Third Division.—Perfection, and attributes therein involved.By perfection we mean, not mere quantitative completeness, but qualitative excellence. The attributes involved in perfection are moral attributes. Right action among men presupposes a perfect moral organization, a normal state of intellect, affection and will. So God's activity presupposes a principle of intelligence, of affection, of volition, in his inmost being, and the existence of a worthy object for each of these powers of his nature. But in eternity past there is nothing existing outside or apart from God. He must find, and he does find, the sufficient object of intellect, affection, and will, in himself. There is a self-knowing, a self-loving, a self-willing, which constitute his absolute perfection. The consideration of the immanent attributes is, therefore, properly concluded with an account of that truth, love, and holiness, which render God entirely sufficient to himself.Mat. 5:48—“Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect”;Rom. 12:2—“perfect will of God”;Col. 1:28—“perfect in Christ”;cf.Deut. 32:4—“The Rock, his work is perfect”;Ps. 18:30—“As for God, his way is perfect.”1. Truth.By truth we mean that attribute of the divine nature in virtue of which God's being and God's knowledge eternally conform to each other.In further explanation we remark:A. Negatively:(a) The immanent truth of God is not to be confounded with that veracity and faithfulness which partially manifest it to creatures. These are transitive truth, and they presuppose the absolute and immanent attribute.Deut 32:4—“A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, Just and right is he”;John 17:3—“the only true God”(ἀληθινόν);1 John 5:20—“we know him that is true”(τὸν ἀληθινόν). In both these passages ἀληθινός describes God as the genuine, the real, as distinguished from ἀληθής, the veracious (compareJohn 6:32—“the true bread”;Heb. 8:2—“the true tabernacle”).John 14:6—“I am ... the truth.”As“I am ... the life”signifies, not“I am the living one,”but rather“I[pg 261]am he who is life and the source of life,”so“I am ... the truth”signifies, not“I am the truthful one,”but“I am he who is truth and the source of truth”—in other words, truth of being, not merely truth of expression. So1 John 5:7—“the Spirit is the truth.”Cf.1 Esdras 1:38—“The truth abideth and is forever strong, and it liveth and ruleth forever”= personal truth? See Godet onJohn 1:18; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:181.Truth is God perfectly revealed and known. It may be likened to the electric current which manifests and measures the power of the dynamo. There is no realm of truth apart from the world-ground, just as there is no law of nature that is independent of the Author of nature. While we know ourselves only partially, God knows himself fully. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 1:192—“In the life of God there are no unrealized possibilities. The presupposition of all our knowledge and activity is that absolute and eternal unity of knowing and being which is only another expression for the nature of God. In one sense, he is all reality, and the only reality, whilst all finite existence is but abecoming, which neveris.”Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 57-63—“Truth is reality revealed. Jesus is the Truth, because in him the sum of the qualities hidden in God is presented and revealed to the world, God's nature in terms of an active force and in relation to his rational creation.”This definition however ignores the fact that God is truth, apart from and before all creation. As an immanent attribute, truth implies a conformity of God's knowledge to God's being, which antedates the universe; see B. (b) below.(b) Truth in God is not a merely active attribute of the divine nature. God is truth, not only in the sense that he is the being who truly knows, but also in the sense that he is the truth that is known. The passive precedes the active; truth of being precedes truth of knowing.Plato:“Truth is his (God's) body, and light his shadow.”Hollaz (quoted in Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:137) says that“truth is the conformity of the divine essence with the divine intellect.”See Gerhard, loc. ii:152; Kahnis, Dogmatik, 2:272, 279; 3:193—“Distinguish in God the personal self-consciousness [spirituality, personality—see pages 252, 253] from the unfolding of this in the divine knowledge, which can have no other object but God himself. So far, now, as self-knowing in God is absolutely identical with his being is he the absolutely true. For truth is the knowledge which answers to the being, and the being which answers to the knowledge.”Royce, World and Individual, 1:270—“Truth either may mean that about which we judge,orit may mean the correspondence between our ideas and their objects.”God's truth is both object of his knowledge and knowledge of his object. Miss Clara French, The Dramatic Action and Motive of King John:“You spell Truth with a capital, and make it an independent existence to be sought for and absorbed; but, unless truth is God, what can it do for man? It is only a personality that can touch a personality.”So we assent to the poet's declaration that“Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again,”only because Truth is personal. Christ, the Revealer of God, is the Truth. He is not simply the medium but also the object of all knowledge;Eph. 4:20—“ye did not so learn Christ”= ye knew more than the doctrine about Christ,—ye knew Christ himself;John 17:3—“this is life eternal that they should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.”B. Positively:(a) All truth among men, whether mathematical, logical, moral, or religious, is to be regarded as having its foundation in this immanent truth of the divine nature and as disclosing facts in the being of God.There is a higher Mind than our mind. No apostle can say“I am the truth,”though each of them can say“I speak the truth.”Truth is not a scientific or moral, but a substantial, thing—“nicht Schulsache, sondern Lebenssache.”Here is the dignity of education, that knowledge of truth is knowledge of God. The laws of mathematics are disclosures to us, not of the divine reason merely, for this would imply truth outside of and before God, but of the divine nature. J. W. A. Stewart:“Science is possible because God is scientific.”Plato:“God geometrizes.”Bowne:“The heavens are crystalized mathematics.”The statement that two and two make four, or that virtue is commendable and vice condemnable, expresses an everlasting principle in the being of God. Separate statements of truth are inexplicable apart from the total revelation of truth, and this total revelation is inexplicable apart from One who is truth and who[pg 262]is thus revealed. The separate electric lights in our streets are inexplicable apart from the electric current which throbs through the wires, and this electric current is itself inexplicable apart from the hidden dynamo whose power it exactly expresses and measures. The separate lights of truth are due to the realizing agency of the Holy Spirit; the one unifying current which they partially reveal is the outgoing work of Christ, the divine Logos; Christ is the one and only Revealer of him who dwells“in light unapproachable; whom no man hath seen, nor can see”(1 Tim. 6:16).Prof. H. E. Webster began his lectures“by assuming the Lord Jesus Christandthe multiplication-table.”But this was tautology, because the Lord Jesus Christ, the Truth, the only revealer of God, includes the multiplication-table. So Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:257; 2:202, unduly narrows the scope of Christ's revelation when he maintains that with Jesus truth is not the truth which corresponds to reality but rather the right conduct which corresponds to the duty prescribed by God.“Grace and truth”(John 1:17)then means the favor of God and the righteousness which God approves. To understand Jesus is impossible without being ethically like him. He is king of truth, in that he reveals this righteousness, and finds obedience for it among men. This ethical aspect of the truth, we would reply, important as it is, does not exclude but rather requires for its complement and presupposition that other aspect of the truth as the reality to which all being must conform and the conformity of all being to that reality. Since Christ is the truth of God, we are successful in our search for truth only as we recognize him. Whether all roads lead to Rome depends upon which way your face is turned. Follow a point of land out into the sea, and you find only ocean. With the back turned upon Jesus Christ all following after truth leads only into mist and darkness. Aristotle's ideal man was“a hunter after truth.”But truth can never be found disjoined from love, nor can the loveless seeker discern it.“For the loving worm within its clod Were diviner than a loveless God”(Robert Browning). Hence Christ can say:John 18:37—“Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.”(b) This attribute therefore constitutes the principle and guarantee of all revelation, while it shows the possibility of an eternal divine self-contemplation apart from and before all creation. It is to be understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity.To all this doctrine, however, a great school of philosophers have opposed themselves. Duns Scotus held that God's will made truth as well as right. Descartes said that God could have made it untrue that the radii of a circle are all equal. Lord Bacon said that Adam's sin consisted in seeking a good in itself, instead of being content with the merely empirical good. Whedon, On the Will, 316—“Infinite wisdom and infinite holiness consist in, and result from, God's volitions eternally.”We reply that, to make truth and good matters of mere will, instead of regarding them as characteristics of God's being, is to deny that anything is true or good in itself. If God can make truth to be falsehood, and injustice to be justice, then God is indifferent to truth or falsehood, to good or evil, and he ceases thereby to be God. Truth is not arbitrary,—it is matter of being—the being of God. There are no regulative principles of knowledge which are not transcendental also. God knows and wills truth, because he is truth. Robert Browning, A Soul's Tragedy, 214—“Were't not for God, I mean, what hope of truth—Speaking truth, hearing truth—would stay with Man?”God's will does not make truth, but truth rather makes God's will. God's perfect knowledge in eternity past has an object. That object must be himself. He is the truth Known, as well as the truthful Knower. But a perfect objective must be personal. The doctrine of the Trinity is the necessary complement to the doctrine of the Attributes. Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:183—“The pillar of cloud becomes a pillar of fire.”See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 102-112.On the question whether it is ever right to deceive, see Paine, Ethnic Trinities, 300-339. Plato said that the use of such medicines should be restricted to physicians. The rulers of the state may lie for the public good, but private people not:“officiosum mendacium.”It is better to say that deception is justifiable only where the person deceived has, like a wild beast or a criminal or an enemy in war, put himself out of human society and deprived himself of the right to truth. Even then deception is a sad necessity which witnesses to an abnormal condition of human affairs. With James Martineau, when asked what answer he would give to an intending murderer when truth would mean death, we may say:“I suppose I should tell an untruth, and then should be sorry for it forever after.”On truth as an attribute of God, see Bib. Sac., Oct. 1877:735; Finney, Syst. Theol., 661; Janet, Final Causes, 416.[pg 263]2. Love.By love we mean that attribute of the divine nature in virtue of which God is eternally moved to self-communication.1 John 4:8—“God is love”;3:16—“hereby know we love, because he laid down his life for us”;John 17:24—“thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world”;Rom. 15:30—“the love of the Spirit.”In further explanation we remark:A. Negatively:(a) The immanent love of God is not to be confounded with mercy and goodness toward creatures. These are its manifestations, and are to be denominated transitive love.Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:138, 139—“God's regard for the happiness of his creatures flows from this self-communicating attribute of his nature. Love, in the true sense of the word, is living good-will, with impulses to impartation and union; self-communication (bonum communicativum sui); devotion, merging of theegoin another, in order to penetrate, fill, bless this other with itself, and in this other, as in another self, to possess itself, without giving up itself or losing itself. Love is therefore possible only between persons, and always presupposes personality. Only as Trinity has God love, absolute love; because as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost he stands in perfect self-impartation, self-devotion, and communion with himself.”Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:136—“God has in himself the eternal and wholly adequate object of his love, independently of his relation to the world.”In the Greek mythology, Eros was one of the oldest and yet one of the youngest of the gods. So Dante makes the oldest angel to be the youngest, because nearest to God the fountain of life. In1 John 2:7, 8,“the old commandment”of love is evermore“a new commandment,”because it reflects this eternal attribute of God.“There is a love unstained by selfishness, Th' outpouring tide of self-abandonment, That loves to love, and deems its preciousness Repaid in loving, though no sentiment Of love returned reward its sacrament; Nor stays to question what the loved one will, But hymns its overture with blessings immanent; Rapt and sublimed by love's exalting thrill, Loves on, through frown or smile, divine, immortal still.”Clara Elizabeth Ward:“If I could gather every look of love, That ever any human creature wore, And all the looks that joy is mother of, All looks of grief that mortals ever bore, And mingle all with God-begotten grace, Methinks that I should see the Savior's face.”(b) Love is not the all-inclusive ethical attribute of God. It does not include truth, nor does it include holiness.Ladd, Philosophy of Conduct, 352, very properly denies that benevolence is the all-inclusive virtue. Justness and Truth, he remarks, are not reducible to benevolence. In a review of Ladd's work in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1903:185, C. M. Mead adds:“He comes to the conclusion that it is impossible to resolve all the virtues into the generic one of love or benevolence without either giving a definition of benevolence which is unwarranted and virtually nullifies the end aimed at, or failing to recognize certain virtues which are as genuinely virtues as benevolence itself. Particularly is it argued that the virtues of the will (courage, constancy, temperance), and the virtues of judgment (wisdom, justness, trueness), get no recognition in this attempt to subsume all virtues under the one virtue of love. 'The unity of the virtues is due to the unity of a personality, in active and varied relations with other persons' (361). If benevolence means wishinghappinessto all men, then happiness is made the ultimate good, and eudæmonism is accepted as the true ethical philosophy. But if, on the other hand, in order to avoid this conclusion, benevolence is made to mean wishing the highestwelfareto all men, and the highest welfare is conceived as a life of virtue, then we come to the rather inane conclusion that the essence of virtue is to wish that men may be virtuous.”See also art. by Vos, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1892:1-37.(c) Nor is God's love a mere regard for being in general, irrespective of its moral quality.Jonathan Edwards, in his treatise On the Nature of Virtue, defines virtue as regard for being in general. He considers that God's love is first of all directed toward himself as having the greatest quantity of being, and only secondarily directed toward[pg 264]his creatures whose quantity of being is infinitesimal as compared with his. But we reply that being in general is far too abstract a thing to elicit or justify love. Charles Hodge said truly that, if obligation is primarily due to being in general, then there is no more virtue in loving God than there is in loving Satan. Virtue, we hold, must consist, not in love for being in general, but in love for good being, that is, in love for God as holy. Love has no moral value except as it is placed upon a right object and is proportioned to the worth of that object.“Love of being in general”makes virtue an irrational thing, because it has no standard of conduct. Virtue is rather the love of God as right and as the source of right.G. S. Lee, The Shadow-cross, 38—“God is love, and law is the way he loves us. But it is also true that God is law, and love is the way he rules us.”Clarke, Christian Theology, 88—“Love is God's desire to impart himself, and so all good, to other persons, and to possess them for his own spiritual fellowship.”The intent to communicate himself is the intent to communicate holiness, and this is the“terminus ad quem”of God's administration. Drummond, in his Ascent of Man, shows that Love began with the first cell of life. Evolution is not a tale of battle, but a love-story. We gradually pass from selfism to otherism. Evolution is the object of nature, and altruism is the object of evolution. Man = nutrition, looking to his own things; Woman = reproduction, looking to the things of others. But the greatest of these is love. The mammalia = the mothers, last and highest, care for others. As the mother gives love, so the father gives righteousness. Law, once a latent thing, now becomes active. The father makes a sort of conscience for those beneath him. Nature, like Raphael, is producing a Holy Family.Jacob Boehme:“Throw open and throw out thy heart. For unless thou dost exercise thy heart, and the love of thy heart, upon every man in the world, thy self-love, thy pride, thy envy, thy distaste, thy dislike, will still have dominion over thee.... In the name and in the strength of God, love all men. Love thy neighbor as thyself, and do to thy neighbor as thou doest to thyself. And do it now. For now is the accepted time, and now is the day of salvation.”These expressions are scriptural and valuable, if they are interpreted ethically, and are understood to inculcate the supreme duty of loving the Holy One, of being holy as he is holy, and of seeking to bring all intelligent beings into conformity with his holiness.(d) God's love is not a merely emotional affection, proceeding from sense or impulse, nor is it prompted by utilitarian considerations.Of the two words for love in the N. T., φιλέω designates an emotional affection, which is not and cannot be commanded (John 11:36—“Behold how he loved him!”), while ἀγαπάω expresses a rational and benevolent affection which springs from deliberate choice (John 3:16—“God so loved the world”;Mat. 19:19—“Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself”;5:44—“Love your enemies”). Thayer, N. T. Lex., 653—Ἀγαπᾶν“properly denotes a love founded in admiration, veneration, esteem, like the Lat.diligere, to be kindly disposed to one, to wish one well; but φιλεîν denotes an inclination prompted by sense and emotion, Lat.amare.... Hence men are said ἀγαπᾶν God, not φιλεîν.”In this word ἀγάπη, when used of God, it is already implied that God loves, not for what he can get, but for what he can give. The rationality of his love involves moreover a subordination of the emotional element to a higher law than itself, namely, that of holiness. Even God's self-love must have a reason and norm in the perfections of his own being.B. Positively:(a) The immanent love of God is a rational and voluntary affection, grounded in perfect reason and deliberate choice.Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 3:277—“Love is will, aiming either at the appropriation of an object, or at the enrichment of its existence, because moved by a feeling of its worth.... Love is to persons; it is a constant will; it aims at the promotion of the other's personal end, whether known or conjectured; it takes up the other's personal end and makes it part of his own. Will, as love, does not give itself up for the other's sake; it aims at closest fellowship with the other for a common end.”A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 388-405—“Love is not rightfully independent of the other faculties, but is subject to regulation and control.... We sometimes say that religion consists in love.... It would be more strictly true to say that religion consists in a new direction of our love, a turning of the current toward God which once flowed[pg 265]toward self.... Christianity rectifies the affections, before excessive, impulsive, lawless,—gives them worthy and immortal objects, regulates their intensity in some due proportion to the value of the things they rest upon, and teaches the true methods of their manifestation. In true religion love forms a copartnership with reason.... God's love is no arbitrary, wild, passionate torrent of emotion ... and we become like God by bringing our emotions, sympathies, affections, under the dominion of reason and conscience.”(b) Since God's love is rational, it involves a subordination of theemotionalelement to a higher law than itself, namely, that of truth and holiness.Phil. 1:9—“And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and all discernment.”True love among men illustrates God's love. It merges self in another instead of making that other an appendage to self. It seeks the other's true good, not merely his present enjoyment or advantage. Its aim is to realize the divine idea in that other, and therefore it is exercised for God's sake and in the strength which God supplies. Hence it is a love for holiness, and is under law to holiness. So God's love takes into account the highest interests, and makes infinite sacrifice to secure them. For the sake of saving a world of sinners, God“spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all”(Rom. 8:32), and“Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all”(Is. 53:6). Love requires a rule or standard for its regulation. This rule or standard is the holiness of God. So once more we see that love cannot include holiness, because it is subject to the law of holiness. Love desires only the best for its object, and the best isGod. The golden rule does not bid us give what others desire, but what they need:Rom. 15:2—“Let each one of us please his neighbor for that which is good, unto edifying.”(c) The immanent love of God therefore requires and finds a perfect standard in his own holiness, and a personal object in the image of his own infinite perfections. It is to be understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity.As there is a higher Mind than our mind, so there is a greater Heart than our heart. God is not simply the loving One—he is also the Love that is loved. There is an infinite life of sensibility and affection in God. God has feeling, and in an infinite degree. But feeling alone is not love. Love implies not merely receiving but giving, not merely emotion but impartation. So the love of God is shown in his eternal giving.James 1:5—“God, who giveth,”or“the giving God”(τοῦ διδόντος Θεοῦ) = giving is not an episode in his being—it is his nature to give. And not only togive, but to givehimself. This he does eternally in the self-communications of the Trinity; this he does transitively and temporally in his giving of himself for us in Christ, and to us in the Holy Spirit.Jonathan Edwards, Essay on Trinity (ed. G. P. Fisher), 79—“That in John God is love shows that there are more persons than one in the Deity, for it shows love to be essential and necessary to the Deity, so that his nature consists in it, and this supposes that there is an eternal and necessary object, because all love respects another that is the beloved. By love here the apostle certainly means something beside that which is commonly called self-love: that is very improperly called love, and is a thing of an exceeding diverse nature from the affection or virtue of love the apostle is speaking of.”When Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 226-239, makes the first characteristic of love to be self-affirmation, and when Dorner, Christian Ethics, 73, makes self-assertion an essential part of love, they violate linguistic usage by including under love what properly belongs to holiness.(d) The immanent love of God constitutes a ground of the divine blessedness. Since there is an infinite and perfect object of love, as well as of knowledge and will, in God's own nature, the existence of the universe is not necessary to his serenity and joy.Blessedness is not itself a divine attribute; it is rather a result of the exercise of the divine attributes. It is a subjective result of this exercise, as glory is an objective result. Perfect faculties, with perfect objects for their exercise, ensure God's blessedness. But love is especially its source.Acts 20:35—“It is more blessed to give than to receive.”Happiness (hap, happen) is grounded in circumstances; blessedness, in character.[pg 266]Love precedes creation and is the ground of creation. Its object therefore cannot be the universe, for that does not exist, and, if it did exist, could not be a proper object of love for the infinite God. The only sufficient object of his love is the image of his own perfections, for that alone is equal to himself. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 264—“Man most truly realizes his own nature, when he is ruled by rational, self-forgetful love. He cannot help inferring that the highest thing in the individual consciousness is the dominant thing in the universe at large.”Here we may assent, if we remember that not the love itself but that which is loved must be the dominant thing, and we shall see that to be not love but holiness.Jones, Robert Browning, 219—“Love is for Browning the highest, richest conception man can form. It is our idea of that which is perfect; we cannot even imagine anything better. And the idea of evolution necessarily explains the world as the return of the highest to itself. The universe is homeward bound.... All things are potentially spirit, and all the phenomena of the world are manifestations of love.... Man's reason is not, but man's love is, a direct emanation from the inmost being of God”(345). Browning should have applied to truth and holiness the same principle which he recognized with regard to love. But we gratefully accept his dicta:“He that created love, shall not he love?... God! thou art Love! I build my faith on that.”(e) The love of God involves also the possibility of divine suffering, and the suffering on account of sin which holiness necessitates on the part of God is itself the atonement.Christ is“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”(Rev. 13:8);1 Pet. 1:19, 20—“precious blood, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, even the blood of Christ: who was foreknown indeed before the foundation of the world.”While holiness requires atonement, love provides it. The blessedness of God is consistent with sorrow for human misery and sin. God is passible, or capable of suffering. The permission of moral evil in the decree of creation was at cost to God. Scripture attributes to him emotions of grief and anger at human sin (Gen. 6:6—“it grieved him at his heart”;Rom. 1:18—“wrath of God”;Eph. 4:30—“grieve not the Holy Spirit of God”); painful sacrifice in the gift of Christ (Rom. 8:32—“spared not his own son”;cf.Gen. 22:16—“hast not withheld thy son”) and participation in the suffering of his people (Is. 63:9—“in all their affliction he was afflicted”); Jesus Christ in his sorrow and sympathy, his tears and agony, is the revealer of God's feelings toward the race, and we are urged to follow in his steps, that we may be perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect. We cannot, indeed, conceive of love without self-sacrifice, nor of self-sacrifice without suffering. It would seem, then, that as immutability is consistent with imperative volitions in human history, so the blessedness of God may be consistent with emotions of sorrow.But does God feel in proportion to his greatness, as the mother suffers more than the sick child whom she tends? Does God suffer infinitely in every suffering of his creatures? We must remember that God is infinitely greater than his creation, and that he sees all human sin and woe as part of his great plan. We are entitled to attribute to him only such passibleness as is consistent with infinite perfection. In combining passibleness with blessedness, then, we must allow blessedness to be the controlling element, for our fundamental idea of God is that of absolute perfection. Martensen, Dogmatics, 101—“This limitation is swallowed up in the inner life of perfection which God lives, in total independence of his creation, and in triumphant prospect of the fulfilment of his great designs. We may therefore say with the old theosophic writers:‘In the outer chambers is sadness, but in the inner ones is unmixed joy.’”Christ was“anointed ... with the oil of gladness above his fellows,”and“for the joy that was set before him endured the cross”(Heb. 1:9; 12:2). Love rejoices even in pain, when this brings good to those beloved.“Though round its base the rolling clouds are spread, Eternal sunshine settles on its head.”In George Adam Smith's Life of Henry Drummond, 11, Drummond cries out after hearing the confessions of men who came to him:“I am sick of the sins of these men! How can God bear it?”Simon, Reconciliation, 338-343, shows that before the incarnation, the Logos was a sufferer from the sins of men. This suffering however was kept in check and counterbalanced by his consciousness as a factor in the Godhead, and by the clear knowledge that men were themselves the causes of this suffering. After he became incarnate he suffered without knowing whence all the suffering came. He had a subconscious life into which were interwoven elements due to the sinful conduct of the race whose energy was drawn from himself and with which in addition he had organically united himself. If this is limitation, it is also self-limitation which[pg 267]Christ could have avoided by not creating, preserving, and redeeming mankind. We rejoice in giving away a daughter in marriage, even though it costs pain. The highest blessedness in the Christian is coincident with agony for the souls of others. We partake of Christ's joy only when we know the fellowship of his sufferings. Joy and sorrow can coëxist, like Greek fire, that burns under water.Abbé Gratry, La Morale et la Loi de l'Histoire, 165, 166—“What! Do you really suppose that the personal God, free and intelligent, loving and good, who knows every detail of human torture, and hears every sigh—this God who sees, who loves as we do, and more than we do—do you believe that he is present and looks pitilessly on what breaks your heart, and what to him must be the spectacle of Satan reveling in the blood of humanity? History teaches us that men so feel for sufferers that they have been drawn to die with them, so that their own executioners have become the next martyrs. And yet you represent God, the absolute goodness, as alone impassible? It is here that our evangelical faith comes in. Our God was made man to suffer and to die! Yes, here is the true God. He has suffered from the beginning in all who have suffered. He has been hungry in all who have hungered. He has been immolated in all and with all who have offered up their lives. He is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.”Similarly Alexander Vinet, Vital Christianity, 240, remarks that“The suffering God is not simply the teaching of modern divines. It is a New Testament thought, and it is one that answers all the doubts that arise at the sight of human suffering. To know that God is suffering with it makes that suffering more awful, but it gives strength and life and hope, for we know that, if God is in it, suffering is the road to victory. If he shares our suffering we shall share his crown,”and we can say with thePsalmist, 68:19—“Blessed be God, who daily beareth our burden, even the God who is our salvation,”and withIsaiah 63:9—“In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them.”Borden P. Bowne, Atonement:“Something like this work of grace was a moral necessity with God. It was an awful responsibility that was taken when our human race was launched with its fearful possibilities of good and evil. God thereby put himself under infinite obligation to care for his human family; and reflections on his position as Creator and Ruler, instead of removing, only make more manifest this obligation. So long as we conceive God as sitting apart in supreme ease and self-satisfaction, he is notloveat all, but only a reflection of our selfishness and vulgarity. So long as we conceive him as bestowing blessing upon us out of his infinite fulness, but at no real cost to himself, he sinks below the moral heroes of our race. There is ever a higher thought possible, until we see God taking the world upon his heart, entering into the fellowship of our sorrow, and becoming the supreme burden bearer and leader in self-sacrifice. Then only are the possibilities of grace and condescension and love and moral heroism filled up, so that nothing higher remains. And the work of Christ, so far as it was a historical event, must be viewed not merely as a piece of history, but also as a manifestation of that cross which was hidden in the divine love from the foundation of the world, and which is involved in the existence of the human world at all.”Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 264—“The eternal resolution that, if the worldwillbe tragic, itshallstill, in Satan's despite, be spiritual, is the very essence of the eternal joy of that World-Spirit of whose wisdom ours is but a fragmentary reflection.... When you suffer, your sufferings are God's sufferings,—not his external work nor his external penalty, nor the fruit of his neglect, but identically his own personal woe. In you God himself suffers, precisely as you do, and has all your reason for overcoming this grief.”Henry N. Dodge, Christus Victor:“O Thou, that from eternity Upon thy wounded heart hast borne Each pang and cry of misery Wherewith our human hearts are torn, Thy love upon the grievous cross Doth glow, the beacon-light of time, Forever sharing pain and loss With every man in every clime. How vast, how vast Thy sacrifice, As ages come and ages go, Still waiting till it shall suffice To draw the last cold heart and slow!”On the question, Is God passible? see Bennett Tyler, Sufferings of Christ; A Layman, Sufferings of Christ; Woods, Works, 1:299-317; Bib. Sac., 11:744; 17:422-424; Emmons, Works, 4:201-208; Fairbairn, Place of Christ, 483-487; Bushnell, Vic. Sacrifice, 59-93; Kedney, Christ. Doctrine Harmonized, 1:185-245; Edward Beecher, Concord of Ages, 81-204; Young, Life and Light of Men, 20-43, 147-150; Schaff, Hist. Christ. Church, 2:191; Crawford, Fatherhood of God, 43, 44; Anselm, Proslogion, cap. 8; Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 268; John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:117, 118, 137-142.Per[pg 268]contra, see Shedd, Essays and Addresses, 277, 279 note; Woods, in Lit. and Theol. Rev., 1834:43-61; Harris, God the Creator and Lord of All, 1:201. On the Biblical conception of Love in general, see article by James Orr, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.
