01.12. Chapter 12

CHAPTER XII THE DIVINE FATHER

SOME teachers of Christianity tell us that fatherhood is the fundamental word in our interpretation of God that all the divine attributes have to be approached as attributes of a father. Those who write thus are mostly taking the Christian idea of fatherhood for granted, and no harm is done. It is well for us to remind ourselves, however, that Christlikeness is more basal for Christianity than fatherhood, for "God the Father" depends for its significance upon the quality of fatherhood. It is essential to Christianity that we conceive of the Divine Fatherhood as Christlike. As soon as we pass from the study of God as King to God as Father some conclude that we have moved out of the sphere of the social relationships to that of the individual as an individual. Repeatedly it has been said that Divine Fatherhood makes the individual stand solitary in the presence of his God. The substance of this truth we shall always have to admit, but it is not possible to step decisively away from the social conception of the kingdom of God by speaking of God as Father, for Fatherhood so implies the relations of brotherhood and of Christian contacts as to make the social conception even more important than does Kingship.

Important as is the doctrine of fatherhood for the significance of the individual, we cannot think of individuals as existing primarily on their own account and then as woven into the family relationship. The family and the individuals that compose it necessarily coexist. The family would, of course, be nonexistent apart from its members, but the members would be almost nonentities apart from the family relationship. An important task, then, for the Christian idea of the divine Fatherhood is to inquire as to the nature of the family of God as a group.

All we are concerned about is to see whither the assumption of the Christlikeness of God will lead us if carried out to the full length. If, then, God the Father has the Christ-spirit we are not to think of him as doing the best he can with men already here, or as calling men into existence by haphazard, by the workings of irrepressible fullness of life, or out of impulsive affection. If God is a Father after the mind of Christ, men are here because the wise and holy love of God calls them here. The race is not, from the Christview, "on hand" for God to deal with just as he can or may. Nor can we believe that God the Father creates men as individuals and then adjusts them to one another as best he may. The idea of the family is necessarily prior to the idea of the individuals as such, even if we concede, as we do, that the aim of all creative effort is to build the individuals into the largest and best life. That is to say, what one individual is to be depends upon what all the other individuals are to be. To put it crudely, what one person is to be depends upon the number and kind of other persons there are to be, and the possible relations among them. In the creation of the divinely fathered family the purpose necessarily works inward from the encompassing general conception to the particular individual. A first legitimate expectation is the negative one that in the family it will not be the divine purpose that any individuals be used merely for the benefit of other individuals, or for the benefit of society, without regard to the rights of such utilized individuals. A person may well take other persons as the aim of his own endeavor, but that is different from saying that anyone else can use him as instrument for the ends of any third person or persons.

I may look upon myself as an instrument to be developed into fineness for the service of any ideals I choose, but that is quite another matter from someone else’s using me as an instrument. The first requirement, then, if we are to have a family based on the Fatherhood of God is justice in the Father’s dealing with the family. The late Dr. Charles W. Eliot, of Harvard, once uttered a profoundly wise opinion which at first sounded cold. He declared that it is much better for the children in a family to think of the father as just, and as entitled to respect because of justice, than for them to think of the father as affectionate, as "affectionate" is ordinarily used. In reflecting on God the Father the first requisite is that we think of him as just.

