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The Meaning of God

By Harris Franklin Rall

Chapter 2 THE GOD WHO IS NEAR

RELIGION moves in paradoxes; it is no wonder then that we find something of paradox in its central idea, that of God. And the paradox is this, that for religion God must be at once that which is far and that which is near. Until a man has found that which is above him, there can be no reverence, no trust, no devotion, and so no religion. But so long as this Being remains simply a Being above him, religion will be equally wanting; for religion lives only as man believes that this higher Being somehow draws near, that somehow he touches man's life, has some meaning for him, bears upon his destiny.

The great teachers of religion have known how to unite these contrasted conceptions in the unity of their faith. The prophet sees "the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up," ¹ but he does not leave the temple till this same Lord draws near to cleanse his lips and bring his commission. Jehovah is "the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy," who dwells "in the high and holy place"; but in the same breath we are told that he dwells "with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit." ² A whole volume could not enforce the thought of the nearness of God more than the one word "Father" with which Jesus opposes alike the weak faith of men and the distance to which Judaism often removed God in its thought; yet he bids us pray to this God as the one who is in heaven and whose name is to be made holy.

Such paradox, which is the very life of religion, seems intolerable however to theology and philosophy, and so the tendency has always been to isolate one of these elements and carry it out to its conclusion. In traditional theology it is the farness of God which has received this emphasis—that is, the idea of God as transcending humanity. Its most common form in popular thought has been Calvinism. Here we have the supremacy of power, God as absolute sovereign. The final word for faith is not the glory of God as revealed in the character of Jesus, but "the omnipotence of God, by which, according to his secret counsel on which everything depends, he rules over all." When the mind calls for light or the affronted moral sense rises in revolt, there is no answer except that of decrees and decisions that rest upon "the mere pleasure of the divine will." "Everything which he wills must be held to be righteous by the mere fact of his willing it." ³ The other form which has been taken in theology by this one-sided emphasis on the transcendence of God has been an abstract idea of perfection. Here the supreme concern has been to lift God above every condition, every limitation, every likeness to the human or finite. Instead of a living God touching human life, we have the long list of attributes, omnipotence and omnipresence and omniscience and the rest, an analysis of which will show that they are at bottom really negations, denials of limitation.

"Whatever you say, I tell you flat,
God is not that."

In both these cases you have a beautiful logical system, but at the expense of religion itself. The God of sheer sovereign power leaves no room for moral freedom and responsibility, and makes goodness second to might. The God of abstract perfection is a philosophical idea rather than the object of a living faith. It endangers what is the very life of religion, the thought of personal relation. It lifts up an absolute substance or idea, where man wants personal fellowship. It is the influence of Greek philosophy still persistent in Christian theology, and its God as an absolute idea demands a static world. Christianity moves in the line of Hebrew thought and interest; its God is high and lifted up, but he is a living God who moves in his world and his world is one in which high purposes are being carried out.

It is true that the one-sided emphasis on the nearness of God is just as inimical to the interests of religion. Some of its representatives must be considered more in detail later on. There is the pantheist for whom God is not only present in his world, but merged with his world, so that the world arid God are one. There is the man who, like Mr. Wells, must have a finite God if he is to save his faith in a good God in the presence of the world's evil. There is the humanist, who identifies God with humanity and finds in an idealized humanity the object of devotion and the ground of hope. But here too it is religion that suffers, the religion that must have for reverence a higher good than it finds in itself and that must have as object of trust a power that can fulfill its hopes and aims.