Third Division.—Perfection, and attributes therein involved.By perfection we mean, not mere quantitative completeness, but qualitative excellence. The attributes involved in perfection are moral attributes. Right action among men presupposes a perfect moral organization, a normal state of intellect, affection and will. So God's activity presupposes a principle of intelligence, of affection, of volition, in his inmost being, and the existence of a worthy object for each of these powers of his nature. But in eternity past there is nothing existing outside or apart from God. He must find, and he does find, the sufficient object of intellect, affection, and will, in himself. There is a self-knowing, a self-loving, a self-willing, which constitute his absolute perfection. The consideration of the immanent attributes is, therefore, properly concluded with an account of that truth, love, and holiness, which render God entirely sufficient to himself.Mat. 5:48—“Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect”;Rom. 12:2—“perfect will of God”;Col. 1:28—“perfect in Christ”;cf.Deut. 32:4—“The Rock, his work is perfect”;Ps. 18:30—“As for God, his way is perfect.”1. Truth.By truth we mean that attribute of the divine nature in virtue of which God's being and God's knowledge eternally conform to each other.In further explanation we remark:A. Negatively:(a) The immanent truth of God is not to be confounded with that veracity and faithfulness which partially manifest it to creatures. These are transitive truth, and they presuppose the absolute and immanent attribute.Deut 32:4—“A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, Just and right is he”;John 17:3—“the only true God”(ἀληθινόν);1 John 5:20—“we know him that is true”(τὸν ἀληθινόν). In both these passages ἀληθινός describes God as the genuine, the real, as distinguished from ἀληθής, the veracious (compareJohn 6:32—“the true bread”;Heb. 8:2—“the true tabernacle”).John 14:6—“I am ... the truth.”As“I am ... the life”signifies, not“I am the living one,”but rather“I[pg 261]am he who is life and the source of life,”so“I am ... the truth”signifies, not“I am the truthful one,”but“I am he who is truth and the source of truth”—in other words, truth of being, not merely truth of expression. So1 John 5:7—“the Spirit is the truth.”Cf.1 Esdras 1:38—“The truth abideth and is forever strong, and it liveth and ruleth forever”= personal truth? See Godet onJohn 1:18; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:181.Truth is God perfectly revealed and known. It may be likened to the electric current which manifests and measures the power of the dynamo. There is no realm of truth apart from the world-ground, just as there is no law of nature that is independent of the Author of nature. While we know ourselves only partially, God knows himself fully. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 1:192—“In the life of God there are no unrealized possibilities. The presupposition of all our knowledge and activity is that absolute and eternal unity of knowing and being which is only another expression for the nature of God. In one sense, he is all reality, and the only reality, whilst all finite existence is but abecoming, which neveris.”Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 57-63—“Truth is reality revealed. Jesus is the Truth, because in him the sum of the qualities hidden in God is presented and revealed to the world, God's nature in terms of an active force and in relation to his rational creation.”This definition however ignores the fact that God is truth, apart from and before all creation. As an immanent attribute, truth implies a conformity of God's knowledge to God's being, which antedates the universe; see B. (b) below.(b) Truth in God is not a merely active attribute of the divine nature. God is truth, not only in the sense that he is the being who truly knows, but also in the sense that he is the truth that is known. The passive precedes the active; truth of being precedes truth of knowing.Plato:“Truth is his (God's) body, and light his shadow.”Hollaz (quoted in Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:137) says that“truth is the conformity of the divine essence with the divine intellect.”See Gerhard, loc. ii:152; Kahnis, Dogmatik, 2:272, 279; 3:193—“Distinguish in God the personal self-consciousness [spirituality, personality—see pages 252, 253] from the unfolding of this in the divine knowledge, which can have no other object but God himself. So far, now, as self-knowing in God is absolutely identical with his being is he the absolutely true. For truth is the knowledge which answers to the being, and the being which answers to the knowledge.”Royce, World and Individual, 1:270—“Truth either may mean that about which we judge,orit may mean the correspondence between our ideas and their objects.”God's truth is both object of his knowledge and knowledge of his object. Miss Clara French, The Dramatic Action and Motive of King John:“You spell Truth with a capital, and make it an independent existence to be sought for and absorbed; but, unless truth is God, what can it do for man? It is only a personality that can touch a personality.”So we assent to the poet's declaration that“Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again,”only because Truth is personal. Christ, the Revealer of God, is the Truth. He is not simply the medium but also the object of all knowledge;Eph. 4:20—“ye did not so learn Christ”= ye knew more than the doctrine about Christ,—ye knew Christ himself;John 17:3—“this is life eternal that they should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.”B. Positively:(a) All truth among men, whether mathematical, logical, moral, or religious, is to be regarded as having its foundation in this immanent truth of the divine nature and as disclosing facts in the being of God.There is a higher Mind than our mind. No apostle can say“I am the truth,”though each of them can say“I speak the truth.”Truth is not a scientific or moral, but a substantial, thing—“nicht Schulsache, sondern Lebenssache.”Here is the dignity of education, that knowledge of truth is knowledge of God. The laws of mathematics are disclosures to us, not of the divine reason merely, for this would imply truth outside of and before God, but of the divine nature. J. W. A. Stewart:“Science is possible because God is scientific.”Plato:“God geometrizes.”Bowne:“The heavens are crystalized mathematics.”The statement that two and two make four, or that virtue is commendable and vice condemnable, expresses an everlasting principle in the being of God. Separate statements of truth are inexplicable apart from the total revelation of truth, and this total revelation is inexplicable apart from One who is truth and who[pg 262]is thus revealed. The separate electric lights in our streets are inexplicable apart from the electric current which throbs through the wires, and this electric current is itself inexplicable apart from the hidden dynamo whose power it exactly expresses and measures. The separate lights of truth are due to the realizing agency of the Holy Spirit; the one unifying current which they partially reveal is the outgoing work of Christ, the divine Logos; Christ is the one and only Revealer of him who dwells“in light unapproachable; whom no man hath seen, nor can see”(1 Tim. 6:16).Prof. H. E. Webster began his lectures“by assuming the Lord Jesus Christandthe multiplication-table.”But this was tautology, because the Lord Jesus Christ, the Truth, the only revealer of God, includes the multiplication-table. So Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:257; 2:202, unduly narrows the scope of Christ's revelation when he maintains that with Jesus truth is not the truth which corresponds to reality but rather the right conduct which corresponds to the duty prescribed by God.“Grace and truth”(John 1:17)then means the favor of God and the righteousness which God approves. To understand Jesus is impossible without being ethically like him. He is king of truth, in that he reveals this righteousness, and finds obedience for it among men. This ethical aspect of the truth, we would reply, important as it is, does not exclude but rather requires for its complement and presupposition that other aspect of the truth as the reality to which all being must conform and the conformity of all being to that reality. Since Christ is the truth of God, we are successful in our search for truth only as we recognize him. Whether all roads lead to Rome depends upon which way your face is turned. Follow a point of land out into the sea, and you find only ocean. With the back turned upon Jesus Christ all following after truth leads only into mist and darkness. Aristotle's ideal man was“a hunter after truth.”But truth can never be found disjoined from love, nor can the loveless seeker discern it.“For the loving worm within its clod Were diviner than a loveless God”(Robert Browning). Hence Christ can say:John 18:37—“Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.”(b) This attribute therefore constitutes the principle and guarantee of all revelation, while it shows the possibility of an eternal divine self-contemplation apart from and before all creation. It is to be understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity.To all this doctrine, however, a great school of philosophers have opposed themselves. Duns Scotus held that God's will made truth as well as right. Descartes said that God could have made it untrue that the radii of a circle are all equal. Lord Bacon said that Adam's sin consisted in seeking a good in itself, instead of being content with the merely empirical good. Whedon, On the Will, 316—“Infinite wisdom and infinite holiness consist in, and result from, God's volitions eternally.”We reply that, to make truth and good matters of mere will, instead of regarding them as characteristics of God's being, is to deny that anything is true or good in itself. If God can make truth to be falsehood, and injustice to be justice, then God is indifferent to truth or falsehood, to good or evil, and he ceases thereby to be God. Truth is not arbitrary,—it is matter of being—the being of God. There are no regulative principles of knowledge which are not transcendental also. God knows and wills truth, because he is truth. Robert Browning, A Soul's Tragedy, 214—“Were't not for God, I mean, what hope of truth—Speaking truth, hearing truth—would stay with Man?”God's will does not make truth, but truth rather makes God's will. God's perfect knowledge in eternity past has an object. That object must be himself. He is the truth Known, as well as the truthful Knower. But a perfect objective must be personal. The doctrine of the Trinity is the necessary complement to the doctrine of the Attributes. Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:183—“The pillar of cloud becomes a pillar of fire.”See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 102-112.On the question whether it is ever right to deceive, see Paine, Ethnic Trinities, 300-339. Plato said that the use of such medicines should be restricted to physicians. The rulers of the state may lie for the public good, but private people not:“officiosum mendacium.”It is better to say that deception is justifiable only where the person deceived has, like a wild beast or a criminal or an enemy in war, put himself out of human society and deprived himself of the right to truth. Even then deception is a sad necessity which witnesses to an abnormal condition of human affairs. With James Martineau, when asked what answer he would give to an intending murderer when truth would mean death, we may say:“I suppose I should tell an untruth, and then should be sorry for it forever after.”On truth as an attribute of God, see Bib. Sac., Oct. 1877:735; Finney, Syst. Theol., 661; Janet, Final Causes, 416.[pg 263]2. Love.By love we mean that attribute of the divine nature in virtue of which God is eternally moved to self-communication.1 John 4:8—“God is love”;3:16—“hereby know we love, because he laid down his life for us”;John 17:24—“thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world”;Rom. 15:30—“the love of the Spirit.”In further explanation we remark:A. Negatively:(a) The immanent love of God is not to be confounded with mercy and goodness toward creatures. These are its manifestations, and are to be denominated transitive love.Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:138, 139—“God's regard for the happiness of his creatures flows from this self-communicating attribute of his nature. Love, in the true sense of the word, is living good-will, with impulses to impartation and union; self-communication (bonum communicativum sui); devotion, merging of theegoin another, in order to penetrate, fill, bless this other with itself, and in this other, as in another self, to possess itself, without giving up itself or losing itself. Love is therefore possible only between persons, and always presupposes personality. Only as Trinity has God love, absolute love; because as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost he stands in perfect self-impartation, self-devotion, and communion with himself.”Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:136—“God has in himself the eternal and wholly adequate object of his love, independently of his relation to the world.”In the Greek mythology, Eros was one of the oldest and yet one of the youngest of the gods. So Dante makes the oldest angel to be the youngest, because nearest to God the fountain of life. In1 John 2:7, 8,“the old commandment”of love is evermore“a new commandment,”because it reflects this eternal attribute of God.“There is a love unstained by selfishness, Th' outpouring tide of self-abandonment, That loves to love, and deems its preciousness Repaid in loving, though no sentiment Of love returned reward its sacrament; Nor stays to question what the loved one will, But hymns its overture with blessings immanent; Rapt and sublimed by love's exalting thrill, Loves on, through frown or smile, divine, immortal still.”Clara Elizabeth Ward:“If I could gather every look of love, That ever any human creature wore, And all the looks that joy is mother of, All looks of grief that mortals ever bore, And mingle all with God-begotten grace, Methinks that I should see the Savior's face.”(b) Love is not the all-inclusive ethical attribute of God. It does not include truth, nor does it include holiness.Ladd, Philosophy of Conduct, 352, very properly denies that benevolence is the all-inclusive virtue. Justness and Truth, he remarks, are not reducible to benevolence. In a review of Ladd's work in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1903:185, C. M. Mead adds:“He comes to the conclusion that it is impossible to resolve all the virtues into the generic one of love or benevolence without either giving a definition of benevolence which is unwarranted and virtually nullifies the end aimed at, or failing to recognize certain virtues which are as genuinely virtues as benevolence itself. Particularly is it argued that the virtues of the will (courage, constancy, temperance), and the virtues of judgment (wisdom, justness, trueness), get no recognition in this attempt to subsume all virtues under the one virtue of love. 'The unity of the virtues is due to the unity of a personality, in active and varied relations with other persons' (361). If benevolence means wishinghappinessto all men, then happiness is made the ultimate good, and eudæmonism is accepted as the true ethical philosophy. But if, on the other hand, in order to avoid this conclusion, benevolence is made to mean wishing the highestwelfareto all men, and the highest welfare is conceived as a life of virtue, then we come to the rather inane conclusion that the essence of virtue is to wish that men may be virtuous.”See also art. by Vos, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1892:1-37.(c) Nor is God's love a mere regard for being in general, irrespective of its moral quality.Jonathan Edwards, in his treatise On the Nature of Virtue, defines virtue as regard for being in general. He considers that God's love is first of all directed toward himself as having the greatest quantity of being, and only secondarily directed toward[pg 264]his creatures whose quantity of being is infinitesimal as compared with his. But we reply that being in general is far too abstract a thing to elicit or justify love. Charles Hodge said truly that, if obligation is primarily due to being in general, then there is no more virtue in loving God than there is in loving Satan. Virtue, we hold, must consist, not in love for being in general, but in love for good being, that is, in love for God as holy. Love has no moral value except as it is placed upon a right object and is proportioned to the worth of that object.“Love of being in general”makes virtue an irrational thing, because it has no standard of conduct. Virtue is rather the love of God as right and as the source of right.G. S. Lee, The Shadow-cross, 38—“God is love, and law is the way he loves us. But it is also true that God is law, and love is the way he rules us.”Clarke, Christian Theology, 88—“Love is God's desire to impart himself, and so all good, to other persons, and to possess them for his own spiritual fellowship.”The intent to communicate himself is the intent to communicate holiness, and this is the“terminus ad quem”of God's administration. Drummond, in his Ascent of Man, shows that Love began with the first cell of life. Evolution is not a tale of battle, but a love-story. We gradually pass from selfism to otherism. Evolution is the object of nature, and altruism is the object of evolution. Man = nutrition, looking to his own things; Woman = reproduction, looking to the things of others. But the greatest of these is love. The mammalia = the mothers, last and highest, care for others. As the mother gives love, so the father gives righteousness. Law, once a latent thing, now becomes active. The father makes a sort of conscience for those beneath him. Nature, like Raphael, is producing a Holy Family.Jacob Boehme:“Throw open and throw out thy heart. For unless thou dost exercise thy heart, and the love of thy heart, upon every man in the world, thy self-love, thy pride, thy envy, thy distaste, thy dislike, will still have dominion over thee.... In the name and in the strength of God, love all men. Love thy neighbor as thyself, and do to thy neighbor as thou doest to thyself. And do it now. For now is the accepted time, and now is the day of salvation.”These expressions are scriptural and valuable, if they are interpreted ethically, and are understood to inculcate the supreme duty of loving the Holy One, of being holy as he is holy, and of seeking to bring all intelligent beings into conformity with his holiness.(d) God's love is not a merely emotional affection, proceeding from sense or impulse, nor is it prompted by utilitarian considerations.Of the two words for love in the N. T., φιλέω designates an emotional affection, which is not and cannot be commanded (John 11:36—“Behold how he loved him!”), while ἀγαπάω expresses a rational and benevolent affection which springs from deliberate choice (John 3:16—“God so loved the world”;Mat. 19:19—“Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself”;5:44—“Love your enemies”). Thayer, N. T. Lex., 653—Ἀγαπᾶν“properly denotes a love founded in admiration, veneration, esteem, like the Lat.diligere, to be kindly disposed to one, to wish one well; but φιλεîν denotes an inclination prompted by sense and emotion, Lat.amare.... Hence men are said ἀγαπᾶν God, not φιλεîν.”In this word ἀγάπη, when used of God, it is already implied that God loves, not for what he can get, but for what he can give. The rationality of his love involves moreover a subordination of the emotional element to a higher law than itself, namely, that of holiness. Even God's self-love must have a reason and norm in the perfections of his own being.B. Positively:(a) The immanent love of God is a rational and voluntary affection, grounded in perfect reason and deliberate choice.Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 3:277—“Love is will, aiming either at the appropriation of an object, or at the enrichment of its existence, because moved by a feeling of its worth.... Love is to persons; it is a constant will; it aims at the promotion of the other's personal end, whether known or conjectured; it takes up the other's personal end and makes it part of his own. Will, as love, does not give itself up for the other's sake; it aims at closest fellowship with the other for a common end.”A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 388-405—“Love is not rightfully independent of the other faculties, but is subject to regulation and control.... We sometimes say that religion consists in love.... It would be more strictly true to say that religion consists in a new direction of our love, a turning of the current toward God which once flowed[pg 265]toward self.... Christianity rectifies the affections, before excessive, impulsive, lawless,—gives them worthy and immortal objects, regulates their intensity in some due proportion to the value of the things they rest upon, and teaches the true methods of their manifestation. In true religion love forms a copartnership with reason.... God's love is no arbitrary, wild, passionate torrent of emotion ... and we become like God by bringing our emotions, sympathies, affections, under the dominion of reason and conscience.”(b) Since God's love is rational, it involves a subordination of theemotionalelement to a higher law than itself, namely, that of truth and holiness.Phil. 1:9—“And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and all discernment.”True love among men illustrates God's love. It merges self in another instead of making that other an appendage to self. It seeks the other's true good, not merely his present enjoyment or advantage. Its aim is to realize the divine idea in that other, and therefore it is exercised for God's sake and in the strength which God supplies. Hence it is a love for holiness, and is under law to holiness. So God's love takes into account the highest interests, and makes infinite sacrifice to secure them. For the sake of saving a world of sinners, God“spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all”(Rom. 8:32), and“Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all”(Is. 53:6). Love requires a rule or standard for its regulation. This rule or standard is the holiness of God. So once more we see that love cannot include holiness, because it is subject to the law of holiness. Love desires only the best for its object, and the best isGod. The golden rule does not bid us give what others desire, but what they need:Rom. 15:2—“Let each one of us please his neighbor for that which is good, unto edifying.”(c) The immanent love of God therefore requires and finds a perfect standard in his own holiness, and a personal object in the image of his own infinite perfections. It is to be understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity.As there is a higher Mind than our mind, so there is a greater Heart than our heart. God is not simply the loving One—he is also the Love that is loved. There is an infinite life of sensibility and affection in God. God has feeling, and in an infinite degree. But feeling alone is not love. Love implies not merely receiving but giving, not merely emotion but impartation. So the love of God is shown in his eternal giving.James 1:5—“God, who giveth,”or“the giving God”(τοῦ διδόντος Θεοῦ) = giving is not an episode in his being—it is his nature to give. And not only togive, but to givehimself. This he does eternally in the self-communications of the Trinity; this he does transitively and temporally in his giving of himself for us in Christ, and to us in the Holy Spirit.Jonathan Edwards, Essay on Trinity (ed. G. P. Fisher), 79—“That in John God is love shows that there are more persons than one in the Deity, for it shows love to be essential and necessary to the Deity, so that his nature consists in it, and this supposes that there is an eternal and necessary object, because all love respects another that is the beloved. By love here the apostle certainly means something beside that which is commonly called self-love: that is very improperly called love, and is a thing of an exceeding diverse nature from the affection or virtue of love the apostle is speaking of.”When Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 226-239, makes the first characteristic of love to be self-affirmation, and when Dorner, Christian Ethics, 73, makes self-assertion an essential part of love, they violate linguistic usage by including under love what properly belongs to holiness.(d) The immanent love of God constitutes a ground of the divine blessedness. Since there is an infinite and perfect object of love, as well as of knowledge and will, in God's own nature, the existence of the universe is not necessary to his serenity and joy.Blessedness is not itself a divine attribute; it is rather a result of the exercise of the divine attributes. It is a subjective result of this exercise, as glory is an objective result. Perfect faculties, with perfect objects for their exercise, ensure God's blessedness. But love is especially its source.Acts 20:35—“It is more blessed to give than to receive.”Happiness (hap, happen) is grounded in circumstances; blessedness, in character.[pg 266]Love precedes creation and is the ground of creation. Its object therefore cannot be the universe, for that does not exist, and, if it did exist, could not be a proper object of love for the infinite God. The only sufficient object of his love is the image of his own perfections, for that alone is equal to himself. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 264—“Man most truly realizes his own nature, when he is ruled by rational, self-forgetful love. He cannot help inferring that the highest thing in the individual consciousness is the dominant thing in the universe at large.”Here we may assent, if we remember that not the love itself but that which is loved must be the dominant thing, and we shall see that to be not love but holiness.Jones, Robert Browning, 219—“Love is for Browning the highest, richest conception man can form. It is our idea of that which is perfect; we cannot even imagine anything better. And the idea of evolution necessarily explains the world as the return of the highest to itself. The universe is homeward bound.... All things are potentially spirit, and all the phenomena of the world are manifestations of love.... Man's reason is not, but man's love is, a direct emanation from the inmost being of God”(345). Browning should have applied to truth and holiness the same principle which he recognized with regard to love. But we gratefully accept his dicta:“He that created love, shall not he love?... God! thou art Love! I build my faith on that.”(e) The love of God involves also the possibility of divine suffering, and the suffering on account of sin which holiness necessitates on the part of God is itself the atonement.Christ is“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”(Rev. 13:8);1 Pet. 1:19, 20—“precious blood, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, even the blood of Christ: who was foreknown indeed before the foundation of the world.”While holiness requires atonement, love provides it. The blessedness of God is consistent with sorrow for human misery and sin. God is passible, or capable of suffering. The permission of moral evil in the decree of creation was at cost to God. Scripture attributes to him emotions of grief and anger at human sin (Gen. 6:6—“it grieved him at his heart”;Rom. 1:18—“wrath of God”;Eph. 4:30—“grieve not the Holy Spirit of God”); painful sacrifice in the gift of Christ (Rom. 8:32—“spared not his own son”;cf.Gen. 22:16—“hast not withheld thy son”) and participation in the suffering of his people (Is. 63:9—“in all their affliction he was afflicted”); Jesus Christ in his sorrow and sympathy, his tears and agony, is the revealer of God's feelings toward the race, and we are urged to follow in his steps, that we may be perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect. We cannot, indeed, conceive of love without self-sacrifice, nor of self-sacrifice without suffering. It would seem, then, that as immutability is consistent with imperative volitions in human history, so the blessedness of God may be consistent with emotions of sorrow.But does God feel in proportion to his greatness, as the mother suffers more than the sick child whom she tends? Does God suffer infinitely in every suffering of his creatures? We must remember that God is infinitely greater than his creation, and that he sees all human sin and woe as part of his great plan. We are entitled to attribute to him only such passibleness as is consistent with infinite perfection. In combining passibleness with blessedness, then, we must allow blessedness to be the controlling element, for our fundamental idea of God is that of absolute perfection. Martensen, Dogmatics, 101—“This limitation is swallowed up in the inner life of perfection which God lives, in total independence of his creation, and in triumphant prospect of the fulfilment of his great designs. We may therefore say with the old theosophic writers:‘In the outer chambers is sadness, but in the inner ones is unmixed joy.’”Christ was“anointed ... with the oil of gladness above his fellows,”and“for the joy that was set before him endured the cross”(Heb. 1:9; 12:2). Love rejoices even in pain, when this brings good to those beloved.“Though round its base the rolling clouds are spread, Eternal sunshine settles on its head.”In George Adam Smith's Life of Henry Drummond, 11, Drummond cries out after hearing the confessions of men who came to him:“I am sick of the sins of these men! How can God bear it?”Simon, Reconciliation, 338-343, shows that before the incarnation, the Logos was a sufferer from the sins of men. This suffering however was kept in check and counterbalanced by his consciousness as a factor in the Godhead, and by the clear knowledge that men were themselves the causes of this suffering. After he became incarnate he suffered without knowing whence all the suffering came. He had a subconscious life into which were interwoven elements due to the sinful conduct of the race whose energy was drawn from himself and with which in addition he had organically united himself. If this is limitation, it is also self-limitation which[pg 267]Christ could have avoided by not creating, preserving, and redeeming mankind. We rejoice in giving away a daughter in marriage, even though it costs pain. The highest blessedness in the Christian is coincident with agony for the souls of others. We partake of Christ's joy only when we know the fellowship of his sufferings. Joy and sorrow can coëxist, like Greek fire, that burns under water.Abbé Gratry, La Morale et la Loi de l'Histoire, 165, 166—“What! Do you really suppose that the personal God, free and intelligent, loving and good, who knows every detail of human torture, and hears every sigh—this God who sees, who loves as we do, and more than we do—do you believe that he is present and looks pitilessly on what breaks your heart, and what to him must be the spectacle of Satan reveling in the blood of humanity? History teaches us that men so feel for sufferers that they have been drawn to die with them, so that their own executioners have become the next martyrs. And yet you represent God, the absolute goodness, as alone impassible? It is here that our evangelical faith comes in. Our God was made man to suffer and to die! Yes, here is the true God. He has suffered from the beginning in all who have suffered. He has been hungry in all who have hungered. He has been immolated in all and with all who have offered up their lives. He is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.”Similarly Alexander Vinet, Vital Christianity, 240, remarks that“The suffering God is not simply the teaching of modern divines. It is a New Testament thought, and it is one that answers all the doubts that arise at the sight of human suffering. To know that God is suffering with it makes that suffering more awful, but it gives strength and life and hope, for we know that, if God is in it, suffering is the road to victory. If he shares our suffering we shall share his crown,”and we can say with thePsalmist, 68:19—“Blessed be God, who daily beareth our burden, even the God who is our salvation,”and withIsaiah 63:9—“In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them.”Borden P. Bowne, Atonement:“Something like this work of grace was a moral necessity with God. It was an awful responsibility that was taken when our human race was launched with its fearful possibilities of good and evil. God thereby put himself under infinite obligation to care for his human family; and reflections on his position as Creator and Ruler, instead of removing, only make more manifest this obligation. So long as we conceive God as sitting apart in supreme ease and self-satisfaction, he is notloveat all, but only a reflection of our selfishness and vulgarity. So long as we conceive him as bestowing blessing upon us out of his infinite fulness, but at no real cost to himself, he sinks below the moral heroes of our race. There is ever a higher thought possible, until we see God taking the world upon his heart, entering into the fellowship of our sorrow, and becoming the supreme burden bearer and leader in self-sacrifice. Then only are the possibilities of grace and condescension and love and moral heroism filled up, so that nothing higher remains. And the work of Christ, so far as it was a historical event, must be viewed not merely as a piece of history, but also as a manifestation of that cross which was hidden in the divine love from the foundation of the world, and which is involved in the existence of the human world at all.”Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 264—“The eternal resolution that, if the worldwillbe tragic, itshallstill, in Satan's despite, be spiritual, is the very essence of the eternal joy of that World-Spirit of whose wisdom ours is but a fragmentary reflection.... When you suffer, your sufferings are God's sufferings,—not his external work nor his external penalty, nor the fruit of his neglect, but identically his own personal woe. In you God himself suffers, precisely as you do, and has all your reason for overcoming this grief.”Henry N. Dodge, Christus Victor:“O Thou, that from eternity Upon thy wounded heart hast borne Each pang and cry of misery Wherewith our human hearts are torn, Thy love upon the grievous cross Doth glow, the beacon-light of time, Forever sharing pain and loss With every man in every clime. How vast, how vast Thy sacrifice, As ages come and ages go, Still waiting till it shall suffice To draw the last cold heart and slow!”On the question, Is God passible? see Bennett Tyler, Sufferings of Christ; A Layman, Sufferings of Christ; Woods, Works, 1:299-317; Bib. Sac., 11:744; 17:422-424; Emmons, Works, 4:201-208; Fairbairn, Place of Christ, 483-487; Bushnell, Vic. Sacrifice, 59-93; Kedney, Christ. Doctrine Harmonized, 1:185-245; Edward Beecher, Concord of Ages, 81-204; Young, Life and Light of Men, 20-43, 147-150; Schaff, Hist. Christ. Church, 2:191; Crawford, Fatherhood of God, 43, 44; Anselm, Proslogion, cap. 8; Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 268; John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:117, 118, 137-142.Per[pg 268]contra, see Shedd, Essays and Addresses, 277, 279 note; Woods, in Lit. and Theol. Rev., 1834:43-61; Harris, God the Creator and Lord of All, 1:201. On the Biblical conception of Love in general, see article by James Orr, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.
