GOD

Outline

I. Biblical view grounded in God’s self-revelation

Evangelical Christianity traces to divine self-revelation all authentic information about God’s reality, perfections, and purposes. This supernatural disclosure is universally given in nature, history, and conscience, and in the special redemptive events of Judeo-Christian history climaxed by the incarnation of the Logos. In the inspired Scriptures God has addressed to man, as fallen and sinful, an objective, propositional declaration of His nature and work centering in redemptive rescue.

The Bible reveals God as the eternal Spirit, the infinite Creator and preserver, judge of all the universe, and redeemer of all who put their faith in Him. Its characterization of the living God is everywhere related to divine disclosure. The summary by the Westminster divines remains highly serviceable: “God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchanging in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth.” Whereas modern theory expounds love as the core of divine being, and deprives other attributes of equal ultimacy in the divine nature, this statement defines love (as a manifestation of goodness) in a way that does not subordinate the righteousness and justice of God.

II. Scholastic view based on rationalistic proofs

The medieval scholastics tended to shift discussion of the case for theism from revelation to speculation, and as a result the exposition of God’s nature acquired rationalistic metaphysical overtones. Thomas Aquinas, in the 13th cent. shaped the traditionally official theology of the Roman Catholic Church. His Summa contended that, apart from any appeal to divine revelation, the existence of God, and the existence and immortality of the human soul, are logically demonstrable, as a necessary inference from the universe. Thomas also asserted that man thus acquires a knowledge only of the divine existence but not of the divine essence. He further distinguished between univocal and analogical knowledge, denying that man’s knowledge of God coincides at any point with God’s knowledge of Himself. The scholastics thus compromised the importance and primacy of divine revelation and rested the case for theism first and foremost on natural theology.

III. Modern transition from speculative theism to naturalism

With the rise of modern philosophy, speculative theism further displaced Biblical theism. From Descartes onward, the case for the supernatural is typically referred to nature and to man; no longer is it grounded in an appeal to special divine disclosure, the incarnate Logos, and the inspired Scriptures. Medieval theorizing had prepared the way for this speculative trend, and Protestant reformers vigorously protested it, as seen in the writings of Calvin and Luther. Descartes, a distinguished Jesuit mathematician, remained a professing Catholic despite his assertion of skepticism as a philosophical method. He predicated all truth, including proof of God’s existence, upon prior establishment of the reality of the self. From innate ideas he derived the existence of God as perfect being, omniscent, omnipotent, and infinite. Descartes’ scheme embraced a curious circularity: in the clearness and distinctiveness of man’s ideas he grounded man’s certainty of knowledge regarding his own existence and God’s, yet he invoked God’s veracity as the guarantee of this knowledge.

By its speculative rather than scriptural orientation of the question of God, modern philosophy was led to successive and extensive revisions of Christian doctrine. Unitarian theism insisted on the unipersonality of God as against trinitarianism, so that the divine triunity was an early casualty. God’s role as creator remained, although pantheists viewed the universe and man in terms of emanation rather than of creation ex nihilo. Divine redemptive activity was less and less understood in Biblical categories.

Yet, in its beginnings, modern philosophy (Descartes, Leibnitz, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel) was theistic or idealistic rather than naturalistic in intention and mood. But once the case for theism abandoned revelation as its ground, and a Biblical basis was ignored, the exposition of the supernatural was increasingly vexed by instability. The ground of belief was shifted away from divine disclosure to human reason, experience, intuition, or other facets of man’s awareness. Although supernaturalistic in its beginnings, modern philosophy moved swiftly and suddenly toward naturalism.

A. Neo-Protestant reactions and concessions. Kant, although a professed theist, had surrendered all cognitive knowledge of metaphysical realities; he considered God a regulative ideal demanded by man’s moral nature but insisted that knowledge of suprasensible reality is unattainable. In the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics Kant mentions the possibility of an analogical noncognitive notion of God: “a concept of the Supreme Being sufficiently determined for us, though we have left out everything that could determine it absolutely or in itself”—thus discarding “objective anthropomorphism” (sec. 58). Here one readily finds anticipations of more recent theological emphases.

Hegel stressed Reason, but transmuted the Christian emphasis that God is revealed as truth and spirit into a spiritual monism; his pantheistic theory of the Absolute forsook the scriptural doctrine of God as a reality transcendent to nature and man. Although he retained a trinitarian approach, Hegel recast history as the differentiation of the Infinite into finite manisfestations by a dialectical process. He deliberately chose the term Geist as a governing principle. He thrust aside Kant’s restrictions on man’s competency to know metaphysical truth, but his abortive doctrine of the Holy Spirit led to unbiblical notions of man’s reason as the candle of the Lord. In The Spirit of Christianity he miscarried the Biblical view of man in the image of God to a perverse emphasis that man as spirit can grasp and comprehend the divine Spirit in his present condition apart from mediated revelation, and sought to reinforce this notion by an exegesis of selected passages from John’s gospel. In deference to his speculations of evolutionary pantheistic immanence, he erased the adverse noetic consequences of the fall of man, concealed the need of once-for-all divine revelation and redemption, and through his false metaphysics misstated even the doctrine of general revelation. This denial of God’s transcendence, and of divine wrath against man as sinner, and of the need of miraculous redemption—predicated on immanentistic evolutionary assumptions—became decisive elements of classic rationalistic modernism.

1. Liberal theology. During the late 19th cent. and into the second decade of the 20th, the religious philosophies of Kant and Hegel were theologically most influential. Kant had differentiated God from man and the universe but he had condemned man to cognitive ignorance of the supernatural; his concealment of the reality and intelligibility of divine revelation inspired a vast variety of anti-metaphysical theologies. Hegel promoted human competence in the realm of metaphysics by unabashedly making man a part of God; thus he obscured the real presence of God in his transcendent confrontation of man as a finite creation and moral rebel. In either event the religious spirit of the age set itself over against revelation in the Biblical understanding, and consequently lent itself to arbitrary notions of deity.

