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Systems of Religious and Spiritual
Belief
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Theism is the view that all limited or
finite things are dependent in some way on one supreme or ultimate reality of
which one may also speak in personal terms. |
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Theism's view of God can be clarified by
contrasting it with that of deism, of pantheism,
and of mysticism. Deism
closely resembles theism; but for the deist, God is not involved in the world in
the same personal way. He has made it, so to speak, or set the laws of it--and
to that extent he sustains it in being. But subject to this final and somewhat
remote control, God, as the deist sees him, allows the world to continue in its
own way. This view simplifies some problems, especially those that arise from
the scientific account of the world: one does not have to allow for any factor
that cannot be handled and understood in the ordinary way. God is in the shadows
or beyond; and, though men may still in some way centre their lives upon him,
this calls for no radical adjustment at the human or finite level. The deist
proceeds, for most purposes at least, as if there were no God--or only an absent
one; and this approach is especially true of man's understanding of the world.
This is why deism appealed so much to thinkers in the time of the first triumphs
of modern science. They could indeed allow for God, but they had "no need
of that hypothesis" in science or in their normal account of things.
Religion, being wholly superadded, was significant only in a manner that
involved little else in the world or in the way man lives. The theist, on the
other hand, questions this view and seeks in various ways (as noted below) to
bring man's relation to God into closer involvement with the way he understands
himself and the world around him. |
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Theism also sharply contrasts with
pantheism, which identifies God with all that there is; and with various forms
of monism, which regards all
finite things as parts, modes, limitations, or appearances of some one ultimate
Being, which is all that there is. Some types of absolute Idealism,
a philosophy of all-pervading Mind, while regarding every finite thing as
comprising some limitation of the one whole of Being, seek also to retain the
theistic element in their view of the world; and they do this normally--as in
the works of A.E. Taylor, Andrew Pringle-Pattison, or G.F. Stout--by stressing
the role of unifying finite centres, such as self-conscious human beings, in the
way the universe as a whole functions. But there is no recognition here of the
finality of what is technically known as "the distinctness of
persons." The theist, by contrast, considers the world to be quite distinct
from its Author or Creator, human life being thus in no sense strictly the life
of God, while also making room for a peculiarly intimate involvement of God in
the world and in human life. |
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Mysticism
in practice comes close to theism; but mystical thought, and much of its
practice, has often involved a repudiation of the proper reality of finite
things and sometimes (as in a work by W.T. Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy) tends to dismiss all of the finite
manifold or multiplicity of things as some wholly unreal phantasm that has no
place in the one undiversified Being, which alone is real. Theism is very far
removed from ideas of this kind. |
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The idea that the world, as man
understands it in a finite way, is dependent on some reality altogether beyond
his comprehension, perfect and self-sustained but also peculiarly involved in
the world and its events, is presented with exceptional sharpness and
discernment in the Old Testament,
whence it became a formative influence in Hebrew history and subsequently in Christianity
and Islam. Behind the creation stories; behind the patriarchal
narratives, like that of Jacob at Bethel (Gen. 28) or wrestling with his strange
visitor at Penuel (Gen. 32); and behind the high moments of prophecy, like
Isaiah's famous vision in the Temple (Isa. 6), and of moving religious
experience in the Psalms, in the Book of Job, and (with remarkable explicitness)
in some well-known passages, like the story of Moses
at the burning bush (Ex. 3)--behind all of these there lies a sense of some
mysterious, all-encompassing reality by which man is also in some way addressed
and which he may also venture to address in turn. Moses wished to see God, to
have some explicit sign that could convince the people and establish his own
authority; but he was shown, instead, that this is just what he could not have:
all that he could be assured of was that God is real and is bound to be--"I
am who I am," he was told. On the other hand, in the throes of this
humbling and staggering experience, Moses began to learn also what was expected
of him and how his people should live and be led. The God who was so strange and
elusive was somehow found to be a God who "talked" to him and with
whom people could "walk." The same seemingly bewildering claim of
remoteness, almost to the point of unreality, linked with a compelling
explicitness and closeness, is also found in other cultures, as illustrated
below. This claim presents the reflective thinker with the twofold problem of
theism, viz., how, in the first place, a reality as remote and mysterious as the
God of theism--the "wholly other," in the famous words of the German
theologian Rudolf Otto--can be known at all; and, second, how, if it can be
known, it can be spoken of in precise and intimate ways and encountered as a
person. (see also sacred
and profane, revelation) |
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There have been many attempts to
establish the existence of one supreme and ultimate Being--whom in religion one
speaks of as God--and some of these have been given very precise forms in the
course of time. |
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The pattern for many of these was laid
down in ancient Greece by Plato.
