21. XIX. The Alternative: Impersonal Power or Personal God

XIX. The Alternative: Impersonal Power or Personal God

According to the teaching of Paul, there is nothing really and in the highest sense true except (1) the axiom that God is, (2) what arises inexorably and necessarily out of this fundamental principle. The universe around us, then, becomes intelligible to us only through its relation to God, the original power which gives reality to all the rest of things.

There are some who prefer to regard this primal reality under the impersonal term “power” or “force” or “energy”. It is to a certain extent immaterial for our present purpose whether you speak and think of “the power which constitutes the whole,” or “God who constitutes the whole”. After all, distinction of gender is here merely figurative; the nearer one comes to the Divine, the less important does such a distinction become. In common experience it may be observed that “it” and “which” are used nearly as much as the personal pronoun and relative “he,” “she,” “who,” about the child in the first months or years of its life: now, as Wordsworth says, the young child is nearest to the Divine: —

Trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing Boy, But he beholds the light . . . At length the Man perceives it die away And fade into the light of common day. The difference lies in the recognition of personality; but one need not, therefore, quarrel with those who prefer the impersonal form, “the force which constitutes the whole,” to the personal form. That difference stands apart from our purpose; and we welcome the admission (which modern science has from its own side reached by its own methods) that a certain unifying principle does give intelligibility to the universe; and that this principle is not immobility, but force or energy.

We prefer to give a personal form to the fundamental proposition; and we believe that those who choose the impersonal form miss much of true philosophic thought. This impersonal statement of the first principle in the Universe leaves no place in its philosophy for man, and man then becomes an alien, so to say an impertinence or an anachronism, in the scheme of the universe. Such a principle, if it remains hard and does not develop towards a recognition of personality, must lead at last to the Oriental non-Hebrew systems of thought, which find the necessary goal and true end of human existence in shaking off human nature and becoming once more merged in the ultimate and primary energy.

Still we must welcome the recognition of this one constituting “force” as a stage in thought, which is likely sooner or later to produce the consciousness that this is a halfway position; and we therefore find in it an approximation to a better statement of the one ultimate nature. Here we have room and atmosphere wherein to work. On the contrary, we had neither room nor atmosphere in that dull and blind materialism out of which, during the last half of the nineteenth century, scientific theory was gradually and slowly struggling. To Paul, however, the distinction between the personal and the impersonal expression was, in a religious view, vital — certainly vital in his ordinary preaching. Only misapprehension and misdirection could result if he addressed the masses in terms that might seem to admit the distinction as indifferent; for it is not indifferent, but essential and vital.

There are, however, degrees of opposition. Some forms of religion or of philosophy were more hateful to him, and were regarded by him as more hostile, than others. The superstition and idolatry of the ordinary Anatolian cults were especially detested by him.

Paul knew well that there is a time for everything, and that only among them that are full grown should he speak philosophy. (1 Corinthians 2:6.) Most dangerous was it to talk philosophically among the Corinthians, a middle-class audience, who possessed that half-education or quarter-education which is worse than a lesser degree of education combined with greater rustic sympathy with external nature. Among them he must insist in the most emphatic terms on the simple and absolute personality of the Divine power and message; he must “preach the Gospel not in philosophic terms,” lest by the use of such terms the truth about the redeeming death of Jesus might lose meaning to them. (“To preach the Gospel: not in wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made void” (1 Corinthians 1:17).) In speaking to this kind of audience he perceived that he must have in his mind nothing save Jesus Christ and Him crucified. (1 Corinthians 2:12: so inActs 18:5.) To a simpler almost rustic audience he could speak in terms that were wider and less precise, and bid them “turn from these vain things unto a living God”. (So the American Revisers rightly. The English Revisers wrongly retain from the Authorised Version “the living God”. I shall generally cite the American Revision, which appears to me superior to the English Revision. Many years ago I was struck with the fact that, when I tested a number of the cases in which the American preference is indicated at the end of the English Revised Version, the American reading proved better than the English.)

Paul had experimented in the more philosophic style of address, when he engaged in discussion with the philosophic teachers of Athens and was required to explain his doctrine before the Court of Areopagus and the audience of interested and curious persons who always thronged the courts in that period, and whose keen partisanship and applause or disapproval were more powerful influences even with professional lawyers (as Pliny says) than the opinion and verdict of judge and jury. On that occasion and in those circumstances Paul used a non-personal form of expression: “What therefore ye worship in ignorance, this I set forth unto you”; and perhaps also a sentence or two later “that they might seek the Divine, if haply they might feel after it and find it”; (Acts 17:27. Western authorities read the neuter gender in 27, as all good MSS. have in 29.) and certainly afterwards “we ought not to think that what is Divine [or ‘the Godhead’] is like unto gold or silver or stone, graven by art”. Paul’s purpose in this address is to start from the admission of this universal principle, that the Divine nature is immanent in the whole universe including man, who is its progeny, and to argue that his audience must logically take the needed further steps, first to regard the Divine as a personal God, then to understand the purpose of God in regard to man through the mission of “the man whom He hath ordained,” and finally to comprehend the ideas of final judgment and the resurrection of Jesus.

Incidentally I may take this opportunity of acknowledging that I went too far in nny book called St. Paul the Traveller and the Roman Citizen, p. 252, when I declared that the Apostle “was disappointed and perhaps disillusionised by his experience in Athens. He felt that he had gone at least as far as was right in the way of presenting his doctrine in a form suited to the current philosophy; and apparently the result had been little more than naught.” I did not allow sufficiently for adaptation to different classes of hearers, in one case the tradesmen and middle-classes of Corinth, in the other the more strictly university and philosophic class in Athens. It is true (as is there shown) that Luke recognised and recorded the change in style of preaching at Corinth; but on the other hand it is improbable that Luke would have preserved a careful report of the address at Athens, if he had not considered it typical of Paul’s method when speaking to an educated Hellenic audience.

It now seems to me quite inadequate to say that Paul, feeling disappointed with the results of this Athenian address, resolved to change his style finally and permanently to the purely personal evangel. The fact is certain, that (as both Luke and himself mention) he did adopt the latter method definitely and emphatically at Corinth; yet the inference is also equally certain that both Luke and Paul must have regarded the other method as justifiable in suitable circumstances — the method, viz., of taking the impersonal philosophic position as his basis and upon this foundation building up his doctrine of the personality of this primal force, the purpose and plan of the personal (as Paul would say, the living) God in regard to man, and the rest of his evangelical teaching. If he used the latter method less, his choice implied no disapproval of the method as wrong, but only a preference for the other method as more effective, because far more suitable to the world of the Roman Empire generally. (Here should come several paragraphs, which were delayed in post: they appear at end of Section XLVI.) The speech which Paul delivered before the Court of Areopagus presents many points of interest, and raises many important questions. Hence the best course will be to relegate it to a separate place in Part 3, as it would require too much space and too detailed attention in view of the arrangement here. In a special section it can be treated more conveniently and more fully. In Paul’s attitude towards the philosophic statement of the nature of God, we perceive the Hellenic and philosophic side of his mind. The doctrine of an impersonal Divine nature or Divine power may be taken as the beginning of a recognition of the higher truth. Knowledge or truth in religion is not to Paul a hard, definite fact presented in the unchangeable terms of a creed or confession: it is a living idea, capable of infinite growth towards the higher truth, or of perversion and degeneration through being misunderstood and overgrown by error. The idea, though in a sense imperfect, is true so long as it is growing towards truth. The force through which it grows is Divine.