Omnipresence of God
THE OMNIPRESENT KING OF AGES
He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.
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Expounding on the Greek kairotic expression on the omnipresence of God
The phrase "kairotic expression" (sometimes transliterated or conflated with kyretic in colloquial preaching), refers to a famously known teaching in modern theological and philosophical circles. It uses the framework of ancient Greek thought to conceptualize the omnipresence of God not as a static, passive ether distributed across physical space, but as a dynamic, transcendent reality that operates entirely outside the boundaries of linear time (chronos) and physical constraints.
The core expression states:
"God can be where He is, on His way to where He is going, and by the time He gets to where He is going, He has already arrived. By the time He arrives, He is still in the same place He was before He left... and He bumps into Himself while He is in transition because there is nowhere where there is a 'where' that God is not."
Deconstructing the Expression
To fully expound on this paradox, we must look at how it intersects with classical Greek concepts of time, space, and divine nature:
1. Kairos vs. Chronos (The Dimension of Time)
The ancient Greeks split time into two definitions:
· Chronos (χρόνος): Quantitative, sequential, linear time—the ticking of a clock.
· Kairos (καιρός): Qualitative, opportune, or divine time. It is the "pregnant pause" or the moment where eternity breaks into history.
When applied to omnipresence, a kairotic understanding means God does not travel through chronos. He does not wait for 2:00 PM to become 2:01 PM, nor does He travel from Point A to Point B. Because God exists in the permanent "now" of eternity (Aion), His movements are not sequential journeys but simultaneous, immediate realities. He is already at the destination before the journey through human history even begins.
2. The Transcendent "Where"
In spatial physics, two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Human language forces us to use spatial coordinates ("here," "there," "where"). The expression humorously notes that God "bumps into Himself in transition". This is a poetic way of saying God cannot move to a vacuum where He doesn't already exist.
As classical theologians like Augustine noted, God is not physically stretched out across the universe like fog or light. Instead, the universe exists inside the presence of God. He is fully present at every point in space simultaneously.
3. "Lowering the Voltage" of Divine Being
The final part of this traditional expression states that while God is overwhelmingly everywhere, He can "lower the voltage of His being" to be somewhere specific.
This addresses the theological tension between God's omnipresence (being everywhere fundamentally) and His manifest presence (revealing Himself intimately in a specific moment or place). If God manifested His raw, unfiltered reality everywhere at once, finite material creation would be consumed. Therefore, He condenses or localizes His presence—such as in the burning bush, the Incarnation, or inside a quiet moment of human prayer—filtering His infinite power so that finite humanity can experience Him without being overwhelmed.
The phrase you are referring to is famously known in modern theological and philosophical circles as the "kairotic expression" (sometimes transliterated or conflated with kyretic in colloquial preaching). It uses the framework of ancient Greek thought to conceptualize the omnipresence of God not as a static, passive ether distributed across physical space, but as a dynamic, transcendent reality that operates entirely outside the boundaries of linear time (chronos) and physical constraints.
The core expression states:
"God can be where He is, on His way to where He is going, and by the time He gets to where He is going, He has already arrived. By the time He arrives, He is still in the same place He was before He left... and He bumps into Himself while He is in transition because there is nowhere where there is a 'where' that God is not."
Deconstructing the Expression
To fully expound on this paradox, we must look at how it intersects with classical Greek concepts of time, space, and divine nature:
1. Kairos vs. Chronos (The Dimension of Time)
The ancient Greeks split time into two definitions:
· Chronos (χρόνος): Quantitative, sequential, linear time—the ticking of a clock.
· Kairos (καιρός): Qualitative, opportune, or divine time. It is the "pregnant pause" or the moment where eternity breaks into history.
When applied to omnipresence, a kairotic understanding means God does not travel through chronos. He does not wait for 2:00 PM to become 2:01 PM, nor does He travel from Point A to Point B. Because God exists in the permanent "now" of eternity (Aion), His movements are not sequential journeys but simultaneous, immediate realities. He is already at the destination before the journey through human history even begins.
