01.05. Chapter 05

CHAPTER V THE DIVINE POWER FOR the past few years considerable stress has been laid on the limitations which any careful thinking must [put on the divine omnipotence. The problem of evil both in the form of pain and that of sin has been met by the declaration that God cannot help himself. Nobody has ever put the difficulties of reconciling divine benevolence with divine omnipotence more effectively than John Stuart Mill, and the effort of religious thinkers of recent years has been to find some way out of the dilemma. The theists have held fast to the divine benevolence, mostly at the cost of the divine omnipotence, though their surrenders have not been considerable. A good share of discussion of omnipotence throughout the ages of the church’s life has been purely verbal. Of course if God is to be at all, he must be something. Much of the debate has attacked omnipotence in the artificial fashion that would insist that being something means not being something else, and then this not being something else is called limitation. All of which is merely words. There is no chance of advance in theological thinking in manipulating verbalisms. The dictionary is not the best mine of knowledge about God. In one sense definition itself is limitation, but the refusal even to define God lest we in some degree limit his power is no longer looked upon as the path to wisdom.

All seem to agree that the creation of finite wills is, indeed, a limitation of the omnipotence of God. I wish to deal with the problem of the creation of finite wills, especially of human beings, in a separate section. The problem of limitation of divine power is serious enough here, particularly when we think of the number of such beings. For the present, however, I deal with the power manifest in other spheres.

It seems increasingly evident that there is no way of understanding the universe by the exercise of purely intellectual faculties. The only relief is in a Christlike God whom we can trust but whom we cannot now understand. I think the problem is sterner outside than inside the distinctively human sphere. No matter how dark human suffering may be, it is possible to believe that the pain may be utilized for a moral result. This implies personal immortality, of course, but such implication is integral in the Christian system. It is when we ponder over animal pain, and even over some features of the inorganic realm, that we feel our helplessness. Our only recourse is to carry into our thought of the divine activity a confidence that God’s power is used under responsibility. In Christ we have set forth an appeal to such trust. God sees the fall of the sparrow and clothes the grass of the field.

It is a strain to see how limitation of the divine omnipotence aids us much. No doubt certain minds will find comfort in the idea of a God who cannot help us in the presence of stern necessities, but other minds will be worse than bewildered by such a doctrine. Limit the divine power to whatever extent we please, we cannot go far enough to get the relief we seek. Our realization of immensity of the powers in the control of God, whatever may be the divine nature, grows constantly. We rightly insist that if God is to create at all, he by creation itself takes limitation upon himself, but we no sooner finish saying this than the latest scientific journal informs us in most casual manner of discoveries which vastly increase the range of sentient life on our planet, and of the distances with which we have been accustomed to measure the universe. The commonplace expression which we employ to measure astronomical time, the "light-year," means nothing to the imagination, for who can grasp such a unit as the distance traveled in a year by light speeding at the rate of over 186,000 miles a second? The distance traveled in a second is itself too long for any adequate grasp by a dweller on the earth. The longest distance we know is the circumference of the earth. "When we are told that light can flash seven times around the earth in a second we are at once paralyzed so far as any imaginative grasp of the figures is concerned. All we can do is to calculate the distances, set down the results, and let it go at that. So likewise with time measures for astronomical reckonings, or even for the reckonings of the periods through which life has existed on earth. The figures are beyond us. Thus when a seeker for an explanation of the apparently cruel and meaningless features of the universe is told that the divine omnipotence is limited he is likely to pass by with a shrug of the shoulders. With the physicist teaching him that the tiniest speck of dust in the sunshine is the scene of the interplay of stupendous energies* he is not ready to conceive of the divine power as enough limited to make such limitation an answer to his question. There is enough power left to make a massive problem, if we are to think of God as personal. Of course if God is not personal, the problem of responsibility can be dismissed forthwith. In the first chapter I remarked on the difficulty of explaining God’s dealings with the universe in such measure as to satisfy the intellectual demands. May I be permitted, even at the peril of seeming repetitious, to delay for a little longer over the inadequacy of the explanation. May I say that the knowledge of the actual steps by which the world processes go forward increases faster than the knowledge of the meanings of those processes. Many a scientist stands in awe at the prevalence of law in the universe, at the definiteness with which consequent follows antecedent. Such scientists speak of the unity and harmony of the physical universe, and declare it easy to believe in mind as the foundation of that universe, especially when the philosophers point out that intelligibility of the universe itself is possible only if the universe is woven throughout according to a thoughtpattern. All of which the seeker after an understanding of God may accept, while protesting that it does not bring him within sight of the meanings for which he seeks. Admitting that the universe is grounded in intelligence, can we have any assurance as to the fundamental spirit and purpose of that intelligence? Can the intelligence be trusted?

