Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

THE NEOPLATONIC PHILOSOPHY AND EPOCH 305sonality, nor even any being of his own apart from theworld and independent of it. He is, in fact, merely alogical conception, drawn from abstraction and assumedto be real. And the world is his eternal and necessaryprocession, under an infinite variety of appearance.The antagonism in the teaching of the ChristianChurch respecting the being of God and His relationto the world with the Neoplatonic system may bmmed up under four heads. The first will be thunity and unicity of God ; the second, the Trinity ofPersonal Relations in God ; the third, the doctrine ofCreation ; and the fourth, the infinite gulf betweenthe being of God and the being of creatures whichthat doctrine establishes.I. The Church proclaimed belief in one God, whowas not the abstract conception of unity or beingformed by the mind, the highest generality whicarises in the thought when it considers the universe,a thing of logic, not real nor actual. God is the Beingapart from all other being, subsisting in Himself, consciousand free. His Being is concrete, not abstract;peculiar, not general; not the possible basis of all being,which is nothing and may be anything, but the fulnessof beingr infinite on all sides, incanable of mixture, in-pable of addition, incapable of becoming, that is, ofchange; determined in Himself, and divided from allother beings because no addition can be made to Him. iSuch is the One God viewed as over against theAbsolute Unity.2. In this One God the Christian Church proclaimeda Trinity of Personal Relations, eternal as God Himself,the Father eternally generating, the Son eternallygenerated, the Holy Ghost eternally proceeding, but1 See Kleutgen, Theologie der Vorzeit, i. 364 ; i. 208.VOL. Ill,