01.06. Chapter 06

CHAPTER VI THE DIVINE KNOWLEDGE THE problem of the divine knowledge, like that of divine power, has supplied material for debate since men first began to speak of God. The discussion has usually turned around the enigma as to divine foreknowledge of what a free being may do. In these later days our moral sense is demanding more and more that a chance for real freedom be granted to men, no matter what inroads such freedom may make on divine omniscience, though divine knowledge of what a free will may do has never yet been proved a contradiction.

Here I wish to look at some of the underlying puzzles which have to do with divine knowing in general. Those who will not concede personality to the Divine of course rule out knowledge in any humanly intelligible sense. Again, a certain type of mind seems to be in hopeless funk over the infinity of combinations of factors conceivably always present to the divine intelligence. Such intelligence would always have present the actual combination of factors, but what would hinder thinking also of the other possible combinations, until consciousness became smothered under the load? Why, further, should intelligence have chosen just the combination we see and no others? A powerfully intellectual acquaintance of mine was once sick and in his illness went into a half-delirium, in which he nearly drove himself to madness counting the various objects in the room, and making all sorts of combinations among the squares and cubes of the numbers. Just so some intellectualists seem to fancy that God must be in a perpetual inanity because of the infinity of possibilities always before him.

If a man is bound to conceive of the divine thinking in this fashion, I suppose there is no help for him, except in ceasing thinking altogether till he rights himself into mental seriousness and balance, for all the above is verbal and artificial. The thinker is abstracting from the actual to enter into a .circle of logic-chopping and word-spinning. A Christian idea of God provides a moral center makes the divine will fundamental. All this fine-webbed stuff about possibilities is abstraction from an actual doing which is followed because it is ethically best. We repeat over and over again that while it is impossible to separate thinking and feeling and doing in any personality divine or otherwise the essential is to decide which we are to put first in order of value. The Christian doctrine of God puts moral doing first. Often as I restate this I am sure that it will not command the assent of some teachers avowedly Christian, for to some there seems need of a stronger foundation for the divine than moral purpose. They crave a logical basis on which the ethical can rest. Then, stepping about among these logical cornerstones, the overrational get to thinking solely of logic, and after a season ethics seem unsubstantial to them. Nothing will avail against this tendency except steeping oneself in ethical seriousness like that of Jesus, for the malady is a species of intellectual frivolity, seriously though the frivolity may take itself. It all resembles that old schoolboy jibe that spelling is more important than the Bible, for if there were no spelling there could be no Bible. Of course no logic will compel a thinker to accept a Christlike God. If one wishes a logic-chopping God, there is no insuperable logical objection. If one, however, is to accept a Christlike God, he may as well make the most of his belief, and trust that even the divine knowledge bases itself in moral solidity.

It is not quite fair to raise all manner of quibbles as to the manner of divine thinking, when these same quibbles tell just as pertinently against human thinking. We do think, in spite of the alleged contradictions in thinking; nor is it fair to carry into our conception of the Divine all the conceivable and inconceivable weariness and strain with which we should imagine ourselves embarrassed if we were put in charge of the universe. For example, when we speak of knowledge as arising out of moral doing we cannot help suggesting strain toward an ideal, and of lapse again and again to levels far below the ideal. We then fall away in sheer weariness from grasp on a moral intelligence forever at the full which sees always with faultless discernment. At the back of our minds is this craving for something solid, or for something impersonal which goes by itself. When we begin to reach about for that something, however, we experience just as much perplexity as before.

