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the existence of God may differ somewhat from the dogmatic atheist, but they, as well as the
latter, leave us without a God.
2. PRESENT DAY FALSE CONCEPTIONS OF GOD INVOLVING A DENIAL OF THE TRUE GOD.
There
are several false conceptions of God current in our day, which involve a denial of the theistic
conception of God. A brief indication of the most important of these must suffice in this
connection.
a. An immanent and impersonal God.
Theism has always believed in a God who is both
transcendent and immanent. Deism removed God from the world, and stressed His
transcendence at the expense of His immanence. Under the influence of Pantheism, however,
the pendulum swung in the other direction. It identified God and the world, and did not
recognize a Divine Being, distinct from, and infinitely exalted above, His creation. Through
Schleiermacher the tendency to make God continuous with the world gained a footing in
theology. He completely ignores the transcendent God, and recognizes only a God that can be
known by human experience and manifests Himself in Christian consciousness as Absolute
Causality, to which a feeling of absolute dependence corresponds. The attributes we ascribe to
God are in this view merely symbolical expressions of the various modes of this feeling of
dependence, subjective ideas without any corresponding reality. His earlier and his later
representations of God seem to differ somewhat, and interpreters of Schleiermacher differ as
to the way in which his statements must be harmonized. Brunner would seem to be quite
correct, however, when he says that with him the universe takes the place of God, though the
latter name is used; and that he conceives of God both as identical with the universe and as the
unity lying behind it. It often seems as if his distinction between God and the world is only an
ideal one, namely, the distinction between the world as a unity and the world in its manifold
manifestations. He frequently speaks of God as the “Universum” or the “Welt-All,” and argues
against the personality of God; though, inconsistently, also speaking as if we could have
communion with Him in Christ. These views of Schleiermacher, making God continuous with
the world, largely dominated the theology of the past century, and it is this view that Barth is
combatting with his strong emphasis on God as “the Wholly Other.”
b. A finite and personal God.
The idea of a finite god or gods is not new, but as old as
Polytheism and Henotheism. The idea fits in with Pluralism, but not with philosophical Monism
or theological Monotheism. Theism has always regarded God as an absolute personal Being of
infinite perfections. During the nineteenth century, when monistic philosophy was in the
ascendant, it became rather common to identify the God of theology with the Absolute of
philosophy. Toward the end of the century, however, the term “Absolute,” as a designation of
God, fell into disfavor, partly because of its agnostic and pantheistic implications, and partly as