Despite the fabulous supernaturalisms advanced by the metaphysical idealists of the 19th cent., or perhaps encouraged by it, the modern movement in philosophy continued away from theism toward humanism or naturalism; idealistic theory was constantly beset by waning faith in God. Karl Marx, in revolt against Hegel, described the real world not as an evolutionary manifestation of Absolute Spirit, but as a process of dialectical materialism—with economic determinism as its critical center. John Dewey retained the term God while he rejected the supernatural; empirical scientific method had become for him the sole arbiter of what modern man can know and believe. The humanists welcomed liberal Protestant concessions that disowned the miracles of the Bible, but pressed the modernists additionally to reject the absoluteness of Jesus of Nazareth on the ground of its equal incompatibility with empirical methodology as the definitive criterion of knowledge. The perverse misunderstanding of divine revelation led on, therefore, not only to a rejection of idealistic speculative theology, with its confusion of God’s acting and speaking with man’s history and religious life, but automatically and uncritically also to rejection of the God of Biblical revelation so long obscured and nullified by the heaven-absorbing idealists.

Freed from dependence on and answerability to Biblical revelation, modern religious philosophers swiftly and successively assailed one or another facet of the inherited Judeo-Christian view of God. Naturalists waged a comprehensive frontal attack on the basic emphasis that God is Spirit—an immaterial and invisible mind and will. The naturalistic philosophy could tolerate no reality superior to and independent of the space-time continuum; whatever gods it accommodated were simply capitalized aspects of the space-time process. But lesser assaults on the Christian definition of God were also common. As had John Stuart Mill in the 19th cent., so Edgar S. Brightman in the 20th rejected the infinity of God for a finite deity. Henry Nelson Wieman, contrary to the traditional emphasis on God as eternal and unchanging, dignified the moving front of the evolutionary process as divine. Not a single divine attribute affirmed by historic Christian theology was undisputed in the recent modern period; in fact, many neo-Protestant theologians not only denied a distinction between divine goodness or benevolence and justice, but some even promoted a “new morality” that in God’s name approved conduct contravening the divine commands in Scripture.

An overview of early 20th cent. theological speculation will disclose its oscillation between innate, historical, and experiential approaches to the doctrine of God. Belief in God was grounded in finite man’s feeling of anxiety or cosmic loneliness; or as an awareness of divinity involved in man’s sense of absolute dependence; or viewed as a subjective necessity of human nature; or as a precognitive intuition; or as a psychic response to the mystery of the universe. Or this belief was derived from empirical reflection upon nature, or affirmed as a requirement of man’s moral nature, or regarded as an inference either from the decline of civilization or from supposed evolutionary progress.

2. Dialectical theology. The Hegelian orientation of 19th cent. religious thought underlay the anthropocentric character of much of its theology. All questions about God were raised in the context of human experience on the assumption of an essential kinship and partial identity of the human and divine Spirit. This secularizing religious trend was called into judgment by the theology of crisis through its vigorous reassertion of special divine revelation—the Word of God confronting man from without, and making an absolute demand upon him. Yet the single most influential factor shaping neo-Protestant theology had perhaps been Kant’s anti-metaphysical dogma that the limits of human reason exclude cognitive knowledge of supernatural reality. Even Barth, who strove energetically to rise above Ritschl’s disparagement of knowledge in favor of trust as the essence of Christian experience, held in his earliest writings that the quest for conceptual knowledge of God characterizes speculative philosophy and not prophetic-apostolic declaration. Even when Barth later insisted that the believer has religiously adequate knowledge of God, he hedged this concession: the believer acquires this knowledge only as a bonus of personal divine confrontation. Thus Barth still left in doubt the universal validity of the believer’s conceptions of God even on the basis of special revelation. Neo-Protestant theology has characteristically shunned metaphysics as an illicit concern, or at least as outside the orbit of divine revelation. It depicted the Biblical interest in divine transcendence as simply kerygmatic—that is, as expressive of faith-constructs rather than of cognitive trust about supernatural reality; hence, the religious exposition of divine transcendence was distinguished from philosophical affirmations about metaphysical transcendence in a way that stripped cognitive rights from the theologians and conferred them—if any—wholly upon the philosophers.

Nonetheless the rise of neo-orthodoxy after World War I marked a new theological era increasingly predicated on divine transcendence, special revelational disclosure, and wrath against sin. By the 1930s, crisis theology, or dialectical theology as it was widely designated, achieved the open collapse of classic modernism as a formative theological influence in Europe. Both Barth and Emil Brunner espoused the view that God meets human beings paradoxically in the Word, and personally makes that Word his own. Against Ritschlian theology, Barth insisted that divine wrath has NT as well as OT reality: Jesus’ crucifixion supremely exhibits the fact that God meets man in wrath and grace in the NT as he met Israel in the OT. Yet Barth carried forward the modernist subordination of divine righteousness and wrath to love, and inadequately related the latter to the core of God’s being. In expounding God’s perfections, Barth considers righteousness and mercy, wrath and love, simply as variants of the same scriptural theme.

For all the neo-orthodox reaffirmation of divine transcendence, its delineation of divinity was vulnerable through its compromise of the historical evangelical acknowledgment of scripturally revealed truths about God. The dialectical theology had the merit of restoring some elements of Judeo-Christian revelation, but it obscured others, and in fact explicitly rejected propositional scriptural revelation. Barth’s warning that modernism’s loss of the self-revealing God made unavoidable the loss of God Himself, was too indefinite. The lesson taught by neo-orthodoxy is that the loss of an inscripturated revelation leads to the loss of the Judeo-Christian God who acts and speaks for Himself.

3. Existential theology. Rudolf Bultmann’s existential theology, projected as a counter-thrust to the Barthian view, soon won its way. Bultmann insisted that Barth’s essential emphasis that God transcendently reveals Himself in personal confrontation requires neither the Biblical miracles, nor a correlation of revelation with the Biblical history. Bultmann therefore dismissed interest in the historical Jesus, and shifted the center of Christian faith to the kerygmatic, or apostolically-proclaimed Christ. Barth’s theological effort to sustain quasi-objectivity for God, against an approach that seemed wholly to subjectivize God, proved unavailing; Bultmann’s alternative emphasized the reality of God while wholly dispensing with larger remnants of an evangelical theology on which Barth had insisted.

