Is God a person?

The thought here is indeed hardly needed to complete the ideal image which has been rising before us: for the intelligent, purposive Will-Cause of the universe must needs be a "living God." And of course this organic unity is not true of Him, but only the shadow of what is ineffably higher than itself. We are but using earth-boundary-lines to mark off — not to measure — the heavens. But above this unity of life, however connected with it, rises another unity far higher, and therefore pointing more toward God, — the personality, which is other than the corporeity, and other than its life. But this, if disputed, we need not here contend about. Life and personality are at least the expression of unities which plainly enter into the idea of God, if we are to possess one; and no one will contend that He of whom Scripture speaks is not Living and Personal.

But this does not end the correspondence: personality itself leads us further, in that character which seems very clearly to distinguish it from the constantly changing material body. The unity of consciousness is such as our bodies, ever in flux, have not — a unity in time. With all the changes wrought in the course, say, of fifty years, we are witnesses to ourselves that we are, after all, the same persons as fifty years ago. We have not, in that sense, changed in all that time, though the body has been renewed, physiologists tell us, some seven times over. Here there is a unity in time, an unchangeable identity, which, if carried to its highest conceivable terms, develops yet further that thought of God which has been growing steadily, and keeping step with us, as we have pursued our way. Now it overshadows us with the suggestion of the Unchangeable, and so, the Eternal. "Jehovah" meant this for the Hebrew and here the figure of the Hebrew's God is on the coin. But the Hebrew did not stamp it there: who did?

To state such wild vapourings sufficiently exposes them to any persons of sound judgment. The unsound may be left to the logic of facts as the best disproof. Nor should such verbiage have called for a notice in these pages, but that the vagary claims to be a religion! as well as a science, and not a new religion but the oldest Christian religion!! yea its clear and intelligible apprehension, according to the rules laid down by the Master Himself!!! Such a pretension, along with its suicidal basis of "NO PERSONAL GOD," calls for the sternest denunciation. Mind without a personal subsistence is the shallowest of delusions. The self-existent God has affections and will, no less than purity, wisdom, and power according to His own infinitude. He is love and light in the beautiful yet true figures of scripture. But to deny implicitly His creation of angels and men, as well as of the heavens and the earth, is to fly in the face of His holy writ. To say that there is no other mind but the One, and no other will but His, is to contradict the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, nay the surest and saddest facts before us every day.

Think again how such a system destroys all the highest relations, and duties of the Christian. It were absurd to worship a principle: one can only worship a living personal God. Our communion is with the Father and with His Son by the Holy Spirit. With an impersonal Being this cannot be, as indeed it is folly to talk of mind, will, or love in that case: "His" we cannot say, save improperly.

A living and personal God we are called to serve, and Him only, as the Word when become flesh did perfectly; and He is the truth. Further every form of Pantheism undermines responsibility which must be to a person. Adherence to a principle is quite a different thing. Pantheism or "Christian Science" is incompatible with relationship to God, and hence overthrows the foundation of morality; as it still more evidently shuts out grace, redemption, the new creation, and the new relations God forms in all who receive Christ the Lord by faith.

We have thus one personal God - "I am," supreme, absolutely free, omniscient, omnipotent, wise, the Creator. These are, so to speak, natural attributes; moral ones are righteous, holy, good; known to man not by ideas or thinking, which is impossible, for then man's mind would be at least the equal of God, that is, He would not be God at all; but by conscience, or the knowledge of good and evil, the proofs in the creation around us of creative power and wisdom, and in spite of the undeniable, utter degradation of man, in corruption and violence, and the monstrous deities into which he had merged it, the idea of God, the abiding sense of unity, supremacy, absolute godhead, everywhere found.

46 Having the unity of the Godhead constantly asserted in scripture, the manner of the divine existence is a subject of mere revelation. There I find that the Holy Ghost wills and distributes; the Father sends; the Son is sent; and yet He and His Father are one. I find that the "Word is God," that the Son is "the true God," that "all things were created by him." If it is said of the Holy Ghost, "All these worketh that one and the self-same Spirit," I read in the same passage, "It is the same God that worketh all in all." Now, I have no better word than "person" for one who is sent, who wills, who distributes, who sends, and so on. It cannot give me that circumscribed idea of "person" which the word applied to man does (for then one existence excludes another); but I have no reason whatever to impose the limits of my manner of being on God's, but rather the contrary. Now all Mr. N.'s reasoning is merely the reducing the Godhead to the strictest limits of creature-nature, which is a mere absurdity and a miserable exclusion of all above us, and a levelling of God to man — the necessary degradation of man too, for he is elevated in knowing God.

The truth as to the Deity is not that there are Gods—three supreme and omnipotent Beings, each having His own life and acting from Himself—but three in one—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—One God; and though for the sake of accommodation we use the word Person, and speak of three Persons in the Godhead, yet there are not three Persons as we understand persons. Such as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were three persons; each having his own separate life.

In human language when we speak of a person, we think of separate entity, separate existence, separate will, different characteristics, thoughts and plans peculiar to each person, not shared with any others. Carry that human thought into the subject before us, and the truth of the Trinity is entirely perverted and lost. Instead of the Trinity—Father, Son and Spirit, ONE God—we should have three Gods, an absolute impossibility, for there can only be one God, unique and incomprehensible.

I speak of His personality because in Scripture I have a Being that comes and goes, is sent, speaks, and hears, and so I say, He is a Person. And I would insist upon certain statements of truth, commonly accepted, that present truth in the way the saints of God admit. But if I find a person quarrelling much over the words, I rather suspect it is because he does not like the thing itself. God is not the truth. He always tells the truth; but the truth is something that is told of another. Christ is the truth, for He is the One who tells others of God.

The truth is that this pretentious folly is only a revival of heathen Pantheism. In it Christ has not even the place allowed to Him in the Koran of the false Prophet of Mecca. For He in it is owned to be the Judge, if not the Saviour. But Mrs. Eddy leads her followers to deny a Personal God which the Moslems acknowledge, and consequently the everlasting judgment which remains for the unbelieving. An impersonal God must be indifferent, a mere abstraction incapable of either love or judgment. The True God is He that sent His Son into the world to save sinners, but only such as believe. All others who hear add to their other sins the crowning one of rejecting the Lord and Saviour, and of disbelieving God. Scripture is clear and decisive that He who is to judge the wicked is the same Jesus who once suffered for sins, Just for unjust. What an awful aggravation of their unbelief, when the risen and glorified Saviour sits to judge those who denied the true God as well as His Son! To say that "sin" is an illusion is to sink morally lower than an unbelieving Jew. The very heathen were not so false or audacious, though they had no adequate idea of what sin is in God's sight. "Christian Science" in denying its reality robs Christ of His moral glory as well as His grace, as the Taker away of the sin of the world.

It is this unity of the individual which, we might say, qualifies man for the apprehension of God. The very fact that he stands out distinct from all else enables hint to apprehend the necessity for the same truth in the sphere of the Infinite. He knows what "one" means because he himself is one in the sense we have indicated, and thus in his sphere as a creature the very stamp of the Creator's being has been put upon him. If man is a person, an individual, so also He who enables him thus to recognize his individuality and to be conscious of it, is a Person. It is this which gives us one view, at least, of the truth of that sublime statement that man is made "in the image of God!"