By infinity we mean, not that the divine nature has no known limits or bounds, but that it has no limits or bounds. That which has simply no known limits is the indefinite. The infinity of God implies that he is in no way limited by the universe or confined to the universe; he is transcendent as well as immanent. Transcendence, however, must not be conceived as freedom from merely spatial restrictions, but rather as unlimited resource, of which God's glory is the expression.
Ps. 145:3—“his greatness is unsearchable”; Job 11:7-9—“high as heaven ... deeper than Sheol”; Is. 66:1—“Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool”; 1 K. 8:27—“Heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee”; Rom. 11:33—“how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out.” There can be no infinite number, since to any assignable number a unit can be added, which shows that this number was not infinite before. There can be no infinite universe, because an infinite universe is conceivable only as an infinite number of worlds or of minds. God himself is the only real Infinite, and the universe is but the finite expression or symbol of his greatness.
We therefore object to the statement of Lotze, Microcosm, 1:446—“The complete system, grasped in its totality, offers an expression of the whole nature of the One.... The Cause makes actual existence its complete manifestation.” In a similar way Schurman, Belief in God, 26, 173-178, grants infinity, but denies transcendence: “The infinite Spirit may include the finite, as the idea of a single organism embraces within a single life a plurality of members and functions.... The world is the expression of an ever active and inexhaustible will. That the external manifestation is as boundless as the life it expresses, science makes exceedingly probable. In any event, we have not the slightest reason to contrast the finitude of the world with the infinity of God.... If the natural order is eternal and infinite, as there seems no reason to doubt, it will be difficult to find a meaning for ‘beyond’ or ‘before.’ Of this illimitable, ever-existing universe, God is the Inner ground or substance. There is no evidence, neither does any religious need require us to believe, that the divine Being manifest in the universe has any actual or possible existence elsewhere, in some transcendent sphere.... The divine will can express itself only as it does, because no other expression would reveal what it is. Of such a will, the universe is the eternal expression.”
In explanation of the term infinity, we may notice:
(a) That infinity can belong to but one Being, and therefore cannot be shared with the universe. Infinity is not a negative but a positive idea. It does not take its rise from an impotence of thought, but is an intuitive conviction which constitutes the basis of all other knowledge.
See Porter, Human Intellect, 651, 652, and this Compendium, pages 59-62. Versus Mansel, Proleg. Logica, chap. 1—“Such negative notions ... imply at once an attempt to think, and a failure in that attempt.” On the contrary, the conception of the Infinite is perfectly distinguishable from that of the finite, and is both necessary and logically prior to that of the finite. This is not true of our idea of the universe, of which all we know is finite and dependent. We therefore regard such utterances as those of Lotze and Schurman above, and those of Chamberlin and Caird below, as pantheistic in tendency, although the belief of these writers in divine and human personality saves them from falling into other errors of pantheism.
Prof. T. C. Chamberlin, of the University of Chicago: “It is not sufficient to the modern scientific thought to think of a Ruler outside of the universe, nor of a universe with the Ruler outside. A supreme Being who does not embrace all the activities and possibilities and potencies of the universe seems something less than the supremest Being, and a universe with a Ruler outside seems something less than a universe. And therefore the thought is growing on the minds of scientific thinkers that the supreme Being is the universal Being, embracing and comprehending all things.” [pg 255]Caird, Evolution of Religion, 2:62—“Religion, if it would continue to exist, must combine the monotheistic idea with that which it has often regarded as its greatest enemy, the spirit of pantheism.” We grant in reply that religion must appropriate the element of truth in pantheism, namely, that God is the only substance, ground and principle of being, but we regard it as fatal to religion to side with pantheism in its denials of God's transcendence and of God's personality.
(b) That the infinity of God does not involve his identity with “the all,” or the sum of existence, nor prevent the coëxistence of derived and finite beings to which he bears relation. Infinity implies simply that God exists in no necessary relation to finite things or beings, and that whatever limitation of the divine nature results from their existence is, on the part of God, a self-limitation.
Ps. 113:5, 6—“that humbleth himself to behold the things that are in heaven and in the earth.” It is involved in God's infinity that there should be no barriers to his self-limitation in creation and redemption (see page 9, F.). Jacob Boehme said: “God is infinite, for God is all.” But this is to make God all imperfection, as well as all perfection. Harris, Philos. Basis Theism: “The relation of the absolute to the finite is not the mathematical relation of a total to its parts, but it is a dynamical and rational relation.” Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:189-191—“The infinite is not the total; ‘the all’ is a pseudo-infinite, and to assert that it is greater than the simple infinite is the same error that is committed in mathematics when it is asserted that an infinite number plus a vast finite number is greater than the simple infinite.” Fullerton, Conception of the Infinite, 90—“The Infinite, though it involves unlimited possibility of quantity, is not itself a quantitative but rather a qualitative conception.” Hovey, Studies of Ethics and Religion, 39-47—“Any number of finite beings, minds, loves, wills, cannot reveal fully an infinite Being, Mind, Love, Will. God must be transcendent as well as immanent in the universe, or he is neither infinite nor an object of supreme worship.”
Clarke, Christian Theology, 117—“Great as the universe is, God is not limited to it, wholly absorbed by what he is doing in it, and capable of doing nothing more. God in the universe is not like the life of the tree in the tree, which does all that it is capable of in making the tree what it is. God in the universe is rather like the spirit of a man in his body, which is greater than his body, able to direct his body, and capable of activities in which his body has no share. God is a free spirit, personal, self-directing, unexhausted by his present activities.” The Persian poet said truly: “The world is a bud from his bower of beauty; the sun is a spark from the light of his wisdom; the sky is a bubble on the sea of his power.” Faber: “For greatness which is infinite makes room For all things in its lap to lie. We should be crushed by a magnificence Short of infinity. We share in what is infinite; 'tis ours, For we and it alike are Thine. What I enjoy, great God, by right of Thee, Is more than doubly mine.”