monotheism

• enabled man to see Father as creator and controller

1:0.1The Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther is the God of all cre­ation, the First Source and Cen­ter of all things and be­ings. First think of God as a cre­ator, then as a con­trol­ler, and lastly as an in­fi­nite up­holder. The truth about the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther had be­gun to dawn upon man­kind when the prophet said: “You, God, are alone; there is none be­side you. You have cre­ated the heaven and the heaven of heav­ens, with all their hosts; you pre­serve and con­trol them. By the Sons of God were the uni­verses made. The Cre­ator cov­ers him­self with light as with a gar­ment and stretches out the heav­ens as a cur­tain.” Only the con­cept of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther—one God in the place of many gods—en­abled mor­tal man to com­pre­hend the Fa­ther as di­vine cre­ator and in­fi­nite con­trol­ler.

• all religious philosophy sooner or later arrives at

3:6.3All re­li­gious phi­los­o­phy, sooner or later, ar­rives at the con­cept of uni­fied uni­verse rule, of one God. Uni­verse causes can­not be lower than uni­verse ef­fects. The source of the streams of uni­verse life and of the cos­mic mind must be above the lev­els of their man­i­fes­ta­tion. The hu­man mind can­not be con­sis­tently ex­plained in terms of the lower or­ders of ex­is­tence. Man’s mind can be truly com­pre­hended only by rec­og­niz­ing the re­al­ity of higher or­ders of thought and pur­po­sive will. Man as a moral be­ing is in­ex­pli­ca­ble un­less the re­al­ity of the Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther is ac­knowl­edged.

• breakup of Mogul empire handicapped growth of

79:1.9The last great man­i­fes­ta­tion of the sub­merged mil­i­tary ge­nius of the cen­tral Asi­atic And­ites was in A.D. 1200, when the Mon­gols un­der Genghis Khan be­gan the con­quest of the greater por­tion of the Asi­atic con­ti­nent. And like the And­ites of old, these war­riors pro­claimed the ex­is­tence of “one God in heaven.” The early breakup of their em­pire long de­layed cul­tural in­ter­course be­tween Oc­ci­dent and Ori­ent and greatly hand­i­capped the growth of the mono­the­is­tic con­cept in Asia.

• Egyptian political factors favored

95:2.2It was po­lit­i­cal and moral, rather than philo­sophic or re­li­gious, ten­den­cies that ren­dered Egypt more fa­vor­able to the Salem teach­ing than Mes­o­po­ta­mia. Each tribal leader in Egypt, af­ter fight­ing his way to the throne, sought to per­pet­u­ate his dy­nasty by pro­claim­ing his tribal god the orig­i­nal de­ity and cre­ator of all other gods. In this way the Egyp­tians grad­u­ally got used to the idea of a super­god, a step­ping­stone to the later doc­trine of a uni­ver­sal cre­ator De­ity. The idea of mono­the­ism wa­vered back and forth in Egypt for many cen­turies, the be­lief in one God al­ways gain­ing ground but never quite dom­i­nat­ing the evolv­ing con­cepts of poly­the­ism.

• Egyptian priests combined and hyphenated their gods

95:5.11But the priests could not fully over­come the mono­the­is­tic wave. In­creas­ingly they were com­pelled to com­bine and hy­phen­ate their gods; more and more the fam­ily of gods con­tracted. Ikh­na­ton had as­so­ci­ated the flam­ing disc of the heav­ens with the cre­ator God, and this idea con­tin­ued to flame up in the hearts of men, even of the priests, long af­ter the young re­former had passed on. Never did the con­cept of mono­the­ism die out of the hearts of men in Egypt and in the world. It per­sisted even to the ar­rival of the Cre­ator Son of that same di­vine Fa­ther, the one God whom Ikh­na­ton had so zeal­ously pro­claimed for the wor­ship of all Egypt.

• evolution of

96:0.1In con­ceiv­ing of De­ity, man first in­cludes all gods, then sub­or­di­nates all for­eign gods to his tribal de­ity, and fi­nally ex­cludes all but the one God of fi­nal and su­preme value. The Jews syn­the­sized all gods into their more sub­lime con­cept of the Lord God of Is­rael. The Hin­dus like­wise com­bined their mul­ti­far­i­ous de­i­ties into the “one spir­i­tu­al­ity of the gods” por­trayed in the Rig-Veda, while the Mes­o­po­ta­mi­ans re­duced their gods to the more cen­tral­ized con­cept of Bel-Mar­duk. These ideas of mono­the­ism ma­tured all over the world not long af­ter the ap­pear­ance of Ma­chi­venta Mel­chiz­e­dek at Salem in Pales­tine. But the Mel­chiz­e­dek con­cept of De­ity was un­like that of the evo­lu­tion­ary phi­los­o­phy of in­clu­sion, sub­or­di­na­tion, and ex­clu­sion; it was based ex­clu­sively on cre­ative power and very soon in­flu­enced the high­est de­ity con­cepts of Mes­o­po­ta­mia, In­dia, and Egypt.

• evolution of

96:1.14As man ad­vances in cul­ture, the lesser gods are sub­or­di­nated to a su­preme de­ity; the great Jove per­sists only as an ex­cla­ma­tion. The mono­the­ists keep their sub­or­di­nate gods as spir­its, demons, fates, Nereids, fairies, brown­ies, dwarfs, ban­shees, and the evil eye. The He­brews passed through heno­the­ism and long be­lieved in the ex­is­tence of gods other than Yah­weh, but they in­creas­ingly held that these for­eign de­i­ties were sub­or­di­nate to Yah­weh. They con­ceded the ac­tu­al­ity of Chemosh, god of the Amor­ites, but main­tained that he was sub­or­di­nate to Yah­weh.

• evolution of

104:2.1Mono­the­ism arose as a philo­sophic protest against the in­con­sis­tency of poly­the­ism. It de­vel­oped first through pan­theon or­ga­ni­za­tions with the de­part­men­tal­iza­tion of super­nat­u­ral ac­tiv­i­ties, then through the henothe­is­tic ex­al­ta­tion of one god above the many, and fi­nally through the ex­clu­sion of all but the One God of fi­nal value.

• pure m. reduces God to status of pantheistic Absolute

104:2.2Trini­tar­i­an­ism grows out of the ex­pe­ri­en­tial protest against the im­pos­si­bil­ity of con­ceiv­ing the one­ness of a dean­thro­po­mor­phized soli­tary De­ity of un­re­lated uni­verse sig­nif­i­cance. Given a suf­fi­cient time, phi­los­o­phy tends to ab­stract the per­sonal qual­i­ties from the De­ity con­cept of pure mono­the­ism, thus re­duc­ing this idea of an un­re­lated God to the sta­tus of a pan­the­is­tic Ab­so­lute. It has al­ways been dif­fi­cult to un­der­stand the per­sonal na­ture of a God who has no per­sonal re­la­tion­ships in equal­ity with other and co-or­di­nate per­sonal be­ings. Per­son­al­ity in De­ity de­mands that such De­ity ex­ist in re­la­tion to other and equal per­sonal De­ity.