Essays in Unitarian Theology by Kenneth Twinn Lindsey - General ...

ESSAYS IN UNITARIAN THEOLOGY
It robs religious devotion of its special genius. Man,
when engaged in religious activity and contemplation
and in commitment to ideal standards of moral behaviour,
feels himself to be in communion with personality
similar to his own, he acknowledges that he is
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sustained, energized, prompted and guided by it.
He distinguishes between this experience and any
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natural piety which might link his spirit with the
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grandeurs of: cosmic process. In specifically religious
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ex~erience men feel their own personality invaded by
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God's rather than by an infinite energy which shapes
the star systems and gathers up the radiations of a
million miles to make a living satellite of the sun.
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This - - felt interfusion of the divine with the human
suggests that the symbolism cc Fatherhood of God ",
in the sense of a personality from which human per-
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sonality derives its being and strength, is not outworn.
Such spiritual insights, however, are notoriously
subjective, they are not shared by all, nor felt at all
times by those who experience them. Searching ques-
tions hive been asked of such mysticism. What part
do human wish and the desire to transcend the in-
tolerable sense of man's cosmic loneliness play in the
experience? How much is the awareness of a divine
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personality a projection of an internal psychic situa-
tion? The frail conscious ego of a man is invaded by
other portions of his psychic life : by the under-swell of
his libidinal energy releasing erotic emotions, so that
he feels himself immersed in a sea of rapture; by the
restraining forces of a well-developed super-ego, so that
he feels constrained by - the imperatives and disciplines
and driven by the compulsions of father-figures; by
dormant racial archetypes, so that he feels currents
IMAGES OF GOD
of personal forces vaster than himself sweeping him to
heroic or tragic issues. The fact that such questions
have been seriously asked and seriously examined is
evidence that the argument from direct religious
experience is not as final as it is usually claimed to be.
Nor does this type of experience point exclusively to
the existence of an objective divine personality. Men
can and do commune in a very real sense with im-
personal nature; they feel en rapport with the mood,
strength or beauty of the natural world around them.
Such communion often rises to an awareness of a
CC presence " moving in or through the sights, sounds
and movements of the physical world. This has been
taken as a surrogate for deity, but it does not neces-
sarily imply personality. Quite the reverse, sometimes.
A man is swamped by the immensity and ravelled
intricacy of existence around him, by the felt infinitude
of it, sometimes by its very impersonality, its sublime
unconcern for human happenings. Confronted with
something not himself, something which moves in-
exorably by purposes not his own, or by no conceivable
purposes at all, he still has communion with it. There
is a very real and not uncommon .natural mysticism
which does not imply personality in the object of
reverence, and for which the term " Father " fails to
express the core of the experience.
The question then arises: how far can one go in
discarding traditional symbols ? If the Fatherhood
and Personality of God are felt to be inadequate, what
of the Unitarian favourites: God as Spirit, Goodness,
Truth, Beauty ? These are verbal symbols, general
abstract concepts which do not readily translate into .
rich imagery. By " spirit " we mean a depth and