Perhaps the most fundamental difference between this new faith and any
recognised form of Christianity is that, knowingly or unknowingly, it
worships A FINITE GOD. Directly the believer is fairly confronted with
the plain questions of the case, the vague identifications that are
still carelessly made with one or all of the persons of the Trinity
dissolve away. He will admit that his God is neither all-wise, nor
all-powerful, nor omnipresent; that he is neither the maker of heaven
nor earth, and that he has little to identify him with that hereditary
God of the Jews who became the “Father” in the Christian system. On the
other hand he will assert that his God is a god of salvation, that he is
a spirit, a person, a strongly marked and knowable personality, loving,
inspiring, and lovable, who exists or strives to exist in every human
soul. He will be much less certain in his denials that his God has a
close resemblance to the Pauline (as distinguished from the Trinitarian)
“Christ.” . . .
The modern religious man will almost certainly profess a kind of
universalism; he will assert that whensoever men have called upon any
God and have found fellowship and comfort and courage and that sense
of God within them, that inner light which is the quintessence of the
religious experience, it was the True God that answered them. For the
True God is a generous God, not a jealous God; the very antithesis of
that bickering monopolist who “will have none other gods but Me”; and
when a human heart cries out--to what name it matters not--for a larger
spirit and a stronger help than the visible things of life can give,
straightway the nameless Helper is with it and the God of Man answers to
the call. The True God has no scorn nor hate for those who have accepted
the many-handed symbols of the Hindu or the lacquered idols of China.
Where there is faith, where there is need, there is the True God ready
to clasp the hands that stretch out seeking for him into the darkness
behind the ivory and gold.
The fact that God is FINITE is one upon which those who think clearly
among the new believers are very insistent. He is, above everything
else, a personality, and to be a personality is to have characteristics,
to be limited by characteristics; he is a Being, not us but dealing
with us and through us, he has an aim and that means he has a past and
future; he is within time and not outside it. And they point out that
this is really what everyone who prays sincerely to God or gets help
from God, feels and believes. Our practice with God is better than our
theory. None of us really pray to that fantastic, unqualified danse a
trois, the Trinity, which the wranglings and disputes of the worthies
of Alexandria and Syria declared to be God. We pray to one single
understanding person. But so far the tactics of those Trinitarians at
Nicaea, who stuck their fingers in their ears, have prevailed in this
world; this was no matter for discussion, they declared, it was a Holy
Mystery full of magical terror, and few religious people have thought
it worth while to revive these terrors by a definite contradiction. The
truly religious have been content to lapse quietly into the comparative
sanity of an unformulated Arianism, they have left it to the scoffing
Atheist to mock at the patent absurdities of the official creed. But one
magnificent protest against this theological fantasy must have been
the work of a sincerely religious man, the cold superb humour of that
burlesque creed, ascribed, at first no doubt facetiously and then quite
seriously, to Saint Athanasius the Great, which, by an irony far beyond
its original intention, has become at last the accepted creed of the
church.
The long truce in the criticism of Trinitarian theology is drawing to
its end. It is when men most urgently need God that they become least
patient with foolish presentations and dogmas. The new believers are
very definitely set upon a thorough analysis of the nature and growth
of the Christian creeds and ideas. There has grown up a practice of
assuming that, when God is spoken of, the Hebrew-Christian God of Nicaea
is meant. But that God trails with him a thousand misconceptions and
bad associations; his alleged infinite nature, his jealousy, his strange
preferences, his vindictive Old Testament past. These things do not even
make a caricature of the True God; they compose an altogether different
and antagonistic figure.
It is a very childish and unphilosophical set of impulses that has led
the theologians of nearly every faith to claim infinite qualities for
their deity. One has to remember the poorness of the mental and moral
quality of the churchmen of the third, fourth, and fifth centuries who
saddled Christendom with its characteristic dogmas, and the extreme
poverty and confusion of the circle of ideas within which they thought.
