Intellectual Objections
By
J.S. Bezzant

All the objections discussed in these lectures, whether moral, historical or psychological, are intellectual in that they concern belief which is an intellectual activity. My assignment is with such as do not fall exclusively under others though related to them. As the lectures are addressed to persons in process of being educated (as the lecturers themselves are or should be) I do not phrase what I wish to say as I should do if I were speaking to, say, students of philosophy, nor shall I deal with specialist philosophical puzzles.

Few intellectual objections to Christianity are wholly or largely new. Some are its equal in age, some older, though the latter are, of course, redirected against Christianity. Others are directed against what people think Christianity teaches, having gained their knowledge of it from ill-instructed Christians, but which are either not legitimate elements in it or not essential to it. I assume that religion, unless it is weaving a world of fancy into which to flee from the world of fact, must be integrated with other knowledge or probable beliefs about the world and man which are the proper concern of sciences and philosophy based upon them.

These are far from having attained finality. Moreover, they begin at the top of the intellectual scale and only gradually percolate to less learned people and, by the time they do so, are generally surpassed or out of date among scientists and thinkers at the top; whereas religion, if it is to have any great influence, must speak to all sorts and conditions of men and therefore the greater its influence the more it will be permeated by pre-scientific supposed knowledge and vague ideas, thus creating difficulties and objections as knowledge increases, or thought becomes more logical and precise. This is inevitable, and has always been so: it is intensified in an age in which knowledge of the world and man is rapidly increasing and has in many respects changed, as in our own age.

But objections, even if substantial, particularly in a time like the present, need not and are not likely to prove fatal: they may be seriously modified or overcome. Unless we are not to be sceptical of all positive statements while swallowing scepticism at one gulp with a credulity equalling that of biblical fundamentalists, objections against Christianity do not afford adequate ground for abandoning Christianity and dispensing with its practices or refusing to consider it more seriously. Such action or inaction is too much like easy religious dogmatism; and it is to cut oneself off from evidence far from irrelevant and to weight the scales negatively in advance.

This is precisely what the prevailing secularism does, if I may use 'secular' without the pejorative or bad sense which religious people commonly import into it. The disinclination to think about Christianity, the ignorance about it and the feeling that it is irrelevant are not very different from the closed minds of the narrower of biblical fundamentalists. But this prevailing attitude, at present presenting an insoluble difficulty for the churches, affords no basis for intellectual or other objections to Christianity; but even among the more thoughtful and influential objections are often grounded upon this prevailing attitude.

There is not, nor is there ever likely to be, any view of the meaning, purpose, value and destiny of human life, not even the view that it has none, that is not in a greater or less degree founded upon faith, for neither the negative nor the positive belief is demonstrable, i.e. capable of proof. Judgement, whether positive or negative, to be worth consideration, depends upon whether the faith or the refusal of it, has actual and reasonable grounds. Nor, for this purpose, need we extend the meaning of faith beyond that which is very important for the continuation of some scientific researches. To cite but one instance - the efforts to find the cause or causes of cancer and its possible remedies. Conceivably these efforts may never be successful or the disease may cease to afflict mankind before they are. They have, so far, been baffled again and again, but the efforts to find them continue unabated: the sponge is not thrown in with anything like the ease with which difficulties in and objections to Christianity are allowed to be negatively effective.

Traditional Christianity has what was known as the scheme of salvation. It was based on Scripture regarded as the verbally inspired record of Divine revelation; and the scheme as a whole, but by no means all included in it, stands or falls with that view of the Bible. The Pauline teaching on sin and salvation was elaborated into a scheme containing elements of Aristotelian science and the theology of St Augustine. It began with an alleged rebellion of Satan against God in which angels fell. By direct acts of God, Adam and Eve were created, apparently as adults, not only innocent but fully righteous.

Their descendants were intended to restore the number of the angels depleted by the heavenly revolt. Moved by envy, Satan persuaded our first parents to disobey one absolute command of God, that they were not to obtain knowledge, and so brought about their fall from original righteousness, in consequence of which they transmitted to all their offspring, by natural generation, a corrupted nature wholly inclined to evil, an enfeebled will, and also the guilt of their sin. Thus all mankind lay under the curse of sin both original and actual, justly the object of Divine wrath and destined to damnation. In order to restore his thwarted purpose God sent his Son who, assuming human nature, was born on earth, whereon was wrought the drama of his death and resurrection. Jesus, pure from all defect of original and actual sin, alone fulfilled the conditions of a perfect sacrifice for human sin. By this God's legitimate anger with guilty mankind was appeased and his honour satisfied; he was graciously pleased to accept his Son's sacrifice, enabled to forgive sin, and man was potentially redeemed. The Christian church, a Divine corporation, came into being; those baptized into it who by grace persevered in the fulfilment of its commands would be secure in the life to come.

