Omnipresence

Omnipresence is the attribute of being present everywhere, and the scriptural statements of it are among the most memorable in the theistic traditions. "Where shall I go from your spirit, or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there" (Psalm 139:7-8). "Do I not fill heaven and earth?" (Jeremiah 23:24). "Wherever you turn, there is the face of God" (Qur'an 2:115), and "We are nearer to him than his jugular vein" (50:16).

Classical theology is careful about what this does not mean. God is not spatially extended, diffused through space like a fluid, or divided so that part of God is here and part elsewhere, all of which would make God material and composite. The scholastic account, in Aquinas' Summa Theologiae I.8, distinguishes three ways of speaking: God is present by power, since everything is subject to God; by knowledge, since everything lies open to God; and by essence, since God causes the being of everything and must therefore be immediately present to it as an agent is present to what it acts upon. God is in things as a cause is in its effects, not as water is in a sponge.

A tension follows immediately, and every tradition handles it. If God is everywhere, what is meant by special presence, the Temple, the Kaaba, the sacraments, the indwelling Spirit, the holy place? The standard resolution distinguishes presence of essence, which is universal, from presence of manifestation, grace or covenant, which is particular; the holy place is where God has undertaken to be found rather than where God is more located.

Some traditions press the attribute to its limit. Kabbalistic and Hasidic thought made the formula leit atar panui minneh, "no place is empty of him", central, and drew frankly acosmic conclusions from it. Advaita Vedanta arrives at neighbouring territory by another route, in Brahman as the inner controller of all beings. The distinctions that matter here are with pantheism, which identifies God with the totality, and panentheism, which holds the world to be within God while God exceeds it; classical theism asserts neither, maintaining that God is wholly present to everything without being any of it and without the world being a part of God.

Article one distinguishes omnipresence as a general attribute from special modes of presence, grace, covenant, incarnation. A specific and historically consequential version of that distinction split the Reformation itself, and it turned on Christ's body rather than on God in general.

Martin Luther held that Christ's human nature, by virtue of its union with the divine nature in one person, shares in the attribute of ubiquity, being present everywhere, which he used to defend the real, bodily presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper without requiring the bread to travel or Christ's body to leave heaven: if the human nature can be present wherever the divine nature is present, it can be present on every altar at once. Huldrych Zwingli rejected this as confusing the two natures, holding that a genuine human body is located in one place at a time and ascended bodily to heaven, so the Supper must be a memorial and spiritual feeding rather than a claim about Christ's body being locally present in the elements.

The two reformers met at the Marburg Colloquy in 1529, convened to reconcile them and unite the Protestant movement against a common threat, and agreed on fourteen of fifteen articles of faith before failing decisively on this one, the nature of Christ's presence in the sacrament. The failure had lasting institutional consequences, hardening the separate Lutheran and Reformed confessional traditions that persist today, and it is among the clearest cases in Christian history of one application of a general divine attribute, here extended to Christ's human nature, determining the shape of separate church bodies rather than remaining private theological opinion.