2. New Testament: Fatherhood of God

Fatherhood of God

The New Testament revelation is characterized by the fact that God now reveals himself in the highest and fullest sense as a father to all those who share in his salvation or are members of his kingdom, and in the most absolute and perfect way as the father of Jesus Christ. On this relation of sonship is based the free, confident access to God and enjoyment of his love and all the blessings connected with it; and the children are required to resemble their father in character (Matt. v. 9, 16, 44). While in the Old Testament Israel taken as a whole sometimes appears as a son, here God's relation is to the individual; although this fact does not interfere with

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the other thought that the children of the One Father form a community, a kingdom of God, and that they can enjoy their union with God only when they are thus united with each other. According to Paul, the Spirit of God dwells in the Church as the motive power and principle of an entire new inner life in the sons of God who have also attained to their faith in Christ and their sonship only through the same Spirit (I Cor. xii. 3). The internal change effected from above is set forth as a new birth (see Regeneration). John contrasts this birth from God with the ordinary human, physical birth (John i. 12; I John iii. 9, v. 4). It is especially John and Paul who conceive God's relation to man under these aspects of self-revelation, foundation of a community, and self-communication; but I Peter also contains the idea of our being born again of incorruptible seed (i. 23), and James of our being begotten of God with the word of truth (i. 18). The effect of this fatherhood is finally to be the filling of the children with all the fullness of God (Eph. iii. 19, iv. 6).

This whole relation of God to the faithful is brought about through Christ. He is called the Son absolutely, the only-begotten, just as he calls God his father with a distinction ("my father and your father," John xx. 17, not "our father"). This he is by virtue of his primary origin, not through a regeneration. It is through him that all the others become children of God; the spirit of their adoption is his Spirit (Gal. iv. 6; II Cor. iii. 17; cf. John xiv-xvi). The fullness of God is communicated to the Church and to the individual as it is comprehended and revealed in him (Col. ii. 10; Eph, iv. 13, ii. 22). And of him who, as the historic Christ and Son, is the partaker of the divine life and the head of the kingdom, and shall see all things put under him, it is asserted by Paul, the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Johannine writings (including the Apocalypse) that in like manner all things were created by him and through him, that in him they have their life and being, and that all divine revelation is his revelation-the revelation of the Logos. Thus the New Testament idea of God includes the doctrine that from the very beginning the Word was with God and of divine character and essence. With this relation of God to the Logos the elements appear which are treated at greater length in the article Trinity.

But this relation of God to his children must be clearly distinguished from God's relation to the universal natural life of personal spirits and to nature in general. The expression "the Father of spirits" in Heb. xii. 9 (cf. "the God of the spirits of all flesh," Num. xvi. 22, xxvii. 16) refers not to the regenerate as such, and not to birth from God, but to creation by him, in which (cf. Gen. i. 2) he has imparted his image by the breathing of his Spirit. With the same reference the saying of the pagan poet "We are also his offspring" is quoted in Acts xvii. 28. In this same passage Paul expresses the general relation of God to man, which subsists even in those who have rejected him, by the words "In him we live, and move, and have our being." At the same time, it is said of the glorified Christ, who fills the Church, that he fills all things (Eph. i. 23, iv. 10). and this can only mean the whole world, over which he presides, his divine powers first penetrating humanity, and then through it bringing all things into harmony with his purposes. Thus, as all things proceed from God and exist in him, so he, and especially he as revealed in Christ, with his plan of salvation and his kingdom, is the final goal of all things (cf. Rom. xi. 36).

