Yes; it is such a supernal God--that God
who is apart, incredible, awful--that the soul of humanity craves and
needs.
Of course, here again, as throughout these discussions, we are
returning to a form of the old dualism. We cannot seem to help it. We
may construct philosophies like Hegel's in which thesis and antithesis
merge in a higher synthesis; we may use the dual view of the world as
representing only a stage, a present achievement in cosmic progress or
human understanding. But that does not alter the incontestable witness
of present experience that the religious consciousness is based upon,
interwoven with, the sense of the cosmic division without, and the
unresolved moral dualism within the individual life. It is important
enough to remember, however, that we have rejected, at least for this
generation, the old scholastic theologies founded on this general
experience. Fashions of thought change with significant facility;
there is not much of the Absolute about them! Nevertheless we cannot
think with forgotten terms. Therefore ours is no mechanically divided
world where man and God, nature and supernature, soul and body, belong
to mutually exclusive territories. We do not deny the principle of
identity. Hence we have discarded that old view of the world and all
the elder doctrines of an absentee creator, a worthless and totally
depraved humanity, a legalistic or substitutionary atonement, a
magical and non-understandable Incarnation which flowed from it.
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