01.09. Chapter 09

CHAPTER IX THE DIVINE TRANSCENDENCE THE transcendence of God is often used as if it had one clearly cut meaning, but it too serves different purposes in the hands of different persons. With some it lends itself readily to the thought of God as Christlike. For example, it is at times taken to mean that the range of the divine activities is beyond the comprehension of man. This is admitted by the Christian outright. All that Christianity asks is that in all realms the Christspirit rule. Suppose there are millions of worlds like ours which never yet have come swimming within focus of the farthest-reaching telescope. There is nothing in this to make us modify our conception of the character of ’God. Or suppose that every atom is to a degree a self-contained universe. The physicist thinks that the atoms are like solar systems, with planets of negatively electrified matter revolving around a positive center similar to our sun, that the distances between the electrons are, as compared to the size of the electrons, like distances between the planets of the solar system compared to the size of the planets. Suppose that every atom is a universe. On a different scale with a difference which nobody on the electron-planet might recognize it might be that each of the atoms is the seat of a history of an atom-race of minds. This is fancy, but let fancy have her way for a little. Is there anything in all this to require modification of the nature of God? Not at all. Or suppose there are universes possible in some dimension beyond the three dimensions. Or suppose that there are realms of existence outside of space altogether. Nothing in this necessarily calls for change in our attitude toward God. We are here merely dealing with a God of whom our knowledge grows from, more to more. This kind of transcendence is compatible with immanence, in that God is immanent not only in the world we know, but also in all the worlds that transcend ours. This is not, however, what transcendence always means. In the interpretations, or at least the implications, of some theologians, it implies that there may be as many different moral systems as there are different worlds, and that it is the height of impertinence for us to try to make our moral ideas of God rule for systems other than our own. Let me repeat that John Stuart Mill once found himself in a logical corner from which he sought to escape by saying that two and two might make five in some other planet. Only very gritty pragmatists would go that far to-day, though some do indeed make truth just an agreed-upon convention. In the field of moral theory, however, more than a few who would maintain that in another universe our mathematics would have to rule as far as applicable* will have it that we could not for a moment apply our moral conceptions to such a transcendent sphere.

There is confusion here. When we speak of a moral God we do not refer to any detailed code as the expression of God’s moral nature. Nothing hi our conviction as to the Christlikeness of God will tell us in concrete detail just what God will do in a given situation. Inasmuch as we do not claim to know what the divine Christlikeness calls for in the limited round of our present experience, we are not so bold as to expatiate on what God will do in other spheres beyond our knowledge. In general, however, we are sure of some features of moral character which must be true of the divine nature anywhere, inside or outside of our experience, if the divine is to be Christlike. Wherever a Christlike God acts he must act with good will toward the intelligences there, no matter how different the form of the experience of such intelligences from all others in the universe. The good will, in other words, is absolute for the Divine everywhere. Next, good will demands that the Divine must give those intelligences all the chance of which they are capable, the opportunity being presented in terms of possible Christlikeness of spirit. With these two requirements in hand as the absolute fundamentals, we are then ready to say that just how the requirements are to be met depends upon the divine knowledge of the concrete circumstances, about which no outsider can say anything. For some reason there are those who will maintain that such talk as the above is the utmost limit in presumption, but is it? Is it any more presumptuous than to affirm that if the Spirit back of the universe is to be a Spirit of Truth, Truth must be the ideal everywhere? The backlying Force may conceivably not be devoted to truth, but if devotion to truth rules, is it not to rule everywhere? To be sure, this would not say one word as to the concrete content of truth, but would not the demands of such an ideal be final? It may be that some restlessness here comes out of our uneasiness at being told too much about God, that is to say, out of a feeling that it is not altogether reverent to speak so confidently. There is a sound instinct which tells us that, in a degree, God is and should be unknowable. For this instinct we ought to have all respect, but let us glance for a moment at an illustration which can, unhappily, be taken too often from actual life. A man is stricken with a terrible affliction. A spiritual counselor, anxious to console, proceeds to tell the sufferer in detail just why the affliction came. The grief -laden soul may himself be the first to resent such positiveness of utterance as irreverent and impertinent, whereas he would not resent a frank declaration from the counselor that there is no light on the reason for the affliction, at the same time that there is the deepest wisdom in trusting that God even in such blows acts with the spirit of Christ. We admit the havoc wrought by the teachers who have set before us a too-knowable God, but how the interpretation of God as of Christlike spirit sins against reverence we fail to see. To return for a moment to the man in sorrow. It is, indeed, a sin against a fine reverence to converse glibly with souls in distress as to just why God permits woe, but an error just as grave, from the point of view of Christian experience, is to quote without much understanding the passage which tells us that his ways are not as our ways. The man who wrote that line was not preaching the transcendence of which I am speaking. He believed in God as most real in Israel’s life as the shepherd of his people at ,the same time that he admitted the mysteriousness of his actual dealings. God’s ways are not our ways indeed, but if they are Christ’s ways, we can be content. Of course it will always be possible to speak of God as the Unknowable. There will always be an element of knowledge beyond us, because of the impossibility of our overtaking anything infinite, but the spirit of the mind back of that knowledge must be knowable if we are to hold to God as Christlike. It is interesting to observe that many who will not accept Christianity because God is unknowable, end by specifying quite a’ few items of information about God. It would be instructive to examine the agnostic philosophies from Spencer’s day down to our own and note the professed knowledge they set before us about the unknowable. In a considerable part, I urge, this insistence upon transcendence comes from confusing moral spirit and the concrete details of a moral code. We have heard the departures in conduct of geniuses from our ordinary morality justified on the ground that it is impossible to tie a genius down to the cramping limits of the accustomed. The genius must break new paths. So too it is folly for us to try to frame any conception of what a divine morality would be, we are told. The most elementary data are too far beyond us. According to the old saying, we are no more fitted to understand the moral constitution of the universe than is an ant to know the constitution of the sun.

