The Churches and Modern Thought: An inquiry into the grounds of unbelief and an appeal for candourPhelips, Vivian
Religion
The Churches and Modern Thought: An inquiry into the grounds of unbelief and an appeal for candour
Phelips, Vivian
Rationalism
As ages roll on, God's attributes--or rather, we should say, the
attributes given Him by man--are continually altering. All that the
early gods demanded was fear and worship. Even the Jehovah of the Jews
asked at first little else than this. Anthropomorphic conceptions of
God are now admitted by the cultured to be a thing of the past. Do
they not, however, still survive when human emotions, such as love
and anger, happiness and sorrow, are attributed to the Deity? We
acknowledge God to be infinite, and, consequently, incomprehensible by
finite minds; yet we imagine and attempt to argue that He possesses
the same qualities--those we most admire--as ourselves! "How can
we believe in a personal God?" asks the Rationalist. "A person
must have limitations, or he ceases to be a person." However, we
must not forget that in philosophy and theology the word "person"
simply implies "a nature endowed with consciousness," and does not
involve limits. Demurring to this definition, there still remains
another difficulty. In all our experience and knowledge, emotions
and intelligence are connected with nerve structures; how, then,
can we attribute these qualities to a Being who is described to us
as devoid of any nerve structure? I know of no answer that could be
called satisfactory from a Theistic standpoint.
In the previous section we considered the doctrine of final
causes. This doctrine, as Spinoza points out, [206] "does away with
the perfection of God; for, if God acts for an object, He necessarily
desires something which He lacks." The Theist goes a step further than
the mere teleologist, and insists on a benevolent purpose throughout
nature. Is he, then, oblivious to Spinoza's objection? No, he is not;
and therefore it is that he struggles to save his personal God by an
infinite extension of the limits of His personality. In fine, Theism,
in the hands of its modern advocates, and in spite of the seeming
orthodoxy of the phrase, "Divine Immanence," is often nothing less
than another form of Pantheism.
DIVINE IMMANENCE IN NATURE.
The Church's great philosopher to-day, the Rev. J. R. Illingworth,
D.D., argues [207] that "Divine Immanence in Nature" excludes
Pantheism--the belief that God is merely immanent in nature--as well
as Deism and Monism, while it harmonises with Trinitarianism. We are to
"conceive of God as at once transcending and immanent in nature." [208]
He admits that "this relationship may be incomprehensible," [209] but
states that "we know it in our own case to be a fact." [210] Afterwards
he puts the question, "Is the universe His body or His work?" [211] and
proceeds to explain that the Trinitarian conception of God furnishes,
or helps to furnish, an answer to this question. "It is," he maintains,
"intellectually the most satisfactory." [212] It apparently is so to
certain subtle and biassed intellects; but the question is, Is it so,
will it ever be so, to the average mortal?
A FACT IN HISTORY.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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