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IXDIYIDUAL
IXDIYIDUALISM
This liigh gift of being an individual with the possibility of being a cliild of God, carries with it also the ijossibility of such exclusion of good as can make him a child of the wicked one (Mt 13^). Nor does the closest relation to God absorb the individual. Whatever ordinances there may be for public worship, the distinctive position is to enter into our closet and shut to the door, and be witli our Father who sees in secret (Mt 6*). There is an individual hearing and an indiWdual answering, which, however little our minds may compass it, are essential both in God's giving and in man's receiv- ing. Just as there is a strange pitiful isolation of tlie individual who rejects God, so there is a strange saving of his own individuality in losing it, in the soul that ftnds God. That we remain indi- viduals is as essential to the relationship as that we find our joy in another individuaL The revela- tion of the Father in the Son must preclude all idea of absorption in God.
This is the ground of Ritschl's contention not only against a Catholicism which bears down the individual by the weight of the institution, but also against a mysticism which reduces all individuals to mere personality, upon which a Spirit, Himself mere personality, operates not as individual with individual, but as abstract spiritual force upon abstract spiritual substance. ~" ■ "nterpret
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t having come in His place to bring jrance (Jn 1426). Ritschl argues that ion in the Scriptures on the one hand, by the experiences and duties of life
on the other. The tend but also to ignore possibilities in man ; yet his main contention is of greiit value, and it helps us to understand the patient humanness of God's revelation, if we take it to be a dialogue in which God could not speak the next word till man had responded to the last.
The onlj' influences our Lord used were the appeals of wisdom and love. In every case He respected the individuality of another, and sought to make men realize how much they were to them- selves as well as to God. When any influence appeared as a substitute for personal choice. He sternly repressed it. He trusted no general move- ment, and appealed to nothing occult. He Avas always willing to leave a crowd for an individual (Mk P', Lk 4''^ Jn 6'=). The only miracle He ever wrought for the multitude He used for sift- ing them and for gathering individuals from among them (Jn 6"). And when a crowd did gather to hear Him preach, He gave them most individual teaching. He never departed from the method of being an individual dealing with individuals, and from requiring of them the most individual of actions— repentance and obedience to one's own call.
Nor is the individual overborne by the society (see artt. Church, Kingdom of God, Individual- ism). Here it suffices to say that it is just the dis- tinctive place Christ assigned to the individual that marks His Church off from the world, and His king- dom as a Kingdom of Heaven, a Kingdom of God. A kingdom which treats its subjects as mere pawns in a great game, is, in that very act, marked as temporal. Other-worldliness, indeed, is not the mind of Christ, and the attempt to derive every- thing from the far-sighted selfishness which does ' good according to the will of God and for the sake everlasting happiness,' leaves no
highest things of Christianitj'.
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s'hou'l.l ilt'.-ontciit to Inu ,_!,', m"the" Hvi'- ..'t\',i hi'is and that the Kingdom of God is everything iind the individual nothing. The Kingdom of God is not thereby exalted. Nay, there can be no King- dom of God, but a mere fleeting earthly Utopia. If the individual is obliterated, then, in view of the endless ages, but a moment more, and the society is obliterated as well. It becomes the
Kingdom of God only when it deals with the eternal, and that must always be the individual. It is of God and not of mere human regulation just because it respects the individual — his choice, his peace, his freedom ; because it is a society of persons not constrained by force to a common pur- pose, but attuned to it by love and wisdom. All our Lord says of His society speaks of an associa- tion in which its members wUl realize what the Apostle calls the glorious liberty of the children of God, and, so long as the Church is content to stand over against men as an institution claiming external authority, Christ's great problem of how- men were at once to live wholly for the Kingdom of God, and not surrender their Christian freedom, their rights as individuals, remains unsolved. (For the general philosophical questions regarding the individual, see art. Personality).
One question yet remains. Can a person whose isolation has been thus defined to himself, ever again pass into the great undis'tinguishable mass ? According to the orthodox conception, indiA^du- ality, though a mere containing wall, is so ada- mantine, that, whatever it may contain, it must abide. Ritschl. for one, argues that an alienation from God «hiih i\ir highest love cannot overcome, mustiiieuii :iiimliilaU',ii. The verj" idea of a reality so import:iiit a> to In- inextinguishable, while all its manife.>t;itiiiii^ ilcuiaud its extinction, he would ascribe to tlie pernicious influence of the abstract Platonic idea of the .soul. Nor can it be said that in the Gospels, or anywhere else in Scripture, there is any metaphysical basis of a Platonic kind for a necessary individual immortalitj'. The Scripture hope is not in man, but in the character of God, and we cannot suppose Him under any necessity to continue evil for its o^vn sake. On the other hand, if, as Ritschl maintains, the personality of God and man is individual, and pantheism is wholly an abandonment of the religious problem, which is how to maintain the spiritual personality against the whole material universe, through belief in the exalted Power that rules above it, it remains a problem whether evil can ever attain such power as to be able to blot out for God an individual.