Here someone objects that the less we poor humans speak of God as justice the better for ourselves, for in the course of justice none of us would see salvation. This reminder ought to keep us from any spiritual conceit, but let us not forget that if we do not build on justice in thinking about God, it does not make much difference what we build. The responsibility for the founding of that family which is the race of men is with God. Let us keep that straight always. We are not clamorous for knowledge, for God’s reasons which are beyond our grasp. We are willing to wait till we are able to understand, even if we wait for ages, but we are not willing to live without protest in a universe governed by irresponsible injustice. Of course if the universe were unjust, or indifferent to justice, our protests would not do any good except to relieve ourselves, but that would be something. Justice, however, is not to be defined merely in the negative sense that the needs of the family shall be so met that the members do not harm one another. There is the positive requirement that the whole family relationship be such as to benefit each individual member. While we cannot specify a single concrete item of the moral demand as to the just dealing of God with men, we can see some general obligations which must freely express the divine nature if that nature is Christlike. There must be, first of all. the inescapable moral obligation to build men into the likeness of Christ. After that is the duty to put into the hands of men themselves power which will make for the upbuilding of the family just as fast as that responsibility can safely be assumed by men, regard being had for all the interests of the Kingdom. In other words, light and power must be given man. Light without power adds to the resentment against frustration, and power without light spells disaster. The task before a Divine Father accepting him as Christlike is to educate or train men into Christlikeness. Anyone will concede that this means training in loyalty to the highest Christian ideals. Perhaps not everyone will concede what I next say, but I do not see how we can deny that loyalty to the highest Christian ideals involves the constant intellectual search for light on the application of Christian principles to all the situations in which men find themselves. When we avow the divineness of what is called to-day the scientific method we seem to some to have said too much, but the scientific method is the ordered, consecrated search for God’s truth. There are readers of the Scriptures who suppose that all we have to consider in a problem of conduct is to ask what Jesus would do, and then to turn to the New Testament and find what Jesus would do. My whole argument in this essay turns around the duty of Christlikeness of conduct, but my readers will bear witness that I have not asked what the Christlikeness of God calls for in a single concrete detail, though the demands in general become increasingly clear. So with going to the gospel for light on a particular human duty. Jesus did not proclaim codified rules. He applied principles to the concrete, but those principles have to be reapplied to duties of our own time in the light of all the information available. I do not think it is too much to say that, once the human will is turned in selfsurrender to the divine will, the chief duty of man thereafter is to seek to find how to work out that will into daily life by search with the intellect. If, now, the scientific method, putting the best construction on the term, is not divine, where is any method which is divine? As it is the religious duty and privilege of man to search for light, it is the duty and the privilege of God to grant light to men’s eyes just as fast as the eyes can stand the light. Religious education may, indeed, sometimes be a superficial manifestation of pedagogical mechanic, but, after all, the responsibility is upon God to help in the religious training of men.

If we believe that we are members of the family of a Christlike God, we can be confident that God deals with each of us in entire knowledge of what we are. We are mysterious enough to ourselves, and we are mysteries to one another. There are depths in human nature out of which strange impulses are constantly springing, to our vast astonishment, but these impulses are known to the Father of all long before they become articulate to us. In the light of his full knowledge we may be confident that in training men God will not put upon them burdens that are too heavy. If men break under burdens for which they are not responsible, the obvious conclusion is that the question of moral desert does not arise in such collapse. The problem is not, then, one of guilt, but of the exercise of the divine resources of strengthening and healing. There is no reason why a member of the family of God should bear the stings and lashings of conscience over failures for which he is not responsible. In all this field, however, we must walk with great circumspection of thinking. It is true that we should not whip ourselves with blame for falling short of an ideal when we are not to blame, but there is no excuse for willing acquiescence in a low ideal. The situation here is somewhat like the plight of the wise man in the presence of an intellectual ideal. The wise man may be entirely conscious that, as far as he has gone in his study, he has made no voluntary mistake, but he may, with every increase of knowledge, feel increasingly ashamed of his own ignorance.

There is a paradox here. The wisest man deplores most his own ignorance, and the saint feels most deeply the shortcomings of his own moral conduct. This, however, is different from feeling unjustly self -condemned for evils we have not committed. Speaking paradoxically again, the saint comes to feel that the progressive revelation of the moral ideal which ever reproves what he has attained with the beckoning glimpses of heights still further on, is not condemnation but favor. Once the ideal is discerned, the will becomes evil if it does not set itself toward the ideal.