Many contemporary theologians assail the modernist theology of the recent past for suppressing the once-for-all uniqueness of the Christ-event in its exposition of divine revelation. Yet this criticism proceeds not from evangelical but rather from existential motivations. It is charged that the entire past theological tradition—both evangelical and modernist—misunderstood the “true” nature of the revelation event, now redefined as recurring personal confrontation. This reconstruction of the doctrine of revelation rests on a radical exaggeration of God’s transcendence by current dialectical and/or existential theologians. Consequently they deny that revelation is mediated objectively in historical events or in human concepts and language, and dismiss the revelatory status of Scripture in order to insist on contemporaneous disclosure. Sören Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the leap of faith that alone bridges the gulf between eternity and time, his notion of the moment filled with eternity, inspired this correlation of faith and Christ-event in contrast to the Biblical and evangelical understanding of revelation. Here the Christ-event no longer bears the meaning of an occurrence open to historical investigation, nor is “once-for-allness” associated with a content of revelation mediated by divinely chosen prophets and apostles.

In the Bible the events of holy history—supremely the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ—carry a revelation-meaning that the inspired writings define in the context of prophecy and fulfillment. But Bultmann’s philosophical bias forces his dismissal of all history as ambiguous; instead he assimilates revelation wholly to contemporary personal experience. Bultmann disavows as revelation the sacred truths delivered once-for-all by the Bible prophets and apostles; revelation he redefines rather as an eschatological event that happens again and again in the existential response of persons throughout the life of the Church.

Barthian dialectical theology was unable to stem a declension to the existentialism of Bultmann, with its “demythologizing” of the miraculous elements of the NT. The Bultmannian approach in turn was unable to arrest a further decline. For the so-called Mainz radicals, Herbert Braun and Manfred Mezger, reduced God to the anthropological dimension of love in intrapersonal relationships. From the left, existentialist theologians have been pressed to indicate on what ground they insist that it is only in the Word (Christ) that God confronts men (Schubert Ogden), or why, quite apart from insistence on the supernatural, agape in interpersonal relationships may not as authentically define divine confrontation and response?

Recent modern theology emphasizes the hiddenness of God, mainly on the basis of dialectical or existential projections of divine revelation as extra-rational. A passage from a recent book by J. Rodman Williams serves to illuminate this ready transition of existential theories to the secular point of view:

“Existentialism, philosophical and theological, atheistic and non-atheistic, non-Christian and Christian, is quite closely related to the obscurity of God. It matters not whether this be the ‘silence of God’ (Sartre), the ‘absence of God’ (Heidegger), the ‘concealment of God’ (Jaspers), the ‘non-being of God’ (Tillich), or the ‘hiddenness of God’ (Bultmann)....The obscurity of God might indeed be called ‘the Eclipse of God’ (Contemporary Existentialism and Christian Faith [1965], pp. 63f.).

Evangelical theologians have resisted attempts to equate such treatments with Luther’s stress on the hidden God. G. C. Berkouwer rightly indicts a “completely unbiblical concept of God” that separates the God of revelation from the lives of believers and compromises “the absolute trustworthiness and sufficiency” of His revelation (Divine Election [1955], 125). Berkouwer repudiates the conception of a God who discloses just enough of Himself to keep man in despair of ever knowing the real God. God is hidden to the worldly-wise and proud; He is revealed to the humble who seek grace. The problem of revelation is not divine paradox but human pride. The paradox theologians, Berkouwer notes, postulate an inverted natural theology, by locating the offense of Christianity in an abstract dialectic (based on the supposed infinite qualitative difference between God and man) rather than in its demand for repentance and rescue (The Work of Christ [1965], 34).

4. Ecumenical chaos in theology. By the last third of the 20th cent. the neo-Protestant ecumenical scene was in complete disarray respecting the nature and reality of God, and in Protestant circles only evangelical scholars championed the case for Biblical theism on the ground of revelation and reason.

B. Secular views and death-of-God speculation. Some philosophical theologians attempted a revival of interest in ontology. Among these was Paul Tillich, who defined ontology, however, not to designate a spiritual reality “beyond the world,” but to refer to a structure of orders of being supposedly encountered in man’s meeting with reality; the immanent ground of being replaces the supernatural transcendent God. His notion that the modern scientific world-view annuls any possibility of faith in the supernatural God of the Bible is patently arbitrary. The supernatural has been a problem for every secular worldview, prescientific or scientific. The transcendent Creator-Redeemer God of the Bible was no less alien to the thinking of Plotinus and Seneca, Descartes and Hegel, than to Bishop John A. T. Robinson. The bias against the Biblical view springs from a readiness to taper the methods of knowing reality to empirically-based rationalism.

Reinhold Niebuhr countered Tillich’s view by insisting that God is a mysterious source of order above and beyond the orders and evils of the world. But Niebuhr, too, rejected objectifiable knowledge of God, and grounded affirmations of divine transcendence in the supposed dialectical experience of man in relation to the divine. Hence, the assertion of transcendence implied an epistemological predicament rather than metaphysical affirmation defining God’s perfections.

The recent secular tendency to rest the case for theism wholly upon empirical scientific investigation of reality rules out in advance the existence of a supernatural God, by delimiting the field of reality to areas of inquiry that fall within this methodology. But it has also provoked the rise of linguistic theology, which defends the validity of language about trans-empirical supernatural reality as functionally meaningful, but not as conceptually true. But if religious language merely reflects a psychological or experimental necessity in man, and the cognitive validity of religious ideas is ruled out, then no reason can be adduced for preferring one religion to another, or any to none.

One outcome of modern theological declension toward a wholly secular view of life was the emergence of “death of God” speculation, which revived a theme already found in Nietzsche. Some writers, like Gabriel Vahanian, by their reference to the “death of God” simply refer factually to the modern cultural development wherein the reality of God has increasingly become an irrelevance. A Jewish rabbi has said, “God is dead as seen from Auschwitz.”

Others, like Thomas J. J. Altizer, contend that in the crucifixion of Christ, God literally died, and that since the events of the gospels the human Jesus alone has formative significance for Christianity.

