036. GOD IMMANENT IN THE SOUL

GOD IMMANENT IN THE SOUL Our generation is coming to recognize God’s immanence in the soul, as well as in nature. As nature is throbbing with life because God is in the molecular as well as in the molar masses of the universe, so humanity is throbbing with life because humanity lives, moves, and has its being in God. The germs of this conception are found in all great Christian thinkers. How impossible it is to regard Augustine as ignorant of the immanent God when we hear him crying: "I could not be, O my God, could not be at all, wert thou not in me; rather, were not I in thee, of whom are all things, by whom are all things, in whom are all things." Here is a natural union with God which is irrespective of human choice, and which is antecedent to the moral and spiritual union which is mediated by faith and of which Augustine speaks in that other more familiar utterance: "O God, thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless until it find rest in thee." Luther’s friends wrote despairingly of the negotiations connected with the Diet of Worms. But the great Reformer wrote back from Coburg that he had been looking up at the night sky, spangled and studded with stars. He had found no pillars to hold them up, yet they did not fall. God needed no props for his planets and suns, but hung them upon nothing. So Luther concluded that the unseen is prop enough for the seen, and that behind all the decisions of men are the will and power and life of God. The theology of fifty years ago did not so much deny God’s immanence as it forgot God’s immanence. It emphasized the other side of the truth and let this side go by default. It was individualistic and ignored the fact of solidarity. Similarly we think of the continents and islands of our globe as disjoined from one another. The dissociable sea is regarded as an absolute barrier between them. But if the ocean could be dried, we should see that all the while there had been submarine connections, and the hidden unity of all lands would appear. So the individuality of human beings, real as it is, is not the only reality. There is a profounder fact of common life. Even the great mountainpeaks of personality are superficial distinctions, compared with the organic oneness in which they are rooted, into which they all dip down, and from which, like volcanoes, they receive at times quick and overflowing impulses of insight, emotion, and energy.

I have said that our half-century has, first of all, rediscovered the immanent God. Now, secondly, I would say it has discovered that this immanent God is Christ. We have become familiar with the phrase, "the larger Christ." I wish to avail myself of the phrase without adopting any of the doctrinal connotations which have so often accompanied it. I wish simply to point out that our later theology has, as never before since the times of the apostles, identified the Christ of the incarnation with the Logos of God, through whom and unto whom all things were made and in whom all things consist. A recent writer has said that Christ is "the frankness of God." But this is only a faint echo of of the Scripture: "No man hath seen God at any time: the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him." Modern theology sees in Christ not merely the Man of sorrows who lived and died and rose again in Palestine, but also the one and only principle of divine expression, the one outgoing and revealing agency in the nature of God. In other words, while the transcendent and unknowable God is the Father, the immanent and revealed God is Christ.

We owe to what has been called "the new theology" in this country, in spite of its wrong applications of the principle, a conception of Christ’s larger relations, to which both the main divisions of recent German theology are strangers. And as a valuable side-light is thrown upon our subject from across the sea, let me briefly refer to the views of Christ held by Ritschl and by Pfleiderer respectively, the two leaders of German theological thought,—the one living and the other dead. Pfleiderer bases his theology upon the philosophy of Hegel. Like Strauss and Baur, Beidermann and Lipsius, he emphasizes the ideal Christ; he declares that historical facts cannot be the ground of faith; he denies miracle; his Christ is a phantom in the air; only the conception of a perfect humanity is needful to save. While Pfleiderer emphasizes the ideal Christ, Ritschl emphasizes the historical Christ. But this historical Christ is only historical. As Matthew Arnold said, so Ritschl might say of Christ:

Now he is dead! Far hence he lies In the lorn Syrian town; And on his grave, with shining eyes, The Syrian stars look down. A dead Christ, and a Christ far away; a Christ who influences us by his remembered teachings and example, just as other great men of the past rule us from their urns—this is the historical Christ whom Ritschl presents for our acceptance. Between the historical Christ of Ritschl and the ideal Christ of Pfleiderer there is not much to choose, for they both ignore the living Christ who is present in every believer.