If the life growing in sonship in the family of God is not to be burdened with tasks too heavy, it is equally clear that such a life can cherish a confidence that the tasks will not be too light. There is no teaching about God less true to Christianity than that which would make him so help men as to weaken them. God is a helper, not a doer of everything for men. Consider for a moment a current debate on the method of the divine revelation. The fundamental difficulty with the theological party which calls itself fundamentalist is that it seeks to make revelation too easy with its doctrine of an infallibly dictated book. In actual experience, if we take the Book as thus dictated, it is not easy, because of the contradictions in the dictations; but if we had such a dictated book, sun-clear to the last syllable, we should lose the invaluable benefit of learning how to search out eternal principles from transient circumstances, how to show our loyalty to principles when we have to apply them in the dark, or at most in a half-light, how to make ventures with moral truth out upon uncharted seas of change. The trouble with infallibility of detailed revelation would be that it could not develop robust saintliness. The family of God is not ruled by rules. The letter killeth but the Spirit giveth life. How one can conceive of God as like Christ and hold to a mechanically dictated revelation from God is a mystery. The bottom objection to such a method is that it is not fair not fair to men, not fair to God. It is too easy and too hard, too hard as emptying the zest and adventure out of the life in the divine family.

Kant once said that the wisdom of God is shown quite as much in what is withheld from us as in what is revealed to us. We cannot well gain moral development in total darkness or in total light. We read to-day that the noblest ideal for man is to live according to a correct moral standard, aware that the universe itself is blind, hostile to, or indifferent to all moral interests whatsoever. The genuine morality, we are told, is to confront this hostile universe with unconquerable heroism and to go down fighting. Whereas men have at some periods of the world’s history been so optimistic as to believe that everything will come out right in the end, no matter how bad men are, the modern subscriber to the creed I am considering will have it that everything will come out wrong in the end, no matter how good men may be. Now, this is well enough for certain moods, or for men who have never themselves felt the sharp slap of the world’s rough hand. If a moralist has enough of this world’s goods to be physically comfortable he can, at his ease, counsel men to struggle unyieldingly against black fate. Confronted by that fate, however, the masses of men are likely to let go of high moral purpose, and to help themselves as best they can, ordinarily finding peace in the stupor of moral indifference. When men do hold fast to lofty morality there is usually an implicit hope which the holder himself may deny. On the other hand, too much light is bad. If modern pedagogy has taught us anything, it is the desirability of gradualness in the revelation of truth. In most realms there is no way of turning on the light all at once.

Just what would it mean to have all the light of mathematics turned on at once? It would mean nothing, for we can attain to mathematical knowledge only by mastering a step at a time. In the kingdom of moral ends the successive glimpses of understanding must be earned if they are to be genuinely moral. Evolutionary method as having to do with the creation of the worlds may merit all the objurgations that some theologians urge against it; but, taking human beings as they are, evolutionary method as the dependence of each stage of knowledge on those that precede it, fits in well with the needs of men. He who exhorts us to follow the moral ideal even to inevitable defeat has the right of it so far as the worth of the ideal itself is concerned. If a final glorious triumph of the moral throughout the universe could be uncovered to the gaze of men and it could only be so revealed if somehow the triumph affected material conditions the attention of the imperfectly moralized minds would be fixed on the material results, to the loss of moral development. What we need is confidence in the Father above, and light enough freely to take the next step. Knowledge is, indeed, an end in itself, but it is also a tool, or a power. On the power side it is important that it get into the hands of children, or of childlike intelligences, only as far as they can use it. The members of the family, however, must be given the power as fast as they can use it. The most difficult task in the training of children is to respect their growing independence. Let us look at an ideal family or one as nearly ideal as we are likely to find under earthly conditions. The father does not regard his children as any sort of investment, to bring any sort of return to himself. He does not gaze upon them with the doting fondness which would keep them always children. He does not harbor any purposes concerning them except such as have to do with their development into manhood or womanhood. Now, there comes a period when he begins to allow a child to make his own choices, even if a wrong choice brings pain to the child. Of course there is a watchful eye on all. A wise father will hardly encourage a boy to touch a live electric wire to show him that electricity will kill, yet the father does insist on a boy’s having a chance to make his own mistakes. He gives the boy some money to spend on himself, for which he is expected to render account. He gives him some money to spend without rendering account. He allows the son to form his own opinions, and sometimes seeks to set them right. At other times he encourages the son to opinions with which he himself does not agree, and does not seek in the slightest to modify those opinions.

