08 Gospel of Creation
CHAPTER VIII. THE GOSPEL OF CREATION.
WE have now reached the stage when some attempt must be made to set forth the Christian answer to the question : What is the Good? What is the summum bonum, the ideal of human life and endeavour?
If it be indeed true that man is made in the image of God, and that he can only attain his goal in God Himself, it is clear that the answer to the great question, now more than two thousand years old, is to be found in what God Himself is. We have then to enquire whether we have any reliable knowledge about God. Have we any means of knowing what God is? We have certainly a means of knowing what He is not, a means which we are ready enough to make use of when we hear unworthy thoughts put forward about Him. The ready answer of the moral reason to every unworthy presentation of what God is is this : I will not believe in any God who is not good, in the sense in which the word ’ good ’ can be used of a good man. We must judge anything that claims to be a revelation of the divine by our sense of its moral fitness.
Now we have seen that it was Jesus Christ who brought the relation between the human and the divine into a clear light, revealing a heavenly Fatherhood, and a Sonship of men. But He claimed to do much more than this. He not only taught the relationship of the human to the divine, He claimed to be Himself both human and divine. There are some who deny this, but such denial makes it necessary either to explain away the obvious meaning of plain words, or to suppose that the words of Jesus as given in the gospels were not His words, but claims made for Him by the reverence of a later time. If we accept the gospels as giving on the whole a faithful representation of the life and words of Christ, His claims to divinity are perfectly clear. And certainly the prologue to St. John’s Gospel could not have been written by one who did not hold the divinity of Christ. " In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." " And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth." The words purport to come from one who had himself known the Incarnate Word.
Assuming as I shall here do that St. John the beloved disciple was the author of the fourth gospel, we gather that Jesus not only revealed the Divine Fatherhood but revealed also the Divine Father. " If ye had known me, ye would have known my Father also : from henceforth ye know him and have seen him. Philip saith unto him, Lord shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us. Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long time with you, and dost thou not know me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father ; how sayest thou, shew us the Father? " (St. John 14:9).
Jesus Christ then puts His own life before His disciples as a proof of what He claims to be. He has been long time with them. What then, supposing Him to reveal the Father, must the Divine Father be? When John the Baptist from his prison, as it would seem for the confirmation of his wavering faith that Jesus was the Christ, sent to ask whether He were or not, Jesus sent the two disciples back again with the answer : " Go your way and tell John the things which ye do hear and see : the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good tidings preached to them." [St. Matthew 11:4; Matthew 11:5.] These are all works of love and mercy. And indeed the life of Jesus on earth might be summed up in the words : " He went about doing good." This must have been the impression left on the minds of the disciples that there was absolutely no self-seeking in Him, that His every thought was for others. Even Judas who betrayed Him did so because the service of His Master was not paying. He grudged his Master’s self-sacrifice.
It is no exaggeration to say that the impression got from a study of the Gospel history is that Jesus had no thought for Himself. It is true that in the garden of Gethsemane He prayed earnestly that the cup of suffering might pass from Him, that He might not drink it, but there was no faltering about the fulfilment of the divine purpose for the redemption of the world. Whatever was needful for ’ doing good ’ that He did. In this way did He reveal the Father.
What has just been said will help to throw light on Christ’s answer to the young man enquiring what he was to do to inherit eternal life. After insisting on an observance of the restrictive commandments of God. Jesus told him to go and sell all that he had and give to the poor. Why was this necessary, but because his riches were for him selfishness, self -enjoyment? To enter into the divine life, all self-seeking and selfishness must be left behind. The essential character of God is Love. This was the conclusion come to by St. John after living with Jesus Christ, and after working for Him when the Lord was removed from earth, and after quiet meditation on the meaning of what he had seen and heard. God is Love. The apostle’s life was changed by the knowledge of this truth. And all men whose moral reason is illuminated by the Divine Spirit must conclude : God must be loving if there be any God at all, for otherwise God is not as good as good men, and a God who was not as good as the creatures He has made could not be God at all; He could not be worthy of man’s worship.