It would seem to be wisdom here to let the critic of theism state his case just as fully as may be. There is no need of making things worse than they are, but, on the other hand, there is only folly in trying to make a better formal argument for the divine benevolence than is warrantable. Scientific processes themselves, or the processes which science describes, do not always move with such show of intelligence as we believer.s in God declare, or at least imply. To be sure, chemical elements combine according to formulas with finer than hairbreadth exactness, but when the elements combine into the materials of organisms many of the organisms seem to be without significance, as if they came by chance and suffered without purpose. If we could grant to the Darwinians what has been called the arrival of the fit that is to say, the appearance at the opportune moment of those organisms qualified to survive a particular crisis we might well say that Darwinism is in accord at least with appearances. Let chemical forces rule with mathematical accuracy down to the last cell of the animal’s organism and to the last atom of the plant it eats, the presence of the animals themselves and the food they eat seems to be haphazard. The animate world looks as if it found its way along by trial and error. Organs may, indeed, have come into existence to meet a need, but they survive the need so long that A they finally make toward death and not toward life. In the organic world the rule seems to be the rule-of-thumb. It is no doubt true that design seems to order the portioning out of the inorganic material on earth just so that organic life may become possible. A slight change in the proportions of these elements would have made impossible such forms of life as we know. Professor Henderson’s argument as to all this is not to be gainsaid. Once the forms begin to appear, however, the progress takes place, not, indeed, as if there were no intelligence at all, but as if there were an intelligence not sure of itself, or confronted by some intractabilities which it could only slowly overcome. The attempts to make the presence of vestigial survivals, like the appendix in man, strengthen the design argument are worse than nothing, for they argue an intelligence lacking in the ability to put the vestiges away once and for all. In other words, granting that intelligence appears, it is not of the sort that we can understand. It is not of much comfort to us to learn that organisms are the outcomes of the finest processes conceivable, processes that can only be expressed in formulas which show the workmanship of highest intelligence, if the organisms seem useless or worse than useless, after they appear. As good a suggestion as any to explain divine benevolence is to say with Leibniz that any finite creation is a part of a system and that the demands of the system have the right of way. For a little distance this is sun- clear. In a circle not every feature can be the center. Some points inevitably must lie off the center. There must be orders of values and grades of importance. So that even omnipotence could not make an intelliligible system if everything in that system were of first importance. Just now we are being told of the "web of life" which binds all parts of nature together. If some weaver is actually spinning a web, the pattern of the web seems to be the essential. If every tiny stretch of a spider’s web could wake to an organic consciousness and ask as to the meaning of its existence, not much light would dawn oil that consciousness out of the information that a mathematical design called the logarithmic spiral binds all the parts of the web into one pattern. The logarithmic spiral, since it requires mind to understand it, no doubt requires mind to explain its existence; but if the threads of that spiral were endowed with sentient consciousness, they might, indeed, ask what light the logarithm throws on the possible or actual pains of their individual existence. The lot of the individual is most baffling in any arguments which lay stress on system. I have said that I shall treat of human individuals later. There may be question as to how far a sentient creature without selfconsciousness can be called an individual, but such sentient creatures do feel, or all signs are void of sense. They may, indeed, not suffer as they seem, since they presumably possess little or no imagination, but to all appearances they suffer. The suffering of the system is in these separate centers. Nothing in the general requirement that in a system some elements must be secondary to others affords the slightest clue to the meaning of animal pain as we see it. The mere placing of one feature of a system as subordinate to some other might, indeed, hurt that feature’s pride, but we are talking of suffering much more substantial than the hurt of pride. No, this problem of animal suffering, seen in its extent in space and time, is the most potent single objection to the doctrine of a benevolent God. As men become themselves more and more sensitive to pain anywhere, the mystery becomes more serious. No bright light shines on it after all the centuries of speculation. There is scant relief except in trust in the God revealed in Christ. The questions raised by the apparent meaninglessness of the inanimate universe are not so seriously acute as those having to do with pain, but they are not to be dismissed lightly. The older notion that the universe centers around man, for all its value, is slippery, in view of the increase of our knowledge. /Granted that just this type of universe is the best conceivable for starting a race like ours, and granted that this may be part of the explanation of the universe, we cannot claim that we have here a full explanation. Nothing in the universe so stretches the thought and the imagination of the human intellect as the realm of the stars. The mind which can weigh the distant suns is truly of more consequence than the suns themselves. What a tax upon our belief it would be, however, to try to accept the doctrine that light travels to us through thousands of "light-years" just to give our minds a chance to measure it and to read its story of the constitution of far-off stars! The incredible size of the universe does make a mystery of high order.

