Second Division.—Attributes having relation to Creation.1. Omnipresence.By this we mean that God, in the totality of his essence, without diffusion or expansion, multiplication or division, penetrates and fills the universe in all its parts.[pg 280]Ps. 139:7sq.—“Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?”Jer. 23:23, 24—“Am I a God at hand, saith Jehovah, and not a God afar off?... Do not I fill heaven and earth?”Acts 17:27, 28—“he is not far from each one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being.”Faber:“For God is never so far off As even to be near. He is within. Our spirit is The home he holds most dear. To think of him as by our side Is almost as untrue As to remove his shrine beyond Those skies of starry blue. So all the while I thought myself Homeless, forlorn and weary, Missing my joy, I walked the earth Myself God's sanctuary.”Henri Amiel:“From every point on earth we are equally near to heaven and the infinite.”Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism:“Speak to him then, for he hears, and spirit with spirit can meet; Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.”“As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart.”The atheist wrote:“God is nowhere,”but his little daughter read it:“God is now here,”and it converted him. The child however sometimes asks:“If God is everywhere, how is there any room for us?”and the only answer is that God is not a material but a spiritual being, whose presence does not exclude finite existence but rather makes such existence possible. This universal presence of God had to be learned gradually. It required great faith in Abraham to go out from Ur of the Chaldees, and yet to hold that God would be with him in a distant land (Heb. 11:8). Jacob learned that the heavenly ladder followed him wherever he went (Gen. 28:15). Jesus taught that“neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father”(John 4:21). Our Lord's mysterious comings and goings after his resurrection were intended to teach his disciples that he was with them“always, even unto the end of the world”(Mat. 28:20). The omnipresence of Jesus demonstrates,a fortiori, the omnipresence of God.In explanation of this attribute we may say:(a) God's omnipresence is not potential but essential.—We reject the Socinian representation that God's essence is in heaven, only his power on earth. When God is said to“dwell in the heavens,”we are to understand the language either as a symbolic expression of exaltation above earthly things, or as a declaration that his most special and glorious self-manifestations are to the spirits of heaven.Ps. 123:1—“O thou that sittest in the heavens”;113:5—“That hath his seat on high”;Is. 57:15—“the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity.”Mere potential omnipresence is Deistic as well as Socinian. Like birds in the air or fish in the sea,“at home, abroad, We are surrounded still with God.”We do not need to go up to heaven to call him down, or into the abyss to call him up (Rom. 10:6, 7). The best illustration is found in the presence of the soul in every part of the body. Mind seems not confined to the brain. Natural realism in philosophy, as distinguished from idealism, requires that the mind should be at the point of contact with the outer world, instead of having reports and ideas brought to it in the brain; see Porter, Human Intellect, 149. All believers in a soul regard the soul as at least present in all parts of the brain, and this is a relative omnipresence no less difficult in principle than its presence in all parts of the body. An animal's brain may be frozen into a piece solid as ice, yet, after thawing, it will act as before: although freezing of the whole body will cause death. If the immaterial principle were confined to the brain we should expect freezing of the brain to cause death. But if the soul may be omnipresent in the body or even in the brain, the divine Spirit may be omnipresent in the universe. Bowne, Metaphysics, 136—“If finite things are modes of the infinite, each thing must be a mode of the entire infinite; and the infinite must be present in its unity and completeness in every finite thing, just as the entire soul is present in all its acts.”This idealistic conception of the entire mind as present in all its thoughts must be regarded as the best analogue to God's omnipresence in the universe. We object to the view that this omnipresence is merely potential, as we find it in Clarke, Christian Theology, 74—“We know, and only know, that God is able to put forth all his power of action, without regard to place.... Omnipresence is an element in the immanence of God.... A local God would be no real God. If he is not everywhere, he is not true God anywhere. Omnipresence is implied in all providence, in all prayer, in all communion with God and reliance on God.”So long as it is conceded that consciousness is not confined to a single point in the brain, the question whether other portions of the brain or of the body are also the seat of consciousness may be regarded as a purely academic one, and the answer need not[pg 281]affect our present argument. The principle of omnipresence is granted when once we hold that the soul is conscious at more than one point of the physical organism. Yet the question suggested above is an interesting one and with regard to it psychologists are divided. Paulsen, Einleitung in die Philosophie (1892), 138-159, holds that consciousness is correlated with the sum-total of bodily processes, and with him agree Fechner and Wundt.“Pflüger and Lewes say that as the hemispheres of the brain owe their intelligence to the consciousness which we know to be there, so the intelligence of the spinal cord's acts must really be due to the invisible presence of a consciousness lower in degree.”Professor Brewer's rattlesnake, after several hours of decapitation, still struck at him with its bloody neck, when he attempted to seize it by the tail. From the reaction of the frog's leg after decapitation may we not infer a certain consciousness?“Robin, on tickling the breast of a criminal an hour after decapitation, saw the arm and hand move toward the spot.”Hudson, Demonstration of a Future Life, 239-249, quotes from Hammond, Treatise on Insanity, chapter 2, to prove that the brain is not the sole organ of the mind. Instinct does not reside exclusively in the brain; it is seated in themedulla oblongata, or in the spinal cord, or in both these organs. Objective mind, as Hudson thinks, is the function of the physical brain, and it ceases when the brain loses its vitality. Instinctive acts are performed by animals after excision of the brain, and by human beings born without brain. Johnson, in Andover Rev., April, 1890:421—“The brain is not the only seat of consciousness. The same evidence that points to the brain as theprincipalseat of consciousness points to the nerve-centres situated in the spinal cord or elsewhere as the seat of a more or lesssubordinateconsciousness or intelligence.”Ireland, Blot on the Brain, 26—“I do not take it for proved that consciousness is entirely confined to the brain.”In spite of these opinions, however, we must grant that the general consensus among psychologists is upon the other side. Dewey, Psychology, 349—“The sensory and motor nerves have points of meeting in the spinal cord. When a stimulus is transferred from a sensory nerve to a motor without the conscious intervention of the mind, we have reflex action.... If something approaches the eye, the stimulus is transferred to the spinal cord, and instead of being continued to the brain and giving rise to a sensation, it is discharged into a motor nerve and the eye is immediately closed.... The reflex action in itself involves no consciousness.”William James, Psychology, 1:16, 66, 134, 214—“The cortex of the brain is the sole organ of consciousness in man.... If there be any consciousness pertaining to the lower centres, it is a consciousness of which the self knows nothing.... In lower animals this may not be so much the case.... The seat of the mind, so far as its dynamical relations are concerned, is somewhere in the cortex of the brain.”See also C. A. Strong, Why the Mind has a Body, 40-50.(b) God's omnipresence is not the presence of a part but of the whole of God in every place.—This follows from the conception of God as incorporeal We reject the materialistic representation that God is composed of material elements which can be divided or sundered. There is no multiplication or diffusion of his substance to correspond with the parts of his dominions. The one essence of God is present at the same moment in all.1 Kings 8:27—“the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain(circumscribe)thee.”God must be present in all his essence and all his attributes in every place. He is“totus in omni parte.”Alger, Poetry of the Orient:“Though God extends beyond Creation's rim, Each smallest atom holds the whole of him.”From this it follows that the whole Logos can be united to and be present in the man Christ Jesus, while at the same time he fills and governs the whole universe; and so the whole Christ can be united to, and can be present in, the single believer, as fully as if that believer were the only one to receive of his fulness.A. J. Gordon:“In mathematics the whole is equal to the sum of its parts. But we know of the Spirit that every part is equal to the whole. Every church, every true body of Jesus Christ, has just as much of Christ as every other, and each has the whole Christ.”Mat. 13:20—“where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”“The parish priest of austerity Climbed up in a high church steeple, To be nearer God so that he might Hand his word down to the people. And in sermon script he daily wrote What he thought was sent from heaven, And he dropt it down on the people's heads Two times one day in seven. In his age God said,‘Come down and die,’And he cried out from the steeple,‘Where art thou, Lord?’And the Lord replied,‘Down here among my people.’”[pg 282](c) God's omnipresence is not necessary but free.—We reject the pantheistic notion that God is bound to the universe as the universe is bound to God. God is immanent in the universe, not by compulsion, but by the free act of his own will, and this immanence is qualified by his transcendence.God might at will cease to be omnipresent, for he could destroy the universe; but while the universe exists, he is and must be in all its parts. God is the life and law of the universe,—this is the truth in pantheism. But he is also personal and free,—this pantheism denies. Christianity holds to a free, as well as to an essential, omnipresence—qualified and supplemented, however, by God's transcendence. The boasted truth in pantheism is an elementary principle of Christianity, and is only the stepping-stone to a nobler truth—God's personal presence with his church. The Talmud contrasts the worship of an idol and the worship of Jehovah:“The idol seems so near, but is so far, Jehovah seems so far, but is so near!”God's omnipresence assures us that he is present with us to hear, and present in every heart and in the ends of the earth to answer, prayer. See Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 10; Bowne, Metaphysics, 136; Charnock, Attributes, 1:363-405.The Puritan turned from the moss-rose bud, saying:“I have learned to call nothing on earth lovely.”But this is to despise not only the workmanship but the presence of the Almighty. The least thing in nature is worthy of study because it is the revelation of a present God. The uniformity of nature and the reign of law are nothing but the steady will of the omnipresent God. Gravitation is God's omnipresence in space, as evolution is God's omnipresence in time. Dorner, System of Doctrine, 1:73-“God being omnipresent, contact with him may be sought at any moment in prayer and contemplation; indeed, it will always be true that we live and move and have our being in him, as the perennial and omnipresent source of our existence.”Rom. 10:6-8—“Say not in thy heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down:) or, Who shall descend into the abyss? (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead.) But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart.”Lotze, Metaphysics, § 256, quoted in Illingworth, Divine Immanence, 135, 136. Sunday-school scholar:“Is God in my pocket?”“Certainly.”“No, he isn't, for I haven't any pocket.”God is omnipresent so long as there is a universe, but he ceases to be omnipresent when the universe ceases to be.2. Omniscience.By this we mean God's perfect and eternal knowledge of all things which are objects of knowledge, whether they be actual or possible, past, present, or future.God knows his inanimate creation:Ps. 147:4—“counteth the number of the stars; He calleth them all by their names.”He has knowledge of brute creatures:Mat. 10:29—sparrows—“not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father.”Of men and their works:Ps. 33:13-15—“beholdeth all the sons of men ... considereth all their works.”Of hearts of men and their thoughts:Acts 15:8—“God, who knoweth the heart”;Ps. 139:2—“understandest my thought afar off.”Of our wants:Mat. 6:8—“knoweth what things ye have need of.”Of the least things:Mat. 10:30—“the very hairs of your head are all numbered.”Of the past:Mal. 3:16—“book of remembrance.”Of the future:Is. 46:9, 10—“declaring the end from the beginning.”Of men's future free acts:Is. 44:28—“that saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd and shall perform all my pleasure.”Of men's future evil acts:Acts 2:23—“him, being delivered up by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God.”Of the ideally possible:1 Sam. 23:12—“Will the men of Keilah deliver up me and my men into the hands of Saul? And Jehovah said, They will deliver thee up”(sc.if thou remainest);Mat. 11:23—“if the mighty works had been done in Sodom which were done in thee, it would have remained.”From eternity:Acts 15:18—“the Lord, who maketh these things known from of old.”Incomprehensible:Ps. 139:6—“Such knowledge is too wonderful for me”;Rom. 11:33—“O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God.”Related to wisdom:Ps. 104:24—“In wisdom hast thou made them all”;Eph. 3:10—“manifold wisdom of God.”Job 7:20—“O thou watcher of men”;Ps. 56:8—“Thou numberest my wanderings”= my whole life has been one continuous exile;“Put thou my tears into thy bottle”= the skin bottle of the east,—there are tears enough to fill one;“Are they not in thy book?”= no tear has fallen to the ground unnoted,—God has gathered them all. Paul Gerhardt:“Du zählst wie oft ein Christe wein', Und was sein Kummer sei; Kein stilles Thränlein ist so klein, Du hebst und legst es bei.”Heb. 4:13—“there is no creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all[pg 283]things are naked and laid open before the eyes of him with whom we have to do”—τετραχηλισμένα—with head bent back and neck laid bare, as animals slaughtered in sacrifice,orseized by the throat and thrown on the back, so that the priest might discover whether there was any blemish. Japanese proverb:“God has forgotten to forget.”(a) The omniscience of God may be argued from his omnipresence, as well as from his truth or self-knowledge, in which the plan of creation has its eternal ground, and from prophecy, which expresses God's omniscience.It is to be remembered that omniscience, as the designation of a relative and transitive attribute, does not include God's self-knowledge. The term is used in the technical sense of God's knowledge of all things that pertain to the universe of his creation. H. A. Gordon:“Light travels faster than sound. You can see the flash of fire from the cannon's mouth, a mile away, considerably before the noise of the discharge reaches the ear. God flashed the light of prediction upon the pages of his word, and we see it. Wait a little and we see the event itself.”Royce, The Conception of God, 9—“An omniscient being would be one who simply found presented to him, not by virtue of fragmentary and gradually completed processes of inquiry, but by virtue of an all-embracing, direct and transparent insight into his own truth—who found thus presented to him, I say, the complete, the fulfilled answer to every genuinely rational question.”Browning, Ferishtah's Fancies, Plot-culture:“How will it fare shouldst thou impress on me That certainly an Eye is over all And each, to make the minute's deed, word, thought As worthy of reward and punishment? Shall I permit my sense an Eye-viewed shame, Broad daylight perpetration,—so to speak,—I had not dared to breathe within the Ear, With black night's help around me?”(b) Since it is free from all imperfection, God's knowledge is immediate, as distinguished from the knowledge that comes through sense or imagination; simultaneous, as not acquired by successive observations, or built up by processes of reasoning; distinct, as free from all vagueness or confusion; true, as perfectly corresponding to the reality of things; eternal, as comprehended in one timeless act of the divine mind.An infinite mind must always act, and must always act in an absolutely perfect manner. There is in God no sense, symbol, memory, abstraction, growth, reflection, reasoning,—his knowledge is all direct and without intermediaries. God was properly represented by the ancient Egyptians, not as having eye, but as being eye. His thoughts toward us are“more than can be numbered”(Ps. 40:5), not because there is succession in them, now a remembering and now a forgetting, but because there is never a moment of our existence in which we are out of his mind; he is always thinking of us. See Charnock, Attributes, 1:406-497.Gen. 16:13—“Thou art a God that seeth.”Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 374—“Every creature of every order of existence, while its existence is sustained, is so complacently contemplated by God, that the intense and concentrated attention of all men of science together upon it could but form an utterly inadequate symbol of such divine contemplation.”So God's scrutiny of every deed of darkness is more searching than the gaze of a whole Coliseum of spectators, and his eye is more watchful over the good than would be the united care of all his hosts in heaven and earth.Armstrong, God and the Soul:“God's energy is concentrated attention, attention concentrated everywhere. We can attend to two or three things at once; the pianist plays and talks at the same time; the magician does one thing while he seems to do another. God attends to all things, does all things, at once.”Marie Corelli, Master Christian, 104—“The biograph is a hint that every scene of human life is reflected in a ceaseless moving panoramasome where, for the beholding ofsome one.”Wireless telegraphy is a stupendous warning that from God no secrets are hid, that“there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known”(Mat. 10:26). The Röntgen rays, which take photographs of our insides, right through our clothes, and even in the darkness of midnight, show that to God“the night shineth as the day”(Ps. 139:12).Professor Mitchel's equatorial telescope, slowly moving by clockwork, toward sunset, suddenly touched the horizon and disclosed a boy in a tree stealing apples, but the boy was all unconscious that he was under the gaze of the astronomer. Nothing was[pg 284]so fearful to the prisoner in the Frenchcachotas the eye of the guard that never ceased to watch him in perfect silence through the loophole in the door. As in the Roman empire the whole world was to a malefactor one great prison, and in his flight to the most distant lands the emperor could track him, so under the government of God no sinner can escape the eye of his Judge. But omnipresence is protective as well as detective. The textGen. 16:13—“Thou, God, seest me”—has been used as a restraint from evil more than as a stimulus to good. To the child of the devil it should certainly be the former. But to the child of God it should as certainly be the latter. God should not be regarded as an exacting overseer or a standing threat, but rather as one who understands us, loves us, and helps us.Ps. 139:17, 18—“How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! How great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: When I awake, I am still with thee.”(c) Since God knows things as they are, he knows the necessary sequences of his creation as necessary, the free acts of his creatures as free, the ideally possible as ideally possible.God knows what would have taken place under circumstances not now present; knows what the universe would have been, had he chosen a different plan of creation; knows what our lives would have been, had we made different decisions in the past (Is. 48:18—“Oh that thou hadst hearkened ... then had thy peace been as a river”). Clarke, Christian Theology, 77—“God has a double knowledge of his universe. He knows it as it exists eternally in his mind, as his own idea; and he knows it as actually existing in time and space, a moving, changing, growing universe, with perpetual process of succession. In his own idea, he knows it all at once; but he is also aware of its perpetual becoming, and with reference to events as they occur he has foreknowledge, present knowledge, and knowledge afterwards.... He conceives of all things simultaneously, but observes all things in their succession.”Royce, World and Individual, 2:374—holds that God does not temporally foreknow anything except as he is expressed in finite beings, but yet that the Absolute possesses a perfect knowledge at one glance of the whole of the temporal order, present, past and future. This, he says, is not foreknowledge, but eternal knowledge. Priestley denied that any contingent event could be an object of knowledge. But Reid says the denial that any free action can be foreseen involves the denial of God's own free agency, since God's future actions can be foreseen by men; also that while God foresees his own free actions, this does not determine those actions necessarily. Tennyson, In Memoriam, 26—“And if that eye which watches guilt And goodness, and hath power to see Within the green the mouldered tree, And towers fallen as soon as built—Oh, if indeed that eye foresee Or see (in Him is no before) In more of life true life no more And Love the indifference to be, Then might I find, ere yet the morn Breaks hither over Indian seas, That Shadow waiting with the keys, To shroud me from my proper scorn.”(d) The fact that there is nothing in the present condition of things from which the future actions of free creatures necessarily follow by natural law does not prevent God from foreseeing such actions, since his knowledge is not mediate, but immediate. He not only foreknows the motives which will occasion men's acts, but he directly foreknows the acts themselves. The possibility of such direct knowledge without assignable grounds of knowledge is apparent if we admit that time is a form of finite thought to which the divine mind is not subject.Aristotle maintained that there is no certain knowledge of contingent future events. Socinus, in like manner, while he admitted that God knows all things that are knowable, abridged the objects of the divine knowledge by withdrawing from the number those objects whose future existence he considered as uncertain, such as the determinations of free agents. These, he held, cannot be certainly foreknown, because there is nothing in the present condition of things from which they will necessarily follow by natural law. The man who makes a clock can tell when it will strike. But free-will, not being subject to mechanical laws, cannot have its acts predicted or foreknown. God knows things only in their causes—future events only in their antecedents. John Milton seems also to deny God's foreknowledge of free acts:“So, without least impulse or shadow of fate, Or aught by me immutably foreseen, They trespass.”[pg 285]With this Socinian doctrine some Arminians agree, as McCabe, in his Foreknowledge of God, and in his Divine Nescience of Future Contingencies a Necessity. McCabe, however, sacrifices the principle of free will, in defence of which he makes this surrender of God's foreknowledge, by saying that in cases of fulfilled prophecy, like Peter's denial and Judas's betrayal, God brought special influences to bear to secure the result,—so that Peter's and Judas's wills acted irresponsibly under the law of cause and effect. He quotes Dr. Daniel Curry as declaring that“the denial of absolute divine foreknowledge is the essential complement of the Methodist theology, without which its philosophical incompleteness is defenceless against the logical consistency of Calvinism.”See also article by McCabe in Methodist Review, Sept. 1892:760-773. Also Simon, Reconciliation, 287—“God has constituted a creature, the actions of which he can only know as such when they are performed. In presence of man, to a certain extent, even the great God condescends to wait; nay more, has himself so ordained things that he must wait, inquiring,‘What will he do?’”So Dugald Stewart:“Shall we venture to affirm that it exceeds the power of God to permit such a train of contingent events to take place as his own foreknowledge shall not extend to?”Martensen holds this view, and Rothe, Theologische Ethik, 1:212-234, who declares that the free choices of men are continually increasing the knowledge of God. So also Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:279—“The belief in the divine foreknowledge of our future has no basis in philosophy. We no longer deem it true that even God knows the moment of my moral life that is coming next. Even he does not know whether I shall yield to the secret temptation at midday. To him life is a drama of which he knows not the conclusion.”Then, says Dr. A. J. Gordon, there is nothing so dreary and dreadful as to be living under the direction of such a God. The universe is rushing on like an express-train in the darkness without headlight or engineer; at any moment we may be plunged into the abyss. Lotze does not deny God's foreknowledge of free human actions, but he regards as insoluble by the intellect the problem of the relation of time to God, and such foreknowledge as“one of those postulates as to which we know not how they can be fulfilled.”Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 159—“Foreknowledge of a free act is a knowledge without assignable grounds of knowing. On the assumption of a real time, it is hard to find a way out of this difficulty.... The doctrine of the ideality of time helps us by suggesting the possibility of an all-embracing present, or an eternal now, for God. In that case the problem vanishes with time, its condition.”Against the doctrine of the divine nescience we urge not only our fundamental conviction of God's perfection, but the constant testimony of Scripture. InIs. 41:21, 22, God makes his foreknowledge the test of his Godhead in the controversy with idols. If God cannot foreknow free human acts, then“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”(Rev. 13:8)was only a sacrifice to be offeredin caseAdam should fall, God not knowing whether he would or not, andin caseJudas should betray Christ, God not knowing whether he would or not. Indeed, since the course of nature is changed by man's will when he burns towns and fells forests, God cannot on this theory predict even the course of nature. All prophecy is therefore a protest against this view.How God foreknows free human decisions we may not be able to say, but then the method of God's knowledge in many other respects is unknown to us. The following explanations have been proposed. God may foreknow free acts:—1.Mediately, by foreknowing the motives of these acts, and this either because these motives induce the acts, (1) necessarily, or (2) certainly. This last“certainly”is to be accepted, if either; since motives are nevercauses, but are onlyoccasions, of action. The cause is the will, or the man himself. But it may be said that foreknowing acts through their motives is not foreknowing at all, but is reasoning or inference rather. Moreover, although intelligent beings commonly act according to motives previously dominant, they also at critical epochs, as at the fall of Satan and of Adam, choose between motives, and in such cases knowledge of the motives which have hitherto actuated them gives no clue to their next decisions. Another statement is therefore proposed to meet these difficulties, namely, that God may foreknow free acts:—2.Immediately, by pure intuition, inexplicable to us. Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:203, 225—“If God can know a future event as certain only by a calculation of causes, it must be allowed that he cannot with certainty foreknow any free act of man; for his foreknowledge would then be proof that the act in question was the necessary consequence of certain causes, and was not in itself free. If, on the contrary, the divine knowledge be regarded asintuitive, we see that it stands in the same immediate relation to the act itself as to its antecedents, and thus the difficulty is removed.”Even[pg 286]upon this view there still remains the difficulty of perceiving how there can be in God's mind a subjective certitude with regard to acts in respect to which there is no assignable objective ground of certainty. Yet, in spite of this difficulty, we feel bound both by Scripture and by our fundamental idea of God's perfection to maintain God's perfect knowledge of the future free acts of his creatures. With President Pepper we say:“Knowledge of contingency is not necessarily contingent knowledge.”With Whedon:“It is not calculation, but pure knowledge.”See Dorner, System of Doct., 1:332-337; 2:58-62; Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1858:601-605; Charnock, Attributes, 1:429-446; Solly, The Will, 240-254. For a valuable article on the whole subject, though advocating the view that God foreknows acts by foreknowing motives, see Bib. Sac., Oct. 1883:655-694. See also Hill, Divinity, 517.(e) Prescience is not itself causative. It is not to be confounded with the predetermining will of God. Free actions do not take place because they are foreseen, but they are foreseen because they are to take place.Seeing a thing in the future does not cause it to be, more than seeing a thing in the past causes it to be. As to future events, we may say with Whedon:“Knowledgetakesthem, notmakesthem.”Foreknowledge may, and does, presuppose predetermination, but it is not itself predetermination. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa, 1:38:1:1, says that“the knowledge of God is the cause of things”; but he is obliged to add:“God is not the cause of all things that are known by God, since evil things that are known by God are not from him.”John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 3—“Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault, Which had no less proved certain unforeknown.”(f) Omniscience embraces the actual and the possible, but it does not embrace the self-contradictory and the impossible, because these are not objects of knowledge.God does not know what the result would be if two and two made five, nor does he know“whether a chimæra ruminating in a vacuum devoureth second intentions”; and that, simply for the reason that he cannot know self-contradiction and nonsense. These things are not objects of knowledge. Clarke, Christian Theology, 80—“Can God make an old man in a minute? Could he make it well with the wicked while they remained wicked? Could he create a world in which 2 + 2 = 5?”Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 366—“Does God know the whole number that is the square root of 65? or what adjacent hills there are that have no valleys between them? Does God know round squares, and sugar salt-lumps, and Snarks and Boojums and Abracadabras?”(g) Omniscience, as qualified by holy will, is in Scripture denominated“wisdom.”In virtue of his wisdom God chooses the highest ends and uses the fittest means to accomplish them.Wisdom is not simply“estimating all things at their proper value”(Olmstead); it has in it also the element of counsel and purpose. It has been defined as“the talent of using one's talents.”It implies two things: first, choice of the highest end; secondly, choice of the best means to secure this end. J. C. C. Clarke, Self and the Father, 39—“Wisdom is not invented conceptions, or harmony of theories with theories; but is humble obedience of mind to the reception of facts that are found in things.”Thus man's wisdom, obedience, faith, are all names for different aspects of the same thing. And wisdom in God is the moral choice which makes truth and holiness supreme. Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 261—“Socialism pursues a laudable end by unwise or destructive means. It is not enough to mean well. Our methods must take some account of the nature of things, if they are to succeed. We cannot produce well-being by law. No legislation can remove inequalities of nature and constitution. Society cannot produce equality, any more than it can enable a rhinoceros to sing, or legislate a cat into a lion.”3. Omnipotence.By this we mean the power of God to do all things which are objects of power, whether with or without the use of means.Gen. 17:1—“I am God Almighty.”He performs natural wonders:Gen. 1:1-3—“Let there be Light”;Is. 44:24—“stretcheth forth the heavens alone”;Heb. 1:3—“upholding all things by the word of his power.”Spiritual wonders:2 Cor. 4:6—“God, that said, Light shall shine out of darkness, who shined in our hearts”;[pg 287]Eph. 1:19—“exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe”;Eph. 3:20—“able to do exceeding abundantly.”Power to create new things:Mat. 3:9—“able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham”.Rom. 4:17—“giveth life to the dead, and calleth the things that are not, as though they were.”After his own pleasure:Ps. 115:3—“He hath done whatsoever he hath pleased”;Eph. 1:11—“worketh all things after the counsel of his will.”Nothing impossible:Gen 18:14—“Is anything too hard for Jehovah?”Mat. 19:26—“with God all things are possible.”E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 73—“If all power in the universe is dependent on his creative will for its existence, it is impossible to conceive any limit to his power except that laid on it by his own will. But this is only negative proof; absolute omnipotence is not logically demonstrable, though readily enough recognized as a just conception of the infinite God, when propounded on the authority of a positive revelation.”The omnipotence of God is illustrated by the work of the Holy Spirit, which in Scripture is compared to wind, water and fire. The ordinary manifestations of these elements afford no criterion of the effects they are able to produce. The rushing mighty wind at Pentecost was the analogue of the wind-Spirit who bore everything before him on the first day of creation (Gen. 1:2;John 3:8;Acts 2:2). The pouring out of the Spirit is likened to the flood of Noah when the windows of heaven were opened and there was not room enough to receive that which fell (Mal. 3:10). And the baptism of the Holy Spirit is like the fire that shall destroy all impurity at the end of the world (Mat. 3:11;2 Pet. 3:7-13). See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 307-310.(a) Omnipotence does not imply power to do that which is not an object of power; as, for example, that which is self-contradictory or contradictory to the nature of God.Self-contradictory things:“facere factum infectum”—the making of a past event to have not occurred (hence the uselessness of praying:“May it be that much good was done”); drawing a shorter than a straight line between two given points; putting two separate mountains together without a valley between them. Things contradictory to the nature of God: for God to lie, to sin, to die. To do such things would not imply power, but impotence. God has all the power that is consistent with infinite perfection—all power to do what is worthy of himself. So no greater thing can be said by man than this:“I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none.”Even God cannot make wrong to be right, nor hatred of himself to be blessed. Some have held that the prevention of sin in a moral system is not an object of power, and therefore that God cannot prevent sin in a moral system. We hold the contrary; see this Compendium: Objections to the Doctrine of Decrees.Dryden, Imitation of Horace, 3:29:71—“Over the past not heaven itself has power; What has been has, and I have had my hour”—words applied by Lord John Russell to his own career. Emerson, The Past:“All is now secure and fast, Not the gods can shake the Past.”Sunday-school scholar:“Say, teacher, can God make a rock so big that he can't lift it?”Seminary Professor:“Can God tell a lie?”Seminary student:“With God all things are possible.”(b) Omnipotence does not imply the exercise of all his power on the part of God. He has power over his power; in other words, his power is under the control of wise and holy will. God can do all he will, but he will not do all he can. Else his power is mere force acting necessarily, and God is the slave of his own omnipotence.Schleiermacher held that nature not only is grounded in the divine causality, but fully expresses that causality; there is no causative power in God for anything that is not real and actual. This doctrine does not essentially differ from Spinoza'snatura naturansandnatura naturata. See Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:62-66. But omnipotence is not instinctive; it is a power used according to God's pleasure. God is by no means encompassed by the laws of nature, or shut up to a necessary evolution of his own being, as pantheism supposes. As Rothe has shown, God has a will-power over his nature-power, and is not compelled to do all that he can do. He is able from the stones of the street to“raise up children unto Abraham,”but he has not done it. In God are unopened treasures, an inexhaustible fountain of new beginnings, new creations, new revelations. To suppose that in creation he has expended all the inner possibilities of his being is to deny his omnipotence. SoJob 26:14—“Lo, these are but the outskirts[pg 288]of his ways: And how small a whisper do we hear of him! But the thunder of his power who can understand?”See Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 10; Hodgson, Time and Space, 579, 580.1 Pet. 5:6—“Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God”—his mighty hand of providence, salvation, blessing—“that he may exalt you in due time; casting all your anxiety upon him, because he careth for you.”“The mighty powers held under mighty control”—this is the greatest exhibition of power. Unrestraint is not the highest freedom. Young men must learn that self-restraint is the true power.Prov. 16:32—“He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; And he that ruleth his spirit, than he that taketh a city.”Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 2:3—“We have power in ourselves to do it, but it is a power that we have no power to do.”When dynamite goes off, it all goes off: there is no reserve. God uses as much of his power as he pleases: the remainder of wrath in himself, as well as in others, he restrains.(c) Omnipotence in God does not exclude, but implies, the power of self-limitation. Since all such self-limitation is free, proceeding from neither external nor internal compulsion, it is the act and manifestation of God's power. Human freedom is not rendered impossible by the divine omnipotence, but exists by virtue of it. It is an act of omnipotence when God humbles himself to the taking of human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ.Thomasius:“If God is to be over all and in all, he cannot himself be all.”Ps. 113: 5, 6—“Who is like unto Jehovah our God.... That humbleth himself to behold the things that are in heaven and in the earth?”Phil. 2:7, 8—“emptied himself ... humbled himself.”See Charnock, Attributes, 2:5-107. President Woolsey showed true power when he controlled his indignation and let an offending student go free. Of Christ on the cross, says Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 116—“It was the power [to retain his life, to escape suffering], with the will to hold it unused, which proved him to be what he was, the obedient and perfect man.”We are likest the omnipotent One when we limit ourselves for love's sake. The attribute of omnipotence is the ground of trust, as well as of fear, on the part of God's creatures. Isaac Watts:“His every word of grace is strong As that which built the skies; The voice that rolls the stars along Speaks all the promises.”
