Mansel is on wholly false ground as to this, because (while saying it is impossible by ideas) he confounds the revelation of God with ideas of Him, or human knowledge. He does not see here revelation of God in Christ, with the Holy Ghost giving perception of it and dwelling in us. Hence he runs back to acknowledge the incapacity which is true of mind as absolutely true, and makes the test of truth the harmonious consent of man's faculties. If so, I have no test as to God; for they cannot know or test Him. A revelation is another thing; first, objectively, and then by divine capacitating power to the soul. God is light; Christ was the light of the world. God is love; Christ was love in the world; but the eyes must be opened to see the light, a new nature be communicated to enjoy it. The same thing must be to estimate the love, as shown to me a sinner (without which in its own uncaused unsustained character, i.e., as divine, it is not known) and as enjoyed by a saint—perfect as putting me in the absolute enjoyment of it, for it makes us to be as Christ (see 1 John 4), and that in full righteousness and holiness. (See his Lecture v.) How sad that any sentence should be exactly the opposite of what Christ meant!
Even if I take the conscious “I” as marking knowledge of a person, I have no objection to use it as regards the Trinity in speaking of human language. For why—because the conscious “I” in man supposes distinctness from any other “I” —should the divine consciousness be a human one? Why not the consciousness of subsisting in unity—not ours? We cannot conceive it by our minds so as to explain it in language, but yet can recognize as truth undoubtingly “I and my Father are one.” We apprehend it not by thought but by the Spirit. He “hath given us an understanding that we should know him that is true, and we are in him that is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life.” The perfect revelation of God in Christ is the strongest proof that limited existence to our minds (or the contrary) has nothing to do with the perfect revelation and knowledge of God. Love, holiness, absence of evil, presence of good, were there. He was limited as a man on earth as to space, yet He was all the while in heaven. He conferred power to work miracles elsewhere, and wrought them far off from Himself; yet it was a power in Him. He was the truth. He skewed what everything was. from God by direct revelation, and all evil, by its opposition to himself, vanity by the revelation of the true God. I recognize a perfect absolute revelation of God in Christ. I” know God.” But this is a revelation of the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, yet one God.
When I have spoken of the consciousness of personality, yet of unity, I would not darken counsel by words without knowledge, or pretend to speak metaphysics on what is known only by revelation (but of which, when revealed, I may see the perfectness), but find the Lord saying, “I and my Father” (that is, consciousness of personal distinctness), yet He acids, “are one;” so that there was the consciousness of unity. And why not? Why should not distinctness of willing and acting, and the consciousness of it be there, yet in perfect community of thought, will, and community of undistinguished Godhead without separate being, as a source of being able to say “I am?” None could have known it (part of its character as known is in revelation): but when revealed, I see not why we may not see its perfectness, and that indeed (which is the way we know it too) man would have had nothing to say to God as a moral being without it, or only in this way. And so it really is; but we come to it by our wants, not by metaphysics, which I have no thought of applying to the doctrine. But having a revelation, one sees how it connects itself with the human conception of it.
As to moral law, the notion that it is of necessary and universal obligation, and so absolute (i.e., not subject to the forms of human conception), that it must be “the measure and adequate representation of the moral nature of God,” and that our knowledge of the Divine Being is identical with that of our own moral duties, is just the fruit—wise as men may think themselves—of unsound educational or traditional ideas about the law, as if it were the highest rule, the transcript of the divine mind. It is nothing of the sort. Had men only seen God's activity of love in Christ, and that it is our pattern and rule—in a word, Christ as the full revelation of God in every way, all this confusion would have been avoided.
Law is an authoritatively imposed obligation. This cannot be God's nature and position. His liberty in love (and there is no love without, but in, liberty) is wholly set aside (i.e., the whole activity of His nature, His nature itself, for He is love) if this principle be true. To make law my nature is to make love impossible.
