Now there is a question that forces itself upon us here. Can there be a coalescence of mind and will, an identity, between God and man, of this living, spiritual—that is, real, concrete—kind? Or is God so different from man as to be incommunicable to him? Is he remote from man in his own nature or, indeed, not only remote but alien? The answer to this is that if he is even remote, not to say alien, he is nothing to us and we may ignore him.
The Christian's God certainly is not remote; he is all men's lover and father and they are all his beloved and his sons. The philosopher's God is sometimes made blankly, abstractly, identical with us, and then we may ignore him; because a blank identity simply is, as conceived in thought, and like the alien God it means nothing for us. But more often nowadays the philosopher's God is like the Christian's in that he both transcends his universe and indwells it; for the philosopher has begun in good earnest to reckon with life and with science and human experience at large. God indwelt Jesus Christ, and he knew God as lover and father both. He spoke as though God had communicated himself to him in a fulness we do not know among ourselves. There was an identity of will, it seems, recognized by him, between himself and God, and an identity of reason and knowledge. And if God is Spirit and Lord and Giver of life, then, if the prophet was right, in this identity by fulness of communication, this personal coalescence of reason and will, God, very God, gave himself to very man, and very man entered into personal union with very God. The transcendent God indwelt the man, was immanent within him as the man's own self; and the man's own self was lifted up into the self of God. The intercommunication of person with person, which we see as the prerogative of persons, was complete.
We have confessed this to be the goal of human endeavour; let us allow ourselves to think that in regard to us it may be the goal, also, of divine endeavour, and that in the man who offered no opposition to God it was attained. As long as we do not indulge in the secret materialism of regarding a person as a thing _producing_ knowledge or activity, instead of as _being_ that knowledge and activity, we shall have no difficulty in recognizing the fact that where knowledge and will in two persons coincide, there also the persons coincide. We shall be able to see that a man is identical with God, in the only sense identity can have for personal beings, when he fully knows the mind of God and his will is bent on the same ends as the will of God. Then this man is both man and God in one, for God indwells him by that activity which he truly is.