01.08. Chapter 08

CHAPTER VII THE DIVINE IMMANENCE THE distinction between omnipresence and immanence may seem too closely drawn, but there are some suggestions which cluster more naturally about the one term than the other. The skeptic mentioned in the preceding chapter is just in his contention that the theist takes it all too easy in resting his argument as soon as he hears the widespread concession that law and mind are expressed everywhere. God, indeed, may be everywhere, but what is he doing everywhere, or anywhere? One law may rule everywhere, but is there one purpose everywhere? Who knows but the law may supply a stage on which no purpose rules whatever, or on which puppets are jerked about; by wires, all the time under the illusion that they are free?

Let us admit again that omnipresence and immanence start a swarm of detailed problems that they do not specifically solve. The advantages of the doctrine of immanence are that with it we can think of all-pervading law, which is a help even when we do not know what the law is for, that we do away with the notion of a Deity who started the world like a wound-up toy and then left it to run, or run down, of itself; that we conceive of God as free from barriers which he must break through in order to get to the world in which we live. The old notion of nature as a manufactured contrivance which even the Deity had to break into, and whose laws he had to set aside if he reached us at all, was a heavy load upon mind and heart and will. Relief from all this is distinct advance and clear gain, though it is astonishing, by the way, to note the traces of deism which still abound not only in common thought but also in some philosophical exposition which disavows deism.

Still, this relief is not the whole story, by any means. God is brought near in immanence; but if we are to hold to immanence, we must face all the implications of the conception. We must go the whole way. God is in everything, with the reservation that he is not himself willing the choices of free men. In popular expositions of the doctrine God is in the blue skies and the green grass and the pretty birds. But he is also in everything else. "Tiger, Tiger, burning bright" presents a theological problem which we can escape only by deliberately turning away from the jungle. If the poet draws comfort out of the beauty which the immanent God is now and here spreading out before him, the cynic can in his turn point to facts ugly and even hideous. The doctrine of divine immanence is, I repeat, a long step ahead, but we may as well recognize its limitations. It brings God immediately near in something resembling a physical contact. It puts him in all things alike so far as causal activity is concerned. It also and this we must not forget forces on us a new conviction that God is immediately responsible for the features of the world that we see and for those that we do not see. If we can believe in the God of Christ, that is enough. We must reach some focus of belief in any case, or quit thinking about the problem.

I would not, however, leave the impression that the older, more deistic systems were any better off than immanence as regards the divine responsibility. No matter how far away we put God, so far as intermediaries are concerned, we cannot acquit him of responsibility for the stern facts of the universe by the introduction of self-running agencies. A summary deistic procedure is, or used to be, to draw a distinction between God as First Cause and the secondary causes through which he does his work. Just counting "first" and "second" gets us nowhere. "Secondary causes" is a term useful to keep our minds on the factors themselves without raising back-lying questions, but it does not and never did get at the final responsibility. Secondary causes can do nothing on their own account. So with the attempts to put the fault for the mysteries on laws. All that this can mean is that God made poor tools or that the tools were made of material that he could not control or that they slip hi his hands! No matter how long a chain reaches from the universe to God, God is not cleared of responsibility by the length of the chain.

Nevertheless, the conviction that God is immanent does bring him nearer to us at least by ridding us of all the clutter of intermediary machinery. Few teachers of immanence get the full help from the doctrine that they could if they would push their reasoning far enough to free themselves of the burden of all-embracing real space, and make the space merely the form under which the immanent energy works. If God is like unto Christ immanence can be pushed out to its implications, and be made a support to faith. If God is as near as immanence brings him, the need for some assurance, at least of faith, as to what he is like is at once apparent. If we are to live at such close quarters with this immanent Power, we are immeasurably helped if we can believe that the spirit of the Power is like unto the spirit of Christ. A moment ago I said that, according to the ’doctrine of immanence, God is causally in all tilings alike. This is not saying that he is in all things alike so far as meaning is concerned. If he were, there wpuld be no meaning. As soon as we affirm that God is in all things a certain type of theologian forthwith declares that this settles everything. All comes from God so all our troubles disappear. In fact, a good many of them just begin. If we cannot have distinctions in the utterances of the universe, there is no meaning in the universe. God is in storms and sunshine, tigers and robins, sickness and health alike. Mind means nothing, unless all factors are parts of a plan in which each plays out its function, with some functions more important than others.

