I called my friend's attention to the fact that once upon a time the invisible God said to the invisible Clara Barton:
"Clara, let us go out onto the battle-field where the poor soldier boys languish and die;" and Clara responded to His thought and love. Then the invisible God and the invisible Clara Barton went to the battle-field in God's body, because Clara had no body exclusively her own. So, when that form bending over the soldier boy wiped away the dust and blood and pain, while whispering of home, of mother, and of God, it was the Father, as much as it was Clara Barton, who was performing the deed; and He, not less than she, was visibly and humanly present. The ministering hand was as truly His instrument as it was hers; while the stronger will and deeper love were the Father's. Before Clara Barton thought of it, the Father, knowing all and feeling all, suggested to her the kindly deed; nor did He stop loving the soldier boy when she began.
Again addressing my friend, I said:
"It is impossible for me to understand you. You have always believed God to be immanent in all nature; you have seen Him in sticks and stones and stars; but you now fail to recognize Him in His highest, His only instrument through which He is capable of coming to articulate speech and deed. How I pity your poor helpless God who is buried fathoms and fathoms out of sight. He can neither see, nor hear, nor breathe; nor can He walk or talk. But you see, my God can get clear to the surface in audible word, and visible deed. When my God finds a good, clean Frenchman, He begins talking and writing French. If you doubt this, either you are not familiar with French literature, or else you do not know God. Under similar conditions God speaks all the languages. How beautifully and abundantly He has spoken through the German and English tongues! While in Greek and Hebrew, God has uttered mighty words of wisdom, and has filled the earth with His glorious pæans. Human wisdom alone could never have spoken thus. If we but have eyes to see and hearts to feel we shall realize that all about us God is getting to the surface through devoted Christians. When the true preacher lifts the souls before him into the will of God, he sees a divine expression upon their faces; and if he is spiritually wise, he will realize that for the time being these are the dear human instruments of God, as truly as they are the faces of human spirits; and when he has poured out his soul in behalf of some great cause of God for which he would be willing to die, he will find someone with outstretched hand ready to meet him and willing to coöperate, if need be, even unto death, and then it is his privilege to know that, while shaking hands with a brother spirit, he was at the same time shaking hands with the infinite God. In these rare experiences of ours, the invisible God no less than the invisible man has come to outward expression, and this He would always do, if our wills were not contrary to His will. Our feeble and infrequent inspiration is but intermittent incarnation, while full incarnation is permanent inspiration.
"Why," I asked, "should you hesitate to think of Jesus as God and man? If the Father-Spirit and the child-spirit were thinking and willing the same thing, which one came to expression through the words and acts of the body? If A and B were lifting an object, would it be truthful to say that A was lifting it? The visible form that lived and taught by the shores of Galilee was as truly God as it was man, unless the child-spirit did not know and do the Father-Spirit's will. Sometimes a whole congregation of wills express themselves joyfully and forcefully through one written resolution. God never speaks an audible word, except through one of His bodies in which He has enfolded a child-spirit. When, however, the child-spirit rebels against the Father, and causes the instrument to speak or act vile things, the Father is dumb. His child has robbed Him of His body. We have grown so accustomed to this form of robbery that we naturally think of human spirits as having bodies all their own, while we conceive of God as a vague, disembodied influence. We speak of God as sending men, forgetting that He never sends a man anywhere without sending him in His own body and accompanying him with His own spiritual Presence. And that which the messenger says is not worth hearing if it fails to express the Father's thought and will. The God who, through beautiful chemical energies, makes the ear, hears; and the God who makes the eye, sees; and He who makes the lips, speaks. Either God knows the thrill of nerves, or else He has an infinite amount to learn. Why then should we say that Jesus was only a good man, when the body was God's very own, and the guiding will was that of the Father? A man is all God except the invisible human spirit; and in the case of Jesus, even the human spirit rendered such filial obedience that the Father, for once in human history, got to the surface through His own instrument in a steady flow of luminous words and loving deeds. If the composite life of Jesus were named after its major elements, then Jesus should be called God. However, as that would be both confusing and false, we state the truth as it is, and say that Jesus was both God and man, that is, a God-filled man, or a God-man."
