The Definition of God
“‘The fashion nowadays is to speak of the God in the heart and the God in the Universe.’ ‘Is it the same God?’ ‘Leave it at that,’ said Peter. ‘We don't know. All the waste and muddle in religion is due to people arguing and asserting that they are the same, that they are different but related,...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
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| Published: |
Cambridge Univ. Press
1923
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| In: |
Harvard theological review
Year: 1923, Volume: 16, Issue: 3, Pages: 259-265 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (JSTOR) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | “‘The fashion nowadays is to speak of the God in the heart and the God in the Universe.’ ‘Is it the same God?’ ‘Leave it at that,’ said Peter. ‘We don't know. All the waste and muddle in religion is due to people arguing and asserting that they are the same, that they are different but related, or that they are different but opposed. And so on and so on.’ & But the name of God was to Oswald a name battered out of all value and meaning.” So Mr. H. G. Wells, in “Joan and Peter,” muses over the present floating theology, where everybody talks about God, and nobody knows what anybody else is talking about. Mr. Wells himself has done his share of the battering, too. If scrupulous scholars of today have difficulty in determining the meaning of ‘Messiah’ and ‘Lord’ in the beginnings of Christianity, what will the twenty-fifth-century scholars think of the term ‘God’ as used in the twentieth? It is curious, though, that along with this confusion of meaning — in fact the thing which itself adds most to the confusion — is an assumption that ‘God’ is “a distinct and familiar kind of entity, like a dragon or centaur; its existence alone being problematical” (Perry, “Approach to Philosophy,” pp. 108 f.). As a matter of fact, what is now problematical, every time we read the word ‘God,’ is what that word means to the man who has written it. Of course it is a large concept, vague around the edges, and variable with varying moods; but what is central and constant in it? Supposing one says that God suffers, or that God cannot suffer, one needs to have some fairly clear idea what it primarily is that suffers or cannot suffer. We can argue indefinitely and disagree eternally about what qualities God has, unless at least we can agree on a primary definition of the subject — what we mean by God in the first place. Several such primary definitions are now current: it is our purpose here to suggest that Christian theology at any rate, and probably most of our theism, tends to a use of one of these, and that it would be well to use it more clearly, consciously, and consistently in the future. |
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| ISSN: | 1475-4517 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Harvard theological review
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0017816000013730 |