Theopedia

Omnipresence of God

“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!”

— Psalm 139:7-8

The omnipresence of God is the teaching that God is wholly present, in the whole of his undivided being, at every point of space at once, rather than spread out through space or confined to any part of it.1 Because God is infinite and simple, he is not present the way a body fills a room or the way a soul is scattered through its parts; he fills heaven and earth entire, “not by scraps and fragments of his essence.”2 Omnipresence is distinct from immanence, God’s active presence and work within creation, and from transcendence, his exaltation above it: omnipresence is the claim that wherever a creature exists, God’s whole being is already there.

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession names God’s relation to space in a single word, among the properties it lists for him: he is “infinite in being and perfection… immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty.”3 “Immense” is the confession’s own term for what this article calls omnipresence. A. A. Hodge draws the distinction the confession’s wording assumes: “Immensity characterizes the relation of God to space viewed abstractly in itself. Omnipresence characterizes the relation of God to his creatures as they severally occupy their several positions in space. The divine essence is immense in its own being, absolutely. It is omnipresent relatively to all his creatures.”4 The confession has no separate chapter devoted to the doctrine; “immense” is the single word carrying it, the same word Transcendence of God draws on for God’s exaltation above space.

Biblical Basis

David asks where he could go to escape God’s presence and answers his own question: to heaven, to Sheol, to the farthest sea, God is there already (Ps. 139:7-10). God asks the same question through Jeremiah and answers it himself: “Am I a God at hand… and not a God afar off? … Do not I fill heaven and earth?” (Jer. 23:23-24). Solomon, dedicating a temple built for God to dwell in, confesses its inadequacy for that very purpose: “heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you” (1 Kings 8:27). Paul tells the Athenians that God “is actually not far from each one of us,” since “in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:27-28). Amos repeats David’s own merism: neither Sheol, nor heaven, nor Mount Carmel, nor the floor of the sea can hide anyone from God’s reach (Amos 9:2-3).

Historical Development

Hilary of Poitiers, writing against the Arians in the mid-fourth century, already treats the doctrine as settled: “In God there is no absence, nor any nowhere. He is in the heavens, he is in hell, he is beyond the seas.”5 Augustine, a generation later: “The same God is everywhere in his entirety, hemmed in by no places, bound by no bonds, divided into no parts, mutable in no part, filling heaven and earth, and where his power is present, his nature is not absent.”5

Reformed scholastic theology inherited this patristic consensus and sharpened it against a specific rival: the Socinians, who held that God’s essence is confined to heaven and present elsewhere only through his “knowledge and efficiency,” not his being itself.6 Francis Turretin answered by distinguishing three ways anything can relate to space: a body exists in space circumscriptively, bounded on every side; a created spirit exists definitively, located somewhere and not everywhere; God alone exists repletively, his “immense essence… present with all and, as it were, completely fill[ing] all places.”4 Petrus van Mastricht built a full chapter of his Theoretical-Practical Theology on the same distinction, working outward from the exegesis of Psalm 139: God coexists with every space “by filling… the whole world with his whole self, and every one of its parts with his whole self,” not by multiplying himself, dividing himself into parts, or being diffused through space the way air or light are.7

Charles Hodge, writing in 1871, traced a later challenge to the same doctrine in nineteenth-century philosophy: Victor Cousin’s claim that God must be “infinite and finite together… at once God, nature, and humanity,” the Remonstrant Episcopius’s argument that an immense divine essence leaves no room for any other kind of being, and D. F. Strauss’s verdict that this was simply the logic of the age’s philosophy.8 Hodge answered that infinity in one respect does not exclude the existence of other, finite things any more than infinite goodness excludes finite goodness, and that the older Reformed formula of repletive presence already guards against exactly this collapse.9

Opposing Views

Pantheism identifies God with the universe rather than distinguishing the two: “God is the universe and the universe is God. They are one and the same.”10 Barrett locates the error in a neglect of divine simplicity, since only a God with separable parts could be mixed into his creation to begin with; properly understood, God’s presence with the world no more makes him one with it than sunlight illuminating a room makes the light identical with the air it fills.10 Charnock makes the same point from the doctrine of omnipresence itself: the whole of God, not a fragment of him, is present in any one place, so no part of creation is or could be a piece of God’s own being.2

Panentheism, the view that creation exists within God rather than God existing within creation, gets a briefer answer from the same principle: God is present everywhere, “but there is still an ‘otherness’ to God’s being compared to creation.”11 Whether God is said to be in the world (pantheism) or the world in God (panentheism), the same simplicity that rules out dividing God’s being among places rules out folding creation’s being into his.

Objections and Responses

If God is present in filthy or evil places, doesn’t that defile his purity? Charnock answers that nothing God has made is filthy to him as its maker, sin excepted, and that God’s essence no more contracts impurity from being present with an unclean creature than his power did from producing it in the first place: “his essence is no more defiled by being present with it, than his power by producing it.”12 God was present with Satan when Satan appeared before him (Job 1:7) without becoming impure himself, “purity to himself in the midst of noisomeness.”12

If God is equally present in heaven and in hell, why does Scripture describe him as near to his people and far from the wicked? The distinction is between God’s essential presence, which never varies, and his manifested presence, the way he acts toward what he is present with.13 Charnock draws the same distinction between God’s gracious and his wrathful presence: “he departs from us when he leaves us to the frowns of his justice; he comes to us when he encircles us in the arms of his mercy; but he was equally present with us in both dispensations, in regard of his essence.”14 God’s presence in hell is real and undiminished; what changes from place to place is not how much of God is there but what he is there to do.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 10, “The Immensity and Omnipresence of God,” 234-238. ↩

  2. Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, ed. William Symington, 2 vols. (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1853), vol. 1, Discourse VII, “On God’s Omnipresence,” 369. ↩ ↩2

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩

  4. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 8, “Attributes of God,” 141. ↩ ↩2

  5. Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, 2:236. ↩ ↩2

  6. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), chap. V, “Nature and Attributes of God,” 384. ↩

  7. Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, 2:238. ↩

  8. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:382-383. ↩

  9. Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, 383. ↩

  10. Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019), chap. 9, “Is God Bound by Space? Omnipresence,” 173. ↩ ↩2

  11. Peter Sammons, The Forgotten Attributes of God: God’s Nature and Why It Matters (Fort Washington, PA: CLC Publications, 2023), chap. 9, “Omnipresence,” 177. ↩

  12. Charnock, Existence and Attributes of God, 1:390-391. ↩ ↩2

  13. Sammons, The Forgotten Attributes of God, 180. ↩

  14. Charnock, Existence and Attributes of God, quoted in Barrett, None Greater, chap. 9, “Is God Bound by Space? Omnipresence,” 177-178. ↩