God must love His creation, if He be good ; and a God that is not good is a contradiction in terms to the enlightened moral reason. In fact we can see that Christ expressed a far-reaching truth when He said : " None is good, save one, God." There is more in the words than might at first appear. Unless the Good find its perfection in Him, there is no such thing as Good, no such thing as perfection. The words have no steady meaning. We had better cease to talk of these things. But ’ God is Love ’ goes far beyond ’ God is loving.’ The latter only expresses an aspect of His activity, the former expresses His essential character.
God is Love. And yet there is the fact of sin and suffering, and of human misery, to say nothing of the pangs of the brutes and of the whole creation groaning and travailing together in pain now as for long ages past. But what if all the misery and suffering of the world are only the birth-pangs of a great spiritual creation of love and goodness?
There has come to me a thought about God which has transfigured everything. It has illuminated for me the whole record of Revelation. It is a thought about God which is not out of touch with the thoughts of men about nature and about man himself ; a thought which seems to explain the long-sealed mystery of finite will, and to unveil the mystery of sin and suffering. It is a thought about God which contains all that is true in every worthy thought that men have ever had about Him, a thought about God which transfigures all life, a thought about God which is indeed life. It is this :
GOD is A BEING WHOSE EVERY THOUGHT is LOVE, OF WHOSE THOUGHTS NOT ONE IS FOR HlMSELF SAVE so FAR AS HIMSELF is NOT HIMSELF, THAT is, so FAR AS THERE is A DISTINCTION OF PERSONS IN THE GODHEAD. CREATION is ONE GREAT UNSELFISH THOUGHT, THE BRINGING INTO BEING OF CREATURES WHO CAN KNOW THE HAPPINESS WHICH GOD HlMSELF KNOWS.
God has not one selfish thought. If this be true, and I am profoundly convinced that it is, we shall be able to find a clear and unequivocal answer to the problem, What is the highest good for man? That being is perfectly good who finds his own happiness entirely in promoting the good of others. The Good is finding one’s happiness in the promotion of the Good of others. This will seem like defining ’ Good ’ in terms of itself. But this is quite right. There is really no ambiguity. We have here an infinite series which is perfectly intelligible.
God is not good merely because He provides for the happiness of His creatures, but because He provides for them the same happiness He has Himself ; the happiness not of contentment merely, but of that activity which freely and purposively directs itself to promoting in others the same happiness.
We thus get in the summum bonum both a state of happiness and the activity of promoting happiness. In Chapter III. I pointed out that both activity and passivity must find a place in the final answer as to what is the Good. Here we have them both. And we may here note that if this thought about God be true we can see that conscience is indeed the voice of God in the human soul, however imperfectly the voice be heard at each stage of human development. Conscience gives men audience of the divine voice as they are able to receive it. The voice accommodates itself, in God’s infinite wisdom and eternal patience, to every child of man according to the circumstances in which he finds himself. It is a revelation of God’s will for that particular person, and that no arbitrary will. Indeed, the word ’ arbitrary ’ has no meaning as applied to the Perfect Divine Being.
There is thus an element of truth in the extreme, intuitional view of ethics, which maintains that by a special faculty we know intuitively what we ought to do. This is not true, as I have tried to shew, if by it is meant that we cannot see the reason of the demand made by conscience. The reason lies in God’s own unselfish being, and the end is the purging of us from all selfishness that we may become sharers of the divine life and character. But in so far as the conscience makes demands upon us, it is for the suppression of the cosmic self and the bringing out the true spiritual self. And this conception of a Perfect Being of infinite love and self-communication is entirely in accord with the highest demands of the moral reason of man, which to a Christian can appear as nothing short of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit of God. That this illumination of the moral reason could not come to man before Christ came and lived and died, is clear when we reflect that His own life and words are the material on which the moral reason had, as we may put it, to operate.
Moreover, we can see that our day is also a " fulness of the time," when the discoveries of science which have all taken place in Christian countries, however much many professing Christians may have disowned them, and disowned too the alliance of science with the teaching of the Church, have made it necessary that some answer of Revelation should be found to the question : What mean all these things? How is it that the " cosmic process," which is one of self- seeking, and the moral intuitions are opposed? May it not be that pain and suffering are the means whereby that which is natural is in process of becoming spiritual, by which I mean being made to share in the divine life of perfect and absolute love? Even the cosmic sets before us by many illus- trations the beauty of altruism ; but it is the altruism of constraint, and not, till it becomes spiritual, is it the altruism of willing freedom, that altruism which is called in the New Testament Love (agaph).
