How is God everywhere, and why can’t we see him?
2024-04-30 00:31:18
Do you have questions about theology, the Bible, or the church that you’re too afraid to ask? Tired of pastors and scholars using unfamiliar language or overly complicated explanations? Curiously, Kaitlyn is a weekly podcast hosted by author and theologian Kaitlyn Schiess that tries to make theology accessible, meaningful, and fun. Each week, you’ll hear a kid ask a theology question–sometimes serious, sometimes silly–and Kaitlyn will interview a scholar to help answer it (without all the academic jargon). Together, Kaitlyn and her guest discover that this one simple question opens up big theological ideas that can impact our lives, shape our view of God, and understand Scripture in a new way. Whether you're reminiscing about your own childhood curiosities or simply seeking a refreshing take on faith, tune in and rediscover the joy of learning with "Curiously Kaitlyn.”
Welcome to Curiously, Caitlyn, a podcast where we try to make theology make sense. I'm Caitlyn Schess, and every week on this show, you will hear a kid's question about God, theology, or the Bible, and then I'll talk with a scholar who will try to answer it.
I don't know.
That doesn't make any sense.
Dr.
Beth Felker-Jones, thank you so much for joining me today, and thank you for hearing this question today.
Glad to be with you. Can't wait to hear.
This is Dr. Beth Felker-Jones. She teaches theology at Northern Seminary and lives in the Chicagoland area with her husband Brian, four kids, two dogs, and her theology cat, Dwight. She's the author of many books, including Practicing Christian Doctrine, An Introduction to Thinking and Living Theologically, and fun fact, she went to Duke. So let's hear our question for today.
People say like, God is always with you. How does he like multiply, and like, why are you not able to see him?
A wonderful question, a really good question, yeah. Let's start with, I think, kind of the first part of his two questions, which is, does God multiply? Or I think, kind of underneath that question is, how is God everywhere? Is God everywhere? That doesn't really make sense.
with, I mean, for a kid, that definitely doesn't make sense. I've never experienced anything that can be everywhere. But even for adults, it's sort of like, how am I supposed to imagine God being everywhere? Is that even true? And if it is true, what does that tell me about God?
Yes, yeah. Such a good question. Though I might not say this directly to our young listener, it reminds me of the late fourth century Bishop Augustine of Hippo.
I'm just warning you now, Augustine is about to come up a lot.
Who, when he tells us his story, actually says that he tripped up over exactly this question. He says, he kept imagining God is this sort of weird, diffuse mass, I'm paraphrasing. And that just seemed to him really strange and dumb. And so he kind of gave up on the thing. And basically, Augustine has a kind of leap in his thinking where he just realizes God is different from anything else that we know.
Dr. Jones is talking here about something theologians call the creator-creature distinction. There is a big and important difference between the creator and everything God created.
For air to be everywhere, it has to be a diffuse mass. But for God to be everywhere, it can be really different, because God is God, right? So the radical difference between God and anything else, and the radical difference between God and material things like air, let's say, that is almost impossible for us to imagine, right? Which is maybe part of the point, because God is God, and not something that we can measure or put into a bottle or pin down to examine, right? God is everywhere.
Everywhere is right, but even that word is a kind of pointer, and it's not working exactly the same way as it would work when we talk about air or anything else. And that's the case, I believe, for all of our language about God. Our language is a kind of metaphor. It's a pointer. It's right.
It helps us to understand God's power and presence everywhere, right?
When Dr. Jones says that all of our language about God is a metaphor, that's related to this creator-creature distinction. If we are finite creatures, limited creatures, and God is the creator, who is not finite or limited, we are always grasping for language to talk about God, but never quite getting there. Some theologians throughout history have even said we can only say what God is not. We can only say things about God by negation.
It's called apophatic theology, but that's not what Dr. Jones thinks.
But it's also wrong, because God is not like air or anything else that we know.
Yeah, I love that you started with Augustine, both because I love when anyone starts with Augustine, but also I love that there's an answer to this kid, and to many of us who have asked this question. that goes, not only have plenty of other people asked this question before, but even someone we would consider a central theological figure in the history of the church had this question and was trying to figure this out. And you said something else there that I think is important to this question, which is just God is different than anything else, anything we have experience with. Can you talk a little bit more about why that's important for us to understand? Because I think part of what's happening behind the question is I have experience of the world, and of humans, and of material things, and that's all the experience I have.
