The old human analogies cannot be maintained in quite the same naif way as once they were. We cannot go back to the anthropomorphism which found it possible to depict God the Father as a man with a grey beard. Yet we may notice at the very outset that the very incompleteness of all human analogies to God may teach a profoundly spiritual lesson, a lesson which the most religious minds of every age have learned for themselves, but which the wider horizons of modern knowledge enable us to enforce with clearer authority. Humanity and its world must depend in the last resort on some Being other and infinitely higher than themselves. The moment the importance of this truth emerges, we can begin to trace a possible value in the very bewilderment which, as we saw, the growth of scientific knowledge has produced. That growth has made man doubt whether God can be conceived at all in human terms. At least then it is possible that modern thought may ally
itself with old religion to teach mankind a new lesson of humility. If the universe is too great for the categories of merely human thinking to interpret, then we may with the greater reason maintain that the source of it is infinitely more than human, a Being before Whom man does well to abase himself in the dust.
* Essay in orthodoxy - Oliver Chase Quick
3 comments:
What year was this written? I just finished another church history text, and it always gets so depressing when we get to Darwin and Freud and become an arrogant human-centered adolescent culture. IF ONLY our scientific knowledge brought us to our knees at the greatness of God. IF ONLY getting a glimpse of the complexity of the universe delivered us FROM our arrogance, instead of into a completely undeserved belief that now that we have SCIENCE, we no longer need JESUS CHRIST. Praise him that He hasn't just left us to it.
Thank you for your wonderful faithfulness in maintaining this blog. I hope our families get to meet sometime. We just finished our inaugural Anglican Men's Leadership Academy retreat here in the Sangre de Cristo mountains. Five college age guys plus our son Dan, who is a priest, packed into the back country from our house and spent three days camping, fishing, and praising God, talking about the future of the continuing church. Maybe your sons next year?
Hi Joanne,
As always, thanks for your wonderful comments. I am glad Dan+ and his cohort had a great retreat.
Fr. Quick wrote that in 1916.
Take Care and God Bless
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