such.
The god “so-called,” which the proposition about the “ane onelie God” was designed to combat, is above all man himself. We cannot help seeing this to-day even more clearly than was possible in the sixteenth century before the Cartesian revolution had taken place. It is man’s self-assertion which is the source of the possible or actual denial of the one and only God—not perhaps in the form that man denies the existence of the one and only God but very simply in the form that he identifies himself with the one and only God. Man can regard himself and treat himself as the measure of all things, just as if he were Creator or free or Lord like Him to whom he owes his being. He can therefore think that he dare not abandon himself but must serve and worship himself, and that he can therefore put his hope of salvation in himself. Without denying God, man can consider himself as having power over God. And not only can man do that, but he actually does it. Eritis sicut Deus. This voice was heard and obeyed by man long before the time of Descartes. Now the knowledge of the one and only God means the limiting of this human self-assertion. “We acknawledge ane onelie God” means simply, we men are not gods or are merely gods so-called or make-believe gods. We are forced to retire within the bounds of our own creatureliness and our own human nature. The modern world has failed to hear the warning of the Reformed confession precisely at this point and has thought fit to exchange the mediæval conception of the world as geocentric for the much more naïve conception of the world as anthropocentric.
The gods so-called, which the proposition about the “ane onelie God” was designed to combat, are, however, also the gods and godheads of all the human ideologies and mythologies, philosophies and religions. With the well-known ambition of a devoted father, man decks the children of his self-assertion with the same authority with which he has previously decked himself. These are the systems by means of which he proposes—at least in phantasy and fancy—to exercise his divine freedom and lordship. They might also be described as costumes, each one more beautiful than the other, which man dons in turn in his rôle as the one and only reality. And just as fathers must sometimes accommodate themselves to their children, and just as each costume constrains the actor to adopt a definite attitude, so the systems woven in man’s phantasy and fancy come to possess and keep a definite power over him. His conception of the world and thus his world become full of ideas and principles, points of view scientific, ethical and æsthetic, axioms, self-evident truths social and political, certainties conservative and revolutionary. They exercise so real a dominion and they bear so definitely the character of gods and godheads, that not infrequently devotion to them actually crystallises into mythologies and religions. (Universities are the temples of these religions.) But each one of these claims at the moment to be the one and only reality with monopoly over all systems. It is now considered impossible to abandon them either. Service and honour are offered them also and it is believed that the hope of salvation should be put in them. To recognise the one and only God means to make all these systems relative. “We acknawledge ane onelie God” means that the principles and objects of these systems, whatever they may be, are in reality no gods or at best gods so-called. Are they to be annihilated? Perhaps not at all, perhaps not yet. But the end of their authority is within sight. When the knowledge of God becomes manifest, they can no longer possess ultimate credibility, and real, serious and solemn reverence cannot be shown them any longer. “What askest thou Me concerning the good? One is good” (Matt. 19:17). “The destruction of the gods” comes down upon them then. In any case they can henceforward prolong their existence only as symbols and hypotheses, perhaps as angels or as demons, perhaps only as ghosts and comical figures. This makes clear to us how it was possible for the early Christians to have been accused of atheism, and the Christian church would be in a better position if she had remained suspect of atheism in this sense of the word in modern times as well. All that we can say is that this is not the case. The church has much rather played a most lively part in the game of dressing up in different costumes a mere counterfeit of the one and only reality.
III
Knowledge of the truly one and only God gains this meaning when it is brought about by this truly one and only God Himself. God is the one and only One and proves Himself to be such by His being both the Author of His own Being and the source of all knowledge of Himself. In both these respects He differs from everything in the world. A God who could be known otherwise than through Himself, i.e. otherwise than through His revelation of Himself, would have already betrayed, eo ipso, that He was not the one and only one and so was not God. He would have betrayed Himself to be one of those principles underlying human systems and finally identical with man himself. But the Confessio speaks not of one of those principles nor of man but of God, and therefore of One through whom all things exist, and who wills to be known through no one except through Himself.
There exists a conception of the unity of all being in its totality. All human thought takes this into account. And this conception can even gain remarkable depth and richness by means of the conception of the uniqueness (the one-and-onlyness) of all being in its individuality. All human thought has taken this also into account from the start. We may adopt this hypothesis of the one, and we may recognise and formulate this cosmic problem of the one as such. Yet in doing so we have done absolutely nothing that would have even a distant connection with the knowledge of God. The secret fire of all or almost all philosophies and religions is kindled by the charm of the idea of mathematical unity, intensified by the charm of the principle of individuality—not to speak of the fire which political domination has needed, whenever the world or a part of it has been ripe for such a domination. But a wrong is done and a strange fire is brought to the altar, if men seek to kindle the fire of the knowledge of God by this charm—and from time to time the Fathers did do this. Thomas Aquinas’s sentence that “Deus non est in aliquo genere” (Sum. Theol. 1, Ques. 3, Art. 5) must be rigorously applied to the genus “unity” or “uniqueness” (one-and-onlyness) also. What falls under this genus is as such not God, even if it were the ultimate and highest conceivable or perceptible unity of the world. The God of Mohammed is an idol like all other idols, and it is an optical illusion to characterise Christianity along with Islam as a “monotheistic” religion.
True knowledge of the one and only God, knowledge of Him in the sense of our Confession, is based on the fact that the one and only God makes Himself known. Everything is through Him Himself or is not at all. He makes Himself known through Himself by distinguishing Himself in the world from the world. Otherwise He cannot be known at all. He can be known, because He arises—“Arise, O Lord”—in human form and therefore in a way that is visible and audible for us, i.e. as the eternal Son of God in the flesh, the one and only God in Whom we have been called to believe, Jesus Christ. He proves Himself in Jesus Christ to be the One to whom no one and nothing is to be preferred or even to be compared, “cuius neque magnitudini neque maiestati neque virtuti quidquam, non dixerim praeferri, sed nec comparari potest” (Novatian, De Trin. 31). Because He manifests Himself thus, He makes Himself knowable to us not through revelation of some sort or other, but through the fact of His self-revelation. On this Paul also has based the knowledge of God as the one and only God in contrast to the many “gods” further on in the passage already quoted. “But to us there is but one God the Father, of whom are all things, and we in Him; and one Lord Jesus Christ by whom are all things, and we by Him.” This “but” which belongs to the self-revelation of the one and only God, is what brings about “the destruction of the gods,” of which we have spoken.
IV
Let us conclude by putting this to the test. And in this connection it is quite legitimate to turn our thoughts to the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18). Which will prove itself to be the one and only reality—man and his principles or He whom the Confession contrasts to them on the ground of His self-revelation? Is man able to sustain his part as the one and only reality and thus do justice to his claim to freedom and lordship? This he is unable to do, because in the very playing of this part he has to furnish and fill his picture of the world with the objective principles above mentioned, and they in their turn win and exercise dominion over him; for he has to live in the world which corresponds to his picture of it. They will
