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Updated: May 14, 2025
It is true, as Raymond Brucker said, that "the answer to the riddle of the universe is God the answer to the riddle of God is Christ"; but it is also true, we hold, that the most effective key for the unlocking of the riddle is the idea of Divine immanence. My Belief, p. 107. Op. cit.; pp. 108, 109.
If this work were to be complete it should include some investigation of the rituals of the cults. They are gradually creating hymns of their own; their public orders of service include responsive readings with meditations on the immanence of God, the supremacy of the spiritual and related themes.
The central thought of Philo's system is that God is immanent in all His work; but it would seem to him sacrilegious to apply to the Godhead itself this universal, unceasing activity, and so he develops the Logos as the most ideal attribute of the Deity, and the sum of all His immanence and effluence.
The Hindu, for example, has the truth of God's immanence, but he turns it into falsehood by denying the correlative and equally important truth of God's transcendence, making God to be a mere nature-force without personality, while Scripture recognizes in God both immanence and transcendence, sees God in all things and through all things, yet above all things.
This purely physical phenomenon, therefore, which brings to most men a scarcely noticed augmentation of heat and light, and an indication of fair weather on the morrow, induces in the mystic an ineffable sense of divine immanence and beneficence, and an assurance of their continuance beyond the dark night of the death of the body.
According to the deistic notion, God was known to man only by reason of a revelation He had given once and for all in the far-off past a revelation which in its very nature excluded the idea of progress; as against this conception that of the immanence of God declares that He is not far from each one of us, that in Him we live and move and have our being, that He is over all and through all and in all the Life of all life, the Energy behind all phenomena, the Presence from which there is no escaping, unceasingly and progressively though by divers portions and in divers manners revealed in the universe, in nature and in man.
But immanence means nothing more abstruse than "indwelling"; and the renewed emphasis which, from the time of Wordsworth onward, began to be laid upon the Divine indwelling, the presence of God in the Universe, represented in the first place the reaction of the human spirit against the cold and formal Deism of the eighteenth century, which thought of God as remote, external to the world, exclusively "transcendent."
We sum up the lessons of history when we recognize in Hinduism the two great ideas of divine immanence and incarnation, in Mohammedanism the two equally essential truths of divine transcendence and personality. And we see the absolute dependence of India upon Christianity for its true Reformation. India needs the missionary more than she needs the schoolmaster.
This principle of development, wherever it is regarded as “world-soul” or as “will” or as the “unconscious,” is frequently, through pantheism and the doctrine of immanence, made equivalent with the object of religion, with God. This is an impossible undertaking. We cannot worship what only reaches its full development in ourselves.
We shall have occasion to see how much such a surrender signifies; for the moment it suffices to say plainly that Pantheism, the doctrine which denies the transcendence of God, is by no means the same as that which affirms His immanence, nor does it logically follow from that affirmation.
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