Divine Immensity
As already hinted at, in our little excursion into Calvin’s method in the Institutes, we may also conceive of this divine attribute in terms of the “spirituality” of God. Here also we can think of the place of the omnipresence of God and his relation to the universe in general. This will also be the best place to weigh in the balance the claims of deism and pantheism. But the words we will look at here—spirituality and immensity—are not strict synonyms. One is the positive essence behind his immateriality, whereas the other regards the limitlessness of his personal presence and, we might even say, pervasiveness of his being.
Defining the “Where-ness” of God
Immensity belongs to God in his essence, whereas omnipresence is this same attribute in relation to creatures in space and time. Turretin says, “When God is said to ascend or descend, to go away or to come … it is not said with respect to his essence, but only to the absence or presence of his divine operations” [1]. So divine immensity is not the superlative extension of a principle of bodies, just as infinity is not the superlative dimension of a finite series of anything. Rather it is the fullness of spirit. The word used for spirit in both Hebrew (רוּחַ) and Greek (πνεῦμα) is the word for “breath” or “wind.” The imagery used to compare the Holy Spirit to wind, by Jesus, in John 3 is very illustrative for our purposes: “you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes” (v. 8). We could extend the metaphor to include seeing the effects of wind. However its substance is itself invisible.
Putting the concept of spirituality together with the concept of infinity, we are arrive at omnipresence only by relating that fullness of divine being to the creature. But some other things must be ruled out. So Hodge adds, “This of course is not to be understood of [as] extension or diffusion. Extension is a property of matter, and cannot be predicated of God. If extended, He would be capable of division and separation; and part of God would be here, and part elsewhere” [2].
The question does not concern either “the presence of power and operation” or “the various modes of special divine presence,” such as in the Incarnation. No party denies these. The question is whether God’s essence is present everywhere. Of course he is present in power by providence. Likewise he is present in knowledge as he sees all things. But following from divine simplicity, we maintain that all that is in God is everywhere present. Since all that is in God is without limitation, it follows that the mode of divine omnipresence cannot share any mode that limits. This is why, incidentally, omnipresence does not “crowd out” any other presence, for all others are precisely instances of limited presence: whether that limit be of space, time, knowledge, or power. It is also why we need not posit that these are God’s energies, rather than essence, since there is no plural of “these” to begin with. If omnipresence is a divine attribute, then it is simple and one with the whole of God’s essence.
At this point it is unavoidable that we should also introduce the paradoxical truth that God is both transcendent and immanent with respect to the whole creation. And we will further insist that this must be the case if God is to be limitless.
Transcendence refers to that which is above and beyond something else: e. g. The world transcends our home towns, as space transcends the earth. Immanence refers to the nearness or pervasiveness of a thing. A mother is immanent to her child: especially when that child is in the womb.
How then can a thing be both transcendent to something else and yet immanent to that same thing? It really depends on what kind of a thing that thing is. So in the case of me being immanent to my family in Florida, I am more or less immanent to the degree that I travel there. But in the case of the climate here in Boise to each of us, there is a sense in which it is greater than any one of us, and yet it presses in on us as well. But all of this is very relative in the many cases of creatures and physical phenomena. On the other hand, from what we have already inferred about God, the First Cause in Pure Act, who is both wholly simple and possesses his whole life of himself, and limitless, how can he not be both transcendent and immanent to all things? We can see this in the relevant biblical texts.
Scripture and Tradition on the Spiritual Dwelling of God
Divine immensity and omnipresence is proved first by express biblical teaching:
Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me (Ps. 139:7-10).
Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool; what is the house that you would build for me, and what is the place of my rest? (Isa. 66:1)
But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built! (1 Ki. 8:27)
That God’s omnipresence encompasses both transcendence and immanence is also seen throughout Scripture. Sometimes both dimensions are treated together, so that terms are used in equivocal ways, very much on purpose: “the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Eph. 1:23). Paul was speaking of Christ as Head of the body, the church, and so he starts by using “fullness” to describe the humanity of Christ being, in some sense, reaching a fullness in the perfection of his body, and yet Paul wraps up that thought in the divine sense of fullness: him who fills all in all.