It is noteworthy that neo-Protestant theological formulations have had a shorter survival span as the decades have passed. Of all the short-term options in neo-Protestant theology, the death-of-God view has most swiftly run its course. The vast majority of theologians today readily identify themselves with the comment of John B. Cobb Jr., that the reality of the referent of “God” as part of one’s intellectual conviction is “a matter of life or death” for one’s spiritual existence as a Christian. Already the contemporary scene shows signs of a new quest for God. Theological concentration on this theme is still more evident in theological journals and in paperback publications than in larger tomes, but the call for new devotion to systematic theology is also heard. This mood does not characterize all branches of the Church; in Europe young seminarians disillusioned by the constantly changing frontiers in theology are taking a “wait and see” attitude that defers specific commitments, while in America, where more of the old liberalism survives on seminary campuses than elsewhere, many students doubt that a theology is possible, and more are unable to identify their commitment in terms of specifics.

IV. Evangelical evaluation of influential current views

The 20th cent. has been an age of extensive travel in theology no less than in tourism. The doctrine of God has emerged in recent modern thought as a main departure point for highly novel excursions. Although the many speculations about deity so conflict and compete that no identifiable “contemporary view” of God exists, a number of distinguishing features characterize some of the more influential modern theories. A survey of the slant and emphasis of these more recent views will aid us in comparing and contrasting them with the historic Christian doctrine of God, and in assessing the current trend in the light of the Biblical revelation of God.

A. Avoidance of empirical orientation. Recent modern theology exhibits a marked disinclination to base the case for theism on empirical arguments from man and the world, and a tendency rather to view the traditional proofs of God as an endeavor to confirm or justify a belief antecedently held or received on other grounds.

The contemporary outlook, in other words, avoids the view of Aquinas, who held that by experience alone, apart from revelation, one can logically demonstrate God’s existence by the so-called “fivefold proof.” Except by a rather small circle of scholars seeking to revive an emphasis on “natural theology,” empirical evidences, where now adduced, are cast at most in a supportive role. There is a divided response to the critical theory of Kant, who limited the content of man’s knowledge to sense experience and rejected rational metaphysics, but postulated God as a “regulative” ideal. Those who exalt scientific empiricism as the only method of verification tend to shun faith in the supernatural entirely, and are prone to promote a wholly secular theology, although some linguistic theologians perpetuate the notion that the role of religious theory in man’s life is psychological rather than cognitive. But much recent modern theology connects the case for theism with divine revelation, by stressing God’s self-demonstration in His words and ways as the basis of faith, or moves behind empirical considerations to man’s primal ontological awareness of a religious reality.

For the wrong reasons some influential Christian spokesmen in the recent past have totally dismissed all empirical considerations.

Kierkegaard espoused the view that, as absolutely different, God the “wholly Other” poses a limit to human reason. He asserted the certainty of God’s existence, but held that the philosopher must leap to a conclusion beyond proof and evidence, because faith by nature supposedly involves an act of will that cannot be rationally justified. Whereas Kant made non-cognition of God a basis for faith, Kierkegaard tied faith in God to a direct paradoxic divine-human confrontation. So radically did Kierkegaard disjoin eternity and time that man’s epistemological predicament assertedly requires a divine Teacher who gives truth in the form of Absolute Paradox—the infinite in the form of a servant.

The bankruptcy of natural theology became a leading motif of neo-orthodox theology (see esp. Barth’s Church Dogmatics I/1 and I/2), and then of existential theology. These movements emphasize personal revelational disclosure and individual response; they repudiate objective metaphysical knowledge on any basis, and disparage universally valid truths about God. Barth considered the theological anthropology of Hegelian idealism a special target, since it viewed man and nature as extensions or manifestations of God. To Barth, all association of divine revelation with man and the universe seemed objectionably to imply that these are God’s necessary environment. Hence Barth’s insistence that there is no way “up” to God by proofs or arguments from human consciousness or nature led him at the same time to repudiate a general divine revelation in man and the world.

Emil Brunner, however, championed general revelation. He refused to brush aside the speculative arguments for God as insignificant, and stressed that philosophical theism is the closest approximation of God possible to reason independent of special revelation. But, like Barth, he insisted that the living God is known only in paradoxic personal confrontation.

Dooyeweerd likewise eliminates metaphysics as a rational science. yet he insists on a revelation of God in nature, a general Word-revelation, which man as sinner holds down and perverts. God’s common grace conserves the fallen cosmos, but provides no basis for the autonomy of reason in the natural sphere, and no ground for natural theology; common grace can itself be understood only in terms of God’s special grace in Christ.

Contemporary expositions of Thomistic philosophy have acquired a defensive character, partly because neo-Protestant theology reasserted the priority of special revelation, and partly because of evangelical and other criticisms of the medieval “fivefold proof.” Whereas Aquinas appealed in his pursuit of natural theology to reason without faith, in order to arrive at reason with faith, and whereas neo-Protestant theologians like Barth promote a theology of faith beyond reason, evangelical thinkers like J. Gresham Machen, Edward John Carnell, Gordon H. Clark, and Cornelius Van Til emphasized faith and reason, or revelation and reason, to combine the priority of divine revelation with the intelligible revelational significance of man and the universe. Clark shows that the Thomistic arguments and their modern reconstruction are invalid (Religion, Reason and Revelation [1961], 36ff.).

George F. Thomas grants that the empirical fivefold proof does not yield logically certain knowledge of God, but holds that they “approximate” the truth, and espouses a modified form of Aquinas’ arguments. More significantly, he relates the empirical arguments to a belief in God otherwise arrived at, and hence as making faith more reasonable (Religious Philosophies of the West [1965], 320). This reconstruction leaves in doubt the serviceability of the arguments as empirical proofs.

Among evangelical scholars, J. Oliver Buswell Jr. and Stewart Hackett have revived emphasis on the empirical arguments for God. Buswell grants that the theistic arguments cannot logically prove God’s existence, but assigns them the force of probability (A Systematic Theology of the Christian Religion [1962], 72); he adds to the Thomistic arguments an inductive form of the ontological argument, and holds that the arguments establish “a presumption in favor of faith in the God of the Bible,” and that unbelief is morally culpable (ibid., p. 100). He stresses that personal faith is a divine gift, but that the Holy Spirit uses the inductive arguments in persuading and converting sinners. It may be replied, however, that the arguments supply an occasion rather than the rationale for faith, and that the Spirit actually reinforces un-suppressed facets of the imago Dei in the context of God’s revelation.