Second Division.—Attributes having relation to Creation.1. Omnipresence.By this we mean that God, in the totality of his essence, without diffusion or expansion, multiplication or division, penetrates and fills the universe in all its parts.[pg 280]Ps. 139:7sq.—“Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?”Jer. 23:23, 24—“Am I a God at hand, saith Jehovah, and not a God afar off?... Do not I fill heaven and earth?”Acts 17:27, 28—“he is not far from each one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being.”Faber:“For God is never so far off As even to be near. He is within. Our spirit is The home he holds most dear. To think of him as by our side Is almost as untrue As to remove his shrine beyond Those skies of starry blue. So all the while I thought myself Homeless, forlorn and weary, Missing my joy, I walked the earth Myself God's sanctuary.”Henri Amiel:“From every point on earth we are equally near to heaven and the infinite.”Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism:“Speak to him then, for he hears, and spirit with spirit can meet; Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.”“As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart.”The atheist wrote:“God is nowhere,”but his little daughter read it:“God is now here,”and it converted him. The child however sometimes asks:“If God is everywhere, how is there any room for us?”and the only answer is that God is not a material but a spiritual being, whose presence does not exclude finite existence but rather makes such existence possible. This universal presence of God had to be learned gradually. It required great faith in Abraham to go out from Ur of the Chaldees, and yet to hold that God would be with him in a distant land (Heb. 11:8). Jacob learned that the heavenly ladder followed him wherever he went (Gen. 28:15). Jesus taught that“neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father”(John 4:21). Our Lord's mysterious comings and goings after his resurrection were intended to teach his disciples that he was with them“always, even unto the end of the world”(Mat. 28:20). The omnipresence of Jesus demonstrates,a fortiori, the omnipresence of God.In explanation of this attribute we may say:(a) God's omnipresence is not potential but essential.—We reject the Socinian representation that God's essence is in heaven, only his power on earth. When God is said to“dwell in the heavens,”we are to understand the language either as a symbolic expression of exaltation above earthly things, or as a declaration that his most special and glorious self-manifestations are to the spirits of heaven.Ps. 123:1—“O thou that sittest in the heavens”;113:5—“That hath his seat on high”;Is. 57:15—“the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity.”Mere potential omnipresence is Deistic as well as Socinian. Like birds in the air or fish in the sea,“at home, abroad, We are surrounded still with God.”We do not need to go up to heaven to call him down, or into the abyss to call him up (Rom. 10:6, 7). The best illustration is found in the presence of the soul in every part of the body. Mind seems not confined to the brain. Natural realism in philosophy, as distinguished from idealism, requires that the mind should be at the point of contact with the outer world, instead of having reports and ideas brought to it in the brain; see Porter, Human Intellect, 149. All believers in a soul regard the soul as at least present in all parts of the brain, and this is a relative omnipresence no less difficult in principle than its presence in all parts of the body. An animal's brain may be frozen into a piece solid as ice, yet, after thawing, it will act as before: although freezing of the whole body will cause death. If the immaterial principle were confined to the brain we should expect freezing of the brain to cause death. But if the soul may be omnipresent in the body or even in the brain, the divine Spirit may be omnipresent in the universe. Bowne, Metaphysics, 136—“If finite things are modes of the infinite, each thing must be a mode of the entire infinite; and the infinite must be present in its unity and completeness in every finite thing, just as the entire soul is present in all its acts.”This idealistic conception of the entire mind as present in all its thoughts must be regarded as the best analogue to God's omnipresence in the universe. We object to the view that this omnipresence is merely potential, as we find it in Clarke, Christian Theology, 74—“We know, and only know, that God is able to put forth all his power of action, without regard to place.... Omnipresence is an element in the immanence of God.... A local God would be no real God. If he is not everywhere, he is not true God anywhere. Omnipresence is implied in all providence, in all prayer, in all communion with God and reliance on God.”So long as it is conceded that consciousness is not confined to a single point in the brain, the question whether other portions of the brain or of the body are also the seat of consciousness may be regarded as a purely academic one, and the answer need not[pg 281]affect our present argument. The principle of omnipresence is granted when once we hold that the soul is conscious at more than one point of the physical organism. Yet the question suggested above is an interesting one and with regard to it psychologists are divided. Paulsen, Einleitung in die Philosophie (1892), 138-159, holds that consciousness is correlated with the sum-total of bodily processes, and with him agree Fechner and Wundt.“Pflüger and Lewes say that as the hemispheres of the brain owe their intelligence to the consciousness which we know to be there, so the intelligence of the spinal cord's acts must really be due to the invisible presence of a consciousness lower in degree.”Professor Brewer's rattlesnake, after several hours of decapitation, still struck at him with its bloody neck, when he attempted to seize it by the tail. From the reaction of the frog's leg after decapitation may we not infer a certain consciousness?“Robin, on tickling the breast of a criminal an hour after decapitation, saw the arm and hand move toward the spot.”Hudson, Demonstration of a Future Life, 239-249, quotes from Hammond, Treatise on Insanity, chapter 2, to prove that the brain is not the sole organ of the mind. Instinct does not reside exclusively in the brain; it is seated in themedulla oblongata, or in the spinal cord, or in both these organs. Objective mind, as Hudson thinks, is the function of the physical brain, and it ceases when the brain loses its vitality. Instinctive acts are performed by animals after excision of the brain, and by human beings born without brain. Johnson, in Andover Rev., April, 1890:421—“The brain is not the only seat of consciousness. The same evidence that points to the brain as theprincipalseat of consciousness points to the nerve-centres situated in the spinal cord or elsewhere as the seat of a more or lesssubordinateconsciousness or intelligence.”Ireland, Blot on the Brain, 26—“I do not take it for proved that consciousness is entirely confined to the brain.”In spite of these opinions, however, we must grant that the general consensus among psychologists is upon the other side. Dewey, Psychology, 349—“The sensory and motor nerves have points of meeting in the spinal cord. When a stimulus is transferred from a sensory nerve to a motor without the conscious intervention of the mind, we have reflex action.... If something approaches the eye, the stimulus is transferred to the spinal cord, and instead of being continued to the brain and giving rise to a sensation, it is discharged into a motor nerve and the eye is immediately closed.... The reflex action in itself involves no consciousness.”William James, Psychology, 1:16, 66, 134, 214—“The cortex of the brain is the sole organ of consciousness in man.... If there be any consciousness pertaining to the lower centres, it is a consciousness of which the self knows nothing.... In lower animals this may not be so much the case.... The seat of the mind, so far as its dynamical relations are concerned, is somewhere in the cortex of the brain.”See also C. A. Strong, Why the Mind has a Body, 40-50.(b) God's omnipresence is not the presence of a part but of the whole of God in every place.—This follows from the conception of God as incorporeal We reject the materialistic representation that God is composed of material elements which can be divided or sundered. There is no multiplication or diffusion of his substance to correspond with the parts of his dominions. The one essence of God is present at the same moment in all.1 Kings 8:27—“the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain(circumscribe)thee.”God must be present in all his essence and all his attributes in every place. He is“totus in omni parte.”Alger, Poetry of the Orient:“Though God extends beyond Creation's rim, Each smallest atom holds the whole of him.”From this it follows that the whole Logos can be united to and be present in the man Christ Jesus, while at the same time he fills and governs the whole universe; and so the whole Christ can be united to, and can be present in, the single believer, as fully as if that believer were the only one to receive of his fulness.A. J. Gordon:“In mathematics the whole is equal to the sum of its parts. But we know of the Spirit that every part is equal to the whole. Every church, every true body of Jesus Christ, has just as much of Christ as every other, and each has the whole Christ.”Mat. 13:20—“where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”“The parish priest of austerity Climbed up in a high church steeple, To be nearer God so that he might Hand his word down to the people. And in sermon script he daily wrote What he thought was sent from heaven, And he dropt it down on the people's heads Two times one day in seven. In his age God said,‘Come down and die,’And he cried out from the steeple,‘Where art thou, Lord?’And the Lord replied,‘Down here among my people.’”[pg 282](c) God's omnipresence is not necessary but free.—We reject the pantheistic notion that God is bound to the universe as the universe is bound to God. God is immanent in the universe, not by compulsion, but by the free act of his own will, and this immanence is qualified by his transcendence.God might at will cease to be omnipresent, for he could destroy the universe; but while the universe exists, he is and must be in all its parts. God is the life and law of the universe,—this is the truth in pantheism. But he is also personal and free,—this pantheism denies. Christianity holds to a free, as well as to an essential, omnipresence—qualified and supplemented, however, by God's transcendence. The boasted truth in pantheism is an elementary principle of Christianity, and is only the stepping-stone to a nobler truth—God's personal presence with his church. The Talmud contrasts the worship of an idol and the worship of Jehovah:“The idol seems so near, but is so far, Jehovah seems so far, but is so near!”God's omnipresence assures us that he is present with us to hear, and present in every heart and in the ends of the earth to answer, prayer. See Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 10; Bowne, Metaphysics, 136; Charnock, Attributes, 1:363-405.The Puritan turned from the moss-rose bud, saying:“I have learned to call nothing on earth lovely.”But this is to despise not only the workmanship but the presence of the Almighty. The least thing in nature is worthy of study because it is the revelation of a present God. The uniformity of nature and the reign of law are nothing but the steady will of the omnipresent God. Gravitation is God's omnipresence in space, as evolution is God's omnipresence in time. Dorner, System of Doctrine, 1:73-“God being omnipresent, contact with him may be sought at any moment in prayer and contemplation; indeed, it will always be true that we live and move and have our being in him, as the perennial and omnipresent source of our existence.”Rom. 10:6-8—“Say not in thy heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down:) or, Who shall descend into the abyss? (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead.) But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart.”Lotze, Metaphysics, § 256, quoted in Illingworth, Divine Immanence, 135, 136. Sunday-school scholar:“Is God in my pocket?”“Certainly.”“No, he isn't, for I haven't any pocket.”God is omnipresent so long as there is a universe, but he ceases to be omnipresent when the universe ceases to be.2. Omniscience.By this we mean God's perfect and eternal knowledge of all things which are objects of knowledge, whether they be actual or possible, past, present, or future.God knows his inanimate creation:Ps. 147:4—“counteth the number of the stars; He calleth them all by their names.”He has knowledge of brute creatures:Mat. 10:29—sparrows—“not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father.”Of men and their works:Ps. 33:13-15—“beholdeth all the sons of men ... considereth all their works.”Of hearts of men and their thoughts:Acts 15:8—“God, who knoweth the heart”;Ps. 139:2—“understandest my thought afar off.”Of our wants:Mat. 6:8—“knoweth what things ye have need of.”Of the least things:Mat. 10:30—“the very hairs of your head are all numbered.”Of the past:Mal. 3:16—“book of remembrance.”Of the future:Is. 46:9, 10—“declaring the end from the beginning.”Of men's future free acts:Is. 44:28—“that saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd and shall perform all my pleasure.”Of men's future evil acts:Acts 2:23—“him, being delivered up by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God.”Of the ideally possible:1 Sam. 23:12—“Will the men of Keilah deliver up me and my men into the hands of Saul? And Jehovah said, They will deliver thee up”(sc.if thou remainest);Mat. 11:23—“if the mighty works had been done in Sodom which were done in thee, it would have remained.”From eternity:Acts 15:18—“the Lord, who maketh these things known from of old.”Incomprehensible:Ps. 139:6—“Such knowledge is too wonderful for me”;Rom. 11:33—“O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God.”Related to wisdom:Ps. 104:24—“In wisdom hast thou made them all”;Eph. 3:10—“manifold wisdom of God.”Job 7:20—“O thou watcher of men”;Ps. 56:8—“Thou numberest my wanderings”= my whole life has been one continuous exile;“Put thou my tears into thy bottle”= the skin bottle of the east,—there are tears enough to fill one;“Are they not in thy book?”= no tear has fallen to the ground unnoted,—God has gathered them all. Paul Gerhardt:“Du zählst wie oft ein Christe wein', Und was sein Kummer sei; Kein stilles Thränlein ist so klein, Du hebst und legst es bei.”Heb. 4:13—“there is no creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all[pg 283]things are naked and laid open before the eyes of him with whom we have to do”—τετραχηλισμένα—with head bent back and neck laid bare, as animals slaughtered in sacrifice,orseized by the throat and thrown on the back, so that the priest might discover whether there was any blemish. Japanese proverb:“God has forgotten to forget.”(a) The omniscience of God may be argued from his omnipresence, as well as from his truth or self-knowledge, in which the plan of creation has its eternal ground, and from prophecy, which expresses God's omniscience.It is to be remembered that omniscience, as the designation of a relative and transitive attribute, does not include God's self-knowledge. The term is used in the technical sense of God's knowledge of all things that pertain to the universe of his creation. H. A. Gordon:“Light travels faster than sound. You can see the flash of fire from the cannon's mouth, a mile away, considerably before the noise of the discharge reaches the ear. God flashed the light of prediction upon the pages of his word, and we see it. Wait a little and we see the event itself.”Royce, The Conception of God, 9—“An omniscient being would be one who simply found presented to him, not by virtue of fragmentary and gradually completed processes of inquiry, but by virtue of an all-embracing, direct and transparent insight into his own truth—who found thus presented to him, I say, the complete, the fulfilled answer to every genuinely rational question.”Browning, Ferishtah's Fancies, Plot-culture:“How will it fare shouldst thou impress on me That certainly an Eye is over all And each, to make the minute's deed, word, thought As worthy of reward and punishment? Shall I permit my sense an Eye-viewed shame, Broad daylight perpetration,—so to speak,—I had not dared to breathe within the Ear, With black night's help around me?”(b) Since it is free from all imperfection, God's knowledge is immediate, as distinguished from the knowledge that comes through sense or imagination; simultaneous, as not acquired by successive observations, or built up by processes of reasoning; distinct, as free from all vagueness or confusion; true, as perfectly corresponding to the reality of things; eternal, as comprehended in one timeless act of the divine mind.An infinite mind must always act, and must always act in an absolutely perfect manner. There is in God no sense, symbol, memory, abstraction, growth, reflection, reasoning,—his knowledge is all direct and without intermediaries. God was properly represented by the ancient Egyptians, not as having eye, but as being eye. His thoughts toward us are“more than can be numbered”(Ps. 40:5), not because there is succession in them, now a remembering and now a forgetting, but because there is never a moment of our existence in which we are out of his mind; he is always thinking of us. See Charnock, Attributes, 1:406-497.Gen. 16:13—“Thou art a God that seeth.”Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 374—“Every creature of every order of existence, while its existence is sustained, is so complacently contemplated by God, that the intense and concentrated attention of all men of science together upon it could but form an utterly inadequate symbol of such divine contemplation.”So God's scrutiny of every deed of darkness is more searching than the gaze of a whole Coliseum of spectators, and his eye is more watchful over the good than would be the united care of all his hosts in heaven and earth.Armstrong, God and the Soul:“God's energy is concentrated attention, attention concentrated everywhere. We can attend to two or three things at once; the pianist plays and talks at the same time; the magician does one thing while he seems to do another. God attends to all things, does all things, at once.”Marie Corelli, Master Christian, 104—“The biograph is a hint that every scene of human life is reflected in a ceaseless moving panoramasome where, for the beholding ofsome one.”Wireless telegraphy is a stupendous warning that from God no secrets are hid, that“there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known”(Mat. 10:26). The Röntgen rays, which take photographs of our insides, right through our clothes, and even in the darkness of midnight, show that to God“the night shineth as the day”(Ps. 139:12).Professor Mitchel's equatorial telescope, slowly moving by clockwork, toward sunset, suddenly touched the horizon and disclosed a boy in a tree stealing apples, but the boy was all unconscious that he was under the gaze of the astronomer. Nothing was[pg 284]so fearful to the prisoner in the Frenchcachotas the eye of the guard that never ceased to watch him in perfect silence through the loophole in the door. As in the Roman empire the whole world was to a malefactor one great prison, and in his flight to the most distant lands the emperor could track him, so under the government of God no sinner can escape the eye of his Judge. But omnipresence is protective as well as detective. The textGen. 16:13—“Thou, God, seest me”—has been used as a restraint from evil more than as a stimulus to good. To the child of the devil it should certainly be the former. But to the child of God it should as certainly be the latter. God should not be regarded as an exacting overseer or a standing threat, but rather as one who understands us, loves us, and helps us.Ps. 139:17, 18—“How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! How great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: When I awake, I am still with thee.”(c) Since God knows things as they are, he knows the necessary sequences of his creation as necessary, the free acts of his creatures as free, the ideally possible as ideally possible.God knows what would have taken place under circumstances not now present; knows what the universe would have been, had he chosen a different plan of creation; knows what our lives would have been, had we made different decisions in the past (Is. 48:18—“Oh that thou hadst hearkened ... then had thy peace been as a river”). Clarke, Christian Theology, 77—“God has a double knowledge of his universe. He knows it as it exists eternally in his mind, as his own idea; and he knows it as actually existing in time and space, a moving, changing, growing universe, with perpetual process of succession. In his own idea, he knows it all at once; but he is also aware of its perpetual becoming, and with reference to events as they occur he has foreknowledge, present knowledge, and knowledge afterwards.... He conceives of all things simultaneously, but observes all things in their succession.”Royce, World and Individual, 2:374—holds that God does not temporally foreknow anything except as he is expressed in finite beings, but yet that the Absolute possesses a perfect knowledge at one glance of the whole of the temporal order, present, past and future. This, he says, is not foreknowledge, but eternal knowledge. Priestley denied that any contingent event could be an object of knowledge. But Reid says the denial that any free action can be foreseen involves the denial of God's own free agency, since God's future actions can be foreseen by men; also that while God foresees his own free actions, this does not determine those actions necessarily. Tennyson, In Memoriam, 26—“And if that eye which watches guilt And goodness, and hath power to see Within the green the mouldered tree, And towers fallen as soon as built—Oh, if indeed that eye foresee Or see (in Him is no before) In more of life true life no more And Love the indifference to be, Then might I find, ere yet the morn Breaks hither over Indian seas, That Shadow waiting with the keys, To shroud me from my proper scorn.”(d) The fact that there is nothing in the present condition of things from which the future actions of free creatures necessarily follow by natural law does not prevent God from foreseeing such actions, since his knowledge is not mediate, but immediate. He not only foreknows the motives which will occasion men's acts, but he directly foreknows the acts themselves. The possibility of such direct knowledge without assignable grounds of knowledge is apparent if we admit that time is a form of finite thought to which the divine mind is not subject.Aristotle maintained that there is no certain knowledge of contingent future events. Socinus, in like manner, while he admitted that God knows all things that are knowable, abridged the objects of the divine knowledge by withdrawing from the number those objects whose future existence he considered as uncertain, such as the determinations of free agents. These, he held, cannot be certainly foreknown, because there is nothing in the present condition of things from which they will necessarily follow by natural law. The man who makes a clock can tell when it will strike. But free-will, not being subject to mechanical laws, cannot have its acts predicted or foreknown. God knows things only in their causes—future events only in their antecedents. John Milton seems also to deny God's foreknowledge of free acts:“So, without least impulse or shadow of fate, Or aught by me immutably foreseen, They trespass.”[pg 285]With this Socinian doctrine some Arminians agree, as McCabe, in his Foreknowledge of God, and in his Divine Nescience of Future Contingencies a Necessity. McCabe, however, sacrifices the principle of free will, in defence of which he makes this surrender of God's foreknowledge, by saying that in cases of fulfilled prophecy, like Peter's denial and Judas's betrayal, God brought special influences to bear to secure the result,—so that Peter's and Judas's wills acted irresponsibly under the law of cause and effect. He quotes Dr. Daniel Curry as declaring that“the denial of absolute divine foreknowledge is the essential complement of the Methodist theology, without which its philosophical incompleteness is defenceless against the logical consistency of Calvinism.”See also article by McCabe in Methodist Review, Sept. 1892:760-773. Also Simon, Reconciliation, 287—“God has constituted a creature, the actions of which he can only know as such when they are performed. In presence of man, to a certain extent, even the great God condescends to wait; nay more, has himself so ordained things that he must wait, inquiring,‘What will he do?’”So Dugald Stewart:“Shall we venture to affirm that it exceeds the power of God to permit such a train of contingent events to take place as his own foreknowledge shall not extend to?”Martensen holds this view, and Rothe, Theologische Ethik, 1:212-234, who declares that the free choices of men are continually increasing the knowledge of God. So also Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:279—“The belief in the divine foreknowledge of our future has no basis in philosophy. We no longer deem it true that even God knows the moment of my moral life that is coming next. Even he does not know whether I shall yield to the secret temptation at midday. To him life is a drama of which he knows not the conclusion.”Then, says Dr. A. J. Gordon, there is nothing so dreary and dreadful as to be living under the direction of such a God. The universe is rushing on like an express-train in the darkness without headlight or engineer; at any moment we may be plunged into the abyss. Lotze does not deny God's foreknowledge of free human actions, but he regards as insoluble by the intellect the problem of the relation of time to God, and such foreknowledge as“one of those postulates as to which we know not how they can be fulfilled.”Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 159—“Foreknowledge of a free act is a knowledge without assignable grounds of knowing. On the assumption of a real time, it is hard to find a way out of this difficulty.... The doctrine of the ideality of time helps us by suggesting the possibility of an all-embracing present, or an eternal now, for God. In that case the problem vanishes with time, its condition.”Against the doctrine of the divine nescience we urge not only our fundamental conviction of God's perfection, but the constant testimony of Scripture. InIs. 41:21, 22, God makes his foreknowledge the test of his Godhead in the controversy with idols. If God cannot foreknow free human acts, then“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”(Rev. 13:8)was only a sacrifice to be offeredin caseAdam should fall, God not knowing whether he would or not, andin caseJudas should betray Christ, God not knowing whether he would or not. Indeed, since the course of nature is changed by man's will when he burns towns and fells forests, God cannot on this theory predict even the course of nature. All prophecy is therefore a protest against this view.How God foreknows free human decisions we may not be able to say, but then the method of God's knowledge in many other respects is unknown to us. The following explanations have been proposed. God may foreknow free acts:—1.Mediately, by foreknowing the motives of these acts, and this either because these motives induce the acts, (1) necessarily, or (2) certainly. This last“certainly”is to be accepted, if either; since motives are nevercauses, but are onlyoccasions, of action. The cause is the will, or the man himself. But it may be said that foreknowing acts through their motives is not foreknowing at all, but is reasoning or inference rather. Moreover, although intelligent beings commonly act according to motives previously dominant, they also at critical epochs, as at the fall of Satan and of Adam, choose between motives, and in such cases knowledge of the motives which have hitherto actuated them gives no clue to their next decisions. Another statement is therefore proposed to meet these difficulties, namely, that God may foreknow free acts:—2.Immediately, by pure intuition, inexplicable to us. Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:203, 225—“If God can know a future event as certain only by a calculation of causes, it must be allowed that he cannot with certainty foreknow any free act of man; for his foreknowledge would then be proof that the act in question was the necessary consequence of certain causes, and was not in itself free. If, on the contrary, the divine knowledge be regarded asintuitive, we see that it stands in the same immediate relation to the act itself as to its antecedents, and thus the difficulty is removed.”Even[pg 286]upon this view there still remains the difficulty of perceiving how there can be in God's mind a subjective certitude with regard to acts in respect to which there is no assignable objective ground of certainty. Yet, in spite of this difficulty, we feel bound both by Scripture and by our fundamental idea of God's perfection to maintain God's perfect knowledge of the future free acts of his creatures. With President Pepper we say:“Knowledge of contingency is not necessarily contingent knowledge.”With Whedon:“It is not calculation, but pure knowledge.”See Dorner, System of Doct., 1:332-337; 2:58-62; Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1858:601-605; Charnock, Attributes, 1:429-446; Solly, The Will, 240-254. For a valuable article on the whole subject, though advocating the view that God foreknows acts by foreknowing motives, see Bib. Sac., Oct. 1883:655-694. See also Hill, Divinity, 517.(e) Prescience is not itself causative. It is not to be confounded with the predetermining will of God. Free actions do not take place because they are foreseen, but they are foreseen because they are to take place.Seeing a thing in the future does not cause it to be, more than seeing a thing in the past causes it to be. As to future events, we may say with Whedon:“Knowledgetakesthem, notmakesthem.”Foreknowledge may, and does, presuppose predetermination, but it is not itself predetermination. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa, 1:38:1:1, says that“the knowledge of God is the cause of things”; but he is obliged to add:“God is not the cause of all things that are known by God, since evil things that are known by God are not from him.”John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 3—“Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault, Which had no less proved certain unforeknown.”(f) Omniscience embraces the actual and the possible, but it does not embrace the self-contradictory and the impossible, because these are not objects of knowledge.God does not know what the result would be if two and two made five, nor does he know“whether a chimæra ruminating in a vacuum devoureth second intentions”; and that, simply for the reason that he cannot know self-contradiction and nonsense. These things are not objects of knowledge. Clarke, Christian Theology, 80—“Can God make an old man in a minute? Could he make it well with the wicked while they remained wicked? Could he create a world in which 2 + 2 = 5?”Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 366—“Does God know the whole number that is the square root of 65? or what adjacent hills there are that have no valleys between them? Does God know round squares, and sugar salt-lumps, and Snarks and Boojums and Abracadabras?”(g) Omniscience, as qualified by holy will, is in Scripture denominated“wisdom.”In virtue of his wisdom God chooses the highest ends and uses the fittest means to accomplish them.Wisdom is not simply“estimating all things at their proper value”(Olmstead); it has in it also the element of counsel and purpose. It has been defined as“the talent of using one's talents.”It implies two things: first, choice of the highest end; secondly, choice of the best means to secure this end. J. C. C. Clarke, Self and the Father, 39—“Wisdom is not invented conceptions, or harmony of theories with theories; but is humble obedience of mind to the reception of facts that are found in things.”Thus man's wisdom, obedience, faith, are all names for different aspects of the same thing. And wisdom in God is the moral choice which makes truth and holiness supreme. Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 261—“Socialism pursues a laudable end by unwise or destructive means. It is not enough to mean well. Our methods must take some account of the nature of things, if they are to succeed. We cannot produce well-being by law. No legislation can remove inequalities of nature and constitution. Society cannot produce equality, any more than it can enable a rhinoceros to sing, or legislate a cat into a lion.”3. Omnipotence.By this we mean the power of God to do all things which are objects of power, whether with or without the use of means.Gen. 17:1—“I am God Almighty.”He performs natural wonders:Gen. 1:1-3—“Let there be Light”;Is. 44:24—“stretcheth forth the heavens alone”;Heb. 1:3—“upholding all things by the word of his power.”Spiritual wonders:2 Cor. 4:6—“God, that said, Light shall shine out of darkness, who shined in our hearts”;[pg 287]Eph. 1:19—“exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe”;Eph. 3:20—“able to do exceeding abundantly.”Power to create new things:Mat. 3:9—“able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham”.Rom. 4:17—“giveth life to the dead, and calleth the things that are not, as though they were.”After his own pleasure:Ps. 115:3—“He hath done whatsoever he hath pleased”;Eph. 1:11—“worketh all things after the counsel of his will.”Nothing impossible:Gen 18:14—“Is anything too hard for Jehovah?”Mat. 19:26—“with God all things are possible.”E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 73—“If all power in the universe is dependent on his creative will for its existence, it is impossible to conceive any limit to his power except that laid on it by his own will. But this is only negative proof; absolute omnipotence is not logically demonstrable, though readily enough recognized as a just conception of the infinite God, when propounded on the authority of a positive revelation.”The omnipotence of God is illustrated by the work of the Holy Spirit, which in Scripture is compared to wind, water and fire. The ordinary manifestations of these elements afford no criterion of the effects they are able to produce. The rushing mighty wind at Pentecost was the analogue of the wind-Spirit who bore everything before him on the first day of creation (Gen. 1:2;John 3:8;Acts 2:2). The pouring out of the Spirit is likened to the flood of Noah when the windows of heaven were opened and there was not room enough to receive that which fell (Mal. 3:10). And the baptism of the Holy Spirit is like the fire that shall destroy all impurity at the end of the world (Mat. 3:11;2 Pet. 3:7-13). See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 307-310.(a) Omnipotence does not imply power to do that which is not an object of power; as, for example, that which is self-contradictory or contradictory to the nature of God.Self-contradictory things:“facere factum infectum”—the making of a past event to have not occurred (hence the uselessness of praying:“May it be that much good was done”); drawing a shorter than a straight line between two given points; putting two separate mountains together without a valley between them. Things contradictory to the nature of God: for God to lie, to sin, to die. To do such things would not imply power, but impotence. God has all the power that is consistent with infinite perfection—all power to do what is worthy of himself. So no greater thing can be said by man than this:“I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none.”Even God cannot make wrong to be right, nor hatred of himself to be blessed. Some have held that the prevention of sin in a moral system is not an object of power, and therefore that God cannot prevent sin in a moral system. We hold the contrary; see this Compendium: Objections to the Doctrine of Decrees.Dryden, Imitation of Horace, 3:29:71—“Over the past not heaven itself has power; What has been has, and I have had my hour”—words applied by Lord John Russell to his own career. Emerson, The Past:“All is now secure and fast, Not the gods can shake the Past.”Sunday-school scholar:“Say, teacher, can God make a rock so big that he can't lift it?”Seminary Professor:“Can God tell a lie?”Seminary student:“With God all things are possible.”(b) Omnipotence does not imply the exercise of all his power on the part of God. He has power over his power; in other words, his power is under the control of wise and holy will. God can do all he will, but he will not do all he can. Else his power is mere force acting necessarily, and God is the slave of his own omnipotence.Schleiermacher held that nature not only is grounded in the divine causality, but fully expresses that causality; there is no causative power in God for anything that is not real and actual. This doctrine does not essentially differ from Spinoza'snatura naturansandnatura naturata. See Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:62-66. But omnipotence is not instinctive; it is a power used according to God's pleasure. God is by no means encompassed by the laws of nature, or shut up to a necessary evolution of his own being, as pantheism supposes. As Rothe has shown, God has a will-power over his nature-power, and is not compelled to do all that he can do. He is able from the stones of the street to“raise up children unto Abraham,”but he has not done it. In God are unopened treasures, an inexhaustible fountain of new beginnings, new creations, new revelations. To suppose that in creation he has expended all the inner possibilities of his being is to deny his omnipotence. SoJob 26:14—“Lo, these are but the outskirts[pg 288]of his ways: And how small a whisper do we hear of him! But the thunder of his power who can understand?”See Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 10; Hodgson, Time and Space, 579, 580.1 Pet. 5:6—“Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God”—his mighty hand of providence, salvation, blessing—“that he may exalt you in due time; casting all your anxiety upon him, because he careth for you.”“The mighty powers held under mighty control”—this is the greatest exhibition of power. Unrestraint is not the highest freedom. Young men must learn that self-restraint is the true power.Prov. 16:32—“He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; And he that ruleth his spirit, than he that taketh a city.”Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 2:3—“We have power in ourselves to do it, but it is a power that we have no power to do.”When dynamite goes off, it all goes off: there is no reserve. God uses as much of his power as he pleases: the remainder of wrath in himself, as well as in others, he restrains.(c) Omnipotence in God does not exclude, but implies, the power of self-limitation. Since all such self-limitation is free, proceeding from neither external nor internal compulsion, it is the act and manifestation of God's power. Human freedom is not rendered impossible by the divine omnipotence, but exists by virtue of it. It is an act of omnipotence when God humbles himself to the taking of human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ.Thomasius:“If God is to be over all and in all, he cannot himself be all.”Ps. 113: 5, 6—“Who is like unto Jehovah our God.... That humbleth himself to behold the things that are in heaven and in the earth?”Phil. 2:7, 8—“emptied himself ... humbled himself.”See Charnock, Attributes, 2:5-107. President Woolsey showed true power when he controlled his indignation and let an offending student go free. Of Christ on the cross, says Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 116—“It was the power [to retain his life, to escape suffering], with the will to hold it unused, which proved him to be what he was, the obedient and perfect man.”We are likest the omnipotent One when we limit ourselves for love's sake. The attribute of omnipotence is the ground of trust, as well as of fear, on the part of God's creatures. Isaac Watts:“His every word of grace is strong As that which built the skies; The voice that rolls the stars along Speaks all the promises.”
