I. THE RECOGNITION OF THE PERSONAL IN MAN
In the first place, the social sense of the value and sacredness of the person will emphasize the full personality of man.
1. Man's Personal Separateness from God.—The sense of the value of the person cannot admit for a moment such a one-sided emphasis upon a universal cosmic evolution, or upon the immanence of God, as should make impossible a true personality in man. It seeks, in its view of both God and man, a really "personal idealism." It does not forget, but earnestly asserts, the dependence of all other spirits upon God; and, consequently, looks for no metaphysical separateness in this sense from God. But a genuine recognition of the personality of man does require that man be conceived as separate from God in just this sense: (1) that he has a clear self-consciousness of his own, and (2) that he has real moral initiative, which makes his volition truly his own. These two factors constitute all of separateness that need be demanded for man. Possessing these, he is "outside of God" in the only sense in which a "personal idealism" feels concerned to assert separateness. But for these factors it is concerned; for without them, it believes, no truly ideal view, no moral world, no religious life, are possible.
2. Emphasis Upon Man's Moral Initiative.—In particular, the application of the sense of the value and sacredness of the person in theology, means the emphatic recognition of the moral initiative of man—of the possession of a real will of his own. The whole social consciousness, especially in this third element of it, rests upon the assumption that man has worth, as a being capable of character as well as of happiness, and so deserves in some worthy sense to be called a child of God. If the social consciousness is, as we have seen, with any fairness to be called the recognition of the fully personal,[93] this reverence for the personal initiative of men cannot be lacking in it. Its influence upon theology at this point, therefore, is hardly to be doubted.
And theology itself is vitally concerned. For the whole possibility of the conceptions of government and providence requires this. These terms are words without meaning, having absolutely no place in theology or philosophy, if man has no moral initiative. Nor should it escape our notice, that we strike at the very root of all possible reverence for God, if we deny a real initiative to man. We have no possible philosophic explanation of either sin or error, consistent with any real reverence for God, if a true human will is denied.[94] In Professor Bowne's vigorous language: In a system of necessity "every thought, belief, conviction, whether truth or superstition, arises with equal necessity with every other.... On this plane of necessary effect the actual is all, and the ideal distinctions of true and false have as little meaning as they would have on the plane of mechanical forces.... The only escape from the overthrow of reason involved in the fact of error lies in the assumption of freedom." Moreover, if real human initiative is denied to men, we conceive God as having really less respect for persons in his dealing with them, than the most elementary ethics requires of men in their relations to one another. A one-sided doctrine of immanence, thus, degrades both man and God. It degrades man, in denying to him a true personality, and so making him simply a thing. It degrades God, in making him the real responsible cause of all sin and error, and in making him treat possible persons as things. The influence of the social consciousness, which leads us to measure the moral growth of a man and of a civilization by the deepening sense of reverence for the person, is fairly decisive at this point. It must see in God the most absolute guarding of man's personality, and especially of his moral initiative.
3. Man, a Child of God.—The Christian faith, that man is a child of God, is a faithful expression of the insistence of the social consciousness upon the recognition of the full personality of man. It expresses both man's entire dependence upon God for his being and maintenance, and at the same time his infinite value and sacredness as a spirit made in the image of God, capable of indefinite progress, and capable of personal relation to God. It voices thus Christianity's characteristic "humbly-proud" conception of man—humble in view of the eternal and infinite plans of God; proud, as "called to an imperishable work in the world." It is, indeed, but a concrete statement of that faith in love at the heart of things, and in the all-embracing plan of a faithful God, which we found required, if the social consciousness itself was to have any justification.[95]
II. THE RECOGNITION OF THE PERSONAL IN CHRIST
In the second place, under this impulse of the sense of the value and sacredness of the person, theology is likely to insist on the recognition of the personal in the conception of Christ.
1. Christ a Personal Revelation of God.—This recognition of the personal in Christ will mean, first, that we are to conceive Christ as a personal revelation of God, rather than as containing in himself a divine substance.[96] It cannot forget, that if God is a person, and men are persons, the adequate self-revelation of God to men can be made only in a truly personal life; and that men need above all, in their relation to God, some manifestation of his ethical will, and this can be shown only in the character of a person. A merely metaphysical conception of the divinity of Christ in terms of substance or essence, as these are commonly thought, must, therefore, wholly fail to satisfy. We must be able to recognize and bow before the personal will of the personal God revealed in Christ, if we are really to find God through him. A strong sense of the personal, then, such as the social consciousness evinces, must see in Christ, above all, a personal revelation of a person.
2. Emphasizing the Moral and Spiritual in Asserting the Supremacy of Christ.—This implies that the dominant sense of the value and sacredness of the person will certainly tend to bring into prominence the moral and spiritual in asserting the supremacy of Christ, rather than the metaphysical or the simply miraculous. So far as these latter come into its representation at all, they will follow rather than precede, and be accepted because of the moral and spiritual, or as simply working hypotheses enabling us to bring into a thought-unity what we have to recognize in the moral and spiritual realm. If one faces the matter fully and frankly, is it not plain that Christians of all shades of belief are increasingly finding the real reason for their faith in Christ in his moral and spiritual supremacy? Many may choose to express their faith in him, when once reached, in terms of the miraculous or metaphysical; but the miraculous and the metaphysical are not the primary reasons for their faith. It is the inner spirit of Christ himself which really masters us and calls out our confident faith and our eager submission. And it is only when we have already gotten this sense of the stupendousness of his personality, that the so-called miraculous in his life becomes to our thought natural and fitting, and we are driven to think him standing in some unique relation to God and so requiring to be conceived in unique metaphysical terms.