Third Division.—Perfection, and attributes therein involved.By perfection we mean, not mere quantitative completeness, but qualitative excellence. The attributes involved in perfection are moral attributes. Right action among men presupposes a perfect moral organization, a normal state of intellect, affection and will. So God's activity presupposes a principle of intelligence, of affection, of volition, in his inmost being, and the existence of a worthy object for each of these powers of his nature. But in eternity past there is nothing existing outside or apart from God. He must find, and he does find, the sufficient object of intellect, affection, and will, in himself. There is a self-knowing, a self-loving, a self-willing, which constitute his absolute perfection. The consideration of the immanent attributes is, therefore, properly concluded with an account of that truth, love, and holiness, which render God entirely sufficient to himself.Mat. 5:48—“Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect”;Rom. 12:2—“perfect will of God”;Col. 1:28—“perfect in Christ”;cf.Deut. 32:4—“The Rock, his work is perfect”;Ps. 18:30—“As for God, his way is perfect.”1. Truth.By truth we mean that attribute of the divine nature in virtue of which God's being and God's knowledge eternally conform to each other.In further explanation we remark:A. Negatively:(a) The immanent truth of God is not to be confounded with that veracity and faithfulness which partially manifest it to creatures. These are transitive truth, and they presuppose the absolute and immanent attribute.Deut 32:4—“A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, Just and right is he”;John 17:3—“the only true God”(ἀληθινόν);1 John 5:20—“we know him that is true”(τὸν ἀληθινόν). In both these passages ἀληθινός describes God as the genuine, the real, as distinguished from ἀληθής, the veracious (compareJohn 6:32—“the true bread”;Heb. 8:2—“the true tabernacle”).John 14:6—“I am ... the truth.”As“I am ... the life”signifies, not“I am the living one,”but rather“I[pg 261]am he who is life and the source of life,”so“I am ... the truth”signifies, not“I am the truthful one,”but“I am he who is truth and the source of truth”—in other words, truth of being, not merely truth of expression. So1 John 5:7—“the Spirit is the truth.”Cf.1 Esdras 1:38—“The truth abideth and is forever strong, and it liveth and ruleth forever”= personal truth? See Godet onJohn 1:18; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:181.Truth is God perfectly revealed and known. It may be likened to the electric current which manifests and measures the power of the dynamo. There is no realm of truth apart from the world-ground, just as there is no law of nature that is independent of the Author of nature. While we know ourselves only partially, God knows himself fully. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 1:192—“In the life of God there are no unrealized possibilities. The presupposition of all our knowledge and activity is that absolute and eternal unity of knowing and being which is only another expression for the nature of God. In one sense, he is all reality, and the only reality, whilst all finite existence is but abecoming, which neveris.”Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 57-63—“Truth is reality revealed. Jesus is the Truth, because in him the sum of the qualities hidden in God is presented and revealed to the world, God's nature in terms of an active force and in relation to his rational creation.”This definition however ignores the fact that God is truth, apart from and before all creation. As an immanent attribute, truth implies a conformity of God's knowledge to God's being, which antedates the universe; see B. (b) below.(b) Truth in God is not a merely active attribute of the divine nature. God is truth, not only in the sense that he is the being who truly knows, but also in the sense that he is the truth that is known. The passive precedes the active; truth of being precedes truth of knowing.Plato:“Truth is his (God's) body, and light his shadow.”Hollaz (quoted in Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:137) says that“truth is the conformity of the divine essence with the divine intellect.”See Gerhard, loc. ii:152; Kahnis, Dogmatik, 2:272, 279; 3:193—“Distinguish in God the personal self-consciousness [spirituality, personality—see pages 252, 253] from the unfolding of this in the divine knowledge, which can have no other object but God himself. So far, now, as self-knowing in God is absolutely identical with his being is he the absolutely true. For truth is the knowledge which answers to the being, and the being which answers to the knowledge.”Royce, World and Individual, 1:270—“Truth either may mean that about which we judge,orit may mean the correspondence between our ideas and their objects.”God's truth is both object of his knowledge and knowledge of his object. Miss Clara French, The Dramatic Action and Motive of King John:“You spell Truth with a capital, and make it an independent existence to be sought for and absorbed; but, unless truth is God, what can it do for man? It is only a personality that can touch a personality.”So we assent to the poet's declaration that“Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again,”only because Truth is personal. Christ, the Revealer of God, is the Truth. He is not simply the medium but also the object of all knowledge;Eph. 4:20—“ye did not so learn Christ”= ye knew more than the doctrine about Christ,—ye knew Christ himself;John 17:3—“this is life eternal that they should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.”B. Positively:(a) All truth among men, whether mathematical, logical, moral, or religious, is to be regarded as having its foundation in this immanent truth of the divine nature and as disclosing facts in the being of God.There is a higher Mind than our mind. No apostle can say“I am the truth,”though each of them can say“I speak the truth.”Truth is not a scientific or moral, but a substantial, thing—“nicht Schulsache, sondern Lebenssache.”Here is the dignity of education, that knowledge of truth is knowledge of God. The laws of mathematics are disclosures to us, not of the divine reason merely, for this would imply truth outside of and before God, but of the divine nature. J. W. A. Stewart:“Science is possible because God is scientific.”Plato:“God geometrizes.”Bowne:“The heavens are crystalized mathematics.”The statement that two and two make four, or that virtue is commendable and vice condemnable, expresses an everlasting principle in the being of God. Separate statements of truth are inexplicable apart from the total revelation of truth, and this total revelation is inexplicable apart from One who is truth and who[pg 262]is thus revealed. The separate electric lights in our streets are inexplicable apart from the electric current which throbs through the wires, and this electric current is itself inexplicable apart from the hidden dynamo whose power it exactly expresses and measures. The separate lights of truth are due to the realizing agency of the Holy Spirit; the one unifying current which they partially reveal is the outgoing work of Christ, the divine Logos; Christ is the one and only Revealer of him who dwells“in light unapproachable; whom no man hath seen, nor can see”(1 Tim. 6:16).Prof. H. E. Webster began his lectures“by assuming the Lord Jesus Christandthe multiplication-table.”But this was tautology, because the Lord Jesus Christ, the Truth, the only revealer of God, includes the multiplication-table. So Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:257; 2:202, unduly narrows the scope of Christ's revelation when he maintains that with Jesus truth is not the truth which corresponds to reality but rather the right conduct which corresponds to the duty prescribed by God.“Grace and truth”(John 1:17)then means the favor of God and the righteousness which God approves. To understand Jesus is impossible without being ethically like him. He is king of truth, in that he reveals this righteousness, and finds obedience for it among men. This ethical aspect of the truth, we would reply, important as it is, does not exclude but rather requires for its complement and presupposition that other aspect of the truth as the reality to which all being must conform and the conformity of all being to that reality. Since Christ is the truth of God, we are successful in our search for truth only as we recognize him. Whether all roads lead to Rome depends upon which way your face is turned. Follow a point of land out into the sea, and you find only ocean. With the back turned upon Jesus Christ all following after truth leads only into mist and darkness. Aristotle's ideal man was“a hunter after truth.”But truth can never be found disjoined from love, nor can the loveless seeker discern it.“For the loving worm within its clod Were diviner than a loveless God”(Robert Browning). Hence Christ can say:John 18:37—“Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.”(b) This attribute therefore constitutes the principle and guarantee of all revelation, while it shows the possibility of an eternal divine self-contemplation apart from and before all creation. It is to be understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity.To all this doctrine, however, a great school of philosophers have opposed themselves. Duns Scotus held that God's will made truth as well as right. Descartes said that God could have made it untrue that the radii of a circle are all equal. Lord Bacon said that Adam's sin consisted in seeking a good in itself, instead of being content with the merely empirical good. Whedon, On the Will, 316—“Infinite wisdom and infinite holiness consist in, and result from, God's volitions eternally.”We reply that, to make truth and good matters of mere will, instead of regarding them as characteristics of God's being, is to deny that anything is true or good in itself. If God can make truth to be falsehood, and injustice to be justice, then God is indifferent to truth or falsehood, to good or evil, and he ceases thereby to be God. Truth is not arbitrary,—it is matter of being—the being of God. There are no regulative principles of knowledge which are not transcendental also. God knows and wills truth, because he is truth. Robert Browning, A Soul's Tragedy, 214—“Were't not for God, I mean, what hope of truth—Speaking truth, hearing truth—would stay with Man?”God's will does not make truth, but truth rather makes God's will. God's perfect knowledge in eternity past has an object. That object must be himself. He is the truth Known, as well as the truthful Knower. But a perfect objective must be personal. The doctrine of the Trinity is the necessary complement to the doctrine of the Attributes. Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:183—“The pillar of cloud becomes a pillar of fire.”See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 102-112.On the question whether it is ever right to deceive, see Paine, Ethnic Trinities, 300-339. Plato said that the use of such medicines should be restricted to physicians. The rulers of the state may lie for the public good, but private people not:“officiosum mendacium.”It is better to say that deception is justifiable only where the person deceived has, like a wild beast or a criminal or an enemy in war, put himself out of human society and deprived himself of the right to truth. Even then deception is a sad necessity which witnesses to an abnormal condition of human affairs. With James Martineau, when asked what answer he would give to an intending murderer when truth would mean death, we may say:“I suppose I should tell an untruth, and then should be sorry for it forever after.”On truth as an attribute of God, see Bib. Sac., Oct. 1877:735; Finney, Syst. Theol., 661; Janet, Final Causes, 416.[pg 263]2. Love.By love we mean that attribute of the divine nature in virtue of which God is eternally moved to self-communication.1 John 4:8—“God is love”;3:16—“hereby know we love, because he laid down his life for us”;John 17:24—“thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world”;Rom. 15:30—“the love of the Spirit.”In further explanation we remark:A. Negatively:(a) The immanent love of God is not to be confounded with mercy and goodness toward creatures. These are its manifestations, and are to be denominated transitive love.Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:138, 139—“God's regard for the happiness of his creatures flows from this self-communicating attribute of his nature. Love, in the true sense of the word, is living good-will, with impulses to impartation and union; self-communication (bonum communicativum sui); devotion, merging of theegoin another, in order to penetrate, fill, bless this other with itself, and in this other, as in another self, to possess itself, without giving up itself or losing itself. Love is therefore possible only between persons, and always presupposes personality. Only as Trinity has God love, absolute love; because as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost he stands in perfect self-impartation, self-devotion, and communion with himself.”Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:136—“God has in himself the eternal and wholly adequate object of his love, independently of his relation to the world.”In the Greek mythology, Eros was one of the oldest and yet one of the youngest of the gods. So Dante makes the oldest angel to be the youngest, because nearest to God the fountain of life. In1 John 2:7, 8,“the old commandment”of love is evermore“a new commandment,”because it reflects this eternal attribute of God.“There is a love unstained by selfishness, Th' outpouring tide of self-abandonment, That loves to love, and deems its preciousness Repaid in loving, though no sentiment Of love returned reward its sacrament; Nor stays to question what the loved one will, But hymns its overture with blessings immanent; Rapt and sublimed by love's exalting thrill, Loves on, through frown or smile, divine, immortal still.”Clara Elizabeth Ward:“If I could gather every look of love, That ever any human creature wore, And all the looks that joy is mother of, All looks of grief that mortals ever bore, And mingle all with God-begotten grace, Methinks that I should see the Savior's face.”(b) Love is not the all-inclusive ethical attribute of God. It does not include truth, nor does it include holiness.Ladd, Philosophy of Conduct, 352, very properly denies that benevolence is the all-inclusive virtue. Justness and Truth, he remarks, are not reducible to benevolence. In a review of Ladd's work in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1903:185, C. M. Mead adds:“He comes to the conclusion that it is impossible to resolve all the virtues into the generic one of love or benevolence without either giving a definition of benevolence which is unwarranted and virtually nullifies the end aimed at, or failing to recognize certain virtues which are as genuinely virtues as benevolence itself. Particularly is it argued that the virtues of the will (courage, constancy, temperance), and the virtues of judgment (wisdom, justness, trueness), get no recognition in this attempt to subsume all virtues under the one virtue of love. 'The unity of the virtues is due to the unity of a personality, in active and varied relations with other persons' (361). If benevolence means wishinghappinessto all men, then happiness is made the ultimate good, and eudæmonism is accepted as the true ethical philosophy. But if, on the other hand, in order to avoid this conclusion, benevolence is made to mean wishing the highestwelfareto all men, and the highest welfare is conceived as a life of virtue, then we come to the rather inane conclusion that the essence of virtue is to wish that men may be virtuous.”See also art. by Vos, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1892:1-37.(c) Nor is God's love a mere regard for being in general, irrespective of its moral quality.Jonathan Edwards, in his treatise On the Nature of Virtue, defines virtue as regard for being in general. He considers that God's love is first of all directed toward himself as having the greatest quantity of being, and only secondarily directed toward[pg 264]his creatures whose quantity of being is infinitesimal as compared with his. But we reply that being in general is far too abstract a thing to elicit or justify love. Charles Hodge said truly that, if obligation is primarily due to being in general, then there is no more virtue in loving God than there is in loving Satan. Virtue, we hold, must consist, not in love for being in general, but in love for good being, that is, in love for God as holy. Love has no moral value except as it is placed upon a right object and is proportioned to the worth of that object.“Love of being in general”makes virtue an irrational thing, because it has no standard of conduct. Virtue is rather the love of God as right and as the source of right.G. S. Lee, The Shadow-cross, 38—“God is love, and law is the way he loves us. But it is also true that God is law, and love is the way he rules us.”Clarke, Christian Theology, 88—“Love is God's desire to impart himself, and so all good, to other persons, and to possess them for his own spiritual fellowship.”The intent to communicate himself is the intent to communicate holiness, and this is the“terminus ad quem”of God's administration. Drummond, in his Ascent of Man, shows that Love began with the first cell of life. Evolution is not a tale of battle, but a love-story. We gradually pass from selfism to otherism. Evolution is the object of nature, and altruism is the object of evolution. Man = nutrition, looking to his own things; Woman = reproduction, looking to the things of others. But the greatest of these is love. The mammalia = the mothers, last and highest, care for others. As the mother gives love, so the father gives righteousness. Law, once a latent thing, now becomes active. The father makes a sort of conscience for those beneath him. Nature, like Raphael, is producing a Holy Family.Jacob Boehme:“Throw open and throw out thy heart. For unless thou dost exercise thy heart, and the love of thy heart, upon every man in the world, thy self-love, thy pride, thy envy, thy distaste, thy dislike, will still have dominion over thee.... In the name and in the strength of God, love all men. Love thy neighbor as thyself, and do to thy neighbor as thou doest to thyself. And do it now. For now is the accepted time, and now is the day of salvation.”These expressions are scriptural and valuable, if they are interpreted ethically, and are understood to inculcate the supreme duty of loving the Holy One, of being holy as he is holy, and of seeking to bring all intelligent beings into conformity with his holiness.(d) God's love is not a merely emotional affection, proceeding from sense or impulse, nor is it prompted by utilitarian considerations.Of the two words for love in the N. T., φιλέω designates an emotional affection, which is not and cannot be commanded (John 11:36—“Behold how he loved him!”), while ἀγαπάω expresses a rational and benevolent affection which springs from deliberate choice (John 3:16—“God so loved the world”;Mat. 19:19—“Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself”;5:44—“Love your enemies”). Thayer, N. T. Lex., 653—Ἀγαπᾶν“properly denotes a love founded in admiration, veneration, esteem, like the Lat.diligere, to be kindly disposed to one, to wish one well; but φιλεîν denotes an inclination prompted by sense and emotion, Lat.amare.... Hence men are said ἀγαπᾶν God, not φιλεîν.”In this word ἀγάπη, when used of God, it is already implied that God loves, not for what he can get, but for what he can give. The rationality of his love involves moreover a subordination of the emotional element to a higher law than itself, namely, that of holiness. Even God's self-love must have a reason and norm in the perfections of his own being.B. Positively:(a) The immanent love of God is a rational and voluntary affection, grounded in perfect reason and deliberate choice.Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 3:277—“Love is will, aiming either at the appropriation of an object, or at the enrichment of its existence, because moved by a feeling of its worth.... Love is to persons; it is a constant will; it aims at the promotion of the other's personal end, whether known or conjectured; it takes up the other's personal end and makes it part of his own. Will, as love, does not give itself up for the other's sake; it aims at closest fellowship with the other for a common end.”A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 388-405—“Love is not rightfully independent of the other faculties, but is subject to regulation and control.... We sometimes say that religion consists in love.... It would be more strictly true to say that religion consists in a new direction of our love, a turning of the current toward God which once flowed[pg 265]toward self.... Christianity rectifies the affections, before excessive, impulsive, lawless,—gives them worthy and immortal objects, regulates their intensity in some due proportion to the value of the things they rest upon, and teaches the true methods of their manifestation. In true religion love forms a copartnership with reason.... God's love is no arbitrary, wild, passionate torrent of emotion ... and we become like God by bringing our emotions, sympathies, affections, under the dominion of reason and conscience.”(b) Since God's love is rational, it involves a subordination of theemotionalelement to a higher law than itself, namely, that of truth and holiness.Phil. 1:9—“And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and all discernment.”True love among men illustrates God's love. It merges self in another instead of making that other an appendage to self. It seeks the other's true good, not merely his present enjoyment or advantage. Its aim is to realize the divine idea in that other, and therefore it is exercised for God's sake and in the strength which God supplies. Hence it is a love for holiness, and is under law to holiness. So God's love takes into account the highest interests, and makes infinite sacrifice to secure them. For the sake of saving a world of sinners, God“spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all”(Rom. 8:32), and“Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all”(Is. 53:6). Love requires a rule or standard for its regulation. This rule or standard is the holiness of God. So once more we see that love cannot include holiness, because it is subject to the law of holiness. Love desires only the best for its object, and the best isGod. The golden rule does not bid us give what others desire, but what they need:Rom. 15:2—“Let each one of us please his neighbor for that which is good, unto edifying.”(c) The immanent love of God therefore requires and finds a perfect standard in his own holiness, and a personal object in the image of his own infinite perfections. It is to be understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity.As there is a higher Mind than our mind, so there is a greater Heart than our heart. God is not simply the loving One—he is also the Love that is loved. There is an infinite life of sensibility and affection in God. God has feeling, and in an infinite degree. But feeling alone is not love. Love implies not merely receiving but giving, not merely emotion but impartation. So the love of God is shown in his eternal giving.James 1:5—“God, who giveth,”or“the giving God”(τοῦ διδόντος Θεοῦ) = giving is not an episode in his being—it is his nature to give. And not only togive, but to givehimself. This he does eternally in the self-communications of the Trinity; this he does transitively and temporally in his giving of himself for us in Christ, and to us in the Holy Spirit.Jonathan Edwards, Essay on Trinity (ed. G. P. Fisher), 79—“That in John God is love shows that there are more persons than one in the Deity, for it shows love to be essential and necessary to the Deity, so that his nature consists in it, and this supposes that there is an eternal and necessary object, because all love respects another that is the beloved. By love here the apostle certainly means something beside that which is commonly called self-love: that is very improperly called love, and is a thing of an exceeding diverse nature from the affection or virtue of love the apostle is speaking of.”When Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 226-239, makes the first characteristic of love to be self-affirmation, and when Dorner, Christian Ethics, 73, makes self-assertion an essential part of love, they violate linguistic usage by including under love what properly belongs to holiness.(d) The immanent love of God constitutes a ground of the divine blessedness. Since there is an infinite and perfect object of love, as well as of knowledge and will, in God's own nature, the existence of the universe is not necessary to his serenity and joy.Blessedness is not itself a divine attribute; it is rather a result of the exercise of the divine attributes. It is a subjective result of this exercise, as glory is an objective result. Perfect faculties, with perfect objects for their exercise, ensure God's blessedness. But love is especially its source.Acts 20:35—“It is more blessed to give than to receive.”Happiness (hap, happen) is grounded in circumstances; blessedness, in character.[pg 266]Love precedes creation and is the ground of creation. Its object therefore cannot be the universe, for that does not exist, and, if it did exist, could not be a proper object of love for the infinite God. The only sufficient object of his love is the image of his own perfections, for that alone is equal to himself. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 264—“Man most truly realizes his own nature, when he is ruled by rational, self-forgetful love. He cannot help inferring that the highest thing in the individual consciousness is the dominant thing in the universe at large.”Here we may assent, if we remember that not the love itself but that which is loved must be the dominant thing, and we shall see that to be not love but holiness.Jones, Robert Browning, 219—“Love is for Browning the highest, richest conception man can form. It is our idea of that which is perfect; we cannot even imagine anything better. And the idea of evolution necessarily explains the world as the return of the highest to itself. The universe is homeward bound.... All things are potentially spirit, and all the phenomena of the world are manifestations of love.... Man's reason is not, but man's love is, a direct emanation from the inmost being of God”(345). Browning should have applied to truth and holiness the same principle which he recognized with regard to love. But we gratefully accept his dicta:“He that created love, shall not he love?... God! thou art Love! I build my faith on that.”(e) The love of God involves also the possibility of divine suffering, and the suffering on account of sin which holiness necessitates on the part of God is itself the atonement.Christ is“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”(Rev. 13:8);1 Pet. 1:19, 20—“precious blood, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, even the blood of Christ: who was foreknown indeed before the foundation of the world.”While holiness requires atonement, love provides it. The blessedness of God is consistent with sorrow for human misery and sin. God is passible, or capable of suffering. The permission of moral evil in the decree of creation was at cost to God. Scripture attributes to him emotions of grief and anger at human sin (Gen. 6:6—“it grieved him at his heart”;Rom. 1:18—“wrath of God”;Eph. 4:30—“grieve not the Holy Spirit of God”); painful sacrifice in the gift of Christ (Rom. 8:32—“spared not his own son”;cf.Gen. 22:16—“hast not withheld thy son”) and participation in the suffering of his people (Is. 63:9—“in all their affliction he was afflicted”); Jesus Christ in his sorrow and sympathy, his tears and agony, is the revealer of God's feelings toward the race, and we are urged to follow in his steps, that we may be perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect. We cannot, indeed, conceive of love without self-sacrifice, nor of self-sacrifice without suffering. It would seem, then, that as immutability is consistent with imperative volitions in human history, so the blessedness of God may be consistent with emotions of sorrow.But does God feel in proportion to his greatness, as the mother suffers more than the sick child whom she tends? Does God suffer infinitely in every suffering of his creatures? We must remember that God is infinitely greater than his creation, and that he sees all human sin and woe as part of his great plan. We are entitled to attribute to him only such passibleness as is consistent with infinite perfection. In combining passibleness with blessedness, then, we must allow blessedness to be the controlling element, for our fundamental idea of God is that of absolute perfection. Martensen, Dogmatics, 101—“This limitation is swallowed up in the inner life of perfection which God lives, in total independence of his creation, and in triumphant prospect of the fulfilment of his great designs. We may therefore say with the old theosophic writers:‘In the outer chambers is sadness, but in the inner ones is unmixed joy.’”Christ was“anointed ... with the oil of gladness above his fellows,”and“for the joy that was set before him endured the cross”(Heb. 1:9; 12:2). Love rejoices even in pain, when this brings good to those beloved.“Though round its base the rolling clouds are spread, Eternal sunshine settles on its head.”In George Adam Smith's Life of Henry Drummond, 11, Drummond cries out after hearing the confessions of men who came to him:“I am sick of the sins of these men! How can God bear it?”Simon, Reconciliation, 338-343, shows that before the incarnation, the Logos was a sufferer from the sins of men. This suffering however was kept in check and counterbalanced by his consciousness as a factor in the Godhead, and by the clear knowledge that men were themselves the causes of this suffering. After he became incarnate he suffered without knowing whence all the suffering came. He had a subconscious life into which were interwoven elements due to the sinful conduct of the race whose energy was drawn from himself and with which in addition he had organically united himself. If this is limitation, it is also self-limitation which[pg 267]Christ could have avoided by not creating, preserving, and redeeming mankind. We rejoice in giving away a daughter in marriage, even though it costs pain. The highest blessedness in the Christian is coincident with agony for the souls of others. We partake of Christ's joy only when we know the fellowship of his sufferings. Joy and sorrow can coëxist, like Greek fire, that burns under water.Abbé Gratry, La Morale et la Loi de l'Histoire, 165, 166—“What! Do you really suppose that the personal God, free and intelligent, loving and good, who knows every detail of human torture, and hears every sigh—this God who sees, who loves as we do, and more than we do—do you believe that he is present and looks pitilessly on what breaks your heart, and what to him must be the spectacle of Satan reveling in the blood of humanity? History teaches us that men so feel for sufferers that they have been drawn to die with them, so that their own executioners have become the next martyrs. And yet you represent God, the absolute goodness, as alone impassible? It is here that our evangelical faith comes in. Our God was made man to suffer and to die! Yes, here is the true God. He has suffered from the beginning in all who have suffered. He has been hungry in all who have hungered. He has been immolated in all and with all who have offered up their lives. He is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.”Similarly Alexander Vinet, Vital Christianity, 240, remarks that“The suffering God is not simply the teaching of modern divines. It is a New Testament thought, and it is one that answers all the doubts that arise at the sight of human suffering. To know that God is suffering with it makes that suffering more awful, but it gives strength and life and hope, for we know that, if God is in it, suffering is the road to victory. If he shares our suffering we shall share his crown,”and we can say with thePsalmist, 68:19—“Blessed be God, who daily beareth our burden, even the God who is our salvation,”and withIsaiah 63:9—“In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them.”Borden P. Bowne, Atonement:“Something like this work of grace was a moral necessity with God. It was an awful responsibility that was taken when our human race was launched with its fearful possibilities of good and evil. God thereby put himself under infinite obligation to care for his human family; and reflections on his position as Creator and Ruler, instead of removing, only make more manifest this obligation. So long as we conceive God as sitting apart in supreme ease and self-satisfaction, he is notloveat all, but only a reflection of our selfishness and vulgarity. So long as we conceive him as bestowing blessing upon us out of his infinite fulness, but at no real cost to himself, he sinks below the moral heroes of our race. There is ever a higher thought possible, until we see God taking the world upon his heart, entering into the fellowship of our sorrow, and becoming the supreme burden bearer and leader in self-sacrifice. Then only are the possibilities of grace and condescension and love and moral heroism filled up, so that nothing higher remains. And the work of Christ, so far as it was a historical event, must be viewed not merely as a piece of history, but also as a manifestation of that cross which was hidden in the divine love from the foundation of the world, and which is involved in the existence of the human world at all.”Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 264—“The eternal resolution that, if the worldwillbe tragic, itshallstill, in Satan's despite, be spiritual, is the very essence of the eternal joy of that World-Spirit of whose wisdom ours is but a fragmentary reflection.... When you suffer, your sufferings are God's sufferings,—not his external work nor his external penalty, nor the fruit of his neglect, but identically his own personal woe. In you God himself suffers, precisely as you do, and has all your reason for overcoming this grief.”Henry N. Dodge, Christus Victor:“O Thou, that from eternity Upon thy wounded heart hast borne Each pang and cry of misery Wherewith our human hearts are torn, Thy love upon the grievous cross Doth glow, the beacon-light of time, Forever sharing pain and loss With every man in every clime. How vast, how vast Thy sacrifice, As ages come and ages go, Still waiting till it shall suffice To draw the last cold heart and slow!”On the question, Is God passible? see Bennett Tyler, Sufferings of Christ; A Layman, Sufferings of Christ; Woods, Works, 1:299-317; Bib. Sac., 11:744; 17:422-424; Emmons, Works, 4:201-208; Fairbairn, Place of Christ, 483-487; Bushnell, Vic. Sacrifice, 59-93; Kedney, Christ. Doctrine Harmonized, 1:185-245; Edward Beecher, Concord of Ages, 81-204; Young, Life and Light of Men, 20-43, 147-150; Schaff, Hist. Christ. Church, 2:191; Crawford, Fatherhood of God, 43, 44; Anselm, Proslogion, cap. 8; Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 268; John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:117, 118, 137-142.Per[pg 268]contra, see Shedd, Essays and Addresses, 277, 279 note; Woods, in Lit. and Theol. Rev., 1834:43-61; Harris, God the Creator and Lord of All, 1:201. On the Biblical conception of Love in general, see article by James Orr, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.
