For all the valuable truth that such speech contains, its practical
issue, in many minds today, is to strip God of the last shred of
personality, and with that loss to end the possibility of his being in
earnest about anything. He has become refined Vapor thinly diffused
through space. Folk say they love to meditate on him, and well they
may! For such a god asks nothing of anybody except meditation; he has
no purposes that call for earnestness in them. When little children
are ruined in a city's tenements, when the liquor traffic brutalizes
men, when economic inequity makes many poor that a few may be made
rich, when war clothes the world with unutterable sorrow, such a god
does not care. He is not in earnest about anything. For the only thing
in the universe that can be consciously in earnest is personality, and
when one depersonalizes God, the remainder is a deity who has no love,
no care, no purpose. Thousands do obeisance to such a gaseous idol.
From this fallacy spring such familiar confessions of faith as this,
"God is not a person; he is spirit." If by this negation one intends
to say that God is not a limited individual, that is obviously true;
but _the contrast between personality and spirit is impossible_. One
may as well speak of dry water as of impersonal spirit. Rays of radium
are unimaginably minute and swift, but they are not spirit. Nothing in
the impersonal realm can be conceived so subtle and refined that it is
spirit. Spirit begins only where love and intelligence and purpose
are, and these all are activities of personality. No one can _really_
believe what Jesus said, "God is a Spirit," without being ready to
pray as Jesus prayed, "Our Father."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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