A. N. Whitehead made no effort formally to demonstrate God’s existence, but rather appeals to man’s religious intuition and seeks to confirm God’s existence in conjunction with metaphysical considerations. Somewhat akin to the cosmological argument is his appeal from the “forms of definiteness” (rather than from their existence) to a primordial mind as their causal support, if not their absolute creator. Similarities to the teleological argument underlie the movement from the subjective aim of actual entities seeking satisfaction through value experience, to God as the final cause presenting “lures for feeling.” Whereas the cosmological-teleological appeal survives in the emphasis that the world’s order and value are best explained by God’s purpose to realize maximal good, religious intuition plays an essential role, and from it Whitehead derives assurance that God will conserve whatever good is attained in the world. More recent statements of process philosophy have been provided by Charles Hart-shorne, D. D. Williams and Schubert Ogden.

The importance of man’s primal ontological awareness has been reasserted in a variety of ways. Frederick Herzog stresses a precognitive feeling of reality that raises the religious question in every man’s experience. Tillich considered the sense of human finitude as at the same time an awareness of God, or the Ground of Being. Even John B. Cobb, Jr., who carries Whitehead’s philosophy more fully in the direction of natural theology, concedes an elemental human intuition that the order of the world requires a transcendent explanation. William Horder thinks the worldwide sense of awe and reverence over the mystery of the universe evokes theological language, but that God the Mystery reveals Himself only to the response of personal faith. But it is apparent that the Barthian denial of any human point-of-contact for divine revelation is under increasing pressure. The significance of man’s primal ontological awareness of a religious reality is again being probed, and while most contemporary discussions shy away from cognitive implications, a climate is emerging in which the traditional evangelical understanding of man’s intuitive experience of God can find new visibility.

Clark insists that it is impossible to construct a valid logical argument for the existence of an infinite God from finite empirical data—whether man or the world, and rests the case for theism wholly upon rational a priori considerations rooted in divine revelation.

Cornelius Van Til contends that the unbeliever cannot reach a theistic conclusion based on empirical proofs because nonbelievers and believers assertedly view reality on wholly divergent premises. While the believer derives the knowledge of God from revelation rather than from nature and man, the theistic evidences serve to confirm the believer’s faith in the reality and nature of the living God.

The doctrine of God in contemporary thought is now widely connected to divine self-revelation, or to intuitive considerations, or to both; an empirical grounding of the case for theism is now largely avoided, and appeals to man and the universe most frequently appear as attempts to justify or confirm belief in God already held and acquired in another way.

B. Correlation of religion with all human concerns. The schematic correlation of the claims of religion, philosophy, history, and science into a comprehensive world-life view holds intellectual fascination even for the contemporary mind. Despite the anti-metaphysical mood of our age, the most formative and influential writers integrate theological perspectives with the main concerns of modern life and learning in a synthetic overview. Even theologians whose knowledge-theory leads them to disown universally valid religious truth, propound systematic treatises relating their theological principles to all life and experience. Barth has written the largest and profoundest Church Dogmatics since the Thomistic age. Although he detaches Christian revelation from commitment to any particular world-view (Church Dogmatics, III/2, p. 447), he nonetheless discusses philosophy, science, and history on the margin of dialectical revelation. Much of the power of Tillich’s speculative ontology is surely due to the fact that his Systematic Theology propounds a philosophical apologetics addressed not simply to believers but to man as man; theological perspectives assertedly grounded in revelation are correlated with philosophical considerations derived from an analysis of the human predicament. Whitehead’s philosophical vision derives its appeal in large measure from his attempt to synthesize metaphysical interests (the cosmical attributes of God asserted by the classic philosophers) with the personal perfections of the living God of Biblical revelation in their bearing on major scientific developments and universal human concerns; he blends Judeo-Christian and Greek motifs in a bold religious ontology that seeks to vindicate ultimate meaning, purpose, and value while emphasizing the limitation of science in an age when the scientific outlook is widely correlated with nat uralism. Teilhard presents scientific and confessional approaches side by side in his rational synthesis of experimental, historical, philosophical, and religious concerns.

Dooyeweerd gives Judeo-Christian revelation a significance for every frontier of human theory and action in a radical critique of theoretical thought, and insists that Christian philosophy not only best explains the meaning of reality and life but it also unmasks the basically alien religious motives of the secular alternatives.

Clark insists that Christian presuppositions alone can suggest a satisfactory world-view, that for their solution the problems of science and history and ethics and politics require theistic premises, and that all mediating positions between Biblical Christianity and atheistic naturalism are reducible to incoherence.

It is evident that the dialectical-existential revolt against rational persuasion, and the recent anti-mind mood, have not destroyed the modern interest in intellectual synthesis. Those thinkers influential in serious circles today seek convincingly to correlate their explanation of reality and life with the whole range of human concerns.

C. Emphasis on human decision and initiative. The diminishing modern emphasis on divine election, divine creation, divine revelation, and divine redemption, as scripturally understood, has dwarfed interest in the Biblical view of God and stunted its power in modern life. The modern stress on human competence in respect to man’s present fortunes and final destiny suppresses a recognition of God’s decisive role in man’s life and affairs. It is significant that a vigorous reassertion of even isolated aspects of the Biblical view—as in the neo-orthodox emphasis on divine initiative—tends to revive interest in the historic Christian conception of God. But a lasting impact is thwarted because the scriptural view is fragmented and combined with current speculations.

The Bible doctrine of divine election is a stark reminder that nobody would escape divine wrath were it not for God’s gracious intervention in a fallen world. The declaration that God in sovereign mercy elects a fallen remnant to salvation in Christ notifies all sinners that the slightest hope of their redemptive rescue depends wholly upon divine initiative. This emphasis pervades Clark’s exposition of election, which combines the traditional Reformed view that God mercifully elects some and justly reprobates others, with the “supralapsarian” position that God willed to save some and to reprobate others before He willed to create any. This ties the bare possibility of salvation to the gracious will of God alone; whatever difficulties this exposition of election may pose, it wholly inverts the popular modern notion that man is the sovereign master of his destiny.

