CHAPTER IV

GOD

The word "God" is often employed as though it had a fixed meaning. His part in an event or His relation to a movement is discussed with the assumption that all who speak have in mind the same Being. "God" is the name a man gives to his highest inspiration, and men vary greatly in that which inspires them. One man's god is his belly, another's his reputation, a third's cleverness. Napoleon reintroduced the cult of the God of authority, by establishing the Concordat with Rome, because as he bluntly put it, "men require to be kept in order." A number of socially minded thinkers, of whom the best known is George Eliot, deified humanity and gave themselves to worship and serve it. "Whatever thy heart clings to and relies on," wrote Luther, "that is properly thy God." A Christian is one who clings to Him in whom Jesus trusted, one who responds to the highest inspirations

of Jesus of Nazareth. And a glance over Church history leaves one feeling that few Christians, even among careful thinkers, have had thoroughly Christian ideas of God.

A principal fault has been the method used in arriving at the thought of God. Men began with what was termed "Natural Religion." They studied the universe and inferred the sort of Deity who made and ruled it. It was intricately and wisely designed; its God must be omniscient. It was vast; He must be omnipotent. It displayed the same orderliness everywhere; He must be omnipresent. In epochs when men emphasized the beneficence of nature-its beauty, its usefulness, its wisdom-they concluded that its Creator was good. In an epoch, like the latter part of the Nineteenth Century, they drew a very different conclusion. Charles Darwin wrote, "What a book a Devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature."

Christians never stopped with the view of God drawn from "Natural Religion." They made this their basis, and then added to it the God of "Revealed Religion," contained

in the Bible. They selected all the texts that spoke of God, drawing them from Leviticus and Ecclesiastes as confidently as from the gospels and St. Paul, and constructed a Biblical doctrine of God, which they added to the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent Being of their inferences from Nature. The God and Father of Jesus was thus combined with various, often much lower thoughts of Deity in the Bible, and then further obscured by the Deity of the current views of physical and human nature. It is not surprising that few Christians possessed a truly Christian view of God.

Loyalty to Jesus compels us to begin with Him. If He is the Way, we are not justified in taking half a dozen other roads, and using Him as one path among many. We ask ourselves what was the highest inspiration of Jesus, what was the Being to whom He responded with His obedient trust and with whom He communed. We are eager not to fashion an image of Divinity for ourselves, which is idolatry as truly when our minds grave it in thought as when our hands shape it in stone; but to receive God's disclosure of Himself with a whole-hearted re

sponse, and interpret, as faithfully as we can, the impression He makes upon us. "God," writes Tyndal, the martyr translator of our English New Testament, "is not man's imagination, but that only which He saith of Himself." Our highest inspirations come to us from Jesus, and He is, therefore, God's Self-unveiling to us, God's "Frankness," His Word made flesh.

Responding to God through Jesus, Christians discover:

First, that God is their Christlike Father, and that He is love as Jesus experienced His love and Himself was love.

Second, that God is the Lord of heaven and earth. We do not know whether He is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent; there is much that leads us to think that He is limited. He can do no more than Love can do with His children, and Love has its defeats, and crosses, and tragedies. But trusting the Christlike Father we more and more discover that He is sufficiently in control over all things to accomplish through them His will. He needs us to help Him master nature, and transform it into the servant of man,-to control disease, to harness elec

tricity, to understand earthquakes; and He needs us to help Him conquer human nature and conform it to the likeness of His Son. God's complete lordship waits until His will is done in earth as it is in heaven; but for the present we believe that He is wise and strong enough not to let nature or men defeat His purpose; that He is controlling all things so that they work together for good unto them that love Him.

And third, that God is the indwelling Spirit. The Christlike Father Lord, whom we find outside ourselves through the faith and character of Jesus, becomes as we enter into fellowship with Him, a Force within us. He is the Conscience of our consciences, the Wellspring of motives and impulses and sympathies. We repeat, today, in some degree, the experience of the first disciples at Pentecost; we recognize within ourselves the inspiring, guiding and energizing Spirit of love.

While we find God primarily through Jesus, He reveals Himself to us in many other ways: in the Scriptures, where the generations before us have garnered their experiences of Him; in living epistles in Chris