01.04. Chapter 04

CHAPTER IV THE DIVINE UNCHANGEABLENESS

MUCH that can be said about the divine unity holds also about the divine unehangeableness, for a shifting from mood to mood on the part of the Divine would be a violation of unity. Here, again, the main aim of the doctrine has been moral. Men have been trying to free themselves from whim or caprice in the Divine. I do not think it would be beside the mark to affirm that one of the desperate burdens of heathenism is the belief in capricious gods so common in heathenism. I do not lose sight of the idea of fate, of inescapable destiny, which rules in some religions, but I think nevertheless that something of the affliction of heathenism, especially in the life of the common worshipers, is the need of propitiating gods and the difficulty of knowing when the god is satisfied and how long he will remain satisfied. May I repeat once more that the objection of many serious-minded persons to a belief in a personal God is their inability to think of personality apart from changefulness suggestive of whim or mood. There is no call for attempting to deny this weakness of personality in human beings. Our feelings rise and fall like tides without the regularity of tides, and without any law which we can frame. We know that we are dependent on physical conditions, on social contacts, on the manifoldness of factors which may instantaneously throw us out of one temper of mind and into another, not to the harm of our moral principles indeed, but of the firmness with which we hold those principles. So that many feel that an impersonal Divinity would be better as a basis for unchanging moral values than a personal Divinity.

Once yield to the impulse to seek a basis for moral steadiness in impersonalism and we come forthwith to outright wreck. We are moving in the domain of belief when we avowedly are seeking the best idea of God for our moral satisfaction. Impersonalism is not safe. The moral values have the right of way, to be sure, but impersonalism destroys them outright. These values are in peril, on the other side, from some philosophical doctrines concerning time which at first glance may seem to afford us relief as to moral unchangeableness. Some philosophers tell us that there is no change in God that he is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, that change means nothing to him. Even for ourselves change is not the real, but is woven through, with illusion. I once heard a distinguished teacher of metaphysical idealism remark that in idealism time is merely a mental form, and that, since it has no substantial reality, our puzzled bewilderments as to its meaning themselves have no meaning.

All this sounds easy but it is the blankest answer of all. Our lives know change; in fact, with us the unchanging fact is change. An unchanging world, in the philosophic sense, would be one which we should have to enter by the most detached kind of reasoning a reasoning indeed detached from every pulsing of experience we have ever known. We can think a timeless world or, rather, we can utter the words but we cannot imagine such a world. If we are to conceive of a God who has placed us in a universe in which time means everything to us and nothing to himself, we have in that conception itself a moral difficulty of no scant proportions. No, there is no vast help for moral reflection in a philosophical doctrine that puts the divine and the human 1 so far apart that there is no bridging the distance except by saying the human experience is illusion and the divine experience real. Whence did all this illusion come? It is of the very make of the human mind. If Christian morality moves on the avowal that man is made in the image of God, we arrive at the foot of a blind alley when we accept a philosophic doctrine that makes change touch everything in man’s life and nothing in God’s life.

Here, again, we have to remind ourselves that if we are to believe in a Christlike God, the moral qualities are to have the right of way. It is necessary that we see sharply the issues involved. Someone asks what we are to do if philosophy leads us squarely up to an unchanging God in the metaphysical sense. Are we not to follow whithersoever our logic leads us? That all depends. In all theistic speculation we deal with assumptions. There is nothing that gives the hard-and-fast method of the logician of the formal school the authority to lord it over those who wish to make room for other features of human experience than the formally logical. The strictly rational reasoner cannot have everything his own way, except on the assumption that the universe itself is constructed as a strictly logical product of the mechanical type. That is just as truly assumption as the assumption that moral values have place in the universe. We are dealing with problems where strict proof is out of the question. If we are to have a Christlike God at all, then our construction of the universe must be such as to enthrone Christlike qualities at the center of the universe. If the universe is not to be conceived of in such Christlike terms, we may make any assumptions as to logic we please.

All I plead for is a willingness to look the situation squarely in the face. If we are going to have a Christlike God, let us have one. Let us see where the Christlikeness will lead us. The fact is that this enigma of change and fixity has been with men ever since they started to think at all. From the beginning men have been seeking the unchanging in a hard core of some kind. They would find such a core in matter if matter did not so obviously change. Then they look to some metaphysical fixity.