The modern theologians who retain and reformulate the doctrine of election usually destroy the urgency of personal decision for Christ. Despite many divergences in their theology, Barth and Brunner dismiss Calvin’’s view that God’s decree of election predetermines the redemption of some and reprobation of others. Yet they cannot dilute the scriptural view into mere foreknowledge—since the Biblical references to foreknowledge also imply foreordination—and the resultant effort to preserve a crucial role for divine election leads to highly fanciful theories. Barth regards Christ as the electing God and elected man; since all mankind is comprehended in the election of the man Jesus, and none are excluded, universal election seems the logical and inevitable outcome. Brunner too insists that election is only in Christ, but avoids universal salvation by asserting an area outside Christ, in line with traditional theology; yet his postulation of a possibility of decision-for-Christ after death and hence of salvation for everyone in the life to come robs the doctrine of election of force.

Berkouwer criticizes these arbitrary compromises. He rejects as wholly speculative Barth’s notion that the historical Jesus is the electing One who embraces all mankind. He emphasizes that Scripture views this lifetime as decisive for spiritual destiny, whereas universalism and an open-ended doctrine of salvation destroy the urgency of present commitment. Berkouwer agrees with Barth and Brunner in rejecting reprobation as a logical corollary of election; moreover, he shares Barth’s contention that election is not a discrimination by sovereign divine decree prior to grace, a happening predetermined in eternity, but rather is a present event. He does not, however, clarify why what is now happening cannot also have been a matter of past divine foreordination.

Most recent expositions dilute the doctrine of election still further. George Thomas limits both divine foreordination and foreknowledge; God is not the ultimate cause of all events, and divine knowledge does not extend to future contingent events. Here divine initiative is compromised beyond the tolerance of both Reformed and Thomistic theology.

Reinhold Niebuhr existentializes the doctrine of election—along with the concepts of “creation-fall-redemption.” It remained for Bultmann, however, to dismiss an eternal divine decree as sheer myth, although insisting that God so determines man’s life in addressing him that by faith he is compelled to speak of Him. The atheistic existentialists retain the dramatic emphasis that human decision defines man’s ultimate destiny, but dispose entirely of Bultmann’s “ghost-God.” The confrontation of the transcendent becomes for them simply the claim of man’s higher destiny upon his consciousness; in man’s own response lies the power to decree the future course of history and the universe.

For Tillich, the immanent “Ground of Being” structures all selves and things and preserves them. If any doctrine of election survives, it signals little more than the universal “givenness” of things in its bearing on the finitude of life, rather than a divine decree to rescue doomed persons from sin’s penalty and power.

Whitehead’s denial of divine omnipotence weakens God’s concrete causal power in the universe, and removes any assured final outcome of history. Whitehead sees God as the source of the order of nature wherein new values arise, and as the final cause that guides creatures in conceiving these, but God has only a persuasive relationship to the world of temporal entities as the source of its subjective aims.

Teilhard wholly sacrifices the election motif to a progressive spiritual evolution in space-time, though organic humanity, to a Center in the universal activity of the cosmic Christ that maximizes the personalization of all humanity. Redemption is not grounded on the historical death of Jesus; Christ’s incarnation, rather, enables Him to subdue, control, and purify the evolutionary ascent of consciousness.

Although he protests recent assertions of God’s metaphysical dependence upon the world, George Thomas compromises both God’s sovereignty and foreknowledge by suspending God’s steadfast purpose upon changing human situations and acts. On the basis of the “divine repentance” passages in the Bible he rejects God’s absolute unchangeableness, incorporates temporal succession into God’s eternity, and admits change into divine immutability.

As a main characteristic, therefore, modern religious thought inflates human initiative and contracts divine freedom. This suppression of the Biblical view of the Creator and Redeemer who by His sovereign decision fashions a special calling for mankind, and as Lord of the Covenant provides salvation for some of His fallen creatures, has fatal consequences for the doctrine of God in modern life. For such a diminution of the role of sovereign divinity in relation to human destiny presumes to make man the master of his fate at every critical turn, and by the same token, dispenses with God in the strategic decisions of life, relating him only to secondary human concerns. But the God of the Bible refuses to let history take its own course, and to abandon the course of events to man’s arbitrary will; He works out His sovereign goal in the lives of men, and makes even those who resist Him fulfill His purpose.

Just as a weakened doctrine of God’s predetermination deprives divine decision of forceful significance for human destiny, so recent expositions of divine creation likewise obscure God’s effective causal power in the universe, and particularly in relation to man’s existence. Radical secular theologians, who contend that science has discredited miracle and has debased the supernatural, necessarily deprive the Biblical view of creation of intellectual value.

Bultmann thinks nature is controlled only by immanent forces and that modern science precludes the miraculous; therefore he dismisses as an illusion the view of God as a creative source. Tillich, too, dispenses with the supernatural; God survives not as Creator, but as a quasi-pantheistic ground of all being. Niebuhr expounds the creation doctrine in terms of existential experience rather than of causal explanation, and Brunner similarly substitutes the newer notion of divine address in interpersonal confrontation for the traditional understanding of divine creation in terms of cosmic causality. Even Barth’s view, that Genesis is “saga” rather than myth or fairy tale, seems to equivocate about the causal-historical implications of creation.

Whitehead finds evolutionary theory and the newer views of matter incompatible with materialism, but he allows no finality to any formulation of truth, whether philosophical, scientific, or religious. Whitehead readily combines Gr. and medieval emphases; the personal energy and sovereignty of God are adjusted to a rational teleological order partly immanent in God. As a result, God’s love and purpose for the world are viewed as necessary expressions of His nature, and divine will and initiative are restricted. Whitehead writes: “It is as true to say that God creates the world as that the world creates God” (Adventures of Ideas, 528). The assimilation of God to immanent process is seen in Whitehead’s emphasis that the plurality of individual units of becoming (actual entities) that compose the world, and exemplify creative novelty, arise through concrescence as an interplay of newly arising and perishing aspects. Panpsychism is evident in Whitehead’s relating of all entities to a larger world of objects through the experience of feeling (prehension); eternal objects are potentially present components of actual entities—much as the eternal ideas or forms in classic Gr. speculation—and through them actual entities assertedly gain a mental pole along with the physical, and are guided toward a “satisfaction” that requires the interdependence of God and the world. Measured by the scriptural doctrine of creation, his theory grossly distorts the Judeo-Christian revelation of a sovereign Creator independent of the universe and vastly diminishes the creative causal energy of God.

