And this same thought of the consistency of the meaning of the purpose of God, I have elsewhere argued,[107] saves us from the necessity of a self-contradictory conception of the miraculous or supernatural, by its recognition of the dominant spiritual order. It also enables us to see, with Professor Nash, if the word personal is given sufficient breadth, that "the true supernatural is the personal, and wheresoever the personal is discovered, whether in the life of conscience or the life of reason, whether in Israel or Greece, there the supernatural is discovered. Upon this conception of the supernatural as the personal, apologetics must found the claims of Christianity. The divine and the human personality stand within 'Nature,' that is, within the total of being. But they both, the human as well as the divine, transcend the scope and reach of visible Nature."[108]
(4) The Limitations of the Conception of Immanence.—Indeed, it ought to be clearly recognized on all sides by those who believe in religion at all, that we cannot so exclusively emphasize the immanence of God, as many are now doing, and have a God at all, beyond the finite manifestations. When the matter is so conceived, there is no real personal God with whom there can be any personal communion. Religion, thus, in any ordinary sense of it, is by this process made simply impossible; Positivism is the only logical result, and Frederic Harrison becomes the one sole, clear-sighted prophet among us, a lone voice crying in the wilderness. Such an outcome is possible for any, because, and in so far as, they are not true to the social consciousness in its demand for the completely personal God, who, in Martineau's language, is a genuinely "free spirit."[109]
3. Deepening the Thought of the Fatherhood of God.—But the influence of the social consciousness in its deepening sense of the value and sacredness of the person, of obligation and of love, not only tends to insist upon the completely personal in the conception of God, but also tends to deepen our thought of the Fatherhood of God.
(1) History no Mere Natural Process.—No mere on-going of an unfeeling Absolute, whatever name be given it, will ever satisfy the social consciousness. The new sense of the sorrow and ethical meaning of the historical process demands, in the first place, that history shall not be regarded as a mere necessitated development, but a movement in which men effectively coöperate, never more consciously and clearly than to-day; and secondly, it demands a God who cares, who loves, who guides. History cannot be a mere holocaust to God.
(2) God, the Great Servant.—Rather, as we saw in the fourth chapter, the social consciousness requires a God whose purpose shall completely support its own purpose, and so requires us, with Fairbairn, to put Fatherhood before Sovereignty, not Sovereignty before Fatherhood, and requires us definitely to conceive God after Christ, as self-giving ministering love. It is one of the anomalies of Christian history, that the church has been so slow to cast off a pagan conception of God, and to come to a truly Christian view. We can hardly take in Christ's own revelation of God without some sharing in his sympathy for men. Some experience of our own is needed to unlock the revelation. And, so, the steady deepening of the social consciousness, both as to the value of the person and as to the sense of obligation, has certainly helped us to see that if God is to be highest, he must be love, and thus the great servant, with transcendent obligations, entering really and sympathetically into all our life.
(3) No Divine Arbitrariness.—With such a conception of God, every trace of arbitrariness disappears. Calvinism, however strenuously insisted upon, means a far different thing for any man who really feels the pressure of the modern social consciousness, who has come to some real sense of the value and sacredness of the person, that is, who really sees God in Christ. The great truth of Calvinism, that God is the ultimate source of all, was perhaps never more secure than to-day; but that God, who is the absolute and ultimate source of all, is the fully personal God, whose will is never divorced from his reason and love, who knows no such abstraction as a bare and empty omnipotence without content or direction, but who is himself always living love. The bane of much so-called Calvinism is in this supposition of a fragmentary God, like a motion without direction or rate of speed. Arbitrary decrees are conceivable only from such a fragmentary God, not yet full and complete in his reality and personality.
(4) The Passibility of God.—It would seem, also, that any vital defense of the Fatherhood of God, required by the social consciousness, involves further the frank admission of the passibility of God, whether it has the look of an ancient heresy or not. We must unhesitatingly admit that, without which God can be no real God to us. "Theology has no falser idea than that of the impassibility of God. If he is capable of sorrow, he is capable of suffering, and were he without the capacity for either he would be without any feeling of the evil of sin or the misery of man. The very truth that comes by Jesus Christ may be said to be summed up in the passibility of God."[110] With the growing sensitiveness of the social consciousness, the problem of suffering and of sin presses increasingly, and itself almost compels the assertion of the passibility of God. Nothing less can satisfy our hearts, nor indeed allow us to keep our reverence for God.
Certainly, with the increasingly clear vision, which the social consciousness is giving us, of sympathetic, unselfish, definitely self-sacrificing, loving leadership even among men, we shall not rest satisfied with less in God. We must have a suffering, seeking, loving God; because our Father, suffering in our sin, bearing as a burden the sin of each, and not satisfied while one child turns away; no mere on-looker, but in all our afflictions, himself afflicted. The cross of Christ, then, is only an honest showing of the actual facts of God's seeking, suffering love.
4. As to the Doctrine of a Social Trinity.—One inference for theology widely drawn from the social consciousness, it ought in fairness, perhaps, to be said, seems to me unjustified,—the doctrine of a so-called "Social Trinity." One must question the constant cool assumption made in these discussions of a social Trinity, that this view is the only alternative to what is called an "abstract simplicity." In any case, one would suppose, we must have in God all the richness and complexity of a complete personal life, freed from the limitations of finite personality. Something of the much that that involves we have been trying to point out. Here certainly is no "abstract simplicity."
Moreover, the conception of a social Trinity, so far as the writer can see, carries us inevitably to a tritheism of the most unmistakable kind. "Social" involves full personality. Nothing requires more complete personality than love, which the view affirms to exist between the persons of the immanent Trinity, between the distinctions in the very Godhead. The relations of Christ to God were, of course, distinctly and definitely personal; but it must not be forgotten that we are not permitted, on any careful theological view, to transfer these directly to the immanent relations of the Godhead.