He taught about God mostly in mythical terms, stressing the goodness of God (as
in The Republic and Timaeus)
and his care for man (as in the Phaedo);
but in the Phaedrusand much more explicitly in the Lawshe presented a more rigorous argument, based on the fact that things change
and are in motion. Not all change comes from outside; some of it is spontaneous
and must be due to "soul" and ultimately to a supreme or perfect soul.
Whether God so conceived quite gives the traditional theist all that he wants,
however, is not certain. For God, in Plato, fashions the world on the pattern of
immutable Forms and, above all, on "the Good," which is "beyond
being and knowledge"; i.e., it is
transcendent and beyond the grasp of thought. But Plato's combination of the
notion of the transcendent, which is also supremely good, and the argument from
change, provided the model for much of the course that subsequent philosophical
arguments were to take. Aristotle
made the argument from motion
more precise, but he coupled it with a doubtful astronomical view and a less
theistic notion of God, who, as the unmoved mover, is the ultimate source of all
other movement, not by expressly communicating it but by being a supreme object
of aspiration, all appetite and activity being in fact directed to some good.
Aristotle thus set the pattern for the more deistic view of God, whereas the
theist, taken in the strict sense, turns more for his start and inspiration to
Plato. |
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The argument for the existence of God
inferred from motion was given a more familiar form in the first of the five
ways of St. Thomas Aquinas,
five major proofs of God that also owed much to the emphasis on the complete
transcendence of God in the teaching of Plotinus,
the leading Neoplatonist of the 3rd century AD, and his followers. (The word
that Plotinus used for the ultimate but mysterious dependence of all things on
God is emanation; but this
characterization was not understood by him, as it has been by some later
thinkers, as questioning the genuine independent existence of finite things.) In
the first way, Aquinas put forward the view that all movement implies, in the
last analysis, an unmoved mover; and though this argument, as he understood it,
presupposes certain views about movement and physical change that may not be
accepted today, it does make the main point that finite processes call for some
ground or condition other than themselves. (see also cosmological
argument) |
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This becomes more explicit in the second
way, which proceeds from the principle that everything must have an
"efficient cause"--i.e., a
cause that actively produces and accounts for it--to the notion of a first
cause required to avoid an infinite regress, or tracing of causes
endlessly backward. As normally found, the idea of efficient causality, in
respect to change and process, has many difficulties; and some would prefer to
speak instead of regular or necessary sequence. But a more serious objection
stresses the apparent inconsistency of thinkers who invoke a general principle
of causality and then exempt the alleged first cause. As the child is apt to put
it, "Who then made God?" To this a defender of St. Thomas, or at least
of the present approach to the idea of God, would reply that the first cause is
not supposed to be itself a member of any ordinary causal sequence but
altogether beyond it, an infinite reality not itself a part of the natural or
temporal order at all. This point, in fact, is what the third way, starting from
the contingency of the world,
brings out more explicitly. Nothing explains itself, and all other explanations
fall short of showing in any exhaustive way why anything is as it is, or why
there is anything at all. But it is also hard to suppose that things just happen
to be. Nothing could come out of just nothing, and so the course of events as
men find and explain them points to some reality that is not itself to be
understood or explained in the normal way at all: it is Explanation with a
capital E, as it were, that is seen to
be necessitated by all that there is--of whose nature, however, nothing may be
directly discerned beyond the inevitability of its being as the ultimate or
unconditioned ground of all else and in this way transcendent or utterly
mysterious in itself. |
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This way of thinking of the being and
necessity of God has been impressively presented in the mid-20th century by
notable thinkers like Austin Farrer, E.L. Mascall, and H.P. Owen and also by the
present writer (see below Bibliography ). Generally known as the cosmological approach to the idea
of God, it has much in common with the insistence on the transcendence of God in
recent theology. |
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Scholars have often converged upon the
same theme in what appears to be a very different line of argument, namely the
ontological one, with which are associated especially the names of St.