Teilhard’s philosophy combines faith in God’s creative origin of the world with the scientific possibility that the world arose by accident; his retention of the creation-concept seems, therefore, to serve little rational purpose. His exposition of the omnipresence of potentially divine substance relies more heavily on motifs derived from Leibnitz and Kant than from Moses. Teilhard asserts that the simple primordial elements of reality, harboring an inner spiritual energy, have evolved progressively into different orders of advancing complexity of psychic concentration. In creating the final universe devout human beings collaborate with Christ to promote world spiritualization through the ascendency of spiritual forms while the incarnate Word simultaneously penetrates the world of reality. Such a view is far removed from the more Biblical emphasis of Oscar Cullmann that the crucified and risen Christ inaugurated a new age and a new creation on the basis of supernatural conquest of sin and death. Teilhard looks for the completion of an ongoing creation through cosmic evolution guided by a partially immanent Logos as its spiritual center, whereas Cullmann foresees the supernatural rescue of a fallen race and cosmos through the redemptive historical incarnation of the transcendent Creator.

So heavily has the theology of the recent past indebted itself to the dogma of evolutionary progress that divine or superhuman forces survive mainly in the guise of an immanent directive principle. Statements on the beginning of things lack Clark’s firm emphasis that the cosmos owes its origin and purpose to an omnipotent creative Logos, and Dooyeweerd’s insistence that God as sovereign supernatural Creator is the source of cosmic existence, order, and enduring meaning.

To affirm God as Creator, as Biblical Christianity does, is to depict everything else as creature and creation—contingent in reality, dependent for its existence and survival, and vulnerable to doom and disappearance. That alongside God nothing need have been or need be, except for a divine decision and deed; that all the days of man’s years—many or few—are a time for existence and survival and destiny that the sovereign Creator has given; and that God’s will and power alone keep us from slipping over the brink of non-humanity, or non-creatureliness, or of non-existence—all this is implied in a recognition of the Creator God. But where religious philosophy entertains all premises but divine creation by a supernatural will and act; where the appearance of men and things is discussable only in a context of pre-existent materials and perpetual process; and where miracle is disallowed—while all marvels of the universe are readily referrable to chance—there the Creator God already counts for so little that the term creation is retained only by falsifying its proper universe of discourse. The modern secular world-view does not discuss man in dependence upon God, and in distinction from Him, but in the context of the cosmos, and in differentiation from organic-chemico-biological processes and from the lower animals.

Hence, this lordly capstone of evolutionary emergence does not consider himself threatened and terrified by nothingness as a real alternative facing finite creatures. What does the almighty Maker of heaven and earth any longer mean to homo sapiens who speaks universally of gods but is deeply sceptical about the living God who speaks as Lord of the universe? What recognition then remains for a sovereign Creator who might withdraw His support of the cosmos or repent that He had made man?

Modern gods mark in actuality a reversion to the antique Epicurean philosophy or world-view in which atoms gain more importance than spirit. Epicurean speculation generously lodged its gods in the interstellar spaces, in the vacuums between the worlds; modern evolutionary speculation has reserved room for the supernatural only in some neutral zone between philosophy and mythology, or at the frontier between learning and liberation.

It is not God as Creator only who is exiled by this secular mentality but also God as Redeemer. For when differentiation of the cosmos from primeval chaos and its reality and continuance are no longer referred to the divine Creator, what force then remains for a doctrine of incarnation whereby God refuses to let fallen mankind slip over the abyss of nonexistence, by Himself mercifully assuming creation’s cause after the Fall, and by declaring that man remains the object of God’s purpose for the cosmos in transporting human nature into the world to come? It is a matter of self-congratulation for modern secular man either that he banishes God as a contemporary irrelevance in a culture satiated by the spirit of naturalism, or that, despite his own achievements, he tolerantly retains God as a partner for the promotion of his own purposes.

D. Dilution of the supernatural character of revelation. Wherever an evolutionary view of man and the world eclipses God’s causal energy in creation and redemption, the doctrine of divine revelation either undergoes a parallel distortion, or mediating theologians hopefully shift to revelational encounter the whole weight of the case for God’s reality.

If the creation concept is severed from miracle and attached to immanent process, and the redemption motif is reduced to a divine-human mutual assistance pact, the doctrine of revelation is in turn readily subverted into the notion of human discovery, and retains little to commend it as divine. Whitehead, for one, shuns the term revelation entirely, replacing transcendent disclosure by man’s rational quest. He insists, moreover, that religious experience carries no direct intuition of a personal God, and renounces all title to final truth, refusing to credit the special claim of Judeo-Christian religion. His doubts about ultimate personality lead on inevitably to a rejection of transcendent revelation; loss of God as personal implies the necessary forefeiture of the Biblical disclosure.

Whitehead’s dismissal of divine disclosure more consistently reflects philosophical implications than does Tillich’s retention of the idea of revelation alongside his disavowal of personality in God. Tillich dismisses a supernatural divinity as merely the product of myth and cult, and reinterprets the traditional doctrine within the context of his own special metaphysics. Revelation he identifies not with an objective universal disclosure of the supernatural God through the Logos, but with a mystical a priori; the divine is assertedly disclosed in the depths of everyman’s experience as an intuition of the Unconditioned. The content of this supposed revelation is conditioned by man’s temporal-historical existence and is not cognitive but symbolic. Tillich rejects a literal historical incarnation of the Logos; the orthodox doctrine is viewed simply as the way Christian faith expresses the triumph of New Being, even as the cross is for Tillich but a symbol of the self-negation of the finite. Tillich’s “theological answers” to philosophical problems thus speculatively subvert the self-revealing God of the Bible, for he deliberately erases the divine perfections of supernatural transcendence and personality, and substitutes a conjectural doctrine of divine disclosure.