How far beyond all this is the conception of our later English and American theology! This adoringly acknowledges that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever; that he is with his people alway even unto the end of the world ; that he is in them, the hope of glory and the power of an endless life. It recognizes in him the eternal Word, who not only was before Abraham, but in the beginning was with God and was God, the personal object of the Father’s love before the foundation of the world. He was the pillar of cloud that led Israel through the sea; his voice thundered forth the law on Mt. Sinai; he was the spiritual rock that followed his people in the desert. There was a pre-incarnate activity of Christ even among the heathen; nowhere did he leave himself without a witness; he is the Light that lighteth every man. And even now, in history, art, science, literature, the seeing eye can discern the inner movement of the omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent Christ, bringing life and order out of warring and dead humanity even as at the beginning his creative Spirit brooded upon chaos and brought forth forms of life and beauty.

I can only hint in passing at the immense practical advantage of this revived New Testament doctrine, that Christ is the immanent God. The suffering of the cross has new meaning when we realize that the life that was there poured forth for our salvation was the same Life that ebbs and flows in mighty tides on the far shores of the universe; and the power of Christ to save the individual sinner and to accomplish the world’s redemption is newly apprehended when we see that he who sends forth laborers to the harvest is the same Christ’s Method Is Evolution Being whose will is the inmost force of nature and of history. But I must hasten to add to these two truths, that God is immanent and that this immanent God is Christ, a third truth which the theology of our half-century has rescued from neglect, this namely, that Christ’s method is the method of evolution. Evolution has ceased to have terrors for us since it has been seen to be not an agent but a method, and to be the method of the immanent Christ. As gravitation, or God’s rule in space, yielded up its sceptre to Christ, so evolution, or God’s rule in time, has yielded up its sceptre also to him. The passion for reality which inspires our generation is no longer content with legal fictions and arbitrary interventions and phenomenal manifestations. It wants consistency and law, at the same time that it has personality and freedom. All this it has when it recognizes the method of the immanent Christ to be the method of growth, the starting from the lowest round of the ladder in order to reach the highest, the beginning with a mere germ, but a germ capable of endless unfolding. Evolution does not exclude design when we once see in it the method by which the Son of God has been imparting his own life and so manifesting the Father.

Law is only the method of freedom, the regular operation of personal life. It not only does not imply necessity, but it implies its opposite. I may choose to do a thing repeatedly, but my choice so to do is no less free. Kant well compared the liberty of determinism to the liberty of a turn-spit which revolves of itself only when it is wound up. But if every operation of nature is due to a supernatural Will, there is no longer any lack of power to work miracle or to push forward the history of life. Not natural law in the spiritual world, but spiritual law in the natural world, is true formula. And so the long struggle between science and faith is ended,—they are but opposite sides or aspects of the same thing. To use the words of Beidermann: "Everything is miracle,—therefore faith sees God everywhere; nothing is miracle,—therefore science sees God nowhere."

It is possible to interpret the universe in terms of naturalism, because science looks only at events and their sequences. But it is also not only possible but necessary to interpret the universe in terms of spiritualism, because faith sees in each event and sequence the manifestation of an all-wise mind and an all-powerful will. And this all-wise mind and this all-powerful will are the mind and will of Christ. Evolution is only his going forth from everlasting. Creation is simply the differentiation of his energy and its transformation into force. We no longer look upon the successive species as products of a fiat from without,—we regard them as results of an operation from within. Man himself is developed from lower forms of life, but the lower forms do not produce the higher or in any way account for the man who caps the climax of them all. Both the lower and the higher derive their being from Christ, and animal forms are only Christ’s preparation for the man who succeeds them. Man has come, not from blind and dead matter, but from the immanent Christ whose life pulsates through the universe and who has reinforced that life from his own infinite fountain.