Second Division.—Attributes having relation to Creation.1. Omnipresence.By this we mean that God, in the totality of his essence, without diffusion or expansion, multiplication or division, penetrates and fills the universe in all its parts.[pg 280]Ps. 139:7sq.—“Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?”Jer. 23:23, 24—“Am I a God at hand, saith Jehovah, and not a God afar off?... Do not I fill heaven and earth?”Acts 17:27, 28—“he is not far from each one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being.”Faber:“For God is never so far off As even to be near. He is within. Our spirit is The home he holds most dear. To think of him as by our side Is almost as untrue As to remove his shrine beyond Those skies of starry blue. So all the while I thought myself Homeless, forlorn and weary, Missing my joy, I walked the earth Myself God's sanctuary.”Henri Amiel:“From every point on earth we are equally near to heaven and the infinite.”Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism:“Speak to him then, for he hears, and spirit with spirit can meet; Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.”“As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart.”The atheist wrote:“God is nowhere,”but his little daughter read it:“God is now here,”and it converted him. The child however sometimes asks:“If God is everywhere, how is there any room for us?”and the only answer is that God is not a material but a spiritual being, whose presence does not exclude finite existence but rather makes such existence possible. This universal presence of God had to be learned gradually. It required great faith in Abraham to go out from Ur of the Chaldees, and yet to hold that God would be with him in a distant land (Heb. 11:8). Jacob learned that the heavenly ladder followed him wherever he went (Gen. 28:15). Jesus taught that“neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father”(John 4:21). Our Lord's mysterious comings and goings after his resurrection were intended to teach his disciples that he was with them“always, even unto the end of the world”(Mat. 28:20). The omnipresence of Jesus demonstrates,a fortiori, the omnipresence of God.In explanation of this attribute we may say:(a) God's omnipresence is not potential but essential.—We reject the Socinian representation that God's essence is in heaven, only his power on earth. When God is said to“dwell in the heavens,”we are to understand the language either as a symbolic expression of exaltation above earthly things, or as a declaration that his most special and glorious self-manifestations are to the spirits of heaven.Ps. 123:1—“O thou that sittest in the heavens”;113:5—“That hath his seat on high”;Is. 57:15—“the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity.”Mere potential omnipresence is Deistic as well as Socinian. Like birds in the air or fish in the sea,“at home, abroad, We are surrounded still with God.”We do not need to go up to heaven to call him down, or into the abyss to call him up (Rom. 10:6, 7). The best illustration is found in the presence of the soul in every part of the body. Mind seems not confined to the brain. Natural realism in philosophy, as distinguished from idealism, requires that the mind should be at the point of contact with the outer world, instead of having reports and ideas brought to it in the brain; see Porter, Human Intellect, 149. All believers in a soul regard the soul as at least present in all parts of the brain, and this is a relative omnipresence no less difficult in principle than its presence in all parts of the body. An animal's brain may be frozen into a piece solid as ice, yet, after thawing, it will act as before: although freezing of the whole body will cause death. If the immaterial principle were confined to the brain we should expect freezing of the brain to cause death. But if the soul may be omnipresent in the body or even in the brain, the divine Spirit may be omnipresent in the universe. Bowne, Metaphysics, 136—“If finite things are modes of the infinite, each thing must be a mode of the entire infinite; and the infinite must be present in its unity and completeness in every finite thing, just as the entire soul is present in all its acts.”This idealistic conception of the entire mind as present in all its thoughts must be regarded as the best analogue to God's omnipresence in the universe. We object to the view that this omnipresence is merely potential, as we find it in Clarke, Christian Theology, 74—“We know, and only know, that God is able to put forth all his power of action, without regard to place.... Omnipresence is an element in the immanence of God.... A local God would be no real God. If he is not everywhere, he is not true God anywhere. Omnipresence is implied in all providence, in all prayer, in all communion with God and reliance on God.”So long as it is conceded that consciousness is not confined to a single point in the brain, the question whether other portions of the brain or of the body are also the seat of consciousness may be regarded as a purely academic one, and the answer need not[pg 281]affect our present argument. The principle of omnipresence is granted when once we hold that the soul is conscious at more than one point of the physical organism. Yet the question suggested above is an interesting one and with regard to it psychologists are divided. Paulsen, Einleitung in die Philosophie (1892), 138-159, holds that consciousness is correlated with the sum-total of bodily processes, and with him agree Fechner and Wundt.“Pflüger and Lewes say that as the hemispheres of the brain owe their intelligence to the consciousness which we know to be there, so the intelligence of the spinal cord's acts must really be due to the invisible presence of a consciousness lower in degree.”Professor Brewer's rattlesnake, after several hours of decapitation, still struck at him with its bloody neck, when he attempted to seize it by the tail. From the reaction of the frog's leg after decapitation may we not infer a certain consciousness?“Robin, on tickling the breast of a criminal an hour after decapitation, saw the arm and hand move toward the spot.”Hudson, Demonstration of a Future Life, 239-249, quotes from Hammond, Treatise on Insanity, chapter 2, to prove that the brain is not the sole organ of the mind. Instinct does not reside exclusively in the brain; it is seated in themedulla oblongata, or in the spinal cord, or in both these organs. Objective mind, as Hudson thinks, is the function of the physical brain, and it ceases when the brain loses its vitality. Instinctive acts are performed by animals after excision of the brain, and by human beings born without brain. Johnson, in Andover Rev., April, 1890:421—“The brain is not the only seat of consciousness. The same evidence that points to the brain as theprincipalseat of consciousness points to the nerve-centres situated in the spinal cord or elsewhere as the seat of a more or lesssubordinateconsciousness or intelligence.”Ireland, Blot on the Brain, 26—“I do not take it for proved that consciousness is entirely confined to the brain.”In spite of these opinions, however, we must grant that the general consensus among psychologists is upon the other side. Dewey, Psychology, 349—“The sensory and motor nerves have points of meeting in the spinal cord. When a stimulus is transferred from a sensory nerve to a motor without the conscious intervention of the mind, we have reflex action.... If something approaches the eye, the stimulus is transferred to the spinal cord, and instead of being continued to the brain and giving rise to a sensation, it is discharged into a motor nerve and the eye is immediately closed.... The reflex action in itself involves no consciousness.”William James, Psychology, 1:16, 66, 134, 214—“The cortex of the brain is the sole organ of consciousness in man.... If there be any consciousness pertaining to the lower centres, it is a consciousness of which the self knows nothing.... In lower animals this may not be so much the case.... The seat of the mind, so far as its dynamical relations are concerned, is somewhere in the cortex of the brain.”See also C. A. Strong, Why the Mind has a Body, 40-50.(b) God's omnipresence is not the presence of a part but of the whole of God in every place.—This follows from the conception of God as incorporeal We reject the materialistic representation that God is composed of material elements which can be divided or sundered. There is no multiplication or diffusion of his substance to correspond with the parts of his dominions. The one essence of God is present at the same moment in all.1 Kings 8:27—“the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain(circumscribe)thee.”God must be present in all his essence and all his attributes in every place. He is“totus in omni parte.”Alger, Poetry of the Orient:“Though God extends beyond Creation's rim, Each smallest atom holds the whole of him.”From this it follows that the whole Logos can be united to and be present in the man Christ Jesus, while at the same time he fills and governs the whole universe; and so the whole Christ can be united to, and can be present in, the single believer, as fully as if that believer were the only one to receive of his fulness.A. J. Gordon:“In mathematics the whole is equal to the sum of its parts. But we know of the Spirit that every part is equal to the whole. Every church, every true body of Jesus Christ, has just as much of Christ as every other, and each has the whole Christ.”Mat. 13:20—“where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”“The parish priest of austerity Climbed up in a high church steeple, To be nearer God so that he might Hand his word down to the people. And in sermon script he daily wrote What he thought was sent from heaven, And he dropt it down on the people's heads Two times one day in seven. In his age God said,‘Come down and die,’And he cried out from the steeple,‘Where art thou, Lord?’And the Lord replied,‘Down here among my people.’”[pg 282](c) God's omnipresence is not necessary but free.—We reject the pantheistic notion that God is bound to the universe as the universe is bound to God. God is immanent in the universe, not by compulsion, but by the free act of his own will, and this immanence is qualified by his transcendence.God might at will cease to be omnipresent, for he could destroy the universe; but while the universe exists, he is and must be in all its parts. God is the life and law of the universe,—this is the truth in pantheism. But he is also personal and free,—this pantheism denies. Christianity holds to a free, as well as to an essential, omnipresence—qualified and supplemented, however, by God's transcendence. The boasted truth in pantheism is an elementary principle of Christianity, and is only the stepping-stone to a nobler truth—God's personal presence with his church. The Talmud contrasts the worship of an idol and the worship of Jehovah:“The idol seems so near, but is so far, Jehovah seems so far, but is so near!”God's omnipresence assures us that he is present with us to hear, and present in every heart and in the ends of the earth to answer, prayer. See Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 10; Bowne, Metaphysics, 136; Charnock, Attributes, 1:363-405.The Puritan turned from the moss-rose bud, saying:“I have learned to call nothing on earth lovely.”But this is to despise not only the workmanship but the presence of the Almighty. The least thing in nature is worthy of study because it is the revelation of a present God. The uniformity of nature and the reign of law are nothing but the steady will of the omnipresent God. Gravitation is God's omnipresence in space, as evolution is God's omnipresence in time. Dorner, System of Doctrine, 1:73-“God being omnipresent, contact with him may be sought at any moment in prayer and contemplation; indeed, it will always be true that we live and move and have our being in him, as the perennial and omnipresent source of our existence.”Rom. 10:6-8—“Say not in thy heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down:) or, Who shall descend into the abyss? (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead.) But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart.”Lotze, Metaphysics, § 256, quoted in Illingworth, Divine Immanence, 135, 136. Sunday-school scholar:“Is God in my pocket?”“Certainly.”“No, he isn't, for I haven't any pocket.”God is omnipresent so long as there is a universe, but he ceases to be omnipresent when the universe ceases to be.2. Omniscience.By this we mean God's perfect and eternal knowledge of all things which are objects of knowledge, whether they be actual or possible, past, present, or future.God knows his inanimate creation:Ps. 147:4—“counteth the number of the stars; He calleth them all by their names.”He has knowledge of brute creatures:Mat. 10:29—sparrows—“not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father.”Of men and their works:Ps. 33:13-15—“beholdeth all the sons of men ... considereth all their works.”Of hearts of men and their thoughts:Acts 15:8—“God, who knoweth the heart”;Ps. 139:2—“understandest my thought afar off.”Of our wants:Mat. 6:8—“knoweth what things ye have need of.”Of the least things:Mat. 10:30—“the very hairs of your head are all numbered.”Of the past:Mal. 3:16—“book of remembrance.”Of the future:Is. 46:9, 10—“declaring the end from the beginning.”Of men's future free acts:Is. 44:28—“that saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd and shall perform all my pleasure.”Of men's future evil acts:Acts 2:23—“him, being delivered up by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God.”Of the ideally possible:1 Sam. 23:12—“Will the men of Keilah deliver up me and my men into the hands of Saul? And Jehovah said, They will deliver thee up”(sc.if thou remainest);Mat. 11:23—“if the mighty works had been done in Sodom which were done in thee, it would have remained.”From eternity:Acts 15:18—“the Lord, who maketh these things known from of old.”Incomprehensible:Ps. 139:6—“Such knowledge is too wonderful for me”;Rom. 11:33—“O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God.”Related to wisdom:Ps. 104:24—“In wisdom hast thou made them all”;Eph. 3:10—“manifold wisdom of God.”Job 7:20—“O thou watcher of men”;Ps. 56:8—“Thou numberest my wanderings”= my whole life has been one continuous exile;“Put thou my tears into thy bottle”= the skin bottle of the east,—there are tears enough to fill one;“Are they not in thy book?”= no tear has fallen to the ground unnoted,—God has gathered them all. Paul Gerhardt:“Du zählst wie oft ein Christe wein', Und was sein Kummer sei; Kein stilles Thränlein ist so klein, Du hebst und legst es bei.”Heb. 4:13—“there is no creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all[pg 283]things are naked and laid open before the eyes of him with whom we have to do”—τετραχηλισμένα—with head bent back and neck laid bare, as animals slaughtered in sacrifice,orseized by the throat and thrown on the back, so that the priest might discover whether there was any blemish. Japanese proverb:“God has forgotten to forget.”(a) The omniscience of God may be argued from his omnipresence, as well as from his truth or self-knowledge, in which the plan of creation has its eternal ground, and from prophecy, which expresses God's omniscience.It is to be remembered that omniscience, as the designation of a relative and transitive attribute, does not include God's self-knowledge. The term is used in the technical sense of God's knowledge of all things that pertain to the universe of his creation. H. A. Gordon:“Light travels faster than sound. You can see the flash of fire from the cannon's mouth, a mile away, considerably before the noise of the discharge reaches the ear. God flashed the light of prediction upon the pages of his word, and we see it. Wait a little and we see the event itself.”Royce, The Conception of God, 9—“An omniscient being would be one who simply found presented to him, not by virtue of fragmentary and gradually completed processes of inquiry, but by virtue of an all-embracing, direct and transparent insight into his own truth—who found thus presented to him, I say, the complete, the fulfilled answer to every genuinely rational question.”Browning, Ferishtah's Fancies, Plot-culture:“How will it fare shouldst thou impress on me That certainly an Eye is over all And each, to make the minute's deed, word, thought As worthy of reward and punishment? Shall I permit my sense an Eye-viewed shame, Broad daylight perpetration,—so to speak,—I had not dared to breathe within the Ear, With black night's help around me?”(b) Since it is free from all imperfection, God's knowledge is immediate, as distinguished from the knowledge that comes through sense or imagination; simultaneous, as not acquired by successive observations, or built up by processes of reasoning; distinct, as free from all vagueness or confusion; true, as perfectly corresponding to the reality of things; eternal, as comprehended in one timeless act of the divine mind.An infinite mind must always act, and must always act in an absolutely perfect manner. There is in God no sense, symbol, memory, abstraction, growth, reflection, reasoning,—his knowledge is all direct and without intermediaries. God was properly represented by the ancient Egyptians, not as having eye, but as being eye. His thoughts toward us are“more than can be numbered”(Ps. 40:5), not because there is succession in them, now a remembering and now a forgetting, but because there is never a moment of our existence in which we are out of his mind; he is always thinking of us. See Charnock, Attributes, 1:406-497.Gen. 16:13—“Thou art a God that seeth.”Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 374—“Every creature of every order of existence, while its existence is sustained, is so complacently contemplated by God, that the intense and concentrated attention of all men of science together upon it could but form an utterly inadequate symbol of such divine contemplation.”So God's scrutiny of every deed of darkness is more searching than the gaze of a whole Coliseum of spectators, and his eye is more watchful over the good than would be the united care of all his hosts in heaven and earth.Armstrong, God and the Soul:“God's energy is concentrated attention, attention concentrated everywhere. We can attend to two or three things at once; the pianist plays and talks at the same time; the magician does one thing while he seems to do another. God attends to all things, does all things, at once.”Marie Corelli, Master Christian, 104—“The biograph is a hint that every scene of human life is reflected in a ceaseless moving panoramasome where, for the beholding ofsome one.”Wireless telegraphy is a stupendous warning that from God no secrets are hid, that“there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known”(Mat. 10:26). The Röntgen rays, which take photographs of our insides, right through our clothes, and even in the darkness of midnight, show that to God“the night shineth as the day”(Ps. 139:12).Professor Mitchel's equatorial telescope, slowly moving by clockwork, toward sunset, suddenly touched the horizon and disclosed a boy in a tree stealing apples, but the boy was all unconscious that he was under the gaze of the astronomer. Nothing was[pg 284]so fearful to the prisoner in the Frenchcachotas the eye of the guard that never ceased to watch him in perfect silence through the loophole in the door. As in the Roman empire the whole world was to a malefactor one great prison, and in his flight to the most distant lands the emperor could track him, so under the government of God no sinner can escape the eye of his Judge. But omnipresence is protective as well as detective. The textGen. 16:13—“Thou, God, seest me”—has been used as a restraint from evil more than as a stimulus to good. To the child of the devil it should certainly be the former. But to the child of God it should as certainly be the latter. God should not be regarded as an exacting overseer or a standing threat, but rather as one who understands us, loves us, and helps us.Ps. 139:17, 18—“How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! How great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: When I awake, I am still with thee.”(c) Since God knows things as they are, he knows the necessary sequences of his creation as necessary, the free acts of his creatures as free, the ideally possible as ideally possible.God knows what would have taken place under circumstances not now present; knows what the universe would have been, had he chosen a different plan of creation; knows what our lives would have been, had we made different decisions in the past (Is. 48:18—“Oh that thou hadst hearkened ... then had thy peace been as a river”). Clarke, Christian Theology, 77—“God has a double knowledge of his universe. He knows it as it exists eternally in his mind, as his own idea; and he knows it as actually existing in time and space, a moving, changing, growing universe, with perpetual process of succession. In his own idea, he knows it all at once; but he is also aware of its perpetual becoming, and with reference to events as they occur he has foreknowledge, present knowledge, and knowledge afterwards.... He conceives of all things simultaneously, but observes all things in their succession.”Royce, World and Individual, 2:374—holds that God does not temporally foreknow anything except as he is expressed in finite beings, but yet that the Absolute possesses a perfect knowledge at one glance of the whole of the temporal order, present, past and future. This, he says, is not foreknowledge, but eternal knowledge. Priestley denied that any contingent event could be an object of knowledge. But Reid says the denial that any free action can be foreseen involves the denial of God's own free agency, since God's future actions can be foreseen by men; also that while God foresees his own free actions, this does not determine those actions necessarily. Tennyson, In Memoriam, 26—“And if that eye which watches guilt And goodness, and hath power to see Within the green the mouldered tree, And towers fallen as soon as built—Oh, if indeed that eye foresee Or see (in Him is no before) In more of life true life no more And Love the indifference to be, Then might I find, ere yet the morn Breaks hither over Indian seas, That Shadow waiting with the keys, To shroud me from my proper scorn.”(d) The fact that there is nothing in the present condition of things from which the future actions of free creatures necessarily follow by natural law does not prevent God from foreseeing such actions, since his knowledge is not mediate, but immediate. He not only foreknows the motives which will occasion men's acts, but he directly foreknows the acts themselves. The possibility of such direct knowledge without assignable grounds of knowledge is apparent if we admit that time is a form of finite thought to which the divine mind is not subject.Aristotle maintained that there is no certain knowledge of contingent future events. Socinus, in like manner, while he admitted that God knows all things that are knowable, abridged the objects of the divine knowledge by withdrawing from the number those objects whose future existence he considered as uncertain, such as the determinations of free agents. These, he held, cannot be certainly foreknown, because there is nothing in the present condition of things from which they will necessarily follow by natural law. The man who makes a clock can tell when it will strike. But free-will, not being subject to mechanical laws, cannot have its acts predicted or foreknown. God knows things only in their causes—future events only in their antecedents. John Milton seems also to deny God's foreknowledge of free acts:“So, without least impulse or shadow of fate, Or aught by me immutably foreseen, They trespass.”[pg 285]With this Socinian doctrine some Arminians agree, as McCabe, in his Foreknowledge of God, and in his Divine Nescience of Future Contingencies a Necessity. McCabe, however, sacrifices the principle of free will, in defence of which he makes this surrender of God's foreknowledge, by saying that in cases of fulfilled prophecy, like Peter's denial and Judas's betrayal, God brought special influences to bear to secure the result,—so that Peter's and Judas's wills acted irresponsibly under the law of cause and effect. He quotes Dr. Daniel Curry as declaring that“the denial of absolute divine foreknowledge is the essential complement of the Methodist theology, without which its philosophical incompleteness is defenceless against the logical consistency of Calvinism.”See also article by McCabe in Methodist Review, Sept. 1892:760-773. Also Simon, Reconciliation, 287—“God has constituted a creature, the actions of which he can only know as such when they are performed. In presence of man, to a certain extent, even the great God condescends to wait; nay more, has himself so ordained things that he must wait, inquiring,‘What will he do?’”So Dugald Stewart:“Shall we venture to affirm that it exceeds the power of God to permit such a train of contingent events to take place as his own foreknowledge shall not extend to?”Martensen holds this view, and Rothe, Theologische Ethik, 1:212-234, who declares that the free choices of men are continually increasing the knowledge of God. So also Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:279—“The belief in the divine foreknowledge of our future has no basis in philosophy. We no longer deem it true that even God knows the moment of my moral life that is coming next. Even he does not know whether I shall yield to the secret temptation at midday. To him life is a drama of which he knows not the conclusion.”Then, says Dr. A. J. Gordon, there is nothing so dreary and dreadful as to be living under the direction of such a God. The universe is rushing on like an express-train in the darkness without headlight or engineer; at any moment we may be plunged into the abyss. Lotze does not deny God's foreknowledge of free human actions, but he regards as insoluble by the intellect the problem of the relation of time to God, and such foreknowledge as“one of those postulates as to which we know not how they can be fulfilled.”Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 159—“Foreknowledge of a free act is a knowledge without assignable grounds of knowing. On the assumption of a real time, it is hard to find a way out of this difficulty.... The doctrine of the ideality of time helps us by suggesting the possibility of an all-embracing present, or an eternal now, for God. In that case the problem vanishes with time, its condition.”Against the doctrine of the divine nescience we urge not only our fundamental conviction of God's perfection, but the constant testimony of Scripture. InIs. 41:21, 22, God makes his foreknowledge the test of his Godhead in the controversy with idols. If God cannot foreknow free human acts, then“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”(Rev. 13:8)was only a sacrifice to be offeredin caseAdam should fall, God not knowing whether he would or not, andin caseJudas should betray Christ, God not knowing whether he would or not. Indeed, since the course of nature is changed by man's will when he burns towns and fells forests, God cannot on this theory predict even the course of nature. All prophecy is therefore a protest against this view.How God foreknows free human decisions we may not be able to say, but then the method of God's knowledge in many other respects is unknown to us. The following explanations have been proposed. God may foreknow free acts:—1.Mediately, by foreknowing the motives of these acts, and this either because these motives induce the acts, (1) necessarily, or (2) certainly. This last“certainly”is to be accepted, if either; since motives are nevercauses, but are onlyoccasions, of action. The cause is the will, or the man himself. But it may be said that foreknowing acts through their motives is not foreknowing at all, but is reasoning or inference rather. Moreover, although intelligent beings commonly act according to motives previously dominant, they also at critical epochs, as at the fall of Satan and of Adam, choose between motives, and in such cases knowledge of the motives which have hitherto actuated them gives no clue to their next decisions. Another statement is therefore proposed to meet these difficulties, namely, that God may foreknow free acts:—2.Immediately, by pure intuition, inexplicable to us. Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:203, 225—“If God can know a future event as certain only by a calculation of causes, it must be allowed that he cannot with certainty foreknow any free act of man; for his foreknowledge would then be proof that the act in question was the necessary consequence of certain causes, and was not in itself free. If, on the contrary, the divine knowledge be regarded asintuitive, we see that it stands in the same immediate relation to the act itself as to its antecedents, and thus the difficulty is removed.”Even[pg 286]upon this view there still remains the difficulty of perceiving how there can be in God's mind a subjective certitude with regard to acts in respect to which there is no assignable objective ground of certainty. Yet, in spite of this difficulty, we feel bound both by Scripture and by our fundamental idea of God's perfection to maintain God's perfect knowledge of the future free acts of his creatures. With President Pepper we say:“Knowledge of contingency is not necessarily contingent knowledge.”With Whedon:“It is not calculation, but pure knowledge.”See Dorner, System of Doct., 1:332-337; 2:58-62; Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1858:601-605; Charnock, Attributes, 1:429-446; Solly, The Will, 240-254. For a valuable article on the whole subject, though advocating the view that God foreknows acts by foreknowing motives, see Bib. Sac., Oct. 1883:655-694. See also Hill, Divinity, 517.(e) Prescience is not itself causative. It is not to be confounded with the predetermining will of God. Free actions do not take place because they are foreseen, but they are foreseen because they are to take place.Seeing a thing in the future does not cause it to be, more than seeing a thing in the past causes it to be. As to future events, we may say with Whedon:“Knowledgetakesthem, notmakesthem.”Foreknowledge may, and does, presuppose predetermination, but it is not itself predetermination. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa, 1:38:1:1, says that“the knowledge of God is the cause of things”; but he is obliged to add:“God is not the cause of all things that are known by God, since evil things that are known by God are not from him.”John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 3—“Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault, Which had no less proved certain unforeknown.”(f) Omniscience embraces the actual and the possible, but it does not embrace the self-contradictory and the impossible, because these are not objects of knowledge.God does not know what the result would be if two and two made five, nor does he know“whether a chimæra ruminating in a vacuum devoureth second intentions”; and that, simply for the reason that he cannot know self-contradiction and nonsense. These things are not objects of knowledge. Clarke, Christian Theology, 80—“Can God make an old man in a minute? Could he make it well with the wicked while they remained wicked? Could he create a world in which 2 + 2 = 5?”Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 366—“Does God know the whole number that is the square root of 65? or what adjacent hills there are that have no valleys between them? Does God know round squares, and sugar salt-lumps, and Snarks and Boojums and Abracadabras?”(g) Omniscience, as qualified by holy will, is in Scripture denominated“wisdom.”In virtue of his wisdom God chooses the highest ends and uses the fittest means to accomplish them.Wisdom is not simply“estimating all things at their proper value”(Olmstead); it has in it also the element of counsel and purpose. It has been defined as“the talent of using one's talents.”It implies two things: first, choice of the highest end; secondly, choice of the best means to secure this end. J. C. C. Clarke, Self and the Father, 39—“Wisdom is not invented conceptions, or harmony of theories with theories; but is humble obedience of mind to the reception of facts that are found in things.”Thus man's wisdom, obedience, faith, are all names for different aspects of the same thing. And wisdom in God is the moral choice which makes truth and holiness supreme. Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 261—“Socialism pursues a laudable end by unwise or destructive means. It is not enough to mean well. Our methods must take some account of the nature of things, if they are to succeed. We cannot produce well-being by law. No legislation can remove inequalities of nature and constitution. Society cannot produce equality, any more than it can enable a rhinoceros to sing, or legislate a cat into a lion.”3. Omnipotence.By this we mean the power of God to do all things which are objects of power, whether with or without the use of means.Gen. 17:1—“I am God Almighty.”He performs natural wonders:Gen. 1:1-3—“Let there be Light”;Is. 44:24—“stretcheth forth the heavens alone”;Heb. 1:3—“upholding all things by the word of his power.”Spiritual wonders:2 Cor. 4:6—“God, that said, Light shall shine out of darkness, who shined in our hearts”;[pg 287]Eph. 1:19—“exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe”;Eph. 3:20—“able to do exceeding abundantly.”Power to create new things:Mat. 3:9—“able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham”.Rom. 4:17—“giveth life to the dead, and calleth the things that are not, as though they were.”After his own pleasure:Ps. 115:3—“He hath done whatsoever he hath pleased”;Eph. 1:11—“worketh all things after the counsel of his will.”Nothing impossible:Gen 18:14—“Is anything too hard for Jehovah?”Mat. 19:26—“with God all things are possible.”E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 73—“If all power in the universe is dependent on his creative will for its existence, it is impossible to conceive any limit to his power except that laid on it by his own will. But this is only negative proof; absolute omnipotence is not logically demonstrable, though readily enough recognized as a just conception of the infinite God, when propounded on the authority of a positive revelation.”The omnipotence of God is illustrated by the work of the Holy Spirit, which in Scripture is compared to wind, water and fire. The ordinary manifestations of these elements afford no criterion of the effects they are able to produce. The rushing mighty wind at Pentecost was the analogue of the wind-Spirit who bore everything before him on the first day of creation (Gen. 1:2;John 3:8;Acts 2:2). The pouring out of the Spirit is likened to the flood of Noah when the windows of heaven were opened and there was not room enough to receive that which fell (Mal. 3:10). And the baptism of the Holy Spirit is like the fire that shall destroy all impurity at the end of the world (Mat. 3:11;2 Pet. 3:7-13). See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 307-310.(a) Omnipotence does not imply power to do that which is not an object of power; as, for example, that which is self-contradictory or contradictory to the nature of God.Self-contradictory things:“facere factum infectum”—the making of a past event to have not occurred (hence the uselessness of praying:“May it be that much good was done”); drawing a shorter than a straight line between two given points; putting two separate mountains together without a valley between them. Things contradictory to the nature of God: for God to lie, to sin, to die. To do such things would not imply power, but impotence. God has all the power that is consistent with infinite perfection—all power to do what is worthy of himself. So no greater thing can be said by man than this:“I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none.”Even God cannot make wrong to be right, nor hatred of himself to be blessed. Some have held that the prevention of sin in a moral system is not an object of power, and therefore that God cannot prevent sin in a moral system. We hold the contrary; see this Compendium: Objections to the Doctrine of Decrees.Dryden, Imitation of Horace, 3:29:71—“Over the past not heaven itself has power; What has been has, and I have had my hour”—words applied by Lord John Russell to his own career. Emerson, The Past:“All is now secure and fast, Not the gods can shake the Past.”Sunday-school scholar:“Say, teacher, can God make a rock so big that he can't lift it?”Seminary Professor:“Can God tell a lie?”Seminary student:“With God all things are possible.”(b) Omnipotence does not imply the exercise of all his power on the part of God. He has power over his power; in other words, his power is under the control of wise and holy will. God can do all he will, but he will not do all he can. Else his power is mere force acting necessarily, and God is the slave of his own omnipotence.Schleiermacher held that nature not only is grounded in the divine causality, but fully expresses that causality; there is no causative power in God for anything that is not real and actual. This doctrine does not essentially differ from Spinoza'snatura naturansandnatura naturata. See Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:62-66. But omnipotence is not instinctive; it is a power used according to God's pleasure. God is by no means encompassed by the laws of nature, or shut up to a necessary evolution of his own being, as pantheism supposes. As Rothe has shown, God has a will-power over his nature-power, and is not compelled to do all that he can do. He is able from the stones of the street to“raise up children unto Abraham,”but he has not done it. In God are unopened treasures, an inexhaustible fountain of new beginnings, new creations, new revelations. To suppose that in creation he has expended all the inner possibilities of his being is to deny his omnipotence. SoJob 26:14—“Lo, these are but the outskirts[pg 288]of his ways: And how small a whisper do we hear of him! But the thunder of his power who can understand?”See Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 10; Hodgson, Time and Space, 579, 580.1 Pet. 5:6—“Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God”—his mighty hand of providence, salvation, blessing—“that he may exalt you in due time; casting all your anxiety upon him, because he careth for you.”“The mighty powers held under mighty control”—this is the greatest exhibition of power. Unrestraint is not the highest freedom. Young men must learn that self-restraint is the true power.Prov. 16:32—“He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; And he that ruleth his spirit, than he that taketh a city.”Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 2:3—“We have power in ourselves to do it, but it is a power that we have no power to do.”When dynamite goes off, it all goes off: there is no reserve. God uses as much of his power as he pleases: the remainder of wrath in himself, as well as in others, he restrains.(c) Omnipotence in God does not exclude, but implies, the power of self-limitation. Since all such self-limitation is free, proceeding from neither external nor internal compulsion, it is the act and manifestation of God's power. Human freedom is not rendered impossible by the divine omnipotence, but exists by virtue of it. It is an act of omnipotence when God humbles himself to the taking of human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ.Thomasius:“If God is to be over all and in all, he cannot himself be all.”Ps. 113: 5, 6—“Who is like unto Jehovah our God.... That humbleth himself to behold the things that are in heaven and in the earth?”Phil. 2:7, 8—“emptied himself ... humbled himself.”See Charnock, Attributes, 2:5-107. President Woolsey showed true power when he controlled his indignation and let an offending student go free. Of Christ on the cross, says Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 116—“It was the power [to retain his life, to escape suffering], with the will to hold it unused, which proved him to be what he was, the obedient and perfect man.”We are likest the omnipotent One when we limit ourselves for love's sake. The attribute of omnipotence is the ground of trust, as well as of fear, on the part of God's creatures. Isaac Watts:“His every word of grace is strong As that which built the skies; The voice that rolls the stars along Speaks all the promises.”
