The Omnipresence of God: How Is God Everywhere?
The omnipresence of God is His presence, whole and undivided, to every place and every moment at once. He is not spread through space like a gas filling a room; He is present as the one who keeps every location in being. That answer raises the question most readers bring, because Scripture also says that God dwells in a temple, lives in believers, and "comes near" to those who come near. Pantheists and panentheists answer by letting God and the world overlap; analytic philosophers divide over whether a being with no body can be located at all; theistic personalists doubt that a timeless, non-spatial God can be with anyone. Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) argues that we meet God's whole presence locally, and that this is how He is everywhere yet near.
Key takeaways
- The omnipresence of God means He is wholly present to every place, not partly present in each. Augustine: God is "wholly everywhere while nothing altogether contains" Him.
- Aquinas names three modes of presence. God is in all things by essence, as the cause of their being; by presence, as all lies open to His sight; and by power.
- Scripture teaches a general and a special presence. God fills heaven and earth (Jeremiah 23:24), yet comes near to those who come near (James 4:8).
- Frame-Indexed Classical Theism treats special presence as the same whole presence received at a place. Against panentheism and theistic personalism alike, nothing in God moves when we draw near, and our nearness is still real.
What is the omnipresence of God?
Omnipresence is the attribute by which God is present, whole and undivided, to every created place and thing at once. A closely related term, immensity, names God's freedom from every limit of place, a perfection He would possess even if He had made nothing. Omnipresence is immensity turned toward a world: once there are places, God is present to all of them. The distinction shows that God's omnipresence is not a fact about how large God is. It is a