25. Monod. Le Problème de Dieu et la Théologie Chrétienne depuis la Réforme
Par Victor Monod. I. Étude historique. Foyer Solidariste:
Saint-Blaise, près Neuchâtel (Suisse); Roubaix, 123, Boulevard de Belfort. 1910. 1
M . Victor Monod is profoundly disturbed by the condition of current opinion upon the nature and activities of God. The idea of God he thinks has perhaps never before been made the object of more intense and widespread study. But the issue of the prolonged debates of recent centuries has been little more than an immense confusion. Nearly every thinking man has formed a different conception of the Divine Being for himself. "In the teaching of the Churches heterogeneous philosophies and contradictory religious aspirations are juxtaposed or superficially amalgamated" (p. 3). The question is raised whether "the Christian doctrine of God is essentially amorphous and irrational or is only compromised to-day by lack of critical spirit and of historical knowledge in some of its adherents" (p. 4). M. Monod's convictions lie in the line of the
latter alternative, and he naturally wishes to do his part to clarify the atmosphere. The task he has undertaken is essentially a dogmatic one. But it has its natural if not necessary historical approach. "To draw out in order," he explains, "the solutions of the problem of God which have been proposed by the great theologians, to set them in the historical framework which explains them, to indicate how they have been engendered by successive corrections or reactions, to discriminate, in a word, the vital necessity to which the succession of divers theological systems has responded; these have appeared to me the indispensable preliminaries of a methodical study of the question" (p. 4). Accordingly he gives us now this
"historical study," while the dogmatic construction to which it is to lead us up waits a more convenient season. He does not feel bound, however, to pass in review in this "historical study" the whole history of the idea of God, in detailed exposition. He is not writing a history of the idea of God but a historical introduction to his own forthcoming attempt to put together a competent exposition of the idea of God. He therefore confines his survey to the historical antecedents of his own construction.
In point of fact, M. Monod confines his survey of the history of the idea of God to two epochs, the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries; and in these two epochs to two great outstanding movements of thought, the Reformation, or better, the Reformed theology, and the Kantian criticism.
The conceptions of God characteristic of these two great movements of thought he sets over against one another in sharp antithesis, discriminating them under the contrasting designations of "God as sovereign" and "God as a moral person." The antithesis obviously is a false one; the two designations are not mutually exclusive. It is also historically unjust: the Reformed theology throws an emphasis upon the moral personality of God which cannot be exceeded, and the moral personality of God is not the most outstanding feature of the conception of God developed by the
Kantian movement. M. Monod himself cites Calvin as declaring that God is good by a necessity as stringent as that by which He is God, and that it would be easier to sever the light of the sun from its heat than to separate
God's power from His righteousness; while the very stress which the Reformed theology places on the will of God is a stress on His personality, since he who says will says person. And M. Monod himself points out how the moral character of God evaporates in, for example, the thought of M.
Ch. Secrétan in the face of the demand of "absolute freedom" for Him. The real distinction between the Reformed and the Kantian movements in their relation to the idea of God lies quite apart from the question of His moral personality, although, of course, it concerns very distinctly the question of His sovereignty. The difficulty with Kantian speculation has been indeed to find any place for God at all in its scheme of things. Beginning with calling in God only as a postulate of the moral imperative, it ends by limiting His action in the interest of human freedom. The whole tendency of the Kantian thought is spoken out when M. Secrétan remarks: "There seems no place in the world for both man and God" (p. 146); and M. Monod's dilemma is from the Kantian standpoint a very real one: Render with Calvin all glory to God and man is reduced to nonentity; vindicate with Kant all man's liberty and all man's dignity and you have (with Schleiermacher) no use for God save, perhaps, for the Judgment Day. The issue that is drawn between the Reformed thought of the sixteenth and the Kantian thought of the nineteenth century is not between a sovereign and an ethical God; it is between God and man. And the movement from the one to the other is a veritable revolution by which God is dethroned and man elevated to His place as the center of the universe. M. Monod puts it not unjustly in a passage which we gladly quote entire (p. 108): "Just as for Copernicus the earth so far from being a pivot about which the stars revolve, describes an ellipse around a fixed sun, so for Kant the objects
which constitute the external world so far from determining knowledge are subject to laws impressed by the mind. This figure can be adapted to indicate the way in which the Kantian theology sets itself in opposition to the theology of the sixteenth century. God is no longer the central star of the religious domain; He is only a satellite, a postulate of the mind. The point of departure is the thinking subject, his rights and his needs; the nature and the attributes of God can be determined only as functions of the exigencies of the human being. And the whole effort of Kant bears on a point which theologians of the sixteenth century had not thought to investigate: In what is God necessary to man? Is the existence of God legitimated by the needs of reason?" In a word the sixteenth century conceived man as the creation of God, existing for God and serving His ends; men now are prone to think of God as, if not exactly the creation of man, yet as existing for man and serving man's ends. The center of the universe has shifted; and God has become as has been, perhaps wittily, perhaps bitterly, said, very much a domestic animal which man keeps, as he does his horse or his cow, to meet certain specific needs of his being.