From the supernatural life of the church, the world and history derived their meaning and without it would at a last day perish by fire. This would happen when the unknown number of souls required to replace the fallen angels was complete. The Anglican Prayer-book office for the burial of the dead still prays that God may be pleased shortly to accomplish the number of the elect and to hasten his kingdom. The dead would be raised from their graves in their bodies, despite St Paul's clear assertion that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God nor corruption incorruption. The saved were predestined to their salvation by an inscrutable decree of God, not for any merits of their own, but solely for those of Christ. As to the fate of the rest, there were differences of opinion, but it was generally held that they would suffer endless torment in the flames of a hell, by which climax not only would God's power and justice be finally vindicated but heaven's bliss intensified.

This outline has been so shattered that the bare recital of it has the aspect of a malicious travesty. Known facts of astronomy, geology, biological evolution, anthropology, the comparative study of religions, race and genetical and analytic psychology, the literary and historical criticism of the Bible, with the teaching of Jesus and the moral conscience of mankind, have banished this scheme beyond the range of credibility. But though it can no longer be taken seriously, certain doctrines vital in the Christian gospel of salvation are still taught in forms which derive from the vanished scheme and from nothing else; and this hinders the effective presentation of Christianity today.

By far the most fruitful root of intellectual objections to Christianity is that, whatever view is taken of its origins, Christians could only interpret new facts and experiences in relation to the mythical world-pictures through which they apprehended them, whether Jewish or Hellenistic, both of which are irrelevant and impossible for our age and never again will be anything else. Inevitably the religious insights, so articulated and elaborated, appear almost equally irrelevant, a fact which present-day biblical theology so largely ignores and which deprives it of influence except among already convinced Christians. The primitive Christian preaching, now called the kerygma or proclamation, ante-dates the writing of anything in the New Testament.

So far as it can be recovered it was a fragmentary outline, requiring much interpretative or explanatory comment to make it intelligible to converts. The inevitable results are clear enough in the New Testament. Jewish Christians found it hard if not impossible to transmute their inherited, largely mythopoeic, ideas and so tended to circumscribe within them what was new and distinctive in the facts and message of Christianity, which was rejected by official Judaism and by those loyal to it. Hellenistic Christians (and Christianity's successes were and continued to be in the Graeco-Roman world - it has never widely or deeply influenced a Semitic civilization) tended to engulf the Christian message in a riotous speculation almost entirely lacking any historical or otherwise empirical or genuinely philosophical basis and which the modern world can only regard as little more than free imaginative composition.

Then, when more serious thought undertook the exposition of Christianity and its rescue from this welter, it did so by large explanatory expansion of the apparent facts and theologizing upon them as recorded in the writings of the New Testament illumined, and as often darkened, by the Old, regarded as finally authoritative. But it did this on the basis of thought, often local enough, but based upon thought-created entities, a priori ultimates, hypostatized abstract nouns treated as actualities, a procedure which issued, for good or ill, in results of centuries' duration, but which the modern world can only regard as pre-scientific philosophizing aloof from facts or as mythopoeic fancy. Mercifully, in its oecumenical creed, the early Church confined itself almost exclusively to the words of Scripture; but the explanatory elaborations of theology have often counted for more in Christian life and thought than the reserved language of the creeds which consequently do not greatly help in dealing with contemporary objections.

Theologians today heavily over-emphasize the unity of the New Testament. What gives it such unity as it has is also fundamental in it - the supreme significance of the coming and of the person of Christ, about which there is neither difference nor controversy, though it is set forth in varying ideas, images or pictures. There is no integrated theological system in the New Testament. What it says about salvation through Christ is heavily coloured by Jewish apocalyptic-eschatological and Gnostic-like redemption mythologies. Biblical cosmology is mythical throughout, with its three-fold structure of the universe, the earth as the scene of Divine and subordinate angelic activity or of Satan and his daemons. Man cannot effectively control his own life for he may be possessed by evil spirits or God may inspire his thought and guide his purposes otherwise than by his reason. History likewise can be controlled by good and evil supernatural forces and does not follow a natural course.

