V. Absolute or Immanent Attributes.
First division.—Spirituality, and attributes therein involved.
In calling spirituality an attribute of God, we mean, not that we are justified in applying to the divine nature the adjective “spiritual,” but that the substantive “Spirit” describes that nature (John 4:24, marg.—“God is spirit”; Rom. 1:20—“the invisible things of him”; 1 Tim. 1:17—“incorruptible, invisible”; Col. 1:15—“the invisible God”). This implies, negatively, that (a) God is not matter. Spirit is not a refined form of matter but an immaterial substance, invisible, uncompounded, indestructible. (b) God is not dependent upon matter. It cannot be shown that the human mind, in any other state than the present, is dependent [pg 250] for consciousness upon its connection with a physical organism. Much less is it true that God is dependent upon the material universe as his sensorium. God is not only spirit, but he is pure spirit. He is not only not matter, but he has no necessary connection with matter (Luke 24:39—“A spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye behold me having”).
John gives us the three characteristic attributes of God when he says that God is “spirit,” “light,” “love” (John 4:24; 1 John 1:5; 4:8),—not a spirit, a light, a love. Le Conte, in Royce's Conception of God, 45—“God is spirit, for spirit is essential Life and essential Energy, and essential Love, and essential Thought; in a word, essential Person.” Biedermann, Dogmatik, 631—“Das Wesen des Geistes als des reinen Gegensatzes zur Materie, ist das reine Sein, das in sich ist, aber nicht da ist.” Martineau, Study, 2:366—“The subjective Ego is always here, as opposed to all else, which is variously there.... Without local relations, therefore, the soul is inaccessible.” But, Martineau continues, “if matter be but centres of force, all the soul needs may be centres from which to act.” Romanes, Mind and Motion, 34—“Because within the limits of human experience mind is only known as associated with brain, it does not follow that mind cannot exist in any other mode.” La Place swept the heavens with his telescope, but could not find anywhere a God. “He might just as well,” says President Sawyer, “have swept his kitchen with a broom.” Since God is not a material being, he cannot be apprehended by any physical means.
Those passages of Scripture which seem to ascribe to God the possession of bodily parts and organs, as eyes and hands, are to be regarded as anthropomorphic and symbolic. “When God is spoken of as appearing to the patriarchs and walking with them, the passages are to be explained as referring to God's temporary manifestations of himself in human form—manifestations which prefigured the final tabernacling of the Son of God in human flesh. Side by side with these anthropomorphic expressions and manifestations, moreover, are specific declarations which repress any materializing conceptions of God; as, for example, that heaven is his throne and the earth his footstool (Is. 66:1), and that the heaven of heavens cannot contain him (1 K. 8:27).”
Ex. 33:18-20 declares that man cannot see God and live; 1 Cor. 2:7-16 intimates that without the teaching of God's Spirit we cannot know God; all this teaches that God is above sensuous perception, in other words, that he is not a material being. The second command of the decalogue does not condemn sculpture and painting, but only the making of images of God. It forbids our conceiving God after the likeness of a thing, but it does not forbid our conceiving God after the likeness of our inward self, i. e., as personal. This again shows that God is a spiritual being. Imagination can be used in religion, and great help can be derived from it. Yet we do not know God by imagination,—imagination only helps us vividly to realize the presence of the God whom we already know. We may almost say that some men have not imagination enough to be religious. But imagination must not lose its wings. In its representations of God, it must not be confined to a picture, or a form, or a place. Humanity tends too much to rest in the material and the sensuous, and we must avoid all representations of God which would identify the Being who is worshiped with the helps used in order to realize his presence; John 4:24—“they that worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”
An Egyptian Hymn to the Nile, dating from the 19th dynasty (14th century B. C.), contains these words: “His abode is not known; no shrine is found with painted figures; there is no building that can contain him” (Cheyne, Isaiah, 2:120). The repudiation of images among the ancient Persians (Herod. 1:131), as among the Japanese Shintos, indicates the remains of a primitive spiritual religion. The representation of Jehovah with body or form degrades him to the level of heathen gods. Pictures of the Almighty over the chancels of Romanist cathedrals confine the mind and degrade the conception of the worshiper. We may use imagination in prayer, picturing God as a benignant form holding out arms of mercy, but we should regard such pictures only as scaffolding for the building of our edifice of worship, while we recognize, with the Scripture, that the reality worshiped is immaterial and spiritual. Otherwise our idea of [pg 251]God is brought down to the low level of man's material being. Even man's spiritual nature may be misrepresented by physical images, as when mediæval artists pictured death, by painting a doll-like figure leaving the body at the mouth of the person dying.