2. The Transcendent "Where"
In spatial physics, two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Human language forces us to use spatial coordinates ("here," "there," "where"). The expression humorously notes that God "bumps into Himself in transition". This is a poetic way of saying God cannot move to a vacuum where He doesn't already exist.
As classical theologians like Augustine noted, God is not physically stretched out across the universe like fog or light. Instead, the universe exists inside the presence of God. He is fully present at every point in space simultaneously.
3. "Lowering the Voltage" of Divine Being
The final part of this traditional expression states that while God is overwhelmingly everywhere, He can "lower the voltage of His being" to be somewhere specific.
This addresses the theological tension between God's omnipresence (being everywhere fundamentally) and His manifest presence (revealing Himself intimately in a specific moment or place). If God manifested His raw, unfiltered reality everywhere at once, finite material creation would be consumed. Therefore, He condenses or localizes His presence—such as in the burning bush, the Incarnation, or inside a quiet moment of human prayer—filtering His infinite power so that finite humanity can experience Him without being overwhelmed.
The Augustinian Dimension: Non-Spatial Totality
In The Confessions and De Trinitate, Saint Augustine radically redefined omnipresence by stripping it of physical imagery. He argued that God is incorporeal and indivisible; He does not fill the universe the way water fills a sponge or air fills a room.
Augustine’s view condenses into two distinct paradoxes:
· The Spatial Paradox (Wholly Everywhere): Material objects are distributed across space—a hand is not a foot. God, however, has no physical extension or parts. He is not "partly here and partly there"; God is wholly present at every single point of creation simultaneously.
· The Temporal Paradox (The Eternal Now): In Book 11 of Confessions, Augustine explains that time (chronos) is merely a creation, a stretching out of human consciousness. God sits outside this timeline in an unchanging, permanent "Now" (Eternity). He does not look back at the past or look forward to the future; He simply acts in a singular, eternal presence.
Scriptural Foundations
The Bible contains several major texts that mirror this Augustinian framework of non-spatial, all-encompassing presence:
1. The Spatial Dimension (Uncontained and Whole)
Psalm 139:7–10
"Where can I go from your Spirit? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there..." This text perfectly matches the idea that there is no geographical coordinate or spiritual depth where God is absent.
Jeremiah 23:24
"‘Can a man hide himself in secret places so that I cannot see him?’ declares the Lord. ‘Do I not fill heaven and earth?’" God does not occupy space alongside creation; His reality completely saturates and encompasses it.
1 Kings 8:27
"But will God really dwell on earth? The heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built!" This supports Augustine's assertion that God is not contained by spatial boundaries; rather, space is contained within God.
2. The Temporal Dimension (The Ever-Present Now)
Exodus 3:14
"God said to Moses, ‘I AM WHO I AM.’" God defines His very identity not in the past tense or future tense, but as absolute, continuous existence.
Isaiah 57:15
"For thus says the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity..." God resides in "eternity"—a reality distinct from linear time.
Colossians 1:17
"He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together." Christ is not just chronologically prior; He sustains the very fabric of space and time from a position of ultimate transcendence.
This distinction perfectly articulated in the conceptualisation capturing the absolute heart of the epistemic divide between theology and physics. To validate and expand slightly on this insight, we can look at the two different destinations these disciplines are marching toward:
1. The Theological Dimension: Derived from Divinity
As you noted, the theologian does not build this concept from the ground up using human logic or measurement. Instead, it is an apophatic or revealed concept—it is perceived as a truth dropped down from a divine source (revelation).
Because it belongs to the realm of the infinite, the theologian accepts that it should transcend human comprehension. The paradoxes (like "bumping into oneself") are not errors to be solved; they are structural boundaries showing where human language fails to describe absolute divinity. The final goal for the theologian is not a formula, but doxology (worship) and mystery.
2. The Physicist’s Dimension: Quod Erat Demonstrandum (Q.E.D.)
The physicist, by contrast, operates under a strict rule: if it cannot be measured, calculated, and integrated into the existing framework of natural law, it cannot be claimed as a fundamental truth of the universe.
When a physicist encounters a mind-bending reality like quantum entanglement, they cannot simply rest in the mystery. They must find the mathematical pattern, the mathematical principles, and the wave equations that govern it. The phenomenon must harmonize with known formulas (or elegantly rewrite them), ultimately leading to that definitive moment of verification: Quod erat demonstrandum ("which was to be demonstrated").