All this implies patience, patience, and still more patience. If we are to read at all seriously the New Testament teaching as to the character of God, we may well believe that in the eyes of the Father men are estimated, so far as favor and disfavor go, by intention rather than performance. There is a mass of confused thinking as to this aspect of the divine attitude toward men. For example, the certainty with which a painful consequence follows a wrong choice in the material world of cause and effect is now and again taken as an illustration of the swiftness of the divine punishment of sin. Such consequences may have nothing to do with sin. We can readily see that if ours is to be a universe of law, like consequences must follow like antecedents. Just why consequences so often work out disastrously for individuals we do not know, but our lack of knowledge is no proof that the problem is insoluble. We do know or men ought to have known all these centuries since the book of Job was written that the suffering of painful consequences may befall an innocent man who has taken no false steps whatever. Final understanding will no doubt reveal that there are some pains we must suffer from the very fact that we live in a universe at all, though, as we have repeatedly said, we may not be able to take advantage of this consideration as concrete explanation of a particular crisis. To get back to the main track, the belief in a Christlike God warrants us in assuming that the actual results following mistaken choices, which we have made in all good faith, are not to be viewed as tokens of divine impatience.

We are warranted also in believing that the divine patience covers those mistakes in which motives are mixed, or in which men may be wrongly influenced, without being conscious of the influence. It is easy for an onlooker to pass severe judgment on the selfishness of a fellowman when that selfishness seems obvious. The onlooker may declare that if the selfish man is not aware of his own selfishness he has befooled himself. Now, human nature is such that we can act selfishly without intending to do so, without being aware that we are doing so, without deceiving ourselves. What often seems to be selfishness and what, indeed, may be selfishness may be the operation of a kind of instinct of self-preservation. This is especially true when what we call class interests are involved. It is often evident to a bystander that the conduct of certain persons is dictated by the instinct of self-preservation of their political, or industrial, or social class. The action of the members of a threatened group or the reaction, as we say in these psychological days takes place spontaneously, but seems to be deliberately dictated by class interest. Now, it is not possible for any but the thousandth, or the ten-thousandth man, to be at all aware of the pressure of this int erest in himself. He thinks of himself as wholly sincere. When it comes to standing against the interest of one’s own class the man who can do this is rare indeed. While it is easy for those of us on the outside to charge men with selfishness, the Divine Father confronts a demand for patience which, we may be confident, is met, and fully met.

While the moral demand upon man is that at least for a time he work in the half light, the demand is equally imperative that God work in the full light. We can trust him not to bring souls into a world like ours unless he knows them through and through to their last possibility. We can discern that human beings are not animals on the one hand, or completely moralized wills on the other. The peculiarity of the human condition is that it is the passage over from a state in which the animal impulses rule to a state in which these impulses are to be ruled in the name of the Christ ideal. The Christian need is control; the natural impulses not stamped out, or brought to heel, but controlled for an ideal. The world has tried out the surrender to animal impulses, and we all know the disasters. The church has tried out the downright subjugation and extinction of the natural, and we know the ruin along that path. Now, the control of impulses, impulses that we ourselves only vaguely understand, is almost insuperably difficult. We may well count upon the patience of the Christlike God as we strive to work our way through.