3. Attributes of God

Both in Christian revelation and in the idea of the fatherhood of God, love is a fundamental element. It is most forcibly expressed in the assertion that "God is love" (I John iv. 8, 16) -not love in the abstract merely, still less a. loving God. This is, in fact, the determining element in God's nature. From it follows that the perfect, almighty One, who needs nothing (Acts xvii. 25), communicates himself to his creatures and brings them into union with him, in order to make them perfect and so eternally happy. Its highest expression is found in the fact that he gave his Son for us while we were yet sinners, and desired to make us his sons (I John iv. 10, iii. 1, 2; Rom. v. 8, viii. 32). But God is not only love; he is also light (I John i. 5). By this may be understood his perfect purity, which repels and excludes all that is unclean; his function as the source of pure moral and religious truth; and his glorious majesty. That the supreme, holy, and loving God, the Father of spirits, is himself a spirit is taken for granted all through the New Testament. In John iv. 24, where this is brought up to enforce the lesson that he is to be worshiped in spirit, without narrow confinement to a special place or to outward forms, it is spoken of as not a new truth but one which Jews and Samaritans were supposed already to know, and for whose consequences they should be prepared. The Yahweh-name of Ex. iii. 14 is further developed, in Rev. i. 4, 8, xxi. 6, xxii. 13, into "Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, which is, and which was, and which is to come." The eternity of God is thus placed in its relation to the development of the world and to its ultimate conclusion in the completed revelation of God and of his kingdom. See Heathenism, § 4.

III. The Doctrine of God in Christian Theology:

1. Dependence upon Pre-Christian Thought

The Christian revelation and its teachings about God supplied a distinct moral and religious need; but even after it had accomplished the foundation of a community based upon these ideas, there was still room for a clear definition of its different elements and an investigation of their relations to other departments of the intellectual life-in a word, for a Christian science of theology. But Christian theology in its earliest stages made use of the results of pre-Christian, especially Greek, thought-the methods and forms of philosophical reasoning, general logical and metaphysical categories, and philosophic views of the Godhead and its relation to the world, which, although they had originated on pagan soil and were in no way permeated by the spirit of Scriptural revelation, were yet considered as elevated far above the common polytheism of the heathen world, and even as borrowed in part from

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the Old Testament. These elements had a distinct influence upon Christian theology; and it is also indisputable that, compared with the spirit known in the New Testament writings, the inner life of the succeeding generations showed a marked falling off in energy and depth, and gave room for reactions of a non-Christian tendency, sometimes mainly pagan, sometimes more Jewish, but always based upon the natural disposition of sinful humanity.

2. Platonism

In regard to philosophy, it is necessary to bear in mind the more or less direct influence of Platonism, which viewed as the highest of all things the good that was above all being and all knowledge, identified it with the divine nous, and attempted to raise the human spirit nism. into the realm of ideas, into a likeness with the Godhead; which taught men to rise to the highest by a process of abstraction disregarding particulars and grasping at universals, and conceived the good of which it spoke not in a strictly ethical sense, but as, after all, the most utterly abstract and undefinable, entirely eluding all attempts at positive description. Neoplatonism (q.v.) went the furthest in this conception of the divine transcendence; God, the absolute One, was, according to Plotinus, elevated not only above all being, but also above all reason and rational activity. He did not, however, attempt to attain to this abstract highest good by reasoning or logical abstraction, but by an immediate contact between God and the soul in a state of ecstasy.

Alexandrian Judaism

This tendency was shared by a school of thought within Judaism itself, whose influence upon Christian theology was considerable. The more Jewish speculation, as was the case especially at Alexandria, rose above an anthropomorphic idea of God to a spiritual conception, the more abstract the latter became. In this connection Platonism was the principal one of the Greek philosophical systems toward which this Jewish theology maintained a receptive attitude. According to Philo, God is to on, "that which is" par excellence, and this being is rather the most universal of all than the supreme good with which Plato identified the divine; all that can be said is that God is, without defining the nature of his being. Between God and the world a middle place is attributed by Philp to the Logos (in the sense of ratio, not at all in the Johannine sense), as the principle of diversity and the summary of the ideas and powers operating in the world.

4. Gnosticism

When the Gnostics attempted to construct a great system of higher knowledge from a Christian standpoint, through assimilating various Greek and Oriental elements, and worked the facts of the Christian revelation into their fantastic speculation on general metaphysical and cosmic problems (see Gnosticism), this atract Godhead became an obscure background for their system; according to the Valentinian doctrine, it was the primal beginning of all things, with eternal silence (aige) for a companion.

