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REVELATION
REVELATION 323
De a a SE cee rs i De
behind the stage reached by science and morality, while the ritual elements were made unduly pro- minent. Yet it is quite evident that the conscious- ness of God ought to have a content adequate to the demands of reason and the dictates of con- science. The religious development of mankind has not been normal; it has been disturbed and perverted by sin. Renewal as well as progress is needed. Hence God’s activity in religion must be redemptive as well as perfecting.
3. Keligion and Revelation.—It follows from the very nature of religion that God is active as well asman. If man raises himself above his natural to his spiritual environment, from self and world to God, God responds to that approach ; nay, it is to the attraction of this spiritual environment that man yields. Unless religion is a delusion, man is not holding intercourse merely with a transfigured self or an idealized world. Religion is not an imagination, which robs the world of its finitude, or lifts the self above its limitations. It is because neither the world nor the self is adequate to his ideal conceptions, or can satisfy his ideal neces- sities as a spiritual being, that man in religion elevates himself to a region not of his own ab- stractions, but where Divine reality meets him, and enters into reciprocal relations with him. The truth, pureness, and power of religion depend on the completeness of this elevation. When the consciousness of self or the world dominates, we have conceptions of God false and unworthy. Paganism never so delivered itself from the con- sciousness of the world as to rise to a true and pure conception of God. Its deities remain natural beings, and therefore not ideally rational or moral. When it did rise above the consciousness of the world, and even strove to rise above the con- sciousness of self, it reached a pantheism in which God was merely 76 év or 76 dv. Neither by observa- tion of the world nor by contemplation of the self can the consciousness of God be reached, for neither is adequate to give content to the conception. The world may suggest a final purpose and an ultimate cause, the relation of the self to the world a com- mon ground for both, the self reason and right- eousness transcending man’s, so much truth there is in speculative theism. But, nevertheless, no effort of man, unaided of God, has reached His reality. Not through nature nor in self does man know God, but only as God makes Himself known. Just as for his natural existence man and nature must be in reciprocal relations, so for his spiritual experience must man and God be alike active. To deny God’s action on man in his religion is to destroy its truth, worth, and claim. His religious knowledge is not self-projection, his religious life is not self-subjection, his religious feeling is not self - satisfaction. So to treat religion is not to interpret it as true, but to account for it as fictitious, however necessary and universal the fiction may be allowed to be. Or to explain religion as the action of nature on man is equally to contradict its essential character. It is further to deny that God can have reciprocal relations with the spirit who has affinity with Himself. It is to affirm that God who is absolutely, and man who is relatively, above nature can have no per- sonal relations except through nature; that God, who is communicative, cannot communicate unless under such conditions as make the communication inadequate for His bounty and man’s need ; that God is unable to constitute such direct relations with man as a complete human development de- mands. This is to subject both God and man to nature. If man in religion is conscious of ele- vating himself above nature that he may more completely ally himself with God, shall we say that God is unable so to detach Himself from
nature that He may respond to man’s effort ? May we not believe rather that God stands in such personal relations to man that He can out of His own fulness meet the need of Himself which He has implanted ; that the spirit that seeks for knowledge of Him, because it has been made for it, will gain it, and not be mocked by a trans- figured self or an idealized world? Yet mystic thinkers have been mistaken when they thought that God could be known only in abstraction from the consciousness of self and the world. It is not by losing the finite consciousness that the Infinite reality is known. Nay, it is in such an elevation and purification of the consciousness of self and the world as carry us beyond their finitude and reveal to us their absolute source and purpose. This is a real distinction, the verbal expression of which is not easy. We do not know God apart from the world and self, and yet we know Him as different, though not separated, from both. We do not leave the world and the self behind when we rise to God, but we see the self and the world in God. Although God is manifested, yet He is not exhausted in world and self. God has a revelation of Himself in nature and history on the one hand, and man’s own spiritual being on the other; but that revelation cannot be identi- fied with human discovery in the realm of nature, human reflexion on the course of history, human insight into character. All these human activities imply Divine action, as in God we live, and move, and have our being ; yet, to be in the full sense a revelation to man, nature and history, reason and conscience must become the organs of a Divine activity, not of creation, or preservation, or govern- ment only, but distinctly of self-communication. Nature as a succession of phenomena, history as a series of events, and personality as an organism of varied functions, are not revelations, but become so when man knows that in them God is speaking to him, and making Himself known.