01.02. Chapter 02

CHAPTER II THE DIVINE PERSONALITY

EVEN at the cost of wearisome iteration I must make it clear that I am holding up Christlikeness as a clue to the character of God, trying to see how we can test the attributes usually called divine by the measure of likeness to Christ. I am assuming that if we are to keep to the Christian idea of God we must maintain that the moral attributes of God find their interpretation in Christ In discussing his own theory of the relation of Christ to God, the late Dr. A. M. Fairbairn drew a distinction between the ethical and the metaphysical attributes of God, and made the metaphysical subordinate to and secondary to the ethical. I think Fairbairn was on the right road. It is not necessary to subscribe to his doctrine of Christ to see that his subordination of the metaphysical to the ethical is fundamentally Christian. Of course we cannot formally prove the subordination, but we cannot prove that God exists at all, for that matter. We are trying to fashion the most adequate conception of God we can. Christianity cannot be Christian if it does not put the moral attributes above all others in its exposition of the divine.

We look first at the fundamental question of the personality of God, though, of course, personality is something in itself and not an attribute. It is instructive to note how many believers in Christ to-day actually speak of God as impersonal. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they shrink from using the term "personal" in reference to God. A good deal of this hesitancy is altogether intelligible. We often use the word "personal" to denote some of the weaker aspects of human experience; memory, feeling, will-power are all subject to such rise and fall of rhythm and are so dependent on material conditions both inside and outside of our physical organisms that we draw back from speaking of God as personal. The difficulty here manifestly arises through taking human personality as the only form, of personality.. The subjection to physical conditions may be merely a human limitation, while personality as such may be self-consciousness and self-control, conceived of as in divine form above ebb or flow. Some speak of God as being more than personality, which is correct enough if we mean more than human personality.

I was not thinking, however, of the more than-personality idea when I spoke of the many who accept Christ while denying personality to God. I had in mind those who conceive of the forces of the universe as at bottom impersonal, the forces themselves being either materialistic, or idealistic, or, in the latest terminology, "neutral." They would be willing, many of them, to pronounce Christ the finest flower of the universe, the apex and climax of creation, but they would make him nevertheless the outcome of an impersonal process.

Now, in the Christian examination of various world-views the most important question is as to the adequacy especially the moral adequacy of the views. The emphasis is not primarily upon scientifically ascertained bodies of fact, or upon strict logical processes, important as these are. The emphasis is upon adequacy. A world-view may be in itself consistent enough, or it may be woven throughout of excellent logical and scientific texture, but it may lack in size. A naval architect might build a vessel according to the most approved designs and yet never dream of starting the vessel across the Atlantic. It might not be big enough for that. It might not be able to carry within itself its own supplies. It might not be large enough to carry an engineer or a captain. Or waiving the question of size, a view may not be adequate to the quality of a result which it assumes to explain. The indifference of many thoughtful Christians to arguments against Christianity finds its explanation here. Contemplating the Christ, the Christian feels that the theory which would make the determining forces of the universe impersonal is inadequate. The theory is not big enough, and it is not good enough. The critic wonders if the Christian can be sincere. Cannot anyone see the strength of the reasoning against personality in God? The Christian may indeed be duly impressed by the logic, but his answer is likely to be simply that the theory "won’t do." He has been steeped in the mind and spirit of Christ so long that the magnitude and richness of that mind and spirit are, for him, not to be accounted for on an impersonal basis. In this the Christian is, after all, standing for a rational faith.

Faith of some sort is underneath all our world-views. We have to make assumptions and ventures. Since we have to exercise faith in any event, the rational course would seem to be to believe something worth believing. Consider the strain upon a mind schooled in the study of the Christ to try to believe that Christ is, after all, just the fine flower of the material forces. I suppose that this would imply that the spiritual balance of Jesus was the outcome of a phenomenally steady equilibrium in the part of the physical universe with which he was connected, namely, his own physical organism. For the period of a short life, but long enough to mark the destinies of the race, that part of the physical universe which we could call the body of Jesus came into such stability of equilibrium and such thorough symmetry that the Christ-life was the result. The impatience of the Christian is not to be wondered at when he hears theorizing like this. Of course I have put the materialistic position baldly, but I have not done wrong to the essentials of such theory. Any reasoning which puts the physical factors in the position of primary importance is not caricatured by the above phrasing. All such theories have to maintain in the end what they might as well say in the beginning that the Christ-life, and all other lives filled with the Christ-spirit, are the outcome of the play of physical forces reaching peculiarly happy results. There is nothing in the reasoning to forbid the contention that with a different turn or twist the forces might have come to as unhappy a result as in the career of Judas, for example.

No, the theory won’t do. To be sure, anyone who recognizes the existence of material forces at all has to make place for those forces. For Christianity the incarnation means that matter can be used to set forth a moral and spiritual revelation. Matter can be more honored and glorified in Christianity than in any other view of the world. To make the material supreme, however, is for the believer in Christ impossible. The believer does not feel called upon to meet the materialistic reasoning step by step, though he is confident that the reasoning can be met. He does not feel called upon to deny the pressure and power of the physical. That would be absurd. He simply declares that to one who thinks of God as Jesus thought of God, and set forth that thought in life, the explanation of such thought and life in merely physical terms falls short. It will not do.