About half of M. Monod's volume is given to an exposition of each of these two types of thought concerning God. The latter half, dealing broadly speaking with the Kantian notions, under the rubric of "God as a moral person," appears to us the more penetrating and satisfactory piece of exposition, chiefly because it seems to us the more sympathetically worked out. The master-thought of this movement is shown to be the conception of the greatness of man: "the idea that man so far as he is man and because he is man has right to the free efflorescence of his personality and can recognize as legitimate no authority which is not judicially constituted" (p.
102). This master-thought is traced in its enunciation to Kant, to whom God exists only as a moral postulate and only so far as His existence may be made consistent with what Kant deemed the necessities of the moral
responsibility of man. So determining has the conception of "freedom" thus conceived become in modern thought that M. Monod incidentally drops the remark, as if it were a matter of course, that since Kant "liberty and morality have become so indissolubly bound together that Luther's and Calvin's doctrine of the subject-will has become merely an incomprehensible curiosity to the contemporary consciousness" (p. 121).
After Kant, no doubt, there comes Schleiermacher, in whose system there is no place for any other liberty than "that of Spinozistic spontaneity, autonomous vitality," the capacity of "reaction upon finite beings which exert a certain determination on man, and of determining them in turn" (p.
133); and who led in the interest of the religious feeling a reaction towards a kind of spurious Calvinism which would preserve a divine sovereignty without emphasis upon the divine personality. "God, for Schleiermacher," we read (pp. 130 f.), "is therefore a mysterious master of whom we know only one thing,—that He commands and that we ought to obey. He is an active Being and not a dead Law, but He is not less an abstract Being, with no name and no countenance, known only by the hand which He presses against us. The Sovereign God of Calvin, the Monarch of good-pleasure and individual feeling is gone; but on the celestial throne there still remains in austere idealization the Scepter, the Baton of command." But Schleiermacher does not mark the end of the series. After Schleiermacher comes Secrétan—Secrétan to whom "freedom" is at once the first and the last word of philosophy, a "freedom" for man which admits of no limitations and a corresponding "freedom" for God which enables Him to keep out of the way of this "free" man—by virtue of which He is infinite only if He wishes it, and can be finite as well if He wishes it, knows what
He wishes to know and is ignorant of what He wishes to be ignorant of. "If God is God," says Secrétan, "it is only because He wills it" (p. 148). Thus
Secrétan finds his way out of the great difficulty of his school of thought by
pressing to its extreme its primal postulate. It has been common to say that if "freedom" be defined as this school defines freedom, then we have to choose between a "free" humanity and a "free" Deity; both cannot be
"free" in this sense, which knows no difference between freedom and ability. Secrétan replies that the difficulty disappears if only you make God free enough, if only you ascribe to Him "absolute liberty," a liberty which is capable of everything; for, then, He would be free not to be God, or even to abnegate His freedom itself. "Secrétan, we see," remarks M. Monod (pp.
148 f.), "commences by attributing to the absolute Being a fathomless freedom and sovereignty, but he adds that the day on which pure freedom resolves itself into an act, the day on which creation takes place, the reign of Law, of Relation, of Determinism commences." For M. Monod's present purpose, Secrétan has spoken the last word which has yet been spoken in the way of solving "the problem of God"—that is to say, in the effort so to conceive God that man may be left "free," in the exaggerated sense of freedom assumed by this school. But this last word has not, he thinks, solved the problem; and the way is open for another attempt to reach a true conception of God—a conception which shall do better justice to both sides of the problem, the side rooted in man's sense of dependence as well as that rooted in his sense of freedom. For the terms in which this solution may be worked out, however, we shall have to wait for the dogmatic discussion which, M. Monod promises us, shall follow this historical sketch. We may, indeed, already perceive that what M. Monod proposes to do is to set over against "God as sovereign" and "God as moral person" alike the conception of "God as Father." This is, of course, to introduce another false antithesis, and to substitute tropical for scientific treatment. But despite these drawbacks with respect to method it is quite possible that M.
Monod may give us in his dogmatic treatment a very happy solution of the problem of the conception of God. We are content to wait to see.