Third Division.—Perfection, and attributes therein involved.By perfection we mean, not mere quantitative completeness, but qualitative excellence. The attributes involved in perfection are moral attributes. Right action among men presupposes a perfect moral organization, a normal state of intellect, affection and will. So God's activity presupposes a principle of intelligence, of affection, of volition, in his inmost being, and the existence of a worthy object for each of these powers of his nature. But in eternity past there is nothing existing outside or apart from God. He must find, and he does find, the sufficient object of intellect, affection, and will, in himself. There is a self-knowing, a self-loving, a self-willing, which constitute his absolute perfection. The consideration of the immanent attributes is, therefore, properly concluded with an account of that truth, love, and holiness, which render God entirely sufficient to himself.Mat. 5:48—“Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect”;Rom. 12:2—“perfect will of God”;Col. 1:28—“perfect in Christ”;cf.Deut. 32:4—“The Rock, his work is perfect”;Ps. 18:30—“As for God, his way is perfect.”1. Truth.By truth we mean that attribute of the divine nature in virtue of which God's being and God's knowledge eternally conform to each other.In further explanation we remark:A. Negatively:(a) The immanent truth of God is not to be confounded with that veracity and faithfulness which partially manifest it to creatures. These are transitive truth, and they presuppose the absolute and immanent attribute.Deut 32:4—“A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, Just and right is he”;John 17:3—“the only true God”(ἀληθινόν);1 John 5:20—“we know him that is true”(τὸν ἀληθινόν). In both these passages ἀληθινός describes God as the genuine, the real, as distinguished from ἀληθής, the veracious (compareJohn 6:32—“the true bread”;Heb. 8:2—“the true tabernacle”).John 14:6—“I am ... the truth.”As“I am ... the life”signifies, not“I am the living one,”but rather“I[pg 261]am he who is life and the source of life,”so“I am ... the truth”signifies, not“I am the truthful one,”but“I am he who is truth and the source of truth”—in other words, truth of being, not merely truth of expression. So1 John 5:7—“the Spirit is the truth.”Cf.1 Esdras 1:38—“The truth abideth and is forever strong, and it liveth and ruleth forever”= personal truth? See Godet onJohn 1:18; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:181.Truth is God perfectly revealed and known. It may be likened to the electric current which manifests and measures the power of the dynamo. There is no realm of truth apart from the world-ground, just as there is no law of nature that is independent of the Author of nature. While we know ourselves only partially, God knows himself fully. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 1:192—“In the life of God there are no unrealized possibilities. The presupposition of all our knowledge and activity is that absolute and eternal unity of knowing and being which is only another expression for the nature of God. In one sense, he is all reality, and the only reality, whilst all finite existence is but abecoming, which neveris.”Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 57-63—“Truth is reality revealed. Jesus is the Truth, because in him the sum of the qualities hidden in God is presented and revealed to the world, God's nature in terms of an active force and in relation to his rational creation.”This definition however ignores the fact that God is truth, apart from and before all creation. As an immanent attribute, truth implies a conformity of God's knowledge to God's being, which antedates the universe; see B. (b) below.(b) Truth in God is not a merely active attribute of the divine nature. God is truth, not only in the sense that he is the being who truly knows, but also in the sense that he is the truth that is known. The passive precedes the active; truth of being precedes truth of knowing.Plato:“Truth is his (God's) body, and light his shadow.”Hollaz (quoted in Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:137) says that“truth is the conformity of the divine essence with the divine intellect.”See Gerhard, loc. ii:152; Kahnis, Dogmatik, 2:272, 279; 3:193—“Distinguish in God the personal self-consciousness [spirituality, personality—see pages 252, 253] from the unfolding of this in the divine knowledge, which can have no other object but God himself. So far, now, as self-knowing in God is absolutely identical with his being is he the absolutely true. For truth is the knowledge which answers to the being, and the being which answers to the knowledge.”Royce, World and Individual, 1:270—“Truth either may mean that about which we judge,orit may mean the correspondence between our ideas and their objects.”God's truth is both object of his knowledge and knowledge of his object. Miss Clara French, The Dramatic Action and Motive of King John:“You spell Truth with a capital, and make it an independent existence to be sought for and absorbed; but, unless truth is God, what can it do for man? It is only a personality that can touch a personality.”So we assent to the poet's declaration that“Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again,”only because Truth is personal. Christ, the Revealer of God, is the Truth. He is not simply the medium but also the object of all knowledge;Eph. 4:20—“ye did not so learn Christ”= ye knew more than the doctrine about Christ,—ye knew Christ himself;John 17:3—“this is life eternal that they should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.”B. Positively:(a) All truth among men, whether mathematical, logical, moral, or religious, is to be regarded as having its foundation in this immanent truth of the divine nature and as disclosing facts in the being of God.There is a higher Mind than our mind. No apostle can say“I am the truth,”though each of them can say“I speak the truth.”Truth is not a scientific or moral, but a substantial, thing—“nicht Schulsache, sondern Lebenssache.”Here is the dignity of education, that knowledge of truth is knowledge of God. The laws of mathematics are disclosures to us, not of the divine reason merely, for this would imply truth outside of and before God, but of the divine nature. J. W. A. Stewart:“Science is possible because God is scientific.”Plato:“God geometrizes.”Bowne:“The heavens are crystalized mathematics.”The statement that two and two make four, or that virtue is commendable and vice condemnable, expresses an everlasting principle in the being of God. Separate statements of truth are inexplicable apart from the total revelation of truth, and this total revelation is inexplicable apart from One who is truth and who[pg 262]is thus revealed. The separate electric lights in our streets are inexplicable apart from the electric current which throbs through the wires, and this electric current is itself inexplicable apart from the hidden dynamo whose power it exactly expresses and measures. The separate lights of truth are due to the realizing agency of the Holy Spirit; the one unifying current which they partially reveal is the outgoing work of Christ, the divine Logos; Christ is the one and only Revealer of him who dwells“in light unapproachable; whom no man hath seen, nor can see”(1 Tim. 6:16).Prof. H. E. Webster began his lectures“by assuming the Lord Jesus Christandthe multiplication-table.”But this was tautology, because the Lord Jesus Christ, the Truth, the only revealer of God, includes the multiplication-table. So Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:257; 2:202, unduly narrows the scope of Christ's revelation when he maintains that with Jesus truth is not the truth which corresponds to reality but rather the right conduct which corresponds to the duty prescribed by God.“Grace and truth”(John 1:17)then means the favor of God and the righteousness which God approves. To understand Jesus is impossible without being ethically like him. He is king of truth, in that he reveals this righteousness, and finds obedience for it among men. This ethical aspect of the truth, we would reply, important as it is, does not exclude but rather requires for its complement and presupposition that other aspect of the truth as the reality to which all being must conform and the conformity of all being to that reality. Since Christ is the truth of God, we are successful in our search for truth only as we recognize him. Whether all roads lead to Rome depends upon which way your face is turned. Follow a point of land out into the sea, and you find only ocean. With the back turned upon Jesus Christ all following after truth leads only into mist and darkness. Aristotle's ideal man was“a hunter after truth.”But truth can never be found disjoined from love, nor can the loveless seeker discern it.“For the loving worm within its clod Were diviner than a loveless God”(Robert Browning). Hence Christ can say:John 18:37—“Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.”(b) This attribute therefore constitutes the principle and guarantee of all revelation, while it shows the possibility of an eternal divine self-contemplation apart from and before all creation. It is to be understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity.To all this doctrine, however, a great school of philosophers have opposed themselves. Duns Scotus held that God's will made truth as well as right. Descartes said that God could have made it untrue that the radii of a circle are all equal. Lord Bacon said that Adam's sin consisted in seeking a good in itself, instead of being content with the merely empirical good. Whedon, On the Will, 316—“Infinite wisdom and infinite holiness consist in, and result from, God's volitions eternally.”We reply that, to make truth and good matters of mere will, instead of regarding them as characteristics of God's being, is to deny that anything is true or good in itself. If God can make truth to be falsehood, and injustice to be justice, then God is indifferent to truth or falsehood, to good or evil, and he ceases thereby to be God. Truth is not arbitrary,—it is matter of being—the being of God. There are no regulative principles of knowledge which are not transcendental also. God knows and wills truth, because he is truth. Robert Browning, A Soul's Tragedy, 214—“Were't not for God, I mean, what hope of truth—Speaking truth, hearing truth—would stay with Man?”God's will does not make truth, but truth rather makes God's will. God's perfect knowledge in eternity past has an object. That object must be himself. He is the truth Known, as well as the truthful Knower. But a perfect objective must be personal. The doctrine of the Trinity is the necessary complement to the doctrine of the Attributes. Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:183—“The pillar of cloud becomes a pillar of fire.”See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 102-112.On the question whether it is ever right to deceive, see Paine, Ethnic Trinities, 300-339. Plato said that the use of such medicines should be restricted to physicians. The rulers of the state may lie for the public good, but private people not:“officiosum mendacium.”It is better to say that deception is justifiable only where the person deceived has, like a wild beast or a criminal or an enemy in war, put himself out of human society and deprived himself of the right to truth. Even then deception is a sad necessity which witnesses to an abnormal condition of human affairs. With James Martineau, when asked what answer he would give to an intending murderer when truth would mean death, we may say:“I suppose I should tell an untruth, and then should be sorry for it forever after.”On truth as an attribute of God, see Bib. Sac., Oct. 1877:735; Finney, Syst. Theol., 661; Janet, Final Causes, 416.[pg 263]2. Love.By love we mean that attribute of the divine nature in virtue of which God is eternally moved to self-communication.1 John 4:8—“God is love”;3:16—“hereby know we love, because he laid down his life for us”;John 17:24—“thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world”;Rom. 15:30—“the love of the Spirit.”In further explanation we remark:A. Negatively:(a) The immanent love of God is not to be confounded with mercy and goodness toward creatures. These are its manifestations, and are to be denominated transitive love.Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:138, 139—“God's regard for the happiness of his creatures flows from this self-communicating attribute of his nature. Love, in the true sense of the word, is living good-will, with impulses to impartation and union; self-communication (bonum communicativum sui); devotion, merging of theegoin another, in order to penetrate, fill, bless this other with itself, and in this other, as in another self, to possess itself, without giving up itself or losing itself. Love is therefore possible only between persons, and always presupposes personality. Only as Trinity has God love, absolute love; because as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost he stands in perfect self-impartation, self-devotion, and communion with himself.”Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:136—“God has in himself the eternal and wholly adequate object of his love, independently of his relation to the world.”In the Greek mythology, Eros was one of the oldest and yet one of the youngest of the gods. So Dante makes the oldest angel to be the youngest, because nearest to God the fountain of life. In1 John 2:7, 8,“the old commandment”of love is evermore“a new commandment,”because it reflects this eternal attribute of God.“There is a love unstained by selfishness, Th' outpouring tide of self-abandonment, That loves to love, and deems its preciousness Repaid in loving, though no sentiment Of love returned reward its sacrament; Nor stays to question what the loved one will, But hymns its overture with blessings immanent; Rapt and sublimed by love's exalting thrill, Loves on, through frown or smile, divine, immortal still.”Clara Elizabeth Ward:“If I could gather every look of love, That ever any human creature wore, And all the looks that joy is mother of, All looks of grief that mortals ever bore, And mingle all with God-begotten grace, Methinks that I should see the Savior's face.”(b) Love is not the all-inclusive ethical attribute of God. It does not include truth, nor does it include holiness.Ladd, Philosophy of Conduct, 352, very properly denies that benevolence is the all-inclusive virtue. Justness and Truth, he remarks, are not reducible to benevolence. In a review of Ladd's work in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1903:185, C. M. Mead adds:“He comes to the conclusion that it is impossible to resolve all the virtues into the generic one of love or benevolence without either giving a definition of benevolence which is unwarranted and virtually nullifies the end aimed at, or failing to recognize certain virtues which are as genuinely virtues as benevolence itself. Particularly is it argued that the virtues of the will (courage, constancy, temperance), and the virtues of judgment (wisdom, justness, trueness), get no recognition in this attempt to subsume all virtues under the one virtue of love. 'The unity of the virtues is due to the unity of a personality, in active and varied relations with other persons' (361). If benevolence means wishinghappinessto all men, then happiness is made the ultimate good, and eudæmonism is accepted as the true ethical philosophy. But if, on the other hand, in order to avoid this conclusion, benevolence is made to mean wishing the highestwelfareto all men, and the highest welfare is conceived as a life of virtue, then we come to the rather inane conclusion that the essence of virtue is to wish that men may be virtuous.”See also art. by Vos, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1892:1-37.(c) Nor is God's love a mere regard for being in general, irrespective of its moral quality.Jonathan Edwards, in his treatise On the Nature of Virtue, defines virtue as regard for being in general. He considers that God's love is first of all directed toward himself as having the greatest quantity of being, and only secondarily directed toward[pg 264]his creatures whose quantity of being is infinitesimal as compared with his. But we reply that being in general is far too abstract a thing to elicit or justify love. Charles Hodge said truly that, if obligation is primarily due to being in general, then there is no more virtue in loving God than there is in loving Satan. Virtue, we hold, must consist, not in love for being in general, but in love for good being, that is, in love for God as holy. Love has no moral value except as it is placed upon a right object and is proportioned to the worth of that object.“Love of being in general”makes virtue an irrational thing, because it has no standard of conduct. Virtue is rather the love of God as right and as the source of right.G. S. Lee, The Shadow-cross, 38—“God is love, and law is the way he loves us. But it is also true that God is law, and love is the way he rules us.”Clarke, Christian Theology, 88—“Love is God's desire to impart himself, and so all good, to other persons, and to possess them for his own spiritual fellowship.”The intent to communicate himself is the intent to communicate holiness, and this is the“terminus ad quem”of God's administration. Drummond, in his Ascent of Man, shows that Love began with the first cell of life. Evolution is not a tale of battle, but a love-story. We gradually pass from selfism to otherism. Evolution is the object of nature, and altruism is the object of evolution. Man = nutrition, looking to his own things; Woman = reproduction, looking to the things of others. But the greatest of these is love. The mammalia = the mothers, last and highest, care for others. As the mother gives love, so the father gives righteousness. Law, once a latent thing, now becomes active. The father makes a sort of conscience for those beneath him. Nature, like Raphael, is producing a Holy Family.Jacob Boehme:“Throw open and throw out thy heart. For unless thou dost exercise thy heart, and the love of thy heart, upon every man in the world, thy self-love, thy pride, thy envy, thy distaste, thy dislike, will still have dominion over thee.... In the name and in the strength of God, love all men. Love thy neighbor as thyself, and do to thy neighbor as thou doest to thyself. And do it now. For now is the accepted time, and now is the day of salvation.”These expressions are scriptural and valuable, if they are interpreted ethically, and are understood to inculcate the supreme duty of loving the Holy One, of being holy as he is holy, and of seeking to bring all intelligent beings into conformity with his holiness.(d) God's love is not a merely emotional affection, proceeding from sense or impulse, nor is it prompted by utilitarian considerations.Of the two words for love in the N. T., φιλέω designates an emotional affection, which is not and cannot be commanded (John 11:36—“Behold how he loved him!”), while ἀγαπάω expresses a rational and benevolent affection which springs from deliberate choice (John 3:16—“God so loved the world”;Mat. 19:19—“Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself”;5:44—“Love your enemies”). Thayer, N. T. Lex., 653—Ἀγαπᾶν“properly denotes a love founded in admiration, veneration, esteem, like the Lat.diligere, to be kindly disposed to one, to wish one well; but φιλεîν denotes an inclination prompted by sense and emotion, Lat.amare.... Hence men are said ἀγαπᾶν God, not φιλεîν.”In this word ἀγάπη, when used of God, it is already implied that God loves, not for what he can get, but for what he can give. The rationality of his love involves moreover a subordination of the emotional element to a higher law than itself, namely, that of holiness. Even God's self-love must have a reason and norm in the perfections of his own being.B. Positively:(a) The immanent love of God is a rational and voluntary affection, grounded in perfect reason and deliberate choice.Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 3:277—“Love is will, aiming either at the appropriation of an object, or at the enrichment of its existence, because moved by a feeling of its worth.... Love is to persons; it is a constant will; it aims at the promotion of the other's personal end, whether known or conjectured; it takes up the other's personal end and makes it part of his own. Will, as love, does not give itself up for the other's sake; it aims at closest fellowship with the other for a common end.”A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 388-405—“Love is not rightfully independent of the other faculties, but is subject to regulation and control.... We sometimes say that religion consists in love.... It would be more strictly true to say that religion consists in a new direction of our love, a turning of the current toward God which once flowed[pg 265]toward self.... Christianity rectifies the affections, before excessive, impulsive, lawless,—gives them worthy and immortal objects, regulates their intensity in some due proportion to the value of the things they rest upon, and teaches the true methods of their manifestation. In true religion love forms a copartnership with reason.... God's love is no arbitrary, wild, passionate torrent of emotion ... and we become like God by bringing our emotions, sympathies, affections, under the dominion of reason and conscience.”(b) Since God's love is rational, it involves a subordination of theemotionalelement to a higher law than itself, namely, that of truth and holiness.Phil. 1:9—“And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and all discernment.”True love among men illustrates God's love. It merges self in another instead of making that other an appendage to self. It seeks the other's true good, not merely his present enjoyment or advantage. Its aim is to realize the divine idea in that other, and therefore it is exercised for God's sake and in the strength which God supplies. Hence it is a love for holiness, and is under law to holiness. So God's love takes into account the highest interests, and makes infinite sacrifice to secure them. For the sake of saving a world of sinners, God“spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all”(Rom. 8:32), and“Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all”(Is. 53:6). Love requires a rule or standard for its regulation. This rule or standard is the holiness of God. So once more we see that love cannot include holiness, because it is subject to the law of holiness. Love desires only the best for its object, and the best isGod. The golden rule does not bid us give what others desire, but what they need:Rom. 15:2—“Let each one of us please his neighbor for that which is good, unto edifying.”(c) The immanent love of God therefore requires and finds a perfect standard in his own holiness, and a personal object in the image of his own infinite perfections. It is to be understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity.As there is a higher Mind than our mind, so there is a greater Heart than our heart. God is not simply the loving One—he is also the Love that is loved. There is an infinite life of sensibility and affection in God. God has feeling, and in an infinite degree. But feeling alone is not love. Love implies not merely receiving but giving, not merely emotion but impartation. So the love of God is shown in his eternal giving.James 1:5—“God, who giveth,”or“the giving God”(τοῦ διδόντος Θεοῦ) = giving is not an episode in his being—it is his nature to give. And not only togive, but to givehimself. This he does eternally in the self-communications of the Trinity; this he does transitively and temporally in his giving of himself for us in Christ, and to us in the Holy Spirit.Jonathan Edwards, Essay on Trinity (ed. G. P. Fisher), 79—“That in John God is love shows that there are more persons than one in the Deity, for it shows love to be essential and necessary to the Deity, so that his nature consists in it, and this supposes that there is an eternal and necessary object, because all love respects another that is the beloved. By love here the apostle certainly means something beside that which is commonly called self-love: that is very improperly called love, and is a thing of an exceeding diverse nature from the affection or virtue of love the apostle is speaking of.”When Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 226-239, makes the first characteristic of love to be self-affirmation, and when Dorner, Christian Ethics, 73, makes self-assertion an essential part of love, they violate linguistic usage by including under love what properly belongs to holiness.(d) The immanent love of God constitutes a ground of the divine blessedness. Since there is an infinite and perfect object of love, as well as of knowledge and will, in God's own nature, the existence of the universe is not necessary to his serenity and joy.Blessedness is not itself a divine attribute; it is rather a result of the exercise of the divine attributes. It is a subjective result of this exercise, as glory is an objective result. Perfect faculties, with perfect objects for their exercise, ensure God's blessedness. But love is especially its source.Acts 20:35—“It is more blessed to give than to receive.”Happiness (hap, happen) is grounded in circumstances; blessedness, in character.[pg 266]Love precedes creation and is the ground of creation. Its object therefore cannot be the universe, for that does not exist, and, if it did exist, could not be a proper object of love for the infinite God. The only sufficient object of his love is the image of his own perfections, for that alone is equal to himself. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 264—“Man most truly realizes his own nature, when he is ruled by rational, self-forgetful love. He cannot help inferring that the highest thing in the individual consciousness is the dominant thing in the universe at large.”Here we may assent, if we remember that not the love itself but that which is loved must be the dominant thing, and we shall see that to be not love but holiness.Jones, Robert Browning, 219—“Love is for Browning the highest, richest conception man can form. It is our idea of that which is perfect; we cannot even imagine anything better. And the idea of evolution necessarily explains the world as the return of the highest to itself. The universe is homeward bound.... All things are potentially spirit, and all the phenomena of the world are manifestations of love.... Man's reason is not, but man's love is, a direct emanation from the inmost being of God”(345). Browning should have applied to truth and holiness the same principle which he recognized with regard to love. But we gratefully accept his dicta:“He that created love, shall not he love?... God! thou art Love! I build my faith on that.”(e) The love of God involves also the possibility of divine suffering, and the suffering on account of sin which holiness necessitates on the part of God is itself the atonement.Christ is“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”(Rev. 13:8);1 Pet. 1:19, 20—“precious blood, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, even the blood of Christ: who was foreknown indeed before the foundation of the world.”While holiness requires atonement, love provides it. The blessedness of God is consistent with sorrow for human misery and sin. God is passible, or capable of suffering. The permission of moral evil in the decree of creation was at cost to God. Scripture attributes to him emotions of grief and anger at human sin (Gen. 6:6—“it grieved him at his heart”;Rom. 1:18—“wrath of God”;Eph. 4:30—“grieve not the Holy Spirit of God”); painful sacrifice in the gift of Christ (Rom. 8:32—“spared not his own son”;cf.Gen. 22:16—“hast not withheld thy son”) and participation in the suffering of his people (Is. 63:9—“in all their affliction he was afflicted”); Jesus Christ in his sorrow and sympathy, his tears and agony, is the revealer of God's feelings toward the race, and we are urged to follow in his steps, that we may be perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect. We cannot, indeed, conceive of love without self-sacrifice, nor of self-sacrifice without suffering. It would seem, then, that as immutability is consistent with imperative volitions in human history, so the blessedness of God may be consistent with emotions of sorrow.But does God feel in proportion to his greatness, as the mother suffers more than the sick child whom she tends? Does God suffer infinitely in every suffering of his creatures? We must remember that God is infinitely greater than his creation, and that he sees all human sin and woe as part of his great plan. We are entitled to attribute to him only such passibleness as is consistent with infinite perfection. In combining passibleness with blessedness, then, we must allow blessedness to be the controlling element, for our fundamental idea of God is that of absolute perfection. Martensen, Dogmatics, 101—“This limitation is swallowed up in the inner life of perfection which God lives, in total independence of his creation, and in triumphant prospect of the fulfilment of his great designs. We may therefore say with the old theosophic writers:‘In the outer chambers is sadness, but in the inner ones is unmixed joy.’”Christ was“anointed ... with the oil of gladness above his fellows,”and“for the joy that was set before him endured the cross”(Heb. 1:9; 12:2). Love rejoices even in pain, when this brings good to those beloved.“Though round its base the rolling clouds are spread, Eternal sunshine settles on its head.”In George Adam Smith's Life of Henry Drummond, 11, Drummond cries out after hearing the confessions of men who came to him:“I am sick of the sins of these men! How can God bear it?”Simon, Reconciliation, 338-343, shows that before the incarnation, the Logos was a sufferer from the sins of men. This suffering however was kept in check and counterbalanced by his consciousness as a factor in the Godhead, and by the clear knowledge that men were themselves the causes of this suffering. After he became incarnate he suffered without knowing whence all the suffering came. He had a subconscious life into which were interwoven elements due to the sinful conduct of the race whose energy was drawn from himself and with which in addition he had organically united himself. If this is limitation, it is also self-limitation which[pg 267]Christ could have avoided by not creating, preserving, and redeeming mankind. We rejoice in giving away a daughter in marriage, even though it costs pain. The highest blessedness in the Christian is coincident with agony for the souls of others. We partake of Christ's joy only when we know the fellowship of his sufferings. Joy and sorrow can coëxist, like Greek fire, that burns under water.Abbé Gratry, La Morale et la Loi de l'Histoire, 165, 166—“What! Do you really suppose that the personal God, free and intelligent, loving and good, who knows every detail of human torture, and hears every sigh—this God who sees, who loves as we do, and more than we do—do you believe that he is present and looks pitilessly on what breaks your heart, and what to him must be the spectacle of Satan reveling in the blood of humanity? History teaches us that men so feel for sufferers that they have been drawn to die with them, so that their own executioners have become the next martyrs. And yet you represent God, the absolute goodness, as alone impassible? It is here that our evangelical faith comes in. Our God was made man to suffer and to die! Yes, here is the true God. He has suffered from the beginning in all who have suffered. He has been hungry in all who have hungered. He has been immolated in all and with all who have offered up their lives. He is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.”Similarly Alexander Vinet, Vital Christianity, 240, remarks that“The suffering God is not simply the teaching of modern divines. It is a New Testament thought, and it is one that answers all the doubts that arise at the sight of human suffering. To know that God is suffering with it makes that suffering more awful, but it gives strength and life and hope, for we know that, if God is in it, suffering is the road to victory. If he shares our suffering we shall share his crown,”and we can say with thePsalmist, 68:19—“Blessed be God, who daily beareth our burden, even the God who is our salvation,”and withIsaiah 63:9—“In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them.”Borden P. Bowne, Atonement:“Something like this work of grace was a moral necessity with God. It was an awful responsibility that was taken when our human race was launched with its fearful possibilities of good and evil. God thereby put himself under infinite obligation to care for his human family; and reflections on his position as Creator and Ruler, instead of removing, only make more manifest this obligation. So long as we conceive God as sitting apart in supreme ease and self-satisfaction, he is notloveat all, but only a reflection of our selfishness and vulgarity. So long as we conceive him as bestowing blessing upon us out of his infinite fulness, but at no real cost to himself, he sinks below the moral heroes of our race. There is ever a higher thought possible, until we see God taking the world upon his heart, entering into the fellowship of our sorrow, and becoming the supreme burden bearer and leader in self-sacrifice. Then only are the possibilities of grace and condescension and love and moral heroism filled up, so that nothing higher remains. And the work of Christ, so far as it was a historical event, must be viewed not merely as a piece of history, but also as a manifestation of that cross which was hidden in the divine love from the foundation of the world, and which is involved in the existence of the human world at all.”Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 264—“The eternal resolution that, if the worldwillbe tragic, itshallstill, in Satan's despite, be spiritual, is the very essence of the eternal joy of that World-Spirit of whose wisdom ours is but a fragmentary reflection.... When you suffer, your sufferings are God's sufferings,—not his external work nor his external penalty, nor the fruit of his neglect, but identically his own personal woe. In you God himself suffers, precisely as you do, and has all your reason for overcoming this grief.”Henry N. Dodge, Christus Victor:“O Thou, that from eternity Upon thy wounded heart hast borne Each pang and cry of misery Wherewith our human hearts are torn, Thy love upon the grievous cross Doth glow, the beacon-light of time, Forever sharing pain and loss With every man in every clime. How vast, how vast Thy sacrifice, As ages come and ages go, Still waiting till it shall suffice To draw the last cold heart and slow!”On the question, Is God passible? see Bennett Tyler, Sufferings of Christ; A Layman, Sufferings of Christ; Woods, Works, 1:299-317; Bib. Sac., 11:744; 17:422-424; Emmons, Works, 4:201-208; Fairbairn, Place of Christ, 483-487; Bushnell, Vic. Sacrifice, 59-93; Kedney, Christ. Doctrine Harmonized, 1:185-245; Edward Beecher, Concord of Ages, 81-204; Young, Life and Light of Men, 20-43, 147-150; Schaff, Hist. Christ. Church, 2:191; Crawford, Fatherhood of God, 43, 44; Anselm, Proslogion, cap. 8; Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 268; John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:117, 118, 137-142.Per[pg 268]contra, see Shedd, Essays and Addresses, 277, 279 note; Woods, in Lit. and Theol. Rev., 1834:43-61; Harris, God the Creator and Lord of All, 1:201. On the Biblical conception of Love in general, see article by James Orr, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.
Third Division.—Perfection, and attributes therein involved.By perfection we mean, not mere quantitative completeness, but qualitative excellence. The attributes involved in perfection are moral attributes. Right action among men presupposes a perfect moral organization, a normal state of intellect, affection and will. So God's activity presupposes a principle of intelligence, of affection, of volition, in his inmost being, and the existence of a worthy object for each of these powers of his nature. But in eternity past there is nothing existing outside or apart from God. He must find, and he does find, the sufficient object of intellect, affection, and will, in himself. There is a self-knowing, a self-loving, a self-willing, which constitute his absolute perfection. The consideration of the immanent attributes is, therefore, properly concluded with an account of that truth, love, and holiness, which render God entirely sufficient to himself.Mat. 5:48—“Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect”;Rom. 12:2—“perfect will of God”;Col. 1:28—“perfect in Christ”;cf.Deut. 32:4—“The Rock, his work is perfect”;Ps. 18:30—“As for God, his way is perfect.”1. Truth.By truth we mean that attribute of the divine nature in virtue of which God's being and God's knowledge eternally conform to each other.In further explanation we remark:A. Negatively:(a) The immanent truth of God is not to be confounded with that veracity and faithfulness which partially manifest it to creatures. These are transitive truth, and they presuppose the absolute and immanent attribute.Deut 32:4—“A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, Just and right is he”;John 17:3—“the only true God”(ἀληθινόν);1 John 5:20—“we know him that is true”(τὸν ἀληθινόν). In both these passages ἀληθινός describes God as the genuine, the real, as distinguished from ἀληθής, the veracious (compareJohn 6:32—“the true bread”;Heb. 8:2—“the true tabernacle”).John 14:6—“I am ... the truth.”As“I am ... the life”signifies, not“I am the living one,”but rather“I[pg 261]am he who is life and the source of life,”so“I am ... the truth”signifies, not“I am the truthful one,”but“I am he who is truth and the source of truth”—in other words, truth of being, not merely truth of expression. So1 John 5:7—“the Spirit is the truth.”Cf.1 Esdras 1:38—“The truth abideth and is forever strong, and it liveth and ruleth forever”= personal truth? See Godet onJohn 1:18; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:181.Truth is God perfectly revealed and known. It may be likened to the electric current which manifests and measures the power of the dynamo. There is no realm of truth apart from the world-ground, just as there is no law of nature that is independent of the Author of nature. While we know ourselves only partially, God knows himself fully. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 1:192—“In the life of God there are no unrealized possibilities. The presupposition of all our knowledge and activity is that absolute and eternal unity of knowing and being which is only another expression for the nature of God. In one sense, he is all reality, and the only reality, whilst all finite existence is but abecoming, which neveris.”Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 57-63—“Truth is reality revealed. Jesus is the Truth, because in him the sum of the qualities hidden in God is presented and revealed to the world, God's nature in terms of an active force and in relation to his rational creation.”This definition however ignores the fact that God is truth, apart from and before all creation. As an immanent attribute, truth implies a conformity of God's knowledge to God's being, which antedates the universe; see B. (b) below.(b) Truth in God is not a merely active attribute of the divine nature. God is truth, not only in the sense that he is the being who truly knows, but also in the sense that he is the truth that is known. The passive precedes the active; truth of being precedes truth of knowing.Plato:“Truth is his (God's) body, and light his shadow.”Hollaz (quoted in Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:137) says that“truth is the conformity of the divine essence with the divine intellect.”See Gerhard, loc. ii:152; Kahnis, Dogmatik, 2:272, 279; 3:193—“Distinguish in God the personal self-consciousness [spirituality, personality—see pages 252, 253] from the unfolding of this in the divine knowledge, which can have no other object but God himself. So far, now, as self-knowing in God is absolutely identical with his being is he the absolutely true. For truth is the knowledge which answers to the being, and the being which answers to the knowledge.”Royce, World and Individual, 1:270—“Truth either may mean that about which we judge,orit may mean the correspondence between our ideas and their objects.”God's truth is both object of his knowledge and knowledge of his object. Miss Clara French, The Dramatic Action and Motive of King John:“You spell Truth with a capital, and make it an independent existence to be sought for and absorbed; but, unless truth is God, what can it do for man? It is only a personality that can touch a personality.”So we assent to the poet's declaration that“Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again,”only because Truth is personal. Christ, the Revealer of God, is the Truth. He is not simply the medium but also the object of all knowledge;Eph. 4:20—“ye did not so learn Christ”= ye knew more than the doctrine about Christ,—ye knew Christ himself;John 17:3—“this is life eternal that they should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.”B. Positively:(a) All truth among men, whether mathematical, logical, moral, or religious, is to be regarded as having its foundation in this immanent truth of the divine nature and as disclosing facts in the being of God.There is a higher Mind than our mind. No apostle can say“I am the truth,”though each of them can say“I speak the truth.”Truth is not a scientific or moral, but a substantial, thing—“nicht Schulsache, sondern Lebenssache.”Here is the dignity of education, that knowledge of truth is knowledge of God. The laws of mathematics are disclosures to us, not of the divine reason merely, for this would imply truth outside of and before God, but of the divine nature. J. W. A. Stewart:“Science is possible because God is scientific.”Plato:“God geometrizes.”Bowne:“The heavens are crystalized mathematics.”The statement that two and two make four, or that virtue is commendable and vice condemnable, expresses an everlasting principle in the being of God. Separate statements of truth are inexplicable apart from the total revelation of truth, and this total revelation is inexplicable apart from One who is truth and who[pg 262]is thus revealed. The separate electric lights in our streets are inexplicable apart from the electric current which throbs through the wires, and this electric current is itself inexplicable apart from the hidden dynamo whose power it exactly expresses and measures. The separate lights of truth are due to the realizing agency of the Holy Spirit; the one unifying current which they partially reveal is the outgoing work of Christ, the divine Logos; Christ is the one and only Revealer of him who dwells“in light unapproachable; whom no man hath seen, nor can see”(1 Tim. 6:16).Prof. H. E. Webster began his lectures“by assuming the Lord Jesus Christandthe multiplication-table.”But this was tautology, because the Lord Jesus Christ, the Truth, the only revealer of God, includes the multiplication-table. So Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:257; 2:202, unduly narrows the scope of Christ's revelation when he maintains that with Jesus truth is not the truth which corresponds to reality but rather the right conduct which corresponds to the duty prescribed by God.