I can't really totally think outside of that. But I also have to say things about God. We want to be able to say things about God. And it also seems pretty important that it's both hard to say things about God well, and trying to find ways to say things about God when God is different than anything else we've experienced feels like just an important truth for us to start with. So can you say a little bit more about that?
Yeah, maybe one of the most important truths, I think, and I'll just pull on a guest again here. You can also call him Augustine, by the way, both are right.
He says something like, if we could understand it, it wouldn't be God. And he's pointing there to God's mysterious, holy otherness, right? The fact that God is beyond and different than anything that we know. And that points to God's magnificence, right, and greatness, which, just like the words everywhere, are pointer words here, and aren't working exactly the way they would ordinarily work. But it reminds us, right, that God is God, and that we, rightfully, right, worship and kneel before this God, who is so far beyond anything we could imagine.
Yeah. And I, again, I love that this kid, you know, starts to ask the question and says, okay, it's kind of two questions. And one of those questions is basically, how does God multiply? Which gets at this idea that we have, like you've already said, okay, we have an idea of air being everywhere, but that's because it is a substance that's sort of diffuse everywhere. We have an idea of humans that can move or things that can multiply, but we don't really have a sense of how God is everywhere, and yet is not multiple things and other places.
What kind of language can we use to talk about what God is? Like, we can talk about God's characteristics, and we will. We have lots of questions. people have asked about how God can be just and loving or merciful. But then there's also times when our language, we just want to say, like, God is a being.
What does that mean? Or God is not material. What does that mean? God is material in Christ. So what language can we use to talk about what God is, as well as who God is?
Well, everywhere is a great word, right? The fact that everywhere is a different kind of everywhere when it's for God doesn't mean it's not a great word. And one of the things that Scripture does in this case, but I think in lots of other areas where it helps us to understand God, is that Scripture uses a variety of different kinds of language, so that we don't get stuck just with everywhere, but our imaginations can use other images or ideas as well, probably, again, multiplying that sense that God is magnificent and beyond in ways that we can't grab, right? Or Scripture uses the language of. where can I flee from your presence, right?
Even the worst possible places, God is there with us. And that reminds us that God's presence is not just an in-placeness, right? But it's relational. It's about God's there-for-us and there-with-us-ness and God's power and purpose in our lives, which is true both when we want it and when, maybe in shame, we're trying to run away.
Yeah. Yeah. And so the other part of this question is, so does God multiply, or how does God multiply? And then the second question that he says is, can we see God? or how can we not see God?
If God is everywhere, why don't we see God? And that also gets at this larger question of God is spirit, and how do we describe that? But how would you respond to this question? Why can't we see God? And I think probably there's a little part of this question from both kids and adults that is like, that would be great.
It would just be great if I could see God.
So God is spirit, is one more piece of language from Scripture and from Christian faith, which helps us to get at this idea of God's difference, right?
This language comes from the Gospel of John, when Jesus is speaking with the Samaritan woman at the well, and after giving him water to drink and having a conversation about her lack of a husband, she says he must be a prophet and recounts some of the theological dispute between Jews and Samaritans over where worship should happen. Jesus responds, believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father, neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You, Samaritans, worship what you do not know. We worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming, and has now come, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.
God is spirit, and His worshipers must worship in the spirit and in truth.
Maybe that language is more or less helpful in different times and places. What I really love, though, about this kid's second question is that it gets at the idea, or maybe points us to the idea, that God knows we have that question, right?
And God has answered it in the most fantastic way possible, right, in the incarnation of Jesus Christ, in which precisely we have seen His glory, right? God is the one we cannot see, and at the exact same time, God came among us in the person of Jesus, and you could see Him and touch Him and have dinner with Him and ask Him your questions, and He might answer them in ways that you didn't like, and so on, right? And then Jesus returns, right, to His Father, and I think lots of kids and adults would say, wouldn't we rather Him be around, right, still able to see, but He tells us that instead, He sent the Spirit to be among us, right? And the Spirit, like God, because the Spirit is God, is someone we can't precisely see, and yet the Spirit works in things that we can see, right, including the bread and cup when we take communion, right, which point us to the fact that we've seen God's glory in Jesus, and including in our own lives, right? So we see God's work in the bodies of God's people, indwelt by that Spirit.
