The Problem of the Presence

[Truthstalker]

Where where is, God is there. There is no where where God is not. He is everywhere. Where He is, He is there wholly and completely, not partially.

The preceding is thoroughly Augustinian, thoroughly Thomist, thoroughly Catholic. Even I agreed with it in my [edited by Moderator] Protestantism. It does, however, create certain problems:

1. How can God come and go if He is already there and cannot depart?
2. How can He appear twice, once in the above universal sense and secondly in special senses, such as in believers, “where two or more are gathered”, or in the Eucharist. He’s already there.
3. How can He be absent from places, such as hell, if its very existence is predicated on His continual presence to sustain it?

 

[vern_humphrey]

1. How can God come and go if He is already there and cannot depart?

Depart how? If we do not accept God, reject Him, then to us He has departed – and yet is still there.

1. How can He appear twice, once in the above universal sense and secondly in special senses, such as in believers, “where two or more are gathered”, or in the Eucharist. He’s already there.

In the same sense as in Number 1 – He is everywhere, but when we are gathered, He is with us.

1. How can He be absent from places, such as hell, if its very existence is predicated on His continual presence to sustain it?

Who says He is absent from hell? Who says hell is a place, obeying the laws of space and time that prevail in this life?

God is everywhere. When I open myself to Him, He is with me. When I shut myself off from Him, He appears to be absent – so far as I can tell – although He remains.

 

[Truthstalker]

Depart how? If we do not accept God, reject Him, then to us He has departed – and yet is still there.

IIt is not clear to me that you are not arguing that the presence of God is not objective but subjective: for example, in the Eucharist, by your argument, He is present only if you believe He is, and that He is present in believers only if the observer believes He is. He is everywhere in the universal sense but He is also certain places in the special sense, independent of us, yet there is no objective difference between the two senses. Yet the objective difference remains.

 

[Francine_Peters]

1. How can God come and go if He is already there and cannot depart?
2. How can He appear twice, once in the above universal sense and secondly in special senses, such as in believers, “where two or more are gathered”, or in the Eucharist. He’s already there.
3. How can He be absent from places, such as hell, if its very existence is predicated on His continual presence to sustain it?

1. In Genesis, God is said to have needed to come down to even see the tower the people were building. This was a literary device to emphasize the insignificance of men’s deeds when compared to God’s glory. People who take this literally must deny God’s omniscience.
2. God the Son is the Word who is with God and who is God. He emptied himself to become human, and he was present in that localized specific way for three decades. After Jesus ascended to the right hand of the Father, he keeps his promise to “remain with you always, until the end of the world” in another very specific and localized (yet universal and timeless) way as the Eucharistic Christ. This is not to be taken in a poetic or metaphoric way like we would say a departed loved one remains with us in our memories.
3. The Eastern Orthodox Church emphasizes the mystical rather than the analytic side of the Faith. They hold that Heaven and hell are the same place. If you love God, then his presence manifested in the afterlife is unending joy. If you hate God, then his presence manifested in the afterlife is unendurable torment.

 

[epostle]

One of the sophisticated concepts used by great Christian theologians is that of “The Ground of Being.” This concept indicates not that God is the fact of things existing, but that God is the basis for the existence of all things. God is more fundamental to existing things than anything else. So fundamental to the existence of all things is God, that God can be thought of as the basis upon which things exist, the ground their being. To say that God is The ground of being or being itself, is to say that there is something we can sense that is so special about the nature of being that it hints at this fundamental reality upon which all else is based.

The phrases “Ground of Being” and “Being itself” are basically the same concept. Tillich used both at different times, and other theologians such as John McQuarrey prefer “Being Itself,” but they really speak to the same concept. Now skeptics are always asking “how can god be being?” I think this question comes from the fact that the term is misleading. The term “Being itself” gives one the impression that God is the actual fact of “my existence,” or the existence of my flowerbed, or any object one might care to name.

