The Churches and Modern Thought An inquiry into the...

As ages roll on, God’s attributes—or rather, we should say, the attributes given Him by man—are continually altering. All that the early gods demanded was fear and worship. Even the Jehovah of the Jews asked at first little else than this. Anthropomorphic conceptions of God are now admitted by the cultured to be a thing of the past. Do they not, however, still survive when human emotions, such as love and anger, happiness and sorrow, are attributed to the Deity? We acknowledge God to be infinite, and, consequently, incomprehensible by finite minds; yet we imagine and attempt to argue that He possesses the same qualities—those we most admire—as ourselves! “How can we believe in a personal God?” asks the Rationalist. “A person must have limitations, or he ceases to be a person.” However, we must not forget that in philosophy and theology the word “person” simply implies “a nature endowed with consciousness,” and does not involve limits. Demurring to this definition, there still remains another difficulty. In all our experience and knowledge, emotions and intelligence are connected with nerve structures; how, then, can we attribute these qualities to a Being who is described to us as devoid of any nerve structure? I know of no answer that could be called satisfactory from a Theistic standpoint.

In the previous section we considered the doctrine of final causes. This doctrine, as Spinoza points out,17 “does away with the perfection of God; for, if God acts for an object, He necessarily desires something which He lacks.” The Theist goes a step further than the mere teleologist, and insists on a benevolent purpose throughout nature. Is he, then, oblivious to Spinoza’s objection? No, he is not; and therefore it is that he struggles to save his personal God by an infinite extension of the limits of His personality. In fine, Theism, in the hands of its modern advocates, and in spite of the seeming orthodoxy of the phrase, “Divine Immanence,” is often nothing less than another form of Pantheism.