Pantheism in Modern Philosophy of God and Nature
By W. A. S.
Present-Day Revivals of Ancient Errors—No. 4
Pantheism in Modern Philosophy of God and Nature
The word “pantheism” has a far-away and pagan sound to western ears. Pantheism is the basis of the heathenism of the East. It is also the thread-idea, running fine as the lotus fiber, through the modern philosophy of God and nature. The Christian teaching concerning the revelation of God in nature is that “the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead.” Rom. 1:20. This is simple enough in the light of the Scripture truth setting forth the being of God, self-limited as to personal form, upon the throne of the universe, “upholding all things by the word of his power.” The power and life of his divine word are seen in the things that he has made; so that men are without excuse for not accepting the word of salvation. But when men, in the vanity of their minds, sought a deeper and more scientific philosophy of the manifested power, they lost sight of God upon his throne in heaven, and thought they had discovered God himself within the creature. Man can not exercise power beyond his bodily presence. The vain imagination of men pictured God as like unto themselves, and fancied that it was not simply the working of the power of God that they saw in nature, but that God himself was in the things that are made. So “professing themselves to be wise,” they missed the glorious truth, and “changed the truth of God into a lie.” The full fruit of that highly spiritualized philosophy was the worship of the creature rather than the Creator. The word “pantheism” expresses this philosophy of God himself in nature. It is the product of the Orient, and in this thing also the churches of Christendom are being “replenished from the East.” Isa. 2:6. It has helped to sink India to the depths. A French writer, Leroux, declared that “all religions and all philosophies have their root in India, and that had pantheism not been found in India, that would have been a strong argument against its truth, for then humanity would have erred in its beginning.” It comes naturally with the idea of the infinite form of Deity. One Hindu conception, expressed in the Artharva Veda, was “a vast corporeal being, co-extensive with the universe, and comprehending in his several members the different parts of the material world.” Such a personality, of necessity, was diffused through all things. Thus came the famous Hindu saying, “All this [universe] is Brahma.” We need not think for a moment that this was a conscious effort to deny God. It was all in the name of a high and philosophic view of Deity. A modern admirer of the philosophy that assumed to bring God down into all his works cries out in praise of the Hindu sages: “Who in later days or in modern times can even approach the spiritual sublimity of their religious thought, the intellectual splendor of their philosophy, the breadth and purity of their ethic?” Yet, as we shall see, this philosophy was the degradation of India. God was worshiped where the revelation of power seemed closest to man, as in humanity and animal and plant life. Thus came man and animal and plant worship, though only the uninstructed would for a moment admit that they worshiped the creature instead of the Creator. When we think of the degrading worship of Egypt, where the glory of the incorruptible God was made like unto men and beasts and creeping things, we must remember that the philosophy that led to all this was most refined. “It so completely incarnates God,” says one writer, “as to make every type of animal existence divine.” Had one asked the priest of some ancient Egyptian temple why they worshiped animals, he would, says James Freeman Clark, have replied:— Do you think we worship these animals? Each of them is a symbol of a divine thought of the Creator. We reverence the Creator in his work. We dare not make a statue in the likeness of God; we take the creatures of his hand as signifying his character. It is to avoid idolatry, to avoid making anything in the image of God, that we place these creatures in the shrine. Every region is full of gods, for everything that lives and moves is full of the divine. The fields are sacred, for Brahma is there; the rivers are worshiped, for Brahma lives in them. Explaining the theory of the Hindu philosophy that sought to glorify nature study, Prof. Max Muller says:— When we look at a tree and ask what it is, when we see through its leaves and fruits, its barks and wood, and ask again what it is, the answer comes that it would be nothing if it were not Brahma, that it lives through Brahma, that it exists through Brahma. This is the real pantheism of the Vedanta: and strange as it may sound to us, it would not be difficult to match it, whether from our own philosophers or our poets. Even so recent a poet as Tennyson is reported to have said, “Perhaps this earth and all that is in it—storms, mountains, cataracts, the sun and the skies, are the Almighty.” This brings us to the