The existing aeon or age is in bondage to Satan, sin and death; its end will come soon in a cosmic catastrophe preceded by terrible woes. The Judge will come from heaven, the dead will rise for final judgement and all men will be either saved or damned everlastingly. St Paul thinks God has sent a pre-existing Divine being, his son, who came to earth as a man; he dies the death of a sinner on the cross and so makes atonement for human sin. His resurrection is the beginning of the end, when death, the result of Adam's sin, shall be no more; daemonic spirits have already lost their power. Christ, risen and ascended to the right hand of God, will return to complete the redemption, human resurrection and judgement. St Paul, at one stage, thought he might be alive to witness it - 'we shall not all sleep'. Meanwhile, members of the church are united with Christ by faith, baptism and the eucharist, and can be sure of salvation unless they prove unworthy.

There can be no doubt that the demolition squad long ago did its work on all this. Bultmann, I think, greatly exaggerates the extent to which such mythology pervades the New Testament: there is much in it which bears no traces of its influence. But he can hardly exaggerate the intellectual objections which it generates in an age when the thinking of all who are widely influential is shaped by modern science, and by modern science rather than by philosophy. He is also right in saying that It is both senseless and impossible to accept either this mythical outlook or anything that depends upon it as being true. He knows, none better, that this is no new discovery and that all he says about it could have been said forty years ago. It was, and earlier.

When I began the study of theology, what was called liberalism and, later, modernism, which had differing Catholic and Protestant forms, attempted to deal with the inescapable objections. Roman Catholic modernism was suppressed; liberal Protestantism attempted to free the Gospel from its mythology and to set it forth in thought forms of modern knowledge. The accommodations then made enjoy the benediction of malediction; they are now by general consent estimated to have been at least in part superficial and not sustainable, though parts of them have followed the well-worn course of being first execrated, then derided as out of date and finally claimed to have been always known and taught by the church and intelligent people. But the problems were and remain genuine difficulties; and the subsequent vogue of biblical theology, though it has been fruitful, leaves the basic problems and objections unsolved, which is all a switching of interest can do. It was partly motivated by fear that liberalism eviscerated the Gospel.

It has even encouraged the resurrection of a biblical fundamentalism, regarded as stone dead in my youth, and which biblical theologians themselves reject, though I think they need and often subconsciously assume something like it if they are to commend to the modern world what, with an extensive and sometimes strained selectiveness, they put forward as the biblical view of the world and man. For they seem to me to have no satisfactory doctrine of Divine revelation distinguishable from what man, with mythical outlooks, has made of it. Biblical theology cannot set up limits to the scope and influence of human thought based on knowledge, nor will its attempts to do so ever again be widely accepted.

It is no part of the purpose of this lecture to expound how Bultmann proposes to deal with the modern challenge, but I think one aspect of it adds to intellectual objections to Christianity. He thinks it impossible to strip away the mythology of the New Testament and retain the rest of it. The only course is to 'demythologize' both the kerygma and its setting which he thinks can be done by a form of Existentialism which makes the New Testament speak to our human condition. But can it really be an answer to modern perplexities simply to proclaim that Jesus is manifested as the decisive saving event?

It is even said that Christ crucified and risen meets us in the word of preaching and nowhere else. Faith in the word of preaching is sufficient and absolute. There is no possible philosophical natural theology, next to no reliable historical basis of Christianity. Believe the message and it has saving efficacy. But what is the ground for believing? The answer given is Jesus' disciples' experience of the resurrection. But this is not, he holds, a historical confirmation of the crucifixion as the decisive saving event because the resurrection is also a matter of faith only, i.e. one act of faith has no other basis than another act of faith. And what is the resurrection?

Another theologian who accepts the radical historical scepticism of Bultmann says 'the resurrection is to be understood neither as outward nor inward, neither mystically nor as a supernatural phenomenon, nor as historical.' If this has any meaning it can only be that the resurrection is not to be understood in any sense. No intelligent religious person desires to substitute prudent acceptance of the demonstrable for faith; but when I am told that it is precisely its immunity from proof which secures the Christian proclamation from the charge of being mythological, I reply that immunity from proof can 'secure' nothing whatever except immunity from proof, and call nonsense by its name. Nor do I think anything like historical Christianity can be relieved of objections by making the validity of its assertions depend upon the therapeutic function it plays in healing fractures in the souls of believers, or understand how it can ever have this healing function unless it can be believed to be true.

