Pantheistic Atheism

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D.C. · Mar 9, 1905

Pantheistic Atheism

THERE are various ways of denying the existence of the true God, as revealed in his Word. Some do this openly. “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.” There is no difficulty in recognizing this kind of atheism. It wears no mask with which to conceal its hideous folly. Another way of denying the true God is to acknowledge many gods. The heathenism of the Athenians was broad enough to include “the unknown god,” to whom they erected an altar, but their city “full of idols” testified to their rejection of the living God. The modern way of denying the existence of God is to hold such a false conception of his nature and being as gives no place for him as a real, personal God. The present tendency to evolve the thought of God from the human interpretation of the teaching of nature, rather than to accept the teaching of the Bible, is simply latter-day atheism. “Of himself he [man] can not interpret nature without placing it above God. . . . In its human wisdom the world knows not God. Its wise men gather an imperfect knowledge of him from his created works; but this knowledge . . . tends to make men idolaters.” What is really involved in the idea of “the Immanent God,” now being urged as the very essence of religion, has been well expressed in the following quotation from an English writer: “For want of the restraining guidance of a true religion, men to whom these thoughts of the nearness of God to man and to all that is, have come home, as flowing from any worthy, even natural, thought about God and nature, have thrown them, sometimes (not always), into a pantheistic, and so untrue and dangerous, form and connection; when they have so dwelt on the universal, ever and everywhere, present immanence of God in nature and in man as to identify and confound God with creation; to the loss of the overpowering and controlling thought of his awful and transcendent personality, and of the absolute incomprehensible, purely spiritual, nature of his supreme essence and being. Such a system is clearly atheistic. An impersonal God is no God at all. The very conception of such a God is to us impossible, any true sense of the word ‘God’ being maintained.” And this pantheistic atheism is the most dangerous form of atheism.