The Religious Teaching of the Old Testament (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE PERSONALITY OF GOD Personallty and moral quality, as Professor Hocking says, "may well be regarded as the most humanly valuable attributes of the divine nature." 1 Indeed, without them the conception of God would be of very slight value. The former gives to religion its distinctive character, and the latter imparts to it its rational worth. It is these two attributes that are most conspicuous in the Old Testament. We here deal with the first, the personality of God. "Personality" is a term that has had various connotations. Frequently it has been thought to imply corporeality, or form or limitation of some kind. But no such implication necessarily attaches to the term. "The essential meaning of personality," as Professor Bowne says, "is selfhood, self-consciousness, self-control, and the power to know." 2 And in this sense the personality of God is the basal idea in religion. Without it there could be no religion in the proper sense of the term. "Religion," to quote Bowne again, "demands the mutual otherness of the finite and infinite, in order that the relation of love and obedience may obtain. Both love and religion seek for union, but it is not the union of absorption or fusion, but, rather, the union of mutual understanding and sympathy which would disappear if the otherness ofthe persons were removed." 3 "No impersonal being," as Fairbairn puts it, "whether named fate or chance, necessity or existence, the soul or the whole, can be an object of worship, though it may be an object of thought. As a matter of historical fact, no religion has ever been a pantheism, nor has any pantheism ever constituted a religion. . . . The impersonal must be personalized before thought, which is a subjective activity, can pass into worship, which is a reciprocal action, or...