“Grace and truth”(John 1:17)then means the favor of God and the righteousness which God approves. To understand Jesus is impossible without being ethically like him. He is king of truth, in that he reveals this righteousness, and finds obedience for it among men. This ethical aspect of the truth, we would reply, important as it is, does not exclude but rather requires for its complement and presupposition that other aspect of the truth as the reality to which all being must conform and the conformity of all being to that reality. Since Christ is the truth of God, we are successful in our search for truth only as we recognize him. Whether all roads lead to Rome depends upon which way your face is turned. Follow a point of land out into the sea, and you find only ocean. With the back turned upon Jesus Christ all following after truth leads only into mist and darkness. Aristotle's ideal man was“a hunter after truth.”But truth can never be found disjoined from love, nor can the loveless seeker discern it.“For the loving worm within its clod Were diviner than a loveless God”(Robert Browning). Hence Christ can say:John 18:37—“Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.”(b) This attribute therefore constitutes the principle and guarantee of all revelation, while it shows the possibility of an eternal divine self-contemplation apart from and before all creation. It is to be understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity.To all this doctrine, however, a great school of philosophers have opposed themselves. Duns Scotus held that God's will made truth as well as right. Descartes said that God could have made it untrue that the radii of a circle are all equal. Lord Bacon said that Adam's sin consisted in seeking a good in itself, instead of being content with the merely empirical good. Whedon, On the Will, 316—“Infinite wisdom and infinite holiness consist in, and result from, God's volitions eternally.”We reply that, to make truth and good matters of mere will, instead of regarding them as characteristics of God's being, is to deny that anything is true or good in itself. If God can make truth to be falsehood, and injustice to be justice, then God is indifferent to truth or falsehood, to good or evil, and he ceases thereby to be God. Truth is not arbitrary,—it is matter of being—the being of God. There are no regulative principles of knowledge which are not transcendental also. God knows and wills truth, because he is truth. Robert Browning, A Soul's Tragedy, 214—“Were't not for God, I mean, what hope of truth—Speaking truth, hearing truth—would stay with Man?”God's will does not make truth, but truth rather makes God's will. God's perfect knowledge in eternity past has an object. That object must be himself. He is the truth Known, as well as the truthful Knower. But a perfect objective must be personal. The doctrine of the Trinity is the necessary complement to the doctrine of the Attributes. Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:183—“The pillar of cloud becomes a pillar of fire.”See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 102-112.On the question whether it is ever right to deceive, see Paine, Ethnic Trinities, 300-339. Plato said that the use of such medicines should be restricted to physicians. The rulers of the state may lie for the public good, but private people not:“officiosum mendacium.”It is better to say that deception is justifiable only where the person deceived has, like a wild beast or a criminal or an enemy in war, put himself out of human society and deprived himself of the right to truth. Even then deception is a sad necessity which witnesses to an abnormal condition of human affairs. With James Martineau, when asked what answer he would give to an intending murderer when truth would mean death, we may say:“I suppose I should tell an untruth, and then should be sorry for it forever after.”On truth as an attribute of God, see Bib. Sac., Oct. 1877:735; Finney, Syst. Theol., 661; Janet, Final Causes, 416.[pg 263]2. Love.By love we mean that attribute of the divine nature in virtue of which God is eternally moved to self-communication.1 John 4:8—“God is love”;3:16—“hereby know we love, because he laid down his life for us”;John 17:24—“thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world”;Rom. 15:30—“the love of the Spirit.”In further explanation we remark:A. Negatively:(a) The immanent love of God is not to be confounded with mercy and goodness toward creatures. These are its manifestations, and are to be denominated transitive love.Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:138, 139—“God's regard for the happiness of his creatures flows from this self-communicating attribute of his nature. Love, in the true sense of the word, is living good-will, with impulses to impartation and union; self-communication (bonum communicativum sui); devotion, merging of theegoin another, in order to penetrate, fill, bless this other with itself, and in this other, as in another self, to possess itself, without giving up itself or losing itself. Love is therefore possible only between persons, and always presupposes personality. Only as Trinity has God love, absolute love; because as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost he stands in perfect self-impartation, self-devotion, and communion with himself.”Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:136—“God has in himself the eternal and wholly adequate object of his love, independently of his relation to the world.”In the Greek mythology, Eros was one of the oldest and yet one of the youngest of the gods. So Dante makes the oldest angel to be the youngest, because nearest to God the fountain of life. In1 John 2:7, 8,“the old commandment”of love is evermore“a new commandment,”because it reflects this eternal attribute of God.“There is a love unstained by selfishness, Th' outpouring tide of self-abandonment, That loves to love, and deems its preciousness Repaid in loving, though no sentiment Of love returned reward its sacrament; Nor stays to question what the loved one will, But hymns its overture with blessings immanent; Rapt and sublimed by love's exalting thrill, Loves on, through frown or smile, divine, immortal still.”Clara Elizabeth Ward:“If I could gather every look of love, That ever any human creature wore, And all the looks that joy is mother of, All looks of grief that mortals ever bore, And mingle all with God-begotten grace, Methinks that I should see the Savior's face.”(b) Love is not the all-inclusive ethical attribute of God. It does not include truth, nor does it include holiness.Ladd, Philosophy of Conduct, 352, very properly denies that benevolence is the all-inclusive virtue. Justness and Truth, he remarks, are not reducible to benevolence. In a review of Ladd's work in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1903:185, C. M. Mead adds:“He comes to the conclusion that it is impossible to resolve all the virtues into the generic one of love or benevolence without either giving a definition of benevolence which is unwarranted and virtually nullifies the end aimed at, or failing to recognize certain virtues which are as genuinely virtues as benevolence itself. Particularly is it argued that the virtues of the will (courage, constancy, temperance), and the virtues of judgment (wisdom, justness, trueness), get no recognition in this attempt to subsume all virtues under the one virtue of love. 'The unity of the virtues is due to the unity of a personality, in active and varied relations with other persons' (361). If benevolence means wishinghappinessto all men, then happiness is made the ultimate good, and eudæmonism is accepted as the true ethical philosophy. But if, on the other hand, in order to avoid this conclusion, benevolence is made to mean wishing the highestwelfareto all men, and the highest welfare is conceived as a life of virtue, then we come to the rather inane conclusion that the essence of virtue is to wish that men may be virtuous.”See also art. by Vos, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1892:1-37.(c) Nor is God's love a mere regard for being in general, irrespective of its moral quality.Jonathan Edwards, in his treatise On the Nature of Virtue, defines virtue as regard for being in general. He considers that God's love is first of all directed toward himself as having the greatest quantity of being, and only secondarily directed toward[pg 264]his creatures whose quantity of being is infinitesimal as compared with his. But we reply that being in general is far too abstract a thing to elicit or justify love. Charles Hodge said truly that, if obligation is primarily due to being in general, then there is no more virtue in loving God than there is in loving Satan. Virtue, we hold, must consist, not in love for being in general, but in love for good being, that is, in love for God as holy. Love has no moral value except as it is placed upon a right object and is proportioned to the worth of that object.“Love of being in general”makes virtue an irrational thing, because it has no standard of conduct. Virtue is rather the love of God as right and as the source of right.G. S. Lee, The Shadow-cross, 38—“God is love, and law is the way he loves us. But it is also true that God is law, and love is the way he rules us.”Clarke, Christian Theology, 88—“Love is God's desire to impart himself, and so all good, to other persons, and to possess them for his own spiritual fellowship.”The intent to communicate himself is the intent to communicate holiness, and this is the“terminus ad quem”of God's administration. Drummond, in his Ascent of Man, shows that Love began with the first cell of life. Evolution is not a tale of battle, but a love-story. We gradually pass from selfism to otherism. Evolution is the object of nature, and altruism is the object of evolution. Man = nutrition, looking to his own things; Woman = reproduction, looking to the things of others. But the greatest of these is love. The mammalia = the mothers, last and highest, care for others. As the mother gives love, so the father gives righteousness. Law, once a latent thing, now becomes active. The father makes a sort of conscience for those beneath him. Nature, like Raphael, is producing a Holy Family.Jacob Boehme:“Throw open and throw out thy heart. For unless thou dost exercise thy heart, and the love of thy heart, upon every man in the world, thy self-love, thy pride, thy envy, thy distaste, thy dislike, will still have dominion over thee.... In the name and in the strength of God, love all men. Love thy neighbor as thyself, and do to thy neighbor as thou doest to thyself. And do it now. For now is the accepted time, and now is the day of salvation.”These expressions are scriptural and valuable, if they are interpreted ethically, and are understood to inculcate the supreme duty of loving the Holy One, of being holy as he is holy, and of seeking to bring all intelligent beings into conformity with his holiness.(d) God's love is not a merely emotional affection, proceeding from sense or impulse, nor is it prompted by utilitarian considerations.Of the two words for love in the N. T., φιλέω designates an emotional affection, which is not and cannot be commanded (John 11:36—“Behold how he loved him!”), while ἀγαπάω expresses a rational and benevolent affection which springs from deliberate choice (John 3:16—“God so loved the world”;Mat. 19:19—“Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself”;5:44—“Love your enemies”). Thayer, N. T. Lex., 653—Ἀγαπᾶν“properly denotes a love founded in admiration, veneration, esteem, like the Lat.diligere, to be kindly disposed to one, to wish one well; but φιλεîν denotes an inclination prompted by sense and emotion, Lat.amare.... Hence men are said ἀγαπᾶν God, not φιλεîν.”In this word ἀγάπη, when used of God, it is already implied that God loves, not for what he can get, but for what he can give. The rationality of his love involves moreover a subordination of the emotional element to a higher law than itself, namely, that of holiness. Even God's self-love must have a reason and norm in the perfections of his own being.B. Positively:(a) The immanent love of God is a rational and voluntary affection, grounded in perfect reason and deliberate choice.Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 3:277—“Love is will, aiming either at the appropriation of an object, or at the enrichment of its existence, because moved by a feeling of its worth.... Love is to persons; it is a constant will; it aims at the promotion of the other's personal end, whether known or conjectured; it takes up the other's personal end and makes it part of his own. Will, as love, does not give itself up for the other's sake; it aims at closest fellowship with the other for a common end.”A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 388-405—“Love is not rightfully independent of the other faculties, but is subject to regulation and control.... We sometimes say that religion consists in love.... It would be more strictly true to say that religion consists in a new direction of our love, a turning of the current toward God which once flowed[pg 265]toward self.... Christianity rectifies the affections, before excessive, impulsive, lawless,—gives them worthy and immortal objects, regulates their intensity in some due proportion to the value of the things they rest upon, and teaches the true methods of their manifestation. In true religion love forms a copartnership with reason.... God's love is no arbitrary, wild, passionate torrent of emotion ... and we become like God by bringing our emotions, sympathies, affections, under the dominion of reason and conscience.”(b) Since God's love is rational, it involves a subordination of theemotionalelement to a higher law than itself, namely, that of truth and holiness.Phil. 1:9—“And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and all discernment.”True love among men illustrates God's love. It merges self in another instead of making that other an appendage to self. It seeks the other's true good, not merely his present enjoyment or advantage. Its aim is to realize the divine idea in that other, and therefore it is exercised for God's sake and in the strength which God supplies. Hence it is a love for holiness, and is under law to holiness. So God's love takes into account the highest interests, and makes infinite sacrifice to secure them. For the sake of saving a world of sinners, God“spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all”(Rom. 8:32), and“Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all”(Is. 53:6). Love requires a rule or standard for its regulation. This rule or standard is the holiness of God. So once more we see that love cannot include holiness, because it is subject to the law of holiness. Love desires only the best for its object, and the best isGod. The golden rule does not bid us give what others desire, but what they need:Rom. 15:2—“Let each one of us please his neighbor for that which is good, unto edifying.”(c) The immanent love of God therefore requires and finds a perfect standard in his own holiness, and a personal object in the image of his own infinite perfections. It is to be understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity.As there is a higher Mind than our mind, so there is a greater Heart than our heart. God is not simply the loving One—he is also the Love that is loved. There is an infinite life of sensibility and affection in God. God has feeling, and in an infinite degree. But feeling alone is not love. Love implies not merely receiving but giving, not merely emotion but impartation. So the love of God is shown in his eternal giving.James 1:5—“God, who giveth,”or“the giving God”(τοῦ διδόντος Θεοῦ) = giving is not an episode in his being—it is his nature to give. And not only togive, but to givehimself. This he does eternally in the self-communications of the Trinity; this he does transitively and temporally in his giving of himself for us in Christ, and to us in the Holy Spirit.Jonathan Edwards, Essay on Trinity (ed. G. P. Fisher), 79—“That in John God is love shows that there are more persons than one in the Deity, for it shows love to be essential and necessary to the Deity, so that his nature consists in it, and this supposes that there is an eternal and necessary object, because all love respects another that is the beloved. By love here the apostle certainly means something beside that which is commonly called self-love: that is very improperly called love, and is a thing of an exceeding diverse nature from the affection or virtue of love the apostle is speaking of.”When Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 226-239, makes the first characteristic of love to be self-affirmation, and when Dorner, Christian Ethics, 73, makes self-assertion an essential part of love, they violate linguistic usage by including under love what properly belongs to holiness.(d) The immanent love of God constitutes a ground of the divine blessedness. Since there is an infinite and perfect object of love, as well as of knowledge and will, in God's own nature, the existence of the universe is not necessary to his serenity and joy.Blessedness is not itself a divine attribute; it is rather a result of the exercise of the divine attributes. It is a subjective result of this exercise, as glory is an objective result. Perfect faculties, with perfect objects for their exercise, ensure God's blessedness. But love is especially its source.Acts 20:35—“It is more blessed to give than to receive.”Happiness (hap, happen) is grounded in circumstances; blessedness, in character.[pg 266]Love precedes creation and is the ground of creation. Its object therefore cannot be the universe, for that does not exist, and, if it did exist, could not be a proper object of love for the infinite God. The only sufficient object of his love is the image of his own perfections, for that alone is equal to himself. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 264—“Man most truly realizes his own nature, when he is ruled by rational, self-forgetful love. He cannot help inferring that the highest thing in the individual consciousness is the dominant thing in the universe at large.”Here we may assent, if we remember that not the love itself but that which is loved must be the dominant thing, and we shall see that to be not love but holiness.Jones, Robert Browning, 219—“Love is for Browning the highest, richest conception man can form. It is our idea of that which is perfect; we cannot even imagine anything better. And the idea of evolution necessarily explains the world as the return of the highest to itself. The universe is homeward bound.... All things are potentially spirit, and all the phenomena of the world are manifestations of love.... Man's reason is not, but man's love is, a direct emanation from the inmost being of God”(345). Browning should have applied to truth and holiness the same principle which he recognized with regard to love. But we gratefully accept his dicta:“He that created love, shall not he love?... God! thou art Love! I build my faith on that.”(e) The love of God involves also the possibility of divine suffering, and the suffering on account of sin which holiness necessitates on the part of God is itself the atonement.Christ is“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”(Rev. 13:8);1 Pet. 1:19, 20—“precious blood, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, even the blood of Christ: who was foreknown indeed before the foundation of the world.”While holiness requires atonement, love provides it. The blessedness of God is consistent with sorrow for human misery and sin. God is passible, or capable of suffering. The permission of moral evil in the decree of creation was at cost to God. Scripture attributes to him emotions of grief and anger at human sin (Gen. 6:6—“it grieved him at his heart”;Rom. 1:18—“wrath of God”;Eph. 4:30—“grieve not the Holy Spirit of God”); painful sacrifice in the gift of Christ (Rom. 8:32—“spared not his own son”;cf.Gen. 22:16—“hast not withheld thy son”) and participation in the suffering of his people (Is. 63:9—“in all their affliction he was afflicted”); Jesus Christ in his sorrow and sympathy, his tears and agony, is the revealer of God's feelings toward the race, and we are urged to follow in his steps, that we may be perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect. We cannot, indeed, conceive of love without self-sacrifice, nor of self-sacrifice without suffering. It would seem, then, that as immutability is consistent with imperative volitions in human history, so the blessedness of God may be consistent with emotions of sorrow.But does God feel in proportion to his greatness, as the mother suffers more than the sick child whom she tends? Does God suffer infinitely in every suffering of his creatures? We must remember that God is infinitely greater than his creation, and that he sees all human sin and woe as part of his great plan. We are entitled to attribute to him only such passibleness as is consistent with infinite perfection. In combining passibleness with blessedness, then, we must allow blessedness to be the controlling element, for our fundamental idea of God is that of absolute perfection. Martensen, Dogmatics, 101—“This limitation is swallowed up in the inner life of perfection which God lives, in total independence of his creation, and in triumphant prospect of the fulfilment of his great designs. We may therefore say with the old theosophic writers:‘In the outer chambers is sadness, but in the inner ones is unmixed joy.’”Christ was“anointed ... with the oil of gladness above his fellows,”and“for the joy that was set before him endured the cross”(Heb. 1:9; 12:2). Love rejoices even in pain, when this brings good to those beloved.“Though round its base the rolling clouds are spread, Eternal sunshine settles on its head.”In George Adam Smith's Life of Henry Drummond, 11, Drummond cries out after hearing the confessions of men who came to him:“I am sick of the sins of these men! How can God bear it?”Simon, Reconciliation, 338-343, shows that before the incarnation, the Logos was a sufferer from the sins of men. This suffering however was kept in check and counterbalanced by his consciousness as a factor in the Godhead, and by the clear knowledge that men were themselves the causes of this suffering. After he became incarnate he suffered without knowing whence all the suffering came. He had a subconscious life into which were interwoven elements due to the sinful conduct of the race whose energy was drawn from himself and with which in addition he had organically united himself. If this is limitation, it is also self-limitation which[pg 267]Christ could have avoided by not creating, preserving, and redeeming mankind. We rejoice in giving away a daughter in marriage, even though it costs pain. The highest blessedness in the Christian is coincident with agony for the souls of others. We partake of Christ's joy only when we know the fellowship of his sufferings. Joy and sorrow can coëxist, like Greek fire, that burns under water.Abbé Gratry, La Morale et la Loi de l'Histoire, 165, 166—“What! Do you really suppose that the personal God, free and intelligent, loving and good, who knows every detail of human torture, and hears every sigh—this God who sees, who loves as we do, and more than we do—do you believe that he is present and looks pitilessly on what breaks your heart, and what to him must be the spectacle of Satan reveling in the blood of humanity? History teaches us that men so feel for sufferers that they have been drawn to die with them, so that their own executioners have become the next martyrs. And yet you represent God, the absolute goodness, as alone impassible? It is here that our evangelical faith comes in. Our God was made man to suffer and to die! Yes, here is the true God. He has suffered from the beginning in all who have suffered. He has been hungry in all who have hungered. He has been immolated in all and with all who have offered up their lives. He is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.”Similarly Alexander Vinet, Vital Christianity, 240, remarks that“The suffering God is not simply the teaching of modern divines. It is a New Testament thought, and it is one that answers all the doubts that arise at the sight of human suffering. To know that God is suffering with it makes that suffering more awful, but it gives strength and life and hope, for we know that, if God is in it, suffering is the road to victory. If he shares our suffering we shall share his crown,”and we can say with thePsalmist, 68:19—“Blessed be God, who daily beareth our burden, even the God who is our salvation,”and withIsaiah 63:9—“In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them.”Borden P. Bowne, Atonement:“Something like this work of grace was a moral necessity with God. It was an awful responsibility that was taken when our human race was launched with its fearful possibilities of good and evil. God thereby put himself under infinite obligation to care for his human family; and reflections on his position as Creator and Ruler, instead of removing, only make more manifest this obligation. So long as we conceive God as sitting apart in supreme ease and self-satisfaction, he is notloveat all, but only a reflection of our selfishness and vulgarity. So long as we conceive him as bestowing blessing upon us out of his infinite fulness, but at no real cost to himself, he sinks below the moral heroes of our race. There is ever a higher thought possible, until we see God taking the world upon his heart, entering into the fellowship of our sorrow, and becoming the supreme burden bearer and leader in self-sacrifice. Then only are the possibilities of grace and condescension and love and moral heroism filled up, so that nothing higher remains. And the work of Christ, so far as it was a historical event, must be viewed not merely as a piece of history, but also as a manifestation of that cross which was hidden in the divine love from the foundation of the world, and which is involved in the existence of the human world at all.”Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 264—“The eternal resolution that, if the worldwillbe tragic, itshallstill, in Satan's despite, be spiritual, is the very essence of the eternal joy of that World-Spirit of whose wisdom ours is but a fragmentary reflection.... When you suffer, your sufferings are God's sufferings,—not his external work nor his external penalty, nor the fruit of his neglect, but identically his own personal woe. In you God himself suffers, precisely as you do, and has all your reason for overcoming this grief.”Henry N. Dodge, Christus Victor:“O Thou, that from eternity Upon thy wounded heart hast borne Each pang and cry of misery Wherewith our human hearts are torn, Thy love upon the grievous cross Doth glow, the beacon-light of time, Forever sharing pain and loss With every man in every clime. How vast, how vast Thy sacrifice, As ages come and ages go, Still waiting till it shall suffice To draw the last cold heart and slow!”On the question, Is God passible? see Bennett Tyler, Sufferings of Christ; A Layman, Sufferings of Christ; Woods, Works, 1:299-317; Bib. Sac., 11:744; 17:422-424; Emmons, Works, 4:201-208; Fairbairn, Place of Christ, 483-487; Bushnell, Vic. Sacrifice, 59-93; Kedney, Christ. Doctrine Harmonized, 1:185-245; Edward Beecher, Concord of Ages, 81-204; Young, Life and Light of Men, 20-43, 147-150; Schaff, Hist. Christ. Church, 2:191; Crawford, Fatherhood of God, 43, 44; Anselm, Proslogion, cap. 8; Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 268; John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:117, 118, 137-142.Per[pg 268]contra, see Shedd, Essays and Addresses, 277, 279 note; Woods, in Lit. and Theol. Rev., 1834:43-61; Harris, God the Creator and Lord of All, 1:201. On the Biblical conception of Love in general, see article by James Orr, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.
Third Division.—Perfection, and attributes therein involved.By perfection we mean, not mere quantitative completeness, but qualitative excellence. The attributes involved in perfection are moral attributes. Right action among men presupposes a perfect moral organization, a normal state of intellect, affection and will. So God's activity presupposes a principle of intelligence, of affection, of volition, in his inmost being, and the existence of a worthy object for each of these powers of his nature. But in eternity past there is nothing existing outside or apart from God. He must find, and he does find, the sufficient object of intellect, affection, and will, in himself. There is a self-knowing, a self-loving, a self-willing, which constitute his absolute perfection. The consideration of the immanent attributes is, therefore, properly concluded with an account of that truth, love, and holiness, which render God entirely sufficient to himself.Mat. 5:48—“Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect”;Rom. 12:2—“perfect will of God”;Col. 1:28—“perfect in Christ”;cf.Deut. 32:4—“The Rock, his work is perfect”;Ps. 18:30—“As for God, his way is perfect.”1. Truth.By truth we mean that attribute of the divine nature in virtue of which God's being and God's knowledge eternally conform to each other.In further explanation we remark:A. Negatively:(a) The immanent truth of God is not to be confounded with that veracity and faithfulness which partially manifest it to creatures. These are transitive truth, and they presuppose the absolute and immanent attribute.Deut 32:4—“A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, Just and right is he”;John 17:3—“the only true God”(ἀληθινόν);1 John 5:20—“we know him that is true”(τὸν ἀληθινόν). In both these passages ἀληθινός describes God as the genuine, the real, as distinguished from ἀληθής, the veracious (compareJohn 6:32—“the true bread”;Heb. 8:2—“the true tabernacle”).John 14:6—“I am ... the truth.”As“I am ... the life”signifies, not“I am the living one,”but rather“I[pg 261]am he who is life and the source of life,”so“I am ... the truth”signifies, not“I am the truthful one,”but“I am he who is truth and the source of truth”—in other words, truth of being, not merely truth of expression. So1 John 5:7—“the Spirit is the truth.”Cf.1 Esdras 1:38—“The truth abideth and is forever strong, and it liveth and ruleth forever”= personal truth? See Godet onJohn 1:18; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:181.Truth is God perfectly revealed and known. It may be likened to the electric current which manifests and measures the power of the dynamo. There is no realm of truth apart from the world-ground, just as there is no law of nature that is independent of the Author of nature. While we know ourselves only partially, God knows himself fully. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 1:192—“In the life of God there are no unrealized possibilities. The presupposition of all our knowledge and activity is that absolute and eternal unity of knowing and being which is only another expression for the nature of God. In one sense, he is all reality, and the only reality, whilst all finite existence is but abecoming, which neveris.”Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 57-63—“Truth is reality revealed. Jesus is the Truth, because in him the sum of the qualities hidden in God is presented and revealed to the world, God's nature in terms of an active force and in relation to his rational creation.”This definition however ignores the fact that God is truth, apart from and before all creation. As an immanent attribute, truth implies a conformity of God's knowledge to God's being, which antedates the universe; see B. (b) below.(b) Truth in God is not a merely active attribute of the divine nature. God is truth, not only in the sense that he is the being who truly knows, but also in the sense that he is the truth that is known. The passive precedes the active; truth of being precedes truth of knowing.Plato:“Truth is his (God's) body, and light his shadow.”Hollaz (quoted in Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:137) says that“truth is the conformity of the divine essence with the divine intellect.”See Gerhard, loc. ii:152; Kahnis, Dogmatik, 2:272, 279; 3:193—“Distinguish in God the personal self-consciousness [spirituality, personality—see pages 252, 253] from the unfolding of this in the divine knowledge, which can have no other object but God himself. So far, now, as self-knowing in God is absolutely identical with his being is he the absolutely true. For truth is the knowledge which answers to the being, and the being which answers to the knowledge.”Royce, World and Individual, 1:270—“Truth either may mean that about which we judge,orit may mean the correspondence between our ideas and their objects.”God's truth is both object of his knowledge and knowledge of his object. Miss Clara French, The Dramatic Action and Motive of King John:“You spell Truth with a capital, and make it an independent existence to be sought for and absorbed; but, unless truth is God, what can it do for man? It is only a personality that can touch a personality.”So we assent to the poet's declaration that“Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again,”only because Truth is personal. Christ, the Revealer of God, is the Truth. He is not simply the medium but also the object of all knowledge;Eph. 4:20—“ye did not so learn Christ”= ye knew more than the doctrine about Christ,—ye knew Christ himself;John 17:3—“this is life eternal that they should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.”B. Positively:(a) All truth among men, whether mathematical, logical, moral, or religious, is to be regarded as having its foundation in this immanent truth of the divine nature and as disclosing facts in the being of God.There is a higher Mind than our mind. No apostle can say“I am the truth,”though each of them can say“I speak the truth.”Truth is not a scientific or moral, but a substantial, thing—“nicht Schulsache, sondern Lebenssache.”Here is the dignity of education, that knowledge of truth is knowledge of God. The laws of mathematics are disclosures to us, not of the divine reason merely, for this would imply truth outside of and before God, but of the divine nature. J. W. A. Stewart:“Science is possible because God is scientific.”Plato:“God geometrizes.”Bowne:“The heavens are crystalized mathematics.”The statement that two and two make four, or that virtue is commendable and vice condemnable, expresses an everlasting principle in the being of God. Separate statements of truth are inexplicable apart from the total revelation of truth, and this total revelation is inexplicable apart from One who is truth and who[pg 262]is thus revealed. The separate electric lights in our streets are inexplicable apart from the electric current which throbs through the wires, and this electric current is itself inexplicable apart from the hidden dynamo whose power it exactly expresses and measures. The separate lights of truth are due to the realizing agency of the Holy Spirit; the one unifying current which they partially reveal is the outgoing work of Christ, the divine Logos; Christ is the one and only Revealer of him who dwells“in light unapproachable; whom no man hath seen, nor can see”(1 Tim. 6:16).Prof. H. E. Webster began his lectures“by assuming the Lord Jesus Christandthe multiplication-table.”But this was tautology, because the Lord Jesus Christ, the Truth, the only revealer of God, includes the multiplication-table. So Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:257; 2:202, unduly narrows the scope of Christ's revelation when he maintains that with Jesus truth is not the truth which corresponds to reality but rather the right conduct which corresponds to the duty prescribed by God.“Grace and truth”(John 1:17)then means the favor of God and the righteousness which God approves. To understand Jesus is impossible without being ethically like him. He is king of truth, in that he reveals this righteousness, and finds obedience for it among men. This ethical aspect of the truth, we would reply, important as it is, does not exclude but rather requires for its complement and presupposition that other aspect of the truth as the reality to which all being must conform and the conformity of all being to that reality. Since Christ is the truth of God, we are successful in our search for truth only as we recognize him. Whether all roads lead to Rome depends upon which way your face is turned. Follow a point of land out into the sea, and you find only ocean. With the back turned upon Jesus Christ all following after truth leads only into mist and darkness. Aristotle's ideal man was“a hunter after truth.”But truth can never be found disjoined from love, nor can the loveless seeker discern it.“For the loving worm within its clod Were diviner than a loveless God”(Robert Browning). Hence Christ can say:John 18:37—“Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.”(b) This attribute therefore constitutes the principle and guarantee of all revelation, while it shows the possibility of an eternal divine self-contemplation apart from and before all creation. It is to be understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity.To all this doctrine, however, a great school of philosophers have opposed themselves. Duns Scotus held that God's will made truth as well as right. Descartes said that God could have made it untrue that the radii of a circle are all equal. Lord Bacon said that Adam's sin consisted in seeking a good in itself, instead of being content with the merely empirical good. Whedon, On the Will, 316—“Infinite wisdom and infinite holiness consist in, and result from, God's volitions eternally.”We reply that, to make truth and good matters of mere will, instead of regarding them as characteristics of God's being, is to deny that anything is true or good in itself. If God can make truth to be falsehood, and injustice to be justice, then God is indifferent to truth or falsehood, to good or evil, and he ceases thereby to be God. Truth is not arbitrary,—it is matter of being—the being of God. There are no regulative principles of knowledge which are not transcendental also. God knows and wills truth, because he is truth. Robert Browning, A Soul's Tragedy, 214—“Were't not for God, I mean, what hope of truth—Speaking truth, hearing truth—would stay with Man?”God's will does not make truth, but truth rather makes God's will. God's perfect knowledge in eternity past has an object. That object must be himself. He is the truth Known, as well as the truthful Knower. But a perfect objective must be personal. The doctrine of the Trinity is the necessary complement to the doctrine of the Attributes. Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:183—“The pillar of cloud becomes a pillar of fire.”See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 102-112.On the question whether it is ever right to deceive, see Paine, Ethnic Trinities, 300-339. Plato said that the use of such medicines should be restricted to physicians. The rulers of the state may lie for the public good, but private people not:“officiosum mendacium.”It is better to say that deception is justifiable only where the person deceived has, like a wild beast or a criminal or an enemy in war, put himself out of human society and deprived himself of the right to truth. Even then deception is a sad necessity which witnesses to an abnormal condition of human affairs. With James Martineau, when asked what answer he would give to an intending murderer when truth would mean death, we may say:“I suppose I should tell an untruth, and then should be sorry for it forever after.”On truth as an attribute of God, see Bib. Sac., Oct. 1877:735; Finney, Syst. Theol., 661; Janet, Final Causes, 416.[pg 263]2. Love.By love we mean that attribute of the divine nature in virtue of which God is eternally moved to self-communication.1 John 4:8—“God is love”;3:16—“hereby know we love, because he laid down his life for us”;John 17:24—“thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world”;Rom. 15:30—“the love of the Spirit.”In further explanation we remark:A. Negatively:(a) The immanent love of God is not to be confounded with mercy and goodness toward creatures. These are its manifestations, and are to be denominated transitive love.Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:138, 139—“God's regard for the happiness of his creatures flows from this self-communicating attribute of his nature. Love, in the true sense of the word, is living good-will, with impulses to impartation and union; self-communication (bonum communicativum sui); devotion, merging of theegoin another, in order to penetrate, fill, bless this other with itself, and in this other, as in another self, to possess itself, without giving up itself or losing itself. Love is therefore possible only between persons, and always presupposes personality. Only as Trinity has God love, absolute love; because as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost he stands in perfect self-impartation, self-devotion, and communion with himself.”Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:136—“God has in himself the eternal and wholly adequate object of his love, independently of his relation to the world.”In the Greek mythology, Eros was one of the oldest and yet one of the youngest of the gods. So Dante makes the oldest angel to be the youngest, because nearest to God the fountain of life. In1 John 2:7, 8,“the old commandment”of love is evermore“a new commandment,”because it reflects this eternal attribute of God.“There is a love unstained by selfishness, Th' outpouring tide of self-abandonment, That loves to love, and deems its preciousness Repaid in loving, though no sentiment Of love returned reward its sacrament; Nor stays to question what the loved one will, But hymns its overture with blessings immanent; Rapt and sublimed by love's exalting thrill, Loves on, through frown or smile, divine, immortal still.”Clara Elizabeth Ward:“If I could gather every look of love, That ever any human creature wore, And all the looks that joy is mother of, All looks of grief that mortals ever bore, And mingle all with God-begotten grace, Methinks that I should see the Savior's face.”(b) Love is not the all-inclusive ethical attribute of God. It does not include truth, nor does it include holiness.Ladd, Philosophy of Conduct, 352, very properly denies that benevolence is the all-inclusive virtue. Justness and Truth, he remarks, are not reducible to benevolence. In a review of Ladd's work in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1903:185, C. M. Mead adds:“He comes to the conclusion that it is impossible to resolve all the virtues into the generic one of love or benevolence without either giving a definition of benevolence which is unwarranted and virtually nullifies the end aimed at, or failing to recognize certain virtues which are as genuinely virtues as benevolence itself. Particularly is it argued that the virtues of the will (courage, constancy, temperance), and the virtues of judgment (wisdom, justness, trueness), get no recognition in this attempt to subsume all virtues under the one virtue of love. 'The unity of the virtues is due to the unity of a personality, in active and varied relations with other persons' (361). If benevolence means wishinghappinessto all men, then happiness is made the ultimate good, and eudæmonism is accepted as the true ethical philosophy. But if, on the other hand, in order to avoid this conclusion, benevolence is made to mean wishing the highestwelfareto all men, and the highest welfare is conceived as a life of virtue, then we come to the rather inane conclusion that the essence of virtue is to wish that men may be virtuous.”See also art. by Vos, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1892:1-37.