28 Preliminary Considerations 



For God, immanence means the winning, not of per- 

 sonality itself, but the freedom of its manifestation in 

 the cosmos. Fellowship is as yet incomplete in that 

 region of His experience. What this means we can 

 partly understand if we think of ourselves in a room full 

 of unsympathetic people. We and they alike are unable 

 to reach the others' point of view ; and so we are in part 

 ignorant of them and they of us. Lack of fellowship 

 involves lack of knowledge, and the lack is there on 

 both sides. In just this kind of way God's knowledge of 

 us must be incomplete, in so far as He is Immanent, as 

 well as our knowledge of Him, for there is much in us 

 that must be 'unsympathetic' for Him. 



But what of transcendence? Surely God's knowledge 

 of us, as far as we are transcendent, is immediate and 

 complete? None the less there is contingency in the 

 cosmos and contingency real for God because there 

 are wills at work that are not wholly in accord with His. 

 If this be so, He cannot know the individual acts of indi- 

 vidual wills beforehand, when those acts do not spring 

 from a sense of fellowship with Him, but are retrograde : 

 prompted by alien, lower impulses. As Transcendent 

 the completeness and fulfilment are real for Him 

 already the whole is eternally present but not the 

 individual wrong acts. 



Thus it would seem that God's knowledge is limited by 

 other wills not yet at one with Him ; not only His know- 

 ledge as self-limited and indwelling the region of His 

 self-limitation, but His transcendent knowledge. For 

 in that region of His experience He has given up trans- 

 cendence for the sake of men. Only as we get into touch 

 with His timeless, changeless Being, does He regain 

 transcendence in us. 



I do not for a moment mean to imply the existence of 

 two consciousnesses in God. The artificiality of any 

 such suggestion would be equalled by its uselessness. 