Anselm, first of the Scholastic philosophers (in the 11th century), and René
Descartes, first major modern philosopher (in the mid-17th century).
Proponents of this argument try to show that the very idea of God implies his
existence. God is the greatest or most perfect being. If the attribute of
existence, however, is not included in man's concept of God, he can then think
of something more perfect, viz., that which has existence as well. Critics, such
as Gaunilo--a monk of
Marmoutier--in Anselm's day and Immanuel
Kant--one of the major architects of modern philosophy--many centuries
later, have fastened on the weakness that existence is not a predicate or
attribute in the same way, at least, as colour or shape; but there have been
highly ingenious attempts by influential religious thinkers of today to restate
the argument in an acceptable form. (See especially the writings of Charles
Hartshorne and Norman Malcolm.) Others find in the argument an oblique and
needlessly elaborate way of eliciting the feeling that there must be some
reality that exists by the very necessity of its own nature and to which
everything else directs man's thought. (see also scholasticism,
Cartesianism) |
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Attempts to arrive at the idea of God in
somewhat more comprehensible terms are reflected in the references to value and
design in the fourth and fifth ways of St. Thomas; this approach, however, has
been given a more explicit presentation and critical discussion in the works of David
Hume, a mid-18th-century Scottish Skeptic, and in Kant. The main idea of
the teleological argument, as
it is called, is that of the worth and purpose, or apparent design, to be found
in the world. This purposiveness is taken to imply a supreme Designer. It has
been questioned, however (by Kant, for example), whether this argument can
really get started without presupposing some feature of the causal argument. The
presence of seemingly purposeless features of the world and of much that is
positively bad, like wickedness and suffering, while always embarrassing for a
theistic view, presents peculiar difficulties here. For the arguer is now
throwing hostages to fortune in the shape of a special assessment of the way
things actually happen, which goes far beyond the mere requirement of some
ultimate ground, whatever the world appears to be like. The arguments from worth
and design have, however, one considerable advantage, viz., that they provide a
fairly straightforward way of learning about the nature of God and of ascribing
a certain aim and character to him from one's understanding of the phenomena
that he is required to explain. The supreme Designer or Architect is known from
his works, especially perhaps as reflected in the lives of men; and this
approach opens up one way of speaking of God, not just as mysterious power
behind the world but as some reality whom man may come to know in a personal way
from the way the world goes and from his understanding of what it means. (see
also evil,
problem of) |
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Many thinkers in the late 19th and early
20th centuries sought to establish man's knowledge of God in the way suggested
through his understanding of himself and the world; and of these the most
notable and valuable still today are the British theists James Ward, a
psychologist, and F.R. Tennant, a philosophical theologian. But the work of
thinkers like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit paleoanthropologist, and the
spate of discussion that he has provoked are also relevant here; and such work,
in turn, owes much--directly or otherwise--to the work of evolutionary thinkers
like Samuel Alexander and Henri Bergson and of modern scientists like Julian
Huxley. |
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If the central theme of traditional
theism, viz., that the finite world depends in some way on one transcendent and
infinite Being, can be sustained, then a crucial problem presents itself at
once: the question of how a being whose essence can never be known to man--who,
as infinite, is bound to be beyond the grasp of reason and to remain wholly
mysterious--how such a being can be said to be known at all, much less known and
experienced in the close and intimate personal ways that the theist makes
equally central to his claim. Part of the answer is that the theist does not
claim to fathom the ultimate mystery
of God or to know him as he is in himself. All that is claimed on this score is
that man sees the inevitability of there being God in the contingent and limited
character of everything else; and though this line of thought could not be
adopted for any finite existence--since one could not normally affirm in any
sensible way the existence of anything without specifying in some measure,
however slight, what it is like--one can, nonetheless, regard the case of God as
unique and not subject to the conditions of finite intelligibility. In these
ways, an insight or intuition into the being of God may be claimed without a
commitment to anything about his nature beyond the sort of completeness or
perfection required to account for there being limited finite things. This
insight is much in line with the "deliverances of religious
consciousness" in which it is claimed that God is "hidden," is
"past finding out," that his ways are not man's ways, that he is
eternal, uncreated, and so on. But the theist still has a major problem on his
hands, for he also makes a central issue of the claim that God can be
known--"met" and "encountered" in some way--indeed, that
some very bold affirmations about God and his dealings with men may be made.