If we are to believe in a Christlike God, we must get away from the conception of the divinity of all things alike. If we are to hold to immanence, we must do so as a statement of the everywhereness of God’s activity and the oneness of plan that works through that activity. This is important because of the tendency, since the coming of the immanence teaching, to say that God is in Christ and in all other men, that he is in Christ and also in the blue skies which, of course, has its measure of truth, but which misses the essential. In painting a landscape there must be a focus, which the artist sometimes calls the eye of the landscape. In a masterpiece of oratory there is a climax; in a drama there is outcome or denouement; in orchestral music there is a theme; in argument there is a conclusion. Painters, orators, dramatists, musicians, philosophers are, it might be said, in all parts of their work alike. They composed it all, and painted and played and spoke and wrote it all. To say that each creator, however, was "in" the interpretative key, which unlocked the one regnant meaning toward which every detail had been moving, in no different sense from that in which he was "in" a minor detail is absurd. That is to say, if we are to preach God as like unto Christ, we have to maintain that the doctrine of the Divine Presence in everything is not to conflict with that presence of God in those central aspects which lead to intelligibility. In the Messiah Handel is present in every note of the oratorio, but we should not say that he is in the drumbeats alone just as he is in the majestic song of the "Hallelujah Chorus." If some hearer should begin to disparage the chorus on the ground that Handel also wrote the drumparts, we should declare he was either putting forth commonplace or nonsense. The believer in a Christlike God beholds in Christ a climax, a theme, a motive, a spirit which gives him God in his deepest nature. In other words, God is in Christ as he is not elsewhere as revelation of spirit and character. If, now, some objector will have it that God is also in everything else, we have to reply that no doubt he is, but that we are on the search for meanings, and that we do not find meanings in settings of scenes, as we do in the scenes themselves. With a clue to a meaning once in our hands the accessories fall into place, but the accessories themselves do not supply the clue. In Christ we feel that we have arrived at a center. The view outward from a center is altogether different from the view inward from a circumference.

Some one seeks to turn upon us the admissions we have already made as to the vastness of our ignorance, or as to the increasing extent of the unknown out beyond the known. Is it not the height of rashness to affirm that we have in anything in Christ, or in anyone, or in anything the central focus of all this universe? We repeat that all we are trying to do is to show what the Christlikeness of God implies. We are not trying to prove to scientists or philosophers that such a God exists. We avow ourselves again and again as unable to deduce God from any data within our reach. We aver that a God of any kind must be seized by faith. All we are doing is to try to unfold the implications of the teaching that in Christ we see God. We insist that there is nothing in the doctrine of the divine immanence to shut us off from seeing God as especially in Christ. A man might conceivably sit by the bank of a river flowing into the sea, or by the edge of a cove into which wash the tides of the sea. By watching ebb and flow he might master the essential laws of the tide without ever looking upon the sea. His knowledge would be admittedly limited. He would know nothing of the thousand-league stretches of the Atlantic and Pacific. He would not be able to tell how high the tide rises at the Bay of Fundy or at Hangchau in China. He would, however, so understand the principles of the tide that wherever he might travel the tide would be intelligible to him. In some respects his little cove might be the best of observation stations, better than the broad expanse of the ocean itself. The scientist never wearies of telling us of Newton’s leap from the law of the falling apple to that of the falling moon. Given all the circumstances, the hint of gravitation was for Newton centrally in the falling apple. Now, these illustrations are inadequate in that they are merely specifications of a law. Christ was more than a specification, so that the other illustrations suggestive^ of climaxes, and themes of dramas, and reasonings are more pertinent. Still, cove and falling apple do suggest that we are not to allow our minds to be terrorized or bullied by quantitative or mass considerations. Moreover, while we may concede all possible worth to that quantitative realm with which the scientist deals, we must never forget that in Christianity we move among qualities as well. Just what could we mean if we said that we believe in an immanence that puts the divine in all qualities alike? That would be equivalent to saying that God is in all values alike, which could only mean that God is in no values at all.

If we are to accept a doctrine of immanence which leaves us a God like unto Christ, we shall have to admit that God is even in some things for their elimination. Was it not Jonathan Edwards who said that some things show forth the glory of God in being acted upon and destroyed? Of course Edwards would have included souls, who for God’s own glory were thus to be destroyed, and a God who would work in men to destroy them merely "for his own glory" would not be the God of Christ. Still there is a truth in Edwards’ words. The perverse or imperfect choices of finite wills might, indeed, make it necessary for God to decree the elimination of features of the universe introduced by evil choices. Or in a progressive advance of the system it might be necessary to work out of and away from features once important but now no longer so.