(c) Nor is God's love a mere regard for being in general, irrespective of its moral quality.Jonathan Edwards, in his treatise On the Nature of Virtue, defines virtue as regard for being in general. He considers that God's love is first of all directed toward himself as having the greatest quantity of being, and only secondarily directed toward[pg 264]his creatures whose quantity of being is infinitesimal as compared with his. But we reply that being in general is far too abstract a thing to elicit or justify love. Charles Hodge said truly that, if obligation is primarily due to being in general, then there is no more virtue in loving God than there is in loving Satan. Virtue, we hold, must consist, not in love for being in general, but in love for good being, that is, in love for God as holy. Love has no moral value except as it is placed upon a right object and is proportioned to the worth of that object.“Love of being in general”makes virtue an irrational thing, because it has no standard of conduct. Virtue is rather the love of God as right and as the source of right.G. S. Lee, The Shadow-cross, 38—“God is love, and law is the way he loves us. But it is also true that God is law, and love is the way he rules us.”Clarke, Christian Theology, 88—“Love is God's desire to impart himself, and so all good, to other persons, and to possess them for his own spiritual fellowship.”The intent to communicate himself is the intent to communicate holiness, and this is the“terminus ad quem”of God's administration. Drummond, in his Ascent of Man, shows that Love began with the first cell of life. Evolution is not a tale of battle, but a love-story. We gradually pass from selfism to otherism. Evolution is the object of nature, and altruism is the object of evolution. Man = nutrition, looking to his own things; Woman = reproduction, looking to the things of others. But the greatest of these is love. The mammalia = the mothers, last and highest, care for others. As the mother gives love, so the father gives righteousness. Law, once a latent thing, now becomes active. The father makes a sort of conscience for those beneath him. Nature, like Raphael, is producing a Holy Family.Jacob Boehme:“Throw open and throw out thy heart. For unless thou dost exercise thy heart, and the love of thy heart, upon every man in the world, thy self-love, thy pride, thy envy, thy distaste, thy dislike, will still have dominion over thee.... In the name and in the strength of God, love all men. Love thy neighbor as thyself, and do to thy neighbor as thou doest to thyself. And do it now. For now is the accepted time, and now is the day of salvation.”These expressions are scriptural and valuable, if they are interpreted ethically, and are understood to inculcate the supreme duty of loving the Holy One, of being holy as he is holy, and of seeking to bring all intelligent beings into conformity with his holiness.(d) God's love is not a merely emotional affection, proceeding from sense or impulse, nor is it prompted by utilitarian considerations.Of the two words for love in the N. T., φιλέω designates an emotional affection, which is not and cannot be commanded (John 11:36—“Behold how he loved him!”), while ἀγαπάω expresses a rational and benevolent affection which springs from deliberate choice (John 3:16—“God so loved the world”;Mat. 19:19—“Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself”;5:44—“Love your enemies”). Thayer, N. T. Lex., 653—Ἀγαπᾶν“properly denotes a love founded in admiration, veneration, esteem, like the Lat.diligere, to be kindly disposed to one, to wish one well; but φιλεîν denotes an inclination prompted by sense and emotion, Lat.amare.... Hence men are said ἀγαπᾶν God, not φιλεîν.”In this word ἀγάπη, when used of God, it is already implied that God loves, not for what he can get, but for what he can give. The rationality of his love involves moreover a subordination of the emotional element to a higher law than itself, namely, that of holiness. Even God's self-love must have a reason and norm in the perfections of his own being.B. Positively:(a) The immanent love of God is a rational and voluntary affection, grounded in perfect reason and deliberate choice.Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 3:277—“Love is will, aiming either at the appropriation of an object, or at the enrichment of its existence, because moved by a feeling of its worth.... Love is to persons; it is a constant will; it aims at the promotion of the other's personal end, whether known or conjectured; it takes up the other's personal end and makes it part of his own. Will, as love, does not give itself up for the other's sake; it aims at closest fellowship with the other for a common end.”A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 388-405—“Love is not rightfully independent of the other faculties, but is subject to regulation and control.... We sometimes say that religion consists in love.... It would be more strictly true to say that religion consists in a new direction of our love, a turning of the current toward God which once flowed[pg 265]toward self.... Christianity rectifies the affections, before excessive, impulsive, lawless,—gives them worthy and immortal objects, regulates their intensity in some due proportion to the value of the things they rest upon, and teaches the true methods of their manifestation. In true religion love forms a copartnership with reason.... God's love is no arbitrary, wild, passionate torrent of emotion ... and we become like God by bringing our emotions, sympathies, affections, under the dominion of reason and conscience.”(b) Since God's love is rational, it involves a subordination of theemotionalelement to a higher law than itself, namely, that of truth and holiness.Phil. 1:9—“And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and all discernment.”True love among men illustrates God's love. It merges self in another instead of making that other an appendage to self. It seeks the other's true good, not merely his present enjoyment or advantage. Its aim is to realize the divine idea in that other, and therefore it is exercised for God's sake and in the strength which God supplies. Hence it is a love for holiness, and is under law to holiness. So God's love takes into account the highest interests, and makes infinite sacrifice to secure them. For the sake of saving a world of sinners, God“spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all”(Rom. 8:32), and“Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all”(Is. 53:6). Love requires a rule or standard for its regulation. This rule or standard is the holiness of God. So once more we see that love cannot include holiness, because it is subject to the law of holiness. Love desires only the best for its object, and the best isGod. The golden rule does not bid us give what others desire, but what they need:Rom. 15:2—“Let each one of us please his neighbor for that which is good, unto edifying.”(c) The immanent love of God therefore requires and finds a perfect standard in his own holiness, and a personal object in the image of his own infinite perfections. It is to be understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity.As there is a higher Mind than our mind, so there is a greater Heart than our heart. God is not simply the loving One—he is also the Love that is loved. There is an infinite life of sensibility and affection in God. God has feeling, and in an infinite degree. But feeling alone is not love. Love implies not merely receiving but giving, not merely emotion but impartation. So the love of God is shown in his eternal giving.James 1:5—“God, who giveth,”or“the giving God”(τοῦ διδόντος Θεοῦ) = giving is not an episode in his being—it is his nature to give. And not only togive, but to givehimself. This he does eternally in the self-communications of the Trinity; this he does transitively and temporally in his giving of himself for us in Christ, and to us in the Holy Spirit.Jonathan Edwards, Essay on Trinity (ed. G. P. Fisher), 79—“That in John God is love shows that there are more persons than one in the Deity, for it shows love to be essential and necessary to the Deity, so that his nature consists in it, and this supposes that there is an eternal and necessary object, because all love respects another that is the beloved. By love here the apostle certainly means something beside that which is commonly called self-love: that is very improperly called love, and is a thing of an exceeding diverse nature from the affection or virtue of love the apostle is speaking of.”When Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 226-239, makes the first characteristic of love to be self-affirmation, and when Dorner, Christian Ethics, 73, makes self-assertion an essential part of love, they violate linguistic usage by including under love what properly belongs to holiness.(d) The immanent love of God constitutes a ground of the divine blessedness. Since there is an infinite and perfect object of love, as well as of knowledge and will, in God's own nature, the existence of the universe is not necessary to his serenity and joy.Blessedness is not itself a divine attribute; it is rather a result of the exercise of the divine attributes. It is a subjective result of this exercise, as glory is an objective result. Perfect faculties, with perfect objects for their exercise, ensure God's blessedness. But love is especially its source.Acts 20:35—“It is more blessed to give than to receive.”Happiness (hap, happen) is grounded in circumstances; blessedness, in character.[pg 266]Love precedes creation and is the ground of creation. Its object therefore cannot be the universe, for that does not exist, and, if it did exist, could not be a proper object of love for the infinite God. The only sufficient object of his love is the image of his own perfections, for that alone is equal to himself. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 264—“Man most truly realizes his own nature, when he is ruled by rational, self-forgetful love. He cannot help inferring that the highest thing in the individual consciousness is the dominant thing in the universe at large.”Here we may assent, if we remember that not the love itself but that which is loved must be the dominant thing, and we shall see that to be not love but holiness.Jones, Robert Browning, 219—“Love is for Browning the highest, richest conception man can form. It is our idea of that which is perfect; we cannot even imagine anything better. And the idea of evolution necessarily explains the world as the return of the highest to itself. The universe is homeward bound.... All things are potentially spirit, and all the phenomena of the world are manifestations of love.... Man's reason is not, but man's love is, a direct emanation from the inmost being of God”(345). Browning should have applied to truth and holiness the same principle which he recognized with regard to love. But we gratefully accept his dicta:“He that created love, shall not he love?... God! thou art Love! I build my faith on that.”(e) The love of God involves also the possibility of divine suffering, and the suffering on account of sin which holiness necessitates on the part of God is itself the atonement.Christ is“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”(Rev. 13:8);1 Pet. 1:19, 20—“precious blood, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, even the blood of Christ: who was foreknown indeed before the foundation of the world.”While holiness requires atonement, love provides it. The blessedness of God is consistent with sorrow for human misery and sin. God is passible, or capable of suffering. The permission of moral evil in the decree of creation was at cost to God. Scripture attributes to him emotions of grief and anger at human sin (Gen. 6:6—“it grieved him at his heart”;Rom. 1:18—“wrath of God”;Eph. 4:30—“grieve not the Holy Spirit of God”); painful sacrifice in the gift of Christ (Rom. 8:32—“spared not his own son”;cf.Gen. 22:16—“hast not withheld thy son”) and participation in the suffering of his people (Is. 63:9—“in all their affliction he was afflicted”); Jesus Christ in his sorrow and sympathy, his tears and agony, is the revealer of God's feelings toward the race, and we are urged to follow in his steps, that we may be perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect. We cannot, indeed, conceive of love without self-sacrifice, nor of self-sacrifice without suffering. It would seem, then, that as immutability is consistent with imperative volitions in human history, so the blessedness of God may be consistent with emotions of sorrow.But does God feel in proportion to his greatness, as the mother suffers more than the sick child whom she tends? Does God suffer infinitely in every suffering of his creatures? We must remember that God is infinitely greater than his creation, and that he sees all human sin and woe as part of his great plan. We are entitled to attribute to him only such passibleness as is consistent with infinite perfection. In combining passibleness with blessedness, then, we must allow blessedness to be the controlling element, for our fundamental idea of God is that of absolute perfection. Martensen, Dogmatics, 101—“This limitation is swallowed up in the inner life of perfection which God lives, in total independence of his creation, and in triumphant prospect of the fulfilment of his great designs. We may therefore say with the old theosophic writers:‘In the outer chambers is sadness, but in the inner ones is unmixed joy.’”Christ was“anointed ... with the oil of gladness above his fellows,”and“for the joy that was set before him endured the cross”(Heb. 1:9; 12:2). Love rejoices even in pain, when this brings good to those beloved.“Though round its base the rolling clouds are spread, Eternal sunshine settles on its head.”In George Adam Smith's Life of Henry Drummond, 11, Drummond cries out after hearing the confessions of men who came to him:“I am sick of the sins of these men! How can God bear it?”Simon, Reconciliation, 338-343, shows that before the incarnation, the Logos was a sufferer from the sins of men. This suffering however was kept in check and counterbalanced by his consciousness as a factor in the Godhead, and by the clear knowledge that men were themselves the causes of this suffering. After he became incarnate he suffered without knowing whence all the suffering came. He had a subconscious life into which were interwoven elements due to the sinful conduct of the race whose energy was drawn from himself and with which in addition he had organically united himself. If this is limitation, it is also self-limitation which[pg 267]Christ could have avoided by not creating, preserving, and redeeming mankind. We rejoice in giving away a daughter in marriage, even though it costs pain. The highest blessedness in the Christian is coincident with agony for the souls of others. We partake of Christ's joy only when we know the fellowship of his sufferings. Joy and sorrow can coëxist, like Greek fire, that burns under water.Abbé Gratry, La Morale et la Loi de l'Histoire, 165, 166—“What! Do you really suppose that the personal God, free and intelligent, loving and good, who knows every detail of human torture, and hears every sigh—this God who sees, who loves as we do, and more than we do—do you believe that he is present and looks pitilessly on what breaks your heart, and what to him must be the spectacle of Satan reveling in the blood of humanity? History teaches us that men so feel for sufferers that they have been drawn to die with them, so that their own executioners have become the next martyrs. And yet you represent God, the absolute goodness, as alone impassible? It is here that our evangelical faith comes in. Our God was made man to suffer and to die! Yes, here is the true God. He has suffered from the beginning in all who have suffered. He has been hungry in all who have hungered. He has been immolated in all and with all who have offered up their lives. He is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.”Similarly Alexander Vinet, Vital Christianity, 240, remarks that“The suffering God is not simply the teaching of modern divines. It is a New Testament thought, and it is one that answers all the doubts that arise at the sight of human suffering. To know that God is suffering with it makes that suffering more awful, but it gives strength and life and hope, for we know that, if God is in it, suffering is the road to victory. If he shares our suffering we shall share his crown,”and we can say with thePsalmist, 68:19—“Blessed be God, who daily beareth our burden, even the God who is our salvation,”and withIsaiah 63:9—“In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them.”Borden P. Bowne, Atonement:“Something like this work of grace was a moral necessity with God. It was an awful responsibility that was taken when our human race was launched with its fearful possibilities of good and evil. God thereby put himself under infinite obligation to care for his human family; and reflections on his position as Creator and Ruler, instead of removing, only make more manifest this obligation. So long as we conceive God as sitting apart in supreme ease and self-satisfaction, he is notloveat all, but only a reflection of our selfishness and vulgarity. So long as we conceive him as bestowing blessing upon us out of his infinite fulness, but at no real cost to himself, he sinks below the moral heroes of our race. There is ever a higher thought possible, until we see God taking the world upon his heart, entering into the fellowship of our sorrow, and becoming the supreme burden bearer and leader in self-sacrifice. Then only are the possibilities of grace and condescension and love and moral heroism filled up, so that nothing higher remains. And the work of Christ, so far as it was a historical event, must be viewed not merely as a piece of history, but also as a manifestation of that cross which was hidden in the divine love from the foundation of the world, and which is involved in the existence of the human world at all.”Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 264—“The eternal resolution that, if the worldwillbe tragic, itshallstill, in Satan's despite, be spiritual, is the very essence of the eternal joy of that World-Spirit of whose wisdom ours is but a fragmentary reflection.... When you suffer, your sufferings are God's sufferings,—not his external work nor his external penalty, nor the fruit of his neglect, but identically his own personal woe. In you God himself suffers, precisely as you do, and has all your reason for overcoming this grief.”Henry N. Dodge, Christus Victor:“O Thou, that from eternity Upon thy wounded heart hast borne Each pang and cry of misery Wherewith our human hearts are torn, Thy love upon the grievous cross Doth glow, the beacon-light of time, Forever sharing pain and loss With every man in every clime. How vast, how vast Thy sacrifice, As ages come and ages go, Still waiting till it shall suffice To draw the last cold heart and slow!”On the question, Is God passible? see Bennett Tyler, Sufferings of Christ; A Layman, Sufferings of Christ; Woods, Works, 1:299-317; Bib. Sac., 11:744; 17:422-424; Emmons, Works, 4:201-208; Fairbairn, Place of Christ, 483-487; Bushnell, Vic. Sacrifice, 59-93; Kedney, Christ. Doctrine Harmonized, 1:185-245; Edward Beecher, Concord of Ages, 81-204; Young, Life and Light of Men, 20-43, 147-150; Schaff, Hist. Christ. Church, 2:191; Crawford, Fatherhood of God, 43, 44; Anselm, Proslogion, cap. 8; Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 268; John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:117, 118, 137-142.Per[pg 268]contra, see Shedd, Essays and Addresses, 277, 279 note; Woods, in Lit. and Theol. Rev., 1834:43-61; Harris, God the Creator and Lord of All, 1:201. On the Biblical conception of Love in general, see article by James Orr, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.
By perfection we mean, not mere quantitative completeness, but qualitative excellence. The attributes involved in perfection are moral attributes. Right action among men presupposes a perfect moral organization, a normal state of intellect, affection and will. So God's activity presupposes a principle of intelligence, of affection, of volition, in his inmost being, and the existence of a worthy object for each of these powers of his nature. But in eternity past there is nothing existing outside or apart from God. He must find, and he does find, the sufficient object of intellect, affection, and will, in himself. There is a self-knowing, a self-loving, a self-willing, which constitute his absolute perfection. The consideration of the immanent attributes is, therefore, properly concluded with an account of that truth, love, and holiness, which render God entirely sufficient to himself.
Mat. 5:48—“Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect”;Rom. 12:2—“perfect will of God”;Col. 1:28—“perfect in Christ”;cf.Deut. 32:4—“The Rock, his work is perfect”;Ps. 18:30—“As for God, his way is perfect.”
Mat. 5:48—“Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect”;Rom. 12:2—“perfect will of God”;Col. 1:28—“perfect in Christ”;cf.Deut. 32:4—“The Rock, his work is perfect”;Ps. 18:30—“As for God, his way is perfect.”
1. Truth.By truth we mean that attribute of the divine nature in virtue of which God's being and God's knowledge eternally conform to each other.In further explanation we remark:A. Negatively:(a) The immanent truth of God is not to be confounded with that veracity and faithfulness which partially manifest it to creatures. These are transitive truth, and they presuppose the absolute and immanent attribute.Deut 32:4—“A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, Just and right is he”;John 17:3—“the only true God”(ἀληθινόν);1 John 5:20—“we know him that is true”(τὸν ἀληθινόν). In both these passages ἀληθινός describes God as the genuine, the real, as distinguished from ἀληθής, the veracious (compareJohn 6:32—“the true bread”;Heb. 8:2—“the true tabernacle”).John 14:6—“I am ... the truth.”As“I am ... the life”signifies, not“I am the living one,”but rather“I[pg 261]am he who is life and the source of life,”so“I am ... the truth”signifies, not“I am the truthful one,”but“I am he who is truth and the source of truth”—in other words, truth of being, not merely truth of expression. So1 John 5:7—“the Spirit is the truth.”Cf.1 Esdras 1:38—“The truth abideth and is forever strong, and it liveth and ruleth forever”= personal truth? See Godet onJohn 1:18; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:181.Truth is God perfectly revealed and known. It may be likened to the electric current which manifests and measures the power of the dynamo. There is no realm of truth apart from the world-ground, just as there is no law of nature that is independent of the Author of nature. While we know ourselves only partially, God knows himself fully. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 1:192—“In the life of God there are no unrealized possibilities. The presupposition of all our knowledge and activity is that absolute and eternal unity of knowing and being which is only another expression for the nature of God. In one sense, he is all reality, and the only reality, whilst all finite existence is but abecoming, which neveris.”Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 57-63—“Truth is reality revealed. Jesus is the Truth, because in him the sum of the qualities hidden in God is presented and revealed to the world, God's nature in terms of an active force and in relation to his rational creation.”This definition however ignores the fact that God is truth, apart from and before all creation. As an immanent attribute, truth implies a conformity of God's knowledge to God's being, which antedates the universe; see B. (b) below.(b) Truth in God is not a merely active attribute of the divine nature. God is truth, not only in the sense that he is the being who truly knows, but also in the sense that he is the truth that is known. The passive precedes the active; truth of being precedes truth of knowing.Plato:“Truth is his (God's) body, and light his shadow.”Hollaz (quoted in Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:137) says that“truth is the conformity of the divine essence with the divine intellect.”See Gerhard, loc. ii:152; Kahnis, Dogmatik, 2:272, 279; 3:193—“Distinguish in God the personal self-consciousness [spirituality, personality—see pages 252, 253] from the unfolding of this in the divine knowledge, which can have no other object but God himself. So far, now, as self-knowing in God is absolutely identical with his being is he the absolutely true. For truth is the knowledge which answers to the being, and the being which answers to the knowledge.”Royce, World and Individual, 1:270—“Truth either may mean that about which we judge,orit may mean the correspondence between our ideas and their objects.”God's truth is both object of his knowledge and knowledge of his object. Miss Clara French, The Dramatic Action and Motive of King John:“You spell Truth with a capital, and make it an independent existence to be sought for and absorbed; but, unless truth is God, what can it do for man? It is only a personality that can touch a personality.”So we assent to the poet's declaration that“Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again,”only because Truth is personal. Christ, the Revealer of God, is the Truth. He is not simply the medium but also the object of all knowledge;Eph. 4:20—“ye did not so learn Christ”= ye knew more than the doctrine about Christ,—ye knew Christ himself;John 17:3—“this is life eternal that they should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.”B. Positively:(a) All truth among men, whether mathematical, logical, moral, or religious, is to be regarded as having its foundation in this immanent truth of the divine nature and as disclosing facts in the being of God.There is a higher Mind than our mind. No apostle can say“I am the truth,”though each of them can say“I speak the truth.”Truth is not a scientific or moral, but a substantial, thing—“nicht Schulsache, sondern Lebenssache.”Here is the dignity of education, that knowledge of truth is knowledge of God. The laws of mathematics are disclosures to us, not of the divine reason merely, for this would imply truth outside of and before God, but of the divine nature. J. W. A. Stewart:“Science is possible because God is scientific.”Plato:“God geometrizes.”Bowne:“The heavens are crystalized mathematics.”The statement that two and two make four, or that virtue is commendable and vice condemnable, expresses an everlasting principle in the being of God. Separate statements of truth are inexplicable apart from the total revelation of truth, and this total revelation is inexplicable apart from One who is truth and who[pg 262]is thus revealed. The separate electric lights in our streets are inexplicable apart from the electric current which throbs through the wires, and this electric current is itself inexplicable apart from the hidden dynamo whose power it exactly expresses and measures. The separate lights of truth are due to the realizing agency of the Holy Spirit; the one unifying current which they partially reveal is the outgoing work of Christ, the divine Logos; Christ is the one and only Revealer of him who dwells“in light unapproachable; whom no man hath seen, nor can see”(1 Tim. 6:16).Prof. H. E. Webster began his lectures“by assuming the Lord Jesus Christandthe multiplication-table.”But this was tautology, because the Lord Jesus Christ, the Truth, the only revealer of God, includes the multiplication-table. So Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:257; 2:202, unduly narrows the scope of Christ's revelation when he maintains that with Jesus truth is not the truth which corresponds to reality but rather the right conduct which corresponds to the duty prescribed by God.“Grace and truth”(John 1:17)then means the favor of God and the righteousness which God approves. To understand Jesus is impossible without being ethically like him. He is king of truth, in that he reveals this righteousness, and finds obedience for it among men. This ethical aspect of the truth, we would reply, important as it is, does not exclude but rather requires for its complement and presupposition that other aspect of the truth as the reality to which all being must conform and the conformity of all being to that reality. Since Christ is the truth of God, we are successful in our search for truth only as we recognize him. Whether all roads lead to Rome depends upon which way your face is turned. Follow a point of land out into the sea, and you find only ocean. With the back turned upon Jesus Christ all following after truth leads only into mist and darkness. Aristotle's ideal man was“a hunter after truth.”But truth can never be found disjoined from love, nor can the loveless seeker discern it.“For the loving worm within its clod Were diviner than a loveless God”(Robert Browning). Hence Christ can say:John 18:37—“Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.”(b) This attribute therefore constitutes the principle and guarantee of all revelation, while it shows the possibility of an eternal divine self-contemplation apart from and before all creation. It is to be understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity.To all this doctrine, however, a great school of philosophers have opposed themselves. Duns Scotus held that God's will made truth as well as right. Descartes said that God could have made it untrue that the radii of a circle are all equal. Lord Bacon said that Adam's sin consisted in seeking a good in itself, instead of being content with the merely empirical good. Whedon, On the Will, 316—“Infinite wisdom and infinite holiness consist in, and result from, God's volitions eternally.”We reply that, to make truth and good matters of mere will, instead of regarding them as characteristics of God's being, is to deny that anything is true or good in itself. If God can make truth to be falsehood, and injustice to be justice, then God is indifferent to truth or falsehood, to good or evil, and he ceases thereby to be God. Truth is not arbitrary,—it is matter of being—the being of God. There are no regulative principles of knowledge which are not transcendental also. God knows and wills truth, because he is truth. Robert Browning, A Soul's Tragedy, 214—“Were't not for God, I mean, what hope of truth—Speaking truth, hearing truth—would stay with Man?”God's will does not make truth, but truth rather makes God's will. God's perfect knowledge in eternity past has an object. That object must be himself. He is the truth Known, as well as the truthful Knower. But a perfect objective must be personal. The doctrine of the Trinity is the necessary complement to the doctrine of the Attributes. Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:183—“The pillar of cloud becomes a pillar of fire.”See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 102-112.On the question whether it is ever right to deceive, see Paine, Ethnic Trinities, 300-339. Plato said that the use of such medicines should be restricted to physicians. The rulers of the state may lie for the public good, but private people not:“officiosum mendacium.”It is better to say that deception is justifiable only where the person deceived has, like a wild beast or a criminal or an enemy in war, put himself out of human society and deprived himself of the right to truth. Even then deception is a sad necessity which witnesses to an abnormal condition of human affairs. With James Martineau, when asked what answer he would give to an intending murderer when truth would mean death, we may say:“I suppose I should tell an untruth, and then should be sorry for it forever after.”On truth as an attribute of God, see Bib. Sac., Oct. 1877:735; Finney, Syst. Theol., 661; Janet, Final Causes, 416.
By truth we mean that attribute of the divine nature in virtue of which God's being and God's knowledge eternally conform to each other.
In further explanation we remark:
A. Negatively:
(a) The immanent truth of God is not to be confounded with that veracity and faithfulness which partially manifest it to creatures. These are transitive truth, and they presuppose the absolute and immanent attribute.
Deut 32:4—“A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, Just and right is he”;John 17:3—“the only true God”(ἀληθινόν);1 John 5:20—“we know him that is true”(τὸν ἀληθινόν). In both these passages ἀληθινός describes God as the genuine, the real, as distinguished from ἀληθής, the veracious (compareJohn 6:32—“the true bread”;Heb. 8:2—“the true tabernacle”).John 14:6—“I am ... the truth.”As“I am ... the life”signifies, not“I am the living one,”but rather“I[pg 261]am he who is life and the source of life,”so“I am ... the truth”signifies, not“I am the truthful one,”but“I am he who is truth and the source of truth”—in other words, truth of being, not merely truth of expression. So1 John 5:7—“the Spirit is the truth.”Cf.1 Esdras 1:38—“The truth abideth and is forever strong, and it liveth and ruleth forever”= personal truth? See Godet onJohn 1:18; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:181.Truth is God perfectly revealed and known. It may be likened to the electric current which manifests and measures the power of the dynamo. There is no realm of truth apart from the world-ground, just as there is no law of nature that is independent of the Author of nature. While we know ourselves only partially, God knows himself fully. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 1:192—“In the life of God there are no unrealized possibilities. The presupposition of all our knowledge and activity is that absolute and eternal unity of knowing and being which is only another expression for the nature of God. In one sense, he is all reality, and the only reality, whilst all finite existence is but abecoming, which neveris.”Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 57-63—“Truth is reality revealed. Jesus is the Truth, because in him the sum of the qualities hidden in God is presented and revealed to the world, God's nature in terms of an active force and in relation to his rational creation.”This definition however ignores the fact that God is truth, apart from and before all creation. As an immanent attribute, truth implies a conformity of God's knowledge to God's being, which antedates the universe; see B. (b) below.
Deut 32:4—“A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, Just and right is he”;John 17:3—“the only true God”(ἀληθινόν);1 John 5:20—“we know him that is true”(τὸν ἀληθινόν). In both these passages ἀληθινός describes God as the genuine, the real, as distinguished from ἀληθής, the veracious (compareJohn 6:32—“the true bread”;Heb. 8:2—“the true tabernacle”).John 14:6—“I am ... the truth.”As“I am ... the life”signifies, not“I am the living one,”but rather“I[pg 261]am he who is life and the source of life,”so“I am ... the truth”signifies, not“I am the truthful one,”but“I am he who is truth and the source of truth”—in other words, truth of being, not merely truth of expression. So1 John 5:7—“the Spirit is the truth.”Cf.1 Esdras 1:38—“The truth abideth and is forever strong, and it liveth and ruleth forever”= personal truth? See Godet onJohn 1:18; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:181.
Truth is God perfectly revealed and known. It may be likened to the electric current which manifests and measures the power of the dynamo. There is no realm of truth apart from the world-ground, just as there is no law of nature that is independent of the Author of nature. While we know ourselves only partially, God knows himself fully. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 1:192—“In the life of God there are no unrealized possibilities. The presupposition of all our knowledge and activity is that absolute and eternal unity of knowing and being which is only another expression for the nature of God. In one sense, he is all reality, and the only reality, whilst all finite existence is but abecoming, which neveris.”Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 57-63—“Truth is reality revealed. Jesus is the Truth, because in him the sum of the qualities hidden in God is presented and revealed to the world, God's nature in terms of an active force and in relation to his rational creation.”This definition however ignores the fact that God is truth, apart from and before all creation. As an immanent attribute, truth implies a conformity of God's knowledge to God's being, which antedates the universe; see B. (b) below.
(b) Truth in God is not a merely active attribute of the divine nature. God is truth, not only in the sense that he is the being who truly knows, but also in the sense that he is the truth that is known. The passive precedes the active; truth of being precedes truth of knowing.
Plato:“Truth is his (God's) body, and light his shadow.”Hollaz (quoted in Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:137) says that“truth is the conformity of the divine essence with the divine intellect.”See Gerhard, loc. ii:152; Kahnis, Dogmatik, 2:272, 279; 3:193—“Distinguish in God the personal self-consciousness [spirituality, personality—see pages 252, 253] from the unfolding of this in the divine knowledge, which can have no other object but God himself. So far, now, as self-knowing in God is absolutely identical with his being is he the absolutely true. For truth is the knowledge which answers to the being, and the being which answers to the knowledge.”Royce, World and Individual, 1:270—“Truth either may mean that about which we judge,orit may mean the correspondence between our ideas and their objects.”God's truth is both object of his knowledge and knowledge of his object. Miss Clara French, The Dramatic Action and Motive of King John:“You spell Truth with a capital, and make it an independent existence to be sought for and absorbed; but, unless truth is God, what can it do for man? It is only a personality that can touch a personality.”So we assent to the poet's declaration that“Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again,”only because Truth is personal. Christ, the Revealer of God, is the Truth. He is not simply the medium but also the object of all knowledge;Eph. 4:20—“ye did not so learn Christ”= ye knew more than the doctrine about Christ,—ye knew Christ himself;John 17:3—“this is life eternal that they should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.”
Plato:“Truth is his (God's) body, and light his shadow.”Hollaz (quoted in Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:137) says that“truth is the conformity of the divine essence with the divine intellect.”See Gerhard, loc. ii:152; Kahnis, Dogmatik, 2:272, 279; 3:193—“Distinguish in God the personal self-consciousness [spirituality, personality—see pages 252, 253] from the unfolding of this in the divine knowledge, which can have no other object but God himself. So far, now, as self-knowing in God is absolutely identical with his being is he the absolutely true. For truth is the knowledge which answers to the being, and the being which answers to the knowledge.”
Royce, World and Individual, 1:270—“Truth either may mean that about which we judge,orit may mean the correspondence between our ideas and their objects.”God's truth is both object of his knowledge and knowledge of his object. Miss Clara French, The Dramatic Action and Motive of King John:“You spell Truth with a capital, and make it an independent existence to be sought for and absorbed; but, unless truth is God, what can it do for man? It is only a personality that can touch a personality.”So we assent to the poet's declaration that“Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again,”only because Truth is personal. Christ, the Revealer of God, is the Truth. He is not simply the medium but also the object of all knowledge;Eph. 4:20—“ye did not so learn Christ”= ye knew more than the doctrine about Christ,—ye knew Christ himself;John 17:3—“this is life eternal that they should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.”
B. Positively:
(a) All truth among men, whether mathematical, logical, moral, or religious, is to be regarded as having its foundation in this immanent truth of the divine nature and as disclosing facts in the being of God.
There is a higher Mind than our mind. No apostle can say“I am the truth,”though each of them can say“I speak the truth.”Truth is not a scientific or moral, but a substantial, thing—“nicht Schulsache, sondern Lebenssache.”Here is the dignity of education, that knowledge of truth is knowledge of God. The laws of mathematics are disclosures to us, not of the divine reason merely, for this would imply truth outside of and before God, but of the divine nature. J. W. A. Stewart:“Science is possible because God is scientific.”Plato:“God geometrizes.”Bowne:“The heavens are crystalized mathematics.”The statement that two and two make four, or that virtue is commendable and vice condemnable, expresses an everlasting principle in the being of God. Separate statements of truth are inexplicable apart from the total revelation of truth, and this total revelation is inexplicable apart from One who is truth and who[pg 262]is thus revealed. The separate electric lights in our streets are inexplicable apart from the electric current which throbs through the wires, and this electric current is itself inexplicable apart from the hidden dynamo whose power it exactly expresses and measures. The separate lights of truth are due to the realizing agency of the Holy Spirit; the one unifying current which they partially reveal is the outgoing work of Christ, the divine Logos; Christ is the one and only Revealer of him who dwells“in light unapproachable; whom no man hath seen, nor can see”(1 Tim. 6:16).Prof. H. E. Webster began his lectures“by assuming the Lord Jesus Christandthe multiplication-table.”But this was tautology, because the Lord Jesus Christ, the Truth, the only revealer of God, includes the multiplication-table. So Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:257; 2:202, unduly narrows the scope of Christ's revelation when he maintains that with Jesus truth is not the truth which corresponds to reality but rather the right conduct which corresponds to the duty prescribed by God.“Grace and truth”(John 1:17)then means the favor of God and the righteousness which God approves. To understand Jesus is impossible without being ethically like him. He is king of truth, in that he reveals this righteousness, and finds obedience for it among men. This ethical aspect of the truth, we would reply, important as it is, does not exclude but rather requires for its complement and presupposition that other aspect of the truth as the reality to which all being must conform and the conformity of all being to that reality. Since Christ is the truth of God, we are successful in our search for truth only as we recognize him. Whether all roads lead to Rome depends upon which way your face is turned. Follow a point of land out into the sea, and you find only ocean. With the back turned upon Jesus Christ all following after truth leads only into mist and darkness. Aristotle's ideal man was“a hunter after truth.”But truth can never be found disjoined from love, nor can the loveless seeker discern it.“For the loving worm within its clod Were diviner than a loveless God”(Robert Browning). Hence Christ can say:John 18:37—“Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.”
