Man and God
By CANON C. E. RAVEN (Regius P rofessor of Divinity at Cambridge).
GOD—what sort of image do those three letters call up in the mind of your ordinary man ? What reaction of love, fear, awe or obligation, do they provoke ? We talk and write and think and pray : but to whom and with what dominant feelings ? The questions came not from one of those recently modern but already demodis rebels to whom God is taboo and on their own showing repellent, but from a representative of the generation that is succeeding them. It is a generation not less frank nor less open-eyed than its predecessor, but, perhaps because its most impressionable years were not seared by war, more sane, more humble, more human. To such some sort of answer is due when it seeks to know the facts in order to act upon them.
Here after all is a fact of primary importance. What matters most about man or nation is surely the back- ground of half-realized ideas that lies below the level of articulate thought, and expresses itself more or less consistently in character and conduct. Beyond man's typical quality as a creature who reasons or makes tools or laughs, lies the primitive capacity for discovering the universe over against his own self. The animals do not seem to possess it : they live unselfconsciously. Man achieves manhood by reason of it : he can set himself apart from the whole of things, can realize solitariness and therefore can attempt communion. As he comes to terms with his universe so he develops his particular faculties and determines his destiny. It is at least arguable that from this simple reaction to the sum of things has been evolved all the equipment, aesthetic, intellectual and moral, of humanity : even in us sophisticated creatures of to-day it is the essential clement in personality.
But it is not with the primitive idea of wholeness or the holy, and with the response of awe to its " numinous - ness," that our questions are concerned. Fascinating as is the study of the development from unanalysed dread to animism and taboo, to folklore and cultus, to religions and theologies, our concern is with the present and with the reactions of our contemporaries of the Western world and the Christian tradition. What do they feel about God ?
At first the variety of reply seems so large as to forecast
a verdict of Quot homines, tot sententiae, or at least the admission that if wise men think alike they keep their thoughts to themselves. Very many of us, perhaps the majority, get a picture in childhood—the all-seeing Eye, the incalculable Schoolmaster. the amiable Grand- father—from which they never break free : there are, alas, more morons in religion than in any other field of human effort, as a study of our novelists makes manifest. Many more, though far fewer than Mr. Bernard Shaw supposes, have imposed upon them a composite picture in which tribal, legal and apocalyptic elements from the Old Testament are fused with frag- mentary notions of a first cause, an flan vital, a master mathematician. Even in circles of instructed orthodoxy there are probably few who have grown up consistently into an acceptance of Christ's concept of the Father ;
for the Church has not been immune from the influence of metaphysical speculation, of forensic ecclesiasticism and of sentimental piety, and often replaces the Father by the Absolute, the Judge or the Favouritiser ; and popular hymns, or even the Book of Common Prayer, hardly encourage consistency.
When we try to look beneath this surface of confusion, and away from the insincerities of utterance to the experience that most if not all in fact possess, certain broad lines of divergence are plainly discernible. Despite conventional uniformity of expression it is clear that the prevailing environment, cultural, political and racial, has a powerful influence. The religion of the country- man is not that of the city ; the poor who live on the edge of insecurity arc far less pessimistic and sentimental than their affluent and sheltered neighbours; those whose domestic and intimate affections are happy differ widely from the maladjusted, the abnormal, the complex- ridden. Just as such individual or social peculiarities produce specific types of character and of behaviour, so if we could analyse them out we should find them corre- sponding to typical concepts of God. To this extent that man makes God in his own image is true—a half- truth and a platitude which has, of course, no bearing upon the fact of God's reality.
To attempt a classification even of the main types would demand a treatise. One broad division may be stated as an example. Catholic and Protestant, though their boundaries are less rigid than of old, still represent two distinct strains of Christian experience. The Catholic. inheriting something of the Roman reverence for ordered society, for an imperiura and a privileged status, secs God in relation to the supernatural order of which his Church is the representative and instrument. He is profoundly conscious of a deep duality between Church and world, religion and nature, God and the universe. The Reformed or Protestant Churches, much as they have taken over from Catholicism, have never accepted this duality : the divine in nature, the operation of God in all history, whether . secular or sacred, the true manhood of Jesus, are ingrained convictions, going back perhaps to a non-Roman racial heritage : the starry heavens above and the moral law within determine their concept of God far more strongly than Church or Sacraments : their religious response is that deScribed so perfectly in the closing pages of Clarissa's Banquet.
To rescue such a generalization from being set down to prejudice or dismissed as truism, here is a little-observed fact. Nothing is more characteristic of this divergence than the attitude of Catholics and Protestants towards animal life and the world of nature. In our own and other Reformed Churches poetry and literature are full of the beauty of hills and sea, of flowers and birds. From Thomas Browne to Gilbert White, to Charles Kingsley and the churches of to-day there has been a succession of teachers to whom God is primarily testified to by the things that He has made. In Catholicism this concern with nature is almost wholly lacking. St. Francis had it— and is the only saint for whom Protestants recognize enthusiasm. Abbe Mendel had it—but his discoveries were only preserved by the researches of non-Catholic students. Italy, France, Spain, Ireland—hardly a single book, such as appear here or in Holland or Sweden in numbers yearly, has come from them, unless it be from Fabre, the agnostic, and Delamain, the Huguenot. It is one illustration among many : but it is profoundly signifi- cant.
It lies beyond the answer to our questionsto express any judgement upon the comparative merits of such concepts. At least they help us to a reply. For Christians of our
race it would seem true to say that it is God as the imman- ent reality of the universe, God as expressed in its slow and painful evolution, God as witnessed to by conscience, whom we naturally worship. Our reaction is rather that of reverence kindling into joy, than of love. Yet when creation is seen as culminating in the Son of Man, when Christ is adored not as a divine intruder, but as the first-fruits and perfect flower of it, then the two strongest impulses of human nature, awe for the numinous and affection of person for person, coincide ; and God is known as Father and as Father loved.
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