leavening influence of Eastern pantheism in modern thought. I have seen a Hindu prostrate himself before a tree to worship. To any remonstrance he might say that he worships God in the tree. Holding up water in his hand toward the rising sun, he worships at the close of his morning bath. If one objected, he might say that he worshiped God in the light. Here he would use language so nearly that of the Scripture that the critic might ask why we should object to the answer. It shows that we can never take the nature of a teaching for granted simply because Scripture phraseology is sometimes used. To the instructed Christian the text, “God is light,” means one thing; to the theosophist, quite another thing. The physical is confounded with the spiritual. The truth is turned into a lie. In meeting the plague of this Eastern philosophy of God let none be deceived by Scripture phrases perverted to mask and support heathen ideas. The language of Inspiration is given the false interpretation, even as in apostolic days unstable men had begun to wrest some of Paul’s writings to their own destruction. 2 Peter 3:16. People are finding in the pantheistic idea of God in the tree, and God in the grass, and God in the light an influence that they think is making them more devotional. No one is so religious as the pantheist. One of the great modern advocates of pantheism was called “the God-drunken philosopher.” The Hindu sages were not irreligious men. The wine of this doctrine is a mocker and deceiver. It separates from God, while it professes to bring him near. These ideas are daily becoming more popular. A great German scientist recently said, “It follows necessarily that pantheism is the world-system of the modern scientist.” A clergyman of the Church of England declares, “Pantheism is on all hands acknowledged to be the theology of reason.” It is all involved in the idea of the “immanent God,” the root idea of Hinduism. Human reason and science, falsely so-called, aspiring to a new philosophy of God, is rushing headlong down the path that led ancient philosophy to the pit of heathenism. Dr. Stockwell, a student of scientific thought to-day, says:— Monistic idealism, or the conception of an immanent God, pervades all our modern religious thinking and feeling, is taught in our liberal universities, and6tinges deeply, if it does not especially characterize, the new theology. In fact, the substitution of an immanent God for the traditional or far-off God, may almost be said to be a universal movement throughout the intellectual world. Correctly stated, it is pantheistic; . . . In any event, if we accept the growing conviction of modern scientific and philosophic thought, that “God and nature are one,” . . . I fail to see how we are to escape the charge of being pantheistic. And I am quite ready to accept as true Professor Tyler’s statement that “we have been altogether too afraid of this term pantheism.” There is but one reason why men following the same path as the ancients should hesitate to describe the philosophy by its proper name. The reason is that the world has had a pretty fair chance to learn what the fruit of that philosophy is in the degradation of heathenism. But in the final conflict, old controversies are to be revived, the old paganism is to commingle with the new, and every mixture of light and darkness by which Satan has perverted minds in the past will be again set forth as new light, and with “satanic earnestness,” as we have been forewarned. That “God and nature are one” is the logic of the old and the new philosophy. As Dean Mansel said many years ago, of this philosophy of God:— Endeavoring to simplify and purify our representation of the divine nature, [it] ends by depriving it of every attribute which can make God the object of any religious feeling or the source of any moral obligation. Instead of a religious relation between God and man, the relation of a person to a person, this philosophy substitutes a metaphysical relation between God and the world, . . . happy if it stops short at this error only, and does not find itself compelled by the inexorable laws of its own logic to identify God with the world. The newest pantheism now takes this step boldly, as we have seen by the preceding quotation from a representative of the scientific school. Here is a word from Trine, author of “In Tune with the Infinite,” who represents the more religious school:— God is Spirit, the Infinite Spirit, the Infinite Life, back of all these physical manifestations we see in this changing world about us, and of which all, including ourselves, is the body or outer form; the one Infinite Spirit which fills all the universe with himself, so that all is he, since he is all. In one of the magazines published within our own denomination, I read: “Do not believe that nature desires to destroy you. God and nature are one.” It is an idea that crops out in all directions in these times when Eastern philosophy is flooding in. The popular philosophy of India is that of the Puranas, of which one