(Pages 509-513)
BIBLICAL
DOGMATICS
Milton
S. Terry, D.D.
Professor
of Christian Doctrine in Garrett Biblical Institute
ã1907
By, Eaton & Mains.
PART THIRD
OUR FATHER IN HEAVEN
SECTION FIRST
THE UNIVERSAL REVELATION
CHAPTER 1
THE MYSTERY OF THE INVISIBLE
1. Witnessed Among All Nations.
The most mysterious of all facts within us and beyond us is the presence of
an unseen Power whom we call God. In the discussion of this mystery we enter,
as it were, the Holy of holies in our exposition of biblical doctrine. At no
point of our foregoing study have we been able to escape the pressing fact of
the immanence of God; for no rational treatment of the common experiences of
religion is possible without constant recognition of the invisible but all-pervasive
Being who is the ultimate ground of the universe and of all that it contains.
But at this point we must pause to make note of those lower forms of religious
thought and practice which show, as an apostle teaches, that “a living God,
who, made the heaven and the earth and the sea, and all that in them is, . .
. left not himself without witness” among any of the nations of men in any
generation of the past (Acts 14:15-17). It is now quite generally conceded that
there are, and probably have been, no tribes of men so degraded as to be destitute
of religious conceptions.[1] Somehow the most
primitive savages conceive the idea that every moving thing in nature is endowed
with life. The sun and moon and stars possess an invisible force or energy by
which they move regularly through the heaven. The winds and the waters are instinct
with life, possessed, it may be, each with its own self-conscious spirit; the
flowering plant, the waving leaf, nay, even the very sticks and stones that
are stirred before the eye, have been conceived as having an invisible life
and power within themselves. The superstitions of fetishism, the practices of
divination, the belief in ghosts and goblins, and the manifold conceptions of
another world, invisible to mortals on the earth, witness in almost countless
forms the universal fact that man possesses a sort of instinctive, intuitive,
and necessary sense of dependence upon some Higher Power whom he cannot find
out to perfection. Nor should we overlook the fact that the concepts of animism,
fetishism, and magic survive in numerous religious rites of our own time, and
in the midst of prevailing enlightenment and scientific culture. How many among
us can rid ourselves of the superstition of haunted houses, and haunted wells,
and haunted eaves? What reverence is felt by thousands for the crucifix, or
the mere sign of the cross made with the hand, or for the uplifted host, or
for sacred relies, amulets, rings, lucky coins, talismans, charms, incantations
of wizards, or the touch of “holy water”? These all, wherever found, bear witness
to man’s universal belief in the existence of a Power or of powers invisible.
2. The Divers Interpretations. It was but natural that there should arise among men divers interpretations
of this universal consciousness of the influence of Powers unseen. The various
religious cults and the poetic creations of mythology are but so many different
attempts to explain the nature and operations of the Eternal Energy which is
the real basis of all phenomena. It is to be expected that these divers attempts
at explaining the Invisible should be fraught with more or less error, but the
all-commanding and impressive fact remains in spite of every failure to resolve
its mystery. It may be that the phenomena of sleep and dreams, of swoons and
ecstasy, of life and death, developed the notions of ghosts and of good and
evil angels. These all suggest a preternatural, if not a supernatural world
of beings. But inferences from these phenomena do not explain the higher concepts
of God and the facts of religion. The most noteworthy nature-myths, which purport
to explain the regular recurrence of night and day, sunset and dawn, winter
and summer, are obviously based upon those manifestations of the forces of nature
which evince the existence of an unseen law and order of the world. The myth
itself is the poetic or imaginative creation of a story out of an idea. It arises
from a natural impulse of the mind to account for some striking fact or some
existing custom. A solar myth is a story about some doings of the sun conceived
in a realistic way, as if the sun were a real person endowed with life and thought.
Such myths spring from an instinct in primitive peoples to see some sort of
personal intelligence and will in all the more noticeable objects and processes
of nature. There is, or is supposed to be, a real “Soul of the world,” the Anima
Mundi, which
lives and moves through all things; and thence it is easy to imagine, further,
that there are also many distinctive souls in possession of the various phenomena
of sun, moon, stars, winds, clouds, and waters. Of course there are many myths
which have no vital connection with religion, and some men will argue that the
belief in God as the Creator of the world is itself a myth. All we need here
say to facts of this kind is that in all mythologies and in all forms of religion
rational and irrational elements have been strangely mixed, and the divers interpretations
of the mysterious Energy that works unseen through all the world and through
all ages bear unmistakable witness to the fact of God, the mysterious Power,
whom no man hath seen or can see.
