_Christian Theology
		by Milton Valentine, D.D., LL.D
		Copyright 1906,
		Lutheran Publication Society
		Printed Philadelphia, PA.
	               Pages 153-167
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			PART I.

	TRUTHS ANTECEDENT TO REDEMPTION.

CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY, in the distinct sense, and
from the sources explained in the introductory discussion,
begins its specific and proper work in a consideration of
the two great truths of GOD and MAN. These two
truths are the essential presuppositions for all the other
truths or teachings of Christianity. They have a funda-
mental position. All others rest upon them. Apart
from the existence of God and mankind, the whole
matter of theology would be a blank. Christianity, in
all its doctrines, expresses truths concerning them and
inter-relations between them. Theology, therefore, puts
them in the forefront.
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			DIVISION I.
	THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD AND HIS RELATIONS
		TO THE WORLD.

The truth concerning God reaches us from both the
sources of information already indicated--the light of
nature and the teachings of the Christian revelation.
In both of these we have real divine self-disclosure. The
Scriptures themselves affirm the distinctively revelatory
character of nature. Apart from some disclosure which
God made of Himself man could not know anything of
Him. But the whole realm of nature itself, the divine
work forming the cosmic universe, necessarily to some
degree reveals his being and thought. In creational
activity, as we have seen, He has opened a way in which
our knowledge may find and interpret Him. Out of the
cosmic existence and order comes the constant witness to
His eternal power and deity. Beyond all doubt, how-
ever, our best and fullest knowledge of God reaches us
through His supernatural redemptory self-revelation.

	ETYMOLOGY OF THE TERM.

The English appelation, God, has been commonly
derived from the same Anglo-Saxon root as _good_, and has
been supposed to designate the Good-Being. But a com-
parison of the various forms of the root discredits this
derivation. Moreover, the idea of "goodness," whether
in the sense of love or in an ethical sense, had too small
a place, if any at all, in the pagan conception of gods, to
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determine their designation. As shown by Max Mueller,
the term has probably come from the Sanscrit _jut_ or _dyut_,
through the Gothic _gutha_, to shine. [1]

The etymology of the Greek _Theos_, is uncertain. He-
rodotus derived it from _tithemi_, to place, under the idea
that the gods placed or determined all things in the
world. But this account is unsustained. So is also the
view of Plato, deriving it from _theo_, to run, because the
earlier worship was largely offered to the sun, moon, and
stars in their courses. The supposition of Curtius, that
it may have come from a root _thes_, whence _thes-samenoi_,
supplicated, is too remote and uncertain. The most
reliable view seems to be that of Max Muellerr, tracing
it from the Sanscrit _deva_, _bright_, _shining_; Zend, _daeva_;
Persian, _dew_; Latin, _deus_--reflecting the early Indo-
European worship as identifying God with the bright,
resplendent heavens.

It is thus apparent that both our English appellation,
God, and the Greek term _Theos_ are carried as a linguistic
inheritance from our ethnic or Gentile descent, and not
from the Hebrew tongue, which was the medium of
the preparatory unfolding of our Christian theism.

		THE IDEA OF GOD.

