WHAT IS GOD?

"And be said, A certain man had two sons." — Luke xv. 11.

It has already been pointed out that there is a much closer connection between the truth taught and the tale told than in most other parables; and the use of the illustration by Jesus shows that He regarded the human affections, and the actions of which they are the motives, as evidences of what God Himself is. When in the title we venture to assert God's Humanity, we are not going at all beyond the warrant of Jesus' teaching. The analogy between the earthly father's and the Heavenly Father's actions assumes the affinity of the nature of God and man. The entire teaching of Jesus about God is summed up in the name Father; God is what man at his best would be. We have then the confirmation of the whole revelation of God in and by Christ when from the words of the parable, "A certain man had two sons," we draw two truths: (1) God is manlike; (2) God is fatherly.

1. God is Manlike.

(1) Herbert Spencer tells us that the ultimate reality is an inscrutable mystery; that religion and science can be reconciled only in the recognition of the Unknowable. Matthew Arnold could not discover more than "a power not ourselves that makes for righteousness." Even idealism to-day often hesitates about assigning to God personality, as personality is often conceived as necessarily finite, and so unpredicable of the Infinite. And one of the commonest charges against Christian theology is that it is anthropomorphic or anthropopathic, that it assigns human form or human passions to God. It need hardly be said that Christian faith is not anthropomorphic, as idolatry is; we may in the imaginative language of devotion speak of God as hearing, seeing, speaking; but we do not mean that God has ears, eyes, or mouth; for Jesus has taught us that God is Spirit. Neither is it anthropopathic in the sense that it ascribes to God any animal passions, as pagan mythology did; for He is Light, and in Him is no darkness at all. No human imperfection attaches to God in the Christian conception. But, on the other hand, if we use the term passion in the sense of suffering, in which there is no moral defect, the Christian faith can be said to be anthropopathic. It has already been pointed out that when Christian theology used the term Patripassian as a term of reproach, it showed its departure from the standpoint of Jesus. He did, and we may, assign to God emotion and affection, love and the sorrow or the joy that love brings as it is disappointed or satisfied. It is about the ascription of feeling to God that most difficulty has been felt. The existence of the Universe demands an infinite and eternal will as its cause; the law and order and progress of that Universe demand that that cause shall be an intelligent cause, that an infinite and eternal Mind shall be allied with an infinite and eternal Will.

There is more doubt and dispute as to whether that Mind and Will may be regarded also as beneficent in view of the evil that is in the world. Even when, in spite of that evil, beneficence is admitted, and affection and emotion are so far conceded as conceivable in God, there is often reluctance in taking the next step, the admission that the Infinite and Eternal Mind and Will is also a Heart that not only wills good to His creatures, but sorrows with them in the evil that they experience. Jesus in this parable and throughout His teaching boldly takes that step. The God He reveals as Father sorrows with man's loss, and rejoices in man's recovery. He is manlike in the full sense of the word man; He thinks, wills, feels, and loves.

(2) As this is not a theological treatise the philosophical problem of the ascription of personality to God cannot here be discussed, but two reasons for accepting Jesus' view which appeal to the religious consciousness may be given. In the first place, religion for its reality demands that God shall be conceived personal as man is personal. The mind needs to hold communion not with an impersonal truth, even if we could attach any meaning to such a phrase, but with another Mind that thinks the truth. The heart calls out, not for a spirit of love, whatever that abstraction may be, but for a Heart that can give and receive love. The conscience cannot bow before an abstract law, but in that law it must discern the authority of a perfect moral subject, not only inspiring righteousness in men, but realising it Himself.

As Eucken has recently been insisting, in religion at its intensest, personality craves, and can be satisfied only with personality. It is not imperfect personality as man knows himself to be, but personality in which all the ideals after which he strives are reality; personality that in its perfection gives the assurance that man shall yet as personal be perfected. To ask men to confess and worship the Unknown is to mock them; and Spencer in making the demand showed that he did not know what religion really is. Even in the lowest forms of savage religion — animism — man has sought the likeness of himself in the divine; and the progress of religion lies not in depersonalising God, but in conceiving the ideal of human personality more worthily, and so ascribing the reality of it more worthily to God.

In the second place, if Jesus is to be accepted as a revelation of God at all, God must be thought manlike. If God be impersonal, how can the personal reveal Him; and yet the firm foundation of all Christian faith is that God is what Christ showed Him to be not only in the words of His lips, but in His whole life. Incarnation crowns the religious development of mankind, if God be personal, for in Christ man at last finds the perfect personality that he sought, and so finds God in Him; but, if God be not personal, then man's religious consciousness has been deceptive at every stage; and such a conception as Incarnation of the divine is an illusion. Only if God be manlike can He have become man in Jesus Christ.