3. Philosophical Theories. It was also but natural that
the sages and the philosophers of the most enlightened peoples should exercise
their wisdom upon the mysterious problems of the world. Cosmic philosophy ancient
and modern is an effort of the cultivated human mind to penetrate into the
mystery of things and to tell us how they came to be what they are and how they
all hold together. The ancient Ionic philosopher Thales, who is said to have
traveled far in quest of knowledge, and to have studied with the priests of
Memphis, maintained that all nature is endowed with life, everything is full
of gods, and water is the primordial element of the universe. Anaximander put
forth the doctrine of “the Infinite,” a sort of illimitable original substance
or first principle, out of which all things arise and into which they return
again. According to Heraclitus the origin of all things and the principle of
perpetual motion are to be found in fire, a clear light fluid or dry vapor,
out of which all the visible forms of nature and the souls of men are evolved,
and each particular soul, accordingly, partakes of the quality of the natal
environments and the soil from which it springs forth. According to Plato, spiritual
entities are the only real things in existence, and the material world is in
perpetual change, flowing into forms of being and then flowing out. He argued
that the great Soul of the world must have existed before the world itself,
and so likewise must all human souls have existed before the bodies they inhabit
here. Still more subtle, speculative, and dreamy are the cosmic theories of
Brahmanic literature, especially as found in the philosophic and theosophic
treatises known as the Upanishads. Modern theories of evolution were anticipated
in part by the ancient thinkers of India and of Greece; but of one and of all
these theories we may say that they fail to explain the riddle of the universe.
They are at most and best only so many attempts at an explanation of the great
mystery of being. The invisible secret is recognized as the most real of things
existing, but the explanations are defective and unsatisfactory. One may search
through the entire history of modern philosophy, from Descartes to Hegel, and
observe that the one mysterious fact, around which as a center all inquiries
and all theories move, is the invisible Reality of things.
4. Current Theistic Arguments. We are, furthermore, obliged to affirm substantially the same judgment concerning
the current standard arguments of rational theism. So far as they go, they appear
to be valid and helpful to faith in the Unseen, but they leave us without any
clear knowledge or conviction as to the real nature of God. The so-called “cosmological
argument” is a familiar syllogism: (1) All things existing must have a sufficient
first cause; (2) no such cause is found in the things which do appear; (3) therefore
the first cause must be the self-existent and eternal Being whom we call God.
The “teleological argument” is a worthy associate of the foregoing, and is
virtually a counterpart and corollary of it. We are shown that the great world
of which we form a part exhibits manifold adaptations of means to ends, adaptations
so obvious as to imply an intelligent Designer, without whose power and wisdom
many things could not have been made as they are made. The “anthropological
argument,” or, as some call it, “the moral argument,” is only an application
of the two preceding modes of reasoning to facts which are conspicuous in the
moral and spiritual constitution of man. The “ontological argument” is less
intelligible; it moves in a line of a priori assumptions, and has been
so variously constructed and modified as to beget with some a doubt of its having
any real value as an argument. But admitting that all these arguments are irrefutable
as proofs of the existence of God, and that they open the way for legitimate
inferences touching his power and wisdom, they still leave us without satisfactory
knowledge of his personal character. We think that in various forms of the creation
we behold unmistakable proofs of benevolent design; yet are we confronted with
other facts which seem rather like the contrivances of horrible malevolence.
What means the fearful struggle for life, which has been going on in the animal
world for incalculable ages? Sharp claws, crushing jaws, and poisonous fangs
are not always indicative of beneficent design. We are often told that the world
of animal life is on the whole a very happy world. Earth, air, and waters “teem
with delighted existence,” and “shoals of the fry of fish are so happy that
they know not what to do with themselves.”[2]
But while this is true for a time, we should not close our eyes to the fact
that there are also shoals of larger swimmers that never seem more happy than
when in the act of gulping down the smaller fry. And these larger fish become
in turn the prey of others greater than themselves. The great shark and the
powerful lion exhibit no signs of more exquisite delight than when they crunch
the yielding bones and devour the quivering flesh of their helpless victims.
What evidences of divine goodness shall we find in this class of facts, or what
sort of beneficent design planned millenniums of such torture and death? Some
of these difficulties may be obviated by a wider induction of facts, but after
all that our reason can formulate into arguments like those of theism, the heart
is not satisfied. We yearn to know more about the moral and personal qualities
of the Great Designer.
5. Words of Zophar and Elihu. And so the all-pervading mystery remains, but it is a certain fact from which
we cannot get away. It ever confronts us in our thoughtful hours; we cannot
lawfully thrust it from our immediate cognition; all men in all times have felt
the presence and the power of some invisible Person or Energy that holds the
world together. We may call it Fate, or Force, or God; but whatever its proper
name, it seems to possess the qualities of wisdom and will. The poetic language
of Zcphar and Elihu, in the book of Job, expresses very forcibly our consciousness
of limitation and lack of knowledge in the presence of this mystery:
Eloah’s secret, canst thou find it out?
Or Shadday’s perfect way canst thou explore?
Higher than heaven’s
height, what canst thou do?
Deeper than Sheol’s
depths, what canst thou know?
Its measurement
is longer than the earth,
And broader than
the sea. Job 11:7-9.
Lo, God is great, we know him not;
Unsearchable the number of his years.
For he it is who draws the water drops;
Whence they distil to rain in place
of mist;
Even that with which the heavens flow
down,
And drop on man abundantly.
Is there who understands the floatings
of the cloud,
The thunderings of his canopy?
Behold upon it spreadeth he the light,
Whilst darkening the sea’s profoundest
depths.[3] Job. 36:26-30.
FOOTNOTES
- See
above, pp. 60-63, in our discussion of the
religious element in man, and comp. E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, Vol. I,
pp. 416-423. Third American ed. New York, 1889.
- Paley,
Natural Theology, chapter 24.
- Translation
by Tayler Lewis in the American ed. of Lange’s Commentary.