Here is as good an opportunity as any to speak of the obligation upon a Divine Father to reveal his purpose toward his children as soon as the children can grasp that purpose. In this essay I am trying to keep away from formal and technical theology, but I am sure I do not violate my own purpose in insisting that it is upon moral bases like those I have been trying to sketch out that all adequate technical theology must be built. In my introductory chapter I tried to show that through the doctrines of incarnation and atonement the church has from the beginning been trying to express her conviction that in Christ God has done all he possibly can to show his purpose for men. If it is imperative for us to show to God what Christ, as the realization of the highest moral and spiritual values, is to us, it is imperative also for God to show us what those values are to him. The charge cannot be urged that God has delayed too long in proclaiming Ms purpose to men. A more pertinent query would be as to whether God has not revealed his purpose in Christ sooner than we can make much of that revelation. The sensitiveness to responsibility revealed in Christ a responsibility holding for the Divine Father calls for the assurance to men as to the divine intentions toward them. The revelation in Christ, so to speak, outflanks our perplexities. It does not meet them by direct answer. It rather gives us a Father whom we can trust when we cannot understand him. It is altogether impossible for us at present to get an answer to many detailed questions. The ramifications reach too far for our intellects. We can, however* see in Christ the revelation of a spirit in the Father which we can trust. As long as the church remains loyal to essential Christianity she will be insistent upon phrasings of incarnation and atonement which will make Christ mean most to God as well as to men. This will involve change of theological statement in the direction of enlargement, provided the church is living an enlarging life. The difficulty with many theories of such matters is, not that they are heretical, but that they are not big enough. They are sound enough as far as they go, but they do not go far. There are various systems which are formally good enough, but Christian consciousness in church and individual will have to decide whether they are adequate or not. Here, by the way, is a challenge for the exercise of charity among believers. As long as the believer finds in a theory about Christ a statement which makes Christ and God mean most to him, he should not be overkeen to charge another believer with heresy for holding to a different view which, for that other believer, meets the like test of spiritual adequacy. It can hardly be maintained, however, that any theory about Christ will finally satisfy the Church’s conception of God as like unto Christ which does not make Christ of the utmost significance for God. Two extremes should be avoided. Christ as just a masked divinity acting a part upon the earth, with no substantial entrance into human life, does not make him significant enough. Christ as merely a man with no special uniqueness of relation to the Father in heaven does not make him significant enough. At any and all tunes the Lordship of Christ must be made to contain all that we can rationally and morally pour into the term. On the basis of this essay we may think of him as the self-expression of God. Language has a double aim the communication of thought to another than the revealer himself, and the self-satisfaction or self-realization of the revealer. The revelation in Christ may well be taken as moral revelation on the part of God, and likewise as God’s moral self-expression. Without seeking to delve into mysteries too deep for us it may be suggested that probably the profoundest significance of the work of Christ is its satisfaction of the moral impulses of the Divine Father.

Here too is as appropriate a place as any to speak a word about God as Judge. The judgeship of God and the Fatherhood of God should be taken together. Let us rid our minds at once of the notion that, in the judgments which we have a right to expect from a Christlike God, impartiality would be any especial virtue. In our human contacts one with another impartiality is, indeed, somewhat of a virtue, simply because, human nature being what it is, partiality is almost certain to result in injustice. When, however, we are thinking of the Divine Judge we have to remember that he is also the Divine Father. Abstract impersonal law is an instrumental creation of our own, of considerable use in the control of society. The justice of the Divine Judge and the mercy of the Divine Father can also be set over against one another as an academic exercise in theology, or, rather, in the shuffling of theological phrases, but how can anyone who sees in Jesus a revelation of the Spirit of God suppose that there is the possibility of any such separation in reality? One of the saddest travesties in the history of religion has been the extent to which the whole theme of judgment has been pulled out of the atmosphere of a family relationship and transferred to the atmosphere of the courtroom, the atmosphere which more than all others in dealing with human relationships, makes for the mechanical and artificial. Whatever else we may or may not believe about the temper of Jesus, we can be sure that his temper was not that of a lawyer. The judgment of the Father is not except possibly as a last resort after men have had the chance which to all moral intelligences throughout the universe would seem adequate chiefly a passing of final sentence upon souls before a bar. It is an attitude more like that of a friendly critic who is seeking, not for faults to condemn, but for excellences on which to build. It may be that when we get the light of the upper skies on the divine handling of men, one of the remarkable features of that handling will be the extent to which the Father-Judge has ignored the mistakes for the sake of bringing out the good. Recall what has been said about conceiving the divine knowledge of man’s inner life as insight based on sympathy. A law court has to give central place to what is called objective fact. Did or did not an accused do this or that? though, to be sure, motive has to be considered in a legal finding. The divine judgment of men, however, is chiefly inner, different from that of accusation and penalty on the basis of outer deed. The task is discipline, correction, reproof, and praise also. The late Borden Parker Bowne once made a profound remark about the Fatherhood of God. He declared that the transgressions of men must be considered, first of all, from the point of view of membership in the divine family; that the wrong choices of men have at least at the outset to be taken as are offenses of children against parental control, and that the possibility of a child’s finding himself forthwith outside of the family because of disobedience or heedlessness, is not to be thought of. The free and easy finality with which, in other days especially, church leaders presumed to say what persons were inside the divine family and what persons outside, was a travesty on the very idea of the family. There are sins of the flesh and sins of the spirit. By sins of the flesh I mean all those slips which come out of the physical conditions and entanglements in which we live on earth. The designation can properly include much more than ordinary fleshly indulgences. It embraces all the weaknesses coming out of our being enmeshed in a material world. On the other hand are the deliberate resolves which make choice of evil, the purposeful rejection of fatherhood. Bowne himself looked upon this as the darkest possibility before the soul, and did not draw back from the conclusion that a will can seal itself to evil forever. Still, rigorous insistence upon this possibility only makes the stronger the contention that men must not pass hasty judgment as to who is inside the family and who outside. Here, as elsewhere, we can hold fast the general principle without the slightest intention to pass sentence on a given individual. No man alive is wise enough or good enough to draw the line in actual human groups in any manner suggestive of judgment. That is the province of the Father-Judge.

