Our spatial reality and God
Abstract
Modern scientific models of cosmological space and the theological concept of God’s immensity seem to exclude the possibility that God himself is personally present with us humans at particular places in space. Are God and our spatial reality incompatible? Or, is it possible to conceive the connection between God and space as ‘positive’, that is, in such a way that God himself can be fully and personally present with us at particular places in space? This essay explores how this question may be addressed in a theology which accepts the results of the natural sciences and acknowledges that God is the free creator of physical space. It describes how space can be conceptualised, and presents an overview of five different views on a positive relation between God and space in recent protestant theology. It concludes by some considerations on the question whether a positive relation between God and space requires that God himself is spatial.
Contribution: This article contributes to the conversation between natural science and theology by making three points. (1) The scientific understanding of cosmological space and the biblical witness of God’s personal and local presence with humans require an alternative for the traditional theological view on God and space in terms of God’s immensity and omnipresence. (2) It is argued that new theological models for the interrelation between God and space have serious weaknesses. (3) A ‘positive’ relation between God and space may be articulated in terms of the correspondence among God’s uncreated movement, multiplicity and relationality, and the movement, multiplicity and relationality in the physical space of creation.
The author(s) retain copyright on work published by AOSIS unless specified otherwise.
Licensing and publishing rights
Author(s) of work published by AOSIS are required to grant AOSIS the unlimited rights to publish the definitive work in any format, language and medium, for any lawful purpose. AOSIS requires journal authors to publish their work in open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
Read more here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
The authors retain the non-exclusive right to do anything they wish with the published article(s), provided attribution is given to the applicable journal with details of the original publication, as set out in the official citation of the article published in the journal. The retained right specifically includes the right to post the article on the authors’ or their institution’s websites or in institutional repositories.
Previously published work may have been published under a different licence. We advise the community that if they would like to reuse the work to consult the applicable licence at article level.