Now, someone avers that since these features of the universe are manifestly beyond our minds, why should we raise question about them at all? They are God’s business and not ours. Let us $tick to our own business. The advice is from one angle of view sound enough, or sound enough advice from any point of view except the Christian, for the Christian is allowed to believe in a God of moral responsibility throughout all the realm of his activity. If this means anything, it means God’s final accountability to all moral intelligence everywhere intelligence, that is, able to understand. This seems to take back in one sentence what has just been given in another, for faced with the dark features of the universe, men are not able to understand. I do not think I am guilty of self-contradiction. If the reason for our not understanding is that we lack at present the requisite data, and the requisite mental power, the answer to our inquiries is simply that we must wait. Just at present the doctrine of relativity as set forth by Einstein and his followers is at once important and difficult to comprehend. What would the demand of the bumptious student amount to that the relativity theory be forthwith explained to him? From one angle the theory is the business only of those who have faculties and training adequate to doing business with it, which is altogether different, however, from saying that the theory is none of our business. It is, or can legitimately be, the business of anyone who will pay the costs of mastering it. Obviously, the pain and apparent aimlessness in the universe are none of our business, in any fashion that warrants our clamoring for explanations forthwith, and railing against a universe which does inot carry its own explanations on its face. / What if the explanations are there all the time, the root difficulty being that we cannot read them? It may be that injunctions to reverence before the universe are overdone. It may be that it would be better if we had less reverence for some phases of the universe, but irreverence is often a mark of intellectual incapacity or at least of impatience.

Now, if we believe in a Christlike God we open the doors for patience. If God is Christian, he is Christian throughout. There are no spaces into which he withdraws to act or live just as he pleases, using the expression for what it suggests in daily conversation. It may well be that what in the universe seems to us futile has no meaning connected with men’s notions of usefulness. It may be that the apparently blank reaches are foils or backgrounds for expressions of divine mood and idea, good on their own account good, too, for us when we get to the vantage-ground where we can understand them. It may be that a seizure of the lordliness of the universe as a whole is impossible from any such little corner of it as ours; still, the notion of a God endlessly weaving and unweaving, or acting merely out of caprice or whim, or sacrificing sentient organisms to the good of a scheme or "web," is not consonant with the idea of God, or the feeling about God, we get through devotion to the mind and spirit of Jesus. We cannot prove the validity of the teaching of Jesus, but in the light of that teaching we stubbornly avow that irresponsibility in the Divine will not do. We shall have more to say later about the union of the concepts of power and moral responsibility when we deal with God as the ruler of men. Suffice it to remark here that this union is one of the fruitful ethical gains of the centuries. The union was first definitely wrought out in the field f of human relationships. After ages of revoluv tions and bloodshed men recognized that a ruler’s power over his subjects must be exercised under a bond of trusteeship. The notion that a king could do as he pleased with his subjects was early, attacked. The victory here is fairly sure. Next came the doctrine that the personal possession of social power of any kind can be justified only by the degree of moral responsibility with which the power is wielded. The implications of this dynamic idea are now being hammered out in the industrial realm in particular. Finally, we are beginning to hear that the possession of power of any sort, even of native personal endowment, involves, or demands, a heavy moral responsibility in the employment /of that power. The critic calls a halt. This may be true enough, he admits, as far as a human society is involved, but we are now arguing about God himself. We have admitted that phases of the divine doing in the physical realm are now beyond us. They seem so far beyond us that we cannot make anything of them. Maybe we can never make anything of them. Possibly there is no intelligence outside of God himself who can make anything of them. Conceivably there may be movements of physical forces whose mathematics no mind, except the Divine Mind, can grasp, or whose purpose no wisdom, except that of God himself, can ever fathom. What does moral responsibility mean in such case? To whom, in such imagined situation, would God be; responsible?

I have put the protest thus to bring out an assumption that too often lurks in the ordinary thinking about God, namely, that responsibility is wholly a relation between persons. Commonly this is true. Our existence is so made up of contacts with our fellows that the demand of moral responsibility is about exhausted in those contacts. Even we, however, speak of loyalty to what we call our ideals, or our own best selves. We desire to be true to ourselves under all circumstances. We say that, even if one were cast alone on a desert island, it would be one’s duty to remember one’s manhood and not to sink toward brutehood. Now, we are certainly not trying to fancy God as cast on a desert island, but we are trying to suggest that in the divine life pre-eminently the responsibility is to the divine nature itself. Responsibility to others could for God mean little apart from responsibility to his own nature. We are always hearing about mysteries in the divine nature which might conceivably explain this or that. Whatever the mysteries, they cannot be out of line with the highest Christlikeness. In interpreting God thus according to Christ we must not imagine that our own piecemeal codes are the standard. All we can ask is that in those phases of activity which we cannot understand, God acts not out of wantonness or sportiveness but out of a nature rational and moral throughout. If the final word about God is Christ, we are content, even if we know ages will pass before we can understand.