God is Love--that is,
Will. Reason, the Word, derives from Him, but He, the Father, is, above
all, Will.
"There can be no doubt whatever," Ritschl says (_Rechtfertigung und
Versoehnung_, iii., chap. v.), "that a very imperfect view was taken of
God's spiritual personality in the older theology, when the functions of
knowing and willing alone were employed to illustrate it. Religious
thought plainly ascribes to God affections of feeling as well. The older
theology, however, laboured under the impression that feeling and
emotion were characteristic only of limited and created personality; it
transformed, _e.g._, the religious idea of the Divine blessedness into
eternal self-knowledge, and that of the Divine wrath into a fixed
purpose to punish sin." Yes, this logical God, arrived at by the _via
negationis_, was a God who, strictly speaking, neither loved nor hated,
because He neither enjoyed nor suffered, an inhuman God, and His justice
was a rational or mathematical justice--that is, an injustice.
The attributes of the living God, of the Father of Christ, must be
deduced from His historical revelation in the Gospel and in the
conscience of every Christian believer, and not from metaphysical
reasonings which lead only to the Nothing-God of Scotus Erigena, to the
rational or pantheistic God, to the atheist God--in short, to the
de-personalized Divinity.
Not by the way of reason, but only by the way of love and of suffering,
do we come to the living God, the human God.
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