Second Division.—Attributes having relation to Creation.1. Omnipresence.By this we mean that God, in the totality of his essence, without diffusion or expansion, multiplication or division, penetrates and fills the universe in all its parts.[pg 280]Ps. 139:7sq.—“Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?”Jer. 23:23, 24—“Am I a God at hand, saith Jehovah, and not a God afar off?... Do not I fill heaven and earth?”Acts 17:27, 28—“he is not far from each one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being.”Faber:“For God is never so far off As even to be near. He is within. Our spirit is The home he holds most dear. To think of him as by our side Is almost as untrue As to remove his shrine beyond Those skies of starry blue. So all the while I thought myself Homeless, forlorn and weary, Missing my joy, I walked the earth Myself God's sanctuary.”Henri Amiel:“From every point on earth we are equally near to heaven and the infinite.”Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism:“Speak to him then, for he hears, and spirit with spirit can meet; Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.”“As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart.”The atheist wrote:“God is nowhere,”but his little daughter read it:“God is now here,”and it converted him. The child however sometimes asks:“If God is everywhere, how is there any room for us?”and the only answer is that God is not a material but a spiritual being, whose presence does not exclude finite existence but rather makes such existence possible. This universal presence of God had to be learned gradually. It required great faith in Abraham to go out from Ur of the Chaldees, and yet to hold that God would be with him in a distant land (Heb. 11:8). Jacob learned that the heavenly ladder followed him wherever he went (Gen. 28:15). Jesus taught that“neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father”(John 4:21). Our Lord's mysterious comings and goings after his resurrection were intended to teach his disciples that he was with them“always, even unto the end of the world”(Mat. 28:20). The omnipresence of Jesus demonstrates,a fortiori, the omnipresence of God.In explanation of this attribute we may say:(a) God's omnipresence is not potential but essential.—We reject the Socinian representation that God's essence is in heaven, only his power on earth. When God is said to“dwell in the heavens,”we are to understand the language either as a symbolic expression of exaltation above earthly things, or as a declaration that his most special and glorious self-manifestations are to the spirits of heaven.Ps. 123:1—“O thou that sittest in the heavens”;113:5—“That hath his seat on high”;Is. 57:15—“the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity.”Mere potential omnipresence is Deistic as well as Socinian. Like birds in the air or fish in the sea,“at home, abroad, We are surrounded still with God.”We do not need to go up to heaven to call him down, or into the abyss to call him up (Rom. 10:6, 7). The best illustration is found in the presence of the soul in every part of the body. Mind seems not confined to the brain. Natural realism in philosophy, as distinguished from idealism, requires that the mind should be at the point of contact with the outer world, instead of having reports and ideas brought to it in the brain; see Porter, Human Intellect, 149. All believers in a soul regard the soul as at least present in all parts of the brain, and this is a relative omnipresence no less difficult in principle than its presence in all parts of the body. An animal's brain may be frozen into a piece solid as ice, yet, after thawing, it will act as before: although freezing of the whole body will cause death. If the immaterial principle were confined to the brain we should expect freezing of the brain to cause death. But if the soul may be omnipresent in the body or even in the brain, the divine Spirit may be omnipresent in the universe. Bowne, Metaphysics, 136—“If finite things are modes of the infinite, each thing must be a mode of the entire infinite; and the infinite must be present in its unity and completeness in every finite thing, just as the entire soul is present in all its acts.”This idealistic conception of the entire mind as present in all its thoughts must be regarded as the best analogue to God's omnipresence in the universe. We object to the view that this omnipresence is merely potential, as we find it in Clarke, Christian Theology, 74—“We know, and only know, that God is able to put forth all his power of action, without regard to place.... Omnipresence is an element in the immanence of God.... A local God would be no real God. If he is not everywhere, he is not true God anywhere. Omnipresence is implied in all providence, in all prayer, in all communion with God and reliance on God.”So long as it is conceded that consciousness is not confined to a single point in the brain, the question whether other portions of the brain or of the body are also the seat of consciousness may be regarded as a purely academic one, and the answer need not[pg 281]affect our present argument. The principle of omnipresence is granted when once we hold that the soul is conscious at more than one point of the physical organism. Yet the question suggested above is an interesting one and with regard to it psychologists are divided. Paulsen, Einleitung in die Philosophie (1892), 138-159, holds that consciousness is correlated with the sum-total of bodily processes, and with him agree Fechner and Wundt.“Pflüger and Lewes say that as the hemispheres of the brain owe their intelligence to the consciousness which we know to be there, so the intelligence of the spinal cord's acts must really be due to the invisible presence of a consciousness lower in degree.”Professor Brewer's rattlesnake, after several hours of decapitation, still struck at him with its bloody neck, when he attempted to seize it by the tail. From the reaction of the frog's leg after decapitation may we not infer a certain consciousness?“Robin, on tickling the breast of a criminal an hour after decapitation, saw the arm and hand move toward the spot.”Hudson, Demonstration of a Future Life, 239-249, quotes from Hammond, Treatise on Insanity, chapter 2, to prove that the brain is not the sole organ of the mind. Instinct does not reside exclusively in the brain; it is seated in themedulla oblongata, or in the spinal cord, or in both these organs. Objective mind, as Hudson thinks, is the function of the physical brain, and it ceases when the brain loses its vitality. Instinctive acts are performed by animals after excision of the brain, and by human beings born without brain. Johnson, in Andover Rev., April, 1890:421—“The brain is not the only seat of consciousness. The same evidence that points to the brain as theprincipalseat of consciousness points to the nerve-centres situated in the spinal cord or elsewhere as the seat of a more or lesssubordinateconsciousness or intelligence.”Ireland, Blot on the Brain, 26—“I do not take it for proved that consciousness is entirely confined to the brain.”In spite of these opinions, however, we must grant that the general consensus among psychologists is upon the other side. Dewey, Psychology, 349—“The sensory and motor nerves have points of meeting in the spinal cord. When a stimulus is transferred from a sensory nerve to a motor without the conscious intervention of the mind, we have reflex action.... If something approaches the eye, the stimulus is transferred to the spinal cord, and instead of being continued to the brain and giving rise to a sensation, it is discharged into a motor nerve and the eye is immediately closed.... The reflex action in itself involves no consciousness.”William James, Psychology, 1:16, 66, 134, 214—“The cortex of the brain is the sole organ of consciousness in man.... If there be any consciousness pertaining to the lower centres, it is a consciousness of which the self knows nothing.... In lower animals this may not be so much the case.... The seat of the mind, so far as its dynamical relations are concerned, is somewhere in the cortex of the brain.”See also C. A. Strong, Why the Mind has a Body, 40-50.(b) God's omnipresence is not the presence of a part but of the whole of God in every place.—This follows from the conception of God as incorporeal We reject the materialistic representation that God is composed of material elements which can be divided or sundered. There is no multiplication or diffusion of his substance to correspond with the parts of his dominions. The one essence of God is present at the same moment in all.1 Kings 8:27—“the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain(circumscribe)thee.”God must be present in all his essence and all his attributes in every place. He is“totus in omni parte.”Alger, Poetry of the Orient:“Though God extends beyond Creation's rim, Each smallest atom holds the whole of him.”From this it follows that the whole Logos can be united to and be present in the man Christ Jesus, while at the same time he fills and governs the whole universe; and so the whole Christ can be united to, and can be present in, the single believer, as fully as if that believer were the only one to receive of his fulness.A. J. Gordon:“In mathematics the whole is equal to the sum of its parts. But we know of the Spirit that every part is equal to the whole. Every church, every true body of Jesus Christ, has just as much of Christ as every other, and each has the whole Christ.”Mat. 13:20—“where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”“The parish priest of austerity Climbed up in a high church steeple, To be nearer God so that he might Hand his word down to the people. And in sermon script he daily wrote What he thought was sent from heaven, And he dropt it down on the people's heads Two times one day in seven. In his age God said,‘Come down and die,’And he cried out from the steeple,‘Where art thou, Lord?’And the Lord replied,‘Down here among my people.’”[pg 282](c) God's omnipresence is not necessary but free.—We reject the pantheistic notion that God is bound to the universe as the universe is bound to God. God is immanent in the universe, not by compulsion, but by the free act of his own will, and this immanence is qualified by his transcendence.God might at will cease to be omnipresent, for he could destroy the universe; but while the universe exists, he is and must be in all its parts. God is the life and law of the universe,—this is the truth in pantheism. But he is also personal and free,—this pantheism denies. Christianity holds to a free, as well as to an essential, omnipresence—qualified and supplemented, however, by God's transcendence. The boasted truth in pantheism is an elementary principle of Christianity, and is only the stepping-stone to a nobler truth—God's personal presence with his church. The Talmud contrasts the worship of an idol and the worship of Jehovah:“The idol seems so near, but is so far, Jehovah seems so far, but is so near!”God's omnipresence assures us that he is present with us to hear, and present in every heart and in the ends of the earth to answer, prayer. See Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 10; Bowne, Metaphysics, 136; Charnock, Attributes, 1:363-405.The Puritan turned from the moss-rose bud, saying:“I have learned to call nothing on earth lovely.”But this is to despise not only the workmanship but the presence of the Almighty. The least thing in nature is worthy of study because it is the revelation of a present God. The uniformity of nature and the reign of law are nothing but the steady will of the omnipresent God. Gravitation is God's omnipresence in space, as evolution is God's omnipresence in time. Dorner, System of Doctrine, 1:73-“God being omnipresent, contact with him may be sought at any moment in prayer and contemplation; indeed, it will always be true that we live and move and have our being in him, as the perennial and omnipresent source of our existence.”Rom. 10:6-8—“Say not in thy heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down:) or, Who shall descend into the abyss? (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead.) But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart.”Lotze, Metaphysics, § 256, quoted in Illingworth, Divine Immanence, 135, 136. Sunday-school scholar:“Is God in my pocket?”“Certainly.”“No, he isn't, for I haven't any pocket.”God is omnipresent so long as there is a universe, but he ceases to be omnipresent when the universe ceases to be.2. Omniscience.By this we mean God's perfect and eternal knowledge of all things which are objects of knowledge, whether they be actual or possible, past, present, or future.God knows his inanimate creation:Ps. 147:4—“counteth the number of the stars; He calleth them all by their names.”He has knowledge of brute creatures:Mat. 10:29—sparrows—“not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father.”Of men and their works:Ps. 33:13-15—“beholdeth all the sons of men ... considereth all their works.”Of hearts of men and their thoughts:Acts 15:8—“God, who knoweth the heart”;Ps. 139:2—“understandest my thought afar off.”Of our wants:Mat. 6:8—“knoweth what things ye have need of.”Of the least things:Mat. 10:30—“the very hairs of your head are all numbered.”Of the past:Mal. 3:16—“book of remembrance.”Of the future:Is. 46:9, 10—“declaring the end from the beginning.”Of men's future free acts:Is. 44:28—“that saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd and shall perform all my pleasure.”Of men's future evil acts:Acts 2:23—“him, being delivered up by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God.”Of the ideally possible:1 Sam. 23:12—“Will the men of Keilah deliver up me and my men into the hands of Saul? And Jehovah said, They will deliver thee up”(sc.if thou remainest);Mat. 11:23—“if the mighty works had been done in Sodom which were done in thee, it would have remained.”From eternity:Acts 15:18—“the Lord, who maketh these things known from of old.”Incomprehensible:Ps. 139:6—“Such knowledge is too wonderful for me”;Rom. 11:33—“O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God.”Related to wisdom:Ps. 104:24—“In wisdom hast thou made them all”;Eph. 3:10—“manifold wisdom of God.”Job 7:20—“O thou watcher of men”;Ps. 56:8—“Thou numberest my wanderings”= my whole life has been one continuous exile;“Put thou my tears into thy bottle”= the skin bottle of the east,—there are tears enough to fill one;“Are they not in thy book?”= no tear has fallen to the ground unnoted,—God has gathered them all. Paul Gerhardt:“Du zählst wie oft ein Christe wein', Und was sein Kummer sei; Kein stilles Thränlein ist so klein, Du hebst und legst es bei.”Heb. 4:13—“there is no creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all[pg 283]things are naked and laid open before the eyes of him with whom we have to do”—τετραχηλισμένα—with head bent back and neck laid bare, as animals slaughtered in sacrifice,orseized by the throat and thrown on the back, so that the priest might discover whether there was any blemish. Japanese proverb:“God has forgotten to forget.”(a) The omniscience of God may be argued from his omnipresence, as well as from his truth or self-knowledge, in which the plan of creation has its eternal ground, and from prophecy, which expresses God's omniscience.It is to be remembered that omniscience, as the designation of a relative and transitive attribute, does not include God's self-knowledge. The term is used in the technical sense of God's knowledge of all things that pertain to the universe of his creation. H. A. Gordon:“Light travels faster than sound. You can see the flash of fire from the cannon's mouth, a mile away, considerably before the noise of the discharge reaches the ear. God flashed the light of prediction upon the pages of his word, and we see it. Wait a little and we see the event itself.”Royce, The Conception of God, 9—“An omniscient being would be one who simply found presented to him, not by virtue of fragmentary and gradually completed processes of inquiry, but by virtue of an all-embracing, direct and transparent insight into his own truth—who found thus presented to him, I say, the complete, the fulfilled answer to every genuinely rational question.”Browning, Ferishtah's Fancies, Plot-culture:“How will it fare shouldst thou impress on me That certainly an Eye is over all And each, to make the minute's deed, word, thought As worthy of reward and punishment? Shall I permit my sense an Eye-viewed shame, Broad daylight perpetration,—so to speak,—I had not dared to breathe within the Ear, With black night's help around me?”(b) Since it is free from all imperfection, God's knowledge is immediate, as distinguished from the knowledge that comes through sense or imagination; simultaneous, as not acquired by successive observations, or built up by processes of reasoning; distinct, as free from all vagueness or confusion; true, as perfectly corresponding to the reality of things; eternal, as comprehended in one timeless act of the divine mind.An infinite mind must always act, and must always act in an absolutely perfect manner. There is in God no sense, symbol, memory, abstraction, growth, reflection, reasoning,—his knowledge is all direct and without intermediaries. God was properly represented by the ancient Egyptians, not as having eye, but as being eye. His thoughts toward us are“more than can be numbered”(Ps. 40:5), not because there is succession in them, now a remembering and now a forgetting, but because there is never a moment of our existence in which we are out of his mind; he is always thinking of us. See Charnock, Attributes, 1:406-497.Gen. 16:13—“Thou art a God that seeth.”Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 374—“Every creature of every order of existence, while its existence is sustained, is so complacently contemplated by God, that the intense and concentrated attention of all men of science together upon it could but form an utterly inadequate symbol of such divine contemplation.”So God's scrutiny of every deed of darkness is more searching than the gaze of a whole Coliseum of spectators, and his eye is more watchful over the good than would be the united care of all his hosts in heaven and earth.Armstrong, God and the Soul:“God's energy is concentrated attention, attention concentrated everywhere. We can attend to two or three things at once; the pianist plays and talks at the same time; the magician does one thing while he seems to do another. God attends to all things, does all things, at once.”Marie Corelli, Master Christian, 104—“The biograph is a hint that every scene of human life is reflected in a ceaseless moving panoramasome where, for the beholding ofsome one.”Wireless telegraphy is a stupendous warning that from God no secrets are hid, that“there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known”(Mat. 10:26). The Röntgen rays, which take photographs of our insides, right through our clothes, and even in the darkness of midnight, show that to God“the night shineth as the day”(Ps. 139:12).Professor Mitchel's equatorial telescope, slowly moving by clockwork, toward sunset, suddenly touched the horizon and disclosed a boy in a tree stealing apples, but the boy was all unconscious that he was under the gaze of the astronomer. Nothing was[pg 284]so fearful to the prisoner in the Frenchcachotas the eye of the guard that never ceased to watch him in perfect silence through the loophole in the door. As in the Roman empire the whole world was to a malefactor one great prison, and in his flight to the most distant lands the emperor could track him, so under the government of God no sinner can escape the eye of his Judge. But omnipresence is protective as well as detective. The textGen. 16:13—“Thou, God, seest me”—has been used as a restraint from evil more than as a stimulus to good. To the child of the devil it should certainly be the former. But to the child of God it should as certainly be the latter. God should not be regarded as an exacting overseer or a standing threat, but rather as one who understands us, loves us, and helps us.Ps. 139:17, 18—“How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! How great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: When I awake, I am still with thee.”(c) Since God knows things as they are, he knows the necessary sequences of his creation as necessary, the free acts of his creatures as free, the ideally possible as ideally possible.God knows what would have taken place under circumstances not now present; knows what the universe would have been, had he chosen a different plan of creation; knows what our lives would have been, had we made different decisions in the past (Is. 48:18—“Oh that thou hadst hearkened ... then had thy peace been as a river”). Clarke, Christian Theology, 77—“God has a double knowledge of his universe. He knows it as it exists eternally in his mind, as his own idea; and he knows it as actually existing in time and space, a moving, changing, growing universe, with perpetual process of succession. In his own idea, he knows it all at once; but he is also aware of its perpetual becoming, and with reference to events as they occur he has foreknowledge, present knowledge, and knowledge afterwards.... He conceives of all things simultaneously, but observes all things in their succession.”Royce, World and Individual, 2:374—holds that God does not temporally foreknow anything except as he is expressed in finite beings, but yet that the Absolute possesses a perfect knowledge at one glance of the whole of the temporal order, present, past and future. This, he says, is not foreknowledge, but eternal knowledge. Priestley denied that any contingent event could be an object of knowledge. But Reid says the denial that any free action can be foreseen involves the denial of God's own free agency, since God's future actions can be foreseen by men; also that while God foresees his own free actions, this does not determine those actions necessarily. Tennyson, In Memoriam, 26—“And if that eye which watches guilt And goodness, and hath power to see Within the green the mouldered tree, And towers fallen as soon as built—Oh, if indeed that eye foresee Or see (in Him is no before) In more of life true life no more And Love the indifference to be, Then might I find, ere yet the morn Breaks hither over Indian seas, That Shadow waiting with the keys, To shroud me from my proper scorn.”(d) The fact that there is nothing in the present condition of things from which the future actions of free creatures necessarily follow by natural law does not prevent God from foreseeing such actions, since his knowledge is not mediate, but immediate. He not only foreknows the motives which will occasion men's acts, but he directly foreknows the acts themselves. The possibility of such direct knowledge without assignable grounds of knowledge is apparent if we admit that time is a form of finite thought to which the divine mind is not subject.Aristotle maintained that there is no certain knowledge of contingent future events. Socinus, in like manner, while he admitted that God knows all things that are knowable, abridged the objects of the divine knowledge by withdrawing from the number those objects whose future existence he considered as uncertain, such as the determinations of free agents. These, he held, cannot be certainly foreknown, because there is nothing in the present condition of things from which they will necessarily follow by natural law. The man who makes a clock can tell when it will strike. But free-will, not being subject to mechanical laws, cannot have its acts predicted or foreknown. God knows things only in their causes—future events only in their antecedents. John Milton seems also to deny God's foreknowledge of free acts:“So, without least impulse or shadow of fate, Or aught by me immutably foreseen, They trespass.”[pg 285]With this Socinian doctrine some Arminians agree, as McCabe, in his Foreknowledge of God, and in his Divine Nescience of Future Contingencies a Necessity. McCabe, however, sacrifices the principle of free will, in defence of which he makes this surrender of God's foreknowledge, by saying that in cases of fulfilled prophecy, like Peter's denial and Judas's betrayal, God brought special influences to bear to secure the result,—so that Peter's and Judas's wills acted irresponsibly under the law of cause and effect. He quotes Dr. Daniel Curry as declaring that“the denial of absolute divine foreknowledge is the essential complement of the Methodist theology, without which its philosophical incompleteness is defenceless against the logical consistency of Calvinism.”See also article by McCabe in Methodist Review, Sept. 1892:760-773. Also Simon, Reconciliation, 287—“God has constituted a creature, the actions of which he can only know as such when they are performed. In presence of man, to a certain extent, even the great God condescends to wait; nay more, has himself so ordained things that he must wait, inquiring,‘What will he do?’”So Dugald Stewart:“Shall we venture to affirm that it exceeds the power of God to permit such a train of contingent events to take place as his own foreknowledge shall not extend to?”Martensen holds this view, and Rothe, Theologische Ethik, 1:212-234, who declares that the free choices of men are continually increasing the knowledge of God. So also Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:279—“The belief in the divine foreknowledge of our future has no basis in philosophy. We no longer deem it true that even God knows the moment of my moral life that is coming next. Even he does not know whether I shall yield to the secret temptation at midday. To him life is a drama of which he knows not the conclusion.”Then, says Dr. A. J. Gordon, there is nothing so dreary and dreadful as to be living under the direction of such a God. The universe is rushing on like an express-train in the darkness without headlight or engineer; at any moment we may be plunged into the abyss. Lotze does not deny God's foreknowledge of free human actions, but he regards as insoluble by the intellect the problem of the relation of time to God, and such foreknowledge as“one of those postulates as to which we know not how they can be fulfilled.”Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 159—“Foreknowledge of a free act is a knowledge without assignable grounds of knowing. On the assumption of a real time, it is hard to find a way out of this difficulty.... The doctrine of the ideality of time helps us by suggesting the possibility of an all-embracing present, or an eternal now, for God. In that case the problem vanishes with time, its condition.”Against the doctrine of the divine nescience we urge not only our fundamental conviction of God's perfection, but the constant testimony of Scripture. InIs. 41:21, 22, God makes his foreknowledge the test of his Godhead in the controversy with idols. If God cannot foreknow free human acts, then“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”(Rev. 13:8)was only a sacrifice to be offeredin caseAdam should fall, God not knowing whether he would or not, andin caseJudas should betray Christ, God not knowing whether he would or not. Indeed, since the course of nature is changed by man's will when he burns towns and fells forests, God cannot on this theory predict even the course of nature. All prophecy is therefore a protest against this view.How God foreknows free human decisions we may not be able to say, but then the method of God's knowledge in many other respects is unknown to us. The following explanations have been proposed. God may foreknow free acts:—1.Mediately, by foreknowing the motives of these acts, and this either because these motives induce the acts, (1) necessarily, or (2) certainly. This last“certainly”is to be accepted, if either; since motives are nevercauses, but are onlyoccasions, of action. The cause is the will, or the man himself. But it may be said that foreknowing acts through their motives is not foreknowing at all, but is reasoning or inference rather. Moreover, although intelligent beings commonly act according to motives previously dominant, they also at critical epochs, as at the fall of Satan and of Adam, choose between motives, and in such cases knowledge of the motives which have hitherto actuated them gives no clue to their next decisions. Another statement is therefore proposed to meet these difficulties, namely, that God may foreknow free acts:—2.Immediately, by pure intuition, inexplicable to us. Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:203, 225—“If God can know a future event as certain only by a calculation of causes, it must be allowed that he cannot with certainty foreknow any free act of man; for his foreknowledge would then be proof that the act in question was the necessary consequence of certain causes, and was not in itself free. If, on the contrary, the divine knowledge be regarded asintuitive, we see that it stands in the same immediate relation to the act itself as to its antecedents, and thus the difficulty is removed.”Even[pg 286]upon this view there still remains the difficulty of perceiving how there can be in God's mind a subjective certitude with regard to acts in respect to which there is no assignable objective ground of certainty. Yet, in spite of this difficulty, we feel bound both by Scripture and by our fundamental idea of God's perfection to maintain God's perfect knowledge of the future free acts of his creatures. With President Pepper we say:“Knowledge of contingency is not necessarily contingent knowledge.”With Whedon:“It is not calculation, but pure knowledge.”See Dorner, System of Doct., 1:332-337; 2:58-62; Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1858:601-605; Charnock, Attributes, 1:429-446; Solly, The Will, 240-254. For a valuable article on the whole subject, though advocating the view that God foreknows acts by foreknowing motives, see Bib. Sac., Oct. 1883:655-694. See also Hill, Divinity, 517.(e) Prescience is not itself causative. It is not to be confounded with the predetermining will of God. Free actions do not take place because they are foreseen, but they are foreseen because they are to take place.Seeing a thing in the future does not cause it to be, more than seeing a thing in the past causes it to be. As to future events, we may say with Whedon:“Knowledgetakesthem, notmakesthem.”Foreknowledge may, and does, presuppose predetermination, but it is not itself predetermination. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa, 1:38:1:1, says that“the knowledge of God is the cause of things”; but he is obliged to add:“God is not the cause of all things that are known by God, since evil things that are known by God are not from him.”John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 3—“Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault, Which had no less proved certain unforeknown.”(f) Omniscience embraces the actual and the possible, but it does not embrace the self-contradictory and the impossible, because these are not objects of knowledge.God does not know what the result would be if two and two made five, nor does he know“whether a chimæra ruminating in a vacuum devoureth second intentions”; and that, simply for the reason that he cannot know self-contradiction and nonsense. These things are not objects of knowledge. Clarke, Christian Theology, 80—“Can God make an old man in a minute? Could he make it well with the wicked while they remained wicked? Could he create a world in which 2 + 2 = 5?”Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 366—“Does God know the whole number that is the square root of 65? or what adjacent hills there are that have no valleys between them? Does God know round squares, and sugar salt-lumps, and Snarks and Boojums and Abracadabras?”(g) Omniscience, as qualified by holy will, is in Scripture denominated“wisdom.”In virtue of his wisdom God chooses the highest ends and uses the fittest means to accomplish them.Wisdom is not simply“estimating all things at their proper value”(Olmstead); it has in it also the element of counsel and purpose. It has been defined as“the talent of using one's talents.”It implies two things: first, choice of the highest end; secondly, choice of the best means to secure this end. J. C. C. Clarke, Self and the Father, 39—“Wisdom is not invented conceptions, or harmony of theories with theories; but is humble obedience of mind to the reception of facts that are found in things.”Thus man's wisdom, obedience, faith, are all names for different aspects of the same thing. And wisdom in God is the moral choice which makes truth and holiness supreme. Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 261—“Socialism pursues a laudable end by unwise or destructive means. It is not enough to mean well. Our methods must take some account of the nature of things, if they are to succeed. We cannot produce well-being by law. No legislation can remove inequalities of nature and constitution. Society cannot produce equality, any more than it can enable a rhinoceros to sing, or legislate a cat into a lion.”3. Omnipotence.By this we mean the power of God to do all things which are objects of power, whether with or without the use of means.Gen. 17:1—“I am God Almighty.”He performs natural wonders:Gen. 1:1-3—“Let there be Light”;Is. 44:24—“stretcheth forth the heavens alone”;Heb. 1:3—“upholding all things by the word of his power.”Spiritual wonders:2 Cor. 4:6—“God, that said, Light shall shine out of darkness, who shined in our hearts”;[pg 287]Eph. 1:19—“exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe”;Eph. 3:20—“able to do exceeding abundantly.”Power to create new things:Mat. 3:9—“able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham”.Rom. 4:17—“giveth life to the dead, and calleth the things that are not, as though they were.”After his own pleasure:Ps. 115:3—“He hath done whatsoever he hath pleased”;Eph. 1:11—“worketh all things after the counsel of his will.”Nothing impossible:Gen 18:14—“Is anything too hard for Jehovah?”Mat. 19:26—“with God all things are possible.”E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 73—“If all power in the universe is dependent on his creative will for its existence, it is impossible to conceive any limit to his power except that laid on it by his own will. But this is only negative proof; absolute omnipotence is not logically demonstrable, though readily enough recognized as a just conception of the infinite God, when propounded on the authority of a positive revelation.”The omnipotence of God is illustrated by the work of the Holy Spirit, which in Scripture is compared to wind, water and fire. The ordinary manifestations of these elements afford no criterion of the effects they are able to produce. The rushing mighty wind at Pentecost was the analogue of the wind-Spirit who bore everything before him on the first day of creation (Gen. 1:2;John 3:8;Acts 2:2). The pouring out of the Spirit is likened to the flood of Noah when the windows of heaven were opened and there was not room enough to receive that which fell (Mal. 3:10). And the baptism of the Holy Spirit is like the fire that shall destroy all impurity at the end of the world (Mat. 3:11;2 Pet. 3:7-13). See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 307-310.(a) Omnipotence does not imply power to do that which is not an object of power; as, for example, that which is self-contradictory or contradictory to the nature of God.Self-contradictory things:“facere factum infectum”—the making of a past event to have not occurred (hence the uselessness of praying:“May it be that much good was done”); drawing a shorter than a straight line between two given points; putting two separate mountains together without a valley between them. Things contradictory to the nature of God: for God to lie, to sin, to die. To do such things would not imply power, but impotence. God has all the power that is consistent with infinite perfection—all power to do what is worthy of himself. So no greater thing can be said by man than this:“I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none.”Even God cannot make wrong to be right, nor hatred of himself to be blessed. Some have held that the prevention of sin in a moral system is not an object of power, and therefore that God cannot prevent sin in a moral system. We hold the contrary; see this Compendium: Objections to the Doctrine of Decrees.Dryden, Imitation of Horace, 3:29:71—“Over the past not heaven itself has power; What has been has, and I have had my hour”—words applied by Lord John Russell to his own career. Emerson, The Past:“All is now secure and fast, Not the gods can shake the Past.”Sunday-school scholar:“Say, teacher, can God make a rock so big that he can't lift it?”Seminary Professor:“Can God tell a lie?”Seminary student:“With God all things are possible.”(b) Omnipotence does not imply the exercise of all his power on the part of God. He has power over his power; in other words, his power is under the control of wise and holy will. God can do all he will, but he will not do all he can. Else his power is mere force acting necessarily, and God is the slave of his own omnipotence.Schleiermacher held that nature not only is grounded in the divine causality, but fully expresses that causality; there is no causative power in God for anything that is not real and actual. This doctrine does not essentially differ from Spinoza'snatura naturansandnatura naturata. See Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:62-66. But omnipotence is not instinctive; it is a power used according to God's pleasure. God is by no means encompassed by the laws of nature, or shut up to a necessary evolution of his own being, as pantheism supposes. As Rothe has shown, God has a will-power over his nature-power, and is not compelled to do all that he can do. He is able from the stones of the street to“raise up children unto Abraham,”but he has not done it. In God are unopened treasures, an inexhaustible fountain of new beginnings, new creations, new revelations. To suppose that in creation he has expended all the inner possibilities of his being is to deny his omnipotence. SoJob 26:14—“Lo, these are but the outskirts[pg 288]of his ways: And how small a whisper do we hear of him! But the thunder of his power who can understand?”See Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 10; Hodgson, Time and Space, 579, 580.1 Pet. 5:6—“Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God”—his mighty hand of providence, salvation, blessing—“that he may exalt you in due time; casting all your anxiety upon him, because he careth for you.”“The mighty powers held under mighty control”—this is the greatest exhibition of power. Unrestraint is not the highest freedom. Young men must learn that self-restraint is the true power.Prov. 16:32—“He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; And he that ruleth his spirit, than he that taketh a city.”Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 2:3—“We have power in ourselves to do it, but it is a power that we have no power to do.”When dynamite goes off, it all goes off: there is no reserve. God uses as much of his power as he pleases: the remainder of wrath in himself, as well as in others, he restrains.(c) Omnipotence in God does not exclude, but implies, the power of self-limitation. Since all such self-limitation is free, proceeding from neither external nor internal compulsion, it is the act and manifestation of God's power. Human freedom is not rendered impossible by the divine omnipotence, but exists by virtue of it. It is an act of omnipotence when God humbles himself to the taking of human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ.Thomasius:“If God is to be over all and in all, he cannot himself be all.”Ps. 113: 5, 6—“Who is like unto Jehovah our God.... That humbleth himself to behold the things that are in heaven and in the earth?”Phil. 2:7, 8—“emptied himself ... humbled himself.”See Charnock, Attributes, 2:5-107. President Woolsey showed true power when he controlled his indignation and let an offending student go free. Of Christ on the cross, says Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 116—“It was the power [to retain his life, to escape suffering], with the will to hold it unused, which proved him to be what he was, the obedient and perfect man.”We are likest the omnipotent One when we limit ourselves for love's sake. The attribute of omnipotence is the ground of trust, as well as of fear, on the part of God's creatures. Isaac Watts:“His every word of grace is strong As that which built the skies; The voice that rolls the stars along Speaks all the promises.”
Second Division.—Attributes having relation to Creation.1. Omnipresence.By this we mean that God, in the totality of his essence, without diffusion or expansion, multiplication or division, penetrates and fills the universe in all its parts.[pg 280]Ps. 139:7sq.—“Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?”Jer. 23:23, 24—“Am I a God at hand, saith Jehovah, and not a God afar off?... Do not I fill heaven and earth?”Acts 17:27, 28—“he is not far from each one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being.”Faber:“For God is never so far off As even to be near. He is within. Our spirit is The home he holds most dear. To think of him as by our side Is almost as untrue As to remove his shrine beyond Those skies of starry blue. So all the while I thought myself Homeless, forlorn and weary, Missing my joy, I walked the earth Myself God's sanctuary.”Henri Amiel:“From every point on earth we are equally near to heaven and the infinite.”Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism:“Speak to him then, for he hears, and spirit with spirit can meet; Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.”“As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart.”The atheist wrote:“God is nowhere,”but his little daughter read it:“God is now here,”and it converted him. The child however sometimes asks:“If God is everywhere, how is there any room for us?”and the only answer is that God is not a material but a spiritual being, whose presence does not exclude finite existence but rather makes such existence possible. This universal presence of God had to be learned gradually. It required great faith in Abraham to go out from Ur of the Chaldees, and yet to hold that God would be with him in a distant land (Heb. 11:8). Jacob learned that the heavenly ladder followed him wherever he went (Gen. 28:15). Jesus taught that“neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father”(John 4:21). Our Lord's mysterious comings and goings after his resurrection were intended to teach his disciples that he was with them“always, even unto the end of the world”(Mat. 28:20). The omnipresence of Jesus demonstrates,a fortiori, the omnipresence of God.In explanation of this attribute we may say:(a) God's omnipresence is not potential but essential.—We reject the Socinian representation that God's essence is in heaven, only his power on earth. When God is said to“dwell in the heavens,”we are to understand the language either as a symbolic expression of exaltation above earthly things, or as a declaration that his most special and glorious self-manifestations are to the spirits of heaven.Ps. 123:1—“O thou that sittest in the heavens”;113:5—“That hath his seat on high”;Is. 57:15—“the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity.”Mere potential omnipresence is Deistic as well as Socinian. Like birds in the air or fish in the sea,“at home, abroad, We are surrounded still with God.”We do not need to go up to heaven to call him down, or into the abyss to call him up (Rom. 10:6, 7). The best illustration is found in the presence of the soul in every part of the body. Mind seems not confined to the brain. Natural realism in philosophy, as distinguished from idealism, requires that the mind should be at the point of contact with the outer world, instead of having reports and ideas brought to it in the brain; see Porter, Human Intellect, 149. All believers in a soul regard the soul as at least present in all parts of the brain, and this is a relative omnipresence no less difficult in principle than its presence in all parts of the body. An animal's brain may be frozen into a piece solid as ice, yet, after thawing, it will act as before: although freezing of the whole body will cause death. If the immaterial principle were confined to the brain we should expect freezing of the brain to cause death. But if the soul may be omnipresent in the body or even in the brain, the divine Spirit may be omnipresent in the universe. Bowne, Metaphysics, 136—“If finite things are modes of the infinite, each thing must be a mode of the entire infinite; and the infinite must be present in its unity and completeness in every finite thing, just as the entire soul is present in all its acts.”This idealistic conception of the entire mind as present in all its thoughts must be regarded as the best analogue to God's omnipresence in the universe. We object to the view that this omnipresence is merely potential, as we find it in Clarke, Christian Theology, 74—“We know, and only know, that God is able to put forth all his power of action, without regard to place.... Omnipresence is an element in the immanence of God.... A local God would be no real God. If he is not everywhere, he is not true God anywhere. Omnipresence is implied in all providence, in all prayer, in all communion with God and reliance on God.”So long as it is conceded that consciousness is not confined to a single point in the brain, the question whether other portions of the brain or of the body are also the seat of consciousness may be regarded as a purely academic one, and the answer need not[pg 281]affect our present argument. The principle of omnipresence is granted when once we hold that the soul is conscious at more than one point of the physical organism. Yet the question suggested above is an interesting one and with regard to it psychologists are divided. Paulsen, Einleitung in die Philosophie (1892), 138-159, holds that consciousness is correlated with the sum-total of bodily processes, and with him agree Fechner and Wundt.“Pflüger and Lewes say that as the hemispheres of the brain owe their intelligence to the consciousness which we know to be there, so the intelligence of the spinal cord's acts must really be due to the invisible presence of a consciousness lower in degree.”Professor Brewer's rattlesnake, after several hours of decapitation, still struck at him with its bloody neck, when he attempted to seize it by the tail. From the reaction of the frog's leg after decapitation may we not infer a certain consciousness?“Robin, on tickling the breast of a criminal an hour after decapitation, saw the arm and hand move toward the spot.”Hudson, Demonstration of a Future Life, 239-249, quotes from Hammond, Treatise on Insanity, chapter 2, to prove that the brain is not the sole organ of the mind. Instinct does not reside exclusively in the brain; it is seated in themedulla oblongata, or in the spinal cord, or in both these organs. Objective mind, as Hudson thinks, is the function of the physical brain, and it ceases when the brain loses its vitality. Instinctive acts are performed by animals after excision of the brain, and by human beings born without brain. Johnson, in Andover Rev., April, 1890:421—“The brain is not the only seat of consciousness. The same evidence that points to the brain as theprincipalseat of consciousness points to the nerve-centres situated in the spinal cord or elsewhere as the seat of a more or lesssubordinateconsciousness or intelligence.”Ireland, Blot on the Brain, 26—“I do not take it for proved that consciousness is entirely confined to the brain.”In spite of these opinions, however, we must grant that the general consensus among psychologists is upon the other side. Dewey, Psychology, 349—“The sensory and motor nerves have points of meeting in the spinal cord. When a stimulus is transferred from a sensory nerve to a motor without the conscious intervention of the mind, we have reflex action.... If something approaches the eye, the stimulus is transferred to the spinal cord, and instead of being continued to the brain and giving rise to a sensation, it is discharged into a motor nerve and the eye is immediately closed.... The reflex action in itself involves no consciousness.”William James, Psychology, 1:16, 66, 134, 214—“The cortex of the brain is the sole organ of consciousness in man.... If there be any consciousness pertaining to the lower centres, it is a consciousness of which the self knows nothing.... In lower animals this may not be so much the case.... The seat of the mind, so far as its dynamical relations are concerned, is somewhere in the cortex of the brain.”See also C. A. Strong, Why the Mind has a Body, 40-50.(b) God's omnipresence is not the presence of a part but of the whole of God in every place.—This follows from the conception of God as incorporeal We reject the materialistic representation that God is composed of material elements which can be divided or sundered. There is no multiplication or diffusion of his substance to correspond with the parts of his dominions. The one essence of God is present at the same moment in all.1 Kings 8:27—“the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain(circumscribe)thee.”God must be present in all his essence and all his attributes in every place. He is“totus in omni parte.”Alger, Poetry of the Orient:“Though God extends beyond Creation's rim, Each smallest atom holds the whole of him.”From this it follows that the whole Logos can be united to and be present in the man Christ Jesus, while at the same time he fills and governs the whole universe; and so the whole Christ can be united to, and can be present in, the single believer, as fully as if that believer were the only one to receive of his fulness.A. J. Gordon:“In mathematics the whole is equal to the sum of its parts. But we know of the Spirit that every part is equal to the whole. Every church, every true body of Jesus Christ, has just as much of Christ as every other, and each has the whole Christ.”Mat. 13:20—“where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”“The parish priest of austerity Climbed up in a high church steeple, To be nearer God so that he might Hand his word down to the people. And in sermon script he daily wrote What he thought was sent from heaven, And he dropt it down on the people's heads Two times one day in seven. In his age God said,‘Come down and die,’And he cried out from the steeple,‘Where art thou, Lord?’And the Lord replied,‘Down here among my people.’”[pg 282](c) God's omnipresence is not necessary but free.—We reject the pantheistic notion that God is bound to the universe as the universe is bound to God. God is immanent in the universe, not by compulsion, but by the free act of his own will, and this immanence is qualified by his transcendence.God might at will cease to be omnipresent, for he could destroy the universe; but while the universe exists, he is and must be in all its parts. God is the life and law of the universe,—this is the truth in pantheism. But he is also personal and free,—this pantheism denies. Christianity holds to a free, as well as to an essential, omnipresence—qualified and supplemented, however, by God's transcendence. The boasted truth in pantheism is an elementary principle of Christianity, and is only the stepping-stone to a nobler truth—God's personal presence with his church. The Talmud contrasts the worship of an idol and the worship of Jehovah:“The idol seems so near, but is so far, Jehovah seems so far, but is so near!”God's omnipresence assures us that he is present with us to hear, and present in every heart and in the ends of the earth to answer, prayer. See Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 10; Bowne, Metaphysics, 136; Charnock, Attributes, 1:363-405.The Puritan turned from the moss-rose bud, saying:“I have learned to call nothing on earth lovely.”But this is to despise not only the workmanship but the presence of the Almighty. The least thing in nature is worthy of study because it is the revelation of a present God. The uniformity of nature and the reign of law are nothing but the steady will of the omnipresent God. Gravitation is God's omnipresence in space, as evolution is God's omnipresence in time. Dorner, System of Doctrine, 1:73-“God being omnipresent, contact with him may be sought at any moment in prayer and contemplation; indeed, it will always be true that we live and move and have our being in him, as the perennial and omnipresent source of our existence.”Rom. 10:6-8—“Say not in thy heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down:) or, Who shall descend into the abyss? (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead.) But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart.”Lotze, Metaphysics, § 256, quoted in Illingworth, Divine Immanence, 135, 136. Sunday-school scholar:“Is God in my pocket?”“Certainly.”“No, he isn't, for I haven't any pocket.”God is omnipresent so long as there is a universe, but he ceases to be omnipresent when the universe ceases to be.2. Omniscience.By this we mean God's perfect and eternal knowledge of all things which are objects of knowledge, whether they be actual or possible, past, present, or future.God knows his inanimate creation:Ps. 147:4—“counteth the number of the stars; He calleth them all by their names.”He has knowledge of brute creatures:Mat. 10:29—sparrows—“not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father.”Of men and their works:Ps. 33:13-15—“beholdeth all the sons of men ... considereth all their works.”Of hearts of men and their thoughts:Acts 15:8—“God, who knoweth the heart”;Ps. 139:2—“understandest my thought afar off.”Of our wants:Mat. 6:8—“knoweth what things ye have need of.”Of the least things:Mat. 10:30—“the very hairs of your head are all numbered.”Of the past:Mal. 3:16—“book of remembrance.”Of the future:Is. 46:9, 10—“declaring the end from the beginning.”Of men's future free acts:Is. 44:28—“that saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd and shall perform all my pleasure.”Of men's future evil acts:Acts 2:23—“him, being delivered up by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God.”Of the ideally possible:1 Sam. 23:12—“Will the men of Keilah deliver up me and my men into the hands of Saul? And Jehovah said, They will deliver thee up”(sc.if thou remainest);Mat. 11:23—“if the mighty works had been done in Sodom which were done in thee, it would have remained.”From eternity:Acts 15:18—“the Lord, who maketh these things known from of old.”Incomprehensible:Ps. 139:6—“Such knowledge is too wonderful for me”;Rom. 11:33—“O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God.”Related to wisdom:Ps. 104:24—“In wisdom hast thou made them all”;Eph. 3:10—“manifold wisdom of God.”Job 7:20—“O thou watcher of men”;Ps. 56:8—“Thou numberest my wanderings”= my whole life has been one continuous exile;“Put thou my tears into thy bottle”= the skin bottle of the east,—there are tears enough to fill one;“Are they not in thy book?”