Besides, the application of the moral law to God as law is impossible, whether we take it as love to God or your neighbor, or the prohibition of evil, as is evident. But it is not because the moral law is not absolute, i.e., above human thoughts. Such reasoning is just the fruit of not getting beyond thought (Mansel's and Kant's error here).
Morality, or moral obligation is in the nature of all relations which imply a claim; it is the bond flowing from them. That man has had all manner of rules is true; but when God says, “The man is become as one of us, knowing good and evil,” it certainly implies that right and wrong was of an absolute nature. But it is the application of a law which makes obligatory a course imposed by authority (though it may be moral too). The knowledge of good and evil is the perception of it in itself, without a law or its being imposed. God does know, doubtless, good and evil according to the perfection of His own nature. But it is a condition of His nature to discern it; it was not of Adam's before his fall. He was innocent; he enjoyed God's goodness unsuspectingly, and did nothing else. There was no occasion to discern, nor capacity to do so. In the fall he acquired this capacity. He could now say, This is good and that evil; but he was under sin.
That moral law is excellent and absolute, because we discern good and evil, is a mistaken way of putting it. What we have is a capacity to discern right and wrong; not a law, but a moral condition of my mind. But, on the other hand, it is not subject to forms of thought, because it is not a question of thought. It is in the nature of the relationship; it is conscience, and not thought; it may be in us misled by thought.
It is all a blunder to say obligations cannot arise by revelation; because I may learn the existence of a relationship, or I may be brought into a relationship. Thus, so far from thinking a moral obligation cannot be formed, I affirm that all the obligations of a Christian are new, because he reckons himself dead and alive to God through Christ as risen. His obligations flow wholly from his new condition. This may call for recognizing sub modo something that subsisted before, as parents and children, &c.
The reason it is wholly untrue that the knowledge of good and evil gives us God's nature is, that the knowledge of good and evil is the source of discerning right and wrong, which right and wrong flow from the relationship a being is in. Now God is either in none (unless within Himself, of which we cannot judge, because it is so), or, if He enter into any in creative will, He is not in the same as we are. Hence the obligation cannot be the same. All we say is, that He will not destroy (as between ourselves or between us and Him) the terms of relationship in which He has set us. If I had slaves or children and gave them something to enjoy in equal shares, it would be wrong for one to take from or defraud the other; but if I had not given up the title, I might do so. If God has revealed His nature to me and my relationship to Him, He does not change, and so the duty abides. But if the relationship changes and I become a son, the duty does.
The capacity to discern good and evil is the capacity to discern these duties or the breach of them. But if the relationship is one of authority, then there is duty to obey. There may be a mere arbitrary command; and I say the thing (if I have the knowledge of good and evil) was not bad in itself, but obedience is the place of one subject. Thus it was with Adam: there was no evil in eating of the tree if it had not been forbidden. It was only a test of obedience. Now we have more than this. I say such a thing is wrong even if not forbidden. As to the measure of it, I may be misled. Hence God has given a prescribed measure—the law. But the faculty of such discernment is in me. I call something wrong. I have a personal faculty to discern that the act does not suit—is not conformed to the relation in which the responsible being stands. One takes a knife from another: I hold it to be evil. A parent does so from a very young child: it is not evil but good. It depends on the relationship.
Hence the only true absolute good is free. It is love, God Himself, and that in fact in the highest sense where there is no obligation at all, but where the responsible one had failed. If God, though surely sovereign, gives a promise, I expect Him to fulfill it, though I do not deny higher reasons may lead to its not being accomplished. But as a general promise, I reckon on it, because in that act Ile has been pleased to put Himself in relationship. If there be a higher claim, it may fail but is in His own sovereign knowledge. But I can say, It is impossible for God to lie, because when He has given His word, He has been pleased to oblige Himself. He might for higher reasons destroy the one to whom the promise was made and it would fail; but He cannot be inconsistent with what He is. But it is important to remember, what moralizers seem anxious to forget, that the knowledge of good and evil came to man in and by that in which he fell.
