01.03. Chapter 03

CHAPTER III THE DIVINE UNITY

WE are insisting that the so-called attributes of God must be brought to the test of Christlikeness. If we are to believe in Christianity at its full value, we have to think of God as Christian. Certain attributes of God which we call metaphysical have been pretty well established in theology, but the metaphysical aspect is subject to the moral aspect in Christian thinking.

We look for a while at the attribute of unity in the Divine Nature. We are most of us fairly sure that if we are to have a worth-while God, that God must be one. It is a long, long stride forward when any people get away from the worship of a host of gods to the worship of one God. Looking out over the havoc wrought in human experience by polytheism we might also say that, paraphrasing Napoleon’s word about generalship, one poor god would be better than two good gods, so urgent is the need of unity in carrying forward satisfactory reflection upon the Divine Nature. Metaphysical unity as a basis for the universe we have pretty well accepted. Even the dualists who hold to the separateness of mind and matter maintain that the two work together in a unified system. Of course it is always possible to find flippant critics, like the scoffer who recently declared that there is so little unity in the world that to all appearances the world is being managed by a committee of gods a bungling committee at that. Even this critic, however, would admit that such a committee would meet in a basic system whose laws rule everywhere. The committee would not likely be conceived of as dividing over the law of gravitation, for example. The great metaphysical quest has been for unity, and unity has been pretty well agreed upon as fundamental. Even those who, like Bertrand Russell, incline to the fancy that space-time, as they call it, is broken up into a cosmic anarchy, nevertheless hold with Einstein to a space-time-gravitation formula universal in its application.

We insist however, that important as is the metaphysical attribute of unity for God, we cannot have a Christian God until we have judged metaphysical attributes from the judgment-seat of the moral. In other words, metaphysical attributes throughout must come to the Christian test; the metaphysical attributes must be weighed by the spirit of Christ.

Some time ago an earnest student of religions expressed surprise that the Mohammedan and Christian systems do not get along better together. His argument was that Islam believes as strongly as Christianity in the unity of God, perhaps more strongly than does Christianity. For Islam God is altogether one, if such an expression can be used. There is not the slightest hesitation as to the impossibility of God’s sharing the oneness. There are no personal distinctions in the Godhead for a Mohammedan. The one prophet of God is named indeed, but he is a prophet and nothing more. This reference to the Islamic faith cogently raises the need of interpreting divine unity in moral as well as in metaphysical terms. Islam built on the metaphysical foundations of ancient Israel but certainly not on the moral foundations, for Mohammed nowhere attains to the moral insight of prophets who lived a thousand years before his time. Islam does give us divine unity. But such unity! The unity of a moral nature set as definitely as the most cruel and selfish barbarians on conquest by sword, and sanctioning as animating motives in that conquest the basest impulses of men, is not an edifying conception of God. Islam is jealous enough in its intent to keep God a unit. It makes no provision for man’s sharing the nature of God, but ends in making God share the nature of man the worst phases of man’s nature at that. The passion for metaphysical unity is one of the powerful driving energies of the mind; but if we are to have a Christian God, we must set limits in our thinking to the demands of that unity. Too much of our philosophy is bent upon making the universe all one thing or another. Materialism does not necessarily spring out of an unworthy or earth-bound nature. The tendency of materialism in philosophy is toward materialism in life, but materialism does not of necessity arise out of a sordidness of purpose. It arises in part out of this metaphysical passion for unity. To many the forces of the physical universe seem to explain more than any other forces; so what is to prevent one’s believing that they may explain everything? At least let us search and see. Here the effective force with many a thinker who most reluctantly surrenders his emphasis on spiritual values is the craving for unity.

Likewise an idealism which dissipates everything body and soul into thought does not necessarily proceed from a dry intellectualism. The absolutists in idealism no doubt are as fond of the joy of concrete existence as are those who have no philosophy at all, but the passion for unity is upon them. There is no denying the pressure of this passion. It is one of the most compelling powers in human thought. If we are to have a universe at all, the philosophers tell us that the very word "universe" itself suggests oneness. Philosophy, for some, is nothing apart from the search for the one in the many. That is the basic assumption of their thought.