The longing for a tangible, incarnate God meets its satisfaction in Jesus Christ. Yet even pictures of Christ soon lose their power. Luther said: “If I have a picture of Christ in my heart, why not one upon canvas?” We answer: Because the picture in the heart is capable of change and improvement, as we ourselves change and improve; the picture upon canvas is fixed, and holds to old conceptions which we should outgrow. Thomas Carlyle: “Men never think of painting the face of Christ, till they lose the impression of him upon their hearts.” Swedenborg, in modern times, represents the view that God exists in the shape of a man—an anthropomorphism of which the making of idols is only a grosser and more barbarous form; see H. B. Smith, System of Theology, 9, 10. This is also the doctrine of Mormonism; see Spencer, Catechism of Latter Day Saints. The Mormons teach that God is a man; that he has numerous wives by whom he peoples space with an infinite number of spirits. Christ was a favorite son by a favorite wife, but birth as man was the only way he could come into the enjoyment of real life. These spirits are all the sons of God, but they can realize and enjoy their sonship only through birth. They are about every one of us pleading to be born. Hence, polygamy.
We come now to consider the positive import of the term Spirit. The spirituality of God involves the two attributes of Life and Personality.
1. Life.
The Scriptures represent God as the living God.
Jer. 10:10—“He is the living God”; 1 Thess. 1:9—“turned unto God from idols, to serve a living and true God”; John 5:26-“hath life in himself”; cf. 14:6—“I am ... the life,” and Heb. 7:16—“the power of an endless life”; Rev. 11:11—“the Spirit of life.”
Life is a simple idea, and is incapable of real definition. We know it, however, in ourselves, and we can perceive the insufficiency or inconsistency of certain current definitions of it. We cannot regard life in God as
(a) Mere process, without a subject; for we cannot conceive of a divine life without a God to live it.
Versus Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, 1:10—“Life and mind are processes; neither is a substance; neither is a force; ... the name given to the whole group of phenomena becomes the personification of the phenomena, and the product is supposed to have been the producer.” Here we have a product without any producer—a series of phenomena without any substance of which they are manifestations. In a similar manner we read in Dewey, Psychology, 247—“Self is an activity. It is not something which acts; it is activity.... It is constituted by activities.... Through its activity the soul is.” Here it does not appear how there can be activity, without any subject or being that is active. The inconsistency of this view is manifest when Dewey goes on to say: “The activity may further or develop the self,” and when he speaks of “the organic activity of the self.” So Dr. Burdon Sanderson: “Life is a state of ceaseless change,—a state of change with permanence; living matter ever changes while it is ever the same.” “Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.” But this permanent thing in the midst of change is the subject, the self, the being, that has life.
Nor can we regard life as
(b) Mere correspondence with outward condition and environment; for this would render impossible a life of God before the existence of the universe.
Versus Herbert Spencer, Biology, 1:59-71—“Life is the definite combination of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and successive, in correspondence with external coëxistences and sequences.” Here we have, at best, a definition of physical and finite life; and even this is insufficient, because the definition recognizes no original source of activity within, but only a power of reaction in response to stimulus from without. We might as well say that the boiling tea-kettle is alive (Mark Hopkins). [pg 252]We find this defect also in Robert Browning's lines in The Ring and the Book (The Pope, 1307): “O Thou—as represented here to me In such conception as my soul allows—Under thy measureless, my atom-width!—Man's mind, what is it but a convex glass Wherein are gathered all the scattered points Picked out of the immensity of sky, To reunite there, be our heaven for earth, Our known Unknown, our God revealed to man?” Life is something more than a passive receptivity.
