Robert Mackintosh

“ Such being the usual point of view, it is plain that the claim of Theology as a science. theology to be a science, or a group of sciences, is made in a sense of its own in so far as theology is orderly, coherent, systematic, and seeks to rest upon good grounds of some sort, it may be called a science. But, in so far as it claims to deal with special revelation, it lifts itself out of the circle of the sciences, and turns away from natural knowledge towards what it regards as more intimate messages from God. ”

“ Still the main weight of intuitionalist theism rests upon the conception of God as First Cause.
As a philosophy, intuitionalism leaves the mind in all the embarrassment of an indefinite number of separate starting points. Every percept is such a starting-point; it is an immediate certainty, remaining with us unmodified as the basis of reliable inference. Every First Principle of the mind is a starting-point too. ”

“ They have not idolized Paulinism; but have they not idolized Luther? They seem to take for granted that the spirit—though not the letter—of that great man was a definitive statement of the Christian principle. To interpret Christianity out of itself is one thing; to interpret it out of Luther, even out of a distillate of Luther, is possibly a lower thing. The theology of the future may draw more equally from several New Testament types of doctrines. The scheme that includes most may be the successful scheme. ”

“ Roman Catholics have come to attach more value to obedience and “implicit belief” than to knowledge; and even the Eastern Church lives to-day by the cultus more than by the vision of supernatural truth. Again, Harnack gravely differs from Catholic dogmatists in assigning a historical origin to what in their view is essentially divine—supernatural in origin, supernatural even in its declaration by the church. If they do not deny that Greek philosophy has entered into Christian doctrine, they consider it a colourless medium used in fixing the contents of revelation. ”

“ To empiricism, all is a posteriori. To intuitionalism, half is a posteriori and half a priori. To idealism, all is a priori. Not that a posteriori is denied, or that idealism even in Hegel tries to evolve reality out of the philosopher's inner consciousness. Mere given fact may be the starting-point; but it is sublimated. We see by degrees—in general outline or upon general principles [29] —that what is is no other than what must be.
There is another conception of necessity which has established itself in the history of science and philosophy. We may call it mechanical necessity. ”

“ Deists and orthodox in those days agreed in recognizing not merely natural theology but natural religion—“essential religion,” Butler more than once styles it; the expression shows how near he stood intellectually to those he criticized. But morally he stood aloof. In part i.—on Natural Religion—he defends a moral or punishing Deity against the sentimental softness of the age. The God of Nature, whom deists confess does punish in time, if they will but look at the facts; why not in eternity? “Morality,” as others have confessed, is “the nature of things”! ”

“ Theology pushed too far may overleap itself. Those who shrink from the old confident assertion, “Christ would not have become incarnate but for man's sin,” might claim to say, from reverence and not from evasiveness, ignoramus. On the other hand, the type of thought which would perfect Christianity in the form of a philosophy, and subordinates Atonement to Incarnation, is pledged to this doctrine that Incarnation was a rational necessity. Such speculative views are associated with the revival of another traditional piece of mysticism—the Holy Spirit the Copula or bond of union in the Godhead. ”

“ This whole period of theology, Protestant and Roman Catholic, is statical. Men are defining and protecting the positions they have inherited; they do not think of progress. And yet the Roman Catholic Church had upon its hands one great unsettled question—the thesis of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin. This became the standing type of an assertion which, while favoured by the church and on the very verge of dogma, was yet not a dogma [15] —till the definition came through Pius IX. in 1854. Here then the frontier of dogma had unquestionably moved forward. ”

“ Perhaps what concerns the Christian is rather the assured revelation that God is acting in character, like Himself, and yet acting wonderfully by methods which we could not predict but must adore. The free life of personal beings is no more to be mastered by a formula than it is to be assigned to caprice. A God who is love will act neither from wilfulness nor from what is called rational but might more correctly be called physical necessity. ”

“ Theism is an afterthought the reply to doubt-the attempted reflective justification of what announced itself at first as a prophetic certainty. But no more is theism the first runnings of the stream of philosophy. It is philosophy harnessed to a practical and religious interest. It is philosophy called into court to answer selected questions. Theism then has its most habitual affinities with intuitionalism, but may fall under any one of our philosophical or quasi philosophical types. We have distinguished three types or tendencies: empiricism, intuitionalism, idealism. ”

“ The Christian apologist indeed may himself seek, following John Fiske, to philosophize evolution as a restatement of natural theology—“one God, one law, one element and one far-off divine event”—and as at least pointing towards personal immortality. But if evolution is to be the whole truth regarding Christianity, we should have to surrender both supernatural revelation and divine redemption. ”

“ It seems as if one foot rested on dogmatism and one on scepticism. The fact—assumed without any attempt at justification by argument–that, in spite of the multitude of logical reasons for scepticism, we do know truth and beauty, makes Balfour a theist. And the God he postulates is brought in ex machina like the God of the old Design argument in its roughest popular form. There must be a God, who could compel irrational matter to serve rational ends–so ran the old argument. There must be a God who can miraculously endow the irrational mind of man with truth—so runs the new. ”

“ But if it be presupposed that the purpose of Christ's mission was to deify men by bestowing physical immortality, then we must assume, first, Christ's essential Godhead, and, secondly, the fusion of His divine and human natures. Whatever be the truth in the assertion that death rather than sin is the enemy dreaded by Eastern Christianity, and immortality rather than forgiveness the blessing craved, it is difficult to take the talk about deification as anything more than rhetoric. ”

“ If a philosophy, why supernaturally revealed? Thomas Arnold, criticizing Edward Hawkins, appeals rather to the atonement as deeper neglected truth. So in Scotland, Thomas Erskine and Thomas Chalmers—the latter in contradiction to his earlier position—hold that the doctrine of salvation, when translated into experience, furnishes “internal evidence”—a somewhat broader use of the phrase than when it applies merely to evidence of date or authorship drawn from the contents of a book. ”