It is less the facts of any science, many of which have no bearing whatever upon Christianity, from which objections arise, than by inferences from them. And it should never be forgotten that all sorts of inferences are much more commonly drawn from the psychological impressiveness of facts rather than from the careful reflection of reason upon them. Many years ago the late W.R. Inge wrote that the virtual disappearance of 'the other world' from Christian preaching was the greatest change in it during his lifetime. An intellectual objection is the great improbability so widely felt about human immortality, which Christianity certainly teaches.

I know the young are not much interested in this, naturally and rightly so. It would be unhealthy for those not far over the threshold of this life to be much concerned about another; nor can it be thought we are given life in this world to spend it wondering what happens when we leave it. Also the secular outlook of uneducated and unreflective people often makes them feel, when they hear the talk of life after death, that they are being put off their rights in this world by cheques drawn on the bank of heaven, the solvency of which they greatly doubt. But none of this removes the fundamental intellectual issue involved. So far as I know, if immortality were or should become demonstrable no established fact of science would require revision.

The widespread objection is due to the psychological impressiveness of knowledge of what happens to embodied consciousness and all that depends upon it from anaesthetics or injuries to the brain, which can reduce a human person to a living block of material substances. How much more likely is it to be so when all the living physical processes we know cease at death? If to die is to become nothing, the intellectual objection to Christianity (though not to everything in it) is that the world cannot be regarded as realizing any Divine purpose.

Next, the doctrine of the Fall of man. It arose from human reflection which St Paul later once for all summarized, 'the good which I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I practise'. The Fall-doctrine purports to explain the origin of the manifest fact that man inclines to sin, does sin and is sinful. But it is objected that on the evolutionary view of man's origin and development, Adam and his transgression, or anything remotely resembling them, simply disappear from the data. And, as a matter of history, Genesis 3, was not the first story appealed to as explaining the fact of man's inclination to sin. Further, it is said, 'fall' has no meaning except collapse or descent from higher to lower of which, except as moral evil or sin occurs in all men, history knows no trace; and apart from mechanical correctness or innocence (neither of which is either moral or immoral) righteousness, by the meaning of the word, cannot be created ready-made, but must whether by effort or by grace or by both be attained.

Moreover, if the essence of sin is said to be man substituting his own desires, concern for himself, and his willing, for the will of God, it is an absurdity to say that primitive man was or could have been guilty of it; and if he did this when he became capable of doing so and this sin of an unknown 'Adam' corruptly affected all descendants, created a state of sin or in any degree explains why all sin, it is said that logical consequences follow which are as absurd as they are simple; for in as far as it necessitates these consequences, responsibility for the sin of all men is borne by the first sinner, while if there is any transmission of sin or of an inborn compulsive tendency to sin, we inherit the consequences of the sins of all our ancestors and the total burden would be borne by the last generation of mankind. The immense structure of doctrine, coupled with theories of atonement for sin, raised on Romans 5:12-21, and other Pauline passages is often appalling to modern educated persons.

Happily the great Christian oecumenical creed says nothing to justify these theories or the disputes they have engendered, and not even the Roman church is committed to the belief in the infallibility of St Paul.

The death of Jesus was the outcome of his absolute consecration of his life to his mission. His death was not his own act but that of the Jewish priests, the Roman procurator and his soldiers: to the end he himself seems to have been sufficiently uncertain as to its necessity to pray that if it were possible the cup might pass from him. There is also a curious hiatus in what St Paul says. He undoubtedly thought death was the consequence of sin and that the death of Jesus made possible the forgiveness of all sins. If he meant physical death, then that of Jesus manifestly delivers no one, even the redeemed, from death: if he means spiritual death it is impossible to begin to understand how the physical death of Christ can deliver man from that; it is simply unintelligible, not a profound mystery.

Further, St Paul plainly thought that the death of Jesus was necessary but does not say why it was. Had he been pressed to do so I think (it is only a guess) he would have said 'Because God had so willed' and might have supported that by an appeal to the Old Testament of a kind which would now have no relevance.

It is another objection that sinners are said to have suffered constructively the penalty of their sins when Christ bore it, because the humanity of the incarnate Divine suffered it. Some would say this involves an erroneous theory of punishment in that it supposes justice to require a penalty for sin independently of any moral or spiritual effect produced upon the sinner by it, but I do not wish to pursue that because, if escaping consequences is a reason for seeking forgiveness, it merely evinces that forgiveness has not yet touched a man, because its first result is to reconcile him to accepting the consequences and so to rise above them and the sins. But in the philosophical form of the theory the a priori Platonic doctrine of universals is mis-applied.

