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The Humanity of the Theologian and the Personal Nature of God

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

David A. Pailin
Affiliation:
Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion, University of Manchester

Extract

In his autobiographical-biographical study, Father and Son, Edmund Gosse describes how one evening, during his childhood, while his father was praying at - or, rather, over - his bed, a rather large insect dark and flat, with more legs than a self-respecting insect ought to need, appeared at the bottom of the counterpane, and slowly advanced… I bore it in silent fascination till it almost tickled my chin, and then I screamed ‘Papa! Papa!’. My Father rose in great dudgeon, removed the insect (what were insects to him!) and then gave me a tremendous lecture.1

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1976

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References

page 141 note 1 Gosse, E., Father and Son (London: Folio Society, 1972), p. 107.Google Scholar

page 141 note 2 Ibid. p. 108.

page 141 note 3 Cf. the claim by Whitehead that traditional Christian theology has erred by fashioning its picture of God on the morally doubtful model of a Byzantine emperor - e.g. in Whitehead, A. N., Process and Reality (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), pp. 519 ff.Google Scholar

page 141 note 4 Anselm, , Proslogion, chapter 2.Google Scholar

page 142 note 1 For the significance of this qualification, cf. Hartshome's notion of God's perfection as ‘dual transcendence’, in, e.g., Logic of Perfection (Illinois: Open Court, 1962), pp. 40 ff.Google Scholar and Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method (London: SCM Press, 1970), pp. 272 ff.Google Scholar

page 142 note 2 Buri, F., How Can we Still Speak Responsibly of God? (Philadelphia, Fortress, 1968), pp. 6, 8.Google Scholar Buri is referring particularly to Barthian theologians.

page 142 note 3 Cf. Job 38 ff.

page 142 note 4 Job 40: 4 f; cf. 42: I–6 (NEB translation).

page 143 note 1 Anselm, , Proslogion, chapter 15, 17.Google Scholar These conclusions did not, of course, prevent Anselm from describing the nature and attributes of God! Few theologians, indeed, who have affirmed the ‘ineffability’ of God have consistently followed the implications of their affirmation.

page 143 note 2 The qualification ‘essentially’ refers to what is determined by man's nature as man's while the qualification ‘culturally’ refers to what is determined for any particular man by his contingent cultural inheritance and situation.

page 143 note 3 For further on the characteristics of an acceptable theological position, cf. ‘Authenticity in the Interpretation of Christianity’ in The Cardinal Meaning, edited by Morgan, R. and Pye, M. (The Hague: Mouton, 1973).Google Scholar

page 143 note 4 Campbell, C. A., On Selfhood and Godhood (London: Allen and Unwin, 1957), p. 339.Google Scholar

page 143 note 5 ‘The Prayer of the Little Ducks Who Went Into the Ark’ from Prayers from the Ark by Carmen, Bernos de Gasztold, translated by Rumer, Godden (London: Macmillan).Google Scholar

page 145 note 1 Burl, , op. cit. p. 33Google Scholar; cf. pp. 33 f. Note the reference to Ebeling on p. 34n as ‘correctly’ emphasizing ‘that knowledge of God “stands or falls with the possibility of prayer” (Word and Faith, p. 352)’.

page 145 note 2 Bertocci, P., The Person God Is (London: Allen and Unwin, 1970), p. 37Google Scholar; cf. pp. 35 ff. and passim.

page 146 note 1 Webb, C. C. J., Problems in the Relations of God and Man (London: Nisbet, 1911), pp. 245 f.; cf. p. 271.Google Scholar Later, in his Gifford Lectures, Webb, prefers to speak of ‘a God with whom we can stand in personal relations’ rather than of ‘a personal God’ because he does not ‘think that Religion is concerned with the nature of the divine self consciousness, except so far as this may be involved in the reality of our personal relations with God’ ( Webb, C. C. J., God and Personality (London: Allen and Unwin, 1919), p. 153; cf. pp. 73Google Scholar, 128 ff.).