5. Post-Apostolic Theologians

In the development of the Church's doctrine with Justin and the succeeding apologists, and still more with the Alexandrian school, the transcendental nature of God was emphasized, while the Scriptures and the religious conscience of Christendom still permitted the contemplation of him as a personal and loving Spirit. Theology did not at first proceed to a systematic and logical explanation of the idea of God with reference to these different aspects. Where philosophical and strictly scientific thought was active, as with the Alexandrians, the element of negation and abstraction got the upper hand. God is, especially with Origen, the simple Being with attributes, exalted above nous and ousia, and at the same time the Father, eternally begetting the Logos and touching the world through the Logos. In opposition to this developed a Judaistic and popular conception of God which leaned to the anthropomorphic, and also a view like Tertullian's, which, under the influence of Stoic philosophy, felt obliged to connect with all realities, and thus also with God, the idea of a tangible substance. In this direction Dionysius the Areopagite (q.v.) finally proceeded to a really Neoplatonist theology, with an inexpressible God who is above all categories, both positive and negative, and thus is neither Being nor Not-being; who permits that which is to emanate from himself in a descending scale coming down to things perceived by the senses, but is unable to reveal his eternal truth in this emanation. With this doctrine is con connected, after the Neoplatonist model, an inner union with God, an ecstatic elevation of the soul which resigns itself to the process into the obscure depth of the Godhead. The ethical conception of God and redemption thus gives place to a physical one, just as the emanation of all things from God was described as a physical process; and as soon as speculation attempts to descend from the hidden God to finite and personal life, this physical view connects itself with the abstract metaphysical.

6. Augustine.

In the West there was long a lack of scientific and speculative discussion of the idea of God. Augustine, the most significant name in Western theology, sets forth the conception of God as a selfconscious personal being which fitted in with his doctrine of the Trinity; but as his own development had led him through Platonism, the influence of that philosophy is found in the idea of God which he developed tematically and handed down. He conceives God as the unity of ideas, of abstract perfections, of the normal types of being, thinking, and acting; as simple essentia, in which will, knowledge, and being are one and the same. The fundamentally determinant factor in the conception of God by the Augustinian theology is thus pure being in general.

Scotus Erigena

Scotus Erigena (q.v.), who gave Dionysius the Areopagite to Western theology, though Augustine was not without influence upon him, fully accepted the notion of God as the absolute Inconceivable, above all affirmation and all negation, distinguishing from him a world to which divine ideas and primal forms belong. He emphasizes the other side of this view-that true existence belongs to God

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alone, so that, in so far as anything exists in the universe, God is the essence of it; a practical pantheism, in spite of his attempting to enforce a creative activity on the part of God. The influence of this pantheistic view on medieval theology was a limited one; Amalric of Bena (q.v.), with his proposition that God was all things, was its main disciple.

8. The Scholastic Philosophers.

In accordance with its fundamental character, scholasticism attempted to reduce the idea of God into the categories which related to the laws of thought, to being in general, and to the world. It began by adapting the Aristotelian terms to its own purposes. God, or absolute being, was to Aristotle the primum mobile, regarded thus from the standpoint of causation and not of mere being, and also a thinking subject. The ideas and prototypes of the finite are accordingly to be found in God, who is the final Cause. God, in Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, is not the essential being of things, but he is their esse effective et exemplariter, their primum movens, and their causa finalia. Aristotelian, again, is the definition of God's own nature, that he is, as a thinking subject, actus purus-pure, absolute energy, without the distinction found in finite beings between potentiality and actuality. In opposition to Thomas, Duns Scotus emphasized in his conception of God the primum ens and primum movens, the element of will and free causation. The arbitrary nature of the will of God, taught by him, was raised by Occam to the most important element of his teaching about God. Upon this abstract conception of the will of God as arbitrary and unconditioned depend the questions (so characteristic of scholasticism from Abelard down) as to whether all things are possible to God.

9. The Mystics.

About the end of the thirteenth century, by the side of the logical reasonings of scholasticism, there arose the mystical theology of Eckhart, which attempted to bring the Absolute near to the hearts of men as the object of an immediate intuition dependent upon complete self-surrender. The transcendental Neoplatonic conception of the Absolute is here pushed to its extreme, and Dionysius has more influence than Thomas Aquinas. The view of God's relation to the world is almost pantheistic, unless it may be rather called acosg. The mistic, regarding the finite as naught. This is Eckhart's teaching, although at the same time he speaks of a creation of the world and of a Son in whom God expresses himself and creates. This God is regarded as goodness and love, communicating himself in a way, but not to separate and independent images of his own being; rather, he possesses and loves himself in all things, and the surrender to him is passivity and self-annihilation. The 9Wling ideas of this view were moderated by the practical Ger man mystics and found in this form a wide currency. On the other hand, pantheistic heretics, such as the Brethren of the Free Spirit combined antinomian principles with the doctrine that God was all things and that the Christian united with God was perfect as God.