I am not trying to solve the puzzle in philosophy. I may say, however, that it is not fair to hold against our attempt to provide for a moral God all the metaphysical puzzles about change which have been with men from the beginning, and which tell quite as much against our daily experience as against the theory of the divine. If a thing changes at all, it is not thereafter the same. Where, then, is the fixity unless change is illusion? We see that a soul can know itself as the same, and yet as changing, but how can we work this out in dealing with the Infinite Soul? The swift answer is to deny either fixity or change, but that gets us nowhere. Logically we are as badly off as with the puzzles of Achilles and the hare, and of Zeno and his flying arrow, to which only half-way solutions have ever been given. So much for trying to be narrowly logical.

I insist that a large part of our trouble comes through giving the metaphysical considerations the first place. We construct a universe in our metaphysics and then afterward introduce moral considerations as best we can. The indubitable foundation stones have to be logical, we say. The mind of man makes logical demands which simply must be heeded, as it seems. Of course, now, everybody concedes that if we are to have a moral universe, we must have a basis for morality; but let us not forget that the basis must be a genuine basis, not a foundation on which it accidentally happens to be’possible to build a moral universe. The moral requirements must be primary, if we are to have a Christlike God. It might, indeed, be possible for a thinker to find a place for the Christ-ideal and Christspirit after he had provided for everything else to his mind’s content, but he could not fairly call his system Christian.

Moral unchangeableness means fixity of moral purpose quite a different matter from metaphysical fixity. Some will be surprised at my protests at metaphysical fixity, no doubt, or at my statement that such fixity does not imply moral fixity, but the ethical has to run out to its full implications. The divine might itself be in constant change and yet be morally unchangeable. All that would be required would be that all the changes be ruled throughout by a moral purpose which did not change.

If we are to have a God at all, we may just as well have one worth having. Since the time of Kant the outright demonstration of the existence of God has been given up for the assumption of a God whose nature satisfies the demands for our largest and best life. Now if our best demands are moral, the metaphysical must be adjusted to those. There can be no denying that divine experience must be different from human experience, but if we are to have a moral God, the human experience of change must mean something to God; or he must at least know what it means to men. To picture the divine experience as stripped of all the colorful change that belongs to human life and make it one eternal now above change, would deprive the thought of the Divine Life of much of its moral dynamic.

Timeless the life of God may well be, but not in such fashion that time, which is the form of all human experience, is to mean nothing to God. Granted to the idealist that time is nothing but form, the further remark is pertinent that while form may be nothing substantial in itself, it may well be more important than substance. Anything which so colors experience that we cannot for an instant imagine what experience would be without it, is not to be dismissed with the flourish that all this means nothing to God. The metaphysician may reply that he is himself trying to preserve a moral God, one whose moral life is forever at the full and knows no change. He may say that even if one moral law rules all the activities of the Divine, we do not have a worthy divine object if the Divine Life is subject to ebb and flow, or to a process of becoming either more or less. This point is, indeed, well taken, but it introduces an idea of divine development which may not necessarily belong here. I think we do not indeed get help from the thought of a morally developing God, but a God whose own life is forever at the full might well order the changes in the system in which we live. He would know all the possibilities of the system. Nothing could take him by surprise. No change might make him more moral after an event than before. We might admit that we cannot tell what such change would mean to him, but that is altogether different from saying that it would mean nothing. We cannot come close to the mind of Jesus, imperfect as are the records of the movements of that mind, without feeling that the changes which men know have mighty meaning for God.

Especially is this true when we are thinking of the moral changes in men’s wills. Here are moral facts which have significance for God. If God is indeed unchangeable he must change his activities as men change theirs. The meaning of the paradox is, of course, that if God is Christlike in his morality the fact itself that he is inflexibly moral will cause him to treat a sinful life differently from the way he treats a righteous life. The truth that the church has gone too far in dwelling on the difference between sinners and saints, and has usurped too much authority in assuming to apportion to men their eternal destiny, does not invalidate the conclusion that a moral God must take account of moral situations which call now for one kind of response and now for another. It can be said that the sameness of God calls for differences in his treatment of men.