= no tear has fallen to the ground unnoted,—God has gathered them all. Paul Gerhardt:“Du zählst wie oft ein Christe wein', Und was sein Kummer sei; Kein stilles Thränlein ist so klein, Du hebst und legst es bei.”Heb. 4:13—“there is no creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all[pg 283]things are naked and laid open before the eyes of him with whom we have to do”—τετραχηλισμένα—with head bent back and neck laid bare, as animals slaughtered in sacrifice,orseized by the throat and thrown on the back, so that the priest might discover whether there was any blemish. Japanese proverb:“God has forgotten to forget.”(a) The omniscience of God may be argued from his omnipresence, as well as from his truth or self-knowledge, in which the plan of creation has its eternal ground, and from prophecy, which expresses God's omniscience.It is to be remembered that omniscience, as the designation of a relative and transitive attribute, does not include God's self-knowledge. The term is used in the technical sense of God's knowledge of all things that pertain to the universe of his creation. H. A. Gordon:“Light travels faster than sound. You can see the flash of fire from the cannon's mouth, a mile away, considerably before the noise of the discharge reaches the ear. God flashed the light of prediction upon the pages of his word, and we see it. Wait a little and we see the event itself.”Royce, The Conception of God, 9—“An omniscient being would be one who simply found presented to him, not by virtue of fragmentary and gradually completed processes of inquiry, but by virtue of an all-embracing, direct and transparent insight into his own truth—who found thus presented to him, I say, the complete, the fulfilled answer to every genuinely rational question.”Browning, Ferishtah's Fancies, Plot-culture:“How will it fare shouldst thou impress on me That certainly an Eye is over all And each, to make the minute's deed, word, thought As worthy of reward and punishment? Shall I permit my sense an Eye-viewed shame, Broad daylight perpetration,—so to speak,—I had not dared to breathe within the Ear, With black night's help around me?”(b) Since it is free from all imperfection, God's knowledge is immediate, as distinguished from the knowledge that comes through sense or imagination; simultaneous, as not acquired by successive observations, or built up by processes of reasoning; distinct, as free from all vagueness or confusion; true, as perfectly corresponding to the reality of things; eternal, as comprehended in one timeless act of the divine mind.An infinite mind must always act, and must always act in an absolutely perfect manner. There is in God no sense, symbol, memory, abstraction, growth, reflection, reasoning,—his knowledge is all direct and without intermediaries. God was properly represented by the ancient Egyptians, not as having eye, but as being eye. His thoughts toward us are“more than can be numbered”(Ps. 40:5), not because there is succession in them, now a remembering and now a forgetting, but because there is never a moment of our existence in which we are out of his mind; he is always thinking of us. See Charnock, Attributes, 1:406-497.Gen. 16:13—“Thou art a God that seeth.”Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 374—“Every creature of every order of existence, while its existence is sustained, is so complacently contemplated by God, that the intense and concentrated attention of all men of science together upon it could but form an utterly inadequate symbol of such divine contemplation.”So God's scrutiny of every deed of darkness is more searching than the gaze of a whole Coliseum of spectators, and his eye is more watchful over the good than would be the united care of all his hosts in heaven and earth.Armstrong, God and the Soul:“God's energy is concentrated attention, attention concentrated everywhere. We can attend to two or three things at once; the pianist plays and talks at the same time; the magician does one thing while he seems to do another. God attends to all things, does all things, at once.”Marie Corelli, Master Christian, 104—“The biograph is a hint that every scene of human life is reflected in a ceaseless moving panoramasome where, for the beholding ofsome one.”Wireless telegraphy is a stupendous warning that from God no secrets are hid, that“there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known”(Mat. 10:26). The Röntgen rays, which take photographs of our insides, right through our clothes, and even in the darkness of midnight, show that to God“the night shineth as the day”(Ps. 139:12).Professor Mitchel's equatorial telescope, slowly moving by clockwork, toward sunset, suddenly touched the horizon and disclosed a boy in a tree stealing apples, but the boy was all unconscious that he was under the gaze of the astronomer. Nothing was[pg 284]so fearful to the prisoner in the Frenchcachotas the eye of the guard that never ceased to watch him in perfect silence through the loophole in the door. As in the Roman empire the whole world was to a malefactor one great prison, and in his flight to the most distant lands the emperor could track him, so under the government of God no sinner can escape the eye of his Judge. But omnipresence is protective as well as detective. The textGen. 16:13—“Thou, God, seest me”—has been used as a restraint from evil more than as a stimulus to good. To the child of the devil it should certainly be the former. But to the child of God it should as certainly be the latter. God should not be regarded as an exacting overseer or a standing threat, but rather as one who understands us, loves us, and helps us.Ps. 139:17, 18—“How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! How great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: When I awake, I am still with thee.”(c) Since God knows things as they are, he knows the necessary sequences of his creation as necessary, the free acts of his creatures as free, the ideally possible as ideally possible.God knows what would have taken place under circumstances not now present; knows what the universe would have been, had he chosen a different plan of creation; knows what our lives would have been, had we made different decisions in the past (Is. 48:18—“Oh that thou hadst hearkened ... then had thy peace been as a river”). Clarke, Christian Theology, 77—“God has a double knowledge of his universe. He knows it as it exists eternally in his mind, as his own idea; and he knows it as actually existing in time and space, a moving, changing, growing universe, with perpetual process of succession. In his own idea, he knows it all at once; but he is also aware of its perpetual becoming, and with reference to events as they occur he has foreknowledge, present knowledge, and knowledge afterwards.... He conceives of all things simultaneously, but observes all things in their succession.”Royce, World and Individual, 2:374—holds that God does not temporally foreknow anything except as he is expressed in finite beings, but yet that the Absolute possesses a perfect knowledge at one glance of the whole of the temporal order, present, past and future. This, he says, is not foreknowledge, but eternal knowledge. Priestley denied that any contingent event could be an object of knowledge. But Reid says the denial that any free action can be foreseen involves the denial of God's own free agency, since God's future actions can be foreseen by men; also that while God foresees his own free actions, this does not determine those actions necessarily. Tennyson, In Memoriam, 26—“And if that eye which watches guilt And goodness, and hath power to see Within the green the mouldered tree, And towers fallen as soon as built—Oh, if indeed that eye foresee Or see (in Him is no before) In more of life true life no more And Love the indifference to be, Then might I find, ere yet the morn Breaks hither over Indian seas, That Shadow waiting with the keys, To shroud me from my proper scorn.”(d) The fact that there is nothing in the present condition of things from which the future actions of free creatures necessarily follow by natural law does not prevent God from foreseeing such actions, since his knowledge is not mediate, but immediate. He not only foreknows the motives which will occasion men's acts, but he directly foreknows the acts themselves. The possibility of such direct knowledge without assignable grounds of knowledge is apparent if we admit that time is a form of finite thought to which the divine mind is not subject.Aristotle maintained that there is no certain knowledge of contingent future events. Socinus, in like manner, while he admitted that God knows all things that are knowable, abridged the objects of the divine knowledge by withdrawing from the number those objects whose future existence he considered as uncertain, such as the determinations of free agents. These, he held, cannot be certainly foreknown, because there is nothing in the present condition of things from which they will necessarily follow by natural law. The man who makes a clock can tell when it will strike. But free-will, not being subject to mechanical laws, cannot have its acts predicted or foreknown. God knows things only in their causes—future events only in their antecedents. John Milton seems also to deny God's foreknowledge of free acts:“So, without least impulse or shadow of fate, Or aught by me immutably foreseen, They trespass.”[pg 285]With this Socinian doctrine some Arminians agree, as McCabe, in his Foreknowledge of God, and in his Divine Nescience of Future Contingencies a Necessity. McCabe, however, sacrifices the principle of free will, in defence of which he makes this surrender of God's foreknowledge, by saying that in cases of fulfilled prophecy, like Peter's denial and Judas's betrayal, God brought special influences to bear to secure the result,—so that Peter's and Judas's wills acted irresponsibly under the law of cause and effect. He quotes Dr. Daniel Curry as declaring that“the denial of absolute divine foreknowledge is the essential complement of the Methodist theology, without which its philosophical incompleteness is defenceless against the logical consistency of Calvinism.”See also article by McCabe in Methodist Review, Sept. 1892:760-773. Also Simon, Reconciliation, 287—“God has constituted a creature, the actions of which he can only know as such when they are performed. In presence of man, to a certain extent, even the great God condescends to wait; nay more, has himself so ordained things that he must wait, inquiring,‘What will he do?’”So Dugald Stewart:“Shall we venture to affirm that it exceeds the power of God to permit such a train of contingent events to take place as his own foreknowledge shall not extend to?”Martensen holds this view, and Rothe, Theologische Ethik, 1:212-234, who declares that the free choices of men are continually increasing the knowledge of God. So also Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:279—“The belief in the divine foreknowledge of our future has no basis in philosophy. We no longer deem it true that even God knows the moment of my moral life that is coming next. Even he does not know whether I shall yield to the secret temptation at midday. To him life is a drama of which he knows not the conclusion.”Then, says Dr. A. J. Gordon, there is nothing so dreary and dreadful as to be living under the direction of such a God. The universe is rushing on like an express-train in the darkness without headlight or engineer; at any moment we may be plunged into the abyss. Lotze does not deny God's foreknowledge of free human actions, but he regards as insoluble by the intellect the problem of the relation of time to God, and such foreknowledge as“one of those postulates as to which we know not how they can be fulfilled.”Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 159—“Foreknowledge of a free act is a knowledge without assignable grounds of knowing. On the assumption of a real time, it is hard to find a way out of this difficulty.... The doctrine of the ideality of time helps us by suggesting the possibility of an all-embracing present, or an eternal now, for God. In that case the problem vanishes with time, its condition.”Against the doctrine of the divine nescience we urge not only our fundamental conviction of God's perfection, but the constant testimony of Scripture. InIs. 41:21, 22, God makes his foreknowledge the test of his Godhead in the controversy with idols. If God cannot foreknow free human acts, then“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”(Rev. 13:8)was only a sacrifice to be offeredin caseAdam should fall, God not knowing whether he would or not, andin caseJudas should betray Christ, God not knowing whether he would or not. Indeed, since the course of nature is changed by man's will when he burns towns and fells forests, God cannot on this theory predict even the course of nature. All prophecy is therefore a protest against this view.How God foreknows free human decisions we may not be able to say, but then the method of God's knowledge in many other respects is unknown to us. The following explanations have been proposed. God may foreknow free acts:—1.Mediately, by foreknowing the motives of these acts, and this either because these motives induce the acts, (1) necessarily, or (2) certainly. This last“certainly”is to be accepted, if either; since motives are nevercauses, but are onlyoccasions, of action. The cause is the will, or the man himself. But it may be said that foreknowing acts through their motives is not foreknowing at all, but is reasoning or inference rather. Moreover, although intelligent beings commonly act according to motives previously dominant, they also at critical epochs, as at the fall of Satan and of Adam, choose between motives, and in such cases knowledge of the motives which have hitherto actuated them gives no clue to their next decisions. Another statement is therefore proposed to meet these difficulties, namely, that God may foreknow free acts:—2.Immediately, by pure intuition, inexplicable to us. Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:203, 225—“If God can know a future event as certain only by a calculation of causes, it must be allowed that he cannot with certainty foreknow any free act of man; for his foreknowledge would then be proof that the act in question was the necessary consequence of certain causes, and was not in itself free. If, on the contrary, the divine knowledge be regarded asintuitive, we see that it stands in the same immediate relation to the act itself as to its antecedents, and thus the difficulty is removed.”Even[pg 286]upon this view there still remains the difficulty of perceiving how there can be in God's mind a subjective certitude with regard to acts in respect to which there is no assignable objective ground of certainty. Yet, in spite of this difficulty, we feel bound both by Scripture and by our fundamental idea of God's perfection to maintain God's perfect knowledge of the future free acts of his creatures. With President Pepper we say:“Knowledge of contingency is not necessarily contingent knowledge.”With Whedon:“It is not calculation, but pure knowledge.”See Dorner, System of Doct., 1:332-337; 2:58-62; Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1858:601-605; Charnock, Attributes, 1:429-446; Solly, The Will, 240-254. For a valuable article on the whole subject, though advocating the view that God foreknows acts by foreknowing motives, see Bib. Sac., Oct. 1883:655-694. See also Hill, Divinity, 517.(e) Prescience is not itself causative. It is not to be confounded with the predetermining will of God. Free actions do not take place because they are foreseen, but they are foreseen because they are to take place.Seeing a thing in the future does not cause it to be, more than seeing a thing in the past causes it to be. As to future events, we may say with Whedon:“Knowledgetakesthem, notmakesthem.”Foreknowledge may, and does, presuppose predetermination, but it is not itself predetermination. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa, 1:38:1:1, says that“the knowledge of God is the cause of things”; but he is obliged to add:“God is not the cause of all things that are known by God, since evil things that are known by God are not from him.”John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 3—“Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault, Which had no less proved certain unforeknown.”(f) Omniscience embraces the actual and the possible, but it does not embrace the self-contradictory and the impossible, because these are not objects of knowledge.God does not know what the result would be if two and two made five, nor does he know“whether a chimæra ruminating in a vacuum devoureth second intentions”; and that, simply for the reason that he cannot know self-contradiction and nonsense. These things are not objects of knowledge. Clarke, Christian Theology, 80—“Can God make an old man in a minute? Could he make it well with the wicked while they remained wicked? Could he create a world in which 2 + 2 = 5?”Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 366—“Does God know the whole number that is the square root of 65? or what adjacent hills there are that have no valleys between them? Does God know round squares, and sugar salt-lumps, and Snarks and Boojums and Abracadabras?”(g) Omniscience, as qualified by holy will, is in Scripture denominated“wisdom.”In virtue of his wisdom God chooses the highest ends and uses the fittest means to accomplish them.Wisdom is not simply“estimating all things at their proper value”(Olmstead); it has in it also the element of counsel and purpose. It has been defined as“the talent of using one's talents.”It implies two things: first, choice of the highest end; secondly, choice of the best means to secure this end. J. C. C. Clarke, Self and the Father, 39—“Wisdom is not invented conceptions, or harmony of theories with theories; but is humble obedience of mind to the reception of facts that are found in things.”Thus man's wisdom, obedience, faith, are all names for different aspects of the same thing. And wisdom in God is the moral choice which makes truth and holiness supreme. Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 261—“Socialism pursues a laudable end by unwise or destructive means. It is not enough to mean well. Our methods must take some account of the nature of things, if they are to succeed. We cannot produce well-being by law. No legislation can remove inequalities of nature and constitution. Society cannot produce equality, any more than it can enable a rhinoceros to sing, or legislate a cat into a lion.”3. Omnipotence.By this we mean the power of God to do all things which are objects of power, whether with or without the use of means.Gen. 17:1—“I am God Almighty.”He performs natural wonders:Gen. 1:1-3—“Let there be Light”;Is. 44:24—“stretcheth forth the heavens alone”;Heb. 1:3—“upholding all things by the word of his power.”Spiritual wonders:2 Cor. 4:6—“God, that said, Light shall shine out of darkness, who shined in our hearts”;[pg 287]Eph. 1:19—“exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe”;Eph. 3:20—“able to do exceeding abundantly.”Power to create new things:Mat. 3:9—“able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham”.Rom. 4:17—“giveth life to the dead, and calleth the things that are not, as though they were.”After his own pleasure:Ps. 115:3—“He hath done whatsoever he hath pleased”;Eph. 1:11—“worketh all things after the counsel of his will.”Nothing impossible:Gen 18:14—“Is anything too hard for Jehovah?”Mat. 19:26—“with God all things are possible.”E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 73—“If all power in the universe is dependent on his creative will for its existence, it is impossible to conceive any limit to his power except that laid on it by his own will. But this is only negative proof; absolute omnipotence is not logically demonstrable, though readily enough recognized as a just conception of the infinite God, when propounded on the authority of a positive revelation.”The omnipotence of God is illustrated by the work of the Holy Spirit, which in Scripture is compared to wind, water and fire. The ordinary manifestations of these elements afford no criterion of the effects they are able to produce. The rushing mighty wind at Pentecost was the analogue of the wind-Spirit who bore everything before him on the first day of creation (Gen. 1:2;John 3:8;Acts 2:2). The pouring out of the Spirit is likened to the flood of Noah when the windows of heaven were opened and there was not room enough to receive that which fell (Mal. 3:10). And the baptism of the Holy Spirit is like the fire that shall destroy all impurity at the end of the world (Mat. 3:11;2 Pet. 3:7-13). See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 307-310.(a) Omnipotence does not imply power to do that which is not an object of power; as, for example, that which is self-contradictory or contradictory to the nature of God.Self-contradictory things:“facere factum infectum”—the making of a past event to have not occurred (hence the uselessness of praying:“May it be that much good was done”); drawing a shorter than a straight line between two given points; putting two separate mountains together without a valley between them. Things contradictory to the nature of God: for God to lie, to sin, to die. To do such things would not imply power, but impotence. God has all the power that is consistent with infinite perfection—all power to do what is worthy of himself. So no greater thing can be said by man than this:“I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none.”Even God cannot make wrong to be right, nor hatred of himself to be blessed. Some have held that the prevention of sin in a moral system is not an object of power, and therefore that God cannot prevent sin in a moral system. We hold the contrary; see this Compendium: Objections to the Doctrine of Decrees.Dryden, Imitation of Horace, 3:29:71—“Over the past not heaven itself has power; What has been has, and I have had my hour”—words applied by Lord John Russell to his own career. Emerson, The Past:“All is now secure and fast, Not the gods can shake the Past.”Sunday-school scholar:“Say, teacher, can God make a rock so big that he can't lift it?”Seminary Professor:“Can God tell a lie?”Seminary student:“With God all things are possible.”(b) Omnipotence does not imply the exercise of all his power on the part of God. He has power over his power; in other words, his power is under the control of wise and holy will. God can do all he will, but he will not do all he can. Else his power is mere force acting necessarily, and God is the slave of his own omnipotence.Schleiermacher held that nature not only is grounded in the divine causality, but fully expresses that causality; there is no causative power in God for anything that is not real and actual. This doctrine does not essentially differ from Spinoza'snatura naturansandnatura naturata. See Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:62-66. But omnipotence is not instinctive; it is a power used according to God's pleasure. God is by no means encompassed by the laws of nature, or shut up to a necessary evolution of his own being, as pantheism supposes. As Rothe has shown, God has a will-power over his nature-power, and is not compelled to do all that he can do. He is able from the stones of the street to“raise up children unto Abraham,”but he has not done it. In God are unopened treasures, an inexhaustible fountain of new beginnings, new creations, new revelations. To suppose that in creation he has expended all the inner possibilities of his being is to deny his omnipotence. SoJob 26:14—“Lo, these are but the outskirts[pg 288]of his ways: And how small a whisper do we hear of him! But the thunder of his power who can understand?”See Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 10; Hodgson, Time and Space, 579, 580.1 Pet. 5:6—“Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God”—his mighty hand of providence, salvation, blessing—“that he may exalt you in due time; casting all your anxiety upon him, because he careth for you.”“The mighty powers held under mighty control”—this is the greatest exhibition of power. Unrestraint is not the highest freedom. Young men must learn that self-restraint is the true power.Prov. 16:32—“He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; And he that ruleth his spirit, than he that taketh a city.”Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 2:3—“We have power in ourselves to do it, but it is a power that we have no power to do.”When dynamite goes off, it all goes off: there is no reserve. God uses as much of his power as he pleases: the remainder of wrath in himself, as well as in others, he restrains.(c) Omnipotence in God does not exclude, but implies, the power of self-limitation. Since all such self-limitation is free, proceeding from neither external nor internal compulsion, it is the act and manifestation of God's power. Human freedom is not rendered impossible by the divine omnipotence, but exists by virtue of it. It is an act of omnipotence when God humbles himself to the taking of human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ.Thomasius:“If God is to be over all and in all, he cannot himself be all.”Ps. 113: 5, 6—“Who is like unto Jehovah our God.... That humbleth himself to behold the things that are in heaven and in the earth?”Phil. 2:7, 8—“emptied himself ... humbled himself.”See Charnock, Attributes, 2:5-107. President Woolsey showed true power when he controlled his indignation and let an offending student go free. Of Christ on the cross, says Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 116—“It was the power [to retain his life, to escape suffering], with the will to hold it unused, which proved him to be what he was, the obedient and perfect man.”We are likest the omnipotent One when we limit ourselves for love's sake. The attribute of omnipotence is the ground of trust, as well as of fear, on the part of God's creatures. Isaac Watts:“His every word of grace is strong As that which built the skies; The voice that rolls the stars along Speaks all the promises.”
Second Division.—Attributes having relation to Creation.1. Omnipresence.By this we mean that God, in the totality of his essence, without diffusion or expansion, multiplication or division, penetrates and fills the universe in all its parts.[pg 280]Ps. 139:7sq.—“Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?”Jer. 23:23, 24—“Am I a God at hand, saith Jehovah, and not a God afar off?... Do not I fill heaven and earth?”Acts 17:27, 28—“he is not far from each one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being.”Faber:“For God is never so far off As even to be near. He is within. Our spirit is The home he holds most dear. To think of him as by our side Is almost as untrue As to remove his shrine beyond Those skies of starry blue. So all the while I thought myself Homeless, forlorn and weary, Missing my joy, I walked the earth Myself God's sanctuary.”Henri Amiel:“From every point on earth we are equally near to heaven and the infinite.”Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism:“Speak to him then, for he hears, and spirit with spirit can meet; Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.”“As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart.”The atheist wrote:“God is nowhere,”but his little daughter read it:“God is now here,”and it converted him. The child however sometimes asks:“If God is everywhere, how is there any room for us?”and the only answer is that God is not a material but a spiritual being, whose presence does not exclude finite existence but rather makes such existence possible. This universal presence of God had to be learned gradually. It required great faith in Abraham to go out from Ur of the Chaldees, and yet to hold that God would be with him in a distant land (Heb. 11:8). Jacob learned that the heavenly ladder followed him wherever he went (Gen. 28:15). Jesus taught that“neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father”(John 4:21). Our Lord's mysterious comings and goings after his resurrection were intended to teach his disciples that he was with them“always, even unto the end of the world”(Mat. 28:20). The omnipresence of Jesus demonstrates,a fortiori, the omnipresence of God.In explanation of this attribute we may say:(a) God's omnipresence is not potential but essential.—We reject the Socinian representation that God's essence is in heaven, only his power on earth. When God is said to“dwell in the heavens,”we are to understand the language either as a symbolic expression of exaltation above earthly things, or as a declaration that his most special and glorious self-manifestations are to the spirits of heaven.Ps. 123:1—“O thou that sittest in the heavens”;113:5—“That hath his seat on high”;Is. 57:15—“the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity.”Mere potential omnipresence is Deistic as well as Socinian. Like birds in the air or fish in the sea,“at home, abroad, We are surrounded still with God.”We do not need to go up to heaven to call him down, or into the abyss to call him up (Rom. 10:6, 7). The best illustration is found in the presence of the soul in every part of the body. Mind seems not confined to the brain. Natural realism in philosophy, as distinguished from idealism, requires that the mind should be at the point of contact with the outer world, instead of having reports and ideas brought to it in the brain; see Porter, Human Intellect, 149. All believers in a soul regard the soul as at least present in all parts of the brain, and this is a relative omnipresence no less difficult in principle than its presence in all parts of the body. An animal's brain may be frozen into a piece solid as ice, yet, after thawing, it will act as before: although freezing of the whole body will cause death. If the immaterial principle were confined to the brain we should expect freezing of the brain to cause death. But if the soul may be omnipresent in the body or even in the brain, the divine Spirit may be omnipresent in the universe. Bowne, Metaphysics, 136—“If finite things are modes of the infinite, each thing must be a mode of the entire infinite; and the infinite must be present in its unity and completeness in every finite thing, just as the entire soul is present in all its acts.”This idealistic conception of the entire mind as present in all its thoughts must be regarded as the best analogue to God's omnipresence in the universe. We object to the view that this omnipresence is merely potential, as we find it in Clarke, Christian Theology, 74—“We know, and only know, that God is able to put forth all his power of action, without regard to place.... Omnipresence is an element in the immanence of God.... A local God would be no real God. If he is not everywhere, he is not true God anywhere. Omnipresence is implied in all providence, in all prayer, in all communion with God and reliance on God.”So long as it is conceded that consciousness is not confined to a single point in the brain, the question whether other portions of the brain or of the body are also the seat of consciousness may be regarded as a purely academic one, and the answer need not[pg 281]affect our present argument. The principle of omnipresence is granted when once we hold that the soul is conscious at more than one point of the physical organism. Yet the question suggested above is an interesting one and with regard to it psychologists are divided. Paulsen, Einleitung in die Philosophie (1892), 138-159, holds that consciousness is correlated with the sum-total of bodily processes, and with him agree Fechner and Wundt.“Pflüger and Lewes say that as the hemispheres of the brain owe their intelligence to the consciousness which we know to be there, so the intelligence of the spinal cord's acts must really be due to the invisible presence of a consciousness lower in degree.”Professor Brewer's rattlesnake, after several hours of decapitation, still struck at him with its bloody neck, when he attempted to seize it by the tail. From the reaction of the frog's leg after decapitation may we not infer a certain consciousness?“Robin, on tickling the breast of a criminal an hour after decapitation, saw the arm and hand move toward the spot.”Hudson, Demonstration of a Future Life, 239-249, quotes from Hammond, Treatise on Insanity, chapter 2, to prove that the brain is not the sole organ of the mind. Instinct does not reside exclusively in the brain; it is seated in themedulla oblongata, or in the spinal cord, or in both these organs. Objective mind, as Hudson thinks, is the function of the physical brain, and it ceases when the brain loses its vitality. Instinctive acts are performed by animals after excision of the brain, and by human beings born without brain. Johnson, in Andover Rev., April, 1890:421—“The brain is not the only seat of consciousness. The same evidence that points to the brain as theprincipalseat of consciousness points to the nerve-centres situated in the spinal cord or elsewhere as the seat of a more or lesssubordinateconsciousness or intelligence.”Ireland, Blot on the Brain, 26—“I do not take it for proved that consciousness is entirely confined to the brain.”In spite of these opinions, however, we must grant that the general consensus among psychologists is upon the other side. Dewey, Psychology, 349—“The sensory and motor nerves have points of meeting in the spinal cord. When a stimulus is transferred from a sensory nerve to a motor without the conscious intervention of the mind, we have reflex action.... If something approaches the eye, the stimulus is transferred to the spinal cord, and instead of being continued to the brain and giving rise to a sensation, it is discharged into a motor nerve and the eye is immediately closed.... The reflex action in itself involves no consciousness.”William James, Psychology, 1:16, 66, 134, 214—“The cortex of the brain is the sole organ of consciousness in man.... If there be any consciousness pertaining to the lower centres, it is a consciousness of which the self knows nothing.... In lower animals this may not be so much the case.... The seat of the mind, so far as its dynamical relations are concerned, is somewhere in the cortex of the brain.”See also C. A. Strong, Why the Mind has a Body, 40-50.(b) God's omnipresence is not the presence of a part but of the whole of God in every place.—This follows from the conception of God as incorporeal We reject the materialistic representation that God is composed of material elements which can be divided or sundered. There is no multiplication or diffusion of his substance to correspond with the parts of his dominions. The one essence of God is present at the same moment in all.1 Kings 8:27—“the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain(circumscribe)thee.”God must be present in all his essence and all his attributes in every place. He is“totus in omni parte.”Alger, Poetry of the Orient:“Though God extends beyond Creation's rim, Each smallest atom holds the whole of him.”From this it follows that the whole Logos can be united to and be present in the man Christ Jesus, while at the same time he fills and governs the whole universe; and so the whole Christ can be united to, and can be present in, the single believer, as fully as if that believer were the only one to receive of his fulness.A. J. Gordon:“In mathematics the whole is equal to the sum of its parts. But we know of the Spirit that every part is equal to the whole. Every church, every true body of Jesus Christ, has just as much of Christ as every other, and each has the whole Christ.”Mat. 13:20—“where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”“The parish priest of austerity Climbed up in a high church steeple, To be nearer God so that he might Hand his word down to the people. And in sermon script he daily wrote What he thought was sent from heaven, And he dropt it down on the people's heads Two times one day in seven. In his age God said,‘Come down and die,’And he cried out from the steeple,‘Where art thou, Lord?’And the Lord replied,‘Down here among my people.’”[pg 282](c) God's omnipresence is not necessary but free.—We reject the pantheistic notion that God is bound to the universe as the universe is bound to God. God is immanent in the universe, not by compulsion, but by the free act of his own will, and this immanence is qualified by his transcendence.God might at will cease to be omnipresent, for he could destroy the universe; but while the universe exists, he is and must be in all its parts. God is the life and law of the universe,—this is the truth in pantheism. But he is also personal and free,—this pantheism denies. Christianity holds to a free, as well as to an essential, omnipresence—qualified and supplemented, however, by God's transcendence. The boasted truth in pantheism is an elementary principle of Christianity, and is only the stepping-stone to a nobler truth—God's personal presence with his church. The Talmud contrasts the worship of an idol and the worship of Jehovah:“The idol seems so near, but is so far, Jehovah seems so far, but is so near!”God's omnipresence assures us that he is present with us to hear, and present in every heart and in the ends of the earth to answer, prayer. See Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 10; Bowne, Metaphysics, 136; Charnock, Attributes, 1:363-405.The Puritan turned from the moss-rose bud, saying:“I have learned to call nothing on earth lovely.”But this is to despise not only the workmanship but the presence of the Almighty. The least thing in nature is worthy of study because it is the revelation of a present God. The uniformity of nature and the reign of law are nothing but the steady will of the omnipresent God. Gravitation is God's omnipresence in space, as evolution is God's omnipresence in time. Dorner, System of Doctrine, 1:73-“God being omnipresent, contact with him may be sought at any moment in prayer and contemplation; indeed, it will always be true that we live and move and have our being in him, as the perennial and omnipresent source of our existence.”Rom. 10:6-8—“Say not in thy heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down:) or, Who shall descend into the abyss? (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead.) But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart.”Lotze, Metaphysics, § 256, quoted in Illingworth, Divine Immanence, 135, 136. Sunday-school scholar:“Is God in my pocket?”“Certainly.”“No, he isn't, for I haven't any pocket.”God is omnipresent so long as there is a universe, but he ceases to be omnipresent when the universe ceases to be.2. Omniscience.By this we mean God's perfect and eternal knowledge of all things which are objects of knowledge, whether they be actual or possible, past, present, or future.God knows his inanimate creation:Ps. 147:4—“counteth the number of the stars; He calleth them all by their names.”He has knowledge of brute creatures:Mat. 10:29—sparrows—“not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father.”Of men and their works:Ps. 33:13-15—“beholdeth all the sons of men ... considereth all their works.”Of hearts of men and their thoughts:Acts 15:8—“God, who knoweth the heart”;Ps. 139:2—“understandest my thought afar off.”Of our wants:Mat. 6:8—“knoweth what things ye have need of.”Of the least things:Mat. 10:30—“the very hairs of your head are all numbered.”Of the past:Mal. 3:16—“book of remembrance.”Of the future:Is. 46:9, 10—“declaring the end from the beginning.”Of men's future free acts:Is. 44:28—“that saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd and shall perform all my pleasure.”Of men's future evil acts:Acts 2:23—“him, being delivered up by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God.”Of the ideally possible:1 Sam. 23:12—“Will the men of Keilah deliver up me and my men into the hands of Saul? And Jehovah said, They will deliver thee up”(sc.if thou remainest);Mat. 11:23—“if the mighty works had been done in Sodom which were done in thee, it would have remained.”From eternity:Acts 15:18—“the Lord, who maketh these things known from of old.”Incomprehensible:Ps. 139:6—“Such knowledge is too wonderful for me”;Rom. 11:33—“O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God.”Related to wisdom:Ps. 104:24—“In wisdom hast thou made them all”;Eph. 3:10—“manifold wisdom of God.”Job 7:20—“O thou watcher of men”;Ps. 56:8—“Thou numberest my wanderings”= my whole life has been one continuous exile;“Put thou my tears into thy bottle”= the skin bottle of the east,—there are tears enough to fill one;“Are they not in thy book?”= no tear has fallen to the ground unnoted,—God has gathered them all. Paul Gerhardt:“Du zählst wie oft ein Christe wein', Und was sein Kummer sei; Kein stilles Thränlein ist so klein, Du hebst und legst es bei.”Heb. 4:13—“there is no creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all[pg 283]things are naked and laid open before the eyes of him with whom we have to do”—τετραχηλισμένα—with head bent back and neck laid bare, as animals slaughtered in sacrifice,orseized by the throat and thrown on the back, so that the priest might discover whether there was any blemish. Japanese proverb:“God has forgotten to forget.”(a) The omniscience of God may be argued from his omnipresence, as well as from his truth or self-knowledge, in which the plan of creation has its eternal ground, and from prophecy, which expresses God's omniscience.It is to be remembered that omniscience, as the designation of a relative and transitive attribute, does not include God's self-knowledge. The term is used in the technical sense of God's knowledge of all things that pertain to the universe of his creation. H. A. Gordon:“Light travels faster than sound. You can see the flash of fire from the cannon's mouth, a mile away, considerably before the noise of the discharge reaches the ear. God flashed the light of prediction upon the pages of his word, and we see it. Wait a little and we see the event itself.”Royce, The Conception of God, 9—“An omniscient being would be one who simply found presented to him, not by virtue of fragmentary and gradually completed processes of inquiry, but by virtue of an all-embracing, direct and transparent insight into his own truth—who found thus presented to him, I say, the complete, the fulfilled answer to every genuinely rational question.”Browning, Ferishtah's Fancies, Plot-culture:“How will it fare shouldst thou impress on me That certainly an Eye is over all And each, to make the minute's deed, word, thought As worthy of reward and punishment? Shall I permit my sense an Eye-viewed shame, Broad daylight perpetration,—so to speak,—I had not dared to breathe within the Ear, With black night's help around me?”(b) Since it is free from all imperfection, God's knowledge is immediate, as distinguished from the knowledge that comes through sense or imagination; simultaneous, as not acquired by successive observations, or built up by processes of reasoning; distinct, as free from all vagueness or confusion; true, as perfectly corresponding to the reality of things; eternal, as comprehended in one timeless act of the divine mind.An infinite mind must always act, and must always act in an absolutely perfect manner. There is in God no sense, symbol, memory, abstraction, growth, reflection, reasoning,—his knowledge is all direct and without intermediaries. God was properly represented by the ancient Egyptians, not as having eye, but as being eye. His thoughts toward us are“more than can be numbered”(Ps. 40:5), not because there is succession in them, now a remembering and now a forgetting, but because there is never a moment of our existence in which we are out of his mind; he is always thinking of us. See Charnock, Attributes, 1:406-497.Gen. 16:13—“Thou art a God that seeth.”Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 374—“Every creature of every order of existence, while its existence is sustained, is so complacently contemplated by God, that the intense and concentrated attention of all men of science together upon it could but form an utterly inadequate symbol of such divine contemplation.”So God's scrutiny of every deed of darkness is more searching than the gaze of a whole Coliseum of spectators, and his eye is more watchful over the good than would be the united care of all his hosts in heaven and earth.Armstrong, God and the Soul:“God's energy is concentrated attention, attention concentrated everywhere. We can attend to two or three things at once; the pianist plays and talks at the same time; the magician does one thing while he seems to do another. God attends to all things, does all things, at once.”Marie Corelli, Master Christian, 104—“The biograph is a hint that every scene of human life is reflected in a ceaseless moving panoramasome where, for the beholding ofsome one.”Wireless telegraphy is a stupendous warning that from God no secrets are hid, that“there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known”(Mat. 10:26). The Röntgen rays, which take photographs of our insides, right through our clothes, and even in the darkness of midnight, show that to God“the night shineth as the day”(Ps. 139:12).Professor Mitchel's equatorial telescope, slowly moving by clockwork, toward sunset, suddenly touched the horizon and disclosed a boy in a tree stealing apples, but the boy was all unconscious that he was under the gaze of the astronomer. Nothing was[pg 284]so fearful to the prisoner in the Frenchcachotas the eye of the guard that never ceased to watch him in perfect silence through the loophole in the door. As in the Roman empire the whole world was to a malefactor one great prison, and in his flight to the most distant lands the emperor could track him, so under the government of God no sinner can escape the eye of his Judge. But omnipresence is protective as well as detective. The textGen. 16:13—“Thou, God, seest me”—has been used as a restraint from evil more than as a stimulus to good. To the child of the devil it should certainly be the former. But to the child of God it should as certainly be the latter. God should not be regarded as an exacting overseer or a standing threat, but rather as one who understands us, loves us, and helps us.Ps. 139:17, 18—“How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! How great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: When I awake, I am still with thee.”