If Tillich’s depersonalization of God destroys revelation in Biblical dimensions, Teilhard’s inter-personalization of all reality through “christification” is hardly a preferable option. For by postulating Christ as the spiritual center of the universal cosmic process, Teilhard obscures the uniqueness of agape historically revealed in Jesus of Nazareth and erodes the possibilities of once-for-all revelation. Teilhard sees the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as a highly polished mirror of the mystery of the universe, reflecting the prospect of ultimate metamorphosis for ourselves and our environment through personal renunciation and fulfillment. When one recalls Teilhard’s emphasis that in the realms of knowledge and of faith quite divergent explanations are possible, he soon senses that this theory of evolutionary cosmic transformation speculatively replaces revelation by gnosis and obscures man’s radical corruption and redemptive need.

Whereas Cullmann, too, holds that Jesus inaugurates the new creation as a prospect known to faith rather than to empirical proof or logic, it is faith in the Biblical witness on which he insists. The incarnate Logos is both the critical center of general history and the decisive center of salvation history in God’s redemption of man and the cosmos. Cullmann thus defines divine revelation in terms of historical saving events and their scripturally-given meaning, in welcome contrast to recent existential and dialectical theories.

Nor does Niebuhr convincingly preserve the factuality of divine revelation in his emphasis on a dialectical tension between Christ as infinite norm and man’s trans-rational spirit. Niebuhr’s radical contrast of the eternal and the temporal deprives divine revelation of direct historical exposure, even in the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. Only man’s existential freedom to transcend nature and history anchors Niebuhr’s idea of revelation, which he disjoins from rational or conceptual information. The result is an anti-rational, anti-historical view of divine-human relationships, propounded in terms of dialectical paradox. This underlies Niebuhr’s hostility to acceptance of the literal truth of the Bible and to the evangelical view of revelation that rules out the self’s supposedly ideal freedom from rational categories. Niebuhr’s alternative has more costly consequences than its loss of rational and historical revelation, its surrender of objective divine communication identifiable with scriptural information about God and His works, its shattering of the identification of Christ the divine norm with Jesus of Nazareth. For Niebuhr’s speculative revolt against objectively given divine disclosure, and his attenuation of salvation history into existential self-analysis, also jeopardizes the very reality of God. Bultmann’s view had deprived revelation of historicity and objectivity, let alone verbal intelligibility; existentially expounded, revelation became merely a source of spiritual knowledge about ourselves rather than information about God and His redemptive intervention in history. Here anthropology displaces theology and revelation tells us nothing about God as a distinct being. By their further reduction of the notion of revelation, the Mainz radicals Braun and Mezger equated God’s identifiable reality with interpersonal relationships.

To his credit, Barth, even if belatedly, sought to remedy certain weaknesses of “kerygmatic” theology by connecting revelation somewhat more firmly with conceptual thought and historical events. At the outset crisis-theology disparaged conceptualization, verbalization, and historical mediation of the Word of God in its emphasis on personal revelation. Since divine revelation assertedly occurred outside the normativity of thought and on the rim of history, sacred events and sacred Scripture were regarded at best as pointers to revelation, which was located exclusively in direct interpersonal confrontation. A hallmark of “kerygmatic” theology—both dialectical and existential—was its insistence that revelation is a special faith-knowledge for believers only, not truth valid for all men whether or not they accept it. But as existential theologians inspired by Bultmann increasingly disparaged the importance of Biblical history and of intelligible knowledge of God, Barth more fully asserted the quasi-historical and quasi-intellectual character of revelation. Thus Barth modified dialectical revelation to include a conceptual knowledge of God and held the historical environment to be an indispensable suburb of revelation. This was, of course, still a long way from a rational revelation consisting of universally valid propositions about God, and from historical revelation in the traditional evangelical understanding; as Barth saw it, the adequacy of theological concepts is assured only by a subjective miracle of grace, and revelational history remains outside the range of scientific historical inquiry. The very ambiguity of a theology of revelation that denied objectivity and universal validity, and yet insisted on quasi-historical and quasi-propositional divine disclosure, was too great a liability to forestall further dilution of Barth’s view by existentialist theologians. The Barthian era began with a bold call to faith in the self-revealing God, while it rejected the Bible as God’s objectively-given Word; evangelical theologians saw in both dialectical and existential dogmatics a threat to faith in God and to revelation alike. The theological drift of the recent past indicates that loss of the Bible as the Word of God issues sooner or later in the loss of the self-revealing God as well. Attempts to revive faith in the revelation of the Judeo-Christian God that “derevelationize” the Bible—that is, refuse to identify the Bible with revelation, and in fact contrast Scripture with revelation—dilute the concept of revelation and dissipate its theological power. The recent modern notions of revelation cannot bear the weight of the case for Biblical theism, and readily suppress the supernatural features of the Christian view in deference to humanistic emphases.

E. Distortion of sacred Biblical motifs. Another noteworthy feature of contemporary theology lies in the conspicuous reliance on sacred motifs of Biblical theology even by mediating and speculative scholars. Whereas the scriptural motifs are often distorted through an alien and arbitrary content, their ready retention attests that no framework has been found to interpret human experience superior to the controlling themes of the Bible.

For all Niebuhr’s existential transmutation of Biblical concepts into a subjective tension in human experience between the ideal and the actual, he appropriates the whole range of sacred scriptural motifs from creation, and fall through resurrection and second coming, and structures his theology by them.

Tillich, too, despite his explicit repudiation of the supernaturalism of the Bible, symbolically retains not only the “fall” (a cosmic alienation or ontological predicament rather than a historical event), “salvation” (ontological reunion), “the cross” (self-negation), “parousia” (fulfillment of creaturely existence in the eternal), and “hell” (a degree of spiritual non-fulfillment), but also “Father, Son, and Spirit” as a metaphorical depiction of a threefold dialectic of separation and reunion.

Teilhard combines an evolutionary “christification” of reality, through Christ as the universal principle of vitality and cohesion, with the entire gamut of traditional terms—from creation, incarnation, kingdom of God, death, and resurrection, parousia, and Omega as the end—reinterpreted almost to the point of semantic illegitimacy.

Whitehead, too, poetically adopts many familiar Judeo-Christian concepts while annulling important essentials of scriptural theism; thus he speaks of God’s love, wisdom, guidance, purpose, and salvation, whereas he leaves divine personality in doubt.

We are not saying merely that the Judeo-Christian revelation of reality is so comprehensively authentic that no serious interpreter can expound main features of the human scene, however speculatively, without unwittingly borrowing some of the elements inherent in the Biblical view. That is also tru