008. LEAVES ROOM FOR CREATION

LEAVES ROOM FOR CREATION The phrases *’ before the world was," "before the foundation of the world," imply that the universe had a beginning, and the declaration that God and Christ were "before all things" implies that "things " are not a part of God or necessary to God. To make God dependent upon his universe is to ignore the Trinity, to deny that God, is sovereign and self-sufficient, and to put the finite world in place of the eternal Word. The doctrine in question misrepresents man as well as God. Man, according to this theory, can exist only so long as he has body. An intermediate state between death and resurrection, in which man is conscious, though divested of body, is plainly impossible. Yet such a state seems plainly taught in Scripture. Held in connection with the determinism previously mentioned, the view of Doctor Hill, by denying the priority of mind and claiming that matter and mind are inseparable and equally eternal, plays into the hands of materialism and greatly resembles the teaching of the Sadducees that "there is no resurrection, neither angel nor spirit." To all these errors I am persuaded that we have the sufficient antidote only in the Scripture doctrine of creation. The logical alternative of creation is a system of pantheism, in which man has no more freedom than the brute, and God is only an impersonal and necessary force, The Ethical Monism, then, for which I contend,, is notf deterministic monism; it is the monism of free-will, the monism in which personality, both human and divine, sin and righteousness, God and the world, remain—two in one and one in two—with their antagonisms as well as their_jdeal unity. But when I speak of ideal unity I do not mean to favor idealism any more than I favor materialism. Let me explain by alluding to one of the greatest of idealists. Berkeley held that the physical universe exists only ideally; it consists of the ideas of God, made permanent and visible by the divine will; only spirits—the human spirit and the divine spirit— have substantial existence. But the modern doctrine of evolution renders this idealism no longer tenable. The rock, the vegetable, the brute, all shade into one another by imperceptible gradations, and even man is acknowledged to have developed from lower orders of being. If the lower orders have only ideal existence, then man can have only ideal existence. The whole universe, including man, must be ideal if any of it is. We cannot draw the line that Berkeley drew, between man and the brute, calling the one matter and the other spirit. And since we cannot deny that man is spirit, and has substantial existence, we must affirm that nature is spirit, and has substantial existence also. Our system, then, is neither idealistic nor materialistic. It holds that both nature and man are manifestations of God’s life. We have no difficulty in accepting the Scripture teaching with regard to the self-limitation of the Logos in becoming man. We believe in such a depotentiation of the divine, that the Son of God could become ignorant and weak in the cradle of Bethlehem; but we have now to learn that this depot en tiation in becoming man was not the first to which the Logos had submitted. There was a self-limitation also when humanity was originally created in him; since he is the only life of humanity, the race began to be, and it continued to be, only by virtue of a kenosis of the Logos which antedated his incarnation. Nay, we must carry our principle yet farther back. Since all things were made in him, it is his life which pervades even the physical universe, and matter itself is only the manifestation of that life in generic volitions and regular ways. As the Gospel according to John (John 1:3) expresses it: "Whatsoever came into being was life in him." Nature is spiritual because it owes its origin to Christ, is upheld by his power, expresses at every moment his mind and will, is itself his life in a lower form. Christ, the one and only revealer of God, can reveal God only by humbling himself, and the original creation of the heavens and the earth involved a depotentiation of the Logos which already prefigured the greater depotentiation of the cross.

"But why concede the truth of any monistic theory whatever?" says one; "first give me proof!" I grant the justice of the demand. The new philosophy must approve itself to reason, conscience, Scripture, before it has earned a right to supplant the old. Let us understand, however, what sort of proof in such a case is possible. Demonstration, whether mathematical or logical, is out of the question. The only proof which the nature of the subject admits is inductive. Modern astronomy supplanted the ancient by showing that the heliocentric theory gave a simpler and more complete explanation of the movements of the solar system than the geocentric did. So the monistic philosophy rests its claim to acceptance upon its ability to solve the problems of nature, of the soul, and of the Bible, more simply and completely than the theory of dualism ever could. The test of truth in a theory—as in the case of the nebular hypothesis or the atomic theory in chemistry—is not that it can be itself explained, but that it is capable of explaining other things. In the preceding chapter on "Christ in Creation," I have made it plain, I think, that a Christian monism furnishes us with the best solution of the interactions of the physical and the intellectual universe. Does it explain the facts of the moral universe also? This is the question of questions.

How can there be any finite personality or freedom or responsibility, if all persons, as well as all things, are but forms or modifications of the divine? How can we be monists, and yet be faithful to man’s ethical interests? Neither Browning nor Dorner helps us here. They only set the two truths, monism and morals, side ~6y side, without showing the nexus between them. But I venture to suggest that the answer to this problem also is found in Christ. He is of the substance of God, yet he possesses a distinct personality. If in the one substance of God there are three infinite personalities, why may there not be in that same substance multitudinous finite personalities? No believer in the Trinity can consistently deny the possibility of this. And if Christ is the principle of manifestation, outgoing, creation, in God, then it follows that humanity, as well as nature, is among the "all things" which "consist," or hold together "in him." In the one infinite Son of God there are many finite sons of God. "Behold I and the children whom thou hast given me," he can say to the Father. We are naturally children of God, because we were created in Christ; we become spiritually sons of God when we are recreated in Christ.