(c) Since God knows things as they are, he knows the necessary sequences of his creation as necessary, the free acts of his creatures as free, the ideally possible as ideally possible.God knows what would have taken place under circumstances not now present; knows what the universe would have been, had he chosen a different plan of creation; knows what our lives would have been, had we made different decisions in the past (Is. 48:18—“Oh that thou hadst hearkened ... then had thy peace been as a river”). Clarke, Christian Theology, 77—“God has a double knowledge of his universe. He knows it as it exists eternally in his mind, as his own idea; and he knows it as actually existing in time and space, a moving, changing, growing universe, with perpetual process of succession. In his own idea, he knows it all at once; but he is also aware of its perpetual becoming, and with reference to events as they occur he has foreknowledge, present knowledge, and knowledge afterwards.... He conceives of all things simultaneously, but observes all things in their succession.”Royce, World and Individual, 2:374—holds that God does not temporally foreknow anything except as he is expressed in finite beings, but yet that the Absolute possesses a perfect knowledge at one glance of the whole of the temporal order, present, past and future. This, he says, is not foreknowledge, but eternal knowledge. Priestley denied that any contingent event could be an object of knowledge. But Reid says the denial that any free action can be foreseen involves the denial of God's own free agency, since God's future actions can be foreseen by men; also that while God foresees his own free actions, this does not determine those actions necessarily. Tennyson, In Memoriam, 26—“And if that eye which watches guilt And goodness, and hath power to see Within the green the mouldered tree, And towers fallen as soon as built—Oh, if indeed that eye foresee Or see (in Him is no before) In more of life true life no more And Love the indifference to be, Then might I find, ere yet the morn Breaks hither over Indian seas, That Shadow waiting with the keys, To shroud me from my proper scorn.”(d) The fact that there is nothing in the present condition of things from which the future actions of free creatures necessarily follow by natural law does not prevent God from foreseeing such actions, since his knowledge is not mediate, but immediate. He not only foreknows the motives which will occasion men's acts, but he directly foreknows the acts themselves. The possibility of such direct knowledge without assignable grounds of knowledge is apparent if we admit that time is a form of finite thought to which the divine mind is not subject.Aristotle maintained that there is no certain knowledge of contingent future events. Socinus, in like manner, while he admitted that God knows all things that are knowable, abridged the objects of the divine knowledge by withdrawing from the number those objects whose future existence he considered as uncertain, such as the determinations of free agents. These, he held, cannot be certainly foreknown, because there is nothing in the present condition of things from which they will necessarily follow by natural law. The man who makes a clock can tell when it will strike. But free-will, not being subject to mechanical laws, cannot have its acts predicted or foreknown. God knows things only in their causes—future events only in their antecedents. John Milton seems also to deny God's foreknowledge of free acts:“So, without least impulse or shadow of fate, Or aught by me immutably foreseen, They trespass.”[pg 285]With this Socinian doctrine some Arminians agree, as McCabe, in his Foreknowledge of God, and in his Divine Nescience of Future Contingencies a Necessity. McCabe, however, sacrifices the principle of free will, in defence of which he makes this surrender of God's foreknowledge, by saying that in cases of fulfilled prophecy, like Peter's denial and Judas's betrayal, God brought special influences to bear to secure the result,—so that Peter's and Judas's wills acted irresponsibly under the law of cause and effect. He quotes Dr. Daniel Curry as declaring that“the denial of absolute divine foreknowledge is the essential complement of the Methodist theology, without which its philosophical incompleteness is defenceless against the logical consistency of Calvinism.”See also article by McCabe in Methodist Review, Sept. 1892:760-773. Also Simon, Reconciliation, 287—“God has constituted a creature, the actions of which he can only know as such when they are performed. In presence of man, to a certain extent, even the great God condescends to wait; nay more, has himself so ordained things that he must wait, inquiring,‘What will he do?’”So Dugald Stewart:“Shall we venture to affirm that it exceeds the power of God to permit such a train of contingent events to take place as his own foreknowledge shall not extend to?”Martensen holds this view, and Rothe, Theologische Ethik, 1:212-234, who declares that the free choices of men are continually increasing the knowledge of God. So also Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:279—“The belief in the divine foreknowledge of our future has no basis in philosophy. We no longer deem it true that even God knows the moment of my moral life that is coming next. Even he does not know whether I shall yield to the secret temptation at midday. To him life is a drama of which he knows not the conclusion.”Then, says Dr. A. J. Gordon, there is nothing so dreary and dreadful as to be living under the direction of such a God. The universe is rushing on like an express-train in the darkness without headlight or engineer; at any moment we may be plunged into the abyss. Lotze does not deny God's foreknowledge of free human actions, but he regards as insoluble by the intellect the problem of the relation of time to God, and such foreknowledge as“one of those postulates as to which we know not how they can be fulfilled.”Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 159—“Foreknowledge of a free act is a knowledge without assignable grounds of knowing. On the assumption of a real time, it is hard to find a way out of this difficulty.... The doctrine of the ideality of time helps us by suggesting the possibility of an all-embracing present, or an eternal now, for God. In that case the problem vanishes with time, its condition.”Against the doctrine of the divine nescience we urge not only our fundamental conviction of God's perfection, but the constant testimony of Scripture. InIs. 41:21, 22, God makes his foreknowledge the test of his Godhead in the controversy with idols. If God cannot foreknow free human acts, then“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”(Rev. 13:8)was only a sacrifice to be offeredin caseAdam should fall, God not knowing whether he would or not, andin caseJudas should betray Christ, God not knowing whether he would or not. Indeed, since the course of nature is changed by man's will when he burns towns and fells forests, God cannot on this theory predict even the course of nature. All prophecy is therefore a protest against this view.How God foreknows free human decisions we may not be able to say, but then the method of God's knowledge in many other respects is unknown to us. The following explanations have been proposed. God may foreknow free acts:—1.Mediately, by foreknowing the motives of these acts, and this either because these motives induce the acts, (1) necessarily, or (2) certainly. This last“certainly”is to be accepted, if either; since motives are nevercauses, but are onlyoccasions, of action. The cause is the will, or the man himself. But it may be said that foreknowing acts through their motives is not foreknowing at all, but is reasoning or inference rather. Moreover, although intelligent beings commonly act according to motives previously dominant, they also at critical epochs, as at the fall of Satan and of Adam, choose between motives, and in such cases knowledge of the motives which have hitherto actuated them gives no clue to their next decisions. Another statement is therefore proposed to meet these difficulties, namely, that God may foreknow free acts:—2.Immediately, by pure intuition, inexplicable to us. Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:203, 225—“If God can know a future event as certain only by a calculation of causes, it must be allowed that he cannot with certainty foreknow any free act of man; for his foreknowledge would then be proof that the act in question was the necessary consequence of certain causes, and was not in itself free. If, on the contrary, the divine knowledge be regarded asintuitive, we see that it stands in the same immediate relation to the act itself as to its antecedents, and thus the difficulty is removed.”Even[pg 286]upon this view there still remains the difficulty of perceiving how there can be in God's mind a subjective certitude with regard to acts in respect to which there is no assignable objective ground of certainty. Yet, in spite of this difficulty, we feel bound both by Scripture and by our fundamental idea of God's perfection to maintain God's perfect knowledge of the future free acts of his creatures. With President Pepper we say:“Knowledge of contingency is not necessarily contingent knowledge.”With Whedon:“It is not calculation, but pure knowledge.”See Dorner, System of Doct., 1:332-337; 2:58-62; Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1858:601-605; Charnock, Attributes, 1:429-446; Solly, The Will, 240-254. For a valuable article on the whole subject, though advocating the view that God foreknows acts by foreknowing motives, see Bib. Sac., Oct. 1883:655-694. See also Hill, Divinity, 517.(e) Prescience is not itself causative. It is not to be confounded with the predetermining will of God. Free actions do not take place because they are foreseen, but they are foreseen because they are to take place.Seeing a thing in the future does not cause it to be, more than seeing a thing in the past causes it to be. As to future events, we may say with Whedon:“Knowledgetakesthem, notmakesthem.”Foreknowledge may, and does, presuppose predetermination, but it is not itself predetermination. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa, 1:38:1:1, says that“the knowledge of God is the cause of things”; but he is obliged to add:“God is not the cause of all things that are known by God, since evil things that are known by God are not from him.”John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 3—“Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault, Which had no less proved certain unforeknown.”(f) Omniscience embraces the actual and the possible, but it does not embrace the self-contradictory and the impossible, because these are not objects of knowledge.God does not know what the result would be if two and two made five, nor does he know“whether a chimæra ruminating in a vacuum devoureth second intentions”; and that, simply for the reason that he cannot know self-contradiction and nonsense. These things are not objects of knowledge. Clarke, Christian Theology, 80—“Can God make an old man in a minute? Could he make it well with the wicked while they remained wicked? Could he create a world in which 2 + 2 = 5?”Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 366—“Does God know the whole number that is the square root of 65? or what adjacent hills there are that have no valleys between them? Does God know round squares, and sugar salt-lumps, and Snarks and Boojums and Abracadabras?”(g) Omniscience, as qualified by holy will, is in Scripture denominated“wisdom.”In virtue of his wisdom God chooses the highest ends and uses the fittest means to accomplish them.Wisdom is not simply“estimating all things at their proper value”(Olmstead); it has in it also the element of counsel and purpose. It has been defined as“the talent of using one's talents.”It implies two things: first, choice of the highest end; secondly, choice of the best means to secure this end. J. C. C. Clarke, Self and the Father, 39—“Wisdom is not invented conceptions, or harmony of theories with theories; but is humble obedience of mind to the reception of facts that are found in things.”Thus man's wisdom, obedience, faith, are all names for different aspects of the same thing. And wisdom in God is the moral choice which makes truth and holiness supreme. Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 261—“Socialism pursues a laudable end by unwise or destructive means. It is not enough to mean well. Our methods must take some account of the nature of things, if they are to succeed. We cannot produce well-being by law. No legislation can remove inequalities of nature and constitution. Society cannot produce equality, any more than it can enable a rhinoceros to sing, or legislate a cat into a lion.”3. Omnipotence.By this we mean the power of God to do all things which are objects of power, whether with or without the use of means.Gen. 17:1—“I am God Almighty.”He performs natural wonders:Gen. 1:1-3—“Let there be Light”;Is. 44:24—“stretcheth forth the heavens alone”;Heb. 1:3—“upholding all things by the word of his power.”Spiritual wonders:2 Cor. 4:6—“God, that said, Light shall shine out of darkness, who shined in our hearts”;[pg 287]Eph. 1:19—“exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe”;Eph. 3:20—“able to do exceeding abundantly.”Power to create new things:Mat. 3:9—“able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham”.Rom. 4:17—“giveth life to the dead, and calleth the things that are not, as though they were.”After his own pleasure:Ps. 115:3—“He hath done whatsoever he hath pleased”;Eph. 1:11—“worketh all things after the counsel of his will.”Nothing impossible:Gen 18:14—“Is anything too hard for Jehovah?”Mat. 19:26—“with God all things are possible.”E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 73—“If all power in the universe is dependent on his creative will for its existence, it is impossible to conceive any limit to his power except that laid on it by his own will. But this is only negative proof; absolute omnipotence is not logically demonstrable, though readily enough recognized as a just conception of the infinite God, when propounded on the authority of a positive revelation.”The omnipotence of God is illustrated by the work of the Holy Spirit, which in Scripture is compared to wind, water and fire. The ordinary manifestations of these elements afford no criterion of the effects they are able to produce. The rushing mighty wind at Pentecost was the analogue of the wind-Spirit who bore everything before him on the first day of creation (Gen. 1:2;John 3:8;Acts 2:2). The pouring out of the Spirit is likened to the flood of Noah when the windows of heaven were opened and there was not room enough to receive that which fell (Mal. 3:10). And the baptism of the Holy Spirit is like the fire that shall destroy all impurity at the end of the world (Mat. 3:11;2 Pet. 3:7-13). See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 307-310.(a) Omnipotence does not imply power to do that which is not an object of power; as, for example, that which is self-contradictory or contradictory to the nature of God.Self-contradictory things:“facere factum infectum”—the making of a past event to have not occurred (hence the uselessness of praying:“May it be that much good was done”); drawing a shorter than a straight line between two given points; putting two separate mountains together without a valley between them. Things contradictory to the nature of God: for God to lie, to sin, to die. To do such things would not imply power, but impotence. God has all the power that is consistent with infinite perfection—all power to do what is worthy of himself. So no greater thing can be said by man than this:“I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none.”Even God cannot make wrong to be right, nor hatred of himself to be blessed. Some have held that the prevention of sin in a moral system is not an object of power, and therefore that God cannot prevent sin in a moral system. We hold the contrary; see this Compendium: Objections to the Doctrine of Decrees.Dryden, Imitation of Horace, 3:29:71—“Over the past not heaven itself has power; What has been has, and I have had my hour”—words applied by Lord John Russell to his own career. Emerson, The Past:“All is now secure and fast, Not the gods can shake the Past.”Sunday-school scholar:“Say, teacher, can God make a rock so big that he can't lift it?”Seminary Professor:“Can God tell a lie?”Seminary student:“With God all things are possible.”(b) Omnipotence does not imply the exercise of all his power on the part of God. He has power over his power; in other words, his power is under the control of wise and holy will. God can do all he will, but he will not do all he can. Else his power is mere force acting necessarily, and God is the slave of his own omnipotence.Schleiermacher held that nature not only is grounded in the divine causality, but fully expresses that causality; there is no causative power in God for anything that is not real and actual. This doctrine does not essentially differ from Spinoza'snatura naturansandnatura naturata. See Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:62-66. But omnipotence is not instinctive; it is a power used according to God's pleasure. God is by no means encompassed by the laws of nature, or shut up to a necessary evolution of his own being, as pantheism supposes. As Rothe has shown, God has a will-power over his nature-power, and is not compelled to do all that he can do. He is able from the stones of the street to“raise up children unto Abraham,”but he has not done it. In God are unopened treasures, an inexhaustible fountain of new beginnings, new creations, new revelations. To suppose that in creation he has expended all the inner possibilities of his being is to deny his omnipotence. SoJob 26:14—“Lo, these are but the outskirts[pg 288]of his ways: And how small a whisper do we hear of him! But the thunder of his power who can understand?”See Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 10; Hodgson, Time and Space, 579, 580.1 Pet. 5:6—“Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God”—his mighty hand of providence, salvation, blessing—“that he may exalt you in due time; casting all your anxiety upon him, because he careth for you.”“The mighty powers held under mighty control”—this is the greatest exhibition of power. Unrestraint is not the highest freedom. Young men must learn that self-restraint is the true power.Prov. 16:32—“He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; And he that ruleth his spirit, than he that taketh a city.”Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 2:3—“We have power in ourselves to do it, but it is a power that we have no power to do.”When dynamite goes off, it all goes off: there is no reserve. God uses as much of his power as he pleases: the remainder of wrath in himself, as well as in others, he restrains.(c) Omnipotence in God does not exclude, but implies, the power of self-limitation. Since all such self-limitation is free, proceeding from neither external nor internal compulsion, it is the act and manifestation of God's power. Human freedom is not rendered impossible by the divine omnipotence, but exists by virtue of it. It is an act of omnipotence when God humbles himself to the taking of human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ.Thomasius:“If God is to be over all and in all, he cannot himself be all.”Ps. 113: 5, 6—“Who is like unto Jehovah our God.... That humbleth himself to behold the things that are in heaven and in the earth?”Phil. 2:7, 8—“emptied himself ... humbled himself.”See Charnock, Attributes, 2:5-107. President Woolsey showed true power when he controlled his indignation and let an offending student go free. Of Christ on the cross, says Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 116—“It was the power [to retain his life, to escape suffering], with the will to hold it unused, which proved him to be what he was, the obedient and perfect man.”We are likest the omnipotent One when we limit ourselves for love's sake. The attribute of omnipotence is the ground of trust, as well as of fear, on the part of God's creatures. Isaac Watts:“His every word of grace is strong As that which built the skies; The voice that rolls the stars along Speaks all the promises.”
1. Omnipresence.By this we mean that God, in the totality of his essence, without diffusion or expansion, multiplication or division, penetrates and fills the universe in all its parts.[pg 280]Ps. 139:7sq.—“Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?”Jer. 23:23, 24—“Am I a God at hand, saith Jehovah, and not a God afar off?... Do not I fill heaven and earth?”Acts 17:27, 28—“he is not far from each one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being.”Faber:“For God is never so far off As even to be near. He is within. Our spirit is The home he holds most dear. To think of him as by our side Is almost as untrue As to remove his shrine beyond Those skies of starry blue. So all the while I thought myself Homeless, forlorn and weary, Missing my joy, I walked the earth Myself God's sanctuary.”Henri Amiel:“From every point on earth we are equally near to heaven and the infinite.”Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism:“Speak to him then, for he hears, and spirit with spirit can meet; Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.”“As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart.”The atheist wrote:“God is nowhere,”but his little daughter read it:“God is now here,”and it converted him. The child however sometimes asks:“If God is everywhere, how is there any room for us?”and the only answer is that God is not a material but a spiritual being, whose presence does not exclude finite existence but rather makes such existence possible. This universal presence of God had to be learned gradually. It required great faith in Abraham to go out from Ur of the Chaldees, and yet to hold that God would be with him in a distant land (Heb. 11:8). Jacob learned that the heavenly ladder followed him wherever he went (Gen. 28:15). Jesus taught that“neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father”(John 4:21). Our Lord's mysterious comings and goings after his resurrection were intended to teach his disciples that he was with them“always, even unto the end of the world”(Mat. 28:20). The omnipresence of Jesus demonstrates,a fortiori, the omnipresence of God.In explanation of this attribute we may say:(a) God's omnipresence is not potential but essential.—We reject the Socinian representation that God's essence is in heaven, only his power on earth. When God is said to“dwell in the heavens,”we are to understand the language either as a symbolic expression of exaltation above earthly things, or as a declaration that his most special and glorious self-manifestations are to the spirits of heaven.Ps. 123:1—“O thou that sittest in the heavens”;113:5—“That hath his seat on high”;Is. 57:15—“the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity.”Mere potential omnipresence is Deistic as well as Socinian. Like birds in the air or fish in the sea,“at home, abroad, We are surrounded still with God.”We do not need to go up to heaven to call him down, or into the abyss to call him up (Rom. 10:6, 7). The best illustration is found in the presence of the soul in every part of the body. Mind seems not confined to the brain. Natural realism in philosophy, as distinguished from idealism, requires that the mind should be at the point of contact with the outer world, instead of having reports and ideas brought to it in the brain; see Porter, Human Intellect, 149. All believers in a soul regard the soul as at least present in all parts of the brain, and this is a relative omnipresence no less difficult in principle than its presence in all parts of the body. An animal's brain may be frozen into a piece solid as ice, yet, after thawing, it will act as before: although freezing of the whole body will cause death. If the immaterial principle were confined to the brain we should expect freezing of the brain to cause death. But if the soul may be omnipresent in the body or even in the brain, the divine Spirit may be omnipresent in the universe. Bowne, Metaphysics, 136—“If finite things are modes of the infinite, each thing must be a mode of the entire infinite; and the infinite must be present in its unity and completeness in every finite thing, just as the entire soul is present in all its acts.”This idealistic conception of the entire mind as present in all its thoughts must be regarded as the best analogue to God's omnipresence in the universe. We object to the view that this omnipresence is merely potential, as we find it in Clarke, Christian Theology, 74—“We know, and only know, that God is able to put forth all his power of action, without regard to place.... Omnipresence is an element in the immanence of God.... A local God would be no real God. If he is not everywhere, he is not true God anywhere. Omnipresence is implied in all providence, in all prayer, in all communion with God and reliance on God.”So long as it is conceded that consciousness is not confined to a single point in the brain, the question whether other portions of the brain or of the body are also the seat of consciousness may be regarded as a purely academic one, and the answer need not[pg 281]affect our present argument. The principle of omnipresence is granted when once we hold that the soul is conscious at more than one point of the physical organism. Yet the question suggested above is an interesting one and with regard to it psychologists are divided. Paulsen, Einleitung in die Philosophie (1892), 138-159, holds that consciousness is correlated with the sum-total of bodily processes, and with him agree Fechner and Wundt.“Pflüger and Lewes say that as the hemispheres of the brain owe their intelligence to the consciousness which we know to be there, so the intelligence of the spinal cord's acts must really be due to the invisible presence of a consciousness lower in degree.”Professor Brewer's rattlesnake, after several hours of decapitation, still struck at him with its bloody neck, when he attempted to seize it by the tail. From the reaction of the frog's leg after decapitation may we not infer a certain consciousness?“Robin, on tickling the breast of a criminal an hour after decapitation, saw the arm and hand move toward the spot.”Hudson, Demonstration of a Future Life, 239-249, quotes from Hammond, Treatise on Insanity, chapter 2, to prove that the brain is not the sole organ of the mind. Instinct does not reside exclusively in the brain; it is seated in themedulla oblongata, or in the spinal cord, or in both these organs. Objective mind, as Hudson thinks, is the function of the physical brain, and it ceases when the brain loses its vitality. Instinctive acts are performed by animals after excision of the brain, and by human beings born without brain. Johnson, in Andover Rev., April, 1890:421—“The brain is not the only seat of consciousness. The same evidence that points to the brain as theprincipalseat of consciousness points to the nerve-centres situated in the spinal cord or elsewhere as the seat of a more or lesssubordinateconsciousness or intelligence.”Ireland, Blot on the Brain, 26—“I do not take it for proved that consciousness is entirely confined to the brain.”In spite of these opinions, however, we must grant that the general consensus among psychologists is upon the other side. Dewey, Psychology, 349—“The sensory and motor nerves have points of meeting in the spinal cord. When a stimulus is transferred from a sensory nerve to a motor without the conscious intervention of the mind, we have reflex action.... If something approaches the eye, the stimulus is transferred to the spinal cord, and instead of being continued to the brain and giving rise to a sensation, it is discharged into a motor nerve and the eye is immediately closed.... The reflex action in itself involves no consciousness.”William James, Psychology, 1:16, 66, 134, 214—“The cortex of the brain is the sole organ of consciousness in man.... If there be any consciousness pertaining to the lower centres, it is a consciousness of which the self knows nothing.... In lower animals this may not be so much the case.... The seat of the mind, so far as its dynamical relations are concerned, is somewhere in the cortex of the brain.”See also C. A. Strong, Why the Mind has a Body, 40-50.(b) God's omnipresence is not the presence of a part but of the whole of God in every place.—This follows from the conception of God as incorporeal We reject the materialistic representation that God is composed of material elements which can be divided or sundered. There is no multiplication or diffusion of his substance to correspond with the parts of his dominions. The one essence of God is present at the same moment in all.1 Kings 8:27—“the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain(circumscribe)thee.”God must be present in all his essence and all his attributes in every place. He is“totus in omni parte.”Alger, Poetry of the Orient:“Though God extends beyond Creation's rim, Each smallest atom holds the whole of him.”From this it follows that the whole Logos can be united to and be present in the man Christ Jesus, while at the same time he fills and governs the whole universe; and so the whole Christ can be united to, and can be present in, the single believer, as fully as if that believer were the only one to receive of his fulness.A. J. Gordon:“In mathematics the whole is equal to the sum of its parts. But we know of the Spirit that every part is equal to the whole. Every church, every true body of Jesus Christ, has just as much of Christ as every other, and each has the whole Christ.”Mat. 13:20—“where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”“The parish priest of austerity Climbed up in a high church steeple, To be nearer God so that he might Hand his word down to the people. And in sermon script he daily wrote What he thought was sent from heaven, And he dropt it down on the people's heads Two times one day in seven. In his age God said,‘Come down and die,’And he cried out from the steeple,‘Where art thou, Lord?’And the Lord replied,‘Down here among my people.’”[pg 282](c) God's omnipresence is not necessary but free.—We reject the pantheistic notion that God is bound to the universe as the universe is bound to God. God is immanent in the universe, not by compulsion, but by the free act of his own will, and this immanence is qualified by his transcendence.God might at will cease to be omnipresent, for he could destroy the universe; but while the universe exists, he is and must be in all its parts. God is the life and law of the universe,—this is the truth in pantheism. But he is also personal and free,—this pantheism denies. Christianity holds to a free, as well as to an essential, omnipresence—qualified and supplemented, however, by God's transcendence. The boasted truth in pantheism is an elementary principle of Christianity, and is only the stepping-stone to a nobler truth—God's personal presence with his church. The Talmud contrasts the worship of an idol and the worship of Jehovah:“The idol seems so near, but is so far, Jehovah seems so far, but is so near!”God's omnipresence assures us that he is present with us to hear, and present in every heart and in the ends of the earth to answer, prayer. See Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 10; Bowne, Metaphysics, 136; Charnock, Attributes, 1:363-405.The Puritan turned from the moss-rose bud, saying:“I have learned to call nothing on earth lovely.”But this is to despise not only the workmanship but the presence of the Almighty. The least thing in nature is worthy of study because it is the revelation of a present God. The uniformity of nature and the reign of law are nothing but the steady will of the omnipresent God. Gravitation is God's omnipresence in space, as evolution is God's omnipresence in time. Dorner, System of Doctrine, 1:73-“God being omnipresent, contact with him may be sought at any moment in prayer and contemplation; indeed, it will always be true that we live and move and have our being in him, as the perennial and omnipresent source of our existence.”Rom. 10:6-8—“Say not in thy heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down:) or, Who shall descend into the abyss? (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead.) But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart.”Lotze, Metaphysics, § 256, quoted in Illingworth, Divine Immanence, 135, 136. Sunday-school scholar:“Is God in my pocket?”“Certainly.”“No, he isn't, for I haven't any pocket.”God is omnipresent so long as there is a universe, but he ceases to be omnipresent when the universe ceases to be.
By this we mean that God, in the totality of his essence, without diffusion or expansion, multiplication or division, penetrates and fills the universe in all its parts.
Ps. 139:7sq.—“Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?”Jer. 23:23, 24—“Am I a God at hand, saith Jehovah, and not a God afar off?... Do not I fill heaven and earth?”Acts 17:27, 28—“he is not far from each one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being.”Faber:“For God is never so far off As even to be near. He is within. Our spirit is The home he holds most dear. To think of him as by our side Is almost as untrue As to remove his shrine beyond Those skies of starry blue. So all the while I thought myself Homeless, forlorn and weary, Missing my joy, I walked the earth Myself God's sanctuary.”Henri Amiel:“From every point on earth we are equally near to heaven and the infinite.”Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism:“Speak to him then, for he hears, and spirit with spirit can meet; Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.”“As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart.”The atheist wrote:“God is nowhere,”but his little daughter read it:“God is now here,”and it converted him. The child however sometimes asks:“If God is everywhere, how is there any room for us?”and the only answer is that God is not a material but a spiritual being, whose presence does not exclude finite existence but rather makes such existence possible. This universal presence of God had to be learned gradually. It required great faith in Abraham to go out from Ur of the Chaldees, and yet to hold that God would be with him in a distant land (Heb. 11:8). Jacob learned that the heavenly ladder followed him wherever he went (Gen. 28:15). Jesus taught that“neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father”(John 4:21). Our Lord's mysterious comings and goings after his resurrection were intended to teach his disciples that he was with them“always, even unto the end of the world”(Mat. 28:20). The omnipresence of Jesus demonstrates,a fortiori, the omnipresence of God.
Ps. 139:7sq.—“Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?”Jer. 23:23, 24—“Am I a God at hand, saith Jehovah, and not a God afar off?... Do not I fill heaven and earth?”Acts 17:27, 28—“he is not far from each one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being.”Faber:“For God is never so far off As even to be near. He is within. Our spirit is The home he holds most dear. To think of him as by our side Is almost as untrue As to remove his shrine beyond Those skies of starry blue. So all the while I thought myself Homeless, forlorn and weary, Missing my joy, I walked the earth Myself God's sanctuary.”Henri Amiel:“From every point on earth we are equally near to heaven and the infinite.”Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism:“Speak to him then, for he hears, and spirit with spirit can meet; Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.”“As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart.”
The atheist wrote:“God is nowhere,”but his little daughter read it:“God is now here,”and it converted him. The child however sometimes asks:“If God is everywhere, how is there any room for us?”and the only answer is that God is not a material but a spiritual being, whose presence does not exclude finite existence but rather makes such existence possible. This universal presence of God had to be learned gradually. It required great faith in Abraham to go out from Ur of the Chaldees, and yet to hold that God would be with him in a distant land (Heb. 11:8). Jacob learned that the heavenly ladder followed him wherever he went (Gen. 28:15). Jesus taught that“neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father”(John 4:21). Our Lord's mysterious comings and goings after his resurrection were intended to teach his disciples that he was with them“always, even unto the end of the world”(Mat. 28:20). The omnipresence of Jesus demonstrates,a fortiori, the omnipresence of God.
In explanation of this attribute we may say:
(a) God's omnipresence is not potential but essential.—We reject the Socinian representation that God's essence is in heaven, only his power on earth. When God is said to“dwell in the heavens,”we are to understand the language either as a symbolic expression of exaltation above earthly things, or as a declaration that his most special and glorious self-manifestations are to the spirits of heaven.
Ps. 123:1—“O thou that sittest in the heavens”;113:5—“That hath his seat on high”;Is. 57:15—“the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity.”Mere potential omnipresence is Deistic as well as Socinian. Like birds in the air or fish in the sea,“at home, abroad, We are surrounded still with God.”We do not need to go up to heaven to call him down, or into the abyss to call him up (Rom. 10:6, 7). The best illustration is found in the presence of the soul in every part of the body. Mind seems not confined to the brain. Natural realism in philosophy, as distinguished from idealism, requires that the mind should be at the point of contact with the outer world, instead of having reports and ideas brought to it in the brain; see Porter, Human Intellect, 149. All believers in a soul regard the soul as at least present in all parts of the brain, and this is a relative omnipresence no less difficult in principle than its presence in all parts of the body. An animal's brain may be frozen into a piece solid as ice, yet, after thawing, it will act as before: although freezing of the whole body will cause death. If the immaterial principle were confined to the brain we should expect freezing of the brain to cause death. But if the soul may be omnipresent in the body or even in the brain, the divine Spirit may be omnipresent in the universe. Bowne, Metaphysics, 136—“If finite things are modes of the infinite, each thing must be a mode of the entire infinite; and the infinite must be present in its unity and completeness in every finite thing, just as the entire soul is present in all its acts.”This idealistic conception of the entire mind as present in all its thoughts must be regarded as the best analogue to God's omnipresence in the universe. We object to the view that this omnipresence is merely potential, as we find it in Clarke, Christian Theology, 74—“We know, and only know, that God is able to put forth all his power of action, without regard to place.... Omnipresence is an element in the immanence of God.... A local God would be no real God. If he is not everywhere, he is not true God anywhere. Omnipresence is implied in all providence, in all prayer, in all communion with God and reliance on God.”So long as it is conceded that consciousness is not confined to a single point in the brain, the question whether other portions of the brain or of the body are also the seat of consciousness may be regarded as a purely academic one, and the answer need not[pg 281]affect our present argument. The principle of omnipresence is granted when once we hold that the soul is conscious at more than one point of the physical organism. Yet the question suggested above is an interesting one and with regard to it psychologists are divided. Paulsen, Einleitung in die Philosophie (1892), 138-159, holds that consciousness is correlated with the sum-total of bodily processes, and with him agree Fechner and Wundt.“Pflüger and Lewes say that as the hemispheres of the brain owe their intelligence to the consciousness which we know to be there, so the intelligence of the spinal cord's acts must really be due to the invisible presence of a consciousness lower in degree.”Professor Brewer's rattlesnake, after several hours of decapitation, still struck at him with its bloody neck, when he attempted to seize it by the tail. From the reaction of the frog's leg after decapitation may we not infer a certain consciousness?“Robin, on tickling the breast of a criminal an hour after decapitation, saw the arm and hand move toward the spot.”Hudson, Demonstration of a Future Life, 239-249, quotes from Hammond, Treatise on Insanity, chapter 2, to prove that the brain is not the sole organ of the mind. Instinct does not reside exclusively in the brain; it is seated in themedulla oblongata, or in the spinal cord, or in both these organs. Objective mind, as Hudson thinks, is the function of the physical brain, and it ceases when the brain loses its vitality. Instinctive acts are performed by animals after excision of the brain, and by human beings born without brain. Johnson, in Andover Rev., April, 1890:421—“The brain is not the only seat of consciousness. The same evidence that points to the brain as theprincipalseat of consciousness points to the nerve-centres situated in the spinal cord or elsewhere as the seat of a more or lesssubordinateconsciousness or intelligence.”Ireland, Blot on the Brain, 26—“I do not take it for proved that consciousness is entirely confined to the brain.”In spite of these opinions, however, we must grant that the general consensus among psychologists is upon the other side. Dewey, Psychology, 349—“The sensory and motor nerves have points of meeting in the spinal cord. When a stimulus is transferred from a sensory nerve to a motor without the conscious intervention of the mind, we have reflex action.... If something approaches the eye, the stimulus is transferred to the spinal cord, and instead of being continued to the brain and giving rise to a sensation, it is discharged into a motor nerve and the eye is immediately closed.... The reflex action in itself involves no consciousness.”William James, Psychology, 1:16, 66, 134, 214—“The cortex of the brain is the sole organ of consciousness in man.... If there be any consciousness pertaining to the lower centres, it is a consciousness of which the self knows nothing.... In lower animals this may not be so much the case.... The seat of the mind, so far as its dynamical relations are concerned, is somewhere in the cortex of the brain.”See also C. A. Strong, Why the Mind has a Body, 40-50.
Ps. 123:1—“O thou that sittest in the heavens”;113:5—“That hath his seat on high”;Is. 57:15—“the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity.”Mere potential omnipresence is Deistic as well as Socinian. Like birds in the air or fish in the sea,“at home, abroad, We are surrounded still with God.”We do not need to go up to heaven to call him down, or into the abyss to call him up (Rom. 10:6, 7). The best illustration is found in the presence of the soul in every part of the body. Mind seems not confined to the brain. Natural realism in philosophy, as distinguished from idealism, requires that the mind should be at the point of contact with the outer world, instead of having reports and ideas brought to it in the brain; see Porter, Human Intellect, 149. All believers in a soul regard the soul as at least present in all parts of the brain, and this is a relative omnipresence no less difficult in principle than its presence in all parts of the body. An animal's brain may be frozen into a piece solid as ice, yet, after thawing, it will act as before: although freezing of the whole body will cause death. If the immaterial principle were confined to the brain we should expect freezing of the brain to cause death. But if the soul may be omnipresent in the body or even in the brain, the divine Spirit may be omnipresent in the universe. Bowne, Metaphysics, 136—“If finite things are modes of the infinite, each thing must be a mode of the entire infinite; and the infinite must be present in its unity and completeness in every finite thing, just as the entire soul is present in all its acts.”This idealistic conception of the entire mind as present in all its thoughts must be regarded as the best analogue to God's omnipresence in the universe. We object to the view that this omnipresence is merely potential, as we find it in Clarke, Christian Theology, 74—“We know, and only know, that God is able to put forth all his power of action, without regard to place.... Omnipresence is an element in the immanence of God.... A local God would be no real God. If he is not everywhere, he is not true God anywhere. Omnipresence is implied in all providence, in all prayer, in all communion with God and reliance on God.”
So long as it is conceded that consciousness is not confined to a single point in the brain, the question whether other portions of the brain or of the body are also the seat of consciousness may be regarded as a purely academic one, and the answer need not[pg 281]affect our present argument. The principle of omnipresence is granted when once we hold that the soul is conscious at more than one point of the physical organism. Yet the question suggested above is an interesting one and with regard to it psychologists are divided. Paulsen, Einleitung in die Philosophie (1892), 138-159, holds that consciousness is correlated with the sum-total of bodily processes, and with him agree Fechner and Wundt.“Pflüger and Lewes say that as the hemispheres of the brain owe their intelligence to the consciousness which we know to be there, so the intelligence of the spinal cord's acts must really be due to the invisible presence of a consciousness lower in degree.”Professor Brewer's rattlesnake, after several hours of decapitation, still struck at him with its bloody neck, when he attempted to seize it by the tail. From the reaction of the frog's leg after decapitation may we not infer a certain consciousness?“Robin, on tickling the breast of a criminal an hour after decapitation, saw the arm and hand move toward the spot.”Hudson, Demonstration of a Future Life, 239-249, quotes from Hammond, Treatise on Insanity, chapter 2, to prove that the brain is not the sole organ of the mind. Instinct does not reside exclusively in the brain; it is seated in themedulla oblongata, or in the spinal cord, or in both these organs. Objective mind, as Hudson thinks, is the function of the physical brain, and it ceases when the brain loses its vitality. Instinctive acts are performed by animals after excision of the brain, and by human beings born without brain. Johnson, in Andover Rev., April, 1890:421—“The brain is not the only seat of consciousness. The same evidence that points to the brain as theprincipalseat of consciousness points to the nerve-centres situated in the spinal cord or elsewhere as the seat of a more or lesssubordinateconsciousness or intelligence.”Ireland, Blot on the Brain, 26—“I do not take it for proved that consciousness is entirely confined to the brain.”
