Systematic Theology (Vol. 1-3). Augustus Hopkins Strong
a Revelation from God, we may yet cite passages which show that our doctrine is not inconsistent with the teachings of holy Writ. The immanence of God is implied in all statements of his omnipresence, as for example: Ps. 139:7 sq.—“Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?” Jer. 23:23, 24—“Am I a God at hand, saith Jehovah, and not a God afar off? … Do not I fill heaven and earth?” Acts 17:27, 28—“he is not far from each one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being.” The transcendence of God is implied in such passages as: 1 Kings 8:27—“the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee”; Ps. 113:5—“that hath his seat on high”; Is. 57:15—“the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity.”
This is the faith of Augustine: “O God, thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless till it find rest in thee. … I could not be, O my God, could not be at all, wert thou not in me; rather, were not I in thee, of whom are all things, by whom are all things, in whom are all things.” And Anselm, in his Proslogion, says of the divine nature: “It is the essence of the being, the principle of the existence, of all things. … Without parts, without differences, without accidents, without changes, it might be said in a certain sense alone to exist, for in respect to it the other things which appear to be have no existence. The unchangeable Spirit is all that is, and it is this without limit, simply, interminably. It is the perfect and absolute Existence. The rest has come from non-entity, and thither returns if not supported by God. It does not exist by itself. In this sense the Creator alone exists; created things do not.”
1. While Ethical Monism embraces the one element of truth contained in Pantheism—the truth that God is in all things and that all things are in God—it regards this scientific unity as entirely consistent with the facts of ethics—man's freedom, responsibility, sin, and guilt; in other words, Metaphysical Monism, or the doctrine of one substance, ground, or principle of being, is qualified by Psychological Dualism, or the doctrine that the soul is personally distinct from matter on the one hand, and from God on the other.
Ethical Monism is a monism which holds to the ethical facts of the freedom of man and the transcendence and personality of God; it is the monism of free-will, in which personality, both human and divine, sin and righteousness, God and the world, remain—two in one, and one in two—in their moral antithesis as well as their natural unity. Ladd, Introd. to Philosophy: “Dualism is yielding, in history and in the judgment-halls of reason, to a monistic philosophy. … Some form of philosophical monism is indicated by the researches of psycho-physics, and by that philosophy of mind which builds upon the principles ascertained by these researches. Realities correlated as are the body and the mind must have, as it were, a common ground. … They have their reality in the ultimate one Reality; they have their interrelated lives as expressions of the one Life which is immanent in the two. … Only some form of monism that shall satisfy the facts and truths to which both realism and idealism appeal can occupy the place of the true and final philosophy. … Monism must so construct its tenets as to preserve, or at least as not to contradict and destroy, the truths implicated in the distinction between the me and the not-me, … between the morally good and the morally evil. No form of monism can persistently maintain itself which erects its system upon the ruins of fundamentally ethical principles and ideals.”… Philosophy of Mind, 411—“Dualism must be dissolved in some ultimate monistic solution. The Being of the world, of which all particular beings are but parts, must be so conceived of as that in it can be found the one ground of all interrelated existences and activities. … This one Principle is an Other and an Absolute Mind.”
Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person of Christ, II, 3:101, 231—“The unity of essence in God and man is the great discovery of the present age. … The characteristic feature of all recent Christologies is the endeavor to point out the essential unity of the divine and human. To the theology of the present day, the divine and human are not mutually exclusive, but are connected magnitudes. … Yet faith postulates a difference between the world and God, between whom religion seeks an union. Faith does not wish to be a relation merely to itself, or to its own representations and thoughts; that would be a monologue—faith desires a dialogue. Therefore it does not consort with a monism which recognizes only God, or only the world; it opposes such a monism as this. Duality is, in fact, a condition of true and vital unity. But duality is not dualism. It has no desire to oppose the rational demand for unity.” Professor Small of Chicago: “With rare exceptions on each side, all philosophy to-day is monistic in its ontological presumptions; it is dualistic in its methodological procedures.” A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 71—“Men and God are the same in substance, though not identical as individuals.” The theology of fifty years ago was merely individualistic, and ignored the complementary truth of solidarity. Similarly we think of the continents and islands of our globe as disjoined from one another. The dissociable sea is regarded as an absolute barrier between them. But if the ocean could be dried, we should see that all the while there had been submarine connections, and the hidden unity of all lands would appear. So the individuality of human beings, real as it is, is not the only reality. There is the profounder fact of a common life. Even the great mountain-peaks of personality are superficial distinctions, compared with the organic oneness in which they are rooted, into which they all dip down, and from which they all, like volcanoes, receive at times quick and overflowing impulses of insight, emotion and energy; see A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation and Ethical Monism, 189, 190.
2. In contrast then with the two errors of Pantheism—the denial of God's transcendence and the denial of God's personality—Ethical Monism holds that the universe, instead of being one with God and conterminous with God, is but a finite, partial and progressive manifestation of the divine Life: Matter being God's self-limitation under the law of Necessity; Humanity being God's self-limitation under the law of Freedom; Incarnation and Atonement being God's self-limitations under the law of Grace.
The universe is related to God as my thoughts are related to me, the thinker. I am greater than my thoughts, and my thoughts vary in moral value. Ethical Monism traces the universe back to a beginning, while Pantheism regards the universe as coëternal with God. Ethical Monism asserts God's transcendence, while Pantheism regards God as imprisoned in the universe. Ethical Monism asserts that the heaven of heavens cannot contain him, but that contrariwise the whole universe taken together, with its elements and forces, its suns and systems, is but a light breath from his mouth, or a drop of dew upon the fringe of his garment. Upton, Hibbert Lectures: “The Eternal is present in every finite thing, and is felt and known to be present in every rational soul; but still is not broken up into individualities, but ever remains one and the same eternal substance, one and the same unifying principle, immanently and indivisibly present in every one of that countless plurality of finite individuals into which man's analyzing understanding dissects the Cosmos.” James Martineau, in 19th Century, Apl. 1895:559—“What is Nature but the province of God's pledged and habitual causality? And what is Spirit, but the province of his free causality, responding to the needs and affections of his children? … God is not a retired architect, who may now and then be called in for repairs. Nature is not self-active, and God's agency is not intrusive.” Calvin: Pie hoc potest dici, Deum esse Naturam.
With this doctrine many poets show their sympathy. “Every fresh and new creation, A divine improvisation, From the heart of God proceeds.” Robert Browning asserts God's immanence; Hohenstiel-Schwangau: “This is the glory that, in all conceived Or felt, or known, I recognize a Mind—Not mine, but like mine—for the double joy, Making all things for me, and me for him”; Ring and Book, Pope: “O thou, as represented to me here In such conception as my soul allows—Under thy measureless, my atom-width! Man's mind, what is it but a convex glass, Wherein are gathered all the scattered points Picked out of the immensity of sky, To reunite there, be our heaven for earth, Our Known Unknown, our God revealed to man?” But Browning also asserts God's transcendence: in Death in the Desert, we read: “Man is not God, but hath God's end to serve, A Master to obey, a Cause to take, Somewhat to cast off, somewhat to become”; in Christmas Eve, the poet derides “The important stumble Of adding, he, the sage and humble, Was also one with the Creator”; he tells us that it was God's plan to make man in his image: “To create man, and then leave him Able, his own word saith, to grieve him; But able to glorify him too, As a mere machine could never do That prayed