015. REVELATION INVOLVES SELF-LIMITATION

REVELATION INVOLVES SELF-LIMITATION Not only personality, but Trinity also, is an element of the divine perfection. But the distinctions of the Trinity involve limitation. God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; not two persons, or four, but three. The intercommunion and life of the Godhead, God’s security from loneliness and dependence, God’s sovereignty and freedom, all are bound up with his triune existence. God would not be more perfect, but less perfect, if he were not triune. And yet this triunity is. a sort of limitation.

Righteousness is necessary to perfection. But righteousness involves limitation. God cannot be both truth and untruth; but exclusion of untruth is limitation. God cannot be both purity and impurity; but exclusion of impurity is limitation. What sort of a God is the God of the pantheist, of whom all things are equally manifestations, the lower as well as the higher, vice as well as virtue, cruelty as well as kindness, falsehood as well as truth? Would God be more perfect if he were evil as well as good? He who thus blackens the character of God has really no God. Pantheism is practical atheism. And yet to save ourselves from this, we must admit that the very perfection of God’s nature limits him to the good—that is, God’s perfection is inseparable from limitation.

Let us take one step farther now, and consider that any revelation of this perfect Being, or any act looking toward such revelation, must involve a j^-limitation on the part of God. As God’s perfection involves limitation, so God’s revelation involves self-limitation. The fact that this limitation is voluntary, self-chosen, not the result of compulsion from without, but, on the contrary, proceeding from free-will within, renders it perfectly consistent with God’s independence and blessedness. Personality, trinity, righteousness, these are consistent with perfection, because they are also limitations from within. But these are constitutional limitations. In these respects, God cannot be other than he is. Revelation is a limitation from within of a different kind; it is a limitation proceeding from deliberate choice, and therefore a manifestation of the greatest power, even God’s power over himself.

James Martineau has well said that " when the Infinite reveals itself it must limit itself in space and time, must adopt an order of successive steps; in other words, there must be a self-abnegation of Infinity, and this is the only way in which Infinity can reveal itself." In the very decree to create, we would add—God’s decree, framed in eternity past—there is self-limitation, the choice of one plan out of many, the narrowing down of abstract omniscience and omnipotence to a single definite scheme. In the act of creation there is self-limitation; God admits a universe side by side with himself, free creatures side by side with his freedom. To every thoughtful child the question has probably at some time occurred: "Would not God be greater if he included me and the world in himself, instead of being outside of us?" And the answer is: "God has parted with his privilege of sole and only existence in order that he may give room for other things and other beings; but this limitation is no derogation to his greatness, because it is j^-limitation. And so the preservation of the things he has created involves a continual self-limitation on the part of God. He upholds them by the word of his power, and but for his forbearing to destroy —aye, but for his free consent and co-operation—they would sink again into nothingness. As we pass on, let us not fail to notice that this selflimitation on the part of God, this distinction of himself from other beings, is the very condition of our knowing him. Knowing is distinguishing; I cannot know anything except as I distinguish it from something else. If God were in no way limited, if he were "the All," then no knowledge of him would be possible. Herbert Spencer conceives that God will be more perfect if he is without marks or limitations; and since it is plain that what is without marks or limitations cannot be known, he calls God the Inscrutable Reality. But in trying to divest God of limitation in one way, he imposes limitation upon him in another. The impossibility of making one’s self known is the greatest of limitations. A God so shut up within himself would be no God at all. In the early life of Dr. John Duncan, of Edinburgh, that eminent scholar whose unique personality was such a force in the recent theological history of Scotland, there were two turning-points upon which depended all that followed. The first was the evening when, after [ long wandering in the frightful darkness of unbelief, he at last became convinced that there was a God, and, as he himself said, he "danced for joy upon the brig o’ Dee." The second was the time when, after equally anxious pondering, the wonderful truth flashed upon his mind that "God wants us to know him." It was a wonderful truth indeed. God wants us to know him, wants this so much that he has subjected himself to limitation. He has narrowed himself down in order to reveal himself to free creatures. Let us remember that the creation of free beings involves the possibility that freedom will be abused; the development of the highest virtue is inseparable from probation, temptation, a possible fall from virtue into the depths of misery and sin. For a holy being to create a universe in prospect of sin, and to administer a universe in spite of constant opposition to his will, is an act and process of selflimitation, the significance of which it is difficult for us to measure.

