Immanence and Transcendence

How can we speak of anything truly holy, most especially God, as being literally present in our sick, polluted world? In process, God is the chief exemplification of all metaphysical principles. One major principle is relativity, so that Whitehead says one of his major goals is to explain what it means to be present in another entity, We are all incarnate in one another, but in a radically inferior sense. In sharp contrast, God is omnipresent in the richest and fullest sense. That means there is a direct, immediate flow of all creaturely feeling into God, and vice verse. And God is no fair-weather friend. God experiences all the tragedies of life as well as the triumphs. How else could we think of God as all-knowing? If God is not a spacio-temporal being who can suffer, how could God even begin to understand those of us who are? In process, the highest form of knowledge is direct experience, a Da Sein (being there). Do God must be omnipresent, or God cannot be fully God. In classical theism, God and the world are thought of as antithetical, like oil and water. The world was, at best, an anti-God reality that must be escaped from if we are to attain what is truly holy. God and the world were thought of as two mutually exclusive circles, with God standing “outside” the whole order of creation, having no “real relationship” with it, to quote St. Thomas Aquinas. In turn, this meant God and the world appear as but two halves of a whole which includes them bot and transcends even God. What should this transcendent whole? Meta-God? In process, this problem vanishes. There is but one ultimate reality, God, All entities are in God. Hence process is sometimes termed pan-en-theism (all in God). Therefore all entities enjoy the highest possible intimacy with God and vice verse. We can say, along with the Medieval mystic Meister Eckhart, that “God is more in things than they are in themselves.” God works from within out. To find God is to dig deeper into our world, not leave it behind. In sum, transcendence are immanence are not mutually exclusive categories. God's immanence is God's transcendence.

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