Another form of impersonalism is idealistic. The fundamental fact in the world is thought. By what seems to the plain man a most curious reversal of things as they appear, thought in this idealism seems to precede thinkers. Common sense would naturally conclude that before there can be thought there must be a thinker, but impersonalism turns it all the other way around. Of course a theist would say that before there can be a finite thinker there must be a thought in the Divine Mind calling for the creation of that thinker. This, however, is not what the impersonalist means. He means that thought somehow gets itself personalized into thinkers.

Much Christian speech lends itself to this philosophy. We say that Christ is Love Incarnate. We adore God as Wisdom and Love. All this is, indeed, without thought of the logical implication, but aids the idea of God as impersonal. Here again we pass by the merely philosophical argument and raise the question of adequacy. We must think of God as adequate to the revelation in Christ. If Christ is the Divine Wisdom and Love personalized, the divine itself has taken a step forward in such personalization, for the concrete and personal are morally more worthy than the abstract and impersonal. The situation here is not quite the same as in the process of scientific generalization. In generalization the scientist does indeed strip an idea of every possible vestige of the concrete, for the sake of finding a formula which will prove good over the widest possible area. The scientist is aware, however, that he does arrive at a generalization by stripping off the concrete. He moves by emptying rather than by filling. The generalization which he at last reaches may in its way be useful, but it is not a creation. To return to the world which he has left the scientist has to put back into place all that he took out. If he had nothing but the generalization to work with, if all that he left out were to be blotted from his memory, he could not find his way back at all, except possibly by the use of an imagination which would have nothing to work on. Let a thinker abstract from all extended objects everything except the one consideration that they are extended in space. Grant for the sake of argument that those teachers are right who tell us that our idea of space itself is built up by abstraction from extended objects. By abstraction, then, we build up the idea of space. Now, what have we? An interesting subject of thought, about which we can utter many profound observations, but to make our observations of any consequence we have to get back to the world which we left out. Our generalizations about space may indeed supply us with material for noble contemplation, and may indeed quicken us to many a thrill of intellectual delight, but the thrill, after all, has not much tingle of actual life.

All this is suggestive for the moral and spiritual life. There is, indeed, a glory about abstractions like Love, Righteousness, Justice, but these are abstractions. We cannot get the God of Christ by abstraction, by dropping out the concrete which is the glory of the Christ-life. If Christ is concrete love while God is abstract love, then Christ is more than and better than God. Here, again, we have a view which is inadequate. It will not do. An odd philosophical theory has appeared in recent years which would have us believe that it is neither materialistic nor idealistic. The ultimate basic realities are declared to be "neutrals." What seems from one angle an impression on a photographic apparatus is from another angle an impression on the retina of the eye. When the eye sees the "neutral" it takes complete possession of a transparent bit of reality just as the reality is. These neutrals follow one another in a constant stream with more or less resemblance among themselves. What appears to be identity is in the last analysis this likeness among the coming and going neutrals. It is fair to say that the theory makes a distinction between existence and value. In the midst of all this flow, the mind can seize truth which is, on the value side, truth on its own account. There is room also, according to the theory, for the beautiful and the good. As existence there is no place for God, freedom, or immortality. In spite of this, however, one of the leading expounders of the doctrine provides room for what he calls the free man’s worship.

It requires no keen philosophical expertness to see that this doctrine has appropriated outright the activity of mind with all its marvelous powers to relate and to compare and to pass judgment. Just how we could ever use the word "neutral" except as the expression of a judging mind is a mystery. To judge that something is neutral is obviously to say that it is neither one thing nor another, but this implies holding at least three things before the mind for judgment, and this implies further some mental activity set over against material on which it can act. The entire apparatus of mind and minds has to be utilized to get this theory into operation.

It may seem odd that I mention the "neutrals" at all, since my aim is not primarily philosophical, and since the theory itself avowedly makes no place for the existence of God. I take the theory as suggesting a remark or two concerning a type of thinking which to-day draws a line between judgments of value and judgments as to existence. Many devout men, of high spiritual worth, seem content to affirm judgments as to values without troubling themselves as to whether anything corresponding to those values is to be found in actual existence or not. The theory that I mention is attractive to them as suggesting the worthiness of a life that stands over against a passing stream of existences, each inconsequential in itself, each dying as soon as born, and seizing out of the stream ideas of eternal value, the word "eternal" meaning not endless existence, but timelessness, as of ideal value beyond time altogether.

There is something appealing about such a doctrine when it comes from a seeker of the highest ideals; and there is something suggestive of the method by which such a seeker of ideals actually proceeds. For many a man perhaps for most men the world of actual occurrences is a procession, meaningless in itself except for what can be snatched out of it to help in the day’s living. For the nobler mind, on the other hand, the passing procession of events, events often meaningless both in themselves and in their contexts, supplies the opportunity, or at least the occasion, for grasping ideals suggested by events in themselves remote from anything ideal. On the part of the ordinary seeker for ideals, however, there is the more or less conscious assumption that in pursuing an ideal he is on the way to the real. To make the assumption outright and openly that there is nothing real corresponding to the ideal is too cool for the ordinary man. It is in the end to subject the ideal to a killing frost.

