volume 2 of 3)
Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Baptists -- Doctrines; Theology, Doctrinal
Upton, Hibbert Lectures, chap. 2—“In the very making of souls of
his own essence and substance, and in the vacating of his own
causality in order that men may be free, God already dies in order
that they may live. God withdraws himself from our wills, so as to
make possible free choice and even possible opposition to himself.
Individualism admits dualism but not complete division. Our
dualism holds still to underground connections of life between man
and man, man and nature, man and God. Even the physical creation
is ethical at heart: each thing is dependent on other things, and
must serve them, or lose its own life and beauty. The branch must
abide in the vine, or it withers and is cut off and burned” (275).
Swedenborg held to emanation,—see Divine Love and Wisdom, 283,
303, 905—“Every one who thinks from clear reason sees that the
universe is not created from nothing.... All things were created
out of a substance.... As God alone is substance in itself and
therefore the real _esse_, it is evidence that the existence of
things is from no other source.... Yet the created universe is not
God, because God is not in time and space.... There is a creation
of the universe, and of all things therein, by continual
mediations from the First.... In the substances and matters of
which the earths consist, there is nothing of the Divine in
itself, but they are deprived of all that is divine in itself....
Still they have brought with them by continuation from the
substance of the spiritual sum that which was there from the
Divine.” Swedenborgianism is “materialism driven deep and clinched
on the inside.” This system reverses the Lord’s prayer; it should
read: “As on earth, so in heaven.” He disliked certain sects, and
he found that all who belonged to those sects were in the hells,
condemned to everlasting punishment. The truth is not
materialistic emanation, as Swedenborg imagined, but rather divine
energizing in space and time. The universe is God’s system of
graded self-limitation, from matter up to mind. It has had a
beginning, and God has instituted it. It is a finite and partial
manifestation of the infinite Spirit. Matter is an expression of
spirit, but not an emanation from spirit, any more than our
thoughts and volitions are. Finite spirits, on the other hand, are
differentiations within the being of God himself, and so are not
emanations from him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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