2. God is Fatherly.

(1) But Jesus is not content with assuming manlikeness to God. He describes Him as Father. What does that term connote? It does not mean merely that God is Creator of man, that man depends on God for the origin and the continuance of his existence; for that can be affirmed of God in relation to the whole Universe. It is not merely an assertion of the affinity of nature between God and man, that God may be thought manlike, for God made man godlike. All religion implies this likeness, and the fellowship which arises therefrom. If God had not made man mind, heart, will, as He Himself is, man had never known God, or sought any relation with Him. It is not, however, in this wider sense, which to some modern thinkers seems to be the only sense, that Jesus uses the term Father. It expresses the relation of God to man as loving him, seeking his good, and especially in view of man's sinfulness, working for his salvation. We must not take the term out of the context in which Jesus here presented it, and then turn it against the reality in relation to which He declared it. The first and best gift of God's Fatherhood in the teaching of Jesus is His forgiveness of sin. God shows Himself Father most of all in seeking and saving the lost. We must not argue that because God is Father, and man has the likeness, and is in fellowship with God, therefore sin is of little significance, and can in no way affect man's relation to God. A Fatherhood of nature is not the revelation of Jesus, but a Fatherhood of grace. This statement must not, however, be misunderstood, as it has been by theologians standing at the opposite extreme of thought. While God's Fatherhood is a Fatherhood of grace, it is a universal Fatherhood; for God's disposition to all is love, and God's purpose for all is salvation. We need not here concern ourselves at all with the doctrine of election, for we are trying to state simply the plain teaching of Jesus, and the clear meaning of His life. He claimed to express the will of God concerning man, and He ever sought to save the lost. It seems an absolute distortion of the Christian Gospel to teach that Christ's work secures God's Fatherhood for those who believe, whereas it expresses that Fatherhood for all men in order that all may be brought to believe. The will of love to save and bless is an eternal and infinite will; and Christ reveals what God is, and does not make God other than He is. If we emphasise the fact that God's Fatherhood is essentially His will to save and bless mankind sinners, then we can both affirm that it is universal, and that the corresponding human relation to God of sonship is realised only by those who in faith respond to the grace. It is only if we put the abstract terms of logic above the concrete realities of life that we can insist, as I have heard some disputants do, either that man's sonship is as universal as God's Fatherhood, or that God's Fatherhood is limited as man's sonship. God wills to save and bless all men, but all men do not will to be so saved and blessed.

(2) The truth of God's Fatherhood has been widely challenged on the ground that the existence of evil disproves the reality of the love of God. The wider considerations, which in a philosophical treatment of the problem would be relevant, lie beyond the present scope of our inquiry; for we want to discover and then to share the reasons why Jesus believed and taught the Fatherhood. It was not because He was ignorant of, or indifferent to, human pain and need; it was not because He was unsympathetic to human sorrow; it was not because He minimised or explained away the reality of sin. If we realise His tenderness and kindness, we must be convinced that the problem of evil, and especially of sin, was felt by Him as no thinker, who on account of it has challenged the truth of God's love, ever felt it. He knew the whole reality that to some seems to make faith impossible, and He exercised an unwavering and conquering faith. His certainty of God's Fatherhood in face of the reality of evil and sin as He knew and felt it may inspire our confidence that, if we cannot solve the problem, for Him at least it was not insoluble. It was because He concentrated His attention and interest and effort on the moral sin, rather than the physical evil, as many thinkers have done, that He foresaw the solution; for if sin can be conquered, evil can be removed. To Him the problem was first of all, and most of all, man's distrust of and disobedience to God: the core of the problem of evil to Him was that man was lost to God. But the tragedy of man's state assured Him of a blessed consummation. Because man's sin was God's loss, man's recovery was assured by God's love. For Jesus, God's Fatherhood was the constant, victorious will to save and bless. He did not affirm the love of God by denying the existence of evil; but the removal of the evil was the realisation of the love. Enduring the contradiction of sinners, sharing the shame, sorrow, and suffering of man's sin in His love for man, He not only taught God's Fatherhood, but lived it in His Sonship of trust, love, and obedience. His certainty is contagious, and the Fatherhood so real to Him, He, when He casts the spell of His grace over us, makes as real to us. But this is not all; the Fatherhood was being revealed in not only the realisation of His Sonship in Himself, but in the realisation of His Saviourhood to others. He was "the friend of publicans and sinners," because the Son of Man was indeed seeking and saving the lost. The problem of evil was for Him soluble, because He was Himself solving it. It was in that hour, when the burden of the problem fell most heavily upon His own heart, that He maintained His assurance of Saviourhood, the fulfilment through Him of God's will of love towards all mankind. Jesus' teaching of God's Fatherhood would not have for us the value that it has, had He not realised the evil and the sin of the world to the uttermost in His own loving heart; it could not amid doubt and question maintain our certainty, had He not in His Saviourhood shown the victory of God's love over sin and evil.