If there is paradox in this double demand for a God that is far and one that is near, then that is because life itself shows this paradox, a certain tension, a conflict of interests and ideas which may find some ultimate unity, but in which the central meaning of our present life is found. Such are the ideas of dependence and freedom; on the one hand the sense of a whole, a higher something that shuts us in and determines us on every side, on the other the sense of freedom, of independence, and of consequent responsibility. Such is the seeming conflict of the individual and the social: the feeling that our own life is sacred, that the expression of self and its achievement must be our end, yet at the same time the realization that our life must ever be faulty and imperfect except as we relate ourselves in being and devotion to the social whole. In the words of Josiah Royce, "Every man who learns what the true goal of life is, must live this twofold existence—as separate individual; yet also as member of a spiritual community which, if loyal, he loves, and in which, in so far as he is loyal, he knows that his only true life is hidden and is lived." ⁴

The questions of deepest interest to faith come to the front when we consider the near God. For the question of the near God involves just this: What difference does religion really make? What does God mean for my life and the world's? Where does he really touch it? Religion does not live from the thought of a distant Power, or an abstract Idea; it lives through this thought of a near God who makes a difference, who is really related to this world of human experience and daily happening. And if modern theology differs from traditional theology at any one point more than another, it is here. Traditional theology begins with a system of abstract ideas, a perfect and ordered realm of doctrine existing by itself; present-day theology begins with the concrete, with that which is near, with the world of religious experience and need, and seeks to find God and know God in and through this world, Just as much as ever it demands the Eternal, it cries out for God; but it wants a God related to life and it will know this God in and through his world. It has been criticized for its "anthropocentric theology," ⁵ for its humanism and naturalism, and there is some ground for this; but as a matter of fact, on the whole its interest is more truly and constantly religious than is the older orthodoxism which was often quite as abstract and intellectualistic as the old rationalism which it fought. We want a God that makes a difference.

Our first task then in our study of the near God is to find the divine in the human, the eternal here in the world of time, to show that the far God of our faith is the near God in our world, to bring men to a knowledge of "the beyond that is within." But we cannot do this without facing another problem. As long as the theologian remains in the skies his task is fairly simple. He works out his system of ideas at will and there is no one to say him nay, for there is nothing by which to check his conclusions. It is quite different when we think of God as near and relate him to his world. For now we are entering a realm which is shared by others, and in which we must relate our faith to concrete facts. Natural science is here, and history and psychology and the plain facts of human experience. How fares now this idea of a God that is all-good and all-powerful in face of the evil and irrational in the world? Can we think of providence and the reign of natural law at the same time? Can we reconcile our faith in "one increasing purpose" with that seeming tangle of unmeaning events which we call history? When men say sight, can we say faith ? When science says energy, can we say spirit? When it says law, can we say providence? Can we see the supernatural when it describes the natural? Can we say creation when it says evolution? When it says nature, can we see God? We enter the realm here of the "conflict of science and religion" and we know that so long as science and religion are studying and interpreting the selfsame world some conflict will be almost inevitable. That there should be ultimate conflict is impossible. For truth is one, and where truth is found there we find God, whether at the hand of science in the world of nature or at the hand of faith in the world of spirit. It is important too that we remember the distinctly different tasks which science and religion set themselves. Science is descriptive of modes of behavior in the world of nature. It has no answer for the questions "whence the mechanism has come, why it is there, whither it is going, and what may or may not be beyond and beside it, which our senses are incapable of appreciating. These things are not 'explained' by science and never can be." ⁶ It is just these questions for which faith seeks an answer. In case of "conflict" the fault has sometimes lain with the theologian. He has often assumed that faith stood or fell with the particular form of doctrine in which he expressed it. If the facts of science and history contradict some form of Biblical statement, then he concludes hastily that revelation is denied and religion is gone. If the statements of biologist and anthropologist and astronomer do not square with the pictures of Genesis, then the whole idea of creation is in peril. If science declares that the human race has come to be by gradual development, then he feels that the unique nature of man as moral personality is done away; strangely enough that idea never occurs to him in the case of the individual, though he knows that every individual is a gradual development from an infinitely small germ. Undoubtedly one of the most fruitful sources of trouble here is a mechanical conception, of inspiration, insisting upon verbal infallibility and mistaking the nature of revelation. Sometimes the scientist has been at fault. It was a temptation to assume that his world was the only world and his method the only method of reaching truth. The temptation to philosophize and dogmatize is upon us all, and not least upon those who are loudest in decrying philosophers.