page 146 note 2 Collingwood, R. G., Religion and Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1916), p. 115; cf. pp. 115 f.Google Scholar

page 146 note 3 Aulen, G., The Faith of the Christian Church (London: SCM, 1954), p. 160; cf. pp. 158 ff.Google Scholar

page 146 note 4 Farmer, H. H., The World and God (London: Nisbet, 1936), p. IGoogle Scholar; cf. Farmer, , Towards Belief in God (London: SCM, 1942), pp. 48 f.Google Scholar

page 146 note 5 Cf. Farmer, , The World and God, pp. 8 f.Google Scholar; cf. also I. T. Ramsey, who denies that the problem is ‘out of date’ in ‘A Personal God’ in Prospect for Theology, edited by Healey, F. G. (Welwyn: Nisbet, 1966), pp. 55 f.Google Scholar

page 146 note 6 Farmer, H. H., Revelation and Religion (London: Nisbet, 1954), p. 28.Google Scholar

page 146 note 7 Gollwitzer, H., The Existence of God (London, SCM, 1965), p. 188Google Scholar; cf. also Ramsey, I. T., op. cit. pp. 59 f.Google Scholar for reasons for preserving talk about God as personal.

page 147 note 1 Bertocci, , op. cit. p. 20Google Scholar; Niebuhr, H. Richard, Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), pp. 46 f.Google Scholar

page 147 note 2 Webb, , God and Personality, pp. 61 ff.Google Scholar

page 148 note 1 Aquinas, , Summa Theologica, 1, 29Google Scholar, 3. Aquinas' ascription of ‘personal’ being to God here must be understood, however, in terms of what he elsewhere says about the nature of God. In view, for example, of what he says about God's perfection as totally impassible actus purus, it is questionable whether he can really be said to describe the living God of Christian faith - cf. on this point Process Theology- Why and What?’ in Faith and Thought (1972–3), vol. 100.Google Scholar

page 148 note 2 Cf. Aquinas, , op. cit. I, 29Google Scholar, 4 and I, 30, I ff. Aulen, , op. cit. p. 256Google Scholar reminds us that the Fathers would regard us as heretics if we understood our modern concept of personality in their trinitarian formulae.

page 148 note 3 Cf. Ramsey, I. T., op. cit. p. 56.Google Scholar

page 148 note 4 Barth, K., The Knowledge of God and The Service of God (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), pp. 31 ff.Google Scholar; cf. Church Dogmatics, 1, I (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1936), p. 157Google Scholar and also the similar treatment that Barth gives to the notion of fatherhood: ‘we do not call God Father because we know what that is; on the contrary, because we know God's Fatherhood we afterwards understand what human fatherhood truly is. The divine truth precedes and grounds the human truth’ ( Barth, K., The Faith of the Church (London: Collins, 1960), p. 37Google Scholar; cf. also Barth's, Dogmatics in Outline (London: SCM, 1949), p. 43).Google Scholar

page 149 note 1 Cf. Jaspers, K., Philosophical Faith and Revelation, trans. by Ashton, E. B. (London: Collins, 1967), pp. 141 ff.Google Scholar: ‘even as the best that man knows in the world, as personality, Transcendence is still debased, so to speak, into his own kind of being. What is more than a person… and surely not less than a person, is pointed out to man by what he is as a person’ (p. 141).

page 149 note 2 Cf. Gollwitzer, , op. cit. p. 189Google Scholar, referring to the significance of Buber's I and Thou; cf. also Tillich, P., Theology of Culture (Oxford, New York, 1964), pp. 131 f.Google Scholar - note that when Tillich says that the personal is a symbol for God, he regards a symbol as participating in the reality of that which it symbolizes.

page 149 note 3 Cf. Galloway, G., The Philosophy of Religion (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1914), p. 504Google Scholar: ‘to say that God is supra-personal’ is to say that ‘God is personal in a deeper, richer, and more perfect way than man is’.

page 149 note 4 Cf. Illingworth, J. R., Personality Human and Divine (London: Macmillan, 1894), p. 216Google Scholar (and p. 53 quoting Lotze) who sees our finitude as limiting our development as persons. Our finitude certainly limits us but the limit is on the range of our personal being rather than on its quality as personal being.

page 149 note 5 Rashdall, Hastings, Philosophy and Religion (London: Duckworth, 1909), p. 56Google Scholar; cf. also Cobb, J. B., A Christian Natural Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1965), pp. 188–92Google Scholar for a convincing argument that the Whiteheadian notion of God, contrary to Whitehead's own indications, makes more sense in terms of ‘an account of a living person than of an actual entity’.

