Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 79:315 (Jul 1922)
Article: God And Personality
Author: James Lindsay

BSac 79:315 (July 1922) p. 290

God And Personality

James Lindsay

An able and scholarly English author, Mr. Clement Webb, has, in a recent work—one of the mixed blessings which the Gifford Lectures have so often proved to be— entitled “God and Personality,” laid it down, as his central insistence, that we may speak of “Personality in God,” but not of “the Personality of God.” He argues this on the grounds that Church creeds and formularies have not defined God so, at least where the Trinitarian faith has been held. He says (p. 65), “the great majority of Christian theologians down to quite modern times have not affirmed in so many words the Personality of God.” He adds that he is not asserting that they “have not ascribed to God attributes which it may be plausibly argued can belong only to persons.” But he is concerned “only with the actual ascription of Personality itself to God” (p. 65).

I may say at once that I entirely reject Mr. Webb’s main thesis, for I hold that we must, and should, speak of “the personality of God.” For the Christian Church has never known a God that was not personal: that cannot even “plausibly” be argued. One would need to be a victim of the merest verbalism before one could arbitrarily shut off the patent evidence of personal conception of Deity—the thing, the reality, the conception, I mean, not the set phrase—in the writings of the theologians and the saints of the Early and Middle Ages. To their religious consciousness Mr. Webb does serious injustice, when he says (p. 242) that “in the public theologies and ecclesiastical polities of mankind we have the best expression of the normal religious experience of the peoples among whom they have arisen.” I think the history of many of the “public theologies” and “ecclesiastical polities” has been such, in their attendant conditions and polemical strifes and passions, that this value claimed for them

BSac 79:315 (July 1922) p. 291

must be greatly modified, when placed alongside the individual testimonies of the religious consciousness. This last was much freer of extraneous influences and foreign modes of thought, than were the “public theologies” and the “ecclesiastical polities.” Mr. Webb is really begging the whole question of the personality of God by his method; for he gives away his case in substance when he is compelled to admit that “the great majority of Christian theologians” have ascribed to God “attributes” which “can belong only to persons” (p. 65), and that the historic personality of Jesus—”a real historical person”—has been “worshipped as God” (p. 81). To concern oneself “only with the modern actual ascription of Personality to God” is, in these circumstances, a narro...