The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

fact that the absence is after a certain kind or mode only--a relative
absence, not a substantial or absolute one. There is a relative leaving in
human relations. "A man shall leave his father and mother, and cleave to
his wife," and yet he may remain under their roof; he leaves them
relatively, in rising into the new relation. As representatives of the
supremest domestic obligation, the parents are left; for his supremest
domestic obligation is now to his wife. Hence, our Lord does not make the
antithesis he shall leave parents, and go to his wife, but he shall leave
father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife. A pastor may leave a
congregation, as pastor, and yet remain in it as a member. A merchant may
leave a firm, yet retain the room he had in their building. But these cases
are not simply parallel. They illustrate the argument a fortiori.
The presence of God is regarded either as substantial or as operative
and phenomenal. The substantial may exist without the phenomenal; the
phenomenal cannot exist without the substantial. God's substantial
presence is alike everywhere--as complete in the lowest depths of hell as in
the highest glory of heaven; as perfect in the foulest den of heathen orgies
as in the assembly of saints, or on the throne before which seraphim veil
their faces. But His phenomenal presence varies in degrees. "Our Father
who art in Heaven," marks His purest phenomenal presence, as making
that Home to which our hearts aspire. As there is phenomenal presence, so
is there phenomenal absence; hence, God himself is frequently represented
in Scripture as withdrawing Himself, and as absent, though, in His essence,
He neither is, nor can be, absent from any part of the Universe. The
absence of God is, so to speak, a relative absence, a phenomenal absence;
the tokens of Providence or grace by which this presence was actualized,
not only to faith, but even to experience, are withdrawn. So the natural
phenomenal tokens of the presence of the undivided Christ are withdrawn,
yet is He substantially still present, and as thus present is operative in the
supernatural phenomena of His grace.
Thirdly. Just as explicitly as Christ, the whole Christ, is said