The Breath of God

The question today for our theological discussion is:

Shall we pray to God’s Presence and Power in the Cosmos, opening ourselves to the infilling of Sprit?  Or shall we center on the Spirit within, allowing it to emerge? Also known as the “Let It In/Let It Out Controversy”.

This question is just another manifestation of a fundamental problem within theology regarding the definition of God.  In Van Harvey’s A Handbook of Theological Terms, it is noted that in Christian Theology, God is “both a proper name and an abstract noun for deity.”  Within this twofold meaning lies “the problem of relating the God who may be named and addressed in prayer to the absolute and underlying power of the universe called deity”.

We are immediately faced with multiple paradoxes.  How can we ever know that which is absolute and incomprehensible? How can the finite comprehend the infinite? How can the personal symbols of our faith be reconciled with the symbols for the changeless, timeless, omnipotent, ineffable absolute?  How can God be both immanent and transcendent? As Harvey points out, since Kierkegaard paradox itself has been “defended because it is said to point to the inability of man’s reason to grasp the infinite nature of God.  All true theological doctrines, therefore, are alleged to be paradoxical…..”

In such paradox, “Traditionally, Christian Theology has asserted both the immanence and transcendence of God”…….transcendence as “that which stands ‘over against’ all finite Being as such, hence a term for God, the ground and source of all being” and at the polar opposite immanence “that technical term used to denote the nearness or presence or indwelling of God in the Creation”. 

At the heart of Unity’s Metaphysical Theology lies the same paradox of a Oneness that is both transcendent and immanent.  One Presence and One Power in the universe and in our lives.  This Oneness is not a being, but Being itself.  In Revealing Word, Charles Fillmore speaks of  “Transcendent God----God above or beyond God’s universe, apart from it.  God is more than God’s universe; God is prior to and is exalted above it, but at once God is in the universe as the very essence of it.  God is both transcendent and immanent”. How could an Omnipresent God or Omnipresence be otherwise? 

In theologian Paul Tillich’s book The New Being in his chapter on The Paradox of Prayer, Tillich comments on the Apostle Paul’s statement in Romans 8:26-27 where the Apostle says, “we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words”.  Tillich says “God Himself in us: that is what Spirit means.  Spirit is another word for ‘God present’, with shaking, inspiring, transforming power.  Something in us, which is not we ourselves, intercedes before God for us.  We cannot bridge the gap between God and ourselves even through the most intensive and frequent prayers; the gap between God and ourselves can be bridged only by God”.

So the answer to our question: Shall we pray to God’s Presence and Power in the Cosmos, opening ourselves to the infilling of Sprit?  Or shall we center on the Spirit within, allowing it to emerge? Also known as the “Let It In/Let It Out Controversy”. In Genesis 2:7 we read of God forming man from the dust of the ground and that Spirit “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being”.  So the answer is both, for Spirit which is our life continues to breathe life into us and with every exhale we allow Spirit to emerge from us. There is no controversy, for God’s breath is ours……….. a very natural in and out.