The Reformers

In partial contrast to the speculative theology which has been considered above, the practical popular view of the Middle Ages tended to represent God as a strict autocrat and judge, and to multiply intermediate advocates with him, of whom Mary was chief. Luther went back to the God of Scripture, regarded primarily in his ethical relation to man, pronouncing curses, indeed, against the impenitent, but really aiming at man's salvation. As the love of God has an ethical, personal character, so it requires from its human objects not self-annihilation, but an entrance with all the power of personality into communion with this love and enjoyment of the filial relation. The Christian, though free from bondage to the world, is to realize that it was made by God to serve his purposes. Melanchthon and Calvin, in like manner, avoiding scholastic subtleties, laid stress upon these practical relations. The dogmatic differences, however, between the Lutheran and Reformed confessions point to a fundamental difference in the way of regarding God. The former emphasizes his loving condescension to man's weakness, and teaches a deification of humanity in the person of Christ and a union of the divine operations and presence with means of grace having a created and symbolic side, which the latter, with its insistence upon the supreme exaltation of God, can not admit; and it rejects a theory of an eternal decree of reprobation against a part of humanity which the latter defends by appealing to God's rights over sinners and his absolute sovereignty. The next generation of dogmatic theologians was accustomed to define God as essentia spiritualis infinita, and, in the description of his attributes, to pass from general metaphysical terms to his ethical attributes and those relating to his knowledge. The older rationalistic and supranaturalistic theologians showed an increasing tendency to return for their definitions and expositions to the Scriptures. Nor did they accomplish much in the way of solving the real problems or investigating the relation between the content of revelation and the knowledge or conception of the divine to be found elsewhere.

11. Leibnitz and Wolff

The independent metaphysical systems of the philosophers, which embraced God and the world, did not at first make any profound impression on the thought of theologians. Spinoza's pantheism was by its very nature excluded from consideration; but the philosophy of Leibnitz and Wolff, with its conception of God as a supremely prefect, personal Being, in whom all possible realities were embraced in their highest form, and with its demonstration of God's existence, offered itself as a friend to Christian doctrine, and was widely influential. In so far, however, as the theologians adopted any of its conclusions, it was with little clearness of insight or independent thought as to the relation of these metaphysical concepts to the Christian faith or as to their own validity.

12. Kant and Fichte.

A new epoch in German philosophy, with which theology had and still has to reckon, came in with Kant. Confidence in the arguments by which God's existence had been proved and defined was at

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least shaken by his criticism, which, however, energetically asserted the firm foundation of moral consciousness, and so led up to God by a new way, in postulating the existence of a deity for the establishment of the harmony required by the moral consciousness between the and Fichte. moral dignity of the subjects and their happiness based upon the adaptation of nature to their ends. Fichte was led from this standpoint to a God who is not personal, but represents the moral order of the universe, believing in which we are to act as duty requires, without question as to the results.

13. Hegel

But for a time the most successful and apparently the most dangerous to Christian theology was a pantheistic philosophical conception of God which took for its foundation the idea of an Absolute raised above subject and object, above thinking and being; which explained and claimed to deduce all truth as the necessary self-development of this idea. With Schelling this pantheism is still in embryo, and finally comes back (in his "philosophy of revelation") to the recognition of the divine personality, with an attempt to construct it speculatively. In a great piece of constructive work the philosophy of Hegel undertook to show how this Absolute is first pure being, identical with not being; bow then, in the form of externalization or becoming other, it comes to be nature or descends to nature; and finally, in the finite spirit, resumes itself into itself, comes to itself, becomes self-conscious, and thus now for the first tune takes on the form of personality. For Christian theology the special importance of this teaching was its claim to have taken what Christian doctrine had comprehended only in a limited way of God, the divine Personality, the Incarnation, etc., and to have expressed it according to its real con tent and to the laws of thought.