It is by no means all loss here, however. Science has helped theology. For the spirit of science means humility and patience and teachableness. It asks of men a reverence for truth and a devotion to it. It recalls men constantly to the world of fact, to the realities by which our theories must be tested. How it has helped to correct old misconceptions and to lead to a truer understanding of God's way with his world will appear in our further study.

We begin with the thought of the nearness of God in the world of nature, and first of all as the creative God. The older doctrine of creation had little relation to the idea of the near God. Through a few successive steps, requiring in all but six days of time, God by a fiat of will brings forth the universe. His work is like that of a builder, working from without and shaping forth his objects one after the other. Now the question involved here is something far more than the order of appearances in Genesis and geology, or the matter of whether we are dealing with six days or six epochs. It is not, of course, a matter of creation versus evolution. For whether the world sprang into being at some word of power, or came by long processes of development, the question would still remain as to its source, and the answer of faith would still be, "In the beginning God created/* It is the question of how this creative Power has worked, and back of that the question of the nature of the universe itself.

The old idea of the world was static, a finished world, ordered and fixed and final. For physics there were fixed, ultimate particles, the atoms, of which all things were made. For chemistry there was a definite set of elements, themselves unchanging, however they might combine. In the world of life there was a similar order of species and genera that had been from all time. The same idea held in the social realm with the fixed institutions of family and state and property, and the fixed and unchanging social classes, higher and lower, into which men fell. Creation was thought of as the deed by which once for all this world was brought forth. That is behind us to-day. Science has given us a dynamic and developing world. We interpret reality in terms of energy. Activity is being and the mode of action is the revelation of the nature of a given being. The world that is has come to be through a long history of change, and change has not ceased with our day.

Now the first thought of many was that with this idea of a developing world the Christian conception of creation went by the board. That was true of some who welcomed it and some who feared it. Let us turn again to this idea of evolution. No idea of modern times has had a wider influence, or has been more stimulating in all departments of thought, than the idea of evolution, and no other has been so vague, or so mutually contradictory in its different forms. What does evolution mean ? Is it a process of unfolding by which that is brought to light which had previously existed though hidden, or is it the actual coming into being of something really new? Is it a purely mechanical process where all changes are wrought by forces working from without, or is it the movement of some life force that is continually giving birth to new forms of being? Is it mere change without idea or hope of progress, or is there purpose and meaning working to some high end? If we leave aside particular theories, like the Darwinian theory of organic evolution, then the general idea of evolution may be stated thus: That which is has come to be by gradual change in a continuous process through the orderly working of indwelling forces. And this might be further reduced to the two principles, continuity and change; that which is involves the appearance of something new, but the new always stands in relation to the old. All this leaves as many problems as it solves. There is no "explanation" here. Take the problem of the new. Where does it come from? The idea that slight changes may be assumed without any ground, or may be gotten rid of with the phrase "chance variation," is more naive than convincing, and "chance" or "fortuitous" does not fit very well into a discussion where everything is to be scientific. And the assumption that the high is not really higher, and not really different, because it all "developed" from the low, is just a bit of dogmatism. Continuity does not mean identity: it means simply that when the new appears it is related to the old. The new that comes little by little is just as big a problem in principle as if a world leaped forth complete at one stroke.

The idea then of a dynamic and developing world does not for a moment remove the ground for the thought of a creative God, but it certainly gives a different form to that conception. First of all we see creation as the work of an indwelling God. We think of the world no longer in terms of inert things that are being made and shaped, but rather in terms of energy and life, an energy that appears in changing forms, a life that becomes ever richer and more varied as it moves to higher planes. The process by which these changes take place is for the scientist as for the man of faith an orderly one. The former sums them up in terms of natural law; the latter sees in them the work of God and knows that all this energy and life is the moving Spirit of God. These are but two sides of the same reality:

"A fire mist and a planet—
     A crystal and a cell—
A jellyfish and a saurian,
     And caves where the cavemen dwell;
Then a sense of law and beauty,
     And a face turned from the clod—
Some call it Evolution,
     And others call it God." ⁷