I crave indulgence as I say again that I do not see any reason -lor putting the metaphysical difficulties so strongly that we cannot believe in the God of Christ. There is no objection that I know of to saying that God himself must be bound by the laws of his own nature, provided we think of his nature as fundamentally moral. To raise, however, a lot of puzzles as to the nature of time which make God metaphysically unchanging, is to ruin all possibility of thinking of his unchangeableness in moral terms. Change is a fact in the world in which we live. Time may be nothing but the form of that change but the change and the form itself mean so much to men that they must mean something to God. I do not say that if God is to be a moral being like unto Christ, he must himself enter the stream of change, and be subject to its processes. I mean that he must know what change means for men, and know not just in a formal, intellectual fashion. At this point some reader, familiar with the current debate about a finite God, asks if we cannot better provide for an unchangeable moral God by going the full length and bringing God himself into change. I am willing to admit that I would sooner do this than to have him outside, looking on the world with an eternal stare at processes signifying nothing to himself. The difficulty;*however, is that when we say that we will bring God into the stream of change we mean or we are understood to mean that we will subject him to a law of development which may at the end imply a possibility of his becoming better or worse. That would be a finite God with a vengeance. We do not need to resort to such heroic measures. I do not believe the Christian consciousness will ever be content with any doctrine of God that denies that his moral life is forever at the full. In the light of the attitude of Jesus let us ask ourselves if we can believe in a God who is morally better now than he was ages ago. But is the alternative one of a changelessness which means nothing to human experience, and to which human experience means nothing, as over against a God who is himself developing toward a loftier ideal? It seems to me possible to believe in a God above change, so far as his own moral development is concerned, and who yet knows what change means for men. So long as such a God is revealed in the Christ his changelessness means unalterable faithfulness to that revelation. Even if his own mental seizure of change is in accordance with a psychology of timelessness which we cannot understand, there is no reason for shutting God off from a knowledge of the way change appears to us. Speaking of the fullness of divine life, I do not see how we could cut that life off from knowing what change is without impoverishing it. The divine moral character’s standing forever at the full means that the divine is not subject to becoming either better or worse.

It may mean that in an ineffable intuition God grasps all reality past, present, and to come; but ineffable as that timeless grasp may be, it would be a limitation of his life if lie did not also know how time and change strike us. To use a most inadequate suggestion, the reader of Shakespeare may know how each of the plays ends, but that does not prevent his enjoying them more deeply with rereading. His knowledge of the plot as a whole does not interfere with the increased enjoyment of the successive readings. There is a double point of view that of the drama as a whole and that of the successive and shifting scenes. The illustration is most imperfect and raises some questions without answering them, but it does give us a hint. The divine moral life, may be forever at the full, but that fullness does not preclude a realization, of what change is. The Christian thought implies that the Christ-idea is the center of the divine life.

If the knowledge of God is a timeless intuition, the Christ-ideal is the center of that intuition. If God also enters into a realization of what change means for men, the Christ-ideal is the standard by which all the changes are given their significance.

All of this seems, to one type of student of religion, to bring back upon us absolutism of the most aggravated form. At the moment when the world is impatient of absolutism in metaphysics, this conception of an absolutely Christlike God brings absolutism back by the way of ethics. To this critic the doctrine seems ill-timed also because of the larger, more^ catholic view of the moral worth of some of the non-Christian systems which is coming into vogue. "Relativity," moreover, is the charmed word. Moral duties spring out of customs differing from place to place and time to time. The doctrine of a morally unchanging God runs counter to all this.

It does nothing of the sort, if I may be pardoned the bluntness. I am not trying to devise a detailed system of ethics for God. I could not, if I would, pick out material for a codified scheme of ethics from the teaching of Jesus. I concede the relativity of moral systems in detail, but I am trying to insist that it is our privilege to believe that the law of good will, stated in the largest and best terms of which men are capable, holds for God, if we accept the Christ as the revelation of God. It is the God-ward reference of the moral life with which I am concerned. Christian duties, indeed, change. The law of good will among men may call for one attitude and activity at one moment and for another in apparent contradiction at another moment. The revelation of the revelation in Christ may continue indefinitely. Christianity makes the claim that the holy love which Christ taught and lived holds true for God himself. All holiness and all love everywhere may be broken lights of that love. It is no more a sin of absolutism for the theologian to say that the universe cannot escape from holy love than for the scientist to say that it cannot escape from reason.