Institutes of the Christian Religion Volume 1 - Emanuel Vogel Gerhart

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1894 Excerpt: ...Both assumptions are directly in conflict with the God-idea; and so far as their silent force influences men's minds, belief in God is weakened instead of strengthened, and the God-idea is impoverished rather than enriched. Arnobius thought it was as hurtful to try to prove as to deny God's existence. He says that "it is as dangerous to attempt to prove by arguments that God is the highest being, as it is to wish to discover by reasoning that He exists." 1 God becomes a conditional and inferential truth, instead of the reality, the certainty of whose existence is apodictical. The great classic arguments for the divine existence, the physico-theological, teleological, the moral, and the ontological, have each and all great force of a certain kind; but they all fail of their end, if that end be to furnish logical proof of God's existence. To the moral argument Kant accords validity; yet Hegel and Kant, the absolute philosophy and the critical philosophy, have both pronounced all arguments insufficient. Of these traditional arguments the chief value, as has with nice acumen and much force been developed by Dr. Dorner, consists in showing that belief in God is ethical, and rational and natural. That God exists is a truth in fullest accord with our ethical life, our rational activity and our best conceptions of external nature. Arnobius against the Heathen, i. 32. 3. As the common belief of mankind in divine existence arises from the immediate self-authentication of God to the human soul, so the belief of the Church in divine triunity arises from the immediate self-authentication of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit to Christian believers.1 The triune idea is the profounder, richer and more satisfying idea. The belief that Deity exists underlies the f...