So there's a kind of yes, right, God's yes to that question. You want to see me? I get it. You're seeing kinds of people, and there's a kind of yes, and it's still more complicated and beautiful and tremendous than all that, and there's a kind of waiting for that time when we'll, steadily, right, see Him face to face. And now a word from our sponsor.
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And thank you to Brazos Press for sponsoring this episode. You know, I don't think this kid is thinking about this, but I think, you know, some kids and adults think this is like, will I see God? And what does that mean? Because it seems like scripture uses language of seeing face to face and of our limited ability to discern God, now, still there, but limited, and yet awaiting a time when that is not limited, or at least not as limited as it is by sin, just by our continued finitude.
Finitude, meaning we are limited. Um, so yeah. Can you talk a little bit about that, about how, what are we waiting for when it comes to seeing God?
Yeah. Uh, in some sense, we're waiting for something that is already true, right? Um, uh, the incarnation of Jesus and face to face, encounter, uh, with that incarnate Lord. But it's something that is also a not yet, right? For us, not yet.
Is it the case that everyone will see, um, and every knee will bow and every tongue confess, right? To pull from, uh, Philippians. And I think what we'll see, when not yet is now, right? Is still Jesus. Now, theologians sometimes get into kind of quandaries here, right?
Yes, Jesus, of course. But will we also see in some way, right? The Godhead, which is a fancy way to say father, son, and spirit, right? Together, the eternal Holy Trinity.
We have a fancy theological term for this. The beatific vision. Beatific, coming from a Latin word that means to make happy. It's the idea that in eternity, rightly reconciled to God, we will not only have a fuller experience of God, but that it's appropriate, given how much scripture talks about us not seeing God face-to-face, that we will see God, a vision that is happy.
Sorry, but Augustine again, um, works himself to a yes here. His instincts are no, you can't see, um, God as God is in God's self, outside of Jesus, because God is God and other. But it's finally Jesus and the spirit who convinced him that there's, there's some kind of mysterious yes, uh, to that question, um, in which we'll see the very glory of God and how exactly that works, I think, uh, does, does remain mysterious, but I don't think God expects us to ever become something fundamentally different than what we are, which is creatures who want to know by seeing, right? And hearing, and touching and tasting and so on. Um, and so I think that promised future is, um, a future for the senses, right?
Including, including sight.
Yeah, that's an important point you just made too, that we've, we've talked about with some other folks already, of, we're not awaiting a time where we are without bodies or having the ability to sense things. Um, so, it is not just because of sin that we want to see God, is because, as you said, we are creatures who see things, um, and want to see things.
We interrupt this program to bring you great moments in Sunday School history.
Every once in a while on Curiously, Caitlin, we will bring to you something from greatest moments in Sunday School history. This is where we'll share a story about a time something happened with kids in church, a time a kid did or said something hilarious in the service, a time a Sunday School teacher realized they had not quite gotten the message they were trying to get across, or, most importantly, a time a kid taught a grownup something about God. We'd love to hear your greatest moments in Sunday School history. You can submit a voice recording of them at holypost.com slash. curiously.
But for today, here's one of mine from last week in my church. At my church, most of the kids are with us in the service for the first half or so. And then they get dismissed to children's church after they come to the front of the sanctuary and hear a children's message. Sometimes the pastor who's about to preach does the short little children's message. Sometimes it's someone who works with the kids.
And last week, it was our director of children's ministry who gave the children's message. And he was setting up what we adults were about to hear in the sermon. The sermon was on doubting Thomas after Jesus's resurrection. And so the children's ministry director says to the kids, Imagine one day you're having dinner with your family in your house, and Jesus just appears, pops into the room. How do you feel?