The conservative Hegehans still maintained that God, in himself and apart from the creation of the world and the origin of human personality, was to be considered as a self-conscious spirit or personality, and thus offered positive support to the Christian doctrine of God and his revelation of himself. But the Hegelian principles were more logically carried out by the opposite wing of the party, especially by David Friedrich Strauss (in his Christliche Glaubenslehre, Tübingen, 1840) in the strongest antithesis to the Christian doctrine of a personal God, of Christ as the only Son of God and the God-Man, and of a personal ethical relation between God and man. Some other philosophers, however, who may be classed in general under the head of the modern speculative idealism, have, in their speculations on the Absolute as actually present in the universe, retained a belief in the personality of God.

14. Post-Hegelian Philosophers.

The realist philosopher Herbart, who recognized a personal God not through speculations on the Absolute and the finite, but on the basis of moral consciousness and teleology, yet defined little about him, and what he has to say on this subject never attracted much attention among theologians. The Hegelian pantheistic "absolute idealism," once widely prevalent, did not long retain its domination. Its place was taken first in many quarters, as with Strauss, by an atheistic materialism; Hegel had made the universal abstract into God, and when men abandoned their belief in this and in its power to prollute results, they gave up their belief in God with it. Among the post Hegelian philosophers the most important for the present subject is Lotze with his defense and confirmation of the idea of a personal God, going back in the most independent way both to Herbart and to idealism, both to Spinoza and to Leibnitz. Christian theology can, of course, only protest against the peculiar pantheism of Schopenhauer, which is really much older than he, but never before attained wide currency, and against that of Von Hartmann. The significance for the doctrine of God of the newer philosophical undertakings which are characterized by an empiricist-realist tendency, and based on epistemology and criticism is found not so much in their definite expressions about God-they do not as a rule consider him an object of scientific expression, even when they allow him to be a necessary object of faith-as in the impulse which they give to critical investigation of religious belief and perception in general.

15. Schleiermacher

Theology, at least German theology, before Schleiermacher showed but little understanding of and interest in the problems regarding a proper conception and confirmation of the doctrine of God which had been laid before it in this development of philosophy beginning with Kant. This is especially true of its attitude toward Kant himself and not only of the supranaturaliats who were suspicious of any exaltation of the natural reason, but also of the rationalists, who still had a superficial devotion to the Enlightenment and to Wolffian philosophy. In Schleiermacher's teaching about God, however, the results of a devout and immediate consciousness were combined with philosophical postulates. In his mind the place of all the so-called proofs of the existence of God is completely sup plied by the recognition that the feeling of absolute dependence involved in the devout Christian consciousness is a universal element of life; in this consciousness he finds the explanation of the source of this feeling of dependence, i.e., of God, as being Io ~e, by which the divine nature communicates itself. For his reasoned philosophical speculation, however, on the human spirit and universal being, the idea of God is nothing but the idea of the absolute unity of the ideal and the real, which in-the world exist as opposites. (Compare Schelling'a philosophy of identity, unlike which, however, Schleiermacher acknowledges the impossibility of a speculative deduction of opposites from an original identity; and the teaching of Spinoza, whose conception of God, however, as the one substance he does not share.) Thus God and the universe are to him correlatives, but not identical-God is unity without plurality, the universe plurality without unity; and this God is apprehended by man's feeling, just as man's feeling apprehends the unity of ideal and real.

16. Modern Tendencies
Marheineke believed it possible as a dogmatic

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theologian to set forth the content of the Christian faith from the standpoint of Hegelian philosophy without accepting (or even recognizing as Hegelian) the impersonal, pantheistic idea of the Absolute, and indeed without going deeply into the train of thought leading up to that idea. Other theologians who more or less followed Schleiermacher, while they agreed with his statements about the devout consciousness, feeling, inner experience, and the like, yet avoided his philosophical definition of God. Others, again, holding to the same point of departure, have striven with zealous confidence to use the main elements of the idea of God thus attained in connection with conceptual speculation and construction in the interests of an objective knowledge of God. Among these may be classed Rothe, Martensen, Domer, and especially Frank. The point particularly aimed at by these men is the vindication of the personality of God, in opposition to the pantheistic philosophy noticed above. A tendency has also appeared to recognize the very being of this God in the world of being created by him, thus giving a theistic conception of God in opposition not only to the pantheistic but also to the deistic. This tendency has, on the one hand, done justice to so much truth as lies in the pantheistic conception, and, on the other, by its adherence to Scriptural forms of expression, it has led to a more vivid realization of the divine nature in its relation to the world than prevailed among the old rationalists and supranaturalists.