There is a higher Mind than our mind. No apostle can say“I am the truth,”though each of them can say“I speak the truth.”Truth is not a scientific or moral, but a substantial, thing—“nicht Schulsache, sondern Lebenssache.”Here is the dignity of education, that knowledge of truth is knowledge of God. The laws of mathematics are disclosures to us, not of the divine reason merely, for this would imply truth outside of and before God, but of the divine nature. J. W. A. Stewart:“Science is possible because God is scientific.”Plato:“God geometrizes.”Bowne:“The heavens are crystalized mathematics.”The statement that two and two make four, or that virtue is commendable and vice condemnable, expresses an everlasting principle in the being of God. Separate statements of truth are inexplicable apart from the total revelation of truth, and this total revelation is inexplicable apart from One who is truth and who[pg 262]is thus revealed. The separate electric lights in our streets are inexplicable apart from the electric current which throbs through the wires, and this electric current is itself inexplicable apart from the hidden dynamo whose power it exactly expresses and measures. The separate lights of truth are due to the realizing agency of the Holy Spirit; the one unifying current which they partially reveal is the outgoing work of Christ, the divine Logos; Christ is the one and only Revealer of him who dwells“in light unapproachable; whom no man hath seen, nor can see”(1 Tim. 6:16).
Prof. H. E. Webster began his lectures“by assuming the Lord Jesus Christandthe multiplication-table.”But this was tautology, because the Lord Jesus Christ, the Truth, the only revealer of God, includes the multiplication-table. So Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:257; 2:202, unduly narrows the scope of Christ's revelation when he maintains that with Jesus truth is not the truth which corresponds to reality but rather the right conduct which corresponds to the duty prescribed by God.“Grace and truth”(John 1:17)then means the favor of God and the righteousness which God approves. To understand Jesus is impossible without being ethically like him. He is king of truth, in that he reveals this righteousness, and finds obedience for it among men. This ethical aspect of the truth, we would reply, important as it is, does not exclude but rather requires for its complement and presupposition that other aspect of the truth as the reality to which all being must conform and the conformity of all being to that reality. Since Christ is the truth of God, we are successful in our search for truth only as we recognize him. Whether all roads lead to Rome depends upon which way your face is turned. Follow a point of land out into the sea, and you find only ocean. With the back turned upon Jesus Christ all following after truth leads only into mist and darkness. Aristotle's ideal man was“a hunter after truth.”But truth can never be found disjoined from love, nor can the loveless seeker discern it.“For the loving worm within its clod Were diviner than a loveless God”(Robert Browning). Hence Christ can say:John 18:37—“Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.”
(b) This attribute therefore constitutes the principle and guarantee of all revelation, while it shows the possibility of an eternal divine self-contemplation apart from and before all creation. It is to be understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity.
To all this doctrine, however, a great school of philosophers have opposed themselves. Duns Scotus held that God's will made truth as well as right. Descartes said that God could have made it untrue that the radii of a circle are all equal. Lord Bacon said that Adam's sin consisted in seeking a good in itself, instead of being content with the merely empirical good. Whedon, On the Will, 316—“Infinite wisdom and infinite holiness consist in, and result from, God's volitions eternally.”We reply that, to make truth and good matters of mere will, instead of regarding them as characteristics of God's being, is to deny that anything is true or good in itself. If God can make truth to be falsehood, and injustice to be justice, then God is indifferent to truth or falsehood, to good or evil, and he ceases thereby to be God. Truth is not arbitrary,—it is matter of being—the being of God. There are no regulative principles of knowledge which are not transcendental also. God knows and wills truth, because he is truth. Robert Browning, A Soul's Tragedy, 214—“Were't not for God, I mean, what hope of truth—Speaking truth, hearing truth—would stay with Man?”God's will does not make truth, but truth rather makes God's will. God's perfect knowledge in eternity past has an object. That object must be himself. He is the truth Known, as well as the truthful Knower. But a perfect objective must be personal. The doctrine of the Trinity is the necessary complement to the doctrine of the Attributes. Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:183—“The pillar of cloud becomes a pillar of fire.”See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 102-112.On the question whether it is ever right to deceive, see Paine, Ethnic Trinities, 300-339. Plato said that the use of such medicines should be restricted to physicians. The rulers of the state may lie for the public good, but private people not:“officiosum mendacium.”It is better to say that deception is justifiable only where the person deceived has, like a wild beast or a criminal or an enemy in war, put himself out of human society and deprived himself of the right to truth. Even then deception is a sad necessity which witnesses to an abnormal condition of human affairs. With James Martineau, when asked what answer he would give to an intending murderer when truth would mean death, we may say:“I suppose I should tell an untruth, and then should be sorry for it forever after.”On truth as an attribute of God, see Bib. Sac., Oct. 1877:735; Finney, Syst. Theol., 661; Janet, Final Causes, 416.
To all this doctrine, however, a great school of philosophers have opposed themselves. Duns Scotus held that God's will made truth as well as right. Descartes said that God could have made it untrue that the radii of a circle are all equal. Lord Bacon said that Adam's sin consisted in seeking a good in itself, instead of being content with the merely empirical good. Whedon, On the Will, 316—“Infinite wisdom and infinite holiness consist in, and result from, God's volitions eternally.”We reply that, to make truth and good matters of mere will, instead of regarding them as characteristics of God's being, is to deny that anything is true or good in itself. If God can make truth to be falsehood, and injustice to be justice, then God is indifferent to truth or falsehood, to good or evil, and he ceases thereby to be God. Truth is not arbitrary,—it is matter of being—the being of God. There are no regulative principles of knowledge which are not transcendental also. God knows and wills truth, because he is truth. Robert Browning, A Soul's Tragedy, 214—“Were't not for God, I mean, what hope of truth—Speaking truth, hearing truth—would stay with Man?”God's will does not make truth, but truth rather makes God's will. God's perfect knowledge in eternity past has an object. That object must be himself. He is the truth Known, as well as the truthful Knower. But a perfect objective must be personal. The doctrine of the Trinity is the necessary complement to the doctrine of the Attributes. Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:183—“The pillar of cloud becomes a pillar of fire.”See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 102-112.
On the question whether it is ever right to deceive, see Paine, Ethnic Trinities, 300-339. Plato said that the use of such medicines should be restricted to physicians. The rulers of the state may lie for the public good, but private people not:“officiosum mendacium.”It is better to say that deception is justifiable only where the person deceived has, like a wild beast or a criminal or an enemy in war, put himself out of human society and deprived himself of the right to truth. Even then deception is a sad necessity which witnesses to an abnormal condition of human affairs. With James Martineau, when asked what answer he would give to an intending murderer when truth would mean death, we may say:“I suppose I should tell an untruth, and then should be sorry for it forever after.”On truth as an attribute of God, see Bib. Sac., Oct. 1877:735; Finney, Syst. Theol., 661; Janet, Final Causes, 416.
2. Love.By love we mean that attribute of the divine nature in virtue of which God is eternally moved to self-communication.1 John 4:8—“God is love”;3:16—“hereby know we love, because he laid down his life for us”;John 17:24—“thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world”;Rom. 15:30—“the love of the Spirit.”In further explanation we remark:A. Negatively:(a) The immanent love of God is not to be confounded with mercy and goodness toward creatures. These are its manifestations, and are to be denominated transitive love.Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:138, 139—“God's regard for the happiness of his creatures flows from this self-communicating attribute of his nature. Love, in the true sense of the word, is living good-will, with impulses to impartation and union; self-communication (bonum communicativum sui); devotion, merging of theegoin another, in order to penetrate, fill, bless this other with itself, and in this other, as in another self, to possess itself, without giving up itself or losing itself. Love is therefore possible only between persons, and always presupposes personality. Only as Trinity has God love, absolute love; because as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost he stands in perfect self-impartation, self-devotion, and communion with himself.”Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:136—“God has in himself the eternal and wholly adequate object of his love, independently of his relation to the world.”In the Greek mythology, Eros was one of the oldest and yet one of the youngest of the gods. So Dante makes the oldest angel to be the youngest, because nearest to God the fountain of life. In1 John 2:7, 8,“the old commandment”of love is evermore“a new commandment,”because it reflects this eternal attribute of God.“There is a love unstained by selfishness, Th' outpouring tide of self-abandonment, That loves to love, and deems its preciousness Repaid in loving, though no sentiment Of love returned reward its sacrament; Nor stays to question what the loved one will, But hymns its overture with blessings immanent; Rapt and sublimed by love's exalting thrill, Loves on, through frown or smile, divine, immortal still.”Clara Elizabeth Ward:“If I could gather every look of love, That ever any human creature wore, And all the looks that joy is mother of, All looks of grief that mortals ever bore, And mingle all with God-begotten grace, Methinks that I should see the Savior's face.”(b) Love is not the all-inclusive ethical attribute of God. It does not include truth, nor does it include holiness.Ladd, Philosophy of Conduct, 352, very properly denies that benevolence is the all-inclusive virtue. Justness and Truth, he remarks, are not reducible to benevolence. In a review of Ladd's work in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1903:185, C. M. Mead adds:“He comes to the conclusion that it is impossible to resolve all the virtues into the generic one of love or benevolence without either giving a definition of benevolence which is unwarranted and virtually nullifies the end aimed at, or failing to recognize certain virtues which are as genuinely virtues as benevolence itself. Particularly is it argued that the virtues of the will (courage, constancy, temperance), and the virtues of judgment (wisdom, justness, trueness), get no recognition in this attempt to subsume all virtues under the one virtue of love. 'The unity of the virtues is due to the unity of a personality, in active and varied relations with other persons' (361). If benevolence means wishinghappinessto all men, then happiness is made the ultimate good, and eudæmonism is accepted as the true ethical philosophy. But if, on the other hand, in order to avoid this conclusion, benevolence is made to mean wishing the highestwelfareto all men, and the highest welfare is conceived as a life of virtue, then we come to the rather inane conclusion that the essence of virtue is to wish that men may be virtuous.”See also art. by Vos, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1892:1-37.(c) Nor is God's love a mere regard for being in general, irrespective of its moral quality.Jonathan Edwards, in his treatise On the Nature of Virtue, defines virtue as regard for being in general. He considers that God's love is first of all directed toward himself as having the greatest quantity of being, and only secondarily directed toward[pg 264]his creatures whose quantity of being is infinitesimal as compared with his. But we reply that being in general is far too abstract a thing to elicit or justify love. Charles Hodge said truly that, if obligation is primarily due to being in general, then there is no more virtue in loving God than there is in loving Satan. Virtue, we hold, must consist, not in love for being in general, but in love for good being, that is, in love for God as holy. Love has no moral value except as it is placed upon a right object and is proportioned to the worth of that object.“Love of being in general”makes virtue an irrational thing, because it has no standard of conduct. Virtue is rather the love of God as right and as the source of right.G. S. Lee, The Shadow-cross, 38—“God is love, and law is the way he loves us. But it is also true that God is law, and love is the way he rules us.”Clarke, Christian Theology, 88—“Love is God's desire to impart himself, and so all good, to other persons, and to possess them for his own spiritual fellowship.”The intent to communicate himself is the intent to communicate holiness, and this is the“terminus ad quem”of God's administration. Drummond, in his Ascent of Man, shows that Love began with the first cell of life. Evolution is not a tale of battle, but a love-story. We gradually pass from selfism to otherism. Evolution is the object of nature, and altruism is the object of evolution. Man = nutrition, looking to his own things; Woman = reproduction, looking to the things of others. But the greatest of these is love. The mammalia = the mothers, last and highest, care for others. As the mother gives love, so the father gives righteousness. Law, once a latent thing, now becomes active. The father makes a sort of conscience for those beneath him. Nature, like Raphael, is producing a Holy Family.Jacob Boehme:“Throw open and throw out thy heart. For unless thou dost exercise thy heart, and the love of thy heart, upon every man in the world, thy self-love, thy pride, thy envy, thy distaste, thy dislike, will still have dominion over thee.... In the name and in the strength of God, love all men. Love thy neighbor as thyself, and do to thy neighbor as thou doest to thyself. And do it now. For now is the accepted time, and now is the day of salvation.”These expressions are scriptural and valuable, if they are interpreted ethically, and are understood to inculcate the supreme duty of loving the Holy One, of being holy as he is holy, and of seeking to bring all intelligent beings into conformity with his holiness.(d) God's love is not a merely emotional affection, proceeding from sense or impulse, nor is it prompted by utilitarian considerations.Of the two words for love in the N. T., φιλέω designates an emotional affection, which is not and cannot be commanded (John 11:36—“Behold how he loved him!”), while ἀγαπάω expresses a rational and benevolent affection which springs from deliberate choice (John 3:16—“God so loved the world”;Mat. 19:19—“Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself”;5:44—“Love your enemies”). Thayer, N. T. Lex., 653—Ἀγαπᾶν“properly denotes a love founded in admiration, veneration, esteem, like the Lat.diligere, to be kindly disposed to one, to wish one well; but φιλεîν denotes an inclination prompted by sense and emotion, Lat.amare.... Hence men are said ἀγαπᾶν God, not φιλεîν.”In this word ἀγάπη, when used of God, it is already implied that God loves, not for what he can get, but for what he can give. The rationality of his love involves moreover a subordination of the emotional element to a higher law than itself, namely, that of holiness. Even God's self-love must have a reason and norm in the perfections of his own being.B. Positively:(a) The immanent love of God is a rational and voluntary affection, grounded in perfect reason and deliberate choice.Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 3:277—“Love is will, aiming either at the appropriation of an object, or at the enrichment of its existence, because moved by a feeling of its worth.... Love is to persons; it is a constant will; it aims at the promotion of the other's personal end, whether known or conjectured; it takes up the other's personal end and makes it part of his own. Will, as love, does not give itself up for the other's sake; it aims at closest fellowship with the other for a common end.”A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 388-405—“Love is not rightfully independent of the other faculties, but is subject to regulation and control.... We sometimes say that religion consists in love.... It would be more strictly true to say that religion consists in a new direction of our love, a turning of the current toward God which once flowed[pg 265]toward self.... Christianity rectifies the affections, before excessive, impulsive, lawless,—gives them worthy and immortal objects, regulates their intensity in some due proportion to the value of the things they rest upon, and teaches the true methods of their manifestation. In true religion love forms a copartnership with reason.... God's love is no arbitrary, wild, passionate torrent of emotion ... and we become like God by bringing our emotions, sympathies, affections, under the dominion of reason and conscience.”(b) Since God's love is rational, it involves a subordination of theemotionalelement to a higher law than itself, namely, that of truth and holiness.Phil. 1:9—“And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and all discernment.”True love among men illustrates God's love. It merges self in another instead of making that other an appendage to self. It seeks the other's true good, not merely his present enjoyment or advantage. Its aim is to realize the divine idea in that other, and therefore it is exercised for God's sake and in the strength which God supplies. Hence it is a love for holiness, and is under law to holiness. So God's love takes into account the highest interests, and makes infinite sacrifice to secure them. For the sake of saving a world of sinners, God“spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all”(Rom. 8:32), and“Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all”(Is. 53:6). Love requires a rule or standard for its regulation. This rule or standard is the holiness of God. So once more we see that love cannot include holiness, because it is subject to the law of holiness. Love desires only the best for its object, and the best isGod. The golden rule does not bid us give what others desire, but what they need:Rom. 15:2—“Let each one of us please his neighbor for that which is good, unto edifying.”(c) The immanent love of God therefore requires and finds a perfect standard in his own holiness, and a personal object in the image of his own infinite perfections. It is to be understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity.As there is a higher Mind than our mind, so there is a greater Heart than our heart. God is not simply the loving One—he is also the Love that is loved. There is an infinite life of sensibility and affection in God. God has feeling, and in an infinite degree. But feeling alone is not love. Love implies not merely receiving but giving, not merely emotion but impartation. So the love of God is shown in his eternal giving.James 1:5—“God, who giveth,”or“the giving God”(τοῦ διδόντος Θεοῦ) = giving is not an episode in his being—it is his nature to give. And not only togive, but to givehimself. This he does eternally in the self-communications of the Trinity; this he does transitively and temporally in his giving of himself for us in Christ, and to us in the Holy Spirit.Jonathan Edwards, Essay on Trinity (ed. G. P. Fisher), 79—“That in John God is love shows that there are more persons than one in the Deity, for it shows love to be essential and necessary to the Deity, so that his nature consists in it, and this supposes that there is an eternal and necessary object, because all love respects another that is the beloved. By love here the apostle certainly means something beside that which is commonly called self-love: that is very improperly called love, and is a thing of an exceeding diverse nature from the affection or virtue of love the apostle is speaking of.”When Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 226-239, makes the first characteristic of love to be self-affirmation, and when Dorner, Christian Ethics, 73, makes self-assertion an essential part of love, they violate linguistic usage by including under love what properly belongs to holiness.(d) The immanent love of God constitutes a ground of the divine blessedness. Since there is an infinite and perfect object of love, as well as of knowledge and will, in God's own nature, the existence of the universe is not necessary to his serenity and joy.Blessedness is not itself a divine attribute; it is rather a result of the exercise of the divine attributes. It is a subjective result of this exercise, as glory is an objective result. Perfect faculties, with perfect objects for their exercise, ensure God's blessedness. But love is especially its source.Acts 20:35—“It is more blessed to give than to receive.”Happiness (hap, happen) is grounded in circumstances; blessedness, in character.[pg 266]Love precedes creation and is the ground of creation. Its object therefore cannot be the universe, for that does not exist, and, if it did exist, could not be a proper object of love for the infinite God. The only sufficient object of his love is the image of his own perfections, for that alone is equal to himself. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 264—“Man most truly realizes his own nature, when he is ruled by rational, self-forgetful love. He cannot help inferring that the highest thing in the individual consciousness is the dominant thing in the universe at large.”Here we may assent, if we remember that not the love itself but that which is loved must be the dominant thing, and we shall see that to be not love but holiness.Jones, Robert Browning, 219—“Love is for Browning the highest, richest conception man can form. It is our idea of that which is perfect; we cannot even imagine anything better. And the idea of evolution necessarily explains the world as the return of the highest to itself. The universe is homeward bound.... All things are potentially spirit, and all the phenomena of the world are manifestations of love.... Man's reason is not, but man's love is, a direct emanation from the inmost being of God”(345). Browning should have applied to truth and holiness the same principle which he recognized with regard to love. But we gratefully accept his dicta:“He that created love, shall not he love?... God! thou art Love! I build my faith on that.”(e) The love of God involves also the possibility of divine suffering, and the suffering on account of sin which holiness necessitates on the part of God is itself the atonement.Christ is“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”(Rev. 13:8);1 Pet. 1:19, 20—“precious blood, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, even the blood of Christ: who was foreknown indeed before the foundation of the world.”While holiness requires atonement, love provides it. The blessedness of God is consistent with sorrow for human misery and sin. God is passible, or capable of suffering. The permission of moral evil in the decree of creation was at cost to God. Scripture attributes to him emotions of grief and anger at human sin (Gen. 6:6—“it grieved him at his heart”;Rom. 1:18—“wrath of God”;Eph. 4:30—“grieve not the Holy Spirit of God”); painful sacrifice in the gift of Christ (Rom. 8:32—“spared not his own son”;cf.Gen. 22:16—“hast not withheld thy son”) and participation in the suffering of his people (Is. 63:9—“in all their affliction he was afflicted”); Jesus Christ in his sorrow and sympathy, his tears and agony, is the revealer of God's feelings toward the race, and we are urged to follow in his steps, that we may be perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect. We cannot, indeed, conceive of love without self-sacrifice, nor of self-sacrifice without suffering. It would seem, then, that as immutability is consistent with imperative volitions in human history, so the blessedness of God may be consistent with emotions of sorrow.But does God feel in proportion to his greatness, as the mother suffers more than the sick child whom she tends? Does God suffer infinitely in every suffering of his creatures? We must remember that God is infinitely greater than his creation, and that he sees all human sin and woe as part of his great plan. We are entitled to attribute to him only such passibleness as is consistent with infinite perfection. In combining passibleness with blessedness, then, we must allow blessedness to be the controlling element, for our fundamental idea of God is that of absolute perfection. Martensen, Dogmatics, 101—“This limitation is swallowed up in the inner life of perfection which God lives, in total independence of his creation, and in triumphant prospect of the fulfilment of his great designs. We may therefore say with the old theosophic writers:‘In the outer chambers is sadness, but in the inner ones is unmixed joy.’”Christ was“anointed ... with the oil of gladness above his fellows,”and“for the joy that was set before him endured the cross”(Heb. 1:9; 12:2). Love rejoices even in pain, when this brings good to those beloved.“Though round its base the rolling clouds are spread, Eternal sunshine settles on its head.”In George Adam Smith's Life of Henry Drummond, 11, Drummond cries out after hearing the confessions of men who came to him:“I am sick of the sins of these men! How can God bear it?”Simon, Reconciliation, 338-343, shows that before the incarnation, the Logos was a sufferer from the sins of men. This suffering however was kept in check and counterbalanced by his consciousness as a factor in the Godhead, and by the clear knowledge that men were themselves the causes of this suffering. After he became incarnate he suffered without knowing whence all the suffering came. He had a subconscious life into which were interwoven elements due to the sinful conduct of the race whose energy was drawn from himself and with which in addition he had organically united himself. If this is limitation, it is also self-limitation which[pg 267]Christ could have avoided by not creating, preserving, and redeeming mankind. We rejoice in giving away a daughter in marriage, even though it costs pain. The highest blessedness in the Christian is coincident with agony for the souls of others. We partake of Christ's joy only when we know the fellowship of his sufferings. Joy and sorrow can coëxist, like Greek fire, that burns under water.Abbé Gratry, La Morale et la Loi de l'Histoire, 165, 166—“What! Do you really suppose that the personal God, free and intelligent, loving and good, who knows every detail of human torture, and hears every sigh—this God who sees, who loves as we do, and more than we do—do you believe that he is present and looks pitilessly on what breaks your heart, and what to him must be the spectacle of Satan reveling in the blood of humanity? History teaches us that men so feel for sufferers that they have been drawn to die with them, so that their own executioners have become the next martyrs. And yet you represent God, the absolute goodness, as alone impassible? It is here that our evangelical faith comes in. Our God was made man to suffer and to die! Yes, here is the true God. He has suffered from the beginning in all who have suffered. He has been hungry in all who have hungered. He has been immolated in all and with all who have offered up their lives. He is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.”Similarly Alexander Vinet, Vital Christianity, 240, remarks that“The suffering God is not simply the teaching of modern divines. It is a New Testament thought, and it is one that answers all the doubts that arise at the sight of human suffering. To know that God is suffering with it makes that suffering more awful, but it gives strength and life and hope, for we know that, if God is in it, suffering is the road to victory. If he shares our suffering we shall share his crown,”and we can say with thePsalmist, 68:19—“Blessed be God, who daily beareth our burden, even the God who is our salvation,”and withIsaiah 63:9—“In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them.”Borden P. Bowne, Atonement:“Something like this work of grace was a moral necessity with God. It was an awful responsibility that was taken when our human race was launched with its fearful possibilities of good and evil. God thereby put himself under infinite obligation to care for his human family; and reflections on his position as Creator and Ruler, instead of removing, only make more manifest this obligation. So long as we conceive God as sitting apart in supreme ease and self-satisfaction, he is notloveat all, but only a reflection of our selfishness and vulgarity. So long as we conceive him as bestowing blessing upon us out of his infinite fulness, but at no real cost to himself, he sinks below the moral heroes of our race. There is ever a higher thought possible, until we see God taking the world upon his heart, entering into the fellowship of our sorrow, and becoming the supreme burden bearer and leader in self-sacrifice. Then only are the possibilities of grace and condescension and love and moral heroism filled up, so that nothing higher remains. And the work of Christ, so far as it was a historical event, must be viewed not merely as a piece of history, but also as a manifestation of that cross which was hidden in the divine love from the foundation of the world, and which is involved in the existence of the human world at all.”Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 264—“The eternal resolution that, if the worldwillbe tragic, itshallstill, in Satan's despite, be spiritual, is the very essence of the eternal joy of that World-Spirit of whose wisdom ours is but a fragmentary reflection.... When you suffer, your sufferings are God's sufferings,—not his external work nor his external penalty, nor the fruit of his neglect, but identically his own personal woe. In you God himself suffers, precisely as you do, and has all your reason for overcoming this grief.”Henry N. Dodge, Christus Victor:“O Thou, that from eternity Upon thy wounded heart hast borne Each pang and cry of misery Wherewith our human hearts are torn, Thy love upon the grievous cross Doth glow, the beacon-light of time, Forever sharing pain and loss With every man in every clime. How vast, how vast Thy sacrifice, As ages come and ages go, Still waiting till it shall suffice To draw the last cold heart and slow!”On the question, Is God passible? see Bennett Tyler, Sufferings of Christ; A Layman, Sufferings of Christ; Woods, Works, 1:299-317; Bib. Sac., 11:744; 17:422-424; Emmons, Works, 4:201-208; Fairbairn, Place of Christ, 483-487; Bushnell, Vic. Sacrifice, 59-93; Kedney, Christ. Doctrine Harmonized, 1:185-245; Edward Beecher, Concord of Ages, 81-204; Young, Life and Light of Men, 20-43, 147-150; Schaff, Hist. Christ. Church, 2:191; Crawford, Fatherhood of God, 43, 44; Anselm, Proslogion, cap. 8; Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 268; John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:117, 118, 137-142.Per[pg 268]contra, see Shedd, Essays and Addresses, 277, 279 note; Woods, in Lit. and Theol. Rev., 1834:43-61; Harris, God the Creator and Lord of All, 1:201. On the Biblical conception of Love in general, see article by James Orr, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.
By love we mean that attribute of the divine nature in virtue of which God is eternally moved to self-communication.
1 John 4:8—“God is love”;3:16—“hereby know we love, because he laid down his life for us”;John 17:24—“thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world”;Rom. 15:30—“the love of the Spirit.”
In further explanation we remark:
A. Negatively:
(a) The immanent love of God is not to be confounded with mercy and goodness toward creatures. These are its manifestations, and are to be denominated transitive love.
Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:138, 139—“God's regard for the happiness of his creatures flows from this self-communicating attribute of his nature. Love, in the true sense of the word, is living good-will, with impulses to impartation and union; self-communication (bonum communicativum sui); devotion, merging of theegoin another, in order to penetrate, fill, bless this other with itself, and in this other, as in another self, to possess itself, without giving up itself or losing itself. Love is therefore possible only between persons, and always presupposes personality. Only as Trinity has God love, absolute love; because as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost he stands in perfect self-impartation, self-devotion, and communion with himself.”Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:136—“God has in himself the eternal and wholly adequate object of his love, independently of his relation to the world.”In the Greek mythology, Eros was one of the oldest and yet one of the youngest of the gods. So Dante makes the oldest angel to be the youngest, because nearest to God the fountain of life. In1 John 2:7, 8,“the old commandment”of love is evermore“a new commandment,”because it reflects this eternal attribute of God.“There is a love unstained by selfishness, Th' outpouring tide of self-abandonment, That loves to love, and deems its preciousness Repaid in loving, though no sentiment Of love returned reward its sacrament; Nor stays to question what the loved one will, But hymns its overture with blessings immanent; Rapt and sublimed by love's exalting thrill, Loves on, through frown or smile, divine, immortal still.”Clara Elizabeth Ward:“If I could gather every look of love, That ever any human creature wore, And all the looks that joy is mother of, All looks of grief that mortals ever bore, And mingle all with God-begotten grace, Methinks that I should see the Savior's face.”
Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:138, 139—“God's regard for the happiness of his creatures flows from this self-communicating attribute of his nature. Love, in the true sense of the word, is living good-will, with impulses to impartation and union; self-communication (bonum communicativum sui); devotion, merging of theegoin another, in order to penetrate, fill, bless this other with itself, and in this other, as in another self, to possess itself, without giving up itself or losing itself. Love is therefore possible only between persons, and always presupposes personality. Only as Trinity has God love, absolute love; because as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost he stands in perfect self-impartation, self-devotion, and communion with himself.”Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:136—“God has in himself the eternal and wholly adequate object of his love, independently of his relation to the world.”
In the Greek mythology, Eros was one of the oldest and yet one of the youngest of the gods. So Dante makes the oldest angel to be the youngest, because nearest to God the fountain of life. In1 John 2:7, 8,“the old commandment”of love is evermore“a new commandment,”because it reflects this eternal attribute of God.“There is a love unstained by selfishness, Th' outpouring tide of self-abandonment, That loves to love, and deems its preciousness Repaid in loving, though no sentiment Of love returned reward its sacrament; Nor stays to question what the loved one will, But hymns its overture with blessings immanent; Rapt and sublimed by love's exalting thrill, Loves on, through frown or smile, divine, immortal still.”Clara Elizabeth Ward:“If I could gather every look of love, That ever any human creature wore, And all the looks that joy is mother of, All looks of grief that mortals ever bore, And mingle all with God-begotten grace, Methinks that I should see the Savior's face.”
(b) Love is not the all-inclusive ethical attribute of God. It does not include truth, nor does it include holiness.
Ladd, Philosophy of Conduct, 352, very properly denies that benevolence is the all-inclusive virtue. Justness and Truth, he remarks, are not reducible to benevolence. In a review of Ladd's work in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1903:185, C. M. Mead adds:“He comes to the conclusion that it is impossible to resolve all the virtues into the generic one of love or benevolence without either giving a definition of benevolence which is unwarranted and virtually nullifies the end aimed at, or failing to recognize certain virtues which are as genuinely virtues as benevolence itself. Particularly is it argued that the virtues of the will (courage, constancy, temperance), and the virtues of judgment (wisdom, justness, trueness), get no recognition in this attempt to subsume all virtues under the one virtue of love. 'The unity of the virtues is due to the unity of a personality, in active and varied relations with other persons' (361). If benevolence means wishinghappinessto all men, then happiness is made the ultimate good, and eudæmonism is accepted as the true ethical philosophy. But if, on the other hand, in order to avoid this conclusion, benevolence is made to mean wishing the highestwelfareto all men, and the highest welfare is conceived as a life of virtue, then we come to the rather inane conclusion that the essence of virtue is to wish that men may be virtuous.”See also art. by Vos, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1892:1-37.