Why, however, all this reference to the ordinary man? Just because I am trying to find a religious statement that will mean something to the ordinary man. Dr. J. S. Mackenzie, in his little book on Ultimate Values, speaks of that doctrine of immortality which makes the soul live merely "in other lives made better" as having worth, indeed, but worth chiefly for the extraordinary person. For the ordinary human being such immortality would mean just nothing at all. We cannot believe that the higher values of the universe are to be the property of a select number of rare spirits, a sort of spiritual privileged class. There is no aristocracy less attractive than that of supposedly choice souls, most of whom have had more than usual opportunity in this existence, speaking as if they had plucked the higher ideal meanings of life, and then leaning comfortably back and telling us that they are not concerned as to whether these ideals root in reality or not. It may be fine for a privileged individual to testify that he has found such uplift in the thought of God as the crown of ideals that he does not care whether God actually exists or not, but this is worse than nothing to the man whose thought and life are our aim. Understand, we are moving in the realm of belief. We are avowedly not trying to prove that there is a God like unto Christ. We admit that the problem is one of belief, and we are trying to show that the essential Christian belief is that God is like unto Christ. We are not, however, surrendering to the impersonalists. They do not prove impersonalism. For one reason or another impersonalism suits them better as a belief than does personalism as applied to God. Among the elements that count in shaping the Christian belief is familiarity with the mind and temper of Christ. The Christians believe that the mind and temper of Jesus cannot be interpreted as the mere accompaniment of any set of impersonal forces. Of course it is not fair to play on a word in this discussion, but the word "neutrals" does happily hit off the inadequacies of some of these doctrines. It is impossible to account for the fullness and intensity of the moral passion of the Christ life, as that life was lived in the actual Christ, or is approximated in the life of his followers, by anything neutral. We are dealing with positive forces and factors which neutrals can never explain.

We repeat that we do not feel called on to consider, with such philosophical powers as we may muster, the critical objections to these theories. We may not be able to state any objections. We can, however, raise the issue of adequacy. There is not enough in the theories. Moreover, they are not only not large enough, but they are not fine enough. Take Christ just as a cosmic product. The forces these theories deal with are not big enough or fine enough to explain Christ. They lack both the requisite quantity and the requisite quality. We believe that only a Christlike God can account for a Godlike Christ. The opponents of Christian beliefs have taken it altogether too easy as to the inadequacy of impersonal causes to produce Christlike character. All these systems are confronted with what might be called the problem of good. It is often said that the stiff problem for believers in a personal God is the problem of evil. In an earlier section I spoke of that mystery of physical pain before which all human wisdom is dumb. The Christian may indeed sit dumb before this problem, but he does not ignore it. In his own experience he meets acute distress for which he can find no adequate reason whatsoever. He is willing to admit that the advance in the understanding of the reason for suffering in the universe has consisted chiefly in progressively showing the inadequacy of reasons. For example, the glory of the book of Job is in its frankly facing the problem of woe, hi openly declaring that the attempt to solve human distress on the ground of the ill-desert of the sufferer falls short. It is a vast gain to have attained this insight, but Job does not teach that he has solved the problem. It is better to have no explanation than an explanation which conceives of suffering as punishment.

Now, it is unusual to find such openness of mind as this among the opponents of the belief in a personal God when they confront the problem of good. Most of them do not seem to know that there is such a problem. They demand with glib assurance that the believers in God account for evil and do not appear aware that, on their own basis, they have to account for good. Moreover, there is nothing inherently absurd in holding to belief in the God of Christ while admitting around us on all sides dark mysteries which we cannot explain. This present inexplicability, however, does not argue that the mysteries never can be explained. It means a task at present beyond us, beyond us probably because of our sheer lack of knowledge. The problem of good is, for the thinker who derides Christian theism, of quite another order. A wise and good God might, for reasons as yet inexplicable, make a place for pain in the world and might permit moral evil, but a God who is nothing but a name for a set of impersonal forces for which morality means nothing, is simply not equal to the task of explaining the good.

Apart from aberrations here and there in schools of criticism which speak without responsibility, the moral uniqueness of Jesus is everywhere granted. It is one of the strangest phenomena in the history of thinking this admission of the moral supremacy of Jesus even by the enemies of Christianity without any attempt to explain him! Suppose, for the sake of the argument, we make no claim of divinity for Jesus whatever. Suppose we take him merely as the moral climax of humanity, as the type of good man, or as anything which expresses his admitted moral greatness. Then the critics may reply that the problem is just the same sort as with moral goodness anywhere. Let it be so! How does such goodness intensely personal, seeking to put moral values into definitely personal relationships get into a world where the determining factors are entirely impersonal? Perplexing as is the problem of evil for the Christian personalist, it is nothing in its perplexingness as compared with the problem of good for the impersonalist.