And the kids said things like, surprised and excited and happy. And then he said, okay, if Jesus is there with your family in your house, what are you going to ask Jesus? And I imagine most of the adults in the room, like myself, heard that and started thinking of our own questions. we would ask Jesus. Personally, I have some really deep theological questions I have not heard good answers for, and I would want to ask Jesus about them.
But that was not what the kids asked. These are the three questions these kids asked at the front of church. The first one was, will you stay for dinner? The second one was, will you go outside and hunt for bugs with me? The third one was, will you have a tea party with me?
These kids were not asking intellectual questions. They weren't asking for knowledge that Jesus had that they wanted. They were asking to be with Jesus. They were asking for a relationship. These kids intuitively understood something that most grown-up Christians know on some level, but don't always live like.
it's true. That the best gift that we have is relationship with God. That our deepest human need and desire, if we're really honest and dig deep down, is just to be with God. So on that Sunday morning, I am thankful that those kids gave us a whole sermon. before the sermon we actually heard.
A reminder that one of the most beautiful things about the resurrection is not just the intellectual truths we learn from it, but the truth that God truly has been and will be forever with us.
There's another part of this question that I want to talk about briefly, which I think gets at probably where this kid first heard this, right? He starts out saying, I've heard people say, God is always with you. And there's probably two parts of this. The first part is, I've heard this in ways that kind of make me think that God is kind of like Santa. He sees you when you're sleeping.
He knows when you're awake. No one else might see this sin that I do, but God sees it. God is watching. In what sense is it true that God is everywhere, and we kind of sometimes take that to mean, and sometimes in a way that feels kind of shameful, but also in some ways where it's like, man, I thought no one would find out about this horrible abuse or this terrible thing that was done in secret, and I'm glad that God sees it. In what sense is it true that God is everywhere?
What does that mean then for us when we say things like, God is always with you?
Yeah, I think the first bit of that, God is not everywhere, like a policing mechanism, is important. This song has gone out of style, but I grew up singing in church, oh, be careful, little eyes what you see. The father up above is looking down in love, but it felt more like, be careful, right? God is watching you in this way, where he's trying to trap you or something, and the key there is that the God who is everywhere is the God who we meet in scripture, the loving father of our Lord, Jesus Christ, together with his son and his spirit. And who is that God?
Not somebody trying to catch us in something wrong and slap our hands, right? But someone who wants to welcome us home, right? To make us part of the family, to see us grow in the character of the son, so that we might better love God and each other. And so it's a good presence, right? God's everywhere-ness is a good thing.
And yes, we might sometimes feel shame in that, but I think that's precisely part of what Jesus's work in our life helps us to overcome. And then, as you named, God sees the truth, right? Even when the truth is really ugly and when people are trying to hide it because they want to keep up abusive or hurtful or harmful practices, part of the promise of what we will see one day, right? Is that all things will be brought to light and God will call things what they are and name evil for what it is. And again, that's good news, right?
Yes, I might worry about the evil in me, right? But bigger picture, we want things out in the light of day, where God can tell the truth about them. Did I get to all the parts of your question there?
Yes, no, that was great. And I think the last part of this question that struck me was, so there is the question of like, yeah, is God, is this a policing mechanism? Is this Santa Claus who knows all things? But then also even the way that the kid phrased it was God is always with you. I often hear people say, with an attempt to comfort someone, you know, you might be suffering or lonely, God is always with you.
Can you talk a little bit about, on a kind of practical or pastoral level, what God's presence means? Because on one hand, people can often say this in a kind of trite way of just like, oh, God is with you, you know, instead of actually providing something for someone or giving some, you know, material or tangible counsel or gift. But there's also a real truth there. Like. I think many of us have experienced the close presence of God in moments where we needed that.
And it seems to me like a pretty fundamental mystery of the Christian life, why we sometimes have that and sometimes don't, where we sometimes feel a sense of the absence of God, even if we know theologically that's not true. And then in other times we go, wow, that was a really powerful experience of presence. So can you talk a little bit about how that's true, or what that means, or how we might think well about the sense in which we know it's true, God is always with us, and yet we don't always feel that way, but also sometimes we really deeply do.