Yet he is actually not far from each one of us (Acts 17:26)
Be not far from me, for trouble is near, and there is none to help (Ps. 22:11)
Am I a God at hand, declares the Lord, and not a God far away? Can a man hide himself in secret places so that I cannot see him? declares the Lord. Do I not fill heaven and earth? declares the Lord (Jer. 23:23-24)
The more familiar we are with Scripture, the more we see God also manifesting his presence in some local sense: “Then Zedekiah the son of Chenaanah came near and struck Micaiah on the cheek and said, ‘Which way did the Spirit of the LORD go from me to speak to you?” (2 Chr. 18:23) Or think of David’s prayer: “Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me” (Ps. 51:11). This is a bit more difficult than understanding how a theophany is a creation. In the New Testament there is quite a bit more information on man as the dwelling place of God: by his Holy Spirit. But lest anyone think that is troubling, the idea of God “dwelling” in a temple was already present from the very beginning of the Bible. The finite and perspectival sense of God, then, also belongs to the ad extra category, while God’s own pervasive life belongs to himself.
Once again Turretin affirms a divine attribute “against Socinus and Vorstius” [3]. Oddly they affirmed divine omnipresence “as to virtue and operation,” in other words, in relation to the creature; however they denied it to his essence. But remember what we concluded about simplicity: God does not have two sets of attributes in his essence. Consequently this denial is a separation of omnipresence and immensity. The relational attribute is affirmed and the positive essence denied. So this Vortius maintained that “God (according to his essence) is in heaven, but according to his virtue and efficacy is on the earth and present with all creatures” [4].
Mastricht gives five necessary qualities of any spiritual being, but that must especially true of the uncreated God: 1. Substance, not accident; 2. Incorporeal and immaterial; 3. Living, something operates by itself; 4. Intelligent, and 5. Volitional [5]. In the case of his first point, I take Mastricht to mean that the spirit in question is a substance per se (that is in Aristotle’s basic sense of an essence), and not that spirits lesser than God cannot have accidental predicates or properties. Having said that, Mastricht was typical among the Reformed orthodox in seeing the spirituality of God and his simplicity as entailing each other: “Nor is he Spirit in an analogical sense … Rather, God is Spirit in an especially proper and univocal sense, because he is far removed from all composition” [6].
Objections
A most natural objection is to suppose that spiritual presence and spatial presence is a distinction without a difference. But Turretin meets this misgiving by saying that there are “three modes of being in a place” — (1) circumscriptively, of bodies in space; (2) definitively, of spirits only associated with a place [7]; (3) repletively, of God filling all spaces and associated places [8]. Although these categories are imprecise, Turretin cautions against rejecting them. For one, Scripture uses such language, as we saw: “God fills heaven and earth” (Jer. 23:24). Note also that of all three senses of “being in a place,” that the place is larger, if only conceptually, than that which fills it. Kant made space one of his twelve a priori categories: a subjective condition of sensation.
However, even if space is conceived to infinity, it would not follow that this is co-extensive with God’s being, since, as has already been proven, God is infinite in his whole being and thus all perfections. This is to reduce infinity to space, rather than to qualify space to an infinite degree.
Although a somewhat softer objection, it might be said that if God is everywhere, then he is either contaminated by, or approves of, that which is base, common, or wicked. But this either confuses the essence of God with matter that can be corrupted because material substance is inherently corrupted (as in Gnosticism), or else there is theistic personalist bent to the suspicion that if God sees such things, or is present, to such evil, and if he does not instantly stop it, then he becomes morally suspect, or else morally corrupted in a spiritual sense. This assumes the same as the logical problem of evil—namely, that good and evil cannot “co-exist,” to whatever degree—an assumption that is self-defeating. Besides all of that, God is present to all essentially, yet he is in one place to bless and in another to curse [9]. It does not follow that the pervasiveness of the spirit of God is therefore a static “stamp” of approval. Such is the grossest form of what C. S. Lewis called “picture thinking.”
Deism objects to classical theism in that God is depicted as remote. In the beginning God created all things, says the Deist, but then he stepped out of the picture to let it run by its own inherent laws. This has more to do with interpretations of the modern “closed system,” unwittingly framed by Bacon and Newton and the like, than it does with any evidence from Scripture. Indeed the Deist is motivated by closing all supernatural invasions of nature to begin with. That rules out any ongoing revelation, just as much as its does miracles and the Incarnation itself.
Now Deism is especially relevant if we consider the studies of Christian Smith about the religion of the majority of American young people. He gave it a term that has caught on: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Here we are only considering this from the perspective of the Deist element. How is it that a modern religious atmosphere that had so stressed a “more personal relationship” with God has landed in a place where God is banished out of the everyday picture?
The answer is clear: What we mean by “personal relationship” turns out to be a Friend who will “be there when we need them.” Such a deity is a genie in a bottle. When we rub the bottle he is “there for us.” On the other hand, the notion of a God who is actually always there is found to be morally repugnant. In that case all of his attributes—including holiness, righteousness, and wrath toward our sin—would also be there.
