Theopedia

Transcendence of God

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the LORD. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

— Isaiah 55:8-9

The transcendence of God is the teaching that God exists above and independent of his creation, exalted infinitely beyond it in being, power, and knowledge, and bound by none of the limits his creatures are subject to.1 Transcendence is not absence: Scripture holds it together with God’s immanence, his real presence and activity within what he has made, so the same God who is exalted above the heavens is also near to everyone who calls on him.

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession describes God as “infinite in being and perfection,” and among the properties it lists for him are that he is “immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty.”2 “Immense” here carries its older sense, unbounded by space, not merely great in size: God is not contained by the creation he fills. Paired with “eternal,” unbounded by time, the confession states God’s transcendence in two dimensions at once, before it goes on to describe how he relates to what he has made.

Bavinck locates this same transcendence within the incommunicable and communicable attributes that run through the whole doctrine of God: “discernible in every one of God’s perfections is both his absolute superiority over, and his kinship with, his creatures… Scripture thus simultaneously maintains both God’s transcendence over, and his orientation to, the world.”3 Neither side of that pairing is optional; a doctrine of God that kept only transcendence would leave God unable to be truly present and active in creation, and one that kept only immanence would leave nothing that distinguishes God from what he has made.

Biblical Basis

Isaiah records the LORD’s own rebuke to those who would measure him by human categories: “my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways… As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isa. 55:8-9). The Psalmist states the same truth as praise: “you, O LORD, are the Most High over all the earth; you are exalted far above all gods” (Ps. 97:9), and elsewhere, “The LORD is high above all nations, and his glory above the heavens! Who is like the LORD our God, who is seated on high, who looks far down on the heavens and the earth?” (Ps. 113:4-6). Paul tells the Athenians that the God who made the world “does not live in temples made by man” (Acts 17:24), and elsewhere calls him “the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, dwelling in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see” (1 Tim. 6:15-16).

Historical Development

The pairing of God’s transcendence with his immanence, and the danger of collapsing either into the other, runs through Reformed scholastic theology’s incommunicable/communicable classification of the divine attributes (see Immanence of God). Carter argues that much twentieth-century theology lost this balance, trading a doctrine of God’s eternal being in himself for an exclusive focus on his historical, relational involvement with the world, and in doing so “lost its grip on divine transcendence.”4 He traces the drift to what James E. Dolezal calls “theistic mutualism,” the view that God and the world stand in a real, mutual give-and-take relationship, such that God is genuinely affected by his interaction with creation rather than remaining, in his own being, unchanged by it.5

Objections and Responses

If God is genuinely transcendent, wholly other than and independent of creation, how can he also be truly present and active within it, without one claim swallowing the other? Sammons states both sides as twin truths that stand or fall together: “with immensity, God transcends space, and with ubiquity, God is immanent in each place: these are twin truths that need to be maintained. When God’s transcendence over space is denied, pantheism results. When God’s immanence in space is denied, deism results.”6 Denying transcendence collapses God into his creation; denying immanence removes him from it. Historic Christian theism affirms both: God remains, in his own being, wholly other than what he has made, while also being genuinely present and active within it, since “a transcendence that is collapsed into immanence is no transcendence at all.”7

Related Doctrines

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

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

  4. Craig A. Carter, “Classical Orthodoxy and the Rise of Relational Theism,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 1. ↩

  5. Craig A. Carter, “Prologue: How My Mind Has Changed,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition, introduction. ↩

  6. Peter Sammons, The Forgotten Attributes of God: God’s Nature and Why It Matters (Fort Washington, PA: CLC Publications, 2023), chap. 9, “Omnipresence,” 173-197. ↩

  7. Sammons, The Forgotten Attributes of God, chap. 9, “Omnipresence,” 173-197. ↩