Introduction To Christianity

by J.R. Foster

Most people today still admit in some form or other that there probably is some such thing as a “supreme being”. But people find it an absurd idea that this being should concern himself with man; we have the feeling—for it happens again and again even to those who try to believe—that this sort of thing is the expression of a naïve anthropomorphism, of a primitive mode of thought comprehensible in a situation in which man still lived in a small world, in which the earth was the center of all things and God had nothing else to do but look down on it. But, we think, in an age when we know how infinitely different things are, how unimportant the earth is in the vast universe and consequently how unimportant that little speck of dust, man, is in comparison with the dimensions of the cosmos—in an age like this it seems an absurd idea that this supreme being should concern himself with man, his pitiful little world, his cares, his sins, and his non-sins. But although we may think that in this way we are speaking about God in an appropriately divine manner, in reality we are in fact thinking of him in a very petty and only too human way, as if he had to be selective so as not to miss the overview. We thereby imagine him as a consciousness like ours, which has limits, must somewhere or other call a halt, and can never embrace the whole.