A universal 'humanity' is supposed to have an actual existence (as distinct from merely existing in the mind) so independent of its individual manifestations in human persons that 'the universal' can be credited with the guilt of one of its particulars and can endure the punishment which all but one of the particulars do not endure, and yet to be so far inseparable from those manifestations that the endurance of the penalty can nevertheless be credited to each particular. Guilt, it is said, is corporate and implies a violation of the moral order for which humanity as a whole is responsible. The objection can be expressed thus: 'It is clear we cannot have it both ways. If the universal is so real and independent that it can be punished without each particular being punished, it cannot also be true that such a punishment endured by the universal can imply and involve its endurance by each and every particular: no juggling with universals will make it true to say that an individual who has in point of fact not been punished may nevertheless be deemed to have been punished. It is a logical fallacy to hold that everything which is true of one particular is true of each; while as to the theory that Christ is "the universal of humanity" and not a particular man, that is surely a form of words to which no intelligible meaning can be attached.

A particular man cannot also be a universal.' If 'the universal of humanity' meant only the ideal of humanity, it would be intelligible that Jesus was the ideal man; but then how the sufferings of an ideal man can benefit unideal men, except as they may tend to move them to penitence and amendment, would not be elucidated. If it be held that Jesus was not a particular man but a person in whom a universal or generic 'humanity' was united with Divinity, such a theory, if it meant anything, would be inconsistent with the real humanity of Jesus in any intelligible sense; and that he was truly human is, perhaps, the one certain thing about him.

On this matter an idealist philosopher such as the late Hastings Rashdall is in complete agreement with what any empirically based philosophy would maintain. And once it is acknowledged that we cannot be sure that we have the actual words of Jesus, one or two sayings attributed to him cannot weigh against his repeated teaching that God requires nothing but the penitence of the contrite heart to enable him to forgive, except that man must be forgiving towards other men who offend against himself.

From the modern point of view it is argued that moral evil (or, in a theistic context, sin) in beings of evolutionary development is not a serious intellectual problem if man has a measure of freedom. An act of willing is morally evil if directed to an end which a man knows or believes is contrary to his duty; otherwise his act of willing, as such, cannot be intentionally morally evil, even if others judge it to be so. In a theistic context, his willing must also be opposed to what he thinks is the will of God. For the atheist, moral evil may be as real as anything that exists but it cannot properly be called sin, for there cannot be disobedience to a god who does not exist. I think that to all Christians, as to others, human life would lose both dignity and meaning if man had no measure of free choice. Is there, in human nature, as theology has often taught, and as the not unpopular neo-Calvinism appears to teach, only an ingrained bias to evil? If this is false or inadequate, as nearly all modern moral philosophers hold it to be and human practice certainly does, Fall-doctrine as an explanation of the fact that all do sin does not arise.

It is said that the issue is not whether man's will is often evil but whether it is always so. The answer of moral experience is not in doubt, and can be held to be more immediate and certain than any theories based on short passages in the writings of an apostle. There are innumerable acts of devotion to duty by multitudes of men and women as well as the most horrible cruelties and wickednesses.

The sometimes almost incredible good is as real as the sometimes almost incredible evil. Desire and duty often conflict. Experience shows beyond doubt that man can rise to the one as well as fall to the other. If man were not tempted to do what he knows he ought not to do there would be no moral life. Desires arise out of what is morally neutral in that they can be turned to good or evil.

The desire itself is natural and there is no evidence that it was ever anything else. A doctrine of inherent depravity, if it mitigated personal accountability, would mean that man's choices between good and evil are delusory. It is an induced delusion, not fact of experience, that man can of himself do no good thing. I think it would be hard to find anyone, whatever his religious beliefs, who would justify his own evil conduct by refusing responsibility for failure to resist temptation. Yet if, by his own effort, he cannot resist temptation, he has no responsibility for failure to resist it - a wholly demoralizing proposition. If, by his own effort, man cannot will or do what is not evil he cannot be justly blamed, either by man or God, if he does nothing but evil. (1)

There is no escape from this by saying that only by Divine grace can man will or do good; because, if God be creator and his nature includes love, to be totally outside the creator's enveloping grace is a condition in which no man can ever be except, perhaps, as he deliberately and consciously separates himself from it. If Divine grace is offered to man, not forced upon him against his will, man can accept or refuse it; and the choice between accepting or refusing grace is itself a choice between good and evil. If a man can choose to seek and respond to Divine grace, how can it be said he has no will to good?

