(c) God's sovereignty requires a belief in his special preserving agency; since this sovereignty would not be absolute, if anything occurred or existed independent of his will.
James Martineau, Seat of Authority, 29, 30—“All cosmic force is will.... This identification of nature with God's will would be pantheistic only if we turned the proposition round and identified God with no more than the life of the universe. But we do not deny transcendency. Natural forces are God's will, but God's will is more than they. He is not the equivalent of the All, but its directing Mind. God is not the rage of the wild beast, nor the sin of man. There are things and beings objective to him.... He puts his power into that which is other than himself, and he parts with other use of itby preëngagement to an end. Yet he is the continuous source and supply of power to the system.”
Natural forces are generic volitions of God. But human wills, with their power of alternative, are the product of God's self-limitation, even more than nature is, for human wills do not always obey the divine will,—they may even oppose it. Nothing finite is only finite. In it is the Infinite, not only as immanent, but also as transcendent, and in the case of sin, as opposing the sinner and as punishing him. This continuous willing of God has its analogy in our own subconscious willing. J. M. Whiton, in Am. Jour. Theol., Apl. 1901:320—“Our own will, when we walk, does not put forth a separate volition for every step, but depends on the automatic action of the lower nerve-centres, which it both sets in motion and keeps to their work. So the divine Will does not work in innumerable separate acts of volition.” A. R. Wallace: “The whole universe is not merely dependent on, but actually is, the will of higher intelligences or of one supreme intelligence.... Man's free will is only a larger artery for the controlling current of the universal Will, whose time-long evolutionary flow constitutes the self-revelation of the Infinite One.” This latter statement of Wallace merges the finite will far too completely in the will of God. It is true of nature and of all holy beings, but it is untrue of the wicked. These are indeed upheld by God in their being, but opposed by God in their conduct. Preservation leaves room for human freedom, responsibility, sin, and guilt.
All natural forces and all personal beings therefore give testimony to the will of God which originated them and which continually sustains them. The physical universe, indeed, is in no sense independent of God, for its forces are only the constant willing [pg 414]of God, and its laws are only the habits of God. Only in the free will of intelligent beings has God disjoined from himself any portion of force and made it capable of contradicting his holy will. But even in free agents God does not cease to uphold. The being that sins can maintain its existence only through the preserving agency of God. The doctrine of preservation therefore holds a middle ground between two extremes. It holds that finite personal beings have a real existence and a relative independence. On the other hand it holds that these persons retain their being and their powers only as they are upheld by God.
God is the soul, but not the sum, of things. Christianity holds to God's transcendence as well as to God's immanence. Immanence alone is God imprisoned, as transcendence alone is God banished. Gore, Incarnation, 136 sq.—“Christian theology is the harmony of pantheism and deism.” It maintains transcendence, and so has all the good of pantheism without its limitations. It maintains immanence, and so has all the good of deism without its inability to show how God could be blessed without creation. Diman, Theistic Argument, 367—“The dynamical theory of nature as a plastic organism, pervaded by a system of forces uniting at last in one supreme Force, is altogether more in harmony with the spirit and teaching of the Gospel than the mechanical conceptions which prevailed a century ago, which insisted on viewing nature as an intricate machine, fashioned by a great Artificer who stood wholly apart from it.” On the persistency of force, super cuncta, subter cuncta, see Bib. Sac., Jan. 1881:1-24; Cocker, Theistic Conception of the World, 172-243, esp. 236. The doctrine of preservation therefore holds to a God both in nature and beyond nature. According as the one or the other of these elements is exclusively regarded, we have the error of Deism, or the error of Continuous Creation—theories which we now proceed to consider.
III. Theories which virtually deny the doctrine of Preservation.
1. Deism.
This view represents the universe as a self-sustained mechanism, from which God withdrew as soon as he had created it, and which he left to a process of self-development. It was held in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the English Herbert, Collins, Tindal, and Bolingbroke.