Theology and the Social Consciousness: A Study of the Relations of the Social Consciousness to Theology (2nd ed.)King, Henry Churchill
Religion
Theology and the Social Consciousness: A Study of the Relations of the Social Consciousness to Theology (2nd ed.)
King, Henry Churchill
Christian sociology; Theology, Doctrinal -- History -- 20th century
(3) _The Unity and Unchangeableness of God._--And, once more, if God
is always the completely personal God, we shall conceive his own unity
not as monotonous self-identity, but only as consistency of meaning.
We shall not, therefore, transfer to God, pluming ourselves meanwhile
upon a highly philosophical view, the mechanical unchangeableness of a
rock; but we shall be rather concerned with the consistency of his
character and the unchangeableness of his loving will, which would be
the very reasons for his changing, adapting attitude toward his
changing children. From this point of view, too, the sphere of law and
the sphere of the actual, will seem to us, necessarily, to root in the
sphere of the ideal; the _is_ and the _must_, to rest in the _ought_;
though we may not hope to trace the connections in detail. In a God,
then, who is a completely harmonious person, never acting in
fragmentary fashion, whose will and whose reason and whose love are
never at cross purposes--only in such a God can the world find its
adequate and unifying source. The world itself has real unity only in
so far as it is the expression of the consistency of meaning of the
purpose of God concerning it.
And this same thought of the consistency of the meaning of the purpose
of God, I have elsewhere argued,[107] saves us from the necessity of a
self-contradictory conception of the miraculous or supernatural, by
its recognition of the dominant spiritual order. It also enables us to
see, with Professor Nash, if the word personal is given sufficient
breadth, that "the true supernatural is the personal, and wheresoever
the personal is discovered, whether in the life of conscience or the
life of reason, whether in Israel or Greece, there the supernatural is
discovered. Upon this conception of the supernatural as the personal,
apologetics must found the claims of Christianity. The divine and the
human personality stand within 'Nature,' that is, within the total of
being. But they both, the human as well as the divine, transcend the
scope and reach of visible Nature."[108]
(4) _The Limitations of the Conception of Immanence._--Indeed, it
ought to be clearly recognized on all sides by those who believe in
religion at all, that we cannot so exclusively emphasize the immanence
of God, as many are now doing, and have a God at all, beyond the
finite manifestations. When the matter is so conceived, there is no
real personal God with whom there can be any personal communion.
Religion, thus, in any ordinary sense of it, is by this process made
simply impossible; Positivism is the only logical result, and Frederic
Harrison becomes the one sole, clear-sighted prophet among us, a lone
voice crying in the wilderness. Such an outcome is possible for any,
because, and in so far as, they are not true to the social
consciousness in its demand for the completely personal God, who, in
Martineau's language, is a genuinely "free spirit."[109]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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