Only if God confers grace on some and not on others or if man's activity in accepting or refusing grace is comparable with the activity of a bucket when water is poured into it. The root of the doctrine of human depravity is not in direct experience but in the much more dubious statements of the Bible, reinforced by Augustine, regarded as revelation of pro-positional truth.

And here we contact a further objection, for modern theologians who are not Roman Catholics or biblical fundamentalists reject the notion of Divine revelation as consisting in the conveyance of prepositional truths. Here also, it is widely felt, we reach the most fundamental and pervading objections to Christianity, for it is beyond doubt that Christian doctrine was elaborated on the basis of confidence that revelation was of this character - information, otherwise unattainable, imparted, if only fractionally, by the Deity. For the modern man,ever since biblical criticism emerged to produce confusion, science, philosophy and theology alike arose and have developed out of man's ineradicable urge to try to explain, when the knowledge requisite for explanation was scanty as compared with that now available.

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[1] See On Selfhood and Godhood by C.A. Campbell.

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God cannot be regarded as revealing or inspiring notions destined to be found ethically and otherwise defective by man himself. Wherever morality has become decisive in man's theological opining, mythology has tended to become obsolete. The Old Testament itself is the classic example of the part played by ethical considerations in the advance and refinements of religious beliefs. But it is felt that this requires no belief in Divine revelation or inspiration of a different kind or source than is necessary to account for the Greek advances in philosophy and art, the Roman genius for law, or the amazing advances in the sciences in the modern world. 'Nothing', it is said, 'succeeds like success', specially if the first success be to have struck the road which leads to the goal.

As for the supreme instance of revelation, the coming and teaching of Christ 'in the fullness of time' it can be said that an Amos, Hosea, Micah, Isaiah and later Old Testament prophets would have been as capable as, if not more capable than, the majority of people today of understanding and appropriating the teachings of Christ had they been revealed to them. And Divine revelation, whatever the Divine activity, implies the human reception and understanding of it for what it is. It is a fatal objection that there can be Divine revelation which is unassimilable by human understanding. Alleged revelation which is incomprehensible, whatever else it may be, is not revelation. There is an essential but easily concealed and overlooked implication in claiming that anything is true: it is that there are sufficient grounds for knowing or for reasonable belief that it is true. This is at once evident if we envisage the opposite statement, 'This is true, but I have no grounds for knowing or believing it to be true', which is absurd. Human understanding and assimilation are involved in asserting the trueness of any proposition whatsoever.

What was said earlier about the philosophy of universals and particulars is also relevant to objections against the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity, specially with reference to the incarnation as meaning that Christ was one person uniting two complete natures, the Divine and human. It is no valid objection to the idea of Divine incarnation that it cannot be fully explained in terms drawn from anything else; for if it be a fact, it is unique, and the unique cannot be wholly elucidated in terms drawn from anything else because, if it could be, that would abolish its uniqueness and reduce it to one instance of the otherwise common. But no knowledge, modern or other, does or can know or even envisage a complete human nature which is not also a human person. 'Human nature' is nothing but an abstract noun connoting attributes which its use saves us from specifying at length. There is no ground or reason whatever, except baseless imagining, which justifies hypostatizing 'human-nature' into a 'universal-humanity' existing apart from its particulars. An 'impersonal human nature' is as baseless as any idea can be.

A human nature owes its characteristics both to the kind of body and to the kind of soul (if any) which constitutes a person; and the souls of men are, surely, not of the same order or kind as the creator of human souls. In any event, orthodoxy repudiated the notion that Christ had not a truly human soul. It can be said reasonably that the only theory which makes the idea of Divine incarnation intelligible is that the Divine in Christ functioned as a second subject, together with his human soul, of the experiences of Jesus. There is nothing inconceivable or contrary to knowledge in the thought that, in Christ, two subjects were combined in synthetic activities.

Empirically based knowledge can afford no analogy; but how could it if the incarnation is unique? And this view seems to be required if the incarnation means, as it does, not the conversion of the Godhead into flesh but the taking of the manhood into God; for unless the resurrection and ascension are taken to mean the literal absorption of the manhood into God, which would involve the abolition of the manhood, the manhood must still function as one activity in the Divine being.

