Pantheism And Christianity

A book to challenge the status quo, spark a debate, and get people talking about the issues and questions we face as a country!

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1884 edition. Excerpt: ... principle with the independent ground, is the highest personality. And since the living unity of both is spirit, then is God, as the absolute bond, spirit in an eminent and absolute sense. We have followed Schwegler's five divisions of Schelling's philosophy, but in reality the five may be reduced to two--that in which Schelling agrees with Spinoza, and that in which he follows Bohme. He repudiated the epithet 'Pantheistic, ' and strongly expressed his belief, in the personality of God. But whether Spinoza or Bohme was the more Pantheistic, or which of them most believed in the divine personality, is 'among the things which we desire to know.' 'The God of pure idealism, ' said Schelling, 'as well as the God of pure realism is necessarily impersonal. That is the God of Fichte and of Spinoza, but to me God is the living unity of all forces--the union of the ideal principle with itself in the bosom of its own dependence. This is spirit in the only true sense.' On the immortality of the soul, Schelling differs in nothing from Spinoza. 'The I, ' he says, 'with its essence undergoes neither conditions nor restrictions. Its primitive form is that of being, pure and eternal. We cannot say of it, it was or it will be, we can only say, it is. It exists absolutely. It is then outside of time and beyond it. The form of its intellectual intuition is eternity. Now since it is eternal it has no duration, for duration only relates to objects, so that eternity properly consists in having nothing to do with time.' This is the eternity which belongs to God, and, therefore, belongs to the human Boui, which finds its true life in God--whose essence is the essence of God, and as it returns to the source of its life, it loses its individuality, and knows itself a

Pantheism and Christianity 420 Pages.

According to Webster the word “pantheism” is derived from two Greek words meaning “all” and “god.” Webster's derivation of the English word “pantheism” is most suggestive. His uncapitalized word “god” gives the meaning of pantheism as a human opinion of “gods many,” or mind in matter. “The doctrine that the universe, conceived of as a whole, is God; that there is no God but the combined forces and laws which are manifested in the existing universe.” The Standard Dictionary has it that pantheism is the doctrine of the deification of natural causes, conceived as one personified nature, to which the religious sentiment is directed. Pan is a Greek prefix, but it might stand, in the term pantheism, for the mythological deity of that name; and theism for a belief concerning Deity in theology. However, Pan in imagery is preferable to pantheism in theology. The mythical deity may please the fancy, while pantheism suits not at all the Christian sense of religion. Pan, as a deity, is supposed to preside over sylvan solitude, and is a horned and hoofed animal, half goat and half man, that poorly presents the poetical phase of the genii of forests. My sense of nature's rich glooms is, that loneness lacks but one charm to make it half divine — a friend, with whom to whisper, “Solitude is sweet.” Certain moods of mind find an indefinable pleasure in stillness, soft, silent as the storm's sudden hush; for nature's stillness is voiced with a hum of harmony, the gentle murmur of early morn, the evening's closing vespers, and lyre of bird and brooklet.

Many books have successfully defended Christianity against Western rational skepticism. 'Apologetics in the New Age' represents the first serious attempt by evangelical philosophers to answer Eastern pantheism in general and the New Age movement in particular. Teaming up with David Clark, Norman Geisler, one of evangelicalism's leading apologists, probes the pantheistic worldview and its relationship to the New Age movement. Pantheism, the authors write, constitutes the soil in which the movement grows. The notion that every person participates in the divine has found fertile expression in contemporary American culture. The American consciousness of the Eastern alternative has risen rapidly in the last few decades, the authors remind us. Christian apologists have been caught unaware.... For this reason, we believe that Christian apologists must turn their attention in a new direction by developing new arguments for this New Age.

Dr. Adler extends and modernizes the argument for the existence of God developed by Aristotle and Aquinas without relying on faith, mysticism, or science. Instead, he uses a rationalist argument to lead the reader to a point where he or she can see that the existence of God is not necessarily dependent upon a suspension of disbelief. Lightning Print On Demand Title