2. Personality

The Scriptures represent God as a personal being. By personality we mean the power of self-consciousness and of self-determination. By way of further explanation we remark:

(a) Self-consciousness is more than consciousness. This last the brute may be supposed to possess, since the brute is not an automaton. Man is distinguished from the brute by his power to objectify self. Man is not only conscious of his own acts and states, but by abstraction and reflection he recognizes the self which is the subject of these acts and states, (b) Self-determination is more than determination. The brute shows determination, but his determination is the result of influences from without; there is no inner spontaneity. Man, by virtue of his free-will, determines his action from within. He determines self in view of motives, but his determination is not caused by motives; he himself is the cause.

God, as personal, is in the highest degree self-conscious and self-determining. The rise in our own minds of the idea of God, as personal, depends largely upon our recognition of personality in ourselves. Those who deny spirit in man place a bar in the way of the recognition of this attribute of God.

Ex. 3:14—“And God said unto Moses, I am that I am: and he said, Thus shalt thou say onto the children of Israel, I am hath sent me onto you.” God is not the everlasting “It is,” or “I was,” but the everlasting “I am” (Morris, Philosophy and Christianity, 128); “I am” implies both personality and presence. 1 Cor. 2:11—“the things of God none knoweth, save the Spirit of God”; Eph. 1:9—“good pleasure which he purposed”; 11—“the counsel of his will” Definitions of personality are the following: Boethius—“Persona est animæ rationalis individua substantia” (quoted in Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:415). F. W. Robertson, Genesis 3—“Personality = self-consciousness, will, character.” Porter, Human Intellect, 626—“Distinct subsistence, either actually or latently self-conscious and self-determining.” Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism: Person =“being, conscious of self, subsisting in individuality and identity, and endowed with intuitive reason, rational sensibility, and free-will.” See Harris, 98, 99, quotation from Mansel—“The freedom of the will is so far from being, as it is generally considered, a controvertible question in philosophy, that it is the fundamental postulate without which all action and all speculation, philosophy in all its branches and human consciousness itself, would be impossible.”

One of the most astounding announcements in all literature is that of Matthew Arnold, in his “Literature and Dogma,” that the Hebrew Scriptures recognize in God only “the power, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness” = the God of pantheism. The “I am” of Ex. 3:14 could hardly have been so misunderstood, if Matthew Arnold had not lost the sense of his own personality and responsibility. From free-will in man we rise to freedom in God—“That living Will that shall endure, When all that seems shall suffer shock.” Observe that personality needs to be accompanied by life—the power of self-consciousness and self-determination needs to be accompanied by activity—in order to make up our total idea of God as Spirit. Only this personality of God gives proper meaning to his punishments or to his forgiveness. See Bib. Sac., April, 1884:217–333; Eichhorn, die Persönlichkeit Gottes.

Illingworth, Divine and Human Personality, 1:25, shows that the sense of personality has had a gradual growth; that its pre-Christian recognition was imperfect; that its final definition has been due to Christianity. In 29–53, he notes the characteristics of personality as reason, love, will. The brute perceives; only the man apperceives, i. e., recognizes his perception as belonging to himself. In the German story, Dreiäuglein, the three-eyed child, had besides her natural pair of eyes one other to see what the pair did, and besides her natural will had an additional will to set the first to going right. On consciousness and self-consciousness, see Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:179–189—“In consciousness the object is another substance than the subject; but in self-consciousness the object is the same substance as the subject.” Tennyson, in his Palace of Art, speaks of “the abysmal depths of personality.” We do not fully know ourselves, nor yet our relation to God. But the divine consciousness embraces the whole divine content of being: “the Spirit searcheth all tilings, yea, the deep things of God” (1 Cor. 2:10).

We are not fully masters of ourselves. Our self-determination is as limited as is our self-consciousness. But the divine will is absolutely without hindrance; God’s activity is constant, intense, infinite; Job 23:13—“What his soul desireth, even that he doeth”; John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work.” Self-knowledge and self-mastery are the dignity of man; they are also the dignity of God; Tennyson: “Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, These three lead life to sovereign power.” Robert Browning, The Last Ride Together: “What act proved all its thought had been? What will but felt the fleshly screen?” Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 6, 181, 216–255—“Perhaps the root of personality is capacity for affection.”.… Our personality is incomplete; we reason truly only with God helping; our love in higher Love endures; we will rightly, only as God works in us to will and to do; to make us truly ourselves we need an infinite Personality to supplement and energize our own; we are complete only in Christ (Col. 2:9, 10—“In him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, and in him ye are made full.”

Webb, on the Idea of Personality as applied to God, in Jour. Theol. Studies, 2:50—“Self knows itself and what is not itself as two, just because both alike are embraced within the unity of its experience, stand out against this background, the apprehension of which is the very essence of that rationality or personality which distinguishes us from the lower animals. We find that background, God, present in us, or rather, we find ourselves present in it. But if I find myself present in it, then it, as more complete, is simply more personal than I. Our not-self is outside of us, so that we are finite and lonely, but God’s not-self is within him, so that there is a mutual inwardness of love and insight of which the most perfect communion among men is only a faint symbol. We are ‘hermit-spirits,’ as Keble says, and we come to union with others only by realizing our union with God. Personality is not impenetrable in man, for ‘in him we live, and move, and have our being’ (Acts 17:28), and ‘that which hath been made is life in him’ (John 1:3, 4).” Palmer, Theologic Definition, 39—“That which has its cause without itself is a thing, while that which has its cause within itself is a person.”