(see also epistemology) |
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Theists have tried to deal with this
problem in various ways. One of these ways is their use of the doctrine of analogy,
which owes a great deal to the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas. Various types of
analogy are distinguished in the traditional doctrine; but the central claim is
that certain predicates, such as "love," "faithfulness," or
"justice," may be affirmed of God in whatever way may reflect his
involvement as the author of the limited realities, such as man, of which such
predicates may be affirmed in the normal, straightforward way. The difficulty
with this procedure is that, whatever it yields, the content of faith
is still very thin and remote, far from the warm fellowship of personal
relations. Most of the traditional sponsors of the doctrine admit this and
contend, therefore, that the findings of their "natural theology," as
it is called, must be supplemented by that of revelation or of divine
disclosure. Theism, in fact, is hardly conceivable without some doctrine of
revelation. But even if the theologian says that God takes the initiative in
communicating himself to man, the epistemological problem remains of how men's
essentially finite minds can apprehend anything pertaining to infinite or
eternal Being. |
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At this point, recourse is sometimes had
to authority, the authority of
a sacred book, an institution, or a system of doctrines, or one of divinely
implanted images. But there must at least be some initial justification of an
authority, to say nothing of an evaluation of rival claims. A more attractive
solution, then, especially for those who stress the personal involvement of God
in men's lives, is one posed in terms of religious
experience. Such experience is usually given prominence in theistic
contexts. It is sometimes understood in terms of paranormal phenomena, like
hearing voices or seeing visions, which have no natural origin, or like being in
some peculiar psychical state. Some of the faithful believe that God literally
speaks to them (or spoke in times past to prophets) in this way. A more subtle
view holds that men have reason to regard certain experiences as their clue to
what they should say of God in his relation to them. The question then arises of
how these experiences should be recognized; and various answers are given, such
as that which stresses the formative influence (within such experiences) of the
initial insight into the being of God and the patterning of the experiences, in
themselves and in wider ramifications, as a result. Much use is made in this
context of the analogy with men's knowledge of one another. Men do not know one
another's minds, it is alleged, as they know their own but only as mediated
through bodily states and behaviour. So a man may come to know God, who in his
essence is impenetrable to him, from the impact that he makes within experiences
and events that one would otherwise understand and handle just as one does other
finite occurrences. In the molding and perpetuating of such experiences,
prominence is given to imagination and to the place of figurative terms and
symbolism. These forms have therefore a place of special importance in theistic
types of religion, the personal encounter being extended and deepened through
art and literature, song, dance, myth, and ritual.
This fact, in turn, presents problems for thought and practice, since the art
forms and ritual must not be allowed to take wing on their own and thereby be
loosed from the discipline and direction of the proper dynamic of religious
life. |
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Preoccupation with the forms in which
religious life expresses itself has led some theistic writers to lean heavily on
the contribution made to religious understanding today by studies of religious language.
In some cases this concern has carried with it, as generally in much linguistic
philosophy of today, a skeptical or agnostic view of the transcendent factor in
religion. It is hard to see, however, how attenuations of this kind could be
strictly regarded as forms of theism; though clearly, within their more
restricted scope, they can retain many of the other characteristics of theism,
such as the stress on personal involvement and response. This tendency is very
marked in some recent studies of religion, in which the inspiration and form of
theism are retained without the substance--though how long and how properly are
moot points. There are others who, while retaining the transcendent reference of
theism, look for the solution of the central problem less in the substance of
religious awareness and in varieties of experience than in the modes of
articulation and religious language. Controversy centres, to a great degree, on
which of these approaches is the most fruitful. |
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In the work of some theists today, the
preoccupation with language is also combined with the existentialist stress on
personal involvement and commitment. A good example of this approach is found in
the work of I.T. Ramsey, the bishop of Durham, who, in spite of his insistence
on disclosure situations, in which something peculiarly significant becomes
alive to man, seemed to concede more than a theist should to the skeptical
strain in recent studies of religious language. |
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Modern thought has thrown new light on
issues, both old and new, regarding the nature of God. |
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The core of human personality has often
been thought to be man's moral existence, and, accordingly, theists have often
taken this fact to be the main clue to the way they are to think of divine
perfection and to the recognition of a peculiar divine involvement in the world.