Now, this passion for unity in the intellectual realm defeats itself by doing away with the ground of distinction between truth and error. If everything comes alike out of the One, truth and falsity come from the same source. There is no possible ground of decision between them, and the theory which started out to be absolutely logical ends by cutting the props from under all logic whatever. The plight is worse on the moral side. I have heard theologians speak as if the metaphysical unity of God must be held fast at all costs and no doubt such unity is important. How much more important is it, however, that the moral unity of God be held fast? We have seen the outcome in the theology of Islam. Islam gives us a unified God, but of no moral worth after we get him. Islam’s God is distinctively a personal unity, but who, outside of Islam, would care to worship him? I ask indulgence for returning repeatedly to the supremacy of the moral attributes of the divine over the metaphysical. Untold harm has come out of the religious rationalizing which has sought to ground the character of God on something deeper than the ethical. I once heard a foremost theologian declare that we must have some basis firmer than the moral for our understanding of God. This particular theologian was, in deed and spirit, one of the most Christian men I have ever known, but this deliverance of his was far from Christian. If we behold in the thought of Christ the thought of God, we cannot believe that the metaphysical qualities have the right of way. If it be said that Jesus assumed as a matter of course the all-essential metaphysical qualities of God possibly without ever stopping to think of them we reply that the moral and spiritual were the focus of the whole experience of Jesus. At the best we can think of the metaphysical qualities only as furnishing the stage for the higher. Our difficulty here is somewhat the same as in our thought of personality for God. We, indeed, attribute personality to God, but then we fall to thinking of personality in human terms, with all the weakness of human frailty. Then we wonder if, after all, we should not do well to think of God in somewhat solider terms. So with moral unity. The unity in moral purpose in men is so varying and changeful that we naturally incline toward some other unity. It seems easier to relax hold on the moral unity of God than on the metaphysical, or, rather, the pressure for the metaphysical often seems stronger.

Still, we must not put the case here too strongly. The church has indeed always been more or less willing to threaten the metaphysical unity of God for the sake of the moral. I now re fer to the more popular thinking rather than the strictly theological. Take, for illustration, the hold that the doctrine of the devil has, or had, for centuries in the thinking, or imagination, of the ordinary Christian. Practically, in the conception of thousands of Christians to-day, the devil is conceived of as everywhere, as knowing everything, as almost almighty. In part this is superstition, an inheritance from pre-Christian heathenism, or an importation into Christianity from without. In part, however, it is an unreasoned but instinctive attempt to make the problem of evil serious for God without sacrificing the moral unity of God. It requires only a glance, of course, to see how far such a doctrine goes toward imperiling the metaphysical unity of God, but the popular notion is conceived more in respect to the seriousness of the moral struggle than of the metaphysical requirements.

