Monotheism

“ The questions of the mode of creation, and of the precise relation of God to the material world, which had grown with the growth of monotheism as a philosophical doctrine, were asked not less instinctively, and with an even keener-sighted enthusiasm, when monotheism became a religious conviction. They came not from curiosity, but as the necessary outgrowth among an educated people of that which, not less now than then, is the crucial question of all theistic philosophy: How, if a good and almighty God made the world, can we account for imperfection and failure and pain? ”

“ The theory has been held in the past, and is still held, that monotheism was the primitive form of religion and that the worship of many spirits or many gods is a corruption of primitive thought due to man's intellectual feebleness or to his moral depravity. It is urged that such a monotheistic system was the natural one for unsophisticated man. ”

“ A greater proof of the unnaturalness of Monotheism to the human mind before a certain period in its development, could not well be required. The highest form of Monotheism, Christianity, has persisted to the present time in giving partial satisfaction to the mental dispositions that lead to Polytheism, by admitting into its theology the thoroughly polytheistic conception of a devil. ”

“ Monotheism brings mono-nomism. The moral law, which is absolute, self-identical, eternal and immutable in the holy nature and will of God, becomes universal and irrepealable not only for the earth but for all the moral universe. ”

“ We have been listening to the proclamation of a Monotheism so absolute, that, as we have seen, modern critical philosophy, in surveying the history of religion, can find for it no rival among the faiths of the world. God has been exalted before us, in character so perfect, in dominion so universal, that neither the conscience nor the imagination of man can add to the general scope of the vision. Jesus and His Cross shall lead the world's heart farther into the secrets of God's love; God's Spirit in science shall more richly instruct us in the secrets of His laws. ”

“ It is evident, then, that they virtually worship but one God, the inferior Deities being but angels; while Christians, on the contrary, have placed two, if not three, Gods on the throne. Which, then, have the best claim to be considered monotheists?
6. And what sense, we would ask, can attach to the profession of monotheism with such a God as the Bible sets forth,—a limited, local, personal God. No doctrine stands out more prominently as a fundamental tenet of the Christian faith than that which makes God appear a circumscribed, finite being. ”

“ The chief divinity becomes the only divinity; a god becomes God. But divinity, in becoming one and unique, becomes also transcendent. Monotheism pushes God altogether beyond the sensible environment. Personality, instead of being the nature of the world, has become its ground and cause, and all that mankind loves is conserved, in order that man, whom God loves, may have his desire and live forever. Life is eternal and happiness necessary, beyond nature,—in heaven. Finally, in transcendental idealism, the poles meet; what has been put eternally apart is eternally united ”

“ But Monotheism here stands in a very different relation to science.’ ‘If a uniform mode of work on a large scale is attributed to the one God, the mutual connexion of things in their origin and action becomes not only a possible, but even a necessary consequence of the assumption. ”

“ To mark off the doctrines of monotheism, closer definition is required, assigning the distinctive attributes of deity to none save the Almighty Creator. It may be declared that, in this strict sense, no savage tribe of monotheists has been ever known. Nor are any fair representatives of the lower culture in a strict sense pantheists. ”

“ They create mental contradictions. Consequently, the gods are arranged in a hierarchy. Finally, the idea of one God, or of monotheism, developed. The belief arose that every phenomenon is produced by the immediate action of the one God. As man’s vision widened and his observations increased in scope and depth, the concept of a monotheistic universe became clarified. Monotheism is the climax of the theological stage of thinking. ”

“ They may have had all the tendencies possible towards monotheism, but how were they to embrace it in all its perfection in the midst of a population recounting from time to time the many wonderful things which their gods and protecting genii did for them, and which the hearer had no opportunity of probing to the bottom and estimating at their true value? ”

“ I am using a license here in that I do not take pantheism in the ordinary sense, but understand it as the idea that everything can be an agent of divinity, can be a mediator, by my elevation of it: just as monotheism, on the contrary, indicates a belief that there is only one such agent bestowed for us in the world, one alone that is appropriate to the idea of ​​a mediator, and through which God alone lets himself be heard, which I am compelled to choose for myself: for without which monotheism would not be true religion. ”

“ Is the Christian view of the world inseparably bound up with this ancient outlook, or can it be purged of it? Is the moral fervor and idealism of Christianity its essential and permanent contribution, a contribution to a rational appreciation of human life? Probing still deeper, let us not be afraid to ask ourselves whether the surgery which this thesis implies does not involve the daring of a break with theism as only a developed form of primitive animism? In ethical monotheism, may not the monotheism be the protecting envelope from which the butterfly has already flown? ”

“ Though every form of religion holds something of undying truth, the evolutionist must classify religions. He must regard a monotheistic faith as representing, in the progress of human thought, a very considerable advance upon any polytheistic creed; monotheism signifying the fusion and expansion of countless ghostly beliefs into one vast concept of unseen omnipotent power. And, from the standpoint of psychological evolution, he must of course consider pantheism as an advance upon monotheism, and must further regard agnosticism as an advance upon both. ”

“ It seems quite possible, therefore, that a too restrictive definition of monotheism may prove too much, by opening the way for a claim that even the Jewish and Christian faith, with its old Testament names of God, its angels, its theophanies, and its fully developed trinity, is not strictly monotheistic. ”

“ Their words may have sounded monistic when they said "there is no God but God"; but the original polytheism of mankind has only imperfectly and vaguely sublimated itself into monotheism, and monotheism itself, so far as it was religious and not a scheme of class-room instruction for the metaphysicians, has always viewed God as but one helper, primus inter pares, in the midst of all the shapers of the great world's fate. ”