In the second place we see creation as a continuous process. The method of God is that of growth, or development, We see the same process in the shaping of the material universe, the growth of a tree, the making of human, character, the bringing in of that new life of humanity which we call the kingdom of God. In the creative work on these different levels, different forces are brought into play. With the coming of personal life on earth God brings to bear the forces of truth and love, the transforming powers of personal fellowship. But it is still a method of growth. The new is constantly appearing, not the less wonderful because each morning becomes a fresh day of creation; but the new is always related to the old that went before. But, says some one, must we not in the name of religion demand that there be at least one place where a definite break occurred in this gradual development, the place where there' appears at last man, moral, spiritual, in the image of God? Was there not something new and different when man came? Certainly there was something new and different when man appeared, and we must say, as our fathers did, that here is a being made in the image of God into whom God had breathed the breath of life. We may recall too the opinion of certain biologists concerning the sudden appearance of marked variations, or mutations, which initiate new and permanent forms of life. Only let us keep in mind two other considerations: first, not here alone but at every stage God is bringing new life to his world; second, at this stage as at all others the new is related to what went before and conditioned by it. Why be disturbed because man conies thus as the goal of a long process, or because we cannot define and date a dramatic moment and say, Here the new life appeared? Does not the life of each individual man present the same problem? Just a few years ago there was an infinitesimal germ. Step by step it grew. No moment was greatly different from what went before. At no time could you say, This is the great moment, here is a moral personality in the likeness of God. And yet the fact remains, the man is here.

Certainly this idea of creation is far more vital and involves an even loftier conception of God. He is no longer the distant God who, from his place removed, creates worlds and sends them spinning through space; he is indwelling spirit whose life moves in all. Nor is creation the easy fiat of sheer power that works without cost to itself. The great Spirit lives with men, fills his world, gives himself to it in ever-increasing measure, bringing forth out of himself its wonderful life of order and beauty and meaning, until at last he brings forth man to whom he gives in the fellowship of love and truth that measure of his life which no lesser being can share.

The relation of this indwelling God to the world of nature has been sufficiently indicated in the foregoing discussion. It is one of the points at which modern science has been of help to us. For modern science has compelled us to think of this universe not in terms of fixed forms and dead matter, which a carpenter God might have made and set apart from himself, but in terms of energy and life. In such a world, God becomes either the power that moves in all and sustains all, or he is pushed out of the universe as a helpless and useless figure. There is something greatly appealing in such a conception as this. Wordsworth gives evidence of its meaning to the poet as he writes,

"Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things." ⁸

But this conception by itself is very vague and is far from reaching the Christian position. This may be pantheism, identifying God with the world-all.. It 'may reduce itself to the idea of a Life Force, coming perhaps to a transitory consciousness in man. It may mean a pure naturalism, where-the energy is never more than impersonal and its action always mechanical. Is this immanent Force spiritual or mechanical? Is it personal or impersonal? Is it ethical? Does it give reality to individual being and any place for freedom? It must be definitely realized that the dynamic conception of. the universe and the philosophic or poetic conception of immanence are far from giving us the full Christian meaning of the God that is near. Something more is needed than to declare that "God is immanent so far as he is the pervasive principle or energy by which the creative process is carried forward." ⁹ The nearness for which the Christian conception of God distinctly stands is a nearness that is personal, ethical, and redemptive.

God is the personal being of love and good-will who draws near to men for their help; this is the distinctively religious as against the more philosophical conception of immanence. This is the higher immanence, the immanence which is possible only in the realm of personal being. ¹⁰ God as sustaining energy can dwell in all being, lowest and highest; but the nearness of personal fellowship is possible only with persons. There is a physical nearness, as we all know, where bodies may touch each other and souls may still be worlds apart. It is not enough for the Christian man to believe in a God who has beset him behind and before and laid his hand upon him, nor yet in a God in whom he lives and moves and has his being. In a measure that is true of the air that we breathe; but the heart of man cries but for a living God, for a God who knows and cares and draws near with a purpose of love, a God to whom a man may lift his face and say, "Our Father."