The Convergence of Wonder
What makes this comparison so profound is that even though their methods and starting points are completely opposite, both disciplines arrive at the exact same boundary of human intuition.
The theologian looks at God and says, "He is everywhere at once, outside of time."
The physicist looks at space-time math and says, "At the fundamental level, distance and linear time do not exist as we perceive them."
One reaches this truth through divine revelation; the other calculates it through rigorous methodology. But both force the human mind to admit that reality is vastly deeper, stranger, and more interconnected than our everyday senses lead us to believe.
To dissect complementarity, we must look at a concept born in the crucible of early 20th-century quantum physics that became so philosophically rich that theologians immediately seized upon it to resolve ancient paradoxes about the divine nature.
The concept was formulated by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr in 1927. In short, complementarity states that two seemingly contradictory, mutually exclusive descriptions of a single reality are both necessary to fully understand it, depending on how you look at it.
1. The Physics Dimension: Wave-Particle Duality
Before quantum mechanics, physics assumed an object was either a wave (like a ripple in water) or a particle (like a marble). They require completely different mathematical formulations. A wave is spread out over space; a particle is localized to a precise point.
However, experiments showed that subatomic entities, like electrons or light photons, behave as both particles and waves.
If you set up an experiment to measure where a photon hits a screen, it acts like a precise, localized particle.
If you set up an experiment to measure how it moves through space, it forms interference patterns like a spread-out wave.
Niels Bohr argued that it is a mistake to ask, "Is light fundamentally a wave or a particle?" The answer is that it possesses a dual nature. Wave and particle properties are complementary: you cannot witness both behaviours at the exact same instant in a single experiment, yet you cannot fully define "light" without both descriptions. The act of human measurement—the framework of the observer—determines which face of reality reveals itself.
2. The Theological Dimension: Transcendence and Immanence
For centuries, theologians struggled with a parallel structural paradox regarding the omnipresence of God. How can God be two completely opposite things at once?
Transcendence: God is infinitely far, outside of time (kairotic), uncontained by space, totally distinct from the physical universe, and overwhelmingly powerful.
Immanence: God is intimately close, dwelling inside human hearts, speaking in a quiet whisper, and localizing His presence in specific human historical events ("lowering the voltage").
Historically, critics argued that this is a logical contradiction: something cannot be infinitely vast and structurally localized simultaneously.
When theologian-physicists (most notably John Polkinghorne, a quantum physicist turned Anglican priest) looked at Bohr’s complementarity, they realized physics had just provided a perfect vocabulary for this divine mystery.
Feature
Quantum Physics (Light)
Theology (God)
The Contradictory States
Continuous Wave (Spread out everywhere) vs. Localized Particle (Here, right now).
Transcendence (Omnipresent, filling eternity) vs. Immanence (Manifested, localized presence).
The Role of the Context
The experimental setup determines whether light acts as a wave or a particle.
The mode of divine interaction determines whether humanity encounters the infinite Cosmic Ruler or the intimate, personal presence.
The Synthesis
The photon is a singular reality that encompasses both properties.
God is a singular Being whose nature perfectly harmonizes both attributes.
The Ultimate Conceptual Bridge: The Incarnation
Complementarity found its most profound theological application in the doctrine of the Incarnation (the idea of Christ being fully God and fully man).
For a long time, standard human logic balked at the idea of a "God-Man." How can a single entity be finite (needing sleep, bound to a human body) and infinite (sustaining the cosmos) at the same time?
Using the lens of complementarity, theologians can argue that "Divine" and "Human" act exactly like "Wave" and "Particle". They appear completely contradictory to our limited macroscopic human logic. Yet, just as the physicist accepts the paradox of the electron because the math and observations demand it, the theologian accepts the paradox of Christ because revelation demands it. They are two complementary views of one unified, transcendent reality.
Bohr famously loved this concept so much he designed a coat of arms featuring the Taijitu (the Yin-Yang symbol) with the motto Contraria sunt complementa—"Opposites are complementary."
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