Prominence is thus accorded to the high ethical teaching and character of saints
and prophets, who have a special role to play in transmitting the divine
message. In some religions this tendency culminates in doctrines of incarnation,
of God manifesting himself expressly in refined or perfected human form. This
trend is peculiarly marked in the Christian religion, in which the claim is
usually made that a unique and "once for all" incarnation of God has
occurred in Christ. Incarnational claims seem certainly to take their place
easily in some main forms of theism. The vindication of such claims,
however--especially today--relies much on consideration of the personal factor
in religion generally. (see also theophany,
Christianity, Christ,
two natures of) |
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For these and related reasons, the
theist today may find himself calling to his aid certain other disciplines that
centre upon men as persons, such as psychology and anthropology. Not all of the
forms and findings of these studies favour the theist, and he should take
special note of their challenge when they seem hostile, for they may touch him
at his tenderest spot. He may, on the other hand, find in such studies, and
certain general literature that borders on kindred themes, substantial help in
reconstructing his case in the full context of contemporary thought and culture. |
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It is indeed from certain modern studies
of man and his environment that some of the most disturbing challenges to the
theist have come. For it has been argued that the very idea of God, as well as
the more specific forms that it takes, emanate from man's emotional needs for
succour and comfort. It is in fact man himself, it is said, who has created God
in his own image, and the attempt is made to substantiate this view from
accounts of the proclivity of men, especially in early times, to personify
natural objects--rivers, trees, mountains, and so forth--and, in due course, to
confer peculiar properties upon them, leading in time to the notion of some
superbeing in whom these powers and properties are concentrated. The classical
statement of this position appeared before the development of anthropology and
the modern systematic study of religions, viz., in David
Hume's essay "The Natural
History of Religion" (1757). This short but splendidly lucid and
challenging work set the pattern for the more scientific and empirical studies
of religion that began to take shape in the 19th century in pioneer work by E.B.
Tylor, a British ethnologist and anthropologist, in his Primitive e="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Culture
(1871), and by Sir James Frazer, an ethnographer and historian
of religion, in his Golden
Bough(1890-1915).
But a corrective to this approach was soon provided by other scholars equally
renowned, who started from the historical and empirical evidence available to
them at the time. Andrew Lang,
a Scottish litterateur, drew attention to the phenomenon, among very early
peoples, of the High God, a Supreme Being who created himself and the earth and
dwelt at one time on earth. John H. King, in The Supernatural: Its Origin, Nature and Evolution (1892), stressed
the importance of the element of mystery in all religions, and another pioneer
of religious anthropology, R.R.