Ladd, Philosophy of Conduct, 352, very properly denies that benevolence is the all-inclusive virtue. Justness and Truth, he remarks, are not reducible to benevolence. In a review of Ladd's work in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1903:185, C. M. Mead adds:“He comes to the conclusion that it is impossible to resolve all the virtues into the generic one of love or benevolence without either giving a definition of benevolence which is unwarranted and virtually nullifies the end aimed at, or failing to recognize certain virtues which are as genuinely virtues as benevolence itself. Particularly is it argued that the virtues of the will (courage, constancy, temperance), and the virtues of judgment (wisdom, justness, trueness), get no recognition in this attempt to subsume all virtues under the one virtue of love. 'The unity of the virtues is due to the unity of a personality, in active and varied relations with other persons' (361). If benevolence means wishinghappinessto all men, then happiness is made the ultimate good, and eudæmonism is accepted as the true ethical philosophy. But if, on the other hand, in order to avoid this conclusion, benevolence is made to mean wishing the highestwelfareto all men, and the highest welfare is conceived as a life of virtue, then we come to the rather inane conclusion that the essence of virtue is to wish that men may be virtuous.”See also art. by Vos, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1892:1-37.
(c) Nor is God's love a mere regard for being in general, irrespective of its moral quality.
Jonathan Edwards, in his treatise On the Nature of Virtue, defines virtue as regard for being in general. He considers that God's love is first of all directed toward himself as having the greatest quantity of being, and only secondarily directed toward[pg 264]his creatures whose quantity of being is infinitesimal as compared with his. But we reply that being in general is far too abstract a thing to elicit or justify love. Charles Hodge said truly that, if obligation is primarily due to being in general, then there is no more virtue in loving God than there is in loving Satan. Virtue, we hold, must consist, not in love for being in general, but in love for good being, that is, in love for God as holy. Love has no moral value except as it is placed upon a right object and is proportioned to the worth of that object.“Love of being in general”makes virtue an irrational thing, because it has no standard of conduct. Virtue is rather the love of God as right and as the source of right.G. S. Lee, The Shadow-cross, 38—“God is love, and law is the way he loves us. But it is also true that God is law, and love is the way he rules us.”Clarke, Christian Theology, 88—“Love is God's desire to impart himself, and so all good, to other persons, and to possess them for his own spiritual fellowship.”The intent to communicate himself is the intent to communicate holiness, and this is the“terminus ad quem”of God's administration. Drummond, in his Ascent of Man, shows that Love began with the first cell of life. Evolution is not a tale of battle, but a love-story. We gradually pass from selfism to otherism. Evolution is the object of nature, and altruism is the object of evolution. Man = nutrition, looking to his own things; Woman = reproduction, looking to the things of others. But the greatest of these is love. The mammalia = the mothers, last and highest, care for others. As the mother gives love, so the father gives righteousness. Law, once a latent thing, now becomes active. The father makes a sort of conscience for those beneath him. Nature, like Raphael, is producing a Holy Family.Jacob Boehme:“Throw open and throw out thy heart. For unless thou dost exercise thy heart, and the love of thy heart, upon every man in the world, thy self-love, thy pride, thy envy, thy distaste, thy dislike, will still have dominion over thee.... In the name and in the strength of God, love all men. Love thy neighbor as thyself, and do to thy neighbor as thou doest to thyself. And do it now. For now is the accepted time, and now is the day of salvation.”These expressions are scriptural and valuable, if they are interpreted ethically, and are understood to inculcate the supreme duty of loving the Holy One, of being holy as he is holy, and of seeking to bring all intelligent beings into conformity with his holiness.
Jonathan Edwards, in his treatise On the Nature of Virtue, defines virtue as regard for being in general. He considers that God's love is first of all directed toward himself as having the greatest quantity of being, and only secondarily directed toward[pg 264]his creatures whose quantity of being is infinitesimal as compared with his. But we reply that being in general is far too abstract a thing to elicit or justify love. Charles Hodge said truly that, if obligation is primarily due to being in general, then there is no more virtue in loving God than there is in loving Satan. Virtue, we hold, must consist, not in love for being in general, but in love for good being, that is, in love for God as holy. Love has no moral value except as it is placed upon a right object and is proportioned to the worth of that object.“Love of being in general”makes virtue an irrational thing, because it has no standard of conduct. Virtue is rather the love of God as right and as the source of right.
G. S. Lee, The Shadow-cross, 38—“God is love, and law is the way he loves us. But it is also true that God is law, and love is the way he rules us.”Clarke, Christian Theology, 88—“Love is God's desire to impart himself, and so all good, to other persons, and to possess them for his own spiritual fellowship.”The intent to communicate himself is the intent to communicate holiness, and this is the“terminus ad quem”of God's administration. Drummond, in his Ascent of Man, shows that Love began with the first cell of life. Evolution is not a tale of battle, but a love-story. We gradually pass from selfism to otherism. Evolution is the object of nature, and altruism is the object of evolution. Man = nutrition, looking to his own things; Woman = reproduction, looking to the things of others. But the greatest of these is love. The mammalia = the mothers, last and highest, care for others. As the mother gives love, so the father gives righteousness. Law, once a latent thing, now becomes active. The father makes a sort of conscience for those beneath him. Nature, like Raphael, is producing a Holy Family.
Jacob Boehme:“Throw open and throw out thy heart. For unless thou dost exercise thy heart, and the love of thy heart, upon every man in the world, thy self-love, thy pride, thy envy, thy distaste, thy dislike, will still have dominion over thee.... In the name and in the strength of God, love all men. Love thy neighbor as thyself, and do to thy neighbor as thou doest to thyself. And do it now. For now is the accepted time, and now is the day of salvation.”These expressions are scriptural and valuable, if they are interpreted ethically, and are understood to inculcate the supreme duty of loving the Holy One, of being holy as he is holy, and of seeking to bring all intelligent beings into conformity with his holiness.
(d) God's love is not a merely emotional affection, proceeding from sense or impulse, nor is it prompted by utilitarian considerations.
Of the two words for love in the N. T., φιλέω designates an emotional affection, which is not and cannot be commanded (John 11:36—“Behold how he loved him!”), while ἀγαπάω expresses a rational and benevolent affection which springs from deliberate choice (John 3:16—“God so loved the world”;Mat. 19:19—“Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself”;5:44—“Love your enemies”). Thayer, N. T. Lex., 653—Ἀγαπᾶν“properly denotes a love founded in admiration, veneration, esteem, like the Lat.diligere, to be kindly disposed to one, to wish one well; but φιλεîν denotes an inclination prompted by sense and emotion, Lat.amare.... Hence men are said ἀγαπᾶν God, not φιλεîν.”In this word ἀγάπη, when used of God, it is already implied that God loves, not for what he can get, but for what he can give. The rationality of his love involves moreover a subordination of the emotional element to a higher law than itself, namely, that of holiness. Even God's self-love must have a reason and norm in the perfections of his own being.
Of the two words for love in the N. T., φιλέω designates an emotional affection, which is not and cannot be commanded (John 11:36—“Behold how he loved him!”), while ἀγαπάω expresses a rational and benevolent affection which springs from deliberate choice (John 3:16—“God so loved the world”;Mat. 19:19—“Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself”;5:44—“Love your enemies”). Thayer, N. T. Lex., 653—Ἀγαπᾶν“properly denotes a love founded in admiration, veneration, esteem, like the Lat.diligere, to be kindly disposed to one, to wish one well; but φιλεîν denotes an inclination prompted by sense and emotion, Lat.amare.... Hence men are said ἀγαπᾶν God, not φιλεîν.”In this word ἀγάπη, when used of God, it is already implied that God loves, not for what he can get, but for what he can give. The rationality of his love involves moreover a subordination of the emotional element to a higher law than itself, namely, that of holiness. Even God's self-love must have a reason and norm in the perfections of his own being.
B. Positively:
(a) The immanent love of God is a rational and voluntary affection, grounded in perfect reason and deliberate choice.
Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 3:277—“Love is will, aiming either at the appropriation of an object, or at the enrichment of its existence, because moved by a feeling of its worth.... Love is to persons; it is a constant will; it aims at the promotion of the other's personal end, whether known or conjectured; it takes up the other's personal end and makes it part of his own. Will, as love, does not give itself up for the other's sake; it aims at closest fellowship with the other for a common end.”A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 388-405—“Love is not rightfully independent of the other faculties, but is subject to regulation and control.... We sometimes say that religion consists in love.... It would be more strictly true to say that religion consists in a new direction of our love, a turning of the current toward God which once flowed[pg 265]toward self.... Christianity rectifies the affections, before excessive, impulsive, lawless,—gives them worthy and immortal objects, regulates their intensity in some due proportion to the value of the things they rest upon, and teaches the true methods of their manifestation. In true religion love forms a copartnership with reason.... God's love is no arbitrary, wild, passionate torrent of emotion ... and we become like God by bringing our emotions, sympathies, affections, under the dominion of reason and conscience.”
Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 3:277—“Love is will, aiming either at the appropriation of an object, or at the enrichment of its existence, because moved by a feeling of its worth.... Love is to persons; it is a constant will; it aims at the promotion of the other's personal end, whether known or conjectured; it takes up the other's personal end and makes it part of his own. Will, as love, does not give itself up for the other's sake; it aims at closest fellowship with the other for a common end.”A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 388-405—“Love is not rightfully independent of the other faculties, but is subject to regulation and control.... We sometimes say that religion consists in love.... It would be more strictly true to say that religion consists in a new direction of our love, a turning of the current toward God which once flowed[pg 265]toward self.... Christianity rectifies the affections, before excessive, impulsive, lawless,—gives them worthy and immortal objects, regulates their intensity in some due proportion to the value of the things they rest upon, and teaches the true methods of their manifestation. In true religion love forms a copartnership with reason.... God's love is no arbitrary, wild, passionate torrent of emotion ... and we become like God by bringing our emotions, sympathies, affections, under the dominion of reason and conscience.”
(b) Since God's love is rational, it involves a subordination of theemotionalelement to a higher law than itself, namely, that of truth and holiness.
Phil. 1:9—“And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and all discernment.”True love among men illustrates God's love. It merges self in another instead of making that other an appendage to self. It seeks the other's true good, not merely his present enjoyment or advantage. Its aim is to realize the divine idea in that other, and therefore it is exercised for God's sake and in the strength which God supplies. Hence it is a love for holiness, and is under law to holiness. So God's love takes into account the highest interests, and makes infinite sacrifice to secure them. For the sake of saving a world of sinners, God“spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all”(Rom. 8:32), and“Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all”(Is. 53:6). Love requires a rule or standard for its regulation. This rule or standard is the holiness of God. So once more we see that love cannot include holiness, because it is subject to the law of holiness. Love desires only the best for its object, and the best isGod. The golden rule does not bid us give what others desire, but what they need:Rom. 15:2—“Let each one of us please his neighbor for that which is good, unto edifying.”
(c) The immanent love of God therefore requires and finds a perfect standard in his own holiness, and a personal object in the image of his own infinite perfections. It is to be understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity.
As there is a higher Mind than our mind, so there is a greater Heart than our heart. God is not simply the loving One—he is also the Love that is loved. There is an infinite life of sensibility and affection in God. God has feeling, and in an infinite degree. But feeling alone is not love. Love implies not merely receiving but giving, not merely emotion but impartation. So the love of God is shown in his eternal giving.James 1:5—“God, who giveth,”or“the giving God”(τοῦ διδόντος Θεοῦ) = giving is not an episode in his being—it is his nature to give. And not only togive, but to givehimself. This he does eternally in the self-communications of the Trinity; this he does transitively and temporally in his giving of himself for us in Christ, and to us in the Holy Spirit.Jonathan Edwards, Essay on Trinity (ed. G. P. Fisher), 79—“That in John God is love shows that there are more persons than one in the Deity, for it shows love to be essential and necessary to the Deity, so that his nature consists in it, and this supposes that there is an eternal and necessary object, because all love respects another that is the beloved. By love here the apostle certainly means something beside that which is commonly called self-love: that is very improperly called love, and is a thing of an exceeding diverse nature from the affection or virtue of love the apostle is speaking of.”When Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 226-239, makes the first characteristic of love to be self-affirmation, and when Dorner, Christian Ethics, 73, makes self-assertion an essential part of love, they violate linguistic usage by including under love what properly belongs to holiness.
As there is a higher Mind than our mind, so there is a greater Heart than our heart. God is not simply the loving One—he is also the Love that is loved. There is an infinite life of sensibility and affection in God. God has feeling, and in an infinite degree. But feeling alone is not love. Love implies not merely receiving but giving, not merely emotion but impartation. So the love of God is shown in his eternal giving.James 1:5—“God, who giveth,”or“the giving God”(τοῦ διδόντος Θεοῦ) = giving is not an episode in his being—it is his nature to give. And not only togive, but to givehimself. This he does eternally in the self-communications of the Trinity; this he does transitively and temporally in his giving of himself for us in Christ, and to us in the Holy Spirit.
Jonathan Edwards, Essay on Trinity (ed. G. P. Fisher), 79—“That in John God is love shows that there are more persons than one in the Deity, for it shows love to be essential and necessary to the Deity, so that his nature consists in it, and this supposes that there is an eternal and necessary object, because all love respects another that is the beloved. By love here the apostle certainly means something beside that which is commonly called self-love: that is very improperly called love, and is a thing of an exceeding diverse nature from the affection or virtue of love the apostle is speaking of.”When Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 226-239, makes the first characteristic of love to be self-affirmation, and when Dorner, Christian Ethics, 73, makes self-assertion an essential part of love, they violate linguistic usage by including under love what properly belongs to holiness.
(d) The immanent love of God constitutes a ground of the divine blessedness. Since there is an infinite and perfect object of love, as well as of knowledge and will, in God's own nature, the existence of the universe is not necessary to his serenity and joy.
Blessedness is not itself a divine attribute; it is rather a result of the exercise of the divine attributes. It is a subjective result of this exercise, as glory is an objective result. Perfect faculties, with perfect objects for their exercise, ensure God's blessedness. But love is especially its source.Acts 20:35—“It is more blessed to give than to receive.”Happiness (hap, happen) is grounded in circumstances; blessedness, in character.[pg 266]Love precedes creation and is the ground of creation. Its object therefore cannot be the universe, for that does not exist, and, if it did exist, could not be a proper object of love for the infinite God. The only sufficient object of his love is the image of his own perfections, for that alone is equal to himself. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 264—“Man most truly realizes his own nature, when he is ruled by rational, self-forgetful love. He cannot help inferring that the highest thing in the individual consciousness is the dominant thing in the universe at large.”Here we may assent, if we remember that not the love itself but that which is loved must be the dominant thing, and we shall see that to be not love but holiness.Jones, Robert Browning, 219—“Love is for Browning the highest, richest conception man can form. It is our idea of that which is perfect; we cannot even imagine anything better. And the idea of evolution necessarily explains the world as the return of the highest to itself. The universe is homeward bound.... All things are potentially spirit, and all the phenomena of the world are manifestations of love.... Man's reason is not, but man's love is, a direct emanation from the inmost being of God”(345). Browning should have applied to truth and holiness the same principle which he recognized with regard to love. But we gratefully accept his dicta:“He that created love, shall not he love?... God! thou art Love! I build my faith on that.”
Blessedness is not itself a divine attribute; it is rather a result of the exercise of the divine attributes. It is a subjective result of this exercise, as glory is an objective result. Perfect faculties, with perfect objects for their exercise, ensure God's blessedness. But love is especially its source.Acts 20:35—“It is more blessed to give than to receive.”Happiness (hap, happen) is grounded in circumstances; blessedness, in character.[pg 266]Love precedes creation and is the ground of creation. Its object therefore cannot be the universe, for that does not exist, and, if it did exist, could not be a proper object of love for the infinite God. The only sufficient object of his love is the image of his own perfections, for that alone is equal to himself. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 264—“Man most truly realizes his own nature, when he is ruled by rational, self-forgetful love. He cannot help inferring that the highest thing in the individual consciousness is the dominant thing in the universe at large.”Here we may assent, if we remember that not the love itself but that which is loved must be the dominant thing, and we shall see that to be not love but holiness.
Jones, Robert Browning, 219—“Love is for Browning the highest, richest conception man can form. It is our idea of that which is perfect; we cannot even imagine anything better. And the idea of evolution necessarily explains the world as the return of the highest to itself. The universe is homeward bound.... All things are potentially spirit, and all the phenomena of the world are manifestations of love.... Man's reason is not, but man's love is, a direct emanation from the inmost being of God”(345). Browning should have applied to truth and holiness the same principle which he recognized with regard to love. But we gratefully accept his dicta:“He that created love, shall not he love?... God! thou art Love! I build my faith on that.”
(e) The love of God involves also the possibility of divine suffering, and the suffering on account of sin which holiness necessitates on the part of God is itself the atonement.
Christ is“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”(Rev. 13:8);1 Pet. 1:19, 20—“precious blood, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, even the blood of Christ: who was foreknown indeed before the foundation of the world.”While holiness requires atonement, love provides it. The blessedness of God is consistent with sorrow for human misery and sin. God is passible, or capable of suffering. The permission of moral evil in the decree of creation was at cost to God. Scripture attributes to him emotions of grief and anger at human sin (Gen. 6:6—“it grieved him at his heart”;Rom. 1:18—“wrath of God”;Eph. 4:30—“grieve not the Holy Spirit of God”); painful sacrifice in the gift of Christ (Rom. 8:32—“spared not his own son”;cf.Gen. 22:16—“hast not withheld thy son”) and participation in the suffering of his people (Is. 63:9—“in all their affliction he was afflicted”); Jesus Christ in his sorrow and sympathy, his tears and agony, is the revealer of God's feelings toward the race, and we are urged to follow in his steps, that we may be perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect. We cannot, indeed, conceive of love without self-sacrifice, nor of self-sacrifice without suffering. It would seem, then, that as immutability is consistent with imperative volitions in human history, so the blessedness of God may be consistent with emotions of sorrow.But does God feel in proportion to his greatness, as the mother suffers more than the sick child whom she tends? Does God suffer infinitely in every suffering of his creatures? We must remember that God is infinitely greater than his creation, and that he sees all human sin and woe as part of his great plan. We are entitled to attribute to him only such passibleness as is consistent with infinite perfection. In combining passibleness with blessedness, then, we must allow blessedness to be the controlling element, for our fundamental idea of God is that of absolute perfection. Martensen, Dogmatics, 101—“This limitation is swallowed up in the inner life of perfection which God lives, in total independence of his creation, and in triumphant prospect of the fulfilment of his great designs. We may therefore say with the old theosophic writers:‘In the outer chambers is sadness, but in the inner ones is unmixed joy.’”Christ was“anointed ... with the oil of gladness above his fellows,”and“for the joy that was set before him endured the cross”(Heb. 1:9; 12:2). Love rejoices even in pain, when this brings good to those beloved.“Though round its base the rolling clouds are spread, Eternal sunshine settles on its head.”In George Adam Smith's Life of Henry Drummond, 11, Drummond cries out after hearing the confessions of men who came to him:“I am sick of the sins of these men! How can God bear it?”Simon, Reconciliation, 338-343, shows that before the incarnation, the Logos was a sufferer from the sins of men. This suffering however was kept in check and counterbalanced by his consciousness as a factor in the Godhead, and by the clear knowledge that men were themselves the causes of this suffering. After he became incarnate he suffered without knowing whence all the suffering came. He had a subconscious life into which were interwoven elements due to the sinful conduct of the race whose energy was drawn from himself and with which in addition he had organically united himself. If this is limitation, it is also self-limitation which[pg 267]Christ could have avoided by not creating, preserving, and redeeming mankind. We rejoice in giving away a daughter in marriage, even though it costs pain. The highest blessedness in the Christian is coincident with agony for the souls of others. We partake of Christ's joy only when we know the fellowship of his sufferings. Joy and sorrow can coëxist, like Greek fire, that burns under water.Abbé Gratry, La Morale et la Loi de l'Histoire, 165, 166—“What! Do you really suppose that the personal God, free and intelligent, loving and good, who knows every detail of human torture, and hears every sigh—this God who sees, who loves as we do, and more than we do—do you believe that he is present and looks pitilessly on what breaks your heart, and what to him must be the spectacle of Satan reveling in the blood of humanity? History teaches us that men so feel for sufferers that they have been drawn to die with them, so that their own executioners have become the next martyrs. And yet you represent God, the absolute goodness, as alone impassible? It is here that our evangelical faith comes in. Our God was made man to suffer and to die! Yes, here is the true God. He has suffered from the beginning in all who have suffered. He has been hungry in all who have hungered. He has been immolated in all and with all who have offered up their lives. He is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.”Similarly Alexander Vinet, Vital Christianity, 240, remarks that“The suffering God is not simply the teaching of modern divines. It is a New Testament thought, and it is one that answers all the doubts that arise at the sight of human suffering. To know that God is suffering with it makes that suffering more awful, but it gives strength and life and hope, for we know that, if God is in it, suffering is the road to victory. If he shares our suffering we shall share his crown,”and we can say with thePsalmist, 68:19—“Blessed be God, who daily beareth our burden, even the God who is our salvation,”and withIsaiah 63:9—“In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them.”Borden P. Bowne, Atonement:“Something like this work of grace was a moral necessity with God. It was an awful responsibility that was taken when our human race was launched with its fearful possibilities of good and evil. God thereby put himself under infinite obligation to care for his human family; and reflections on his position as Creator and Ruler, instead of removing, only make more manifest this obligation. So long as we conceive God as sitting apart in supreme ease and self-satisfaction, he is notloveat all, but only a reflection of our selfishness and vulgarity. So long as we conceive him as bestowing blessing upon us out of his infinite fulness, but at no real cost to himself, he sinks below the moral heroes of our race. There is ever a higher thought possible, until we see God taking the world upon his heart, entering into the fellowship of our sorrow, and becoming the supreme burden bearer and leader in self-sacrifice. Then only are the possibilities of grace and condescension and love and moral heroism filled up, so that nothing higher remains. And the work of Christ, so far as it was a historical event, must be viewed not merely as a piece of history, but also as a manifestation of that cross which was hidden in the divine love from the foundation of the world, and which is involved in the existence of the human world at all.”Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 264—“The eternal resolution that, if the worldwillbe tragic, itshallstill, in Satan's despite, be spiritual, is the very essence of the eternal joy of that World-Spirit of whose wisdom ours is but a fragmentary reflection.... When you suffer, your sufferings are God's sufferings,—not his external work nor his external penalty, nor the fruit of his neglect, but identically his own personal woe. In you God himself suffers, precisely as you do, and has all your reason for overcoming this grief.”Henry N. Dodge, Christus Victor:“O Thou, that from eternity Upon thy wounded heart hast borne Each pang and cry of misery Wherewith our human hearts are torn, Thy love upon the grievous cross Doth glow, the beacon-light of time, Forever sharing pain and loss With every man in every clime. How vast, how vast Thy sacrifice, As ages come and ages go, Still waiting till it shall suffice To draw the last cold heart and slow!”On the question, Is God passible? see Bennett Tyler, Sufferings of Christ; A Layman, Sufferings of Christ; Woods, Works, 1:299-317; Bib. Sac., 11:744; 17:422-424; Emmons, Works, 4:201-208; Fairbairn, Place of Christ, 483-487; Bushnell, Vic. Sacrifice, 59-93; Kedney, Christ. Doctrine Harmonized, 1:185-245; Edward Beecher, Concord of Ages, 81-204; Young, Life and Light of Men, 20-43, 147-150; Schaff, Hist. Christ. Church, 2:191; Crawford, Fatherhood of God, 43, 44; Anselm, Proslogion, cap. 8; Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 268; John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:117, 118, 137-142.Per[pg 268]contra, see Shedd, Essays and Addresses, 277, 279 note; Woods, in Lit. and Theol. Rev., 1834:43-61; Harris, God the Creator and Lord of All, 1:201. On the Biblical conception of Love in general, see article by James Orr, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.
Christ is“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”(Rev. 13:8);1 Pet. 1:19, 20—“precious blood, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, even the blood of Christ: who was foreknown indeed before the foundation of the world.”While holiness requires atonement, love provides it. The blessedness of God is consistent with sorrow for human misery and sin. God is passible, or capable of suffering. The permission of moral evil in the decree of creation was at cost to God. Scripture attributes to him emotions of grief and anger at human sin (Gen. 6:6—“it grieved him at his heart”;Rom. 1:18—“wrath of God”;Eph. 4:30—“grieve not the Holy Spirit of God”); painful sacrifice in the gift of Christ (Rom. 8:32—“spared not his own son”;cf.Gen. 22:16—“hast not withheld thy son”) and participation in the suffering of his people (Is. 63:9—“in all their affliction he was afflicted”); Jesus Christ in his sorrow and sympathy, his tears and agony, is the revealer of God's feelings toward the race, and we are urged to follow in his steps, that we may be perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect. We cannot, indeed, conceive of love without self-sacrifice, nor of self-sacrifice without suffering. It would seem, then, that as immutability is consistent with imperative volitions in human history, so the blessedness of God may be consistent with emotions of sorrow.
But does God feel in proportion to his greatness, as the mother suffers more than the sick child whom she tends? Does God suffer infinitely in every suffering of his creatures? We must remember that God is infinitely greater than his creation, and that he sees all human sin and woe as part of his great plan. We are entitled to attribute to him only such passibleness as is consistent with infinite perfection. In combining passibleness with blessedness, then, we must allow blessedness to be the controlling element, for our fundamental idea of God is that of absolute perfection. Martensen, Dogmatics, 101—“This limitation is swallowed up in the inner life of perfection which God lives, in total independence of his creation, and in triumphant prospect of the fulfilment of his great designs. We may therefore say with the old theosophic writers:‘In the outer chambers is sadness, but in the inner ones is unmixed joy.’”Christ was“anointed ... with the oil of gladness above his fellows,”and“for the joy that was set before him endured the cross”(Heb. 1:9; 12:2). Love rejoices even in pain, when this brings good to those beloved.“Though round its base the rolling clouds are spread, Eternal sunshine settles on its head.”
In George Adam Smith's Life of Henry Drummond, 11, Drummond cries out after hearing the confessions of men who came to him:“I am sick of the sins of these men! How can God bear it?”Simon, Reconciliation, 338-343, shows that before the incarnation, the Logos was a sufferer from the sins of men. This suffering however was kept in check and counterbalanced by his consciousness as a factor in the Godhead, and by the clear knowledge that men were themselves the causes of this suffering. After he became incarnate he suffered without knowing whence all the suffering came. He had a subconscious life into which were interwoven elements due to the sinful conduct of the race whose energy was drawn from himself and with which in addition he had organically united himself. If this is limitation, it is also self-limitation which[pg 267]Christ could have avoided by not creating, preserving, and redeeming mankind. We rejoice in giving away a daughter in marriage, even though it costs pain. The highest blessedness in the Christian is coincident with agony for the souls of others. We partake of Christ's joy only when we know the fellowship of his sufferings. Joy and sorrow can coëxist, like Greek fire, that burns under water.
Abbé Gratry, La Morale et la Loi de l'Histoire, 165, 166—“What! Do you really suppose that the personal God, free and intelligent, loving and good, who knows every detail of human torture, and hears every sigh—this God who sees, who loves as we do, and more than we do—do you believe that he is present and looks pitilessly on what breaks your heart, and what to him must be the spectacle of Satan reveling in the blood of humanity? History teaches us that men so feel for sufferers that they have been drawn to die with them, so that their own executioners have become the next martyrs. And yet you represent God, the absolute goodness, as alone impassible? It is here that our evangelical faith comes in. Our God was made man to suffer and to die! Yes, here is the true God. He has suffered from the beginning in all who have suffered. He has been hungry in all who have hungered. He has been immolated in all and with all who have offered up their lives. He is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.”Similarly Alexander Vinet, Vital Christianity, 240, remarks that“The suffering God is not simply the teaching of modern divines. It is a New Testament thought, and it is one that answers all the doubts that arise at the sight of human suffering. To know that God is suffering with it makes that suffering more awful, but it gives strength and life and hope, for we know that, if God is in it, suffering is the road to victory. If he shares our suffering we shall share his crown,”and we can say with thePsalmist, 68:19—“Blessed be God, who daily beareth our burden, even the God who is our salvation,”and withIsaiah 63:9—“In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them.”
Borden P. Bowne, Atonement:“Something like this work of grace was a moral necessity with God. It was an awful responsibility that was taken when our human race was launched with its fearful possibilities of good and evil. God thereby put himself under infinite obligation to care for his human family; and reflections on his position as Creator and Ruler, instead of removing, only make more manifest this obligation. So long as we conceive God as sitting apart in supreme ease and self-satisfaction, he is notloveat all, but only a reflection of our selfishness and vulgarity. So long as we conceive him as bestowing blessing upon us out of his infinite fulness, but at no real cost to himself, he sinks below the moral heroes of our race. There is ever a higher thought possible, until we see God taking the world upon his heart, entering into the fellowship of our sorrow, and becoming the supreme burden bearer and leader in self-sacrifice. Then only are the possibilities of grace and condescension and love and moral heroism filled up, so that nothing higher remains. And the work of Christ, so far as it was a historical event, must be viewed not merely as a piece of history, but also as a manifestation of that cross which was hidden in the divine love from the foundation of the world, and which is involved in the existence of the human world at all.”
Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 264—“The eternal resolution that, if the worldwillbe tragic, itshallstill, in Satan's despite, be spiritual, is the very essence of the eternal joy of that World-Spirit of whose wisdom ours is but a fragmentary reflection.... When you suffer, your sufferings are God's sufferings,—not his external work nor his external penalty, nor the fruit of his neglect, but identically his own personal woe. In you God himself suffers, precisely as you do, and has all your reason for overcoming this grief.”Henry N. Dodge, Christus Victor:“O Thou, that from eternity Upon thy wounded heart hast borne Each pang and cry of misery Wherewith our human hearts are torn, Thy love upon the grievous cross Doth glow, the beacon-light of time, Forever sharing pain and loss With every man in every clime. How vast, how vast Thy sacrifice, As ages come and ages go, Still waiting till it shall suffice To draw the last cold heart and slow!”
On the question, Is God passible? see Bennett Tyler, Sufferings of Christ; A Layman, Sufferings of Christ; Woods, Works, 1:299-317; Bib. Sac., 11:744; 17:422-424; Emmons, Works, 4:201-208; Fairbairn, Place of Christ, 483-487; Bushnell, Vic. Sacrifice, 59-93; Kedney, Christ. Doctrine Harmonized, 1:185-245; Edward Beecher, Concord of Ages, 81-204; Young, Life and Light of Men, 20-43, 147-150; Schaff, Hist. Christ. Church, 2:191; Crawford, Fatherhood of God, 43, 44; Anselm, Proslogion, cap. 8; Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 268; John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:117, 118, 137-142.Per[pg 268]contra, see Shedd, Essays and Addresses, 277, 279 note; Woods, in Lit. and Theol. Rev., 1834:43-61; Harris, God the Creator and Lord of All, 1:201. On the Biblical conception of Love in general, see article by James Orr, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.