Once more, we cannot close this section on the divine fatherhood without at least a glance in the direction of immortality. Here again, I do not wish to enter the lists with formal arguments. The ground for our belief in immortality is our conviction that God is a Father that God is like unto Christ.

There is no formal argument, anyhow, that will of itself here bring deep certainty. It is quite generally conceded that no logic avails conclusively against immortality. The inherent dependence of spiritual processes upon physical processes has never been established. Thinking, for example, may take place only when particles of nerve substance are in a particular . relation to one another, but no movement or relation of nerve substance accounts for the unity and persistence necessary in the thinking agent. Let the dependence of thought on brain be ever so close, that does not forbid us from concluding that thinking might be of finer quality if the mental activity were brought into relation to a finer quality of substance in some other sphere than this. As for there being no reason why man’s life should continue into some other sphere, what reason is there for its being in this sphere? The argument that it is absurd that creatures of no more intrinsic worth than human beings should live after physical death is a hazardous one. It keeps suggesting the question as to why some of us exist at all. Yet here we are! No, on the basis of formal argument alone it would require an endless existence itself to supply adequate time to establish a convincing case one way or the other. The attitude we take toward immortality depends on our idea of God. If God is like unto Christ, if God feels toward men as Christ felt, we simply ask ourselves whether such a God could conceivably call men into an existence like human life, and then let them pass out into nothingness after a career like that on earth. Let us put only a scant minimum of suggestion from the earthly family into our interpretation of the divine family. Let fatherhood for God imply the least conceivable. How can it be reconciled with a willingness on God’s part to have men cease to exist at physical death? Nor can immortality on such basis of fatherhood be merely an immortality of good influences, or a conservation of spiritual forces with the personal identity lost. Any earthly father who has sto’od at the grave of a dead son knows what a mockery it would be to say that the boy lives on in that the good influences set going by his life persist. An earthly father will naturally grasp at that straw of comfort if nothing more is possible, but it is indeed a poverty-stricken straw. So with all talk about the absorption of the finite into the infinite with the personal identity destroyed. That is worse than nothing to fatherhood. No, if persistence of personal identity beyond death is not possible, let us stop talking about the Fatherhood of God, for if this life is all the divine fatherhood is only a pleasant figure of speech. This subject is not disposed of by declaring that multitudes of persons are not interested in immortality they would as willingly cease to be as not. We, however, are quite as much interested in where this entire problem of immortality leaves God as in where it leaves men. We need not believe in God at all unless we choose to, but if we are to believe in him as moral, we can fairly and reverently say that he must face the judgment of all righteous intelligence as to how he treats men. It may be true that, as a cynic once said, no human being would care to go back and live over a single month of his life if he were just repeating a particular month. All the more reason why men should be given a chance at a deeper meaning than that of a life like ours. Better believe in no God at all than in one not fully just. Of course, if God is not the God of Christ, eternal life would not be desirable. If the good and the true and the beautiful are not of the warp and woof of the universe, we can now get our fill of life. If God is like Christ, we can believe in immortality. If he is not like Christ, who desires immortality?