The question has also arisen among theologians of the strict positive school, in consequence of the doctrine of Christ as the God-Man, whether, and if so how far, it is consistent with the divine nature, as found in the Logos or the second Person of the Trinity, to speak of a Kenosis (q.v.) or self-emptying, such as was supposed to have taken place in the incarnation of the Logos, bringing with it a suspension of his eternal consciousness. This is in direct opposition to the old orthodox teaching, according to which Christ laid aside in his humiliation not what affected his Godhead, but what affected his humanity, endowed with divine qualities by the Communicatio idiomatum (q.v.).

Biedermann, a dogmatic theologian influenced by Hegelian speculation, treats the notion of the personality of God as one to be rejected from the standpoint of scientific philosophy. It is true that he designates personality as "the adequate form of presentation for the theistic conception of God"; but he goes on to say that a theism of this kind can never attain to pure thought, and is only an unscientific conception of the content of the religious idea, adopted in a polemical spirit against those who think this out logically. As against pantheistic notions of God, however, he is willing to admit the "substantial" validity of the theistic position. He himself describes God as absolute spirit, absolute being in and by himself, and the fundamental essence of all being outside himself. Quite a different tendency of philosophic thought on the matter is met with in Lipsius. He traces the belief in God back to a practical necessity felt by the personal human spirit, and reaches the conception of God as a purpose-determining intelligence and a lawgiving will, and thus as a self-conscious and self-determining personality. He finds our knowledge of God always inadequate as soon as we attempt to go on to transcendental knowledge of his inner nature, because we are forced to speak of this in metaphors borrowed from our human relations, and to carry over our notions of space and tame to where space and time are not. He declares also that the metaphysical speculations which attempt to replace these inadequate notions by a real knowledge of God are them Ives unable to do this, since they can not get beyond the boundary of an eternal and ever-present existence underlying all existence in space and time, and are unable to define this existence in distinction from spatial and temporal existence except by purely formal logical definitions which really add nothing to our knowledge. It is really Kantian criticism which appears here, more forcibly than in previous dogmatic theology, as it reappears also in the later post-Hegelian philosophy.

Ritschl, again, is reminiscent of Kant in his opposition to all "metaphysical" statements about God, and in the way in which he places God for our knowledge in relation to our personal ethical spirit, as well as the powers which he attributes to this latter in relation to nature (cf. Kant's so-called moral proof or God as the postulate of the practical reason). Through the revelation in Christ, God becomes to him to a certain extent an objective reality, and, rejecting the conception of God as the Absolute, he prefers to define him simply as love. Against this not only dogmatic theologians like Frank and Nitzsch, but Kaftan also objects that love is found also in the finite sphere, and thus can not sufficiently express the essential nature of God, which differentiates him from the finite. Ritschl himself says, moreover, that the love which God is has the attribute of omnipotence, and that God is the creator of the universe, as will determining both himself and all things, while these definitions can in no way be deduced from the simple conception of love. Kaftan begins by the statement that God is the Absolute; and this signifies to him not only that God has absolute power over all that is, but also and even more that he is the absolute goal of all human endeavor. Nitzsch employs the term "supramundane" to include the domination of the universe and to express at the same time not only the thought that he who conditions all things is himself unconditioned, but also the moral and intellectual exaltation of God.

The whole body, therefore, of these modern theologians hold fast to an objective doctrine of God with a strict scientific comprehension of terms; and they agree in displaying a characteristic which differentiates them from earlier schools of thought, though varying in degree and in logical sequence the consciousness that the Christian doctrine of God is based not upon the operations of reason but upon the revelation of God in Christ, of which the witness is in our hearts and that it must grasp as the fundamentally essential in God and his relation to us the ethical element in him-must conceive him, in a word, primarily as the sacred Love. (J. KdamLiNt.)

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