Orthodox Rationalism [pp. 294-312]

OR IYI-ODOX RA TIONALISM.
partly supersensibre; then how else than through sensation and
through feeling, at first vague and indeterminate, and then
becoming fixed and formed in necessary ideas, could man be,
come conscious of himself in his environment, material, spiritual,
divine? We need for Christian theology a psychology which
shall be true to the actual processes of man's life; which shall
seek to understand consciousness, not by verbal dissection of it,
but by following its living development; which shall have some
account to give of the rise of ideas out of impressions; of the
crystallization of undefined and general elements of conscious.
ness into conceptions; of the formation of intellectual feelings
into rational beliefs. But the habit of regarding reason as the
beginning and the end of mind, of reducing the rich manifold
development of self-conscious personality to a bare process of
thought, and substituting the logic of ideas for the logic of life,
in one word, rationalistic narrowness and onesidedness in mental
philosophy,-has hampered theology, and prevented even the
intuitionalists from following up their own advantage, and gaining through a better apprehension of the objective and divine
significance-of mental and moral feeling a complete victory over
the scepticism of Kant.
Orthodoxy is too hampered by rationalistic limitations in
its conceptions of God. It needs to escape from the deficiencies of the rationalizing intellect both in its method of belief in
the existence of God and in its mode of viewing the perfections
of the divine nature. If there really is a God, he will prove
himself to us; we shall not first cause him to exist to our own
thought. Our so-called proofs of God will only be the representation in thought of the Reality which has already been presented
to'our consciousness. A God needing to be proved to the understanding would be no God, but at best only an idea of God to
which we might give rational assent. A God proved by us
would be a God made by us. A real God is a being revealing
himself to our consciousness, impressing himself upon us, in
manifold ways making himself felt in our life. Only as he is
before us in our thought of him can we cherish a real belief
in him; he must first lay hold of us before we can lay hold of
him; we are to apprehend that for which also we are apprehended; we love him because he first loved us. So the Scriptures,
299