That relationship is the basis of the sense of right and wrong is every way evident. Thus, not knowing the relationship of angels among themselves, I cannot tell what is right and wrong among themselves; I do of creatures of God; I say they must love one another, and love and obey God. I must not worship them: they must worship God.
Moral duties then are absolute in so far as that they do not depend on ideas as formed by any means at all, but are the judgment of an internal capacity; they only subsist in known relationships and last as long as they. But they belong to relationships; they are the expression of one's consistency with it. And as long as I conceive it, I conceive the duty. Right and wrong did not exist for Adam in themselves (i.e., without a command). It is not merely responsibility personally to God; that there was. God forbade. Man might not eat; but there was no sense of a thing wrong in itself; because inconsistent with a relationship, he being able to judge of it itself. There was nothing inconsistent in Adam's mind with his relationship to God; his mind followed it without a question. He could think of nothing in itself inconsistent with it; that nature of thought was not in his nature.
But there is a difference between God's knowledge of good and evil, and mine. I deny wholly that human morality is manifested in the form of a law of obligation. The knowledge of good and evil is the internal consciousness of what is conformable to position and relationship without a law of obligation. let it is not properly absolute, because it flows from relationship; only it attaches to the idea of the relationship as so contained in it. Moralists on both sides seem wholly wrong here. Goodness, properly speaking, is not morality, but love exercised where there is not an obligation. The only difficulty is to distinguish Adam's case from right and wrong. The eating of the tree was no departure from conformity to the relationship Adam was in to God; he would have eaten it innocently as a matter of course. It was wrong simply to do what was forbidden, because forbidden. This leads to distinguish responsibility to a person absolutely, and the knowledge of right and wrong. That is, law and morality are opposed in nature; though law be the right measure of right when it recognizes existing relationship, but where the law makes the obligation of the particular case, this means that otherwise there was not and could not be any knowledge of right and wrong (it would have denied Adam's innocence to suppose any), but an arbitrary command, however wise a one.
To say that duty ought to be followed, is only saying there is duty. But two straight lines enclosing space is somewhat different; it means if two do not approach they do not meet. God knows good and evil, i.e., He recognizes relationship as it exists. I know good and evil now (i.e., my will apart). I recognize these relationships as they exist; but what has this to do with God's nature? His morality, speaking reverently, would be based on the relationship. He is in Himself; but He is in none, as we have seen, unless He pleases to put Himself in one: I am by virtue of my place. He recognizes mine, and judges, but is not in it. I deny eternal morality save as an idea; it has no relation to Him at all. Absolute morality is nonsense. God did not create morality, but the relationship without which there could be none. If one supposes only the absolute God, there is no morality. Morality in respect of what? I cannot suppose it but with created responsibility, i.e., creatures and consequently relationship.
I am disposed to think that, such as man was, he must have fallen to get the knowledge of good and evil. He knew no good objectively so as to prefer it in innocence. The test he was under was not preference of good to evil or evil to good, but obedience. It could not have been the former, because he must have known the two to decide (i.e., not have been innocent). But then to go right with that knowledge he must have been a holy being, i.e., a being with a spiritual nature divine or sustained of God which in nature delighted in good and abhorred evil, so as not to be in a state of probation because the decision was in the nature itself, so that there was nothing to test. But if he came to know good and evil and was not decided against evil, he was already in an evil state. Besides he could not get into a condition to decide between good and evil; and if he had not known them before he must decide; he has to exercise a will as free and thus he is out of obedience, the only right state and is in evil. A nature formed holy and sustained of God is decided in nature, and then only obeys. God could have given a nature such to man; but then it would. have been a new creation, as it is now.
It is a mistake to think infinite power in itself inconsistent with finite power. Two infinite independent powers cannot be, because they contradict each other. They are not infinite for they cannot destroy each other. But power being only the faculty to do all things, not the actual doing of them, the existence of a finite subordinate power is no contradiction to God. Creation tends to give the idea of a final cause, a framing will, and hence can hardly be ascribed to a finite agent. But forming new objects on subsisting laws may well belong to such.
(Concluded from page 313)