(c) Life is rather mental energy, or energy of intellect, affection, and will. God is the living God, as having in his own being a source of being and activity, both for himself and others.
Life means energy, activity, movement. Aristotle: “Life is energy of mind.”Wordsworth, Excursion, book 5:602—“Life is love and immortality, The Being one, and one the element.... Life, I repeat, is energy of love Divine or human.” Prof. C. L. Herrick, on Critics of Ethical Monism, in Denison Quarterly, Dec. 1896:248—“Force is energy under resistance, or self-limited energy, for all parts of the universe are derived from the energy. Energy manifesting itself under self-conditioning or differential forms is force. The change of pure energy into force is creation.” Prof. Herrick quotes from S. T. Coleridge, Anima Poetæ: “Space is the name for God; it is the most perfect image of soul—pure soul being to us nothing but unresisted action. Whenever action is resisted, limitation begins—and limitation is the first constituent of body; the more omnipresent it is in a given space, the more that space is body or matter; and thus all body presupposes soul, inasmuch as all resistance presupposes action.” Schelling: “Life is the tendency to individualism.”
If spirit in man implies life, spirit in God implies endless and inexhaustible life. The total life of the universe is only a faint image of that moving energy which we call the life of God. Dewey, Psychology, 253—“The sense of being alive is much more vivid in childhood than afterwards. Leigh Hunt says that, when he was a child, the sight of certain palings painted red gave him keener pleasure than any experience of manhood.”Matthew Arnold: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven.” The child's delight in country scenes, and our intensified perceptions in brain fever, show us by contrast how shallow and turbid is the stream of our ordinary life. Tennyson, Two Voices: “'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant, Oh life, not death, for which we pant; More life, and fuller, that we want.” That life the needy human spirit finds only in the infinite God. Instead of Tyndall's: “Matter has in it the promise and potency of every form of life,” we accept Sir William Crookes's dictum: “Life has in it the promise and potency of every form of matter.” See A. H. Strong, on The Living God, in Philos. and Religion, 180-187.
2. Personality.
The Scriptures represent God as a personal being. By personality we mean the power of self-consciousness and of self-determination. By way of further explanation we remark:
(a) Self-consciousness is more than consciousness. This last the brute may be supposed to possess, since the brute is not an automaton. Man is distinguished from the brute by his power to objectify self. Man is not only conscious of his own acts and states, but by abstraction and reflection he recognizes the self which is the subject of these acts and states. (b) Self-determination is more than determination. The brute shows determination, but his determination is the result of influences from without; there is no inner spontaneity. Man, by virtue of his free-will, determines his action from within. He determines self in view of motives, but his determination is not caused by motives; he himself is the cause.
God, as personal, is in the highest degree self-conscious and self-determining. The rise in our own minds of the idea of God, as personal, depends largely upon our recognition of personality in ourselves. Those who deny spirit in man place a bar in the way of the recognition of this attribute of God.
[pg 253]Ex. 3:14—“And God said unto Moses, I am that I am: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I am hath sent me unto you.” God is not the everlasting “It is,” or “I was,” but the everlasting “I am” (Morris, Philosophy and Christianity, 128); “I am” implies both personality and presence. 1 Cor. 2:11—“the things of God none knoweth, save the Spirit of God”; Eph. 1:9—“good pleasure which he purposed”; 11—“the counsel of his will.” Definitions of personality are the following: Boethius—“Persona est animæ rationalis individua substantia” (quoted in Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:415). F. W. Robertson, Genesis 3—“Personality = self-consciousness, will, character.” Porter, Human Intellect, 626—“Distinct subsistence, either actually or latently self-conscious and self-determining.” Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism: Person = “being, conscious of self, subsisting in individuality and identity, and endowed with intuitive reason, rational sensibility, and free-will.” See Harris, 98, 99, quotation from Mansel—“The freedom of the will is so far from being, as it is generally considered, a controvertible question in philosophy, that it is the fundamental postulate without which all action and all speculation, philosophy in all its branches and human consciousness itself, would be impossible.”