Now, it is not likely that reasoned thought about God will concede the vast powers mentioned above omniscience, omnipresence, almost omnipotence to a devil, but it is not likely either that the Christian consciousness will rest in a conception of moral evil which seeks to preserve the metaphysical unity of God at the cost of moral unity. Think how many conceptions of God do strike at his moral unity. Of course impersonal materialism does not concern itself here, but some forms of impersonal idealism are attractive to Christian believers who do not often stop to consider that such idealism in which the many are mere phases of the One carries moral evil to the center of the divine. Any strictly deterministic philosophy likewise violates the divine moral life, or makes absurd any raising of question about distinctions of good and evil. Spinoza, it has been said, was the one consistent determinist in that he saw that with determinism there could be no reason for ever raising the question about determinism or anything else. All forms of strict monism do have a unity of a kind, a unity in which good and evil lose their differences and merge into one. The church has fairly well settled down into the belief that the only way that we can preserve the moral unity of God is by the creation of free wills out of whose choices evil starts. It is objected that such creations themselves do away with the metaphysical unity in the universe. Strictly speaking, this must be so. If we are to have absolute metaphysical unity there is no place for even an inch of free choice, but is not insistence upon such unity a quibble? Is it not a play with words? Is not metaphysical unity well enough preserved by such means as divine wisdom could devise against the splitting of the universe into independent diversities? Even the pluralists, of whom we hear so much to-day, who will have it that lives are independent existences with positive power of creation, hold that these lives meet in a system, or plane, that must be a common-to-all. Such loss of metaphysical unity as the free creation of finite wills involves, we shall have to yield to, if we are to preserve the moral unity of the divine. The result will never please the theorist who desires above all else a compact and tidy universe. There cannot be the slightest doubt that the creation of finite selves makes against tidiness and compactness; but better such looseness than to carry moral evil so deeply into the divine nature as to make it a part of that nature. Better have God struggling to get evil out of men’s lives than struggling to get it out of his own. Any familiarity at all with the life of Jesus would show us how foreign to his thought of the divine is moral evil.

Another instance of the insistence of the church on the primacy of the moral is to be found in the persistence with which the mysterious and baffling doctrine of the Trinity has maintained itself through the ages. Of course no one who has read a line of theology would think that the church has taught that God is one and three in the same sense, but the theories have been refractory to handle at the best. I do not think that it is impossible so to state the doctrine as to maintain the metaphysical unity of the Divine, but what I wish to urge is that the church has never been deterred from holding the doctrine because of the threat to metaphysical unity. Without substantial justice indeed, but with unrelenting vigor nevertheless, the critics of Christianity have pointed to the doctrine of the Trinity as the supreme instance of the church’s defiance of reason in its demands upon the intelligence of men. I am not now concerned either to defend this doctrine or to attack it. All I wish is to ask for the reason for its persistence in the face of argument which has seemed to so many to be conclusive. I think the secret of the longevity of the dogma is not merely the pressure to make a place for Christ in the Divine Life, hi the sense of granting him divine honors, but, rather, to carry the Christ-spirit into the Divine, or, rather, to reveal the divine as throughout Christlike. The life which men saw in Christ they came to believe in as the life of God himself. They were willing to follow that life even into their theories about the inner constitution of divinity. Moral unity has weighed more than metaphysical unity.

Too confident speculation as to the inner constitution of deity is out of fashion at the present hour, and I think justly so; but while I am on this theme I may as well remark that the danger in the usual ideas of the Trinity is not so much to the metaphysical unity as to the moral unity the very end which the doctrine has sought to conserve. In seeking for distinctions in the life of the Divine the church has too often made the Father stand for one moral mood and the Son for another.

Or, if the distinction has not been conceived of as strictly personal, Father has often been made to stand as the phase of righteousness, and Son, of Love. This can be so phrased indeed, often is so phrased as to imperil the moral unity which the church aims to guard. Take either of two views of the Trinity which have been regarded as at least passably orthodox one which provides for personal distinction of Father and Son and Spirit in the divine life itself; and the other which treats Father, Son, and Spirit as three manifestations of inherently different phases of the divine life, not individual persons on the one hand, or mere appearances on the other. The difficulty is, I repeat, not chiefly philosophical in such theological construction. There are ways of fairly well meeting the formally philosophical difficulties. The more serious is the threat to the ethical unity. Think of the tendency to put Father and Son over against one another in opposed moods. The Father is, or used to be, conceived of as in wrath and the Son mollifies the wrath with the aid of the Spirit. To what extremes have we not heard evangelistic appeals rush in such representation of the work of the Son! Yet the teaching that God forgives men their sins for Christ’s sake lends itself naturally to just such difference of moral moods in the inner life of Godhead. If, now, we are to think of a complexity in the God life, all the factors, or phases, must be Christlike that is, if we are to have a Christian God.