Marett, showed how extensively the savage ascribes the mysteries of life
and power to a supernatural source. Lucien
Lévy-Bruhl, a French sociologist, noted the pervasiveness of
prelogical factors in primitive mentality, and Rudolf
Otto, the most famous name in this context, found evidence in early forms
of religion of a response to "the wholly other," the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. |
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Concern with the problem
of evil--i.e., with reconciling the existence of evil with that of a good
God--becomes acute for thinkers who rest their case mainly on what they find in
the world around them; and this has led many to retreat to the notion of a
finite God, according to which the world may be under the direction of a
superior being who is nonetheless limited in power, though not in goodness. This
is a serious alternative to the idea of a supreme and unlimited source of all
reality as found in the usual forms of theism. Indeed, it is a moot point
whether the idea of a finite God should be classified as a form of theism. It
does come close to traditional theism, however, in its insistence on the unity
and absolute benevolence of God. There are clearly advantages in the notion of
God as a limited being, especially where evil is concerned; for though one could
still insist that God intends nothing that is not wholly good, he can now
account for extensive suffering and other ills on the basis of the limits to
God's power. He is doing his utmost, the finitist holds, but there are
things--refractory materials or explicitly evil powers--that he has not yet
subdued, though hopefully he will eventually do so. There is also induced in
this way a sense of urgency in man's own obligation to cooperate with God--to be
a "fellow worker." God will clearly need his help though he himself is
in the vanguard of the battle against evil. Thus, those who incline to the idea
of a finite God usually have been activist in thought and practice. (see also theodicy) |
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There are also grave difficulties to be
met. For if a thinker has recourse to the idea of God simply to account for what
is otherwise bewildering in the finite course of things, he may find no warrant
for the inference involved and indeed may find himself desperately clinging to
what is sometimes called "the God of the gaps" (i.e.,
of the gaps in man's explanations). If, on the other hand, he starts from
the inherently incomplete character of finite explanation as such, or from the
contingency of finite things, nothing short of an infinite or absolute God will
meet the case. In addition, the usual attitude of religious people, or of what
is sometimes known as "the religious consciousness," is that of a
profound assurance and serenity that presupposes that God is "all in
all" and beyond any possibility of being thwarted. It is also questionable
whether the attitude of worship is appropriate for a limited being, however
superior he may be to man. |
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Among the outstanding advocates of the
idea of a finite God were, at
the turn of the 20th century, the U.S. Pragmatist William
James and some of his disciples, notably Ralph Barton Perry. Thus, it is
not surprising that a closely similar notion arising in the mid-20th century
finds its main inspiration and support in the United States, viz., in the work
of process philosophers, such as Charles
Hartshorne and Schubert Ogden, who have developed some of the leading
ideas of A.N. Whitehead, an
eminent metaphysician. In their view, God is himself in process of fulfillment
in some kind of identification with the world, which at the same time leaves him
distinct in some sense from the universe, which he permeates and unifies. There
are grave and admitted paradoxes in this view; and, in spite of the remarkable
ingenuity of its advocates and their logical nimbleness, it is not clear that
the paradoxes can be sustained nor that the difficulties that are shared with
the simpler notion of a finite God can be overcome. Much in recent religious
thought centres on this issue. |
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The Muslim faith owes much to the
Semitic outlook from which the Old Testament and Christianity arose. It centres
on a transcendent personal deity; but, in its regard for the holiness and
majesty of God, it rejects incarnational doctrines as a form of blasphemy. There
is, however, a paradoxical side to one form of Islam: while insisting
that God is all in all, it sometimes tends to represent all of man's own actions
as the action of God within him and thus has some tendency to identify man with
God. This tendency, most marked in the mysticism of the Sufis,
seems, as respects its monism, to veer away from theism but seems, as respects
the sense of devotion and personal excitation that it inspires, to be in line
with the more explicit forms of theism. In its main form, Islam, with its
quite exceptional sense of the transcendence of God, is one of the most
distinctively theistic religions, though at odds with the incarnational factor
in Christian theism. |
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The trend toward the testing of theistic
thought in the crucible of the special disciplines was continued not only in
further anthropological studies (see The
Worship of the Sky-God, by E.O. James) but also in extensive scholarly
studies and translations of the sacred books of the great religions of the East. |
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It was noted, for example, that the
Vedic hymns that appear in the earliest Hindu scriptures contain significant
intimations of a sense of "the wonder of existence," "the
outpourings," as Savepalli Radhakrishnan,
the former philosopher-president of India, has expressed it, "of poetic
minds who were struck by the immensity of the universe and the inexhaustible