Nor, as will be seen, does this great thought of God give the least encouragement to sin, nor does it in any way deny the sinfulness of sin. It will be impossible to say : " Let us continue in sin that grace may abound." The New Testament doctrines of justification and sanctification are seen as they could not otherwise be seen, and the forgiveness of sin is seen to be a necessary law of the spiritual, without in any way lessening the sinfulness of sin. That terrible bugbear of free will is removed, when we see the hand of God in every page of history; and the will is really free only when we know that we are instruments in God’s hands, not of His wrath but of His Love, which would make us to share His own Life and Love. The theory of evolution is seen in its sublime beauty, and by welcoming its truth we shall learn to understand better the lesson of Divine love. And every discovery of science will have to be brought to the elucidation of Christian truth. And in this truth of what God is will come the reunion of Christendom, when the self-seeking and self-assertion of men shall be purged out by the discipline of God’s perfect love. The instinct of gratitude, God’s great gift to man and that by which man can return the divine love, will become supreme in man when he recognises, as he must come to do, the infinite benefit God is bestowing upon him; it will overpower and control all other instincts, and God will shew forth the glory of His perfection in the sons of men. But it may be said: All this is very well if the thought is true ; but is it true? Certainly it solves many very serious difficulties that men have hitherto felt weighing them down. In the fifth chapter I tried to set forth the problem of moral philosophy to reconcile the opposition between self-love and love of others. This opposition disappears altogether in the light of this truth about God. There is really no dualism at all. ’ Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself becomes possible of fulfilment. And ’ Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy mind, and with all thy strength ’ becomes a necessity. Who can fail to love so perfect a Being of love and self-communication?
We have all along in Christian history been sup- posing that God had a purpose of love for His creation, but that there was also a further selfish purpose of so-called self-love, whereby the creation was to be made to shew forth His glory and His wisdom. But that He has not one selfish thought, this we have never seen before. But it is true. The very thought is the sign of its truth.
Some will say : Yes, a priori it is ; but does it accord with our knowledge of the creation? What about sin and suffering? Is there no sin? I have already said that in the light of this truth of God sin becomes exceedingly sinful. It is seen in all its hideousness as never before.
According to this belief in God, the creation is one great act of love. No state then which the creature finds to be one not of happiness can be a final state. Suffering is disciplinary. Leaving aside the sufferings of the lower animals and looking only at the sufferings of man, we think of these as intended to purge out the carnal which is selfish and to substitute the spiritual which is according to God’s own character. The scene of human life is a great purgatorium of infinite love, wherein the self of the flesh is being transformed into the self of the spirit, the true self, the self that we hear speaking within us, the self which is divine, for we are all potentially children of God.
I can foresee that some will think this doctrine i( dangerous." If these will reflect upon it the "danger" will vanish.
If God has it for us in store to make us like Him- self with not one selfish thought but finding our perfect happiness in the good of others and this is what the Kingdom of God means then we must suffer, inevitably suffer, nor can we resent the suffering, until the carnal self be wholly eradicated. It is all His work. It is He that is purging us. It is He that prompts us to the acts of self-sacrifice we have to make. And the thought of His infinite love is so overpowering that our instinct of gratitude will, as already said, overpower every other. We simply must respond to His call, the invitation of His love.
It would therefore be wrong and unreasonable to say that this doctrine of God will make men careless. Nor will it, let it be observed, take men out of the world to save their own souls. Monastic life, regarded as a means of saving the individual soul by privation, is seen not to be the means of a true salvation. But if this thought of God be true, why have we not known it before? Because the fulness of time had not come. The great discovery of evolution was necessary to the understanding of this truth, and without the theory of evolution this truth of God is not intelligible at all. Let us try to see how this is.