The same objection applies equally to the doctrine of the Trinity. The history of that doctrine shows nothing so clearly as that it is the attempt to think of an actual entity which can be described by the technical term 'person' which is neither an individual person in the accepted meaning of the word nor an attribute or adjectival quality of a person, but something between the two, an entity which is neither noun nor adjective. As the human mind cannot conceive such an actuality it can reasonably be said that nothing can justify the assertion of its actual existence; and in spite of the difficulties, orthodoxy remains monotheistic and logical in asserting that God is one and therefore in being modalistic. The remaining objection is that then it does not enrich non-Trinitarian theism and that it seems to lose philosophic-theological importance. From the point of view of religious devotion the tri-unity of God is spoken of in language which renders it indistinguishable from tritheism; but that God is other than one is a departure, if an unconscious one, from orthodoxy.

It may be objected that Christianity over-personalizes the Divine. It would be much easier, in some respects, if we could think of God as concerned only with human life; but to do so is impossible and inconsistent with the conception of God as the creator or ground of the universe. Creation, or absolute origination, is ex hypothesi ultimate, and therefore non-explicable: it would not be ultimate if it were. But no thoughtful person can ignore the fact that the universe, as modern astronomy reveals it, reveals no sign of personal activity. It may be psychological impressiveness, but none the less effective for being so, which leads men to think that the originator of inconceivably vast masses of flaming gas cannot be personal in any ordinary meaning of the word or that he or it can be in any sense specially concerned with one particular and relatively minute satellite of one small star among countless myriads and, at that, an elderly one which has long outgrown the turbulent heats of youth and is well on its way to join the more senile class of luminiferous bodies. I know that there are those who rejoice in what they call 'the scandal of particularity'; but to the thoughtful mind it is the scandal in which they rejoice, a scandal which outrages thoughtful human minds.

With one accord theologians acknowledge that we only speak of God as personal because that is the highest category of unity in diversity which we know. But having made their deferential bow to this inadequacy, they proceed to ignore it and continue to magnify the Lord in language which suggests that he is an inconceivably magnified personality, on the ground that all relations with him in religious experience are more like personal relationships than are our relations with things. I do not wish to be thought to maintain that religious experiences are an isolable source of knowledge. I think they are dependent upon beliefs and vary with beliefs; they can greatly enrich beliefs, but only if the beliefs are otherwise grounded. There is ample evidence that the effectiveness of beliefs of any kind depends, not upon their truth but on the intensity with which they are believed.

Awe, veneration, worship, prayer, sacrifice, the sense of dependence, insignificance and guilt, instinctive obedience, need of purification, a sense of deliverance and joy - these are found in other living religions as in Christianity, and in cults which now have only historical interest. I think nothing but dogmatism can dismiss these activities and experiences of human nature as universal illusion. They may be regarded as the result of the 'projection' of subjective cravings and wishes; and that may well be the psychological account of them. But it is a further question (and one which psychology which knows its limits and minds its own business and does not assume the disguise of science to masquerade as philosophy or theology will not attempt to answer) whether the projection is directed towards nothing or towards an invisible reality which evokes it. But it does not follow that religious experiences and activities point to a reality as their object, or that they entitle us to bestow a character and attributes upon that object, or to claim truth for a message proclaimed as his or its word without reference to other knowledge about the world and man, still less to ascribe to him or it a nature and attributes inconsistent with such other knowledge.

Religious experience has found expression in various and inconsistent and even grotesque mythologies and theologies; and there may be other features of the universe which do not confirm the view of its nature or the kind of explanation of it which man's religious life indicates. It is only by reference to a wider range of experience and knowledge than purely religious experiences that reasonable men can find grounds, as well as causes, for religious beliefs that can claim truth. But as personality is the highest category we know which the world-ground has produced, the possibility of which must have been present in the primary collocations of the universe whatever they were, there is good ground for ascribing personality to its originator, provided we remember not to over-personalize the world-ground, or God. Whatever the difficulties of the doctrine of the Tri-unity of God, at least it enables us, as was said long ago, to speak of personality in God rather than of the personality of God. No one has or can have exhaustive knowledge of God as he is in himself.

Human personality may be, indeed must be, but a faint copy of Divine personality. The essential in theism is that God, as the ground of the universe, must be an intelligent and ethical being. Thought of as apart from and prior to his world, God becomes a cosmologically useless idea. We can no more conceive a transition from a universeless God to God and a universe than logically move from an absolute one to a finite many. Any such attempts are nothing more than mythological imagining. We should conceive the Divine nature as including more than human personality immeasurably perfected, with capacities beyond our understanding as human knowledge transcends the cognition of an insect.