1. _The content of it_. For Christian theology the idea
of God must be the Christian idea. Until we have
reached this, in the measure in which the Christian
Scriptures present it, we are short of the true conception.
Christian theology can integrate its entire doctrine con-
cerning God only when it has comprehended and united
all the realities and features which the full redemptory
revelation has made known. It can never consent to
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[1] "Science of Language," 2d Ser., p. 148.
---------------End of Page 155-------------------------------
less than this as the aim of its elucidations. Neverthe-
less, it justly recognizes, or at least takes account of, the
inferior and inadequate ideas in which the natural religi-
ous and theologic endeavors of mankind, feeling after
God, have embodied their thought of Him. The con-
tent of these has been almost infinitely varied. His-
torically, among pagan peoples, it has been found to
range from the lowest and crudest notions of the most
ignorant and degraded tribes up to the highest and best
conceptions in which the sages and thinkers of cultured
nations have idealized the Supreme Being as an intelli-
gent and personal Spirit, and as the Creator and Ruler of
the world. In the writings of the Old and New Testa-
ments, also, while God is from first to last identical with
Himself, and from the very beginning the concrete per-
sonal Creator as well as the almighty and righteous Ruler
of heaven and earth, there is an advance in the revealed
view, which enlarges the content to the completeness in
which He is revealed as love and a Saviour in Jesus
Christ. The Scriptures, therefore, are the norm for this
full content. It is the high aim of theology to realize
and exhibit it. Without doubt, the sincere mind of the
Church, looking with open face into the word of God's
supreme self-revelation, through the Christian centuries,
has been making advance in comprehending the revealed
idea. It is penetrating the whole thought with increas-
ing clearness and closer approach to the Scripture intent.
There has been progress in the doctrine. There have
been periods in which, from spurious sources or specul-
lative philosophies, the pure, full idea has been obscured
or false conceptions inserted. Partial or one-sided inter-
pretations of the divine self-revelation have to some
degree held sway. Misplaced or undue emphasis on
------------End of Page 156---------------------------------
particular attributes has often beclouded the full ordered
reality or given faulty view. Christian theology can be
satisfied only when it has succeeded in uniting, in true
place and fullness, _all_ features of God's essential and
moral perfection as disclosed in His self-revelation in
nature and the Scriptures and made clear by the explain-
ing force of advancing Providence and the life of the
Church. But even this must not be regarded as giving
the idea of God in the completeness of the divine
reality. When the human mind, in its utmost recep-
tiveness, has appropriated the disclosures of the double
revelation of nature and redemption, it has grasped the
content which belongs to the being of God in only
limited comprehensions. God is forever more and greater
than the fullest measure of even the best Christian
thought.[1]

2. _The origin or genesis of the idea in the human
mind_. Though there are still some differences of ex-
planation among those who accept the validity of the
idea, there is now a near approach to essential agree-
ment as between the two general views that long have
been maintained. The view, often urged, that it was
given by a primitive supernatural revelation, and abides,
often in obscured and corrupted form, as an inheritance
in the race, the broken, scattered rays of that original
disclosure, has been losing ground through modern his-
torical, ethnological, and philological researches. Besides
the difficulties in crediting so uncertain a thing as tradi-
tion with the universal conservation and communication
of this truth, the laws of psychology forbid its accept-
ance as the actual and adequate explanation. For the
"idea" being a psychic product, as all ideas necessarily
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[1] Job xi. 7; Rom. xi. 33, 34.
--------------End of Page 157---------------------------------
are, something beyond mere sense impression, could not
possibly come from _without_ except in the sense that the
mind formed it simply on the _occasion_ of some divine
manifestation. As even "words" are merely occasion or
suggestive force on which a hearer or reader constructs or
reconstructs ideas, so even a divine self-disclosure would
leave the human mind blank of the idea of God except
through the mind's own interpretation and identification
of the external phenomena or revelatory manifestation.
Indeed, the internal idea of God, however and whenever
reached, is a pre-supposition for the recognition of the
supernatural phenomena as _of God_. For these reasons it
seems best, without necessarily denying a primitive reve-
lation as a possible or probable fact--as the Biblical view
implies a relation of immediate open divine communica-
tion with man--to hold that the idea of God is _natural
and normal to the human mind_, acting in the presence of
the world of nature, with its perpetually suggestive force,
lofty and mysterious endowment with a capacity to _know_
reality, both within himself and in the realm of existence
around him and above him, the world of nature itself is
an adequate supply of the suggestive material for his
intelligence to form the idea through acts of intuition
and judgement. In this sense, it must be maintained,
human nature is not atheistic; in its fundamental con-
stitution its faculties are adapted to know God. In har-
mony with this principle also stands the recognized truth
of the essential "religiousness" of human nature. In
the deepest needs of his being and life man was "made
for God"--as tested by the profoundest philosophy of
human experience. As a pre-condition, therefore, for
meeting the fundamental demands of his nature and liv-
------------End of Page 158------------------------------
ing his true life, his rational capacity to think and know
must have included the normal ability and tendency to
form, from the contacts and suggestions of his environ-
ment, the idea of a being with the power, relations, and
prerogatives denoted by the term God. The witness of
history and ethnic life directly supports this view, show-
ing the presence of the idea, in endlessly diversified con-
struction, wherever man has been found with his capaci-
ties in natural development and action. So normal is
the idea to rational thought, that we are justified in
thinking that could it be for a time blotted out from the
earth, the human reason would renew it and fill the world
with it again.

