From My Unpublished Book: On Imminence & Transcendence

The Imminence/Transcendence Conversation

            This Biblical conversation is about God's place in and relationship with the world, and it is in no way a religious conversation that is restricted to the Judeo-Christian religion. Religion as a whole has long struggled with where, if any place, one may find God in the world. Is God in this world? Is God in some other world? If God is in another world, how do the two relate to one another? These kinds of questions are central to almost every religious movement. On the whole, there have been three main lines of thought that have developed. The first way of envisioning God's relationship with the world is to see God as a factor in the world. One can think of God as an impersonal or even a personal force, alongside various other forces both physical and non-physical. Most religions who follow this track think of God as more a spiritual force of nature, like a metaphysical gravity. Those religions are usually called pantheistic religions, pantheism meaning "God is in all things". God as a force may animate the universe, but God doesn't 'control' the universe. On this model, God's creative power is usually limited, and God is just one part of the overall creativity of the universe itself, albeit an important and maybe even the most important part.

            Another model for God's relationship with the world can broadly called Divine Monism. On this model the universe itself IS God. The sum total of things are really just reflections or parts of a Divine Whole. Usually, God on this model is not conceived of as personal. What's more, there really is no talk of 'creation' since there is nothing that is other than God, and all things are just the activity of God. Whereas in the first model to talk about God is to talk about one part of the universe, in the second model to talk about any part of the universe is to talk about one part of God. There are some sophisticated forms of this vision of God where in God remains personal, and the universe is seen as a part of God, but not God itself. This is called 'panentheism' the view that all is IN God.

            The final model for God's relationship with the world is called "classical theism". This is the view that predominates in the Bible. People who hold to this model believe God is completely other than the universe, standing outside of it. God is usually seen as having complete creative control over His creation, and is envisioned as omnipotent, omniscient, immutable (changeless), and omnibenevolent (all-good). Some modern versions of this view include Deism, the idea that God is like a scientist who started a cosmic process and observes it, but doesn't get involved, except maybe here or there when things get too off track.

            In my last book, when I discussed creation, I talked about a tension between the view that God was an actor within the universe, and the view that God was the director over the universe, and that these views gave us diametrically opposed images of God's creative activity. The Biblical discussion over God's place in the universe mirrors that discussion over how God creates, the two are intertwined. Here I will talk about how this discussion shaped the development of our ideas about the Holy Spirit in the New Testament. The earliest creation stories in the Bible (though not the first we encounter in Genesis) begin with a vision of creation that it inherited from the Sumerian ancestors of Abraham. It is classically theistic in that God creates a universe that is truly other than Himself. But this vision of God lacks many of the attributes that classical theism has come to identify with God (omnipotence, omnibenevolence, etc). Rather God is seen as doing battle with some ancient serpent or dragon, and out of that dragons' body God makes the universe (Psalm 74:13-17, Isaiah 51:9-10). We'll talk more about this vision when we talk about images of creation in the Bible. The important thing here is to see that we have a God who has great power over His creation, but not total power. He is limited by the materials He has to work with, and historically there have been powers that stand over against God. Either way, God is other than His creation, on this view.

            Over time, a vision of God more imminent developed. In the early Canaanite times, apparently God was seen as someone who lived in the world. The Second Creation Story, also believed to be the older of the two Creation stories found in Genesis, shows us a God who is creating within the universe, who stands among His creations, who uses the stuff that is there to make things, and who needs others to complete His creative act (Genesis 2:5-7). We see this vision of God in other places, when Abraham is visited by a rather incarnate deity (Genesis 18:1-15), and throughout Exodus God is looked as literally living on Mt. Sinai. When Moses is about to leave Sinai to head towards Canaan, he has to persuade God to make His home with the people, otherwise they might not survive (Exodus 33:12-23). The Temple in Jerusalem is believed to be God's home with the people, and it is from there that He acts as king over them (the best example is probably Psalm 84). This is a highly personalized version of the first model we talked about. God here is mightily powerful, but not all powerful. He is often trying to figure out how to deal with His creations, and literally learns by trial and error. God also needs agents to help Him care for and maintain creation, and it is during this period that talk of the "Spirit of the Lord" and the "Spirit of God" became prominent. God chose certain people to receive His power and agency, and through them He would continue His Divine plan. Sometimes there is a heavenly 'place' outside of earth God is envisioned to live in, but that realm is still part of the universe, and is intimimately connected to the earth itself (Genesis 28:10-22). God is one factor within the universe, the primary creative factor, but not the sole creative factor.

            It was probably during the Babylonian exile, and through encounters with the high sophisticated Babylonian religion, that the move back towards theism took place. The primary Babylonian deity as a Divine King, living in a royal court outside of the universe, with absolute power over creation. The ancient Semitic deith worshipped by the Hebrews became identified with this all-powerful king. That vision fit well with the prophets' move towards hard monotheism, the worship of one God alone, and as God being ethically transcendent, so good that next to Him all human morality looks like 'filthy rags'. God is envisioned as having a heavenly court, from which He judges and controls all that happens (exemplified in Job 1:6). Here we have a totally transcendent God, completely in control and absolutely powerful. This is the matrix out of which the later, Genesis 1 creation story springs. During this time, talk of angels and agents is de-emphasized. If God is all-powerful, and all-knowing, He need not rely on others to do His creative work. God deigned to enter the human realm from time to time in the past, as a special blessing for the Jews. Could would BECOME imminent to show His favor, but His home was outside the earth (Isaiah 6:1-3, Ezekiel 10). This model may have been intellectually satisfying for the prophets and intelligentsia of the Hebrews, but for the rank-and-file Judahite, this didn't sit well. They began to yearn for the days when God lived with them and acted on their behalf. God became, for the people, someone who lived in the past, and their religion seemed to be an endless looking back to the 'good old days', when God was imminent with them, and seeing God's current transcendent status as something of a curse (lsaiah 43:16-18, Psalm 78, Micah 7:15). Some of the prophets would insist that God's actions at a distant now were as great as the actions He undertook when He was seen as imminent within the world (Isaiah 43:19-21), but this never stuck.

            The prophets responded with talk of God's Chosen One, the Messiah, a perfect leader who would usher in God's renewed presence on earth, in and through Him. They also focused on a future time when God would again become imminent in the world. This change in focus seems to have helped. People stopped looking at God as being 'back there' in the past, and started to look at God as 'up there', in the future, and they adopted a kind of expectancy that made life livable by giving hope. Added to this hope was the hope of resurrection, and the view that in this future time when God was again with the people, everyone who had lived righteously would be able to share in the gift. But it is important to remember that the 'imminence' the people thought they once had and would have again was the 'imminence' of a God who was truly transcendent, truly other than the universe. The prophets and the Hebrew people did not have an evolutionary mindset, they were not aware that people's ideas about who God was had changed. They rather worked these earlier ideas into the transcendent vision that had become ascendent. Sometimes visions of imminence and transcendence are juxtaposed in an almost collage fashion (Jeremiah 23:23, WISDOM Look Up). Over time, the voice that became primary in this conversation worked like this: a transcendent God had, at one time, had become imminent in creation for the good of the Israelite people. The sins of the Israelite people and the world had caused this transcendent God to withdraw from the world, and now He lived far and away, only interacting with the world from time to time through agents, both human and angelic. Some day He would send His ultimate agent, the Messiah, and would again become imminent in the world, transforming the entire world order into something that matches the world that He came from, and where He lives now.

            There must have been something in this view that didn't completely jive with the people's own experiences and spiritual needs, because the commentary didn't stop there. Looking at God "coming in" from the future rather than "pushing forward" from the past may have relieved some of the pressure, but it did not solve all the problems, for the peopel. Sects of Judaism developed that concentrated extravagantly on the agents through which God acted, especially angels. Angels became almost god-like in their own importance for some groups (The Book of Tobit, Apocrypha look up). And messianism became one of the defining characteristics of the faith. Various groups grew up around different figures and proclaimed this or that person messiah, and that the Kingdom of God as imminent. Important during this time were the Holy Spirit and the Spirit of the Lord (Apocrypha look up), the mysterious force that God would put on various leaders from time to time in the Old Testament, especially during Judges. In Judges there is a recounting of times when the Hebrew people would turn against God and God would seemingly 'disappear' from their midst. They would then suffer enslavement by one of the surrounding tribes. Then a particular person would be chosen and receive "The Spirit of the Lord" and become empowered to free the people from their captors and return people to the proper worship of God. Especially during the Greek rule over Judah, when the Maccabees rose up and re-established independent Judahite rule, this figure and angelic figures became very prominent in Jewish worship. People simply could not abide by the idea that God was so distant, that God wasn't WITH them, and so they focused on various agents with whom they could still believe they had a relationship, and that agent essentially became a way for them to recialim kinship with the Divine.

            Most importantly, during this period a dialogue began between the Hebraic religion and the philosophy of the Greeks. The Greeks believed in a Divine Idea imminent in the universe, the Logos. This was a foundational thought or reason that pervaded all things. Some Hebrews saw connections between this thinking and the function of (W)isdom both personified and unpersonified, in some ancient texts. They also saw connections between this idea and the Spirit and Breath of God, or Spirit of the Lord. It was during this time that the term 'Holy Spirit' began to get used extensively. This is exemplified nowhere better than in WISDOM OF SOLOMON, written during the Greek encounter with the Jews as a deliberate attempt to reconcile Jewish and Greek ideas about the nature of God and the universe. The writer also saw this as a way to solve the problem of God's distance from the world, because these figures are seen as intermediaries that are both other than God, and yet parts of God Himself. In this way, and others, various Biblical writers tried to envision God as both imminent AND transcendent in the world (WISDOM look up).

            These kinds of attempts, and the use of the term "Holy Spirit" must have been widely known during Jesus' time, because Jesus seems to appropriate them into His ministry. Jesus' main goal, especially early in His ministry, was to create a moral community, the 'remnant' of Israel through which God's Kingdom would be ushered. Jesus seems to have thought the 'Holy Spirit' that was being spoken of in some circles, was going to work in and through Him and His community. In this way, the moral community Jesus was forming would be God's presence with the world until the final transformation took place. The best illustration of this is Matthew 12:22-32. In this passage Jesus claims that He drives out demons 'by the Spirit of God', and implies that this is the same 'Holy Spirit' spoken of in Wisdom of Solomon and elsewhere; He also implies that because He is driving out demons by the Holy Spirit, the Kingdom of God has come. This also clarifies Luke 17:21, "the Kingdom of God is within you". Notice that Jesus links the Holy Spirit to the Spirit of God in Matthew 12, He also links it to the figure of "The Spirit of the Lord" in Luke 4:18, and I think He is linking it with the personified figure of Wisdom, as well, in Matthew 12:42. In this way, Jesus claims God's imminence in and through Him and His community until God comes to make the whole world into Heaven and dwells everywhere on Earth. (Think about the Apostle's Creed: "on earth AS IT IS IN HEAVEN.".

            After Jesus' death and the resurrection event, the Disciples' identify Jesus Himself, the Resurrected Christ, as God's presence on Earth. As time went on, though, and visions of the Ressurected Christ waned, they were presented with a problem. They needed to make sense of their continuing sense of God in and with them with their conviction that Jesus had ascended to the Father, that Jesus was IN Heaven. The Christians had a sense that somehow God had changed them as people, in and through Jesus Christ, that God was animating the community and living within it. But they had to somehow balance this with Jesus' moral pessimism. Jesus was very down on human nature, and doubted strongly our ability to 'save ourselves'. Repentence, not moral perfection, was the sign of God's grace, according to Jesus. Yet the Christians had a strong sense that God was moving through them in a special way, that just as Jesus was God's presence with the world until the End Times, now the Christian community was God's presence with the world, Jesus having ascended to Heaven. Over time, the sense of God with them through Jesus gave way to a sense of God in them through the Holy Spirit. Facing a similar problem to the one the Jews faced when the idea that God was separated from the world became ascendent, the Christian community appropriated the same images some of them, including Jesus, had in the last era BC and early AD.

            So while I am not saying, as some Christians do, that the Trinity is somehow prefigured in the Old Testament. I am also not saying, as others do, that somehow these ideas originate in the New Testament alone and that we should talk about the Holy Spirit only as a phenomenon that was encountered after Jesus' life, death and resurrection. Rather, I am claiming that there was a conversation in the Old Testament out of which the conversations about the Holy Spirit sprang. The New Testament writers were appropriating an experience and a conversation that had originated IN the New Testament, and without that conversation, we probably would not be talking about the Holy Spirit at all. Without the Jewish sense of both God's distance and the need to see God as imminent, the Christians could not have made sense of their own experience of Christ as both ascendent and animating the community. There is an evolution here, one that reaches an apex in the New Testament, but that started long before. There is no escaping the Old Testament conversations regarding God's relatoinship with the world when it comes to the Holy Spirit, just as there is no way of escaping the Old Testament creation conversations when it comes to talking about what it would mean for the Holy Spirit to be "The Giver of Life". It is for that reason that I will rely heavily on the Old Testament conversations surrounding the Breath of God, the Spirit of God, the Spirit of the Lord, and Wisdom. I think my justification for doing so, given here, is pretty solid.

            Simply put, there is important value in seeing God BOTH as imminent AND transcendent. To talk of God's transcendence is to talk of God being the Ultimate Force in the universe, one that cannot be overcome and that will triumph over the evil forces that oppose It. To Talk of God's imminence is to talk about God being something you can genuinely have a relationship with, a God that you can care about at all. A God that cannot or does not return my love for Him is not a God I can reasonably worship, and so any attempt to make God completely transcendent is not likely to last long. What's more, people experience God, and you cannot experience what is wholly transcendent. If it is religious experience that brings me to God, then it is in and through those experiences I am going to talk about God, and that will necessarily lead to some kind of imminent model. Without the Bible's total commentary on these issues in play, we cannot get a clear picture of what a mature Pneumatology will look like.

            These are the major conversations that are in play when we talk about the Holy Spirit, and they provide the justification I think I need to talk about the Old Testament when I discuss the Spirit. But these conversations bring up others we need to touch on, and there will be others that will play some role as we move forward. It is to a quick rundown of those that I now turn.