Ps. 139:7 sq.—“Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?” Jer. 23:23, 24—“Am I a God at hand, saith Jehovah, and not a God afar off?... Do not I fill heaven and earth?” Acts 17:27, 28—“he is not far from each one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being.” Faber: “For God is never so far off As even to be near. He is within. Our spirit is The home he holds most dear. To think of him as by our side Is almost as untrue As to remove his shrine beyond Those skies of starry blue. So all the while I thought myself Homeless, forlorn and weary, Missing my joy, I walked the earth Myself God's sanctuary.”Henri Amiel: “From every point on earth we are equally near to heaven and the infinite.” Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism: “Speak to him then, for he hears, and spirit with spirit can meet; Closer is he than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.” “As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart.”
The atheist wrote: “God is nowhere,” but his little daughter read it: “God is now here,” and it converted him. The child however sometimes asks: “If God is everywhere, how is there any room for us?” and the only answer is that God is not a material but a spiritual being, whose presence does not exclude finite existence but rather makes such existence possible. This universal presence of God had to be learned gradually. It required great faith in Abraham to go out from Ur of the Chaldees, and yet to hold that God would be with him in a distant land (Heb. 11:8). Jacob learned that the heavenly ladder followed him wherever he went (Gen. 28:15). Jesus taught that “neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father” (John 4:21). Our Lord's mysterious comings and goings after his resurrection were intended to teach his disciples that he was with them “always, even unto the end of the world” (Mat. 28:20). The omnipresence of Jesus demonstrates, a fortiori, the omnipresence of God.
In explanation of this attribute we may say:
(a) God's omnipresence is not potential but essential.—We reject the Socinian representation that God's essence is in heaven, only his power on earth. When God is said to “dwell in the heavens,” we are to understand the language either as a symbolic expression of exaltation above earthly things, or as a declaration that his most special and glorious self-manifestations are to the spirits of heaven.
Ps. 123:1—“O thou that sittest in the heavens”; 113:5—“That hath his seat on high”; Is. 57:15—“the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity.” Mere potential omnipresence is Deistic as well as Socinian. Like birds in the air or fish in the sea, “at home, abroad, We are surrounded still with God.” We do not need to go up to heaven to call him down, or into the abyss to call him up (Rom. 10:6, 7). The best illustration is found in the presence of the soul in every part of the body. Mind seems not confined to the brain. Natural realism in philosophy, as distinguished from idealism, requires that the mind should be at the point of contact with the outer world, instead of having reports and ideas brought to it in the brain; see Porter, Human Intellect, 149. All believers in a soul regard the soul as at least present in all parts of the brain, and this is a relative omnipresence no less difficult in principle than its presence in all parts of the body. An animal's brain may be frozen into a piece solid as ice, yet, after thawing, it will act as before: although freezing of the whole body will cause death. If the immaterial principle were confined to the brain we should expect freezing of the brain to cause death. But if the soul may be omnipresent in the body or even in the brain, the divine Spirit may be omnipresent in the universe. Bowne, Metaphysics, 136—“If finite things are modes of the infinite, each thing must be a mode of the entire infinite; and the infinite must be present in its unity and completeness in every finite thing, just as the entire soul is present in all its acts.” This idealistic conception of the entire mind as present in all its thoughts must be regarded as the best analogue to God's omnipresence in the universe. We object to the view that this omnipresence is merely potential, as we find it in Clarke, Christian Theology, 74—“We know, and only know, that God is able to put forth all his power of action, without regard to place.... Omnipresence is an element in the immanence of God.... A local God would be no real God. If he is not everywhere, he is not true God anywhere. Omnipresence is implied in all providence, in all prayer, in all communion with God and reliance on God.”