Of the various explanations which treat the idea, either
theoretically or practically as a _pseud_ idea, whether pre-
sented in the name of history or science, no one has more
than a superficial and illusory plausibility. The effort
to account for its genesis through a transformed reverence
for dead ancestors or departed heroes,[1]  though made to
look specious by discovery of various cults of ancestral
and hero worship, sometimes of remote antiquity, is
plainly futile by reason of its manifestly false assump-
tion that the idea in reverence of ancestors is the same
as the idea of God, or can generate it. For such rever-
ence for human forefathers or heroes does not rest on any
notion of their divinity at all. It may, and when left to
its own simple self, always does, permit the mind to re-
main a blank as to the conception and reality of God.
It is only when the mind attains a new and different
conception, adding from some other source the idea of a
_God_, that the act of _apotheosis_, i.e., the exaltation of
human beings to the rank and prerogatives of deity, be-
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[1] So Herbert Spencer, in his "Principles of Sociology."
------------End of Page 159----------------------------------
comes possible. The idea of God, therefore, is a pre-
requisite to the movement of apotheosis--not a product
of it. The theory affords neither the reality of the idea
nor the process of its origination.

The explanation which attempts to account for the
origin of the idea in the ignorant and superstitious fears
and dread of mankind in the presence of the terrifying
and mysterious powers of nature,[1]  though often and
elaborately presented, is equally illegitimate and incon-
clusive. It is sufficiently confuted by the permanence
of the idea. For, a notion that is the product of ignor-
ance and superstition, a phantom born of dread and dark-
ness, ought to dissolve and disappear in the light of
knowledge. The spectres of night must evanish when
the day comes. But the conception of God has grown
clearer and stronger with the progress of intelligence and
science. Nowhere is it so full and authoritative as in
the highest and most advanced civilizations, in the heart
of the centuries and lands where nature and reality are
investigated and certified under the acutest scientific re-
search and philosophic scrutiny. It is positive and reg-
nant to-day as never before. It is found, indeed, that
this idea is the guiding light for human progress and
elevation, and for penetrative and victorious interpeta-
tion of the cosmic existence. An idea so normal to
thought and so self-authenticating to the intellectual life
and moral judgments of mankind endures by virtue of
its standing, not as a _pseud_ idea, but for an immutably
sure reality.

3. _The earliest form of the idea_. The point of inquiry
here is not the degree of its original fullness or com-
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[1] As by Lucretius, "De Rerum Natura," Lib. VI., 50-70; and Hume,
"The Natural History of Religion," sections i.-viii.
--------------------End of Page 160------------------------------
pleteness of content, which confessedly must have been
very imperfect, but whether it was monotheistic or poly-
theistic. Through the speculations of the "Positive Phi-
losophy" and of various types of evolutionist science, the
view has been widely put forth that back of all monothe-
istic thought, polytheistic notions and practices held
sway. "No trace of monotheism," it has been said, "is to
be found anywhere in the world except with a polytheism
behind it."[1]  The genesis of the idea being supposed
to take place from a time and condition of so-called
"nature-worship"--the fetishism of reverencing or pro-
pitiating the different powers of nature--it is urged that
this naturally at first gave it polytheistic shape in differ-
ent invisible divinities behind the various cosmic powers.
The question is essentially a question of fact, and the
siftings of historical research, as well as of rational
thought, have given an ample refutation fo the theory.
It must suffice simply to poknt out the line of decisive
evidence.

