Turning now to the application of this method and type of phil osophy to the sphere of theology, we may note that to it is due a large part of the content of the traditional conception of God and His attributes. From the patristic age to the modern period of philosophy philosophical theologians took over the concept of God as largely fashioned during the long development of religious thought, including the Hebrew thought in which Christianity has its roots. And in Hebrew religion, the transcendent attribute of Jehovah is His holiness. God is personal, not a cosmic force, in terested in individuals, immanent in Nature and man. But the Greek philosophers, who founded philosophical theology, had relatively little concern with such qualifications of Deity. Greek philosophy began as cosmology and ethics was an after-develop ment. And Greek theology was rather an academic product than born of personal experience and life. Hence, save for Plato's identification of God with the Good, it endowed God with what may roughly be called "the physical" attributes in a predominant degree. The Greek mind, not the Hebrew, is responsible for the attribute of infinity, perhaps for those of omnipotence and omniscience in their absolute and rigorous senses, and for the qualities of immutability and impassibility, the taking over of which by Fathers of the Church involved them in the difficult task of reconciling such attributes with the nature of a living Spirit. Some of the Greek theological ideas, a priori in character rather than derived from life and experience, proved to be a mould somewhat incongruous with the Hebrew-Christian content which philosophically-minded Christian doctors thrust into it. It was at once too large and too small. If immutability means more than self-consistency, and impassibility more than freedom from human anger and corporeal passions, they cannot be predi cates of a God of love and a Father of spirits. Like infinity, until that concept passes over into the idea of ethical perfection, they are derived from inert matter rather than active spirit and are quasimaterialistic or mathematical rather than spiritual and ethical conceptions. "Infinity" has borne several distinct meanings, both in Greek and in later philosophy. Originally its sense seems to have been that of indeterminateness or being devoid of any particular characters, formless, indefinite and indefinable : in which case it is, of course, not predicable of any actual being. Then it came to mean the endless or limitless, what cannot be reached by successive acts of addition or division. Infinity, in this sense of the endless in time, space or number, is only relevant in mathematics ; it can have no application to God, who is without parts or magnitude. Lastly, "infinity" acquired the meaning of completeness, ethical perfection and immutability. Then, how ever, it became a redundant word ; as properly used it can be dispensed with by theology.
Even more inapt to Christian or theistic theology than some of the Greek a priori concepts is the abstractive method of arriving at a conception of God, which passed, through Philo especially, from Greek thought to some of the Fathers of the Church. The rationalistic propensity to regard the most abstract conception as the ultimately real being, coupled with the formally intellectual tendency to oust from philosophy and theology not only the anthropomorphisms of vulgar thought but also the inalienable anthropic functions of human mentality, led to usage of "the negative way." That consists in repudiating all positive charac ter;zations of God supplied by human analogies It has aptly been described as a deification of the word "not." Everything, it is represented, that can be affirmed of the finite must be denied of the Infinite One. Thus God becomes conceived as an indeter minate absolute, ineffable and unknowable ; the living Spirit is replaced by a pure idea. The Fathers favourable to this method,
who even when abstract philosophers were also pastors and cur ators of Christian tradition, were saved from propounding these extravagances by a wholesome inconsistency. But Philo, gnostics, and neoplatonists, who took the negative way more seriously, found it necessary, in order to bridge the impassable gulf which they set between the Infinite One and the finite world, to invent powers, aeons and emanations.
The Empirical Method and Natural Theology.—The phrase "natural theology" has usually been a synonym for "rational theology"; e.g., the natural theology of the English deists, who may aptly be described as rational theists, consisted of doctrines supposed to have been discerned by human reason, its first principles being self-evident, and its secondary doctrines being deduced from them, in accordance with the a priori prin ciple, that so and so is because it must be. But it is convenient to give to "natural theology" a distinctive meaning. As a synonym for "rational theology" it is superfluous ; while there is a the ology derivable empirically from the study of Nature, man and human history, and consequently not "rational" and a priori, for which the title "natural" is the most appropriate. It will there fore be so used in the present context.
The possibility of a theology of this kind was recognized at least as early as the time of St. Paul, who wrote that "the in visible things of [God] from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made." But though theology is thus derivable, it must be added that it has not as yet been derived, at least not with anything like the completeness and system possessed by some of the rational theologies that have been forthcoming between the times of, say, Aristotle and Hegel.
Empiricism, in a nobler than its historical sense which degrades it to sensationism, yet awaits its master-mind comparable to a Plato or a Spinoza; hitherto, both in philosophy and theology, it has been represented but fragmentarily, and, if by able thinkers, scarcely by genius of the highest order. Some of the threads which await weaving into the texture of an empirically grounded philosophical theology by a future master-weaver are already within the common ken and may be briefly indicated.
It is admitted that theology rests on faith. Faith, in the first instance, creates ideas, such as that of God, and believes in real or actual counterparts to them. It claims to be knowledge, but is not knowledge or cannot be known to be knowledge, in the same sense that natural science is knowledge. Faith may issue in knowledge or it may not. The individual believer, whether a mystic or a non-mystic, may adopt, for the ordering of his own life, the attitude "I am certain." Therein he is invulnerable; but his faith will be a matter of personal biography and his certainty will be but subjective certitude or convincedness until reasons be forthcoming for taking the objects of his belief to be actual (as is the king of England) and not merely imaginal (as the mermaid) or purely ideal (as the line without breadth). Theology and phil osophy are concerned with the knowability and the actuality of God and with the validity of statements about Him. Rational theology maintained that God's existence, etc., could be proved as coercively as a theorem in Euclid. Empirical theology denies that this is so, and empiricism asserts that knowledge, in that sense, is not forthcoming even as to the existence of other subjects or souls than one's own. Empiricism can also assert that what is called scientific knowledge and what are our most assured con victions as to the physical world rest ultimately on indemon strable postulates or an act of faith, and observes that there is no more a rational cosmology than there is a rational theology.