Understanding the ScripturesMcConnell, Francis John
Religion
Understanding the Scriptures
McConnell, Francis John
Bible -- Criticism, interpretation, etc.; Bible -- Study and teaching
scientific notions to obscure the qualitative fineness of the biblical
ideal of God. Modern philosophy comes also and announces that it has a
better God than that of the Scriptures. The most imposing modern
philosophical systems are those which proclaim some form of idealism.
The gist of the idealistic argument always is that the world itself is
nothing apart from thought; that thought-relationships rule in and
through all things; that there are no things-in-themselves; that there
can be no hard-and-fast stuff standing apart from God. Things must come
within the range of thought or go out of existence. There is no
alternative. Now, thought implies a thinker, and this implication
carries us at once to God. Here, again, we have no desire to question
the cogency of the argument. We are ready to admit that this is the
strongest theistic argument that has thus far been built. To be sure,
there are some questions that inevitably suggest themselves: What is
the thinker? Is it impersonal thought, as some have maintained? Is it
just the sum of all forms of consciousness--our consciousnesses being
organs or phases of the Supreme Consciousness? Or is the thinker
strictly personal, carrying on a thought-world by the power of his will
and calling into existence finite thinkers in his own image? Assuming
that the world is the expression of the thought of a Personal Thinker
who acts in the forces of nature and creates men in his own image, the
further question arises as to the character of that Thinker. While
returning the heartiest thanks to the idealist for his argument--full
as it is of aid for the Christian system--we have to protest that the
argument does not lift us to the full height of the ideal of God
inculcated in the Scriptures. And if this is true of the majestic
systems of idealism, how much more is it true of the other and less
convincing systems which are just now having their day! We have already
spoken of pragmatism as possessing validity as a method, but pragmatism
can hardly cherish pretension of being itself a system of religious
philosophy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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