Many of these makers of Christianity, like Saint Ambrose of Milan (who
had even to be baptised after his election to his bishopric), had been
pitchforked into the church from civil life; they lived in a time
of pitiless factions and personal feuds; they had to conduct their
disputations amidst the struggles of would-be emperors; court eunuchs
and favourites swayed their counsels, and popular rioting clinched their
decisions. There was less freedom of discussion then in the Christian
world than there is at present (1916) in Belgium, and the whole audience
of educated opinion by which a theory could be judged did not equal,
either in numbers or accuracy of information, the present population of
Constantinople. To these conditions we owe the claim that the Christian
God is a magic god, very great medicine in battle, “in hoc signo
vinces,” and the argument so natural to the minds of those days and so
absurd to ours, that since he had ALL power, all knowledge, and existed
for ever and ever, it was no use whatever to set up any other god
against him. . . .
By the fifth century Christianity had adopted as its fundamental belief,
without which everyone was to be “damned everlastingly,” a conception
of God and of Christ’s relation to God, of which even by the Christian
account of his teaching, Jesus was either totally unaware or so
negligent and careless of the future comfort of his disciples as
scarcely to make mention. The doctrine of the Trinity, so far as the
relationship of the Third Person goes, hangs almost entirely upon one
ambiguous and disputed utterance in St. John’s gospel (XV. 26). Most of
the teachings of Christian orthodoxy resolve themselves to the attentive
student into assertions of the nature of contradiction and repartee.
Someone floats an opinion in some matter that has been hitherto vague,
in regard, for example, to the sonship of Christ or to the method of
his birth. The new opinion arouses the hostility and alarm of minds
unaccustomed to so definite a statement, and in the zeal of their recoil
they fly to a contrary proposition. The Christians would neither admit
that they worshipped more gods than one because of the Greeks, nor
deny the divinity of Christ because of the Jews. They dreaded to be
polytheistic; equally did they dread the least apparent detraction from
the power and importance of their Saviour. They were forced into the
theory of the Trinity by the necessity of those contrary assertions,
and they had to make it a mystery protected by curses to save it from a
reductio ad absurdam. The entire history of the growth of the Christian
doctrine in those disordered early centuries is a history of theology
by committee; a history of furious wrangling, of hasty compromises, and
still more hasty attempts to clinch matters by anathema. When the muddle
was at its very worst, the church was confronted by enormous political
opportunities. In order that it should seize these one chief thing
appeared imperative: doctrinal uniformity. The emperor himself, albeit
unbaptised and very ignorant of Greek, came and seated himself in the
midst of Christian thought upon a golden throne. At the end of it all
Eusebius, that supreme Trimmer, was prepared to damn everlastingly all
those who doubted that consubstantiality he himself had doubted at the
beginning of the conference. It is quite clear that Constantine did not
care who was damned or for what period, so long as the Christians ceased
to wrangle among themselves. The practical unanimity of Nicaea was
secured by threats, and then, turning upon the victors, he sought by
threats to restore Arius to communion. The imperial aim was a common
faith to unite the empire. The crushing out of the Arians and of the
Paulicians and suchlike heretics, and more particularly the systematic
destruction by the orthodox of all heretical writings, had about it none
of that quality of honest conviction which comes to those who have a
real knowledge of God; it was a bawling down of dissensions that, left
to work themselves out, would have spoilt good business; it was the fist
of Nicolas of Myra over again, except that after the days of Ambrose the
sword of the executioner and the fires of the book-burner were added to
the weapon of the human voice. Priscillian was the first human sacrifice
formally offered up under these improved conditions to the greater glory
of the reinforced Trinity. Thereafter the blood of the heretics was the
cement of Christian unity.
It is with these things in mind that those who profess the new faith are
becoming so markedly anxious to distinguish God from the Trinitarian’s
deity. At present if anyone who has left the Christian communion
declares himself a believer in God, priest and parson swell with
self-complacency. There is no reason why they should do so. That many of
us have gone from them and found God is no concern of theirs. It is
not that we who went out into the wilderness which we thought to be
a desert, away from their creeds and dogmas, have turned back and are
returning. It is that we have gone on still further, and are beyond that
desolation. Never more shall we return to those who gather under the
cross. By faith we disbelieved and denied. By faith we said of that
stuffed scarecrow of divinity, that incoherent accumulation of antique
theological notions, the Nicene deity, “This is certainly no God.” And
by faith we have found God. . . .