attached to the object of supreme worship, monotheism proper is
approached; while, when a new thought-construction is put in
the supreme place, there is a tendency rather towards pantheism.
So far as this is true, theism (proper) would seem to
be an accident of language.
There is a further problem; whether monotheism is of very early occurrence. Belief in a primitive historical revelation, once universal among Christians, has almost disappeared; but belief in a very early and highly moral theism is stoutly defended, chiefly on Australian evidence, by Andrew Lang (The Making of Religion and later works). If Lang is right, “primitive” peoples drew typical theistic inferences, and argued to God from nature and from conscience, though without displacing other types of religious belief and practice. In many regions—Egypt, Babylonia, &c.—individual investigators of the great religions have thought they found traces of an early-one hesitates to write, of a “primitive”—monotheism. Perhaps J. Legge, who finds true theism at the dawn of Chinese history, is the most authoritative representative of such views.
Passing to later times, we can watch a theory of monotheism
rising, and dying down again, during what our scholars distinguish
as the Brahmanical period of Indian religion.
The supreme god, Isvara, has the personal name
Prajapati, Visvakarman or some other. But this theism is
lifeless—a “pale and shallow deism, which India has often
Brahman theism.
Egyptian.
confessed with the lips, but which has never won the homage of
her heart.”[1] The thought of India is upon the side of pantheism.
Again, the heretical Egyptian king Amenophis IV.
or Akhenaton, one of the sovereigns to whose government
the celebrated Tell el-Amarna letters from
Palestine were addressed, was a zealous champion of the exclusive
claims of the sun-disk God, Ra; but his policy died
with him. In Babylonia a mutilated inscription printed by
T. Pinches (Transactions of Victoria Institute, vol. 28),
identifying (so far as preserved) thirteen other Gods
with Marduk, has been hailed by Friedrich Delitzsch (Babel und
Bibel) as the great fountain-head of monotheism, and has influenced
Babylonian.
Zoroastrian.the bold if highly precarious conjectures of H. Winckler.[2]
Of more assured importance was the Zoroastrian faith—“pure
moral dualism if not theism” (L. H. Mills)—which
proved its zeal by persecutions. But later times
nearly strangled Zoroastrian piety, not only by laws of ritual
purity but also by newly evolved secondary deities-personified
attributes, and the like. So that here again theism, if theism
it was, did not continue in strength. If we understand by theism
not simple belief in a divine unity, but such faith in one divine
person as will constitute the basis for a popular religion, then unless
we allow a doubtful exception in Zoroastrianism-we must
agree with those historians of religion who affirm that the world
has known only a single living monotheism, viz. that of the Old
Testament, along with what are historically the daughter faiths,
Christianity and Islam.
The theist believes that he can further trace many incomplete workings of the monothesitic instinct in the history of religion. Not only is it true, as A. Menzies observes, t hat “Reason knows only God, not Gods”; if we take religion as saving help, no worshipper possesses religion in full security until he has gone straight to the fountain-head, and gained the friendship of the God of Gods. Indian Vedic henotheism (otherwise called kathenotheism);[3] Semitic monolatry, so important as the probable starting-point of religious development in Israel; the Greek use of “Zeus” almost as we say “God”—even the attempt to arrange deities in a monarchical pantheon, all show the tendency, though it so seldom attains a real victory.
II. We have already suggested that theism covers more ground than the name at first may suggest. It can never quite confine attention to the problem of the being of God. Where God is believed in at all, it is believed that upon God everything else depends. With the thought of God, accordingly, there is correlated a modification in thoughts upon all other subjects; and a full system of theism must discourse “Of God, of the world, of the Soul,” like Matthew Arnold's Moses. In other words there must be doctrines regarding matter and mind, the world and the self, as well as regarding that Absolute Being who is believed to exist behind both, revealing Himself through them. This way of approaching theism is illustrated in A. C. Fraser's Gifford Lectures, or in earlier times in the writings of Christian Wolff, whose sciences, according to the slightly different nomenclature which Kant imposed on them, were “rational psychology,” “rational cosmology,” and “rational theology.” Kant swept away, so far as his influence extended, such “dogmatic metaphysics ” and the old-fashioned theism which it constituted or included; but Kant himself introduced, in his own more sceptical yet also more moral type of theistic doctrine, a new trichotomy—God, Freedom, Immortality, the three “postulates” of the “practical reason.” It is tempting to try to correlate the members of this triad with the individual members of the older triad. But that would only mislead us; free will and immortality are really predicates ascribed-on whatever grounds-to the soul; and it is natural that in theism the soul of man should be a topic second in importance only to God Himself. Every theistic system, or almost every one, makes provision in some way for Kant’s three postulates. Accordingly, even in a hurried survey of the history of theism, we must try to question the systems we are reviewing upon their attitude towards human freedom and immortality, as well as upon their doctrine of God. Sometimes it will be found that free will is asserted as an assured fact, as a datum, Free and so as a ground of inference to God. But some- Wi”times free will is rather a probanduin. In Christian theology, much labour has been spent upon vindicating man's freedom against God's intrusion, or upon blotting out human power in order to leave room for the divine. Theism suggests at the very outset that we should rather expect to find correlation between the two. If there is a God at all, he must be thought of as the guarantee of freedom in man and as the pledge of his immortality.
The mention of Christian theology may remind us that, for the majority of theists in medieval and modern times, theism proper has ranked only as a secondary wisdom. It is possible for Christians to work out natural theology in separate detail; but we cannot wonder if they rarely attempt the task, believing as they do that they have a fuller revelation of religious truth elsewhere. In point of fact, as We look to history, we find that theism has been much simplified and cut down. First of all, attention has been concentrated upon God. One does not suggest that this concentration was an error. On the contrary, even Christian theology makes at least the 'effort to show that the thought of God regulates the whole system of belief. Yet while an adequate doctrine of God may settle everything in principle, we ought to remember that there are applications of the principle, apart from which we do not see our way clearly. As a second step in concentration, attention is almost confined to the question “Does God exist?” and to theistic proofs as answering “Yes.” The 'further question “What is God?" is slurred, as if there could be no two opinions regarding that; whereas in truth there are two hundred opinions. A. B. Bruce feels this so strongly that the natural theology section of his Apologetics entirely omits the question “Does God exist?" in favour of the question “What is God?” Perhaps that is equally one-sided. When we do find theism dealing with the question “What is God?" it tends to borrow from scholastic forms of Christian theology the scheme of Being and Attributes (see e.g. Wolff). But such a scheme gives at best an
- ↑ A. Barth, Religions of India, Eng. trans., pp. 29, 30, 69. We may probably extend this hostile judgment to the theism of the modern Samaj-es.
- ↑ The centralizing of worship at Babylon by its last king, Nabonidos, hardly seems to have amounted to monotheism.
- ↑ The two terms are explicitly identified by F. Max Müller, their inventor (e.g. Hibbert Lectures, chap. vi. p. 271).