In spite of these opinions, however, we must grant that the general consensus among psychologists is upon the other side. Dewey, Psychology, 349—“The sensory and motor nerves have points of meeting in the spinal cord. When a stimulus is transferred from a sensory nerve to a motor without the conscious intervention of the mind, we have reflex action.... If something approaches the eye, the stimulus is transferred to the spinal cord, and instead of being continued to the brain and giving rise to a sensation, it is discharged into a motor nerve and the eye is immediately closed.... The reflex action in itself involves no consciousness.”William James, Psychology, 1:16, 66, 134, 214—“The cortex of the brain is the sole organ of consciousness in man.... If there be any consciousness pertaining to the lower centres, it is a consciousness of which the self knows nothing.... In lower animals this may not be so much the case.... The seat of the mind, so far as its dynamical relations are concerned, is somewhere in the cortex of the brain.”See also C. A. Strong, Why the Mind has a Body, 40-50.
(b) God's omnipresence is not the presence of a part but of the whole of God in every place.—This follows from the conception of God as incorporeal We reject the materialistic representation that God is composed of material elements which can be divided or sundered. There is no multiplication or diffusion of his substance to correspond with the parts of his dominions. The one essence of God is present at the same moment in all.
1 Kings 8:27—“the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain(circumscribe)thee.”God must be present in all his essence and all his attributes in every place. He is“totus in omni parte.”Alger, Poetry of the Orient:“Though God extends beyond Creation's rim, Each smallest atom holds the whole of him.”From this it follows that the whole Logos can be united to and be present in the man Christ Jesus, while at the same time he fills and governs the whole universe; and so the whole Christ can be united to, and can be present in, the single believer, as fully as if that believer were the only one to receive of his fulness.A. J. Gordon:“In mathematics the whole is equal to the sum of its parts. But we know of the Spirit that every part is equal to the whole. Every church, every true body of Jesus Christ, has just as much of Christ as every other, and each has the whole Christ.”Mat. 13:20—“where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”“The parish priest of austerity Climbed up in a high church steeple, To be nearer God so that he might Hand his word down to the people. And in sermon script he daily wrote What he thought was sent from heaven, And he dropt it down on the people's heads Two times one day in seven. In his age God said,‘Come down and die,’And he cried out from the steeple,‘Where art thou, Lord?’And the Lord replied,‘Down here among my people.’”
1 Kings 8:27—“the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain(circumscribe)thee.”God must be present in all his essence and all his attributes in every place. He is“totus in omni parte.”Alger, Poetry of the Orient:“Though God extends beyond Creation's rim, Each smallest atom holds the whole of him.”From this it follows that the whole Logos can be united to and be present in the man Christ Jesus, while at the same time he fills and governs the whole universe; and so the whole Christ can be united to, and can be present in, the single believer, as fully as if that believer were the only one to receive of his fulness.
A. J. Gordon:“In mathematics the whole is equal to the sum of its parts. But we know of the Spirit that every part is equal to the whole. Every church, every true body of Jesus Christ, has just as much of Christ as every other, and each has the whole Christ.”Mat. 13:20—“where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”“The parish priest of austerity Climbed up in a high church steeple, To be nearer God so that he might Hand his word down to the people. And in sermon script he daily wrote What he thought was sent from heaven, And he dropt it down on the people's heads Two times one day in seven. In his age God said,‘Come down and die,’And he cried out from the steeple,‘Where art thou, Lord?’And the Lord replied,‘Down here among my people.’”
(c) God's omnipresence is not necessary but free.—We reject the pantheistic notion that God is bound to the universe as the universe is bound to God. God is immanent in the universe, not by compulsion, but by the free act of his own will, and this immanence is qualified by his transcendence.
God might at will cease to be omnipresent, for he could destroy the universe; but while the universe exists, he is and must be in all its parts. God is the life and law of the universe,—this is the truth in pantheism. But he is also personal and free,—this pantheism denies. Christianity holds to a free, as well as to an essential, omnipresence—qualified and supplemented, however, by God's transcendence. The boasted truth in pantheism is an elementary principle of Christianity, and is only the stepping-stone to a nobler truth—God's personal presence with his church. The Talmud contrasts the worship of an idol and the worship of Jehovah:“The idol seems so near, but is so far, Jehovah seems so far, but is so near!”God's omnipresence assures us that he is present with us to hear, and present in every heart and in the ends of the earth to answer, prayer. See Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 10; Bowne, Metaphysics, 136; Charnock, Attributes, 1:363-405.The Puritan turned from the moss-rose bud, saying:“I have learned to call nothing on earth lovely.”But this is to despise not only the workmanship but the presence of the Almighty. The least thing in nature is worthy of study because it is the revelation of a present God. The uniformity of nature and the reign of law are nothing but the steady will of the omnipresent God. Gravitation is God's omnipresence in space, as evolution is God's omnipresence in time. Dorner, System of Doctrine, 1:73-“God being omnipresent, contact with him may be sought at any moment in prayer and contemplation; indeed, it will always be true that we live and move and have our being in him, as the perennial and omnipresent source of our existence.”Rom. 10:6-8—“Say not in thy heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down:) or, Who shall descend into the abyss? (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead.) But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart.”Lotze, Metaphysics, § 256, quoted in Illingworth, Divine Immanence, 135, 136. Sunday-school scholar:“Is God in my pocket?”“Certainly.”“No, he isn't, for I haven't any pocket.”God is omnipresent so long as there is a universe, but he ceases to be omnipresent when the universe ceases to be.
God might at will cease to be omnipresent, for he could destroy the universe; but while the universe exists, he is and must be in all its parts. God is the life and law of the universe,—this is the truth in pantheism. But he is also personal and free,—this pantheism denies. Christianity holds to a free, as well as to an essential, omnipresence—qualified and supplemented, however, by God's transcendence. The boasted truth in pantheism is an elementary principle of Christianity, and is only the stepping-stone to a nobler truth—God's personal presence with his church. The Talmud contrasts the worship of an idol and the worship of Jehovah:“The idol seems so near, but is so far, Jehovah seems so far, but is so near!”God's omnipresence assures us that he is present with us to hear, and present in every heart and in the ends of the earth to answer, prayer. See Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 10; Bowne, Metaphysics, 136; Charnock, Attributes, 1:363-405.
The Puritan turned from the moss-rose bud, saying:“I have learned to call nothing on earth lovely.”But this is to despise not only the workmanship but the presence of the Almighty. The least thing in nature is worthy of study because it is the revelation of a present God. The uniformity of nature and the reign of law are nothing but the steady will of the omnipresent God. Gravitation is God's omnipresence in space, as evolution is God's omnipresence in time. Dorner, System of Doctrine, 1:73-“God being omnipresent, contact with him may be sought at any moment in prayer and contemplation; indeed, it will always be true that we live and move and have our being in him, as the perennial and omnipresent source of our existence.”Rom. 10:6-8—“Say not in thy heart, Who shall ascend into heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down:) or, Who shall descend into the abyss? (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead.) But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart.”Lotze, Metaphysics, § 256, quoted in Illingworth, Divine Immanence, 135, 136. Sunday-school scholar:“Is God in my pocket?”“Certainly.”“No, he isn't, for I haven't any pocket.”God is omnipresent so long as there is a universe, but he ceases to be omnipresent when the universe ceases to be.
2. Omniscience.By this we mean God's perfect and eternal knowledge of all things which are objects of knowledge, whether they be actual or possible, past, present, or future.God knows his inanimate creation:Ps. 147:4—“counteth the number of the stars; He calleth them all by their names.”He has knowledge of brute creatures:Mat. 10:29—sparrows—“not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father.”Of men and their works:Ps. 33:13-15—“beholdeth all the sons of men ... considereth all their works.”Of hearts of men and their thoughts:Acts 15:8—“God, who knoweth the heart”;Ps. 139:2—“understandest my thought afar off.”Of our wants:Mat. 6:8—“knoweth what things ye have need of.”Of the least things:Mat. 10:30—“the very hairs of your head are all numbered.”Of the past:Mal. 3:16—“book of remembrance.”Of the future:Is. 46:9, 10—“declaring the end from the beginning.”Of men's future free acts:Is. 44:28—“that saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd and shall perform all my pleasure.”Of men's future evil acts:Acts 2:23—“him, being delivered up by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God.”Of the ideally possible:1 Sam. 23:12—“Will the men of Keilah deliver up me and my men into the hands of Saul? And Jehovah said, They will deliver thee up”(sc.if thou remainest);Mat. 11:23—“if the mighty works had been done in Sodom which were done in thee, it would have remained.”From eternity:Acts 15:18—“the Lord, who maketh these things known from of old.”Incomprehensible:Ps. 139:6—“Such knowledge is too wonderful for me”;Rom. 11:33—“O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God.”Related to wisdom:Ps. 104:24—“In wisdom hast thou made them all”;Eph. 3:10—“manifold wisdom of God.”Job 7:20—“O thou watcher of men”;Ps. 56:8—“Thou numberest my wanderings”= my whole life has been one continuous exile;“Put thou my tears into thy bottle”= the skin bottle of the east,—there are tears enough to fill one;“Are they not in thy book?”= no tear has fallen to the ground unnoted,—God has gathered them all. Paul Gerhardt:“Du zählst wie oft ein Christe wein', Und was sein Kummer sei; Kein stilles Thränlein ist so klein, Du hebst und legst es bei.”Heb. 4:13—“there is no creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all[pg 283]things are naked and laid open before the eyes of him with whom we have to do”—τετραχηλισμένα—with head bent back and neck laid bare, as animals slaughtered in sacrifice,orseized by the throat and thrown on the back, so that the priest might discover whether there was any blemish. Japanese proverb:“God has forgotten to forget.”(a) The omniscience of God may be argued from his omnipresence, as well as from his truth or self-knowledge, in which the plan of creation has its eternal ground, and from prophecy, which expresses God's omniscience.It is to be remembered that omniscience, as the designation of a relative and transitive attribute, does not include God's self-knowledge. The term is used in the technical sense of God's knowledge of all things that pertain to the universe of his creation. H. A. Gordon:“Light travels faster than sound. You can see the flash of fire from the cannon's mouth, a mile away, considerably before the noise of the discharge reaches the ear. God flashed the light of prediction upon the pages of his word, and we see it. Wait a little and we see the event itself.”Royce, The Conception of God, 9—“An omniscient being would be one who simply found presented to him, not by virtue of fragmentary and gradually completed processes of inquiry, but by virtue of an all-embracing, direct and transparent insight into his own truth—who found thus presented to him, I say, the complete, the fulfilled answer to every genuinely rational question.”Browning, Ferishtah's Fancies, Plot-culture:“How will it fare shouldst thou impress on me That certainly an Eye is over all And each, to make the minute's deed, word, thought As worthy of reward and punishment? Shall I permit my sense an Eye-viewed shame, Broad daylight perpetration,—so to speak,—I had not dared to breathe within the Ear, With black night's help around me?”(b) Since it is free from all imperfection, God's knowledge is immediate, as distinguished from the knowledge that comes through sense or imagination; simultaneous, as not acquired by successive observations, or built up by processes of reasoning; distinct, as free from all vagueness or confusion; true, as perfectly corresponding to the reality of things; eternal, as comprehended in one timeless act of the divine mind.An infinite mind must always act, and must always act in an absolutely perfect manner. There is in God no sense, symbol, memory, abstraction, growth, reflection, reasoning,—his knowledge is all direct and without intermediaries. God was properly represented by the ancient Egyptians, not as having eye, but as being eye. His thoughts toward us are“more than can be numbered”(Ps. 40:5), not because there is succession in them, now a remembering and now a forgetting, but because there is never a moment of our existence in which we are out of his mind; he is always thinking of us. See Charnock, Attributes, 1:406-497.Gen. 16:13—“Thou art a God that seeth.”Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 374—“Every creature of every order of existence, while its existence is sustained, is so complacently contemplated by God, that the intense and concentrated attention of all men of science together upon it could but form an utterly inadequate symbol of such divine contemplation.”So God's scrutiny of every deed of darkness is more searching than the gaze of a whole Coliseum of spectators, and his eye is more watchful over the good than would be the united care of all his hosts in heaven and earth.Armstrong, God and the Soul:“God's energy is concentrated attention, attention concentrated everywhere. We can attend to two or three things at once; the pianist plays and talks at the same time; the magician does one thing while he seems to do another. God attends to all things, does all things, at once.”Marie Corelli, Master Christian, 104—“The biograph is a hint that every scene of human life is reflected in a ceaseless moving panoramasome where, for the beholding ofsome one.”Wireless telegraphy is a stupendous warning that from God no secrets are hid, that“there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known”(Mat. 10:26). The Röntgen rays, which take photographs of our insides, right through our clothes, and even in the darkness of midnight, show that to God“the night shineth as the day”(Ps. 139:12).Professor Mitchel's equatorial telescope, slowly moving by clockwork, toward sunset, suddenly touched the horizon and disclosed a boy in a tree stealing apples, but the boy was all unconscious that he was under the gaze of the astronomer. Nothing was[pg 284]so fearful to the prisoner in the Frenchcachotas the eye of the guard that never ceased to watch him in perfect silence through the loophole in the door. As in the Roman empire the whole world was to a malefactor one great prison, and in his flight to the most distant lands the emperor could track him, so under the government of God no sinner can escape the eye of his Judge. But omnipresence is protective as well as detective. The textGen. 16:13—“Thou, God, seest me”—has been used as a restraint from evil more than as a stimulus to good. To the child of the devil it should certainly be the former. But to the child of God it should as certainly be the latter. God should not be regarded as an exacting overseer or a standing threat, but rather as one who understands us, loves us, and helps us.Ps. 139:17, 18—“How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! How great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: When I awake, I am still with thee.”(c) Since God knows things as they are, he knows the necessary sequences of his creation as necessary, the free acts of his creatures as free, the ideally possible as ideally possible.God knows what would have taken place under circumstances not now present; knows what the universe would have been, had he chosen a different plan of creation; knows what our lives would have been, had we made different decisions in the past (Is. 48:18—“Oh that thou hadst hearkened ... then had thy peace been as a river”). Clarke, Christian Theology, 77—“God has a double knowledge of his universe. He knows it as it exists eternally in his mind, as his own idea; and he knows it as actually existing in time and space, a moving, changing, growing universe, with perpetual process of succession. In his own idea, he knows it all at once; but he is also aware of its perpetual becoming, and with reference to events as they occur he has foreknowledge, present knowledge, and knowledge afterwards.... He conceives of all things simultaneously, but observes all things in their succession.”Royce, World and Individual, 2:374—holds that God does not temporally foreknow anything except as he is expressed in finite beings, but yet that the Absolute possesses a perfect knowledge at one glance of the whole of the temporal order, present, past and future. This, he says, is not foreknowledge, but eternal knowledge. Priestley denied that any contingent event could be an object of knowledge. But Reid says the denial that any free action can be foreseen involves the denial of God's own free agency, since God's future actions can be foreseen by men; also that while God foresees his own free actions, this does not determine those actions necessarily. Tennyson, In Memoriam, 26—“And if that eye which watches guilt And goodness, and hath power to see Within the green the mouldered tree, And towers fallen as soon as built—Oh, if indeed that eye foresee Or see (in Him is no before) In more of life true life no more And Love the indifference to be, Then might I find, ere yet the morn Breaks hither over Indian seas, That Shadow waiting with the keys, To shroud me from my proper scorn.”(d) The fact that there is nothing in the present condition of things from which the future actions of free creatures necessarily follow by natural law does not prevent God from foreseeing such actions, since his knowledge is not mediate, but immediate. He not only foreknows the motives which will occasion men's acts, but he directly foreknows the acts themselves. The possibility of such direct knowledge without assignable grounds of knowledge is apparent if we admit that time is a form of finite thought to which the divine mind is not subject.Aristotle maintained that there is no certain knowledge of contingent future events. Socinus, in like manner, while he admitted that God knows all things that are knowable, abridged the objects of the divine knowledge by withdrawing from the number those objects whose future existence he considered as uncertain, such as the determinations of free agents. These, he held, cannot be certainly foreknown, because there is nothing in the present condition of things from which they will necessarily follow by natural law. The man who makes a clock can tell when it will strike. But free-will, not being subject to mechanical laws, cannot have its acts predicted or foreknown. God knows things only in their causes—future events only in their antecedents. John Milton seems also to deny God's foreknowledge of free acts:“So, without least impulse or shadow of fate, Or aught by me immutably foreseen, They trespass.”[pg 285]With this Socinian doctrine some Arminians agree, as McCabe, in his Foreknowledge of God, and in his Divine Nescience of Future Contingencies a Necessity. McCabe, however, sacrifices the principle of free will, in defence of which he makes this surrender of God's foreknowledge, by saying that in cases of fulfilled prophecy, like Peter's denial and Judas's betrayal, God brought special influences to bear to secure the result,—so that Peter's and Judas's wills acted irresponsibly under the law of cause and effect. He quotes Dr. Daniel Curry as declaring that“the denial of absolute divine foreknowledge is the essential complement of the Methodist theology, without which its philosophical incompleteness is defenceless against the logical consistency of Calvinism.”See also article by McCabe in Methodist Review, Sept. 1892:760-773. Also Simon, Reconciliation, 287—“God has constituted a creature, the actions of which he can only know as such when they are performed. In presence of man, to a certain extent, even the great God condescends to wait; nay more, has himself so ordained things that he must wait, inquiring,‘What will he do?’”So Dugald Stewart:“Shall we venture to affirm that it exceeds the power of God to permit such a train of contingent events to take place as his own foreknowledge shall not extend to?”Martensen holds this view, and Rothe, Theologische Ethik, 1:212-234, who declares that the free choices of men are continually increasing the knowledge of God. So also Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:279—“The belief in the divine foreknowledge of our future has no basis in philosophy. We no longer deem it true that even God knows the moment of my moral life that is coming next. Even he does not know whether I shall yield to the secret temptation at midday. To him life is a drama of which he knows not the conclusion.”Then, says Dr. A. J. Gordon, there is nothing so dreary and dreadful as to be living under the direction of such a God. The universe is rushing on like an express-train in the darkness without headlight or engineer; at any moment we may be plunged into the abyss. Lotze does not deny God's foreknowledge of free human actions, but he regards as insoluble by the intellect the problem of the relation of time to God, and such foreknowledge as“one of those postulates as to which we know not how they can be fulfilled.”Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 159—“Foreknowledge of a free act is a knowledge without assignable grounds of knowing. On the assumption of a real time, it is hard to find a way out of this difficulty.... The doctrine of the ideality of time helps us by suggesting the possibility of an all-embracing present, or an eternal now, for God. In that case the problem vanishes with time, its condition.”Against the doctrine of the divine nescience we urge not only our fundamental conviction of God's perfection, but the constant testimony of Scripture. InIs. 41:21, 22, God makes his foreknowledge the test of his Godhead in the controversy with idols. If God cannot foreknow free human acts, then“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”(Rev. 13:8)was only a sacrifice to be offeredin caseAdam should fall, God not knowing whether he would or not, andin caseJudas should betray Christ, God not knowing whether he would or not. Indeed, since the course of nature is changed by man's will when he burns towns and fells forests, God cannot on this theory predict even the course of nature. All prophecy is therefore a protest against this view.How God foreknows free human decisions we may not be able to say, but then the method of God's knowledge in many other respects is unknown to us. The following explanations have been proposed. God may foreknow free acts:—1.Mediately, by foreknowing the motives of these acts, and this either because these motives induce the acts, (1) necessarily, or (2) certainly. This last“certainly”is to be accepted, if either; since motives are nevercauses, but are onlyoccasions, of action. The cause is the will, or the man himself. But it may be said that foreknowing acts through their motives is not foreknowing at all, but is reasoning or inference rather. Moreover, although intelligent beings commonly act according to motives previously dominant, they also at critical epochs, as at the fall of Satan and of Adam, choose between motives, and in such cases knowledge of the motives which have hitherto actuated them gives no clue to their next decisions. Another statement is therefore proposed to meet these difficulties, namely, that God may foreknow free acts:—2.Immediately, by pure intuition, inexplicable to us. Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:203, 225—“If God can know a future event as certain only by a calculation of causes, it must be allowed that he cannot with certainty foreknow any free act of man; for his foreknowledge would then be proof that the act in question was the necessary consequence of certain causes, and was not in itself free. If, on the contrary, the divine knowledge be regarded asintuitive, we see that it stands in the same immediate relation to the act itself as to its antecedents, and thus the difficulty is removed.”Even[pg 286]upon this view there still remains the difficulty of perceiving how there can be in God's mind a subjective certitude with regard to acts in respect to which there is no assignable objective ground of certainty. Yet, in spite of this difficulty, we feel bound both by Scripture and by our fundamental idea of God's perfection to maintain God's perfect knowledge of the future free acts of his creatures. With President Pepper we say:“Knowledge of contingency is not necessarily contingent knowledge.”With Whedon:“It is not calculation, but pure knowledge.”See Dorner, System of Doct., 1:332-337; 2:58-62; Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1858:601-605; Charnock, Attributes, 1:429-446; Solly, The Will, 240-254. For a valuable article on the whole subject, though advocating the view that God foreknows acts by foreknowing motives, see Bib. Sac., Oct. 1883:655-694. See also Hill, Divinity, 517.(e) Prescience is not itself causative. It is not to be confounded with the predetermining will of God. Free actions do not take place because they are foreseen, but they are foreseen because they are to take place.Seeing a thing in the future does not cause it to be, more than seeing a thing in the past causes it to be. As to future events, we may say with Whedon:“Knowledgetakesthem, notmakesthem.”Foreknowledge may, and does, presuppose predetermination, but it is not itself predetermination. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa, 1:38:1:1, says that“the knowledge of God is the cause of things”; but he is obliged to add:“God is not the cause of all things that are known by God, since evil things that are known by God are not from him.”John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 3—“Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault, Which had no less proved certain unforeknown.”(f) Omniscience embraces the actual and the possible, but it does not embrace the self-contradictory and the impossible, because these are not objects of knowledge.God does not know what the result would be if two and two made five, nor does he know“whether a chimæra ruminating in a vacuum devoureth second intentions”; and that, simply for the reason that he cannot know self-contradiction and nonsense. These things are not objects of knowledge. Clarke, Christian Theology, 80—“Can God make an old man in a minute? Could he make it well with the wicked while they remained wicked? Could he create a world in which 2 + 2 = 5?”Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 366—“Does God know the whole number that is the square root of 65? or what adjacent hills there are that have no valleys between them? Does God know round squares, and sugar salt-lumps, and Snarks and Boojums and Abracadabras?”(g) Omniscience, as qualified by holy will, is in Scripture denominated“wisdom.”In virtue of his wisdom God chooses the highest ends and uses the fittest means to accomplish them.Wisdom is not simply“estimating all things at their proper value”(Olmstead); it has in it also the element of counsel and purpose. It has been defined as“the talent of using one's talents.”It implies two things: first, choice of the highest end; secondly, choice of the best means to secure this end. J. C. C. Clarke, Self and the Father, 39—“Wisdom is not invented conceptions, or harmony of theories with theories; but is humble obedience of mind to the reception of facts that are found in things.”Thus man's wisdom, obedience, faith, are all names for different aspects of the same thing. And wisdom in God is the moral choice which makes truth and holiness supreme. Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 261—“Socialism pursues a laudable end by unwise or destructive means. It is not enough to mean well. Our methods must take some account of the nature of things, if they are to succeed. We cannot produce well-being by law. No legislation can remove inequalities of nature and constitution. Society cannot produce equality, any more than it can enable a rhinoceros to sing, or legislate a cat into a lion.”
By this we mean God's perfect and eternal knowledge of all things which are objects of knowledge, whether they be actual or possible, past, present, or future.
God knows his inanimate creation:Ps. 147:4—“counteth the number of the stars; He calleth them all by their names.”He has knowledge of brute creatures:Mat. 10:29—sparrows—“not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father.”Of men and their works:Ps. 33:13-15—“beholdeth all the sons of men ... considereth all their works.”Of hearts of men and their thoughts:Acts 15:8—“God, who knoweth the heart”;Ps. 139:2—“understandest my thought afar off.”Of our wants:Mat. 6:8—“knoweth what things ye have need of.”Of the least things:Mat. 10:30—“the very hairs of your head are all numbered.”Of the past:Mal. 3:16—“book of remembrance.”Of the future:Is. 46:9, 10—“declaring the end from the beginning.”Of men's future free acts:Is. 44:28—“that saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd and shall perform all my pleasure.”Of men's future evil acts:Acts 2:23—“him, being delivered up by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God.”Of the ideally possible:1 Sam. 23:12—“Will the men of Keilah deliver up me and my men into the hands of Saul? And Jehovah said, They will deliver thee up”(sc.if thou remainest);Mat. 11:23—“if the mighty works had been done in Sodom which were done in thee, it would have remained.”From eternity:Acts 15:18—“the Lord, who maketh these things known from of old.”Incomprehensible:Ps. 139:6—“Such knowledge is too wonderful for me”;Rom. 11:33—“O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God.”Related to wisdom:Ps. 104:24—“In wisdom hast thou made them all”;Eph. 3:10—“manifold wisdom of God.”Job 7:20—“O thou watcher of men”;Ps. 56:8—“Thou numberest my wanderings”= my whole life has been one continuous exile;“Put thou my tears into thy bottle”= the skin bottle of the east,—there are tears enough to fill one;“Are they not in thy book?”= no tear has fallen to the ground unnoted,—God has gathered them all. Paul Gerhardt:“Du zählst wie oft ein Christe wein', Und was sein Kummer sei; Kein stilles Thränlein ist so klein, Du hebst und legst es bei.”Heb. 4:13—“there is no creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all[pg 283]things are naked and laid open before the eyes of him with whom we have to do”—τετραχηλισμένα—with head bent back and neck laid bare, as animals slaughtered in sacrifice,orseized by the throat and thrown on the back, so that the priest might discover whether there was any blemish. Japanese proverb:“God has forgotten to forget.”
God knows his inanimate creation:Ps. 147:4—“counteth the number of the stars; He calleth them all by their names.”He has knowledge of brute creatures:Mat. 10:29—sparrows—“not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father.”Of men and their works:Ps. 33:13-15—“beholdeth all the sons of men ... considereth all their works.”Of hearts of men and their thoughts:Acts 15:8—“God, who knoweth the heart”;Ps. 139:2—“understandest my thought afar off.”Of our wants:Mat. 6:8—“knoweth what things ye have need of.”Of the least things:Mat. 10:30—“the very hairs of your head are all numbered.”Of the past:Mal. 3:16—“book of remembrance.”Of the future:Is. 46:9, 10—“declaring the end from the beginning.”Of men's future free acts:Is. 44:28—“that saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd and shall perform all my pleasure.”Of men's future evil acts:Acts 2:23—“him, being delivered up by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God.”Of the ideally possible:1 Sam. 23:12—“Will the men of Keilah deliver up me and my men into the hands of Saul? And Jehovah said, They will deliver thee up”(sc.if thou remainest);Mat. 11:23—“if the mighty works had been done in Sodom which were done in thee, it would have remained.”From eternity:Acts 15:18—“the Lord, who maketh these things known from of old.”Incomprehensible:Ps. 139:6—“Such knowledge is too wonderful for me”;Rom. 11:33—“O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God.”Related to wisdom:Ps. 104:24—“In wisdom hast thou made them all”;Eph. 3:10—“manifold wisdom of God.”
Job 7:20—“O thou watcher of men”;Ps. 56:8—“Thou numberest my wanderings”= my whole life has been one continuous exile;“Put thou my tears into thy bottle”= the skin bottle of the east,—there are tears enough to fill one;“Are they not in thy book?”= no tear has fallen to the ground unnoted,—God has gathered them all. Paul Gerhardt:“Du zählst wie oft ein Christe wein', Und was sein Kummer sei; Kein stilles Thränlein ist so klein, Du hebst und legst es bei.”Heb. 4:13—“there is no creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all[pg 283]things are naked and laid open before the eyes of him with whom we have to do”—τετραχηλισμένα—with head bent back and neck laid bare, as animals slaughtered in sacrifice,orseized by the throat and thrown on the back, so that the priest might discover whether there was any blemish. Japanese proverb:“God has forgotten to forget.”
(a) The omniscience of God may be argued from his omnipresence, as well as from his truth or self-knowledge, in which the plan of creation has its eternal ground, and from prophecy, which expresses God's omniscience.
It is to be remembered that omniscience, as the designation of a relative and transitive attribute, does not include God's self-knowledge. The term is used in the technical sense of God's knowledge of all things that pertain to the universe of his creation. H. A. Gordon:“Light travels faster than sound. You can see the flash of fire from the cannon's mouth, a mile away, considerably before the noise of the discharge reaches the ear. God flashed the light of prediction upon the pages of his word, and we see it. Wait a little and we see the event itself.”Royce, The Conception of God, 9—“An omniscient being would be one who simply found presented to him, not by virtue of fragmentary and gradually completed processes of inquiry, but by virtue of an all-embracing, direct and transparent insight into his own truth—who found thus presented to him, I say, the complete, the fulfilled answer to every genuinely rational question.”Browning, Ferishtah's Fancies, Plot-culture:“How will it fare shouldst thou impress on me That certainly an Eye is over all And each, to make the minute's deed, word, thought As worthy of reward and punishment? Shall I permit my sense an Eye-viewed shame, Broad daylight perpetration,—so to speak,—I had not dared to breathe within the Ear, With black night's help around me?”
It is to be remembered that omniscience, as the designation of a relative and transitive attribute, does not include God's self-knowledge. The term is used in the technical sense of God's knowledge of all things that pertain to the universe of his creation. H. A. Gordon:“Light travels faster than sound. You can see the flash of fire from the cannon's mouth, a mile away, considerably before the noise of the discharge reaches the ear. God flashed the light of prediction upon the pages of his word, and we see it. Wait a little and we see the event itself.”
Royce, The Conception of God, 9—“An omniscient being would be one who simply found presented to him, not by virtue of fragmentary and gradually completed processes of inquiry, but by virtue of an all-embracing, direct and transparent insight into his own truth—who found thus presented to him, I say, the complete, the fulfilled answer to every genuinely rational question.”
Browning, Ferishtah's Fancies, Plot-culture:“How will it fare shouldst thou impress on me That certainly an Eye is over all And each, to make the minute's deed, word, thought As worthy of reward and punishment? Shall I permit my sense an Eye-viewed shame, Broad daylight perpetration,—so to speak,—I had not dared to breathe within the Ear, With black night's help around me?”
(b) Since it is free from all imperfection, God's knowledge is immediate, as distinguished from the knowledge that comes through sense or imagination; simultaneous, as not acquired by successive observations, or built up by processes of reasoning; distinct, as free from all vagueness or confusion; true, as perfectly corresponding to the reality of things; eternal, as comprehended in one timeless act of the divine mind.
An infinite mind must always act, and must always act in an absolutely perfect manner. There is in God no sense, symbol, memory, abstraction, growth, reflection, reasoning,—his knowledge is all direct and without intermediaries. God was properly represented by the ancient Egyptians, not as having eye, but as being eye. His thoughts toward us are“more than can be numbered”(Ps. 40:5), not because there is succession in them, now a remembering and now a forgetting, but because there is never a moment of our existence in which we are out of his mind; he is always thinking of us. See Charnock, Attributes, 1:406-497.Gen. 16:13—“Thou art a God that seeth.”Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 374—“Every creature of every order of existence, while its existence is sustained, is so complacently contemplated by God, that the intense and concentrated attention of all men of science together upon it could but form an utterly inadequate symbol of such divine contemplation.”So God's scrutiny of every deed of darkness is more searching than the gaze of a whole Coliseum of spectators, and his eye is more watchful over the good than would be the united care of all his hosts in heaven and earth.Armstrong, God and the Soul:“God's energy is concentrated attention, attention concentrated everywhere. We can attend to two or three things at once; the pianist plays and talks at the same time; the magician does one thing while he seems to do another. God attends to all things, does all things, at once.”Marie Corelli, Master Christian, 104—“The biograph is a hint that every scene of human life is reflected in a ceaseless moving panoramasome where, for the beholding ofsome one.”Wireless telegraphy is a stupendous warning that from God no secrets are hid, that“there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known”(Mat. 10:26). The Röntgen rays, which take photographs of our insides, right through our clothes, and even in the darkness of midnight, show that to God“the night shineth as the day”(Ps. 139:12).Professor Mitchel's equatorial telescope, slowly moving by clockwork, toward sunset, suddenly touched the horizon and disclosed a boy in a tree stealing apples, but the boy was all unconscious that he was under the gaze of the astronomer. Nothing was[pg 284]so fearful to the prisoner in the Frenchcachotas the eye of the guard that never ceased to watch him in perfect silence through the loophole in the door. As in the Roman empire the whole world was to a malefactor one great prison, and in his flight to the most distant lands the emperor could track him, so under the government of God no sinner can escape the eye of his Judge. But omnipresence is protective as well as detective. The textGen. 16:13—“Thou, God, seest me”—has been used as a restraint from evil more than as a stimulus to good. To the child of the devil it should certainly be the former. But to the child of God it should as certainly be the latter. God should not be regarded as an exacting overseer or a standing threat, but rather as one who understands us, loves us, and helps us.Ps. 139:17, 18—“How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! How great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: When I awake, I am still with thee.”
An infinite mind must always act, and must always act in an absolutely perfect manner. There is in God no sense, symbol, memory, abstraction, growth, reflection, reasoning,—his knowledge is all direct and without intermediaries. God was properly represented by the ancient Egyptians, not as having eye, but as being eye. His thoughts toward us are“more than can be numbered”(Ps. 40:5), not because there is succession in them, now a remembering and now a forgetting, but because there is never a moment of our existence in which we are out of his mind; he is always thinking of us. See Charnock, Attributes, 1:406-497.Gen. 16:13—“Thou art a God that seeth.”Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 374—“Every creature of every order of existence, while its existence is sustained, is so complacently contemplated by God, that the intense and concentrated attention of all men of science together upon it could but form an utterly inadequate symbol of such divine contemplation.”So God's scrutiny of every deed of darkness is more searching than the gaze of a whole Coliseum of spectators, and his eye is more watchful over the good than would be the united care of all his hosts in heaven and earth.
Armstrong, God and the Soul:“God's energy is concentrated attention, attention concentrated everywhere. We can attend to two or three things at once; the pianist plays and talks at the same time; the magician does one thing while he seems to do another. God attends to all things, does all things, at once.”Marie Corelli, Master Christian, 104—“The biograph is a hint that every scene of human life is reflected in a ceaseless moving panoramasome where, for the beholding ofsome one.”Wireless telegraphy is a stupendous warning that from God no secrets are hid, that“there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known”(Mat. 10:26). The Röntgen rays, which take photographs of our insides, right through our clothes, and even in the darkness of midnight, show that to God“the night shineth as the day”(Ps. 139:12).
Professor Mitchel's equatorial telescope, slowly moving by clockwork, toward sunset, suddenly touched the horizon and disclosed a boy in a tree stealing apples, but the boy was all unconscious that he was under the gaze of the astronomer. Nothing was[pg 284]so fearful to the prisoner in the Frenchcachotas the eye of the guard that never ceased to watch him in perfect silence through the loophole in the door. As in the Roman empire the whole world was to a malefactor one great prison, and in his flight to the most distant lands the emperor could track him, so under the government of God no sinner can escape the eye of his Judge. But omnipresence is protective as well as detective. The textGen. 16:13—“Thou, God, seest me”—has been used as a restraint from evil more than as a stimulus to good. To the child of the devil it should certainly be the former. But to the child of God it should as certainly be the latter. God should not be regarded as an exacting overseer or a standing threat, but rather as one who understands us, loves us, and helps us.Ps. 139:17, 18—“How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! How great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: When I awake, I am still with thee.”
(c) Since God knows things as they are, he knows the necessary sequences of his creation as necessary, the free acts of his creatures as free, the ideally possible as ideally possible.