page 150 note 1 Cf. Buber, M., Eclipse of God (New York: Harper, 1952), pp. 60, 96Google Scholar for the suggestion that God becomes a personal being in order to allow man to have a personal relationship with him. Such a suggestion, though, is highly problematic because we cannot conceive of a being choosing so to transform himself except in personal terms.

page 150 note 2 Buri, , op. cit. pp. 20 f.Google Scholar: ‘awareness of responsibility and realization of personhood are always bound up with the experience of dissatisfaction and with the knowledge of it’.

page 151 note 1 On the unpredictability of personal being, cf. Webb, , God and Personality, pp. 110 ff.Google Scholar, 124 ff. and especially pp. 266 ff. where he uses the analogy of artistic activity.

page 151 note 2 Cf. C. Hartshorne, Man's Vision of God, The Logic of Perfection and Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method for various discussions of the notion of God's perfection.

page 152 note 1 When, therefore, Campbell, , op. cit. p. 264Google Scholar, states that ‘to lack any kind of power or excellence is to be to that extent imperfect’, he makes the notion of perfection an intrinsically inconsistent one. The notion that to be absolutely perfect means to have all possible values is one of the persistent errors in thought about God.

page 152 note 2 We can probably maintain the constancy and non-randomness of God's activity by understanding his choices in terms of the unending quest for increase in value.

page 153 note 1 Campbell, , op. cit. p. 265.Google Scholar

page 153 note 2 Cf. the similar argument of Mackintosh, H. R., The Christian Apprehension of God (London: SCM, 1934), p. 146Google Scholar: ‘Which limits God more - to say that He does have the capacity for fellowship…or to say that He does not have it?’ Traditional theology contains many claims about what are held to be intuitively obvious divine attributes. On reflection, however, some of them turn out not only to be not obvious but also intrinsically improbable.

page 153 note 3 Fichte, , Science of Knowledge, translated by Heath, P. and Lachs, J. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970), p. 242.Google Scholar

page 153 note 4 Bradley, F. H., Appearance and Reality (Oxford, 1969), p. 471Google Scholar; D. F. Strauss held a similar view – cf. Mackintosh, H. R., op. cit. pp. 142 ff.Google Scholar

page 154 note 1 Lotze, H., Outlines of the Philosophy of Religion (London: Dickinson, 1887), p. 69Google Scholar; cf. also the passage from Lotze's Microcosm in Illingworth, , op. cit. p. 53.Google Scholar

page 155 note 1 Hartshorne, C., Man's Vision of God (Connecticut: Archon, 1964), p. 348Google Scholar; cf. pp. 251 ff. where he considers God as ‘the subject of all change’; cf. also Pfleiderer, O., The Philosophy of Religion (London: Williams and Norgate, 1888), III, 278 ff.Google Scholar It is this concept of God which meets Richardson's, H. W. demand for a ‘God of a sociotechnic intellectus’ (Theology for a New World (London: SCM, 1968), p. 23)Google Scholar and which at the same time meets the needs of ‘the modern intellectus’ in terms of a personal God (cf. pp. 9–19).

page 155 note 2 Cf. Bertocci, , op. cit. pp. 32–4Google Scholar on the significance of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo in this respect, and Matthews, W. R., God in Christian Thought and Experience (London: Nisbet, 1939), pp. 175 ff.Google Scholar

page 155 note 3 Pannenberg, W., Basic Questions in Theology (London: SCM, 1971), 11, 104.Google Scholar

page 155 note 4 Ibid. p. 114.

page 155 note 5 Ibid.

page 155 note 6 Hartshorne, , A Natural Theology for Our Time (Illinois: Open Court, 1967), p. 20Google Scholar, cf. p. 74; cf. Logic of Perfection, pp. 37 ff.

page 155 note 7 Ibid. p. 36. Cf. Hartshorne, , Logic of Perfection, p. 142.Google Scholar

page 158 note 1 Cf. Hartshorne, C., Reality as Social Process (Illinois: Free Press and Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1953), p. 40Google Scholar; Logic of Perfection, p. 203.

page 158 note 2 Cf. Barth, , Church Dogmatics, I/I, pp. 157 f.Google Scholar