Only on this level can we see the higher creative work of God, the work that we usually call redemption. Here again is something more than shaping and sustaining energy; here is Person drawing, near to person, here are goodness and righteousness calling for answering trust and obedience, here is love that asks for love in turn. Whether we emphasize the more negative side and call this redemption, or the more positive aspect and name it creation, here is a work that can be done only on this plane of the higher and personal nearness. And here one sees the weakness of so many modern cults from Christian Science to the varying forms of "New Thought"; with all their emphasis on the reality of the spiritual and its nearness, they miss the clear apprehension of this higher nearness 1 that is personal and ethical. And the correlate of this failure is the equal failure to appreciate sin as the wrong personal and moral attitude on man's part which can block the work of the God who thus draws near. Here we get the larger meaning of the Incarnation of God in Christ, not as some single irruption of the divine into our humanity, but as the supreme deed of that God who ever dwells with men as Jesus did, hating the evil and loving the good, toiling with us and for us, calling us into that fellowship which is life's greatest creative spiritual force, suffering with us and for us. Here belongs also the Christian conception of God as indwelling Spirit, who enters into human life by way of this fellowship as the new and true life of man. But these aspects we must consider more in detail in the study of the democracy of God, and of God as Spirit.

We have seen that the Christian conception of the far God involves the idea of a God of moral transcendence, the righteous and holy God before whom men bow in worship. The moral character of God is equally involved in this thought of the God who is near. The burden of the New Testament is clear; we know God as the good God because he draws near in mercy to save. God, says Jesus, is like the shepherd looking for his sheep, like the father going out to meet the wayward son. "God was in Christ," says Paul, in a summary of his gospel, "reconciling the world unto himself." ¹¹ And the Old Testament in the same way finds the character of God revealed in the goodness with which he chose Israel and led her and blessed her; "When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt."¹² The character of loving good will is the necessary condition of such a fellowship, of this nearness of God and man. In the end it is love alone which can overcome that "salt, unplumbed, estranging sea" which divides person from person, love which gives itself to the other, love which finds its life in the other, love which evokes love from the other. ¹³ "Nowhere is there a fuller consciousness of the Personality and of the distinction from one another of the persons concerned than there is in love. Yet just here, in proportion to the greatness and the depth of the love, such mutual exclusiveness is transcended and done away." ¹⁴

It is from this side, that of the nearness of God in fellowship and good will, that we have the religious approach to the idea of the personality of God. True, the conception of personality is also involved in the idea of the far God; God is not merely in his world, he is always more than his world, above his world, But it is in the thought of a God who thus draws near, as we have just seen, that the conception of God as personal is most clearly involved. And it is important that this demand of religion be clearly seen and be distinguished from philosophical considerations. Professor Pratt points out that there is in all religion a "social attitude" of the worshiper toward the object of his worship. ¹⁵ Certainly that is true of Christianity, and the social attitude involves clearly the thought of God as one so like ourselves that we may have fellowship with him. God's attitude is social, and not merely our own. He draws near with conscious purpose, with good will, and asks a personal response from us.

It is not terms with which we are concerned here, it is not necessary for us to use the word "person"; but the matter involved is for us of vital import. What we are concerned with, as C. C. J. Webb has pointed out, is "the capacity of finite persons for what can only be called a personal relation to the Supreme Reality—and therefore the presence in the Supreme Reality of whatever is necessary for the existence of such a relation thereto." ¹⁶ There is no special pertinence in pointing out, as Mr. Webb does elsewhere,¹⁷ that the term "person" was first used in theology, not for God but for inner-trinitarian distinctions, or in suggesting, as Kirsopp Lake does, that we search the Hebrew and Greek of Biblical times in vain for this term. There is little use in haggling over terms when there is so clearly present in the religion of the Old as of the New Testament that which religion demands, —namely, a conscious, purposive God of good will between whom and man a mutual fellowship is 1 possible. What we are concerned with is not what Augustine had in mind in using tres persona for the Trinity. That the substance can be present without the term is indicated by what Harnack says: "So strongly was Augustine filled with the feeling, never of course clearly formulated, that God was person, whom one was to trust and love, that this certainty was even a hidden guide for his trinitarian speculations." ¹⁸⁾

