Immanence of God

“For thus says the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: ‘I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit.’”

The immanence of God is the teaching that God is present and active within his creation, sustaining, upholding, and working in it, even though he remains distinct from it and is not identical with it.¹ Immanence is the counterpart to God’s transcendence, his exaltation above and independence from creation; Scripture holds both together without contradiction, since the same God who “inhabits eternity” also dwells with “him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit” (Isa. 57:15).

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states that God, though wholly self-sufficient in himself and “not standing in need of any creature which he hath made,” is nonetheless “the alone fountain of all being, of whom, through whom, and to whom are all things.”² The confession holds transcendence and immanence together in a single sentence: God does not depend on creation, yet all created things depend on him, continually and not only at their first making.

Bavinck locates this pairing within the classical distinction between God’s incommunicable and communicable attributes. Incommunicable attributes, such as his oneness, simplicity, and eternity, “accent God’s transcendence”; communicable attributes, such as his knowledge, goodness, and holiness, accent “God’s immanence.” Reformed theology uses this distinction “to underscore the strong opposition of Christian theism to the twin errors of pantheism and deism.”¹ The two sets of attributes are not two separate halves of God; the same God who is absolutely distinct from creation is also, in that same undivided being, genuinely present and at work within it.

Biblical Basis

Paul tells the Athenians that God is not “far from each one of us,” since “in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:27-28), and elsewhere states that Christ sustains the created order at every moment: “in him all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). The author of Hebrews describes the Son as “upholding the universe by the word of his power” (Heb. 1:3), a continuous, present-tense act, not a past event completed at creation. God asks rhetorically through Jeremiah, “Am I a God at hand… and not a God far away?… Do not I fill heaven and earth?” (Jer. 23:23-24), refusing to be confined to any single place. Solomon makes the same point in prayer: “heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you” (1 Kings 8:27), yet the same God chooses to dwell among his people.

Historical Development

The classification of God’s attributes as incommunicable and communicable, tracking transcendence and immanence respectively, developed within Reformed scholastic theology as a way of organizing the doctrine of God without dividing God himself into separate parts. Bavinck insists that distinguishing the attributes this way “must never be taken as a division of God into two halves, a separation of God’s absoluteness from his relatedness to creation,” since each attribute remains identical with God’s own undivided being even while emphasizing one side or the other of how God relates to what he has made.³

Objections and Responses

If God is genuinely present and active within creation, how is that different from pantheism, the view that God simply is the universe? The difference is exactly what the incommunicable attributes preserve: God remains essentially distinct from his creation even while fully present and active within it. Bavinck notes that Reformed theology built the communicable/incommunicable distinction specifically to oppose “the twin errors of pantheism and deism” at once, not only one.¹ Pantheism collapses immanence into identity, making God and the world the same reality; deism denies immanence altogether, treating God as a distant cause who set the world in motion and then withdrew from it. Historic Christian theism affirms both that God is really present and active within his creation and that he remains, in his own being, genuinely other than it.

Related Doctrines

• Transcendence of God
• Omnipresence of God
• Incomprehensibility of God
• Providence of God
• Incarnation

References

1. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 8, “The Living, Acting God.” ↩ ↩² ↩³

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

3. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 8, “The Living, Acting God.” ↩