Divine Spatiality

Timothy Gorringe ( A Theology of the Built Environment: Justice, Empowerment, Redemption ) summarizes Barth’s idea of “divine spatiality”: “God’s ‘eminent spatiality’ . . . grounds our own created spatiality. Space, in other words, is not something contingent, something which will one day be annihilated and ‘be no more,’ because it has its true and intrinsic ground in God. God is present to other things, and is able to create and give them space, because God in Godself [ugh! -PJL] possesses space apart from everything else. What truth, Barth asks, could correspond to phrases like ‘in Christ,’ ‘in God,’ and ‘in the Spirit’ if God were not genuinely and primordially spatial? ‘If it is not an incidental or superfluous belief that we can obtain space from God and find space in him, but a truth which is deceisive for the actuality of creation, reconciliation and redemption and the trustworthiness of the Word of God, we cannot evade the recognition that God himself is spatial.’”

Barth of course has a Trinitarian account of spatiality: “The origin of all space, according to him, is to be found in the Trinitarian relations. It is the fact that God is present to Godself [ugh! again PJL], that there is a divine proximity and remoteness, which is the basis and presupposition of created proximity and remoteness. God’s omnipresence is to be understood primarily as a determination of God’s love, in so far as God is not only one, unique and simple but as such is present to Godself [dittos] and therefore present to everything which by God is outside God.” In Barth’s words, “God’s omnipresence is the perfection in which he is present, and in which he, the One, who is distinct from and preeminent over anything else, possesses a place, his own place,which is distinct from all other places and also preeminent over them all . . . God’s presence necessarily means that he possesses a place, his own place, or . . . his own space . . . If God does not possess space, he can certainly be conceived as that which is one in itself and in all. But he cannot be conceived as the One who is triune, as the One who as such is the Lord of everything else.”