writer says: “Pantheism is one of their invariable characteristics, as they always identify God and nature.” What has been the fruit of this pantheistic doctrine, fully developed? We see it in all India, and more or less in all the world; for it tinges all philosophy and religion of the natural mind. Professor Flint says:— Pantheism, instead of elevating and purifying Hindu polytheism, has contributed to increase the number, the absurdity, and the foulness of its superstitions. It is necessarily so; for if God and nature are one, then, as Bishop Caldwell shows, “everything that exists is a portion of God, and every action that is performed an action of God.” The full fruitage of this philosophy, this “science of evil,” as any missionary to heathen lands can tell, is exactly summed up by James Freeman Clark when he says of pantheism:— It is also immoral, because if all things are God, then bad actions as well as good are divine, and the distinction between right and wrong disappears. Hence the low morality of the Hindus, on whom this teaching has been at work for so many centuries; hence also the immoral practises reappearing in those Christian sects which claim perfect union with God. This is a well-established fact in the history of that over-spiritualized view, by which intuitions and rational nature rule, and every man becomes a seer, inspired by what is supposed to be the God-consciousness within. While it assumes to be a state of remarkable spirituality and union with the divine, it really leads to the impulses of the flesh and the natural heart being taken as the movings of the Spirit of God. Before entering upon the path of mystical philosophy, it behooves us to look to the end of that way. This is not the path on which the advent band set out when they began the final march toward the city of God. It was not this philosophy that built up this great reformatory movement and everything of value in it, and gave us a mission in the world. We have now traced the pantheistic philosophy from its root in the old theology of the East to its spreading forth in the “new theology” of the West. We can see the nature of the doctrine in the bud, and can judge the tree by the fruit it has borne through the centuries. In that recent solemn Testimony “Decided Action to Be Taken Now,” we are told concerning theories regarding the personality of God that have been urged among us:— When fully developed [they] make Him, in the minds of those who accept them, as nothingness. . . . Those doctrines, followed to their logical conclusion, sweep away the whole Christian economy. . . . We are not to allow atheistic, spiritualistic sentiments to be brought before our youth. We can see this in the logic of the pantheistic philosophy and in the fruit of it. In the place of the God of Revelation upon his throne in heaven, self-limited as to bodily form, approachable to redeemed men in the flesh, in one place as he is not in all places, the pantheistic philosophy substitutes an all-pervasive personality, variously called force, energy, intelligence, the universal mind, the infinite personality, the God-immanent, or, as one pantheistic preacher of the Church of England puts it: “The infinite God, impersonal and yet personal—to be called by all names, or if that is irreverent, to be called by no name.” The German philosopher, Schopenhauer, sums it all up frankly and irreverently as follows:— Pantheism is only a polite form of atheism. The truth of pantheism lies in its destruction of the dualist antithesis of God and the world, in its recognition that the world exists in virtue of its own inherent forces. The maxim of the pantheist, “God and the world are one,” is merely a polite way of giving the Lord God his conge [dismissal]. Yet no system has so much to say of bringing God close to men. It assumes by a study of nature—from the atom and the molecule to the universe—to find what is called a rational basis for faith, that will bring God into every man’s consciousness. But when one has found this rational basis for faith, a basis in human reason, it is no longer faith. For faith comes by hearing the Word of God. It can come only as the gift of God. Instead of lifting men to God, the scientific process, “falsely so called,” leaves men just where this same method and philosophy of God originally brought mankind: “Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart.” Eph. 4:18. Well may we take to our own hearts the warning of the apostle to the brethren at Colosse, who had to meet this same philosophy, in the form of Neoplatonism, which worked until it leavened and ruined the church. He wrote to them:— “As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him: rooted and built up in him, and stablished in the faith, as ye have been taught, abounding therein with thanksgiving. Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the elements of the world [the things of nature], and not after Christ. For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. And ye are complete in him.” Col. 2:6-10.