Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 23.djvu/257

Rh THEISM 239 Mono theism in Israel. Old Testa ment theology. New Testa ment theology. spirit, self-thinking reason, the vo^crt? vo^o-ews ; the one perfect being, whose life is completely blessed, and whose likeness is the goal towards which the whole universe tends. Stoicism was originally and predominantly a materialistic or hylozoic form of pantheism ; but some of its greatest representatives conceived of God in a decid edly theistic manner as the supreme moral reason. The beautiful hymn of Cleanthes to Zeus is full of the purest devotional feeling, springing from a clear sense of personal relationship to the one all-ruling personal Spirit. Greek philosophy proceeded throughout its whole course in entire independence of the popular polytheism, and was a con tinuous demonstration of its futility ; and it largely con tributed to that reasoned natural knowledge of God which must underlie all rational belief in revelation. It discerned in some measure all the chief arguments which have since been employed as theistic proofs. It failed, however, to conceive of God as truly creative, or of the universe as in its very substance the result of divine action ; it failed also to make evident, even to cultured minds, the superiority of monotheism to pantheism and scepticism ; and it failed especially to convert the common people to faith in one sole Deity. 1 Israel presents us with the first example of a mono theistic nation. The controversies as to how Israel ac quired this pre-eminence can only be decided by critical and historical investigations into which we cannot here enter (see ISRAEL). The science of Old Testament theology, giving due heed to the results of critical, historical, and exegetical research regarding the documents with which it deals, has to trace by what means and through what stages Hebrew mono theism was developed and established ; and to the treatises on this science our readers must be referred. The mono theistic movement in Israel was one of continuous progress through incessant conflict until a result was reached of incalculable value to humanity. That result was a faith in God singularly comprehensive, sublime, and practical, a faith which rested, not on speculation and reasoning, but on a conviction of God having directly revealed Himself to the spirits of men, and which, while ignoring meta physical theorizing, ascribed to God all metaphysical as well as moral perfections ; a faith which, in spite of its simplicity, so apprehended the relationship of God to nature as neither to confound them like pantheism nor to separate them like deism, but to assert both the immanence and the transcendence of the divine ; a faith in a living and per sonal God, the almighty and sole creator, preserver, and ruler of the world ; a faith, especially, in a God holy in all His ways and righteous in all His works, who was directing and guiding human affairs to a destination worthy of His own character ; and, therefore, an essentially ethical, elevating, and hopeful faith. The existence of utterances in the Hebrew Scriptures which show that Hebrew faith was not always thus enlightened, and sometimes conceived of God as partial and cruel, is no reason for not acknow ledging the general justice and grandeur of its representa tion of the Supreme. 2 The God of the Old Testament is also the God of the New. Christ and the apostles accepted what Moses and the prophets had taught concerning God ; they assigned to 1 See Zeller, Die Entwickelung des Monotheismus bei den Griechen (in Vortriige, vol. i. ) ; and Cocker, Christianity and Greek Philosophy, 1875; also, Meiners, Historia Doctrlnse de Vero Deo, 1780. 2 See the 0. T. Theologies of Oehler, Schultz, Kayser, Piepenbring, &c. ; Ewald, Lehre der Bibel von Gott ; Baudissen, Stud. z. Semit. Religionsgeschichte ; Kuenen, Hibbert Lecture ; Duhm, Theologie d. Propheten ; W. Robertson Smith, Prophets of Israel, &c. As to the name &quot; Jahveh,&quot; an instructive summary and examination of views is given by Prof. Driver in his article &quot;Recent Theories on the Origin and Nature of the Tetragrammaton,&quot; in Stitdia Biblica, Oxford, 1885. Him no other attributes than had already been assigned to Him. Like Moses and the prophets also they made no attempt formally to prove the existence or logically to define the nature of God, but spoke of Him either as from vision or inspiration. And yet their doctrine of God has original and peculiar features. Thus, first, the fatherhood of God was taught with incomparable distinctness and fulness by Jesus Christ, a fatherhood not merely of natural creation or national election, but of spiritual relationship of love, sympathy, mercy, and grace for individual souls. Such fatherhood, if acknowledged at all, was only very rarely and vaguely acknowledged in heathendom, and, although not wholly absent from the Old Testament, is far from clearly and prominently there, and, indeed, is present chiefly by implication in passages which refer directly only to God s connexion with the people of Israel, as an elect and covenant people ; it is conspicuous and central, however, in the conception of God introduced by Christianity. Secondly, Divine father hood had its correlate in Divine sonship. God is repre sented in the New Testament as revealing His fatherhood through His Son, Jesus Christ. In Old Testament repre sentations of Israel, the Messiah, and Wisdom, and in the Logos doctrine of Judseo- Alexandrian philosophy, some approximations to this conception of the Divine may be traced, but they fell far short of it. According to the New Testament, God is not merely infinitely exalted above the world and definitely distinguished therefrom, nor merely immanent and everywhere operative in nature, but also incarnate in Christ ; and Christ is not merely &quot; the Son of man,&quot; essentially sharing in humanity and truly representing it before God, but also &quot; the Son of God,&quot; essentially sharing in Divinity, and giving the fullest disclosure of it to man. The foundation of the Christian faith as laid down in the New Testament is that Christ through His unique relation as Son to the Father perfectly declared and expressed the nature and will of God in relation to human salvation. Thirdly, God is exhibited in the New Testament as the Spirit, the Holy Ghost, who dwells in the spirits of men, to work in them the will of the Father, and to conform them to the image of the Son. Only when thus exhibited can the revelation of the Divine name be regarded from the New Testament point of view as other than manifestly incomplete. Even the manifesta tion of God in Christ, being objective and single, must be supplemented by a manifestation which is subjective and multiple, before the one God, the one Christ, can find a place in the manifoldness of souls, the multitude of sep arate hearts and lives. The manifestation of the Spirit is such a manifestation, and completes in principle the revelation of the Christian idea of God, the revelation of His threefold nature and name. This revelation completed God can be thought of as absolute spirit, absolute love, absolute good, and was, to some extent explicitly, and throughout implicitly, so represented in the New Testa ment. It is precisely in virtue of the threefold represen tation of God characteristic of the New Testament that Christianity is still held by so many of the world s pro- foundest thinkers as the absolute and perfect religion, the crown and consummation of religion, speculatively con sidered, an absolute revelation of God, and practically considered, a perfect salvation, within which there may be infinite evolution and progress, but beyond which there can be no true light or real growth. 3 The threefold representation of God in the New Testa- Doctrine ment was an entirely religious and practical representa- of ^ tion, inseparably connected with the historical facts of ruutv - 3 The New Testament representation of God is treated of in the New Testament Theologies of Schmid, Reuss, Oosterzee, and Weiss ; also in Wittichen, Die Idee Gottes, 1865.