Now what about pantheism? This is the belief that all is God. Panentheism brings in the wrinkle that God is in all. Both confuse the Creator with the creation. E. L. Mascall suggested that any system relying on necessary emmanation from the divine tends toward pantheism [10]. When we do not carefully distinguish between Creator and creation, we are preparing our minds for pantheism. But the essential logical difficulty with Pantheism, and its Monistic philosophical backdrop, is the dichotomy between truth and error. The reality of Pantheism (it being true and any competitors being false) would make no difference, and in fact would be an illusion. Thus both error and evil are considered illusion (maya).
Implications of God’s Spirituality
Divine immensity and omnipresence are also proved by good and necessary consequence from biblical teaching. For example, biblical passages about God’s word upholding or sustaining all:
He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power (Heb. 1:3).
Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for “‘In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:27-28).
Why do each of these necessarily imply immensity and omnipresence? While we may be tempted to conceive of omnipresence as “filling” all things in the sense of spatial dependence, the situation is entirely reversed. It is all of time and space, and all that is created, that is upheld by and within the divine presence. When we speak of God’s presence by the preposition “in,” we are focusing on the immanent aspect of omnipresence and not the transcendent aspect of omnipresence.
In addition, it may be argued by reductio ad absurdum, that if God is limited by space, then the creature is greater than the Creator. We introduced the idea that God is both transcendent and immanent with respect to all creation and further said that this must be so. But why is this necessarily the case? It is precisely because either a restriction on divine transcendence or on divine immanence would be a restriction, and any such restriction would contradict divine infinity.
We may think we are paying respects to God’s transcendence by denying that he could be “in” my cup of coffee. In point of fact, such an “homage” is only setting a boundary to God beyond which he cannot go. More seriously, the same is true about the smallest stage of life in the womb. There is none so small that God is not present to witness the murder. Nor are the intentions of the heart hidden done away from his presence. Again, through Jeremiah, “Can a man hide himself in secret places so that I cannot see him?” (23:24) There is also this same implication for God’s knowledge of time: “just as eternity holds in its embrace all time as a point and coexists with it indivisibly” [11].
Hodge argued, first, from the motion of each part of the universe to the pervasiveness of Spirit in the whole; second, from the nature of the soul to its animating power over our whole beings as humans. He then inferred from these two premises that, “If God be a spirit, it follows of necessity that He is a person,—a self-conscious, intelligent, voluntary agent. As all this is involved in our consciousness of ourselves as spirit, it must all be true of God, or God is a lower order of being than man” [12].
What is true of God in his essence is true about those same attributes shared by the three persons of the Trinity. Thus the Son and the Holy Spirit are also omnipresent. The first common misgiving about this is to note that Jesus is not omnipresent. But that is only to say that he is not omnipresent as a man. His human nature is not to be confused with his divine nature. The Holy Spirit is likewise omnipresent, as the above verse from Psalm 139 made plain. That he operates in this person and not that, or this person in one way and then not in that same way in the same person later, these are not differences in the divine essence, but only in the mode of effect ad extra.
And of course if we want an exceedingly practical implication of this doctrine, it is always good to consider that God is here right now. We may say this at any time and in any place and it will be true.
This is true in one’s religious exercises and one’s business practices and one’s wandering thoughts. It will be true in heaven and also in hell. The former, heaven, will no longer require the Spirit’s war against the desires of the flesh (Gal. 5:16-17), but it does not follow that we will no longer be united to the triune God by him in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit (2 Cor. 13:14). Likewise the Incarnate Lord—both in his earthly ministry and in the eternal state—does not deplete the divinity of the eternal Son. The latter, hell, differs from all good things not in the absence of God per se, but in the absence of our Meditator by which his presence is favorable to us. That the wicked are cast away “from the presence of the Lord” (2 Thess. 1:9) means only away from his blessed relationship. It is precisely in the wish that God would hide from them that the damned will be infinitely deprived: “he will be tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb” (Rev. 14:10). Again, the spiritual immensity of the triune God is both the supreme comfort and the supreme terror. As to which one, that all depends on how one stands with God through Jesus Christ.
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1. Turretin, Institutes, I.3.9.23
2. Hodge, Systematic Theology, I.5.4
3. Turretin, Institutes, I.3.9
4. Turretin, Institutes, I.3.9.7
5. Mastricht, TPT, II:132
6. Mastricht, TPT, II:131
7. Hodge adopted these same three modes: cf. Systematic Theology, I.5.4
8. Turretin, Institutes, I.3.9.5
9. Turretin, Institutes, I.3.9.14-16
10. Mascall, Via Media, 19
11. Turretin, Institutes, I.3.9.19
12. Hodge, Systematic Theology, I.5.4
