007. TWO SORTS OF MONISM

TWO SORTS OF MONISM

It seems all the more necessary to take this position, because there are forms of monism which do not conserve man’s ethical interests, but on the other hand sacrifice man’s freedom and God’s transcendence in the effort to secure scientific unity. I gladly recognize in certain of President Schurman’s writings an intent to stand for man’s power of initiative and to deny that spirit is determined in all its manifestations as the body is determined. In his "Buffalo Address" he says well that absolute determinism leaves no room for ideals in life and renders moral law unintelligible. As between the hypothesis that our minds are mere automata and the hypothesis that, as minds or spirits, we are actually creators, he chooses the latter and declares that "it is either that or a theory of our own capacity and spiritual endowments which renders moral activity, moral initiative, impossible."

Yet, in his *’ Andover Lectures," Doctor Schurman states his monistic doctrine in such a way as virtually to exclude both divine and human freedom: "The divine will can express itself only as it does, because no other expression would reveal what it is. Of such a will the universe is the eternal expression. . . Of this illimitable, ever-existing universe, God is the inner ground and substance. There is no evidence, neither does any religious need require us to believe, that the divine Being manifest in the universe has any actual or possible existence somewhere else in some transcendent sphere." But if God is only immanent and not transcendent, with no freedom, with no powers which are not actually working in the universe, and if all the activities of finite beings are to be referred to God as their source, what room is left for freedom or responsibility or sin or guilt in men? Sin becomes a necessity, an indispensable condition of virtue, a manifestation of God. Though Doctor Schurman has nobly said in one place, "The possibility of sin is the correlative of the free initiative God has vacated on man’s behalf," and "the essence of sin is the enthronement of self," he yet, in another place, seems to take back all he has given, when he says of sin: "Without such self-absorption there could be no sense of union with God. For consciousness is possible only through opposition. To know A, we must know it through not-A. Alienation from God is the necessary condition of communion with God. And this is the meaning of the Scripture that ’where sin abounds, grace shall much more abound.’"

Such monism as this does not seem to be ethical. It gives us a God without moral character, and Doctor Schurman has well remarked that "a God without moral character is no God at all." It regards God as exhaustively expressed in the universe; nothing could be but what is. It is difficult to see how anything can be in the future but what now is; in other words, how evolution itself can be possible. And if there be no transcendent element in God, how can there be any transcendent element in man? how can man possibly be different from what he is? how can his sin be anything more than the necessary product of nature and environment? Monism will be the philosophy of the future, but it will be monism of another sort, a monism which makes sin and Christ the Saviour from sin starting points and fundamentals of the system, instead of virtually explaining both of these away.

Ethical Monism is a monism which maintains both the freedom of man and the transcendence of God. I have endeavored to distinguish my doctrine from a form of monism which fails to conserve these ethical interests. I must notice another recent work in which the ethical element is seriously lacking. President Hill, in his "Genetic Philosophy," a book charming in its merely literary quality and abounding in valuable suggestion to the monistic thinker, has also erred, as it seems to me, by substantially conceding the truth of the deterministic scheme. "Biological and psychological science," he asserts, "unite in affirming that every event, organic or psychic, is to be explained in the terms of its immediate antecedents and that it can be so explained. There is, therefore, no necessity, there is even no room, for interference. If the existence of a Deity depends upon the evidence of intervention and supernatural agency, faith in the divine seems to be destroyed in the scientific mind." This is apparently an explicit denial of free-will in either God or man. I know well that Doctor Hill would still assert his belief in the existence of sin and in the provision of a redemption from it. Yet I must regard his principles as logically excluding such belief and as tending to extirpate it. Determinism, in my judgment, blunts the sense of responsibility and thus obscures the need of atonement, as it blunts the sense of freedom in man and God and thus obscures the possibility of atonement. Sin and salvation are both lost sight of. Neither the fall nor the guilt of the fall is any longer intelligible; neither incarnation nor resurrection is any longer credible.

Still another defect in the "Genetic Philosophy" must be noted. It virtually denies that God is pure spirit, and regards matter as essentially and eternally a part of his being. God is not only reason, but he is dynamic reason. . He not only thinks, but his thought necessarily expresses itself in outward form. There can be no such thing in God as mere plan; execution and plan must be simultaneous. The universe never had a beginning; it has always been the living garment of the Deity. The psychical has ever the physical for its counterpart. Man, like God, can exist only so long as some organism exists as the condition and vehicle of his activity.

Attractive as this view must be to many minds, from the fact that it rids us of the mystery of absolute creation, I must regard it as both unscientific and unscriptural. If man can plan without immediately executing his plan, cannot God do as much? The "Genetic Philosophy" makes no distinction between will and energy, but we know from personal experience that the former does not necessarily involve the latter. The poet and the artist have noble conceptions, but the conceptions must be put into outward form before the work of creation is complete. So the Scripture attributes to God not only a plan which antedates creation, but also an independence of material conditions. If the phrase "God is spirit "[’means anything, it surely means this.