Intellectual objections to Christianity nowadays, in my judgement, and the fact that there are at present no convincing answers to them, both grow out of one root. This is that there is no general of widely accepted natural theology. I know that many theologians rejoice that it is so and seem to think that it leaves them free to commend Christianity as Divine revelation. They know not what they do. For if the immeasurably vast and mysterious creation reveals nothing of its originator or of his or its attributes and nature, there is no ground whatever for supposing that any events recorded in an ancient and partly mythopoeic literature and deductions from it can do so. Nor is it anything but silly to pretend that the human mind cannot judge of such matters; for if it cannot, every ground for belief, unbelief or disbelief is taken away, because every propositional statement is the work of the human mind. It is also useless to proceed without investigation of the nature of what we call knowledge or beliefs based upon it, of how in fact we attain them; and the basis of such knowledge and beliefs must be empirical if it is to be anything other than baseless opining. This does not mean that anything incapable of empirical verification is either meaningless or untrue: it does mean that we can only proceed by analogy or symbolism, from what has an empirical foundation, to a natural theology, for we know ourselves and something about the creation before we know anything of God or gods, and there is nothing else by which to judge between competing and inconsistent claims that Christian or other religious doctrines rest on Divine revelation. Otherwise any claim that there has been such Divine revelation which can set limits to or override human thought is sheer dogmatisms

No one, I suppose, would regard the so-called 'age of enlightenment', the eighteenth century, as other than almost unique in self-confidence, assurance of its own superior wisdom and its profound neglect of the accumulated experience of humanity; but it should have taught us one truth once and for all, namely, that though there must be many truths which any human mind does not know or of which it cannot perceive the truth, nothing can be true for any mind except as that mind can be brought to perceive its reasonableness as knowledge or belief, and that alleged revelation is of no use except as it enables man to attain his own insights. For 'truth' is not a synonym for fact: it is the correspondence of mind with fact. For whatever God may reveal, human reception and understanding of it are involved in asserting it to be Divine revelation.

Unintelligible or humanly unassimilable alleged revelation, whatever else it may be, is not revelation. If there be Divine revelation it may transcend but it cannot contradict what we have reasonable grounds for regarding as knowledge or reasonably grounded belief, because otherwise it implies an overriding of the proper dignity of the moral or ethical personality which God has created; and if He does this, God at the same time removes all possibility of human judgement as to whether it is Divine revelation or not. The only possible basis for a reasonably grounded natural theology is what we call scientific. The difficulty is that there is no such actuality as 'science'; there are many and increasing sciences. Their deliverances are not as yet mutually consistent. This is the root difficulty in constructing a natural theology. For myself, I cling to the hope that it will, in time, become possible.

Meanwhile I think there is nothing that can be called knowledge or reasonable belief that there is or can be anything in the human mind that can possibly justify the passing of such a colossal condemnation on this inconceivably vast and mysterious universe as is implied in the judgement that it has no meaning or enduring value. Further, I think it is entirely reasonable for any man who studies the spirit of the facing of life as Christ faced it, and his recorded teaching, to decide that by him he will stand through life, death or eternity rather than join in a possible triumph of any evil over him.

Whether or not any church will regard such a man as a Christian is nowadays wholly secondary and manifestly relatively unimportant: any church which refuses so to recognize him may be harming itself; it cannot harm him, and he should accept the refusal with regret but with equanimity. This, I think, is the state of affairs in which, whether we like it or not, we do in fact live; and it will long continue. There is really nothing new in it.

It took over 250 years for the church to reach a general agreement that Christ was fully Divine and fully human, well over another hundred years of debate about the relation of the Divine and human in him. Throughout this period the decisions of bishops in council and otherwise were bewildering in their contradictions and there was an insufferable strife of tongues which must have made it impossible for the ordinary man to know whether or no he was an 'orthodox' Christian. But Christianity survived; and it will survive present difficulties, objections and uncertainties, though perhaps in a different form.

Those who try to chart the Christian spiritual life of the intellectual saints distinguish in it a period which they call 'the dark night of the soul' during which all the comforts and certitudes of the truth seem to be withdrawn. They have persisted and triumphed. This is the hard way and it is ours in this age. Christians sing in a saint's day hymn

They wrestled hard, as we do now,
With sins, and doubts, and fears.

This is so often precisely what we do not do. We wish to make religion an escape from the conflict, a haven of refuge even from trials of faith, and tend to enjoy the contempt for others which only a sense of religious superiority can give, forgetting that it is he who shall endure to the end who shall be saved.