2. God is Always the Completely Personal God.—If, now, theology is to do justice to the demands of the social consciousness for a full recognition of the personal in God, it must see clearly that God is always the completely personal God. Certain conclusions, not always admitted, are believed to follow from this position.
(1) The Consequent Relation of God to "Eternal Truths."—In the first place, there can be no sphere of eternal truths, thought of as either created outright by the will of God, or as existing of themselves independently of God and only to be recognized by him.
The difficulty is not merely that at least one of these views would put God in the same dependent relation to truth as we finite beings, and thus practically put a God above God. Nor is the difficulty merely that it is impossible to think the real existence of such a sphere of eternal truth, since truths or laws can be said to exist only in one of two ways: either as the actual mode of action of reality, or as the perception and formulation in an observing mind of that mode of action. And these difficulties are both sufficiently serious.
But, from our present point of view, the great difficulty is, that trying to conceive God as either creating or coming to the recognition of truth, assumes, as Lotze points out, a fragmentary God, a God for whom truth is not yet. It assumes an action of the will of God apart from his reason, that is, a God not yet completely personal, not yet the full God of truth and character. A God for whom truth and duty are not yet, is certainly no true person. Most, if not all, of our metaphysical puzzles connected with the relation of God to what we call eternal truths, seem to me to grow out of this thought of an essentially fragmentary God.
We are driven, consequently, to a denial of both the Scotist and Thomist positions, as ordinarily conceived. It is true neither that the truth is true and the good is good because God wills it, nor yet that God wills the true because it is true and the good because it is good. Both views alike assume the possibility of a fragmentary God, a God for whom at some time truth and goodness were not yet. But God has always been the completely personal God of truth and love, never a bare will and never a bare intellect. Hence, neither as an independent object to be recognized, nor yet as the external product of his will, can we think of the realm of eternal truth and goodness. We must rather say, God alone is the eternal being and absolute source of all, always complete in the perfection of his personality; and, therefore, what we call the eternal truths are only the eternal modes of God's actual activity. This alone seems to the writer to give a thorough-going theistic view, free from self-contradiction.[106]
(2) Eternal Creation.—But, further, if God is to be thought as always the completely personal God, we are led, also, immediately to the doctrine of eternal creation.
If God has had always a completely personal life, his entire being must have been always in exercise. Can we really think of such a God as simply quiescent, and not as always active? Is not his activity involved in his complete personality? The thought of his possible quiescence arises probably out of an unconscious, but nevertheless unwarranted, transfer to God of our finite separation of will and act. But God is here, too, no fragmentary God; he has always been the completely personal God, always acting.
A second consideration carries us to the same conclusion. Theologians have felt that they have made a distinct step in advance in tracing creation to love in God, as, for example, Principal Fairbairn does. But this gives no real help as an explanation of creation as beginning in time; for one must at once ask, Was not the love of God eternal, and if this were the real reason leading to creation, must not, then, creation be eternal?
So far as I am able to see, there is nothing to lose and much to gain in clearness and satisfactoriness of thought in a frank acceptance of the doctrine of eternal creation. Not, of course, in the sense of an eternal dualism, in the sense of the thought of an eternity of matter set over against God, but in the clear sense of the eternal creative activity of God. And to such a doctrine of eternal creation, the social consciousness, in its emphasis on the completely personal, seems to me to lead.
(3) The Unity and Unchangeableness of God.—And, once more, if God is always the completely personal God, we shall conceive his own unity not as monotonous self-identity, but only as consistency of meaning. We shall not, therefore, transfer to God, pluming ourselves meanwhile upon a highly philosophical view, the mechanical unchangeableness of a rock; but we shall be rather concerned with the consistency of his character and the unchangeableness of his loving will, which would be the very reasons for his changing, adapting attitude toward his changing children. From this point of view, too, the sphere of law and the sphere of the actual, will seem to us, necessarily, to root in the sphere of the ideal; the is and the must, to rest in the ought; though we may not hope to trace the connections in detail. In a God, then, who is a completely harmonious person, never acting in fragmentary fashion, whose will and whose reason and whose love are never at cross purposes—only in such a God can the world find its adequate and unifying source. The world itself has real unity only in so far as it is the expression of the consistency of meaning of the purpose of God concerning it.