mystery of life." Note was taken also of early manifestations of henotheism,
a view that exalts several deities to the first place. The theme of some one
supreme reality, the first principle, or the supreme self becomes more explicit
in the Upanisadsancient Hindu scriptures, while retaining a sense of its ineffableness. One
hears of "the way of silence" and of the ultimate absorption of all
into the one supreme reality, the "one who breathes breathless." This
one is variously conceived in its relation to finite things; and although the
transcendent reference is rarely absent, there is not the same recognition of
the distinctness of finite beings that there is in Western theism or of the
eternal self being involved in the world in a personal way. The Upanisads have, in fact, a variety of themes and emphases, tending
generally toward a monistic and mystical philosophy; but on occasion the
theistic element is very marked, as in the Katha
and the Shvetashvatara books of
the Upanisads. The absolutist and the
theistic views are not always felt to be exclusive. This climate of thought has
set the course for much of subsequent Hinduism,
in which, along with the persistence of the monistic strain, the theistic note
is sounded much more distinctly, especially in the doctrine and practice of bhakti--devotion
to a personal God who bestows grace. In the famous Bhagavadgita(probably 3rd or 4th century BC), a classic of religious literature, and in
the teaching of the Brahmin Ramanuja (11th century), considered
the founder of the Vishistadvaita (qualified nondualism) school,
the flowering of the more theistic side of Hinduism is found. In the Shaiva-siddhanta
theology of South Indian Shaivism
(a major cult of Hinduism), there is a firm insistence that the soul, in being
united with God, is not annihilated or negated but only fused into the likeness
of God, who, in turn, is always in loving pursuit of the soul. This doctrine
makes the system "perhaps the highest form of theism that India was ever to
develop" (R.C. Zaehner). In the closing words of the Bhagavadgita
is an insistence on a love of God for man and of man for God that represents
a decisive turning point in the history of Hinduism: |
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Think on me, worship me, sacrifice to
me, pay me homage, so shalt thou come to me, I promise thee truly, for I love
thee well. Give up all things of dharma, turn
to me only as thy refuge. I will deliver thee from all evil. Have no care. |
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This theology has been well reflected in
the 20th century in the devotionalism of Gandhi
and in the writings of Sri Aurobindo,
a philosopher and Yoga devotee, which reflect an indwelling of the divine within
the world and a summons to high moral endeavour on the part of man that comes
close to theism without explicitly accepting it. |
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The same diversity of strains is found
in Buddhism. Though Buddhism
was at one time regarded as an atheistic religion leading to total elimination
of self in a state of Nirvana, a close examination of the evidence--in
the Pali Tipitakafor example, the canon of the Theravada
school of Buddhism--leads to a revision in favour of the view that the seeming
negativism of early Buddhist scriptures and the rejection of metaphysics reflect
chiefly the caution arising from a profound recognition of the characterless
elusiveness of the transcendent. And although the Buddhist doctrine of
compassion and its rigorous intellectual and moral discipline may lack something
of the warmth of a close personal commitment, the Buddhist adoration of the
Buddha and of the bodhisattvas
(those on their way to Enlightenment) afforded much scope to the religious
responses that find their full expression in overt theism. This trend became
more marked in the more popular forms of Buddhism and in the mythologies that
centre upon the idea of the bodhisattvas. |
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In the same way, the seeming agnosticism
of Confucian religion is qualified by its teaching about a power from beyond the
world working for justice within it, a "Heaven-ordained relationship"
that provides the basis of ethics and induces a deep consciousness of
individuality. This trend became intensified in the conflations that resulted
from the extension of Buddhism into China. (see also Confucianism) |
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In the doctrines of Sikhism,
a religion of the eastern Punjab that combines certain Muslim and Hindu
elements, stress is laid upon personal awareness of God as a central and
unifying factor in religion. In doctrine though not always in practice, however,
the Sikhs reject every notion of an avatar, or incarnation.
The religion of the Jains is nontheistic in theory, but the great figures of its
tradition come to function as gods in popular religion. For a period in ancient
Persia, there was established in the teaching of Zoroaster (Zarathushtra) a form
of ethical monotheism in which the god Ahura Mazda is the creator of the
physical and moral world--though limited, for a time at least, by an opposing
principle of evil (Ahriman). (see also Jainism, Zoroastrianism) |
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The clue to the theistic element in the
religions of primitive peoples may well be found in an observation by H.H.
Farmer, a British philosophical theologian: |
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We may surmise that at moments of
living prayer and worship there is in primitive man a turning to a god as if he were in fact the one and only God, though without any
expressly formulated denial of the existence of others; for the time being, the
god worshipped fills the whole sphere of the divine. |
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(H.D.L.) |
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