Coccejus, too, was accused of limiting the omnipresence of God exclusively to “the most
efficacious will of God by which he sustains and governs all things,” a charge against which he
defended himself in letters to Anslar and Alting.66 The Cartesians asserted that God was
omnipresent not by the extension of his being, but by a simple act of his mind or a powerful deed
of his will, acts that were one with his being, and denied that the idea of “location” could be
attributed to God.67 Rationalismwent even further, confining God’s essential presence to heaven
and separating it deistically from the world.68 Deism arrived at this restriction of the
omnipresence of God out of fear of the pantheistic error of identifying God with the world and of
polluting the divine being with the moral and material impurity of created things. And indeed,
that fear is not unfounded. The Stoics already taught that the deity—like fire, ether, air, or
breath—permeates all things, also those that are filthy and ugly.69 Spinoza spoke of substance as
corporeal, describedGod as an “extended thing,” and taught a presence of God that coincides with
the being of the world.70 In Hegel God’s omnipresence is identical with his absolute
substantiality.71 In line with this view is Schleiermacher’s description of the omnipresence of God
as “the absolutely spaceless causality of God, which conditions not only all that is spatial but
space itself as well.”72 In the same way Biedermann writes that the pure “being-in-itself of God”
is the very opposite of all spatiality and to that extent transcendent, but that as ground of the
universe God is immanent in it, and that this Ground-of-being (Grundzein) is God’s very own
being.73
Here again, Christian theology avoided both Deism and pantheism. This is not surprising since
Scripture clearly teaches that God transcends space and location and cannot be determined or
confined by them (1 Kings 8:27; 2 Chron. 2:6; Jer. 23:24). Even where Scripture speaks in human
terms and—with a view to giving us an image of God’s being—as it were, infinitely enlarges space
(Isa. 66:1; Ps. 139:7; Amos 9:2; Acts 17:24), the underlying idea is still that God transcends all spatial
boundaries. Accordingly, just as there is an essential difference between eternity and time, so also
between God’s immensity and space. Aristotle defined space or location as “the immovable
boundary of an enclosing entity.”74 This definition, however, proceeds from a conception of space
that is too external in character. Space, to be sure, is the distance of a certain object from other
fixed points. But if we were to imagine just one simple object, even then space and location would
pertain to it on account of its relation to imaginary points we could assume in our mind. Hence
space and location are attributes of all finite beings. It is implied as such in whatever is finite.
Whatever is finite exists in space. Its limited character carries with it the concept of a
“somewhere.” It is always somewhere and not at the same time somewhere else. Regardless of all
measurable distance from other points (extrinsic location), an intrinsic location is characteristic
of all creatures, not excepting even spiritual beings. In another dispensation distances may be
totally different from those we know here on earth, just as steam and electricity have already
greatly altered our ideas of distance. Yet a limited and local existence will nevertheless always be
characteristic for all creatures.
