5. The Increasing Sense of Our Kinship with Christ, and of His Reality.—Side by side with this recognition of the nature of Christ's uniqueness, there deserves to be set, as another outcome of the emphasis upon conceiving Christ as a personal revelation of God, the increasing sense of our kinship with Christ and of his reality. The connection here is by no means accidental, though it may seem almost paradoxical. We have plainly come in our day to our clearest recognition of the divinity of Christ through the sense of his transcendent character. But revelation in character requires the reality of his human life. The very route, therefore, by which we have most certainly reached our sense of Christ's divinity, leads also to an increasing sense of kinship with Christ, and so of his reality. So long as we seemed driven to conceive the divinity of Christ in terms that had no relation and no meaning for human life, just so long must he seem to us to be really moving in another world and to take on the unreality of that other world quite hidden from us. But now Christ's life has meaning; we can enter into it and feel that it is real. With all its transcendence, the life does not move now simply in the sphere of the mysterious. It is no unreal drama, no play-struggle,—utterly failing to meet our real moral and spiritual needs. Least of all, in this supreme work for man, can the revealing life be only a show. It feels real. It is real. And, with clear sense of the inevitable inadequacy of the analogy, we still rest confidently in the conviction that God's relation to Christ may be best conceived after the analogy of the relation of the Spirit of God to our spirits; and that, when we try to press beyond that, we are attempting to rise into that sphere of a supposed supra-personal, for which we have no possible organ of vision, and where, therefore, we are thinking not more, but less, truly.[102]
With this sense of the reality of the personal, spiritual life of Christ, there naturally comes home to us the appropriateness and practicability of his ideals. They are seen to belong to us more surely, and properly to make demands upon us. It is, probably, not too much to say that, under the influence of the social consciousness, there has been a definite, growing approach to Christ's way of thinking, and to his ideal of life. This means a consciousness increasingly Christian in tone, and, therefore, in turn, increasingly better able to interpret the teaching and life of Christ, and so to give promise of a more Christian theology. None of us, probably, are fully conscious of the more subtle inconsistencies of even our best theological thinking, when measured by a completely Christian spirit. At least, with the insistence upon Christ as a personal revealer of a personal God, it must become more true that the meaning of all terms for the work of Christ shall be more clearly reasonable, more consistently ethical, and more completely spiritual; and then the immediate rooting of Christian theology in the Christian religion can be seen and felt.
III. THE RECOGNITION OF THE PERSONAL IN GOD
The sense of the value and sacredness of the person must lead to the special recognition of the personal not only in man and in Christ, but also in God. We have already seen reasons for believing that the social consciousness is peculiarly bound strongly to emphasize the personality of God, as in the end absolutely essential to its own justification. The social consciousness represents an ethical movement that can live only in the atmosphere of the personal.
1. The Steady Carrying through of the Completely Personal in the Conception of God. Guarding the Conception.—This pressure of the social consciousness toward an imperative faith in the fully personal God is most valuable, as offsetting the tendency in many quarters toward a scientific or even idealistic pantheism or monism that is quite impersonal. "For," in the language of Professor Howison, "the very quality of personality is, that a person is a being who recognizes others as having a reality as unquestionable as his own, and who thus sees himself as a member of a moral republic, standing to other persons in an immutable relationship of reciprocal duties and rights, himself endowed with dignity, and acknowledging the dignity of all the rest."[103] As this is preëminently the spirit of the social consciousness, it is plain that we have in the social consciousness an increasingly powerful motive for guarding the full personality of God.
It needs particularly to be noted, that we know no definite "supra-personal." Pantheism or any impersonal monism is forced, therefore, when it leaves the personal conception of God, to take a lower line of development, not a higher. The result is, that it is obliged to deny the highest attributes to God, and then, as Browning is fond of arguing, man steps at once into the place of God. Men cannot permanently remain satisfied with a philosophical view, of which that is the logical outcome. Certainly, such a view can get no support from the social consciousness, with its deep conviction of the supreme value and sacredness of the person.
Moreover, it is not to be forgotten, in estimating the value of a cosmic monism, that what the cosmological really means, ethically and religiously, to a people, must always depend upon their social ideals. The natural in itself contains no command. For any effective vital interpretation, therefore, even of its impersonal Absolute, pantheism is constantly thrown back upon the personal.
Only a clear, steady carrying through by theology of the completely personal in its conception of God can ultimately satisfy this sense of the value and sacredness of the person. Professor Nash does not speak too strongly when he says: "To fulfil her function the church must develop the doctrine of a Divine Personality. She has not always been true to it in the past. Too often, by her sacraments, by her theology, by her theory of inspiration, she has glorified the impersonal."[104]
Now, such an attempt, it is perhaps worth saying once more, is not to be thought of as a running away from a thorough-going metaphysical investigation. It rather takes the ground, indicated in the earlier discussion, of what may be called, in Professor Howison's language, personal idealism; and holds that spirit, person, is for us the ultimate metaphysical fact: the one reality to which we have immediate access; the reality from which all our metaphysical notions are originally derived; and, in consequence, the one reality which we can take as the key to the understanding of all else. And it believes that even essence and substance, the great words of the old metaphysics, can be really understood only as they are interpreted in personal terms. Ultimately, theology would hold, this would mean the interpretation of the essence of things in terms of the purpose of God concerning them—what he meant them to be.
In the attempt, then, clearly and steadily to carry through the conception of God as completely personal, theology may well guard carefully certain points. In the first place, theology does not mean to transfer to God human limitations; rather, it conceives him to be the only complete personality with perfect self-consciousness and full freedom, no part of whose being is in any degree foreign to himself. Nor, in the second place, does it mean to forget that the personal relations in which God stands to other persons are unique, and that, in three definite respects: that conviction of the love of God, as of no other, must underlie, as a great necessary assumption, all our thinking and all our living; that God is himself the source of the moral constitution of man, which must thus be regarded as an expression of the personal will of God, and the personal relation to God so have universal moral implications such as no other personal relation can have; and in that God is such in his universal love for all, that it is impossible to come into right personal relation to God, and not at the same time come into right relation to all moral beings.[105]