● ● ● situation vis-à-vis orthodoxy. Protestantism, he wrote, too often fears that to speak of God as the ground of being or as “being itself” makes impossible a personal relation between God and man:
This fear would be justified if the assertion that God is being itself were not only the first, as it must be, but also the last statement about God. But there are many more statements, such as, God is life and love and spirit, all of which are derived from revelatory experiences and all of which can be expressed ontologically. The personal character of God is no exception. It makes the person-to-person encounter between God and man possible; but it excludes the assertion that God is a person.24
Mrs. Eddy had excluded the assertion in a passage in Science and Health written many years before:
As the words person and personal are commonly and ignorantly employed, they often lead, when applied to Deity, to confused and erroneous conceptions of divinity and its distinction from humanity. If the term personality, as applied to God, means infinite personality, then God is infinite Person,—in the sense of infinite personality, but not in the lower sense.25
On occasion she wrote of God as Person, but usually she preferred the word that conveyed the sense of His working through invariable, universal law.26 As the years went on she would increasingly couple ● ● ●
24 Paul Tillich, “Reinhold Neibuhr’s Doctrine of Knowledge,” in Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social, and Political Thought, ed. Charles W. Kegley and Robert W. Bretall, The Library of Living Theology 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1956), p. 41. See also Perry Miller, re the Puritan’s theology:
“God” was a word to stand for the majesty and perfection which gleam through the fabric of the world; He was Being, hardly apprehensible to man, yet whose existence man must posit, not so much as a being but as The Being, the beginning of things and the sustainer, the principle of universal harmony and the guide.
The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1939), p. 9.
25 [Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (Boston: Christian Science Board of Directors, 1934), p. 116.]
26 See Mary Baker Eddy, No and Yes (Boston: Christian Science Board of Directors, 1936), p. 20.