Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 36:142 (Apr 1879)
Article: The Unchangeableness Of God
Author: D. W. Simon

BSac 36:142 (April 1879) p. 209

The Unchangeableness Of God

Dr. D. W. Simon

III. The Principle Of The Reconciliation of Vitality And Immutability

§ 9. Introductory Remarks. — The Religion and science alike call for the reconciliation of the divine unchangeableness and the divine vitality. Until the two are seen to be not only reconcilable with, but also necessary to, each other, no mere eclecticism, no mere addition of antitheses, will preserve us from falling now into the one extreme, then into the other; now into mere immutability, then into mere vitality; now into pantheism, then into deism. What is needed is a higher principle, which by combining both vitality and immutability shall enable us to retain our hold on the truth and eschew the errors into which there is constant danger of falling.

The notion is very current, indeed, that man is necessarily doomed to inadequate, or even incorrect, representations of God, because in his religious intercourse with his Creator he cannot but reduce him to finitude and conceive him in the likeness of man. Whereas logical thought compels us to cast aside what is added by pious emotion, and that which remains is more like the caput mortuum of an abstract idea than the God of religion. But to accept an essential contradiction between the real God and the God of faith, between knowledge and the heart, would involve the ruin not only of religion,

BSac 36:142 (April 1879) p. 210

but also of science; for how vain and restricted must the efforts of science be, if it stand in necessary antagonism to the most essential —yea, central —element of man’s spiritual organization. It is, accordingly, one of our fundamental moral duties to hold fast by the belief in the essential harmony of intellect and heart, of man’s thought of God and what God veritably is; that is, to regard apparent dissonances as the fruit of sin, and eradicable with their root. And what is this but to say that Christianity has in principle redeemed us from these dissonances? Such confidence becomes alike the Christian and the theologian. The fundamental fact of Christianity — that is, the incarnation of God — is the matter-of-fact solution of the problem of the union of immutability and vitality. The likeness of man to God is not merely confirmed by the God-man, but brought to full reality; and it cannot have full reality without including a knowledge of God. Humanity in union with Christ knows God truly; and, so far from desiring to keep this knowledge to himself, the God-man yearns for men to whom he can reveal what he knows by the Spirit. As the Christian church believes Christ to be not merely a new and higher, but the final, complete, consummating revelation of God, it is right to utilize this article of its faith in the locus ...