Paul Tillich, on the other hand, said explicitly (in Systematic Theology Vol. I) that this does not refer to an existential fact but to an ontological status. What is being said is not that God is the fact of the being of some particular object, but, that he is the basis upon which being proceeds and upon which objects participate in being. In other words, since God exists forever, nothing else can come to be without God’s will or thought; and since there can’t even be a potential for any being without God’s thought, all potentialities for being arise in the “mind of God” then in that sense God is actually “Being Itself.” I think “Ground of Being” is a less confusing term. God is the ground upon which all being is based and from which all being proceeds.

Two senses and they are both related:

(1) Being itself is the basis upon which proceeds in its individual manifestations as it is considered apart from these manifestations.

God is primordial being. God is ontologically prior to all that is (save himself of course that goes without saying).

Considered in this way God is not a single being since god is not a thing alongside other things in creation. God is unique, not a version of some type of thing. there is nothing else like God. What it means to be is to be a creature of God.

(2) God is the “reality generator” or the mind that thinks the universe.

Metaphorically ;God is a great big mind and we are thoughts in that mind. Thus god is off scale to anything we can think of. Since God is the framework in which our whole existence takes place, we can’t think of God as “a being” because he’s totlaly off scale, hes not a being along side other beings hes’ the basis upon which beingness has any meaning.

These two senses are clearly related since they both stem from God’s eternal nature.

Chrisitan Concept?

This may not sound very orthodox, but it is extremely orthodox.God is not just a big man on a throne, he is not the Zeu Patter(Jupiter,“Sky Father”) of Pagan mythology. The great theologians of Chrsitian fatih, the Orthodox Chruch, and theologians such as Paul Tillich and John Mcquarrie, believe, as Timothy Ware (The Orthodox Church , New York: Pelican, 1963) quoting St. John of Damascus says, “God does not belong to the class of ‘existing’ things; not that he has no existence but that he is above existing things, even above existence itself…” The Jewish Virtual Library tells us, “The name of god, which in Hebrew is spelled YHWH, is difficult to explain. Scholars generally believe that it derives from the Semitic word, “to be,” and so means something like, ‘he causes to be.’”
doxa.ws/Being/Being2.html

 

[Truthstalker]

Jesus stated that before Abraham was, I AM: God exists - He is not just the “ground of our being” (He is that, too). I think this does things to our understanding of the Incarnation, if part of it is that God now exists, Who previously did not, but was only the ground of it. Aquinas stated that with God, action, being, substance, will, thought are the same thing. You could argue that God is the ground of our X, when X is any of these.

This is interesting but still not satisfactory. God went walking in the garden in Genesis - an anthropomorphic expression, if not a theophany - but we cannot state that because it is such, it was also not true. It was the best way of expressing what was happening. Was God walking everywhere? Perhaps not. Was He everywhere? Yes. At the tower we see an expression for God, so to speak, looking down on this infinitesmial tower, this puny human effort, another such expression, but the best the Hebrew could do. Perhaps if it were written today the phrase “electron microscope” would be in it.

The idea of “where” transcends our conception of xyz space, to which you can place coordinates. “Where” also includes whatever dimensions separate heaven and hell. I would be interested in citations concerning heaven and hell being the same place. I seem to recall C.S.Lewis making comments suggestive of that (The Great Divorce?).

 

[vern_humphrey]

IIt is not clear to me that you are not arguing that the presence of God is not objective but subjective: for example, in the Eucharist, by your argument, He is present only if you believe He is, and that He is present in believers only if the observer believes He is.

No. The presense of God is objective – He is everywhere. But “everywhere” has a different meaning to Him who is above time and space.

He is everywhere in the universal sense but He is also certain places in the special sense, independent of us, yet there is no objective difference between the two senses. Yet the objective difference remains.

You’re getting there.

 

[Truthstalker]

No. The presense of God is objective – He is everywhere. But “everywhere” has a different meaning to Him who is above time and space.

You’re getting there.

Perhaps you might elaborate on this.

 

[vern_humphrey]

Perhaps you might elaborate on this.

You said:

He is everywhere in the universal sense but He is also certain places in the special sense

That’s correct. He is everywhere, but in a special sense He is particularly in some places.

He is not bound by the laws of time and space – He can be “in our hearts” which is not a “place” at all in the conventional sense. He can be “among us” by His special grace, or we can reject His grace – and yet He is still everywhere.