I think one thing that helps me with this question is to return to the accounts in the New Testament of what it means for the Spirit to be with the people of God, right? And I'm paraphrasing again a little bit here, but Jesus says something like, you don't want me to go away, but actually you do, because something wonderful is coming. The Spirit's presence with the people of God. The Spirit is specifically, right, an advocate, a comforter, not a policing mechanism, but one who's there to speak up for us and to give us comfort. And the Spirit specifically indwells us, meaning that we can't see, but the presence is so intimate, right, that it is within our very own lives.
And yeah, sometimes we're aware of that, and sometimes we're not. And this seems to me to be part of what it means to live in a world broken by sin, right?
Our awareness of God's presence comes and goes, right? And some people experience it more powerfully than others, but we have to rest on the promise of its truth, right? We don't have to feel God's presence. for God to be present. We don't have to feel the indwelling power of the Spirit.
to experience nonetheless, the indwelling power of the Spirit, because it just is the truth about God's work in our lives. And feelings are great, and I'm not against them, but I think that that reassurance, that we don't have to feel God's presence just is, is a really helpful one, and not maybe something we talk about enough, I think, when we emphasize seeking those wonderful feelings, that, again, can be great, but are not constant or the same for all.
Yeah, that is really great. We're going to come back in some other episodes to talk about the sense of what being dwelled with the Holy Spirit means, or even less, probably theologically accurate language, but that comes up in churches a lot, which is like, Jesus is in my heart. What does that mean? So we're going to come back and talk about those terms, because I think they're important to work through as well. Beth, is there anything that we haven't talked about that you would want to say, not just to this kid asking this question, but I always like to imagine these kids, because it's been true of most of them, they asked this at my church.
Like, we were together with the people of God, and a kid asks a question. If you were with people in a church, and this question came up, is there anything we haven't talked about that you think this would be important for me to say in response to this question?
This is maybe the first thing I said, but let me reiterate. I think the first thing I said was, good questions, right? And I just want to say how important that is, that we bring our questions, and that God welcomes them, and that God gives us ways, right, to seek more understanding, right? Through knowing the scriptures better and better, through coming to worship, to hear the word, to receive at the table. Not only is it good to have questions, but we're not just left poking about in the dark.
We have ways to draw near to God through those questions.
And these are good questions, not just randomly from this one kid, right? But good questions that other Christians have asked over and over through the centuries, from a great bishop, right, who continues to affect the church today, Augustine,
to probably everyone we know who's ever thought about God, and what that present might mean. I'm often struck, as a teacher of theology, by the fact that there are no new questions, and I find that super comforting, right? Often we're asking just the right questions, and tracking down answers to those questions, I hope, will bring us closer to God.
Yeah, I really appreciate that. And I appreciate you modeling for us, taking seriously questions of various kinds, but especially questions that, you know, sometimes in church we can sort of say, oh, okay, we'll get back to that later. Or, you know, oh, that's interesting, we'll move on. So thank you for helping us take seriously, not only our own questions, but questions that come from the wider church that we might be tempted to ignore. So thank you.
My privilege, glad to be with you, Caitlin.
I love how Dr. Jones ended the conversation. We are asking the same questions Christians have been asking for thousands of years. And a lot of our theological disputes come down to how we see God. As Dr.
Jones said, we might not see Jesus or the Holy Spirit with our eyes, but we see God in the bread and wine or grape juice of communion. And we see God in the body of Christ, in the people sitting on a pew with us. So it actually makes sense that we would fight about what communion is and means and who counts as the people of God, because we're really fighting about how we see God. The same is true when it comes to big political movements in history. Christians fight about them for lots of reasons, but one reason is we're asking the question, do we see God here?
Is God working in this or not? This is why theology is so important. We need scripture to help us know where and when we see God in God's creation. And we also need the witness of the church, the communion of saints across time and around the world, to help us see God in people we might dismiss or ignore, in the central practice of the Christian faith, and in movings of the Spirit in our world that we might miss if we aren't paying attention.
Curiously, Caitlyn is a production of Holy Post Media. Produced by Mike Strelow. Editing by Seth Corvette. Theme song by Phil Vischer. Be sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review so more people can discover thoughtful Christian commentary, plus cute kids, and never any butt news.
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