“ The objection to all this was that, in spite of its reservations and safeguards, it tended to ditheism. The philosophical difficulties of monotheism were enormous, but the knot was not to be cut by the hypothesis of either a co-existent and resisting matter or an independent and rival God. The enormous wave of belief in the Divine Unity, which had gathered its strength from the whole sea of contemporary thought, swept away the barriers in its path. ”

“ III. Monotheism is the worship of one Supreme God. It may admit numerous divine beings superior to men, yet beneath the Supreme Divinity, as the Jews, the Mahometans, and the Christians have done; or it may deny these subsidiary beings, as some philosophers have taught. The Idea of God to which Monotheism ultimately attains, is that of a Being infinitely powerful, wise, and good. He may, however, be supposed to manifest himself in one form only, as the Jehovah of the Hebrews, and the Allah of the Mahometans ”

“ A true monotheism has never arisen except as a criticism of polytheism.
986. It is obvious that the popular cults of the great nations of antiquity were far removed from monotheism. The Egyptians, the Babylonians and the Assyrians, the Phœnicians, the Hebrews, the Arabs, the Hindus, the Greeks and the Romans, down to a late period, worshiped a multitude of gods and were not disturbed by any feeling of lack of unity in the divine government of the world. ”

“ But the Metaphysical spirit, strictly so called, did contribute largely to the advent of Monotheism. The conception of impersonal entities, interposed between the governing deity and the phaenomena, and forming the machinery through which these are immediately produced, is not repugnant, as the theory of direct supernatural volitions is, to the belief in invariable laws. ”

“ And while on the subject of spirituality, I may remark that the pure monotheism of the Muslim and the Jew is immensely more spiritual, as well as more rational, than the monotritheism of the Christian, which not only deifies a man, but juggles with a so-called mystery that cannot be expressed in words without self-contradiction, cannot be conceived in thought, and, by the confession of its own apologists, defies reason. ”

“ They stood between men and the Gods. Divine symbols became more rare. Inspiration was not usual; a miracle was a most uncommon thing; the favourites of heaven were children born of the Gods; admitted to intercourse with them, or enabled by them to do wonderful works. Now Monotheism would restore inspiration to all. By representing God as spiritual and omnipresent, it brings him within every man's reach; by making Him infinitely perfect, it shows his Wisdom, Love, and Will always the same. ”

“ We might also ask, Why are "the Lord's day" and "Sunday" used as synonymous terms? or why is the Lord now worshiped on the very day anciently set apart for the worship of the sun or solar Deities? Do not these facts prove that many remnants of the ancient idolatrous religions are still retained in Christian theology?
Monotheism.—This word—from monos, one, or alone, and Theos, God—represents a belief in but one God. We have shown in the preceding section how a belief in a plurality of Gods originated. We will now trace the progress of this idea to a unitary conception of the Deity. ”

“ Truth is older than error, and man began not in error, but in the truth, the sole principle of life and growth. Monotheism preceded, historically, both fetichism and polytheism, and the earliest and most authentic historical documents that we have prove that all the world began by believing in and worshipping one God. Polytheism bears evident traces of a prior religion which asserted the unity of God, of being not a development of fetichism, but a corruption of monotheism, as positivism bears unmistakable traces of its being a corruption of Christianity ”

“ Given a sufficient time, philosophy tends to abstract the personal qualities from the Deity concept of pure monotheism, thus reducing this idea of an unrelated God to the status of a pantheistic Absolute. ”

“ These heathen were worshipping the same source and standard of goodness before which they themselves had been doing homage. A new sense of human brotherhood stirred within the exclusive race, and with it the perception that there is one Father of all men. Religion threw off all lingering polytheistic notions and soared to the vision of One God. Monotheism dates as a clear consciousness from this era.51 It was saved from becoming an abstract, philosophic conception, merging good and evil in a common source, by the stern ethical dualism of the Persians. ”

“ Lecky names as the alternative forces that underlie every115 important movement of mankind,81 a sense of human dignity and a sense of sin, are distinctive marks of polytheism and monotheism. Monotheism, with its one God so far removed from man, inspires a feeling of human nothingness in comparison with him. Polytheism, with its far more anthropomorphic and less awful gods, does not dwarf man thus, but enables him freely to compare himself with the divinities he worships. ”

“ A religion with about a dozen great gods distinct as regards their names, characteristics, histories, relationships, symbols, and worship is not monotheism in the ordinary or proper sense of the term. A religion in which the Divine is viewed as merely immanent in nature, and the deities deemed physical as well as moral, elemental as well as ethical powers, is rather pantheistic than mono theistic. ”

“ Author of all things, He is the beginning and the end of all law, as of all religion. The first command of the Decalogue announces the principle of Monotheism — that there is only one living and true God, who is the Creator of all things, and the only object of human worship. ”

“ Time has been given for the prophetic influences to work. There has been loss, but there has also been gain. That conscious, explicit, and magnificently uncompromising Monotheism, which in the mouth of the Evangelical prophet was quivering with the glow and passion of freshly inspired realization, has by 'the end of the age' had time to bring everything in the sphere of religion under its influence. It had discovered its points of contact with the highest aspirations of the Greek thought which on intellectual lines felt its way towards God. ”

“ With the rise of monotheism our moral sanction came to us as the command of a supreme ruler of the universe; in the age of abstract philosophy as metaphysical principles, and in the age of science these should be recognized as lessons of experience. ”