Many years ago, in the lecture room of President Woolsey, of Yale College, a young man who did not know his lesson ventured to make a mock recitation and to give an impertinent answer. The president was a man of fiery temper, though it had been curbed and subdued by the discipline of years. On this occasion his face turned white; he bowed his head upon the desk before him. There was a half-minute’s silence like the silence of death; he raised his head, called upon another man, and the recitation went on. He knew that if he spoke to the offender he would speak too much, so he said nothing. The students of that class knew well what a lava-flood was pent up there. Self-repression did not seem to them a sign of weakness—it was the greatest evidence of power. Shall we call it a sign of weakness in God that he bears with the sins of men, the manifold and multitudinous transgressions with which they insult his holiness and hurl defiance at his law? When God humbles himself to behold and to forbear, shall we not see in this voluntary self-limitation one of the proofs of his greatness?

If God would reveal himself, he must not only create and govern, but he must also educate. You cannot put the knowledge of God into men’s minds at a stroke. Teaching is a long process. Finite beings at the very best need to begin with the simplest elements, the alphabet and the multiplication table; only later on can they reach upward to the higher learning. And when finite beings are also sinful beings there is a dullness that requires line upon line, precept upon precept. The individual and the race will not learn at all unless they are taught by pictures and by object lessons. As the German Herder once said: "The limitations of the pupil are the limitations also of the teacher." God is a teacher, and the teacher must condescend to dull minds, and must have endless patience with them. This was one of the griefs of Christ, the holding back what he would fain communicate because of the low intellectual and moral state of his disciples. What a tone of sorrow there is in his words: "I have many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now." Is this self-limitation on the part of God a sign of imperfection in him, or is it a sign of the highest nobility and greatness? Let the answer be given in a parable. A burly ruffian on the street was seen dragging along his little daughter and cursing her at every step, because her fainting and trembling feet could not keep up with his giant stride. The brute thought it beneath his dignity to moderate his pace to accommodate a child. Shall this be called greatness, and shall that father be accused of weakness and of inability to go at a faster rate who graduates his own steps to the steps of his child? Let us find our answer in the multitude of mothers who delight in adapting themselves to the infantile capacities of their children and who, in bearing with their thoughtlessness and wrongheadedness, evince a greatness of soul which furnishes us with one of our best images of the divine. If earthly parents are considerate, the heavenly Father, we may be sure, will be much more so. In order to give us the knowledge of himself, he will come down to our weak human speech, will use poor human words, will clothe his great thoughts in earthly symbols—and this is inspiration. He will conduct the education of the race by successive stages, giving truth in germ at the first, enlarging his revelation as men are prepared to receive it— and this is history. Is not this subjection of himself to the conditions of revelation, this adapting of his infinity to the finite and the sinful, a glory and an honor to his name?

Perfection involves limitation ; revelation involves selflimitation. So far we have gone. Consider finally that redemption involves an infinite self-limitation. For we now come upon a fact far more important than any which we have hitherto contemplated, the fact of God’s love. Love is essentially self-sacrificing, and the selfsacrifice of love is the highest and noblest form of selflimitation. And if we are asked, how great this selflimitation will be in God? we can only answer: As great as God’s love and as great as the need of its exercise. If the love is infinite and the need is infinite, then the sacrificial self-limitation will be infinite also. An infinite self-limitation is not only possible, but necessary, when "deep calleth unto deep," the boundless deep of man’s sin and guilt to the boundless deep of God’s love and mercy.