Meanwhile we note that M. Monod already recognizes that there is another side to the problem besides that of human "freedom" and "responsibility" so insisted on by the Kantian thinkers. This other side of the problem is that which forms the burden of the Reformed theology; and M. Monod has begun his book with a survey of it as given expression in that theology. We have already intimated, however, that we do not think this survey as illuminating, because not as sympathetic, as that given of the Kantian theories. It would seem that with all his desire to do justice to that sense of dependence on God which is the psychological reflection of the Divine Sovereignty, M. Monod is to some extent preoccupied with the current overestimate of man in his present condition in the world, which has its ultimate roots in a defective sense of sin. He himself very fairly describes this current point of view when, speaking of the surprise with which the modern man hears Calvin describe the doctrine of predestination as "sweet and savory," he offers this account of it: "The reason is that the condition of man does not appear to us as tragically horrible as it does to the Calvinists; we are surprised at the rejection of the lost, the Reformed of the sixteenth century were astonished rather at the salvation of the elect" (pp. 57 f.). This is but to say that a Pelagianizing estimate of man in his powers, achievements, and present condition cannot accord with an Augustinian soteriology; the current estimate of man is distinctly Pelagianizing and therein lies the whole account of its ineradicable opposition to the Reformed theology. Borne along to some extent, doubtless, by this current of modern thought, M. Monod finds himself out of tune with the Reformed soteriology, and most of all with its emphasis on predestination; and finding himself out of tune with it, he is not quite able to comprehend it, much less to do full justice to it. He recognizes, indeed, the religious value and the practical motive of the Calvinistic doctrine of the divine sovereignty; he even exaggerates this
aspect of it, by representing it as a product of religious experience in such a sense as to give it only a subjective grounding, in this connection misconceiving the doctrine of the testimonium Spiritus Sancti. "We see," he remarks (p. 15), "that while scholasticism limited its art of persuasion to two processes, reasoning and the citation of an inspired text, the Reformation made appeal to a third authority, … the inward witness of the Holy Spirit." The "witness of the Holy Spirit" was not to the Reformers, however, in any sense a "third authority" operating apart from (perhaps in opposition to) reason and the Scriptures—as anyone may satisfy himself by merely reading the anti-Anabaptist chapters in Calvin's exposition of it at the opening of the "Institutes"; but a power of God clarifying reason in its use of the Scriptures and acting only confluently with them. M. Monod's partial sympathy with the Reformed doctrine as an expression of religious experience is therefore itself a symptom of his real lack of complete sympathy with it; and when he goes into its particulars his lack of complete sympathy is manifested in not infrequent failures to enter fully into its spirit which betray him into certain errors of judgment regarding it. There occur even occasional lapses in apprehension of declarations of the advocates of the view he is controverting, which lead him into no doubt unconscious but nevertheless regrettable misrepresentations of their contentions. Thus for example the "De dono perseverantiae," xx. is cited (p.
59) as an avowal on the part of Augustine that "it was the Pelagian controversies which caused him to defend the doctrine of election in its integrity." What Augustine really says is precisely the contrary, namely, that before the controversy broke out he had taught the whole doctrine of election with clearness and emphasis, and had been compelled by the controversy only to do more laboriously and abundantly what he was doing in any event. Immediately after quoting Zanchi's clear statement of his ordo decretorum (which is, on this occasion at least, expressly Infralapsarian:
"creation, fall, election, redemption"), and while in act of inveighing against Zanchi's scholasticism, M. Monod shows so little care for the niceties of the subject as to attribute to Zanchi Amyraut's ordo decretorum. "Once, once only," he cries, "God has thought of man and assigned him his destiny.
Thenceforward everything is evolved with the rigor of a mathematical theorem: creation, fall, redemption, election, reprobation, crimes and virtues, prayers and blasphemy, all has been willed, foreseen, foreordained by God" (p. 81). Are then the differences which separate Supralapsarian,
Infralapsarian, and Postredemptionist too small to hold a place in the mind of one who consigns them all alike to the oblivion of an incomprehensible past?
It is naturally, however, when M. Monod undertakes professedly to report the objections to predestination that his failure of sympathy with the doctrine works most havoc in his reasoning. Here we have arrayed all the old uncomprehending arguments: predestination deprives the work of Christ of all significance, it menaces the authority of the moral law, it dissipates the guilt of man, and the like. What underlies everything, however, is failure to realize that predestination is never supposed to determine ends apart from means. It would for example be as intelligible to argue that when a king has determined to take a city he may at once intermit all concern about armies and engines of war—the determination will take the city; or that when a physician has determined to cure a patient, he may safely neglect to administer the remedies—the determination will cure the patient; as that when God has determined to save His people, all significance in the work of Christ, the only means by which the determined salvation is to be accomplished, is taken away. How reasoners like M.
Monod are pursued by this incomprehensible uncomprehendingness is oddly illustrated in a footnote in which he wishes to ascribe to Luther himself, that sound and fervent predestinarian because sound and fervent
believer in God and His grace, the objection to predestination that "it renders singularly vain and futile the work of Jesus Christ." We quote this footnote (pp. 66 f.) in full: "This was the objection of Luther. Towards
1542 he wrote: 'I hear that the nobles and great people emit such criminal talk about predestination as to say, If I am predestinated I shall be saved whether I do well or ill, and if I am not I shall be damned. I shall gladly combat this impious language if my uncertain health will permit me. If this talk were sound, the incarnation of the Son of God, His passion, His resurrection and all that He has done for the salvation of the world would be abolished. What end would be served by the prophets and all the Holy
Scriptures? What by the Sacraments? Let us cast off and trample under foot this talk'—Commentary on Gen. xxvi. Opera, Witebergae. 1580. Vol. vi.
