|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 48
It is clear, then, that these observations have a bearing upon our
preaching of the doctrine of God. There is a certain illogicality,
something humorous, in going into a church, of all places in the
world, to be told how like we are to Him. The dull and average
personality, the ordinary and not very valuable man, can probably
listen indifferently and with a slow-growing hardness and dim
resentment to that sort of preaching for a number of years. But the
valuable, the highly personalized people, the saints and the sinners,
the great rebels and the great disciples, who are the very folk for
whom the church exists, would hate it, and they would know the final
bitterness of despair if they thought that this was so. Either saint
or sinner would consider it the supreme insult, the last pitch of
insolence, for the church to be telling them that it is true.
For they know within themselves that it is a lie. Their one hope hangs
on God because His thoughts are not their thoughts, nor His ways their
ways; because He seeth the end from the beginning; because in Him
there is no variableness, neither shadow that is caused by turning;
because no man shall see His face and live. They, the sinners and the
saints, do not want to be told that they, within themselves, can heal
themselves and that sin has no real sinfulness. That is tempting them
to the final denial, the last depth of betrayal, the blurring of moral
values, the calling of evil good and the saying that good is evil.
They know that this is the unpardonable madness. In the hours when
they, the saints and sinners, wipe their mouths and say, "We have done
no harm"; in the days when what they love is ugliness because it is
ugly and shameless, and reckless expression because it is so terrible,
so secretly appalling, so bittersweet with the sweetness of death,
they know that it is the last affront to have the church--the one
place where men expect they will be made to face the facts--bow these
facts out of doors.
No, we readily grant that the religious approach to the whole truth
and to final reality is like any other one, either scientific,
economic, political, a partial approach. It sets forth for the most
part only a group of facts. When it does not emphasize other facts,
it does not thereby deny them. But it insists that the truth of man's
differences, man's helplessness which the differences reveal, and
man's fate hanging therefore upon a transcendent God, are the key
truths for the religious life. It is with that aspect of life the
preacher deals, and if he fails to grapple with these problems and
considerations, ignores these facts, his candlestick has been removed.
The argument for a God, then, within His world, but also distinct
from it, above its evil custom and in some sense untouched by
its all-leveling life, is essential to the preservation of human
personality, and personality is essential to dignity, to decency, to
hope. The clearest and simplest thing to be said about the Hebrew God,
lofty and inaccessible Being, with whom nevertheless His purified and
obedient children might have relationships, or about the "living
God" of Greek theology, far removed from us but with whose deathless
goodness, beauty and truth our mortality by some mediator may be
endowed, is that the argument that supports such transcendence is
the argument from necessity. It is the facts of experience, the very
stuff of human life, coming down alike from Hebraic and Hellenic
civilization, which demand Him. Immanence and transcendence are merely
theistic terms for identity and difference. Through them is revealed
and discovered personality, the "I" which is the ultimate fact of
my consciousness. I can but reckon from the known to the unknown.
The world which produced me is also, then, a cosmic identity and
difference. In that double fact is found divine personality. But
that aspect of His Person, that portion of the fact which feeds
the imaginative and volitional life, is the glorious and saving
unlikeness of God--His unthinkable and inexpressible glory; His utter
comprehension and unbelievable compassion; His justice which knows no
flaw and brooks no evasion and cannot be swerved; His power which
may not be withstood and hence is a sure and certain tenderness; His
hatred of sin, terrible and flaming, a hatred which will send sinful
men through a thousand hells, if they will have them, and can only be
saved thereby; His love for men, which is what makes Him hate their
sin and leads Him by His very nature as God to walk into hell with the
sinner, suffering with him a thousand times more than the sinner is
able to understand or know,--like the Paul who could not wish himself,
for himself, in hell, but who did wish himself accursed of God for
his brethren's sake; like Jesus, who, in Gethsemane, would for Himself
avoid His cross, but who accepted it and was willing to hang, forsaken
of God, upon it, for the lives of men, identifying Himself to the
uttermost with their fate. Yes; it is such a supernal God--that God
who is apart, incredible, awful--that the soul of humanity craves and
needs.
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|