First let it be clearly stated that the doctrine of evolution is not a denial of divine working. Quite the contrary. Evolution is divine working, but it is working by a method and for an end. There is nothing godless in the doctrine. The whole cosmic process is divine. God is everywhere and in every thing. But the cosmic process has hitherto been seen to be the direct contrary of what is called moral, and the difficulty has been to see how that which was not moral could be the work of a holy God. The explanation would seem to be this. The cosmic process is the evolution of the self. The moral process which is the preliminary to the spiritual is the discipline of the self until it becomes transformed into its true self like to God Himself in character. There is nothing im- moral in the cosmic process in itself ; it is simply non-moral.
Then what is sin? Sin is the resistance of the cosmic to the spiritual, the striving of the " flesh " against the spirit. It is absolutely and utterly alien to the divine character, and can only be seen to be such by those to whom God imparts the knowledge of what He Himself is. There is no sin in the cosmic until moral reason begins, then comes sin when the cosmic fails to respond to the demand of the spiritual. But what about the Fall? On this subject I propose to say something further on in the eleventh chapter. Preconceived notions of how the story of the Fall is to be interpreted must not make us shut our eyes to fuller truth which God would make known to us. The truths made known in Revelation must all be seen in their right perspective, and the truth about God will bring into their proper places all the separate truths the Holy Scriptures contain.
According to the theory of evolution, man is evolved from a lower form of life. In so far as man was a part of the cosmic process, he was a creature of instincts uncontrolled by reason. Nor would the dawn of reason other than moral bring what we call responsibility. Responsibility only comes in when the moral reason begins, because man has then set before him some ideal of what he may become and he knows that he ought to become it. I do not mean by this that man attains at once to a knowledge of the summum, bonum I That of course would be quite absurd, for men are still asking what is the highest Good. But man has some notion of a ’ Good,’ as human language shews ; and the languages of men tell unmistakably, some more than others, of a knowledge of duty and so forth. These things are undeniable. But they are not the same in the savage as in the civilised community; and it is absurd to suppose that when moral reason began in men, it had the fulness of its more developed light. Of course it had not. But man realised gradually, by the slow growth of conscience within him, that self -restriction and self-suppression were expected of him for the good of others. All this was the work of the Divine Spirit, and in so far as He was teaching men the sacrifice of themselves, we may say that it was the work of the Spirit of Holiness. But the gift of the essentially Holy Spirit could not come to men until Jesus Christ had set forth a life of perfect self- sacrifice and perfect love; had, that is, perfectly revealed God and the demands the divine character made upon men. This is the spiritual ideal. To man, who is a moral being, this spiritual ideal makes its appeal, and the appeal made is ever by the operation of the Holy Spirit in men’s hearts. Thus the natural man has become more and more the spiritual man, but not without retrogressions and resistance.
It may be said that all the suffering that has been undergone in the process of evolution is revolting to our moral reason. But it is absurd to speak as if all the sufferings that have ever been endured could be put together as if they were one collective suffering endured by one sentient being. After all the lifetime of any one sentient being is but short, and we know not what happens at death, because we have not passed through it. But we have no reason to suppose that all that has happened in the way of suffering has not in the eternal beyond its counterpart of joy. We can see so little of the process that we are incapable of judging of the whole. We discern the divine perfection in our moral reason, and we believe that the Judge of all the earth must do right. For ourselves, if once we can learn the truth of God’s love love without reserve and without stint we shall welcome suffering when it comes, though we shall not invite it, as the discipline of ourselves into the truer selves, which we cannot but wish to become. That much of the disease and suffering in the world is due to sin, is undeniable, and we do not yet know how much of what we suffer is due to our own selfish- ness and the selfishness of the generations that are past, who have bequeathed to us a heritage of woe as well as of partial goodness. The solidarity of man- kind is a truth that science has made clear to us, and it is of no use to shut our eyes to it. It may well be that there are great discoveries yet to be made which will throw light on the problem of suffering. It may be that we shall come to see how every suffering is a corrective of some self-assertion.
God has not one selfish thought. But what has become of the Holiness of God, if God is essentially Love, self-communicating Love? The answer to this is that in the light of the great truth of what God is, Holiness and Love are seen to be one. Holiness appears as sternness to the natural, carnal man; it is seen as Perfect Love to the spiritual man. "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all." "God is love." "Perfect love casteth out fear." When Holiness comes to be seen by us as Love, the fear of God and the love of God will become one. The sternness of the Old Testament revelation is explained to us when we come to understand that God reveals Himself to men as they are able to receive Him, and that the hard thoughts men have had about God have been a reflection of their own hardness and selfishness.