"Oh well," said my friend, "if you mean it that way!"
"Did I not tell you," I replied, "that you would believe it? The trouble with you is that you forget it. You should be proclaiming it from the housetop that God has got clear to the surface in human form, and that men have clasped His hand, and heard His voice, and seen His face."
In the life of Jesus, religion reached a new and distinct stage of development. It was in Him that the essential oneness of Deity and humanity first became clearly manifest. To the friends of Jesus, God was no longer a disembodied spirit. The Christian's God is clearly the God of Israel, but He is the God of Israel become human and visible. The world has been slow to grasp the meaning of Christ's life and teachings. To maintain the uniqueness of Jesus, it has denied the universality of the truth which He proclaimed: namely, the organic and moral oneness of God and man. If the union of God and man as realized in Jesus was so beautiful, a similar union between God and all men would be equally beautiful. That God desires such a union with all His children there can be no doubt; and that He is inspiring His disciples with the glorious hope of its accomplishment is equally certain. Yet for the present, even the most devoted followers have not nearly attained unto the fulness of the stature of Jesus; but some glad day they shall be wholly like Him whose image they already unmistakably bear. This is the Christian's noblest hope.
If God has ever united His personality with that of even one man, then there is a way of doing it. And if there is a way, what finer goal is possible, than that such a union between God and every man be consummated? Really, that is what the Christian Religion is about. Not only may God and every man be similarly united, but the sin of man alone can prevent such a union from taking place. If there were no sin or rebellion in a man's heart, he would instantly become a God-man on the plane of his present human development; and as he "Advanced in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and men," he would be a God-man on a higher level. If the human side of the Christ has continued thus to grow for more than nineteen hundred years, on what altitudes of knowledge He is a God-man by this time, we can but faintly surmise. And with the possibility of a complete purging from sin, and the possibility of an infinite growth in wisdom, we, too, may yet be God-men on what would now seem to us dizzying heights; we shall ever be attaining "Unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ." No matter what one's conception of the trinity in God's personality may be, God is capable of uniting with every man in the same way that He united with the man Jesus. If we prefer to believe that God had an Eternal Son who came to clothe himself in a man, the problem of union would in nowise be changed. A Son-God, if He existed either in the Father or out of the Father, could not be less than a person, and the manner of uniting Himself with a man would be the same. My interest in the metaphysics of the trinity is that it gives us a firm grasp on the personality of God and the personality of man. I rest on the fact that the Personal God became incarnate and still seeks the souls of men for his dwelling-place. I further believe that when we do not read a later metaphysics into the Bible, the Scriptures wholly support the more modern conception. In the beginning was the Logos, Word, or Wisdom. Wisdom was with God from the beginning; that is, God was always Wisdom, and not a material thing. All things were made by Wisdom, or God. Life was in God, and God's life was the light of men; and though it was shining into the darkness the darkness apprehended it not. The God who is wisdom, and not matter, was in the world, and the world was made by Him, but it knew Him not. Finally Wisdom, or God, became flesh, and tabernacled among us, and we discerned His glory, a glory as of an only-begotten with a father, full of grace and truth. The author seems to me to believe that the Personal God became incarnate, and that the one in whom He dwelt, in contrast with other men, looked like an only son of a father.
Notwithstanding this glorious possibility, there is always a tendency for religion to revert to a lower type; and this tendency is particularly noticeable just now. Not being able to believe in the divinity of Jesus according to the old metaphysics, multitudes are ceasing to believe in Him as Emmanuel,—or "God with us." At a time like this, when a forward movement is the only hope of saving our great material structure from becoming another Tower of Babel, a retrograde movement is lamentable. What we especially need is a new interpretation of Jesus, followed by a finer devotion to Him, and a whole-hearted commitment of ourselves to His ever-widening program. God is becoming altogether too hazy and inarticulate, at a time when the consciousness of His holy Presence is especially needed, if we are to shape and sustain a civilization that is quadrupling itself in weight and extent by reason of the growth and application of material knowledge. Any quickening of God that is to be highly beneficial must result in His further advent into human lives and human institutions after the pattern of Jesus.