Just a word further about the elusiveness of the divine as a steady, full, moral will. When we reflect upon the divine intelligence as carrying forward the ongoing universe let us say, the universe of stars and suns we are prone to conceive of the process as through distinct and separate acts of will, because such sharply outlined decisive acts are our methods of willing. When we think of God’s volitions we imagine myriads of such isolated decisions. Naturally enough, our imaginations soon break down, and then we conclude that personal will is inadequate to such a task as this. If it will help the imagination any, why not take a hint from our moral habits acquired as the deposits of our successive moral acts until they have become the most substantial strata of our nature? A man’s nature is never more completely moral than when it has attained to this fixity. A man’s intelligence is not always consciously and deliberately debating whether to act one way or another. The more quickly mind seizes upon essential truth without plodding through all the steps of formal reasoning the more logical it is. Instead of picturing God as always solving equations for the propulsions of stars and suns and planets, why not consider him as acting in such complete conformity with what intelligence calls for that our manufactured equations are merely the slow and halting stages by which inferior intelligence reads God’s thought after him? God acts in the full light of wisdom his act the full expression of intelligence, his act a unified whole. Then our duller minds trace out the unity, discover how the parts fit into system, partially solve the equations which so soon run out beyond our mathematical instruments. Likewise with the activity of God from the moral point of view. I say, "from the moral point of view" simply to indicate that we can repeat all this over again from the moral angle. Any such term as "habit" is crudely erroneous as applied to God, for it suggests fixity after struggle, but it does hint at a steadiness of doing which meets the yearning of human weariness for something that seems to go of itself, without innumerable separate deeds of decision. What we think of as halfconscious, or subconscious, processes in ourselves because they go forward without our conscious effort, may give an inkling of a divine life which is not, indeed, half -conscious or subconscious, but which goes forward without strain. Or, at the other end of the scale of personal experience, we may all recall moments of rapt insight when we seem to have risen into a world beyond ourselves. If there is a region of subconsciousness, may we not also speak of a region of superconsciousness at least "super" the usual consciousness? Now, the gleams of sudden insight to which some attain when they rise from the customary levels to something higher have the characteristic of presenting truth or what seems to be truth in wholes, the truth standing in its own right. Moreover, all the familiar processes of reasoning seem at such instants like discarded ladders. We wonder that we ever had any use for them. Since such experiences as these are possible to men, why may they not be the best clues at least to an adumbration of the Divine? Instead, then, of our thinking of the moral life of God as a painful and strained clinging fast to an ideal the difference between the divine and the human being that the divine needs no development and can know no lapse we should better think of a full life, imagined after the highest moments of insight we ever seize, spontaneously and naturally rich on its own account, every pulsing centered upon an ideal which is moral throughout. Of course the Divine must know himself through and through. There must be no dim corners as in ourselves, or hidden depths out of which evil impulses may well forth. The full knowledge in the Divine must rise out of the full moral life.

Here we may as well mention the old, old debate as to whether God acts in a particular way because that way is right, or is the way right merely because it is the divine act? The customary answer to-day is that God acts in a particular way because that way is right, and yet that the right is itself the expression of the divine nature. The moral ideal is not something over against God as a standard to which he must conform, but is itself the expression of his nature. This seems somewhat like a mere collocation of words, I know, but it is vastly different from the teachings of the older days as to a divine sovereignty which made deeds right and ideals true just because God did or spoke them. I would say that there is a realm of moral truth which God and men alike must recognize, and to which they must conform, if it did not suggest that God, like men, is involved in a moral struggle.

Why should we feel any more difficulty in grasping God’s relation to a moral system than in grasping his relation to an intellectual system? We do not ask whether truth is truth because God utters it, or whether it is something with rights on its own account! Whatever truth is, we expect God to conform to it, though we have no objection to the claim that it is the expression of his own nature. Even those who deny the existence of God will concede that if there were to be a God he would have to be, one of whose nature truth would be an expression. Possibly the admitted relativity of moral codes causes some to draw back from making moral truth the expression of a divine nature. This relativity, however, touches all truth. It may be that the crudeness and stiffness and narrowness of our moral precepts make us shrink from saying much about the moral qualities of God as the center of his life, but similar shortcomings affect all our more intellectual processes and deliverances.

We think, then, of God as moral light in whom there is no darkness at all. This fullness of moral understanding itself implies responsibilities upon a Christlike God. Knowledge is power. The difference in knowledge between God and any finite creature puts God under heavy bonds which, we may believe, he rejoices to assume. It is inconceivable, of course, that the Divine Life be stained by any knowledge of sin, except as the holy can recognize and fight against sin; it is inconceivable also that the Divine should live in any moral darkness, or with any feeling of a divided self. Still, it may be well to recall what was said about the divine knowledge of change as a finite creature experiences change. If the Divine, which we think of as changeless, cannot in any form realize what change means to finite intelligence, then the Divine knows little about the finite. So likewise with the relation of the Divine to any growing moral life. If the Divine does not have some realizing insight as to what moral struggle means to the one struggling, then the Divine knows all too little about the moral life of the finite. Especially in passing judgment upon the finite can we believe that the Divine will act under a trusteeship, so to speak, because of the difference between the Infinite’s full knowledge and the finite’ s partial knowledge or no knowledge at all. If we worship a God in terms of Christ, we have less difficulty here.