It does not lie in the scope of this discussion to consider the philosophical objections to the idea of God as personal being. They rest largely upon the idea that divine personality necessarily involves the Hmitedness and separateness that we have in human persons. The significance of this idea for our social faith can only be suggested, and yet it is absolutely fundamental. Back of the social struggles of to-day are two opposed world views. For one the supreme value lies in things, and the supreme rule is, Let him seize who can. For the other the supreme value lies in persons, and the supreme rule is that of a loving service which will further this personal, or human, life. The form which this opposition takes in the social questions of to-day needs no illustration, but we should make clear to ourselves what the opposed philosophies, or faiths, are which underlie this social conflict. Plainly those who stand for social justice, for democracy, for humanity, cannot permanently maintain their position except as it rests back upon the conviction that the universe is organized on their side, that the World Ground is personal and moral, that there is a personal God.

Many voices in our day are giving moving expression to this thought of the God that is near to men. Not least among these is the Indian poet and mystic, Rabindranath Tagore, one of whose poems 1 may furnish a close for this discussion. The closing lines suggest the theme of our next chapter:

"Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut? Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!
"He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the pathmaker is breaking stones. He is with them . in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust. Put thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil!
"Deliverance? Where is this deliverance to be found? Our master himself has joyfully taken upon him the bonds of creation; he Js bound with us all forever,
"Come out of thy meditations and leave aside thy flowers and incense! What harm is there if thy clothes become tattered and stained? Meet him and stand by him in toil and in sweat of thy brow." ¹⁹

NOTES

The idea of development is, of course, a very ancient one. The difference which modern science has made is in the attempt to describe the laws and define the order by which this development takes place, in some instances to reduce it to a mechanical process. For Augustine creation was not the production at once o! all the completed forms of life, but the bringing forth of a world in which all the potencies of this higher life were present, these to appear then through the ages. He suggests to us Tyndall's famous phrase, "the promise and potency of all terrestrial life." Note his "Fragments of Science," II, 191. So also Darwin, when he speaks of "life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one." See the closing words of his "Origin of Species." Augustine's view is apparently approved by Thomas Aquinas. See Simpson, "The Spiritual Interpretation of Nature," pages 382,383, for quotations from both. Very striking are certain passages in the notable "Outline of Science" which John Wesley prepared for his day and published under the title, "A Survey of the Wisdom of God in Creation." It appeared in many editions, the following quotations being from the Philadelphia edition of 1816, volume II. Mr. Wesley writes that the universe is M no less one in succession than in coordination" (page 188). "There is a prodigious number of continued links between the most perfect man and the ape" (page 213). "By what degrees does nature raise herself up to man? How will she rectify this head that is always inclined toward the earth? How change these paws into flexible arms? What method will she make use of to transform these crooked feet into supple and skillful hands? . . . The ape is this rough draft of man: this rude sketch, an imperfect representation, which nevertheless bears a resemblance to him, and is the last creature that serves to display the admirable progression of the works of God" (page 210). It might be added that modern science does not trace man's descent from the ape.

The idea of personality has been one of slow development, the reason for which is to be found more in social life and social ethics than in philosophy or theology, The idea could not come to clear realization until men saw more plainly the quality and value of human life, and so of each human being, as personal. That realization came along the Hebrew-Christian line, not along that of Greek thought or life, though Stoicism moved in that direction. Where Greek thought dominated, there the significance of this idea of personality in relation , to God, and the thought of religion as a personal-ethical relation, suffered. The earlier thought of personality identified it too much with the idea of individuality, tending to make it a principle of individuation, instead of realizing that personality is a quality of life which individuals share rather than that which makes them different. The stress was laid upon person conceived as individual rather than upon the quality of being involved in personality. This defect is illustrated by Webb in chapter II and in the article, "Person," in "The Catholic Encyclopedia," with the definition of Boethius quoted in both places: "A person is an individual substance of rational nature."