Psychologically the polytheistic form can hardly be
conceived as co-incident with the origin of the idea.
"The singular in thought must precede the plural....
It is too often forgotten by those who believe that a
polytheistic worship was the most natural unfolding of
the religious life, that polytheism must everywhere have
been preceded by a more or less conscious theism. In no
language does the plural exist before the singular. No
human mind could have conceived the idea of Gods
without having previously conceived the idea of a God....
It might seem, indeed, as if in such a faith the oneness
of God, though not expressly asserted, was yet implied,
--------------------------------------------------------
[1] Prof. W. D. Whitney, of Yale, in "Princeton Review," May,
1881.
----------------End of Page 161-----------------------------
and that it existed, though latent, in the first revelation."[1]
Max Mueller recognizes this notion: "There is a God," as
one kind of monotheism, but prefers the designation
"henotheism"[2] as specifically expressive of the thought
until the mind makes the further affirmation: "There is
only One." Primitive thinking might, indeed, having the
thought, "There is a God," move in the direction of
saying, "There are many or more than One," but, psycho-
logically, the essentially monotheistic thought must pre-
cede a polytheistic notion or faith.

Philological research has disclosed the further fact
that the various terms and _names_ for God in all the
branches of the Aryan or Indo-European family of races
when traced back exhibit a common root, a single word,
as desinatin of the idea, carried from their original
home in central Asia from which they  migrated. In the
early period, prior to the dispersion, they had an individ-
ual conception expressed by one term and a common
name, still found embedded in the root-forms of the
various languages sprung from that ancient tongue.[3]
Under that single term the deity appears to have been
worshiped by the Aryan race as a whole.

The same investigation brings to view the fact that in
all these races  the polytheism becomes simpler and less,
and approaches monotheism, the further it is traced
back. "The younger the polytheism, the fewer its
gods."[4]  This fact, joined with the psychological order of
the precedence of the singular in thought and the one-
-----------------------------------------------------------
[1] Max Mueller, "Chips from a German Workshop," Vol. I., pp. 347-
350.
[2] From eis, enos, one, as opposed to monos, only one.
[3] A. M. Fairbairn, "Studies in the Philosophy of Religion and
History" (New York), pp. 30-48.
[4] Ib., p. 30.
----------------End of Page 162---------------------------------
ness of the root-term, evidently becomes expressive of
the direction of the movement under which the mani-
fold luxuriant national pantheons have been produced.
They appear as a growth under the process of specializa-
tion of the original idea and false applications of it to
invisible nature-powers and apotheosis of heroes.

This conclusion is fully sustained by historic and
critical investigations which distinctly discover and
report monotheism (counting the so-called "henothe-
ism" as possibly its initial type) as having been in fact
the earliest form of the idea amoung the three most
ancient peoples or nations in the world, whose records
open our deepest view into antiquity, in India, Egypt,
and China.

As to _India_, Max Mueller, after comprehensive scholarly
research, has voiced the testimonty of its oldest litera-
ture in affirming the singular as preceding the plural in
its theoistic conception. In his "Origin and Growth
of Religion,[1]  while giving the origin of the idea an
inferential rather than a revelatory basis, he distinctly
repudiates the notion of a polytheism at the roots of the
conception in the religion of that land.