Here, again, is confusion, confusion even in the "genius" illustration. Ordinarily, this "great man" argument is brought forward in connection with a genius who has been notable for some self-indulgence one who has been drunken, or licentious, or untruthful. What to the unsophisticated onlooker would seem to be falling below an established moral standard is proclaimed by the friends of the genius as a rising above the conventions. Now, genius of this type is likely to be overbalanced on one side or another. An acute student has said that the only two geniuses in art of the first order who apparently showed no traces of nervous instability whatever were Leonardo da Vinci and William Shakespeare. It may be wholly proper to pass charitable judgment on an irregular, unbalanced genius in his defiance of moral laws, but the procedure is not calculated to throw much light on the nature of divinity. When the irregularity of the genius is just a career which ordinary intelligence does not understand, but which is nevertheless followed in a spirit of devotion to truth, we have a problem more like the one we are considering. Moral spirit may call for one course of detailed conduct in one situation and for exactly the reverse in another. Abraham Lincoln was admittedly a great democratic leader, and yet Lincoln at times acted more autocratically than any other ruler of modern times. He transcended all customary precedents and expectations, so far as detailed deeds were concerned, in what seemed violent autocracy, yet his democratic devotion was complete throughout.

We are not quite done with this problem. I once heard a defender of a rigorous theory of atonement avow that he could not make his theory intelligible because of God’s transcendence of all human faculties of understanding. He spoke of demands in the divine nature itself that must be satisfied, demands wholly beyond our grasp. It will be recalled also that some of the followers of Dean Mansel, if not Mansel himself, insisted that God could not be seized by human thought, and that they used this transcendence to attack all attempts at theological reasoning, all attempts possibly except their own. It is true that these Mansellians discoursed of absoluteness rather than of transcendence, but it all came to the same thing in the end. The Absolute was so far above any definition that nobody could intelligibly say anything about him. The Mansellians thus practically joined hands with the Spencerians as to the Unknowableness of God, though both groups found for themselves a good many things to declare. Even a too fluent insistence upon the divine unknowableness is saying quite a little about God.

Some years ago I heard a leader of the extreme fundamentalist party, so called, avow with Boanergic vigor that we must keep silent before the awful transcendence of God. I intend no disrespect toward fundamentalists when I say that this particular leader was using transcendence partly as a shield from criticism which his own theory called forth. He was proclaiming a most amazing theology, and when men asked questions fell back on the divine transcendence. In this instance, however, there was a consideration beyond that of mere avoidance of formal argument. The speaker was a trained scholar, and was not merely trying to avoid meeting difficulties in intellectual debate. He was a thoroughgoing Calvinist of the old school, with outright emphasis on divine sovereignty. He especially resented discussion that spoke as I have done in these pages about divine responsibility, especially God’s responsibility to the man whom he has created. This was, ’according to the fundamentalist, to fasten man-made moral categories on God with irreverence almost blasphemy. It seemed that, according to this fundamentalist, the world was in a fair way to become Christian up to about one hundred years ago, and had then turned sharply back to paganism, the paganism being, as far as I could make out, the spread of modern scientific and democratic ideas. Of course, if one is to accept the old Calvinism with its doctrine of virtually arbitrary sovereignty for God, one will have to hold fast to conceptions which violate morality and common sense, judging the conceptions by any sort of human standards.

We shall have to admit the dangers of irreverence in frank discussion of the divine attributes, and we must always remind ourselves that in the concrete ongoings of the universe we are as much in the dark as the most thorough doctrine of transcendence would demand. That is different, however, from saying that intellectual and moral obligations cannot bind the divine life. Hegel established the principle that things must come within thought or go out of existence. Likewise all reality must come within the sweep of moral obligation, or a Christlike God must drop from our hold. God’s morality is above ours indeed, as his thought and feeling are above ours. Transcending us, however, is not quite the same as transcending morality.