I have ventured to borrow from elsewhere a phrase to sum up the contents of this chapter. "The Gospel of Creation" is meant to describe, to use Bishop Westcott’s words, that the promise of the Incarnation was included in the creation of man, and that it was independent of the Fall. [See Bishop Westcott’s Essay in his Epistles of St. John.] In borrowing this singularly apt phrase I have not done so to make anyone responsible for the views which I have here expressed.
It has long ago been seen that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity in Unity, though not discovered by reason but seen to be contained in the expressions of Revelation, is demanded by reason, and can therefore be welcomed by reason. A solitary monad it has been recognised could have neither thought nor love. Some distinction of Persons in the Godhead then is needed for the Divine Perfection. But it does not seem to have been sufficiently realised by those who have taken hold of this thought that the relation of the Creation to the Perfect Divine Being is left unexplained. If God be Perfect and Complete in Himself why is there a creation at all? According to Pantheism God is not Perfect and Complete in Himself and creation is a necessary part of the Divine Being. But then of course Pantheism is seen to be unsatisfactory because it makes no proper distinction between good and evil.
Now I cannot but think that this Gospel of Creation seizes what is of the truth in Pantheism and at the same time reconciles the apparent contradiction involved in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. For the truth seems to me to be that while the divine wisdom and power are manifested everywhere in the creation, the creation is not, in its becoming, a reflection of the divine character.
There is a sense in which it is true that "whatever is right." But this aphorism is wholly and hopelessly false if it be taken to mean that there is no such thing as evil in the world. Nor will men ever get free from evil except by learning to call it by its proper name. Evil is the negation of the divine character in beings endowed with moral reason, and is due to the failure of moral beings to respond to the demands of the spiritual upon them. This is the permanent truth contained in the story of the Fall, about which something will be said in a later chapter.
What then according to the Gospel of Creation here set forth is the relation of the Creation to God Himself? Is the Creation necessary?
We have to be careful to understand what we mean by speaking of necessity when we are thinking of the Being or Activity of God. There is as I understand it no necessity at all with God except the necessity of His Own Infinite Perfection. God is conditioned by nothing but by His Own Goodness. There is not a something called Holiness to which God conforms. Holiness is the divine character. To ask whether God could be different from what He is seems to me non-sensical. The creation then, as I understand it, cannot be said to be necessary except so far as it may be a necessary expression of the Divine Perfection. And in this sense I should say that the creation is necessary. It is and I think the thought is intelligible a necessary expression of the Divine Love, necessary, that is, to give satisfaction to that Infinite Love. But it must be borne in mind that the creation if regarded as a necessary thought of Divine Love, a thought not of contemplation only but of ceaseless activity, must not be interpreted as to us it seems. For we are only in the process of becoming, and can only very partially enter into the eternal thought of which it is the expression. The creation, as I under- stand it, is one great thought of love, the bringing into being of creatures who can know the happiness God Himself knows, who can partially enter into the Divine Perfection.
I am aware that human language fails to express the truth about God. Thus I have spoken of " the thoughts of God." But the plural word ’ thoughts ’ suggests succession and so change, whereas the Eternal Being cannot be conceived of as changing. When I say that of God’s thoughts not one is for Himself except so far as Himself is not Himself, I confess that I am using human language where it is inadequate, but it conveys to my own mind a truth which I desire to commend to others.
What we call the thoughts of God are only parts, of our making, of one great thought. But we are lost through inability to grasp this stupendous thought. We must acknowledge, and with profound humility, the divine incomprehensibleness. The Gospel of Creation does not, it must be acknowledged, solve the problem of the relation of this earth of ours to the other parts of the great and apparently infinite universe. But though our earth is but a speck of dust in comparison with the whole, we know well within ourselves that we have the promise of a far higher destiny than anything this earth can give us. Yet it is for the time being the scene and the means of our discipline. For my own part I believe that nothing material avails anything except as the means whereby persons made in the divine image can come to know one another, and collectively come to know Him who has made us all to be sharers in the Divine Life and Character of Holiness and Love manifested forth in Infinite Wisdom.