The Old Testament regularly sounds this theme, especially in what we call the wisdom literature (e.g. Job 27:3; 33:4; 34:14-15; Ps. 104:29-30). God upholds the creation through his Spirit. Even the natural processes of everyday life on our planet are credited by Jesus to the direct agency of his Father when he speaks of his Father providing sunshine and rain, feeding the birds and providing the beauty of the flowers (Matt. 5:45; 6:25-30; 10:29-30).

Extreme forms of immanence lead to pantheism, the belief that every creature is not only a manifestation of God, but is identical with God. A similar problem, and one that became more popular in the last century, is panentheism. Panentheism literally means “all-in-God” and posits the idea of God as an eternally animating force that interpenetrates every part of nature and yet timelessly extends beyond it. Unlike pantheism this thinking about God maintains a better Creator-creation distinction but it tends toward believing that the cosmos exists within God, thus it denies, in some way at least, the creation-Creator distinction required by a proper emphasis upon transcendence.

The simple way to say this is to […]

How do we understand God? Careful readers of the Bible since the time of the Jesus and the apostles have sought to understand the answer to this question, thus the meaning of certain prominent and recurring theological terms.  I am persuaded that the most basic of all questions really does come down to this: “How do we define or conceive of God?”

The late evangelical theologian Stanley J. Grenz said, “Perhaps the most deeply ingrained conception among Christian views of God as a being – albeit an eternal, uncreated being – who is both present within and exists beyond the world of created beings” (Stanley J. Grenz, Theology for the Community of God. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1994, page 78). This kind of thinking corresponds, at least to a certain extent, with the very language that the Bible uses about God, particularly in the Old Testament. Yet, as Grenz notes a great deal of this type of thinking about God owes its prominence to Greek philosophy, especially to Plato and Aristotle. This thinking led to the commonly accepted idea of an […]

Last week I posted three blogs on love (August 26-28). I began to show why love is eternal. The reason is to be clearly rooted in the eternal mystery of the biblical truth: “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16). Today I want to take another example that demonstrates my affirmation – the person of Christ.

Nestorius believed in Christ and followed him as a deep thinker. He insisted that the eternal God could not truly be born of a woman. He thus denied that Mary was “The Mother of God.” (This language, which troubles some modern readers who can say Mary was the mother of Jesus, but not the mother of God, must be properly understood in its original doctrinal development and context.) When this affirmation was originally made it was intended to underscore the fact that Jesus was fully human. He could only be fully human if he was conceived in the womb of a real woman, namely Mary. And he had to be birthed in a normal human way. (Remember, the idea of the virgin birth is generally misnamed since the church really confessed […]