014. GOD'S SELF-LIMITATIONS

GOD’S SELF-LIMITATIONS The Christian doctrines of incarnation and atonement are in our day most relentlessly opposed by a school of thinkers who pride themselves on their lofty abstract conception of the Deity. That the second person of the Trinity should "empty himself," should give up "the form of God," should resign the independent exercise of his divine attributes, should join himself to our guilt-burdened humanity, should humble himself even to death in order that he might redeem us—all this is simply unintelligible to those who know only "The Absolute" and "The Infinite." It is plain that "the offence of the cross" has not ceased. To these modern Greeks, quite as much as to their ancient congeners, the gospel is "foolishness."

It will not be possible for us to show these errorists that the cross is "the wisdom of God," unless we can first convince them that they are at fault in their fundamental conception of the divine Being. They think it a contradiction in terms that Christ should be God, and yet that he should put off the form of God; but they think this simply because they assume it to be impossible that God should be limited at all. Here is a speculative difficulty which lies not only at the basis of much skepticism, it also vexes the minds of many devout believers. Though they believe that God actually became man, they cannot at all understand how it could be so. In both cases the mistake is in supposing that an absolute Being can exist in no relations and that an infinite Being can surfer no co-existence of the finite. We maintain, on the other hand, that an absolute Being is simply one who exists in no necessary relations and that an infinite Being is one who furnishes in himself the cause and ground of the finite. In short, the substance of our contention is this: It is not an abstract Absolute or Infinite with which we have to do, but rather with the living God, of whom perfection, power, and love are inalienable attributes.

We begin, then, by asserting that the perfection of God’s own nature involves limitation even before he becomes man at all. Not abstract absoluteness or infinity, but perfection rather is our ruling conception of God. Mere boundlessness is not perfection; to be perfect, a thing must be definite, not indefinite. For example: God would not be perfect if .he were not a personal Being. But personality, with its self-consciousness and self-determination, implies definiteness; God cannot be at the same time both conscious and unconscious, both necessitated and free. His very perfection limits him to consciousness and freedom. The opposite view would make God mere Being, without content or movement, a Hindu Brahma, "as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean." That view cannot explain how this abstract Being should ever become reality; how the Notion should become actual; how the Infinite should become finite; in short, how anything definite should ever come to be. This is the insoluble problem of Hegelianism. If there is a personal God, if there is an actual universe, this doctrine cannot be true.