With respect to _Egypt_, this conclusion is given with
emphasis by most of the great Egyptologists.  P. Le Page
Renouf, in the Hibbert Lectures for 1879, answering
the question of the earliest form of religion there, as
shown in archaic documents, says: "The whole myth-
ology of Egypt may be said to turn upon the histories
of Ra and Osiris, and these histories run into each
other, sometimes in inextricable confusion, which ceases
to be wonderful when texts are discovered which
simply identify Osiris and Ra. And, finally, other texts
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[1] Hibbert Lectures, 1878, pp. 250-275.
----------------End of Page 163----------------------------
are known, wherein Ra, Osiris, Ammon, and all other
gods disappear, except as simple _names_, and the unity
of God is asserted in the noblest language of monothe-
istic religion. There are many very eminent scholars
who, with full knowledge of all that can be said to the
contrary, maintain that the Egyptian religion is essen-
tially monotheistic, and that the multiplicity of gods is
only due to the personification of the attributes, the
characters, and offices of the Supreme God."[1]  Renouf
quotes the matured testimony of Rouge, than whom, he
says, no scholar is better entitled to be heard: "No one has
called in question the fundamental meaning of the prin-
cipal passages, by the help of which we are enabled to
establish what Egypt has taught concerning God, the
world, and man. I say _God_, not gods. The first char-
acteristic of the religion is the Unity [of God] most-
energetically expressed: God, One, Sole, and Only; no
other with Him. He is the Only Being--living in
truth. Thou art One, and millions of beings proceed from
Thee. He has made everything, and He alone has not
been made.... But how reconcile the Unity of God
with Egyptian polytheism? History and geography
will perhaps elucidate the matter. The Egyptian
religion comprehends a quantity of local worships. The
Egypt which Menes brought together entire under his
sceptre was divided into nomes, each having a capital
town; each one of these regions had its principal God
designated by a special name; but it is always the same
doctrine which reappears under different names. One
idea predominates, that of a single and primeval God,
everywhere and always it is One Substance, self-existent,
and an unapprochable God.... Are these doctrines,
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[1] "Hibbert Lectures," p. 92.
----------------------End of Page 164----------------------
then, the result of centuries? Certainly not; for they
were in existence more than two thousand years before
the Christian era. On the other hand, polytheism, the
sources of which we have pointed out, develops itself
and progresses without interruption until the times of the
Ptolomies. It is, therefore, more than five thousand
years since, in the valley of the Nile, the hymn began
to the unity of God and the immortality of the soul, and
we find Egypt in the _last ages_ arrived at the most
unbridled polytheism. The belief in the unity of the
Supreme God and in His attributes as Creator and Law-
giver of man, whom He has endowed with an immortal
soul--these are the primitive notions, encased, like inde-
structible diamonds, in the midst of mythological super-
fectations, accumulated in the centuries which have passed
over the ancient civilization."[1]  Prof. Tiele, of Leiden,
explains that though it was distinctly taught that `the
invisible God by whom all things came into existence
is a Being who is One and alone, He yet revealed
Himself afterwards in innumerable manifestations, and
symbolic representations were easily imagined and multi-
plied. Through different forms of local representation,
without felt inconsistency with the emphatic assertion of
the oneness of His being, polytheistic language and prac-
tice obtained place and propagated itself until the latter
obscured the former.' "Men had long been accustomed
to regard these various divinities as nothing more than
different names for the same God."[2]

In respect to _China_, Prof. James Legge, in the depart-
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[1] "Hibbert Lectures," pp. 92-94.
[2] "History of the Egyptian Religion," pp. 216-223. Like testimonies
may be found in the works of Brugsch, Chabas, Maspero, Pierret, and
others.
----------------End of Page 165---------------------------
ment of the Chinese Language and Literature in the
University of Oxford, is a competent and sufficient wit-
ness. In his "Religion of China," speaking of the two
_primitive_ Chinese characters, Ti and Fien, as affording a
clue to the original form of belief, he says: "Thus the
two characters show us the religion of the ancient
Chinese as a monothesism. How it was with them more
than five thousand years ago, we have no means of know-
ing. But to find this among them at that remote and
early period was worth some toilsome digging among the
roots of primitive written characters. I will only add
here that the relation of the two names which we have
been considering has kept the monotheistic element
prominent in the religion of China proper down to the
present time, and prevented the prostitution of the name
Ti, as Deus and other corresponding appelations of the
Divine Being were prostituted.[1]... Five thousand
years ago the Chinese were monotheists--not henothe-
ists, but monotheists; and this monotheism was in
danger of being corrupted, as we have seen, by a nature-
worship on the one hand, and by a system of supersti-
tious divination on the other."[2]

Only a few words more are needed to indicate the force
and validity of the evidence from these examples. They
present not the dicta of _a priori_ speculation, but the wit-
ness of history and archaeology. The points in which they
appear on the horizon of the past mark the three countries
whose monuments open the longest and deepest retro-
spect into the natural religious thought of humanity for
the study of the subject. Their testimonies are reported
to us by the most learned and competent scholarship,
after special and prolonged study of the fullest resources
--------------------------------------------------------
[1] "Religion of China," p.11.
[2] Ib., p. 16.
-----------------End of Page 166---------------------------
available in each case--resources not likely to be super-
seded. These evidences, therefore, have the right of
way against theories based in speculative philosophies,
superficially sustained by references to the existence of
present polytheisms.
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