It is to be always kept in mind that if God is like unto Christ, the u|iiverse as we see it may not be altogether the universe which would have been if the divine will could everywhere have ruled. God is, indeed, in all things; but if our philosophies of immanence take unto themselves to declare that, since God is in all things, everything, therefore, is as God would have it, we are in danger of getting out of the perspective and away from the moral balance of Jesus. Here, again, we are not in the region of formal proof, but it is not possible to keep close to the words and spirit of Jesus and believe that the world is just what God would have it be. We need not now talk of a taint or an impairment of the realm of nature caused by a fall of man. All that is necessary is to recognize the actual moral struggle, and the consequences of the evil or the imperfect for men, and even for the material conditions under which men live. An evil choice is seldom merely an inner spiritual event in its total effect. ,The closest connection of the human will with the nature outside is through the body which is the organism of the will. That organism is connected with other organisms, and with the other material factors which form a meetingplace for the organisms. Through this web of life the consequences of an evil or mistaken choice may work out into an expression not at all suggestive of divine indwelling, except that the divine life is laboring in all this for elimination and purification and redemption. The redemptive activity of God brings us closest to the mind of Christ. God is working everywhere for redemption among men who have made wrong choices.

Further food for meditation as to the right interpretation of immanence is to be found in a little reflection on the institutions of human society. Suppose we could assume that men everywhere work in society with unselfish purposes. Even so the institutions of society are imperfect. The most radical social agitators to-day insist* that it is at least bad tactics to hold any individual, or set of individuals, responsible for evils arising out of the faulty constitution of society, that we can better spend our time seeking for the reorganization of society. Jesus himself spoke of the most important human institution, the family, as in one stage faulty, the fault due to the ignorance of men. God himself had to overlook the faultiness for the time being a word of Jesus which, of course, is to be taken as a description of the attitude of divine kindliness. In complete strictness God could not overlook the faultiness of a human social institution, for by his own laws that faultiness had consequences of which he had to take account if he was to deal with the chosen people at all. So with all human institutions. All are imperfect. Now, an interpretation of the divine immanence which would have us believe that because the institutions are divine in origin they are therefore all that God would have them be, is far from any ideal of the God-life which we could call Christlike. The doctrine of divine immanence, then, is more for faith than for sight, in any case. I say "in any case," for those who accept the modern lazy, hazy notions of the popular puttings cannot actually see any more than the others of us. As soon as they have heard that God is in all things alike they do not ask as to the different senses in which he may be indwelling, or even as to what indwelling means. They take a causal nearness as sufficient and let it go at that, regardless of the truism that a merely causal nearness settles little. If asked to elaborate on the belief, they talk of those blue skies and green fields and song birds which we mentioned above. That this is better than nothing goes without saying, but the immanence becomes of service only in the hands of the believer that God is in Christ. Once firmly hold of that conception, the believer is willing to look the darkest aspects of the universe in the face. It is noteworthy that Christianity and the Judaism from which it came have always been willing to look squarely at the grimmest of grim facts, with no palliation of the grimness and no glossing it over. The strictest scientist has never shown more willingness to look at things as they are than has the genuine Christian. Only, the Christian has looked at more; or he has looked out of a conviction that the moral nature of the Power working in the most mysterious ways has been Christlike. It is entirely possible, therefore, for the Christian believer to accept the doctrine that God is in all things, and to maintain that he is in some things differently from the way he is in others, and that we do not know what much around us means, so far as the actual processes are concerned.

Here may be as appropriate a place as any for a word in behalf of genuinely Christian agnosticism. The avowal that God is in a manner in all things may be accompanied by a frank profession of ignorance as to how he is in this or that particular fact. Most witnesses to their belief that God has led them along life’s pathway do not go far in their story before creating more doubts than they destroy. I once knew a worthy saint who was never weary of proclaiming that God had so shaped his career as to bring about certain consequences favorable to himself. The supposedly divine guidance had led this one man to a happy outcome through a chain of happenings which necessarily had involved the death of others. Just how these others were favored did not appear. Of course there are crises in life where men justifiably feel that the working out of events shows in especial definiteness the presence of the Divine. I have just been trying to say that if the divine immanence is to be adjusted to a belief in a Christlike God, the adjustment must be on the basis of special nearness which the everywhereness of the divine causality does not of itself imply. Now at the risk of seeming to withdraw all this it becomes imperative to add that the interpretation of such special nearnesses is dangerous if they depart far from the realm of inner spiritual nearness. It is possible to believe that God is with us in the peculiar intimacy like that which we have in mind when we feel that a friend is with us in our work, or struggle, or sorrow, at the same instant that we admit complete agnosticism as to how the nearness of the Divine is to reveal itself in the outer working of events.