One of the most astounding announcements in all literature is that of Matthew Arnold, in his “Literature and Dogma,” that the Hebrew Scriptures recognize in God only “the power, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness” = the God of pantheism. The “I am” of Ex. 3:14 could hardly have been so misunderstood, if Matthew Arnold had not lost the sense of his own personality and responsibility. From free-will in man we rise to freedom in God—“That living Will that shall endure, When all that seems shall suffer shock.” Observe that personality needs to be accompanied by life—the power of self-consciousness and self-determination needs to be accompanied by activity—in order to make up our total idea of God as Spirit. Only this personality of God gives proper meaning to his punishments or to his forgiveness. See Bib. Sac., April, 1884:217-233; Eichhorn, die Persönlichkeit Gottes.
Illingworth, Divine and Human Personality, 1:25, shows that the sense of personality has had a gradual growth; that its pre-Christian recognition was imperfect; that its final definition has been due to Christianity. In 29-53, he notes the characteristics of personality as reason, love, will. The brute perceives; only the man apperceives, i. e., recognizes his perception as belonging to himself. In the German story, Dreiäuglein, the three-eyed child, had besides her natural pair of eyes one other to see what the pair did, and besides her natural will had an additional will to set the first to going right. On consciousness and self-consciousness, see Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:179-189—“In consciousness the object is another substance than the subject; but in self-consciousness the object is the same substance as the subject.” Tennyson, in his Palace of Art, speaks of “the abysmal depths of personality.” We do not fully know ourselves, nor yet our relation to God. But the divine consciousness embraces the whole divine content of being: “the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God” (1 Cor. 2:10).
We are not fully masters of ourselves. Our self-determination is as limited as is our self-consciousness. But the divine will is absolutely without hindrance; God's activity is constant, intense, infinite; Job 23:13—“What his soul desireth, even that he doeth”; John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work.” Self-knowledge and self-mastery are the dignity of man; they are also the dignity of God; Tennyson: “Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, These three lead life to sovereign power.” Robert Browning, The Last Ride Together: “What act proved all its thought had been? What will but felt the fleshly screen?” Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 6, 161, 216-255—“Perhaps the root of personality is capacity for affection.”... Our personality is incomplete; we reason truly only with God helping; our love in higher Love endures; we will rightly, only as God works in us to will and to do; to make us truly ourselves we need an infinite Personality to supplement and energize our own; we are complete only in Christ (Col. 2:9, 10—“In him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, and in him ye are made full.”)
Webb, on the Idea of Personality as applied to God, in Jour. Theol. Studies, 2:50—“Self knows itself and what is not itself as two, just because both alike are embraced within the unity of its experience, stand out against this background, the apprehension of which is the very essence of that rationality or personality which distinguishes us from the lower animals. We find that background, God, present in us, or rather, we find ourselves present in it. But if I find myself present in it, then it, as more complete, is simply more personal than I. Our not-self is outside of us, so that we are finite and lonely, but God's not-self is within him, so that there is a mutual inwardness of love and insight of which the most perfect communion among men is only a faint symbol. We are 'hermit-spirits,' as Keble says, and we come to union with others only by realizing our union with God. Personality is not impenetrable in man, for [pg 254] ‘in him we live, and move, and have our being’ (Acts 17:28), and ‘that which hath been made is life in him’(John 1:3, 4).” Palmer, Theologic Definition, 39—“That which has its cause without itself is a thing, while that which has its cause within itself is a person.”