So long as it is conceded that consciousness is not confined to a single point in the brain, the question whether other portions of the brain or of the body are also the seat of consciousness may be regarded as a purely academic one, and the answer need not [pg 281]affect our present argument. The principle of omnipresence is granted when once we hold that the soul is conscious at more than one point of the physical organism. Yet the question suggested above is an interesting one and with regard to it psychologists are divided. Paulsen, Einleitung in die Philosophie (1892), 138-159, holds that consciousness is correlated with the sum-total of bodily processes, and with him agree Fechner and Wundt. “Pflüger and Lewes say that as the hemispheres of the brain owe their intelligence to the consciousness which we know to be there, so the intelligence of the spinal cord's acts must really be due to the invisible presence of a consciousness lower in degree.” Professor Brewer's rattlesnake, after several hours of decapitation, still struck at him with its bloody neck, when he attempted to seize it by the tail. From the reaction of the frog's leg after decapitation may we not infer a certain consciousness? “Robin, on tickling the breast of a criminal an hour after decapitation, saw the arm and hand move toward the spot.” Hudson, Demonstration of a Future Life, 239-249, quotes from Hammond, Treatise on Insanity, chapter 2, to prove that the brain is not the sole organ of the mind. Instinct does not reside exclusively in the brain; it is seated in the medulla oblongata, or in the spinal cord, or in both these organs. Objective mind, as Hudson thinks, is the function of the physical brain, and it ceases when the brain loses its vitality. Instinctive acts are performed by animals after excision of the brain, and by human beings born without brain. Johnson, in Andover Rev., April, 1890:421—“The brain is not the only seat of consciousness. The same evidence that points to the brain as the principal seat of consciousness points to the nerve-centres situated in the spinal cord or elsewhere as the seat of a more or less subordinate consciousness or intelligence.” Ireland, Blot on the Brain, 26—“I do not take it for proved that consciousness is entirely confined to the brain.”
In spite of these opinions, however, we must grant that the general consensus among psychologists is upon the other side. Dewey, Psychology, 349—“The sensory and motor nerves have points of meeting in the spinal cord. When a stimulus is transferred from a sensory nerve to a motor without the conscious intervention of the mind, we have reflex action.... If something approaches the eye, the stimulus is transferred to the spinal cord, and instead of being continued to the brain and giving rise to a sensation, it is discharged into a motor nerve and the eye is immediately closed.... The reflex action in itself involves no consciousness.” William James, Psychology, 1:16, 66, 134, 214—“The cortex of the brain is the sole organ of consciousness in man.... If there be any consciousness pertaining to the lower centres, it is a consciousness of which the self knows nothing.... In lower animals this may not be so much the case.... The seat of the mind, so far as its dynamical relations are concerned, is somewhere in the cortex of the brain.” See also C. A. Strong, Why the Mind has a Body, 40-50.
(b) God's omnipresence is not the presence of a part but of the whole of God in every place.—This follows from the conception of God as incorporeal We reject the materialistic representation that God is composed of material elements which can be divided or sundered. There is no multiplication or diffusion of his substance to correspond with the parts of his dominions. The one essence of God is present at the same moment in all.
1 Kings 8:27—“the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain (circumscribe) thee.” God must be present in all his essence and all his attributes in every place. He is “totus in omni parte.” Alger, Poetry of the Orient: “Though God extends beyond Creation's rim, Each smallest atom holds the whole of him.” From this it follows that the whole Logos can be united to and be present in the man Christ Jesus, while at the same time he fills and governs the whole universe; and so the whole Christ can be united to, and can be present in, the single believer, as fully as if that believer were the only one to receive of his fulness.
A. J. Gordon: “In mathematics the whole is equal to the sum of its parts. But we know of the Spirit that every part is equal to the whole. Every church, every true body of Jesus Christ, has just as much of Christ as every other, and each has the whole Christ.” Mat. 13:20—“where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” “The parish priest of austerity Climbed up in a high church steeple, To be nearer God so that he might Hand his word down to the people. And in sermon script he daily wrote What he thought was sent from heaven, And he dropt it down on the people's heads Two times one day in seven. In his age God said, ‘Come down and die,’ And he cried out from the steeple, ‘Where art thou, Lord?’ And the Lord replied, ‘Down here among my people.’ ”