353.—How far we are here from the affirmations of the De Servo Arbitrio!"
Needless to say, the words quoted from Luther have no such implication as M. Monod puts on them. In them Luther promises that if only the infirmities of his health permit, he will confute those who abuse the doctrine of predestination, saying, "If I am predestined, I shall be saved no matter whether I do well or ill; if I am not I shall be damned." To give a brief hint of the line his confutation will take, Luther adds that if such talk were sound "the incarnation of the Son of God, His passion, His resurrection and all that He has done for the salvation of the world would be abolished"—the prophets and the whole of the Sacred Scriptures, the sacraments would be useless; wherefore, says he, we should reject and trample under foot such prating. What Luther says in this none too vigorous language is, as we all at once perceive, simply that if predestination is perverted into a predestination of ends apart from all means—so that those predestinated to life will live no matter what they do—then the significance of all means is taken away and this is tantamount to abolishing
Christ and all His work, the Scriptures and all the Means of Grace, since
these are the means by which the predestined end is attained. But he says this only in objection to a manifest perversion of the doctrine of predestination, and in vigorous defense of the doctrine of predestination.
And when M. Monod cries out upon it, "How far we are here from the affirmations of the De Servo Arbitrio," he merely betrays how far he himself, is from understanding not Luther merely whom he quotes
(perhaps at second-hand; possibly through the deflecting medium of Luthardt) and the "De Servo Arbitrio" which he refers to, but the whole
Reformed doctrine of predestination which he is in act of expounding and criticizing. Luther speaks here in complete and even enthusiastic accord with the affirmations of the "De Servo Arbitrio," and can be misunderstood only by writers who, not being in agreement with Luther, are determined to make Luther be in agreement with them.
We have no intention, however, of indulging in a series of petty criticisms of the details of M. Monod's exposition of the Reformed doctrine. We have merely wished to illustrate by a few instances taken at random from his pages a vein of failure in comprehension which runs through them and vitiates their conclusions. There is much in his exposition and criticism meanwhile that is worthy of remark—particularly, if we may specify, his connection of the political and religious thinking of the times. We can only express the conviction that if M. Monod had approached the study of the Reformed theology with the sympathy with which he has approached the study of the post-Kantian movement, he would have found an acceptable doctrine of God less a problem to his thought, because he would have found it already worked out for him in that great body of Augustinian thinking which has been the possession of the world for nearly a millennium and a half. The scandalon of this body of thinking has ever been, and is, that it thinks of God as God, and will not have His glory diminished by the exaltation of man. M. Monod himself says
(p. 84): "The error of Calvinism was, above all, that it did not recognize the specific character and unique value of the human person." The charge is quite untrue. Calvinism fully recognizes the high value of human personality. But Calvinism certainly does not allow that the human person has power to set itself by the side of the Divine. And the retort is just that the error of anti-Calvinism has always been, and continues to be, that it does not recognize the specific character and unique value of the Divine person. M. Monod sometimes speaks as if he would charge Calvinism with wiping out the gulf which separates man from the beasts that perish. It does not do that. Calvin teaches rather that man is raised infinitely above the brutes by that sensus deitatis which is ineradicably imprinted on his nature, and by reason of which he aspires to immortality (e. g. "Institutes,"
I. iii. 1, 3; v. 4). But Calvinism resists and will continue to resist every effort to wipe out the greater gulf which separates the creature from his Creator.
We have said advertently "greater gulf." For we stand with Calvin, or rather with Augustine,—for Calvin is quoting Augustine here ("Opera Calvini," ed. Baum, Cunitz, and Reuss, viii. col. 286)—when he declares that "he is assuredly mad who does not ascribe to God a far greater preëminence above himself than he allows to the human race above the beasts." And we stand with Calvin when (still after Augustine) he adds that what is most becoming in the sheep of God's flock is quiet submission to His will; and when he adjoins, now on his own behalf, that this would assuredly be more fitting than, after the example of Pighius, to substitute man for God and demand that each man should earn his own destiny on the ground of his own virtues. The "problem of God" is to be solved for the twentieth century as for all that have preceded it, not by deifying man and abasing
God in his presence, but by recognizing God to be indeed God and man to be the creation of His hands, whose chief end it is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever. And this is as M. Monod truly perceives, just Calvinism.
1. 1 The Princeton Theological Review, ix. 1911, pp. 149–156.