Transcendence vs Omnipresence - Contradiction or Paradox?
Earlier I discussed God's transcendence, i.e., God is beyond all creation and is apart from it. Yet God's spirit is present within you and me, but only as God gives life to a tree so that it can bear fruit. Without this life, the tree is dead. The roots, branches, leaves, and fruits are alive as long as it has this "life" within it. Yet this life within it doesn't die when the tree dies, because this life is composed of spirit, it is indestructible, it is immortal. This life exists in the supernatural, and is non-spatiotemporal.
We can liken this relationship to the sun and its surroundings. The sun's rays give light and heat to those objects surrounding it, such as the planets. We can absorb the heat from the sun, and we can optically capture the light from the sun, and although the sun's heat and light are within us, we do not contain the sun, nor does the sun contain us or its planets. This is simply an analogy to explain, generally, the operation of God's grace within what He created.
God being both transcendent and omnipresent is not a contradiction, but a paradox. If God were only transcendent without being omnipresent, we would not exist, because without this life force, God's spirit, we would not be discussing this subject, because without God's spirit, none of us would exist.
Showing that transcendence and omnipresence are not contradictory Divine attributes is only the beginning. If that is all there is, it would be bad news for the following reason. The light and heat that bursts forth from the sun never returns to the sun. If that analogy applied to us, our light would never return to The Source of Our Light. That is where the analogy ends, because our spirit or soul, is meant to return to Our Source - eternally. That is why, we cannot explain, in spatio-temporal terms, the true meaning of transcendence and omnipresence. However, that is all we have to work with to explain this paradox.
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