Just a word further as to the source of the divine knowledge about the goodness in a finite life. First of all, let us take fair account of such finite goodness. Was it not Horace Bushnell who once preached on some glories peculiar to men which perhaps might rank high as compared even with the divine glories? As I recall, Bushnell made moral development itself a delight worthy to be compared to the ineffableness of God’s eternal fullness. It almost seemed as if Bushnell preferred such human development to a divine changelessness. A further instance of the glory of finite existence might be found in the spectacle of that goodness which stands for truth when the appearances seem all against truth. In the Divine there is completion and harmony. In the finite there is lack and discord, yet in this region of the half-light, or of no light, there are finite wills which stand for righteousness without ever attaining to a glimpse of harmony, or without anything which can be called a reward of righteousness. Perhaps there is no glory of the finite mightier than this of pursuing truth and right for their own sakes, though the glory fails of recognition because it is so common.

Now, the obligation is accepted by a Christlike God to note and appreciate finite goodness. How is his appreciation possible? By the exercise of irresistible metaphysical omniscience? Such omniscience, if it were not itself moral, could not attain to an appreciation of i the moral even in a finite creature. For such appreciative knowledge requires more than a purely intellectual faculty. I have heard religious teachers speak of the devil as if he were omniscient. In fact, I can now point to teachers who make the devil’s knowledge equal to God’s. Just for the sake of the argument let us assume a devil, or any Satanic intelligence, with a range of knowledge about equal to that with which popular religions endow him. Necessarily such a Satanic intelligence could not know everything. It might grasp at a wide range of objective facts. It might seize all the mathematical principles of the material universe; it might, in short, know everything knowable from the outside. It could not, however, know from the inside that universe of fine wisdom which can only be seized by moral sympathy. Such a Satanic intelligence might behold everything a noble character might do, and yet might miss the inner meaning altogether. All that vast knowledge which comes out of loyalty to a lofty ideal, all that exquisite understanding which comes out of kinship with moral souls, would be closed to a Satan.

If we are overwhelmed at the contemplation of divine omniscience and God’s knowledge is virtually that even if we make exception of free acts of finite creatures we may shift to another center by speaking of the divine insight. A wonderful touch in the parable of the prodigal son is that story of the father’s vision which caught the significance of the son’s return while the son was yet a long way off. It was not an unusually sharp eyesight which enabled the father thus to recognize the son, but the fatherly spirit back of the eye. In the passages where Jesus speaks of the Father’s knowledge though he is, indeed, not discussing metaphysical omniscience there seems to be more of hint of kindliness and sympathy than of power of intellectual irresistibility in itself. The reference to the sparrow’s fall is not intended to show the grasp of the Divine Mind on detail but to reveal the spirit of the Father of all. By the time Jesus appeared on the world’s stage the conception as to the reach of God’s knowledge had been so well worked out as simply to be assumed. What Jesus added was interpretation of the divine knowledge as sympathetic insight. Does not our exposition carry us too far? If the divine knowledge is based, so to speak, on sympathetic insight, does not such insight preclude a divine knowledge of evil? Of course it does, in any sympathetic experience. The divine God of the Christ knows more about some aspects of evil than any other intelligence. He knows more of its cost. Evil means more distress to him than to anyone else. Still, he cannot know evil in the experience of friendly response to evil. He can have sympathy for the soul of low ideals, but not sympathy with that soul. If this is a limitation of the omniscience, let it be so. The approach to God through Christ is not concerned with the preservation of formal omniscience at the cost of moral worth.

If, then, God is like Christ, at least three considerations must shape our reasonings about the divine knowledge. The knowledge, like the power of which it is a form, is held under a heavy responsibility, which God freely carries. It is revolting to contemplate immeasurable knowledge without immeasurable responsibility. Secondly, the knowledge must be linked with moral doing. Jesus said that he that doeth the divine will shall come to a knowledge of the truth. While this applies chiefly to men as learners it must have some meaning for God. The divine knowledge must be a mirroring of the divine doing, and the divine doing must be in response to the divine knowledge. In God the ideal is made real, God’s own choice forever ratifying the ideal and setting it forth into expression. Finally, in any dealings with finite intelligences, God’s approach to men can be conceived of not as through an overpowering intellectual omniscience, but as through moral insight. Sympathetic understanding is the diviner term. Omniscience in dealing with souls seems cold if we believe in God as like unto Christ.