God knows what would have taken place under circumstances not now present; knows what the universe would have been, had he chosen a different plan of creation; knows what our lives would have been, had we made different decisions in the past (Is. 48:18—“Oh that thou hadst hearkened ... then had thy peace been as a river”). Clarke, Christian Theology, 77—“God has a double knowledge of his universe. He knows it as it exists eternally in his mind, as his own idea; and he knows it as actually existing in time and space, a moving, changing, growing universe, with perpetual process of succession. In his own idea, he knows it all at once; but he is also aware of its perpetual becoming, and with reference to events as they occur he has foreknowledge, present knowledge, and knowledge afterwards.... He conceives of all things simultaneously, but observes all things in their succession.”Royce, World and Individual, 2:374—holds that God does not temporally foreknow anything except as he is expressed in finite beings, but yet that the Absolute possesses a perfect knowledge at one glance of the whole of the temporal order, present, past and future. This, he says, is not foreknowledge, but eternal knowledge. Priestley denied that any contingent event could be an object of knowledge. But Reid says the denial that any free action can be foreseen involves the denial of God's own free agency, since God's future actions can be foreseen by men; also that while God foresees his own free actions, this does not determine those actions necessarily. Tennyson, In Memoriam, 26—“And if that eye which watches guilt And goodness, and hath power to see Within the green the mouldered tree, And towers fallen as soon as built—Oh, if indeed that eye foresee Or see (in Him is no before) In more of life true life no more And Love the indifference to be, Then might I find, ere yet the morn Breaks hither over Indian seas, That Shadow waiting with the keys, To shroud me from my proper scorn.”
God knows what would have taken place under circumstances not now present; knows what the universe would have been, had he chosen a different plan of creation; knows what our lives would have been, had we made different decisions in the past (Is. 48:18—“Oh that thou hadst hearkened ... then had thy peace been as a river”). Clarke, Christian Theology, 77—“God has a double knowledge of his universe. He knows it as it exists eternally in his mind, as his own idea; and he knows it as actually existing in time and space, a moving, changing, growing universe, with perpetual process of succession. In his own idea, he knows it all at once; but he is also aware of its perpetual becoming, and with reference to events as they occur he has foreknowledge, present knowledge, and knowledge afterwards.... He conceives of all things simultaneously, but observes all things in their succession.”
Royce, World and Individual, 2:374—holds that God does not temporally foreknow anything except as he is expressed in finite beings, but yet that the Absolute possesses a perfect knowledge at one glance of the whole of the temporal order, present, past and future. This, he says, is not foreknowledge, but eternal knowledge. Priestley denied that any contingent event could be an object of knowledge. But Reid says the denial that any free action can be foreseen involves the denial of God's own free agency, since God's future actions can be foreseen by men; also that while God foresees his own free actions, this does not determine those actions necessarily. Tennyson, In Memoriam, 26—“And if that eye which watches guilt And goodness, and hath power to see Within the green the mouldered tree, And towers fallen as soon as built—Oh, if indeed that eye foresee Or see (in Him is no before) In more of life true life no more And Love the indifference to be, Then might I find, ere yet the morn Breaks hither over Indian seas, That Shadow waiting with the keys, To shroud me from my proper scorn.”
(d) The fact that there is nothing in the present condition of things from which the future actions of free creatures necessarily follow by natural law does not prevent God from foreseeing such actions, since his knowledge is not mediate, but immediate. He not only foreknows the motives which will occasion men's acts, but he directly foreknows the acts themselves. The possibility of such direct knowledge without assignable grounds of knowledge is apparent if we admit that time is a form of finite thought to which the divine mind is not subject.
Aristotle maintained that there is no certain knowledge of contingent future events. Socinus, in like manner, while he admitted that God knows all things that are knowable, abridged the objects of the divine knowledge by withdrawing from the number those objects whose future existence he considered as uncertain, such as the determinations of free agents. These, he held, cannot be certainly foreknown, because there is nothing in the present condition of things from which they will necessarily follow by natural law. The man who makes a clock can tell when it will strike. But free-will, not being subject to mechanical laws, cannot have its acts predicted or foreknown. God knows things only in their causes—future events only in their antecedents. John Milton seems also to deny God's foreknowledge of free acts:“So, without least impulse or shadow of fate, Or aught by me immutably foreseen, They trespass.”[pg 285]With this Socinian doctrine some Arminians agree, as McCabe, in his Foreknowledge of God, and in his Divine Nescience of Future Contingencies a Necessity. McCabe, however, sacrifices the principle of free will, in defence of which he makes this surrender of God's foreknowledge, by saying that in cases of fulfilled prophecy, like Peter's denial and Judas's betrayal, God brought special influences to bear to secure the result,—so that Peter's and Judas's wills acted irresponsibly under the law of cause and effect. He quotes Dr. Daniel Curry as declaring that“the denial of absolute divine foreknowledge is the essential complement of the Methodist theology, without which its philosophical incompleteness is defenceless against the logical consistency of Calvinism.”See also article by McCabe in Methodist Review, Sept. 1892:760-773. Also Simon, Reconciliation, 287—“God has constituted a creature, the actions of which he can only know as such when they are performed. In presence of man, to a certain extent, even the great God condescends to wait; nay more, has himself so ordained things that he must wait, inquiring,‘What will he do?’”So Dugald Stewart:“Shall we venture to affirm that it exceeds the power of God to permit such a train of contingent events to take place as his own foreknowledge shall not extend to?”Martensen holds this view, and Rothe, Theologische Ethik, 1:212-234, who declares that the free choices of men are continually increasing the knowledge of God. So also Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:279—“The belief in the divine foreknowledge of our future has no basis in philosophy. We no longer deem it true that even God knows the moment of my moral life that is coming next. Even he does not know whether I shall yield to the secret temptation at midday. To him life is a drama of which he knows not the conclusion.”Then, says Dr. A. J. Gordon, there is nothing so dreary and dreadful as to be living under the direction of such a God. The universe is rushing on like an express-train in the darkness without headlight or engineer; at any moment we may be plunged into the abyss. Lotze does not deny God's foreknowledge of free human actions, but he regards as insoluble by the intellect the problem of the relation of time to God, and such foreknowledge as“one of those postulates as to which we know not how they can be fulfilled.”Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 159—“Foreknowledge of a free act is a knowledge without assignable grounds of knowing. On the assumption of a real time, it is hard to find a way out of this difficulty.... The doctrine of the ideality of time helps us by suggesting the possibility of an all-embracing present, or an eternal now, for God. In that case the problem vanishes with time, its condition.”Against the doctrine of the divine nescience we urge not only our fundamental conviction of God's perfection, but the constant testimony of Scripture. InIs. 41:21, 22, God makes his foreknowledge the test of his Godhead in the controversy with idols. If God cannot foreknow free human acts, then“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”(Rev. 13:8)was only a sacrifice to be offeredin caseAdam should fall, God not knowing whether he would or not, andin caseJudas should betray Christ, God not knowing whether he would or not. Indeed, since the course of nature is changed by man's will when he burns towns and fells forests, God cannot on this theory predict even the course of nature. All prophecy is therefore a protest against this view.How God foreknows free human decisions we may not be able to say, but then the method of God's knowledge in many other respects is unknown to us. The following explanations have been proposed. God may foreknow free acts:—1.Mediately, by foreknowing the motives of these acts, and this either because these motives induce the acts, (1) necessarily, or (2) certainly. This last“certainly”is to be accepted, if either; since motives are nevercauses, but are onlyoccasions, of action. The cause is the will, or the man himself. But it may be said that foreknowing acts through their motives is not foreknowing at all, but is reasoning or inference rather. Moreover, although intelligent beings commonly act according to motives previously dominant, they also at critical epochs, as at the fall of Satan and of Adam, choose between motives, and in such cases knowledge of the motives which have hitherto actuated them gives no clue to their next decisions. Another statement is therefore proposed to meet these difficulties, namely, that God may foreknow free acts:—2.Immediately, by pure intuition, inexplicable to us. Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:203, 225—“If God can know a future event as certain only by a calculation of causes, it must be allowed that he cannot with certainty foreknow any free act of man; for his foreknowledge would then be proof that the act in question was the necessary consequence of certain causes, and was not in itself free. If, on the contrary, the divine knowledge be regarded asintuitive, we see that it stands in the same immediate relation to the act itself as to its antecedents, and thus the difficulty is removed.”Even[pg 286]upon this view there still remains the difficulty of perceiving how there can be in God's mind a subjective certitude with regard to acts in respect to which there is no assignable objective ground of certainty. Yet, in spite of this difficulty, we feel bound both by Scripture and by our fundamental idea of God's perfection to maintain God's perfect knowledge of the future free acts of his creatures. With President Pepper we say:“Knowledge of contingency is not necessarily contingent knowledge.”With Whedon:“It is not calculation, but pure knowledge.”See Dorner, System of Doct., 1:332-337; 2:58-62; Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1858:601-605; Charnock, Attributes, 1:429-446; Solly, The Will, 240-254. For a valuable article on the whole subject, though advocating the view that God foreknows acts by foreknowing motives, see Bib. Sac., Oct. 1883:655-694. See also Hill, Divinity, 517.
Aristotle maintained that there is no certain knowledge of contingent future events. Socinus, in like manner, while he admitted that God knows all things that are knowable, abridged the objects of the divine knowledge by withdrawing from the number those objects whose future existence he considered as uncertain, such as the determinations of free agents. These, he held, cannot be certainly foreknown, because there is nothing in the present condition of things from which they will necessarily follow by natural law. The man who makes a clock can tell when it will strike. But free-will, not being subject to mechanical laws, cannot have its acts predicted or foreknown. God knows things only in their causes—future events only in their antecedents. John Milton seems also to deny God's foreknowledge of free acts:“So, without least impulse or shadow of fate, Or aught by me immutably foreseen, They trespass.”
With this Socinian doctrine some Arminians agree, as McCabe, in his Foreknowledge of God, and in his Divine Nescience of Future Contingencies a Necessity. McCabe, however, sacrifices the principle of free will, in defence of which he makes this surrender of God's foreknowledge, by saying that in cases of fulfilled prophecy, like Peter's denial and Judas's betrayal, God brought special influences to bear to secure the result,—so that Peter's and Judas's wills acted irresponsibly under the law of cause and effect. He quotes Dr. Daniel Curry as declaring that“the denial of absolute divine foreknowledge is the essential complement of the Methodist theology, without which its philosophical incompleteness is defenceless against the logical consistency of Calvinism.”See also article by McCabe in Methodist Review, Sept. 1892:760-773. Also Simon, Reconciliation, 287—“God has constituted a creature, the actions of which he can only know as such when they are performed. In presence of man, to a certain extent, even the great God condescends to wait; nay more, has himself so ordained things that he must wait, inquiring,‘What will he do?’”
So Dugald Stewart:“Shall we venture to affirm that it exceeds the power of God to permit such a train of contingent events to take place as his own foreknowledge shall not extend to?”Martensen holds this view, and Rothe, Theologische Ethik, 1:212-234, who declares that the free choices of men are continually increasing the knowledge of God. So also Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:279—“The belief in the divine foreknowledge of our future has no basis in philosophy. We no longer deem it true that even God knows the moment of my moral life that is coming next. Even he does not know whether I shall yield to the secret temptation at midday. To him life is a drama of which he knows not the conclusion.”Then, says Dr. A. J. Gordon, there is nothing so dreary and dreadful as to be living under the direction of such a God. The universe is rushing on like an express-train in the darkness without headlight or engineer; at any moment we may be plunged into the abyss. Lotze does not deny God's foreknowledge of free human actions, but he regards as insoluble by the intellect the problem of the relation of time to God, and such foreknowledge as“one of those postulates as to which we know not how they can be fulfilled.”Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 159—“Foreknowledge of a free act is a knowledge without assignable grounds of knowing. On the assumption of a real time, it is hard to find a way out of this difficulty.... The doctrine of the ideality of time helps us by suggesting the possibility of an all-embracing present, or an eternal now, for God. In that case the problem vanishes with time, its condition.”
Against the doctrine of the divine nescience we urge not only our fundamental conviction of God's perfection, but the constant testimony of Scripture. InIs. 41:21, 22, God makes his foreknowledge the test of his Godhead in the controversy with idols. If God cannot foreknow free human acts, then“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world”(Rev. 13:8)was only a sacrifice to be offeredin caseAdam should fall, God not knowing whether he would or not, andin caseJudas should betray Christ, God not knowing whether he would or not. Indeed, since the course of nature is changed by man's will when he burns towns and fells forests, God cannot on this theory predict even the course of nature. All prophecy is therefore a protest against this view.
How God foreknows free human decisions we may not be able to say, but then the method of God's knowledge in many other respects is unknown to us. The following explanations have been proposed. God may foreknow free acts:—
1.Mediately, by foreknowing the motives of these acts, and this either because these motives induce the acts, (1) necessarily, or (2) certainly. This last“certainly”is to be accepted, if either; since motives are nevercauses, but are onlyoccasions, of action. The cause is the will, or the man himself. But it may be said that foreknowing acts through their motives is not foreknowing at all, but is reasoning or inference rather. Moreover, although intelligent beings commonly act according to motives previously dominant, they also at critical epochs, as at the fall of Satan and of Adam, choose between motives, and in such cases knowledge of the motives which have hitherto actuated them gives no clue to their next decisions. Another statement is therefore proposed to meet these difficulties, namely, that God may foreknow free acts:—
2.Immediately, by pure intuition, inexplicable to us. Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 2:203, 225—“If God can know a future event as certain only by a calculation of causes, it must be allowed that he cannot with certainty foreknow any free act of man; for his foreknowledge would then be proof that the act in question was the necessary consequence of certain causes, and was not in itself free. If, on the contrary, the divine knowledge be regarded asintuitive, we see that it stands in the same immediate relation to the act itself as to its antecedents, and thus the difficulty is removed.”Even[pg 286]upon this view there still remains the difficulty of perceiving how there can be in God's mind a subjective certitude with regard to acts in respect to which there is no assignable objective ground of certainty. Yet, in spite of this difficulty, we feel bound both by Scripture and by our fundamental idea of God's perfection to maintain God's perfect knowledge of the future free acts of his creatures. With President Pepper we say:“Knowledge of contingency is not necessarily contingent knowledge.”With Whedon:“It is not calculation, but pure knowledge.”See Dorner, System of Doct., 1:332-337; 2:58-62; Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1858:601-605; Charnock, Attributes, 1:429-446; Solly, The Will, 240-254. For a valuable article on the whole subject, though advocating the view that God foreknows acts by foreknowing motives, see Bib. Sac., Oct. 1883:655-694. See also Hill, Divinity, 517.
(e) Prescience is not itself causative. It is not to be confounded with the predetermining will of God. Free actions do not take place because they are foreseen, but they are foreseen because they are to take place.
Seeing a thing in the future does not cause it to be, more than seeing a thing in the past causes it to be. As to future events, we may say with Whedon:“Knowledgetakesthem, notmakesthem.”Foreknowledge may, and does, presuppose predetermination, but it is not itself predetermination. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa, 1:38:1:1, says that“the knowledge of God is the cause of things”; but he is obliged to add:“God is not the cause of all things that are known by God, since evil things that are known by God are not from him.”John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 3—“Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault, Which had no less proved certain unforeknown.”
Seeing a thing in the future does not cause it to be, more than seeing a thing in the past causes it to be. As to future events, we may say with Whedon:“Knowledgetakesthem, notmakesthem.”Foreknowledge may, and does, presuppose predetermination, but it is not itself predetermination. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa, 1:38:1:1, says that“the knowledge of God is the cause of things”; but he is obliged to add:“God is not the cause of all things that are known by God, since evil things that are known by God are not from him.”John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 3—“Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault, Which had no less proved certain unforeknown.”
(f) Omniscience embraces the actual and the possible, but it does not embrace the self-contradictory and the impossible, because these are not objects of knowledge.
God does not know what the result would be if two and two made five, nor does he know“whether a chimæra ruminating in a vacuum devoureth second intentions”; and that, simply for the reason that he cannot know self-contradiction and nonsense. These things are not objects of knowledge. Clarke, Christian Theology, 80—“Can God make an old man in a minute? Could he make it well with the wicked while they remained wicked? Could he create a world in which 2 + 2 = 5?”Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 366—“Does God know the whole number that is the square root of 65? or what adjacent hills there are that have no valleys between them? Does God know round squares, and sugar salt-lumps, and Snarks and Boojums and Abracadabras?”
God does not know what the result would be if two and two made five, nor does he know“whether a chimæra ruminating in a vacuum devoureth second intentions”; and that, simply for the reason that he cannot know self-contradiction and nonsense. These things are not objects of knowledge. Clarke, Christian Theology, 80—“Can God make an old man in a minute? Could he make it well with the wicked while they remained wicked? Could he create a world in which 2 + 2 = 5?”Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 366—“Does God know the whole number that is the square root of 65? or what adjacent hills there are that have no valleys between them? Does God know round squares, and sugar salt-lumps, and Snarks and Boojums and Abracadabras?”
(g) Omniscience, as qualified by holy will, is in Scripture denominated“wisdom.”In virtue of his wisdom God chooses the highest ends and uses the fittest means to accomplish them.
Wisdom is not simply“estimating all things at their proper value”(Olmstead); it has in it also the element of counsel and purpose. It has been defined as“the talent of using one's talents.”It implies two things: first, choice of the highest end; secondly, choice of the best means to secure this end. J. C. C. Clarke, Self and the Father, 39—“Wisdom is not invented conceptions, or harmony of theories with theories; but is humble obedience of mind to the reception of facts that are found in things.”Thus man's wisdom, obedience, faith, are all names for different aspects of the same thing. And wisdom in God is the moral choice which makes truth and holiness supreme. Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 261—“Socialism pursues a laudable end by unwise or destructive means. It is not enough to mean well. Our methods must take some account of the nature of things, if they are to succeed. We cannot produce well-being by law. No legislation can remove inequalities of nature and constitution. Society cannot produce equality, any more than it can enable a rhinoceros to sing, or legislate a cat into a lion.”
Wisdom is not simply“estimating all things at their proper value”(Olmstead); it has in it also the element of counsel and purpose. It has been defined as“the talent of using one's talents.”It implies two things: first, choice of the highest end; secondly, choice of the best means to secure this end. J. C. C. Clarke, Self and the Father, 39—“Wisdom is not invented conceptions, or harmony of theories with theories; but is humble obedience of mind to the reception of facts that are found in things.”Thus man's wisdom, obedience, faith, are all names for different aspects of the same thing. And wisdom in God is the moral choice which makes truth and holiness supreme. Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 261—“Socialism pursues a laudable end by unwise or destructive means. It is not enough to mean well. Our methods must take some account of the nature of things, if they are to succeed. We cannot produce well-being by law. No legislation can remove inequalities of nature and constitution. Society cannot produce equality, any more than it can enable a rhinoceros to sing, or legislate a cat into a lion.”
3. Omnipotence.By this we mean the power of God to do all things which are objects of power, whether with or without the use of means.Gen. 17:1—“I am God Almighty.”He performs natural wonders:Gen. 1:1-3—“Let there be Light”;Is. 44:24—“stretcheth forth the heavens alone”;Heb. 1:3—“upholding all things by the word of his power.”Spiritual wonders:2 Cor. 4:6—“God, that said, Light shall shine out of darkness, who shined in our hearts”;[pg 287]Eph. 1:19—“exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe”;Eph. 3:20—“able to do exceeding abundantly.”Power to create new things:Mat. 3:9—“able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham”.Rom. 4:17—“giveth life to the dead, and calleth the things that are not, as though they were.”After his own pleasure:Ps. 115:3—“He hath done whatsoever he hath pleased”;Eph. 1:11—“worketh all things after the counsel of his will.”Nothing impossible:Gen 18:14—“Is anything too hard for Jehovah?”Mat. 19:26—“with God all things are possible.”E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 73—“If all power in the universe is dependent on his creative will for its existence, it is impossible to conceive any limit to his power except that laid on it by his own will. But this is only negative proof; absolute omnipotence is not logically demonstrable, though readily enough recognized as a just conception of the infinite God, when propounded on the authority of a positive revelation.”The omnipotence of God is illustrated by the work of the Holy Spirit, which in Scripture is compared to wind, water and fire. The ordinary manifestations of these elements afford no criterion of the effects they are able to produce. The rushing mighty wind at Pentecost was the analogue of the wind-Spirit who bore everything before him on the first day of creation (Gen. 1:2;John 3:8;Acts 2:2). The pouring out of the Spirit is likened to the flood of Noah when the windows of heaven were opened and there was not room enough to receive that which fell (Mal. 3:10). And the baptism of the Holy Spirit is like the fire that shall destroy all impurity at the end of the world (Mat. 3:11;2 Pet. 3:7-13). See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 307-310.(a) Omnipotence does not imply power to do that which is not an object of power; as, for example, that which is self-contradictory or contradictory to the nature of God.Self-contradictory things:“facere factum infectum”—the making of a past event to have not occurred (hence the uselessness of praying:“May it be that much good was done”); drawing a shorter than a straight line between two given points; putting two separate mountains together without a valley between them. Things contradictory to the nature of God: for God to lie, to sin, to die. To do such things would not imply power, but impotence. God has all the power that is consistent with infinite perfection—all power to do what is worthy of himself. So no greater thing can be said by man than this:“I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none.”Even God cannot make wrong to be right, nor hatred of himself to be blessed. Some have held that the prevention of sin in a moral system is not an object of power, and therefore that God cannot prevent sin in a moral system. We hold the contrary; see this Compendium: Objections to the Doctrine of Decrees.Dryden, Imitation of Horace, 3:29:71—“Over the past not heaven itself has power; What has been has, and I have had my hour”—words applied by Lord John Russell to his own career. Emerson, The Past:“All is now secure and fast, Not the gods can shake the Past.”Sunday-school scholar:“Say, teacher, can God make a rock so big that he can't lift it?”Seminary Professor:“Can God tell a lie?”Seminary student:“With God all things are possible.”(b) Omnipotence does not imply the exercise of all his power on the part of God. He has power over his power; in other words, his power is under the control of wise and holy will. God can do all he will, but he will not do all he can. Else his power is mere force acting necessarily, and God is the slave of his own omnipotence.Schleiermacher held that nature not only is grounded in the divine causality, but fully expresses that causality; there is no causative power in God for anything that is not real and actual. This doctrine does not essentially differ from Spinoza'snatura naturansandnatura naturata. See Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:62-66. But omnipotence is not instinctive; it is a power used according to God's pleasure. God is by no means encompassed by the laws of nature, or shut up to a necessary evolution of his own being, as pantheism supposes. As Rothe has shown, God has a will-power over his nature-power, and is not compelled to do all that he can do. He is able from the stones of the street to“raise up children unto Abraham,”but he has not done it. In God are unopened treasures, an inexhaustible fountain of new beginnings, new creations, new revelations. To suppose that in creation he has expended all the inner possibilities of his being is to deny his omnipotence. SoJob 26:14—“Lo, these are but the outskirts[pg 288]of his ways: And how small a whisper do we hear of him! But the thunder of his power who can understand?”See Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 10; Hodgson, Time and Space, 579, 580.1 Pet. 5:6—“Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God”—his mighty hand of providence, salvation, blessing—“that he may exalt you in due time; casting all your anxiety upon him, because he careth for you.”“The mighty powers held under mighty control”—this is the greatest exhibition of power. Unrestraint is not the highest freedom. Young men must learn that self-restraint is the true power.Prov. 16:32—“He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; And he that ruleth his spirit, than he that taketh a city.”Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 2:3—“We have power in ourselves to do it, but it is a power that we have no power to do.”When dynamite goes off, it all goes off: there is no reserve. God uses as much of his power as he pleases: the remainder of wrath in himself, as well as in others, he restrains.(c) Omnipotence in God does not exclude, but implies, the power of self-limitation. Since all such self-limitation is free, proceeding from neither external nor internal compulsion, it is the act and manifestation of God's power. Human freedom is not rendered impossible by the divine omnipotence, but exists by virtue of it. It is an act of omnipotence when God humbles himself to the taking of human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ.Thomasius:“If God is to be over all and in all, he cannot himself be all.”Ps. 113: 5, 6—“Who is like unto Jehovah our God.... That humbleth himself to behold the things that are in heaven and in the earth?”Phil. 2:7, 8—“emptied himself ... humbled himself.”See Charnock, Attributes, 2:5-107. President Woolsey showed true power when he controlled his indignation and let an offending student go free. Of Christ on the cross, says Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 116—“It was the power [to retain his life, to escape suffering], with the will to hold it unused, which proved him to be what he was, the obedient and perfect man.”We are likest the omnipotent One when we limit ourselves for love's sake. The attribute of omnipotence is the ground of trust, as well as of fear, on the part of God's creatures. Isaac Watts:“His every word of grace is strong As that which built the skies; The voice that rolls the stars along Speaks all the promises.”
By this we mean the power of God to do all things which are objects of power, whether with or without the use of means.
Gen. 17:1—“I am God Almighty.”He performs natural wonders:Gen. 1:1-3—“Let there be Light”;Is. 44:24—“stretcheth forth the heavens alone”;Heb. 1:3—“upholding all things by the word of his power.”Spiritual wonders:2 Cor. 4:6—“God, that said, Light shall shine out of darkness, who shined in our hearts”;[pg 287]Eph. 1:19—“exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe”;Eph. 3:20—“able to do exceeding abundantly.”Power to create new things:Mat. 3:9—“able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham”.Rom. 4:17—“giveth life to the dead, and calleth the things that are not, as though they were.”After his own pleasure:Ps. 115:3—“He hath done whatsoever he hath pleased”;Eph. 1:11—“worketh all things after the counsel of his will.”Nothing impossible:Gen 18:14—“Is anything too hard for Jehovah?”Mat. 19:26—“with God all things are possible.”E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 73—“If all power in the universe is dependent on his creative will for its existence, it is impossible to conceive any limit to his power except that laid on it by his own will. But this is only negative proof; absolute omnipotence is not logically demonstrable, though readily enough recognized as a just conception of the infinite God, when propounded on the authority of a positive revelation.”The omnipotence of God is illustrated by the work of the Holy Spirit, which in Scripture is compared to wind, water and fire. The ordinary manifestations of these elements afford no criterion of the effects they are able to produce. The rushing mighty wind at Pentecost was the analogue of the wind-Spirit who bore everything before him on the first day of creation (Gen. 1:2;John 3:8;Acts 2:2). The pouring out of the Spirit is likened to the flood of Noah when the windows of heaven were opened and there was not room enough to receive that which fell (Mal. 3:10). And the baptism of the Holy Spirit is like the fire that shall destroy all impurity at the end of the world (Mat. 3:11;2 Pet. 3:7-13). See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 307-310.
Gen. 17:1—“I am God Almighty.”He performs natural wonders:Gen. 1:1-3—“Let there be Light”;Is. 44:24—“stretcheth forth the heavens alone”;Heb. 1:3—“upholding all things by the word of his power.”Spiritual wonders:2 Cor. 4:6—“God, that said, Light shall shine out of darkness, who shined in our hearts”;[pg 287]Eph. 1:19—“exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe”;Eph. 3:20—“able to do exceeding abundantly.”Power to create new things:Mat. 3:9—“able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham”.Rom. 4:17—“giveth life to the dead, and calleth the things that are not, as though they were.”After his own pleasure:Ps. 115:3—“He hath done whatsoever he hath pleased”;Eph. 1:11—“worketh all things after the counsel of his will.”Nothing impossible:Gen 18:14—“Is anything too hard for Jehovah?”Mat. 19:26—“with God all things are possible.”E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 73—“If all power in the universe is dependent on his creative will for its existence, it is impossible to conceive any limit to his power except that laid on it by his own will. But this is only negative proof; absolute omnipotence is not logically demonstrable, though readily enough recognized as a just conception of the infinite God, when propounded on the authority of a positive revelation.”
The omnipotence of God is illustrated by the work of the Holy Spirit, which in Scripture is compared to wind, water and fire. The ordinary manifestations of these elements afford no criterion of the effects they are able to produce. The rushing mighty wind at Pentecost was the analogue of the wind-Spirit who bore everything before him on the first day of creation (Gen. 1:2;John 3:8;Acts 2:2). The pouring out of the Spirit is likened to the flood of Noah when the windows of heaven were opened and there was not room enough to receive that which fell (Mal. 3:10). And the baptism of the Holy Spirit is like the fire that shall destroy all impurity at the end of the world (Mat. 3:11;2 Pet. 3:7-13). See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 307-310.
(a) Omnipotence does not imply power to do that which is not an object of power; as, for example, that which is self-contradictory or contradictory to the nature of God.
Self-contradictory things:“facere factum infectum”—the making of a past event to have not occurred (hence the uselessness of praying:“May it be that much good was done”); drawing a shorter than a straight line between two given points; putting two separate mountains together without a valley between them. Things contradictory to the nature of God: for God to lie, to sin, to die. To do such things would not imply power, but impotence. God has all the power that is consistent with infinite perfection—all power to do what is worthy of himself. So no greater thing can be said by man than this:“I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none.”Even God cannot make wrong to be right, nor hatred of himself to be blessed. Some have held that the prevention of sin in a moral system is not an object of power, and therefore that God cannot prevent sin in a moral system. We hold the contrary; see this Compendium: Objections to the Doctrine of Decrees.Dryden, Imitation of Horace, 3:29:71—“Over the past not heaven itself has power; What has been has, and I have had my hour”—words applied by Lord John Russell to his own career. Emerson, The Past:“All is now secure and fast, Not the gods can shake the Past.”Sunday-school scholar:“Say, teacher, can God make a rock so big that he can't lift it?”Seminary Professor:“Can God tell a lie?”Seminary student:“With God all things are possible.”
Self-contradictory things:“facere factum infectum”—the making of a past event to have not occurred (hence the uselessness of praying:“May it be that much good was done”); drawing a shorter than a straight line between two given points; putting two separate mountains together without a valley between them. Things contradictory to the nature of God: for God to lie, to sin, to die. To do such things would not imply power, but impotence. God has all the power that is consistent with infinite perfection—all power to do what is worthy of himself. So no greater thing can be said by man than this:“I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none.”Even God cannot make wrong to be right, nor hatred of himself to be blessed. Some have held that the prevention of sin in a moral system is not an object of power, and therefore that God cannot prevent sin in a moral system. We hold the contrary; see this Compendium: Objections to the Doctrine of Decrees.
Dryden, Imitation of Horace, 3:29:71—“Over the past not heaven itself has power; What has been has, and I have had my hour”—words applied by Lord John Russell to his own career. Emerson, The Past:“All is now secure and fast, Not the gods can shake the Past.”Sunday-school scholar:“Say, teacher, can God make a rock so big that he can't lift it?”Seminary Professor:“Can God tell a lie?”Seminary student:“With God all things are possible.”
(b) Omnipotence does not imply the exercise of all his power on the part of God. He has power over his power; in other words, his power is under the control of wise and holy will. God can do all he will, but he will not do all he can. Else his power is mere force acting necessarily, and God is the slave of his own omnipotence.
Schleiermacher held that nature not only is grounded in the divine causality, but fully expresses that causality; there is no causative power in God for anything that is not real and actual. This doctrine does not essentially differ from Spinoza'snatura naturansandnatura naturata. See Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:62-66. But omnipotence is not instinctive; it is a power used according to God's pleasure. God is by no means encompassed by the laws of nature, or shut up to a necessary evolution of his own being, as pantheism supposes. As Rothe has shown, God has a will-power over his nature-power, and is not compelled to do all that he can do. He is able from the stones of the street to“raise up children unto Abraham,”but he has not done it. In God are unopened treasures, an inexhaustible fountain of new beginnings, new creations, new revelations. To suppose that in creation he has expended all the inner possibilities of his being is to deny his omnipotence. SoJob 26:14—“Lo, these are but the outskirts[pg 288]of his ways: And how small a whisper do we hear of him! But the thunder of his power who can understand?”See Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 10; Hodgson, Time and Space, 579, 580.1 Pet. 5:6—“Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God”—his mighty hand of providence, salvation, blessing—“that he may exalt you in due time; casting all your anxiety upon him, because he careth for you.”“The mighty powers held under mighty control”—this is the greatest exhibition of power. Unrestraint is not the highest freedom. Young men must learn that self-restraint is the true power.Prov. 16:32—“He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; And he that ruleth his spirit, than he that taketh a city.”Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 2:3—“We have power in ourselves to do it, but it is a power that we have no power to do.”When dynamite goes off, it all goes off: there is no reserve. God uses as much of his power as he pleases: the remainder of wrath in himself, as well as in others, he restrains.
Schleiermacher held that nature not only is grounded in the divine causality, but fully expresses that causality; there is no causative power in God for anything that is not real and actual. This doctrine does not essentially differ from Spinoza'snatura naturansandnatura naturata. See Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:62-66. But omnipotence is not instinctive; it is a power used according to God's pleasure. God is by no means encompassed by the laws of nature, or shut up to a necessary evolution of his own being, as pantheism supposes. As Rothe has shown, God has a will-power over his nature-power, and is not compelled to do all that he can do. He is able from the stones of the street to“raise up children unto Abraham,”but he has not done it. In God are unopened treasures, an inexhaustible fountain of new beginnings, new creations, new revelations. To suppose that in creation he has expended all the inner possibilities of his being is to deny his omnipotence. SoJob 26:14—“Lo, these are but the outskirts[pg 288]of his ways: And how small a whisper do we hear of him! But the thunder of his power who can understand?”See Rogers, Superhuman Origin of the Bible, 10; Hodgson, Time and Space, 579, 580.
1 Pet. 5:6—“Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God”—his mighty hand of providence, salvation, blessing—“that he may exalt you in due time; casting all your anxiety upon him, because he careth for you.”“The mighty powers held under mighty control”—this is the greatest exhibition of power. Unrestraint is not the highest freedom. Young men must learn that self-restraint is the true power.Prov. 16:32—“He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; And he that ruleth his spirit, than he that taketh a city.”Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 2:3—“We have power in ourselves to do it, but it is a power that we have no power to do.”When dynamite goes off, it all goes off: there is no reserve. God uses as much of his power as he pleases: the remainder of wrath in himself, as well as in others, he restrains.
(c) Omnipotence in God does not exclude, but implies, the power of self-limitation. Since all such self-limitation is free, proceeding from neither external nor internal compulsion, it is the act and manifestation of God's power. Human freedom is not rendered impossible by the divine omnipotence, but exists by virtue of it. It is an act of omnipotence when God humbles himself to the taking of human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ.
Thomasius:“If God is to be over all and in all, he cannot himself be all.”Ps. 113: 5, 6—“Who is like unto Jehovah our God.... That humbleth himself to behold the things that are in heaven and in the earth?”Phil. 2:7, 8—“emptied himself ... humbled himself.”See Charnock, Attributes, 2:5-107. President Woolsey showed true power when he controlled his indignation and let an offending student go free. Of Christ on the cross, says Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 116—“It was the power [to retain his life, to escape suffering], with the will to hold it unused, which proved him to be what he was, the obedient and perfect man.”We are likest the omnipotent One when we limit ourselves for love's sake. The attribute of omnipotence is the ground of trust, as well as of fear, on the part of God's creatures. Isaac Watts:“His every word of grace is strong As that which built the skies; The voice that rolls the stars along Speaks all the promises.”
Thomasius:“If God is to be over all and in all, he cannot himself be all.”Ps. 113: 5, 6—“Who is like unto Jehovah our God.... That humbleth himself to behold the things that are in heaven and in the earth?”Phil. 2:7, 8—“emptied himself ... humbled himself.”See Charnock, Attributes, 2:5-107. President Woolsey showed true power when he controlled his indignation and let an offending student go free. Of Christ on the cross, says Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 116—“It was the power [to retain his life, to escape suffering], with the will to hold it unused, which proved him to be what he was, the obedient and perfect man.”We are likest the omnipotent One when we limit ourselves for love's sake. The attribute of omnipotence is the ground of trust, as well as of fear, on the part of God's creatures. Isaac Watts:“His every word of grace is strong As that which built the skies; The voice that rolls the stars along Speaks all the promises.”