From a God Who Is Everywhere to a God Who Is All and In All
Deconstructing Christianity: Part 3 in a 3-part series on how God’s location changes over time as theology changes in the Jewish and Christian scriptures
What people think about God has never remained static. See my post, How People Understand God Has Changed Again and Again. Part of this change involves where people have understood God to be.
A continuum in how worshipers locate gods and God is embedded in the Hebrew Bible and the Greek Christian scriptures. That continuum of location might be constructed as follows:
Local bamot where people sacrifice to gods (including YHVH) assisted by local priests
Central temple where priests worship various gods including YHVH
Central temple where YHVH only dwells and is worshiped
Tabernacle where YHVH dwelt and was worshiped as a type for the future temple
Heaven and earth filled by the presence of YHVH Elohim, who is everywhere
Physically un-manifest spirit God worshiped in spirit, not in any particular location
God / Christ pervading all and in all
This three-part series on the changing location of God is not predicated on the notion that God or ultimate reality changes; it is rather based on the idea that it is we who have changed and continue to change over time in our concepts of who or what God is as our understanding evolves. This post (Part 3) covers the last two points along the continuum above. For Part 1 see my post From Many Gods in High Places to One God on One Mountain. For Part 2 see God Unhoused: From God in One Place to God in Every Place.
God the Everywhere Spirit
The gospels were written after the Jewish Revolt and subsequent destruction of Jerusalem and the second temple by the Romans, or in the case of Mark, at the earliest during the revolt itself. In the gospel of John, Jesus is depicted having a remarkable conversation about the location and spiritual nature of God.
[Jesus] left Judea and started back to Galilee. But he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.
A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.)...
[There follows the living water, and the multiple husbands parts of the conversation]
...The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you [pl.] say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you [pl.] will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. ‘You [pl.] worship what you [pl.] do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jewish people’. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”
Besides Jesus’ characteristic use of “Father,” there are a few important things to note in this passage concerning God:
Assumed monotheism.
The woman’s recitation of the Samaritan-Jewish dispute concerning the proper location for worshiping God.
Jesus’ self-contextualization among Jewish people presupposing superior knowledge and a tradition that is the source of salvation.
Jesus’ de-localization of God based on the notion of God as spirit, who would be worshiped “in spirit and truth.”
For Iron-Age YHVHists in the kingdom of Judah, YHVH had historically been a material presence manifest as cloud, fire, smoke, or some combination of these. This God is seen in the Torah at particular locations, manifested in the places designated by YHVH for his dwelling, whether mountain, trackless wilderness, temple, or tabernacle. For Jesus in the gospel of John, God—the Father—is an immaterial spirit, and truly worshiped as such, for whom location is irrelevant.
Check out the ARCHIVE of Faith Shifter posts.
It was in the context of a once-again destroyed temple that the writers and compilers of the gospels undertook their work. It is only natural that such a context would have affected their understanding of Jesus and his deeds and sayings. Jesus’ words about an immaterial God not bound by location would have made even more sense in the absence of any locus for worship, as would sayings—symbolic or not—about one stone not being left on another, tearing down the temple, etc.
Hebrew writers depict YHVH as having a spirit. In Hebrew scripture, the ruach of God is a property of God. In the same sense, breath is a property of a living human being rather than the human being itself.
In Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible, and references in the New Testament, ruach is translated using the Greek term pneuma, which is similar in meaning and usage. But in Jesus’ own depicted use of a term translated pneuma in John 4, the statement is made (with the implied ‘be’ verb commonly used in Greek) that God IS spirit. This is qualitatively different from God’s spirit as a property of God. Jesus’ description of God as being spirit represents a theological innovation.
Presence in No Human-Built House
The book of Acts depicts what took place among the apostles and within the early movement of Jesus’ followers after the time of his physical presence with them. It also contains references to God’s location and presence.
Acts 17 contains what is purported to be Paul’s speech at the Areopagus in Athens. The author of Acts reiterates the theme (from Stephen’s sermon in Chapter 7) of God as the creator of all who is not housed in handmade locations. Altogether, it is a remarkable bit of theological discourse:
The God [theós] who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord [kýrios] of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God/the Lord [theón/kýrion][1] and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being; as even some of your own poets have said, “For we too are his [Zeus’s] offspring.” Since we are the offspring of God [theoȗ], we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. While God [theós] has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent...
There are several items here worthy of discussion, but for the purpose at hand these are significant:
The application of kýrios within a title for the Creator—“Lord of heaven and earth”—according to the everyday definition and usage of kýrios rather than as a substitution for YHVH in Greek translation of Hebrew scripture; this is in context of the expectation that Roman citizens and subjects formally acknowledge Caesar as Lord.
A poem by Aratus probably of Tarsus quoted by Paul that refers to Zeus.
God contrasted with inanimate handcrafted objects of worship.
God not dwelling in handmade enclosures.
The unitive and arguably panentheistic notion of a God in whom “we live and move and have our being.”
God in Christ the All in All
In both the undisputed epistles of Paul and in those whose attribution is questioned, the phrase “all in all” (pánta en pȃsin) or “all and in all” (pánta kai en pȃsin) can be found in reference to God, Jesus, and Christ. In First Corinthians 15, Paul is describing the end of days in the context of expected resurrection. He uses the phrase with respect to the unity of God the Son and God the Father, to be seen in the future summation of all things: “When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to the one who put all things in subjection under him, so that God may be all in all.”
The same phrase appears in both Ephesians and Colossians. If Paul himself did not write Ephesians, it could not have been composed too many years following his death. Some critical scholars have ascribed Colossians to an early follower of Paul, writing as Paul.
In the first chapter of Ephesians, the phrase itself is cast in the present: “And [God] has put all things under [Jesus’] feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.” And again, with respect to the church, “all and in all” appears in the third chapter of Colossians, also in the present tense:
Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator, where there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!
In these passages, concerning people called as part of Christ’s body the church, if not the whole cosmos, God, or Christ, is presented as all and in all. If understood cosmically, this fits with the notion in Acts of a God in whom “we live and move and have our being.”
It should be understood that the various locations for gods or God as depicted in scripture represent change and development over time. These all exist simultaneously in the same canonical body of scripture and are thus all available to us at the same time. But rather than attempting to reconcile all of them together, it is hermeneutically stronger to regard all as a developmental record reflecting changing levels of consciousness.
Just as all these concepts are simultaneously available in scripture, they are also simultaneously manifest in the theologies of Christian individuals and groups in the present, depending on the level of consciousness to which they have developed. A tribal God is awe-inspiring if capricious, completely separate from us but magically interventional if properly appeased and invoked. A warrior God unleashes his wrath on those who oppose him, meting out justice, avenging his own, and occasionally showing compassion toward them.
A traditional God is a righteous judge who controls creation, who is both loving and jealous, but whose own need not fear his wrath. A modern God is a distant, third-person ‘Divine’ or ‘Ground of Being’, a God of existence for whom the concept of a distinct supernatural being separate from the universe is too small and confining. For the postmodern mind, God is the great unity of being itself, both one with and greater than the universe. This last concept shows up in both the story of Moses and the Burning Bush and in the phrase, “in him we live and move and have our being” attributed to Paul.
Just as scripture is a record of collective development showing multiple levels of consciousness simultaneously, so each one of us has our own history of psychological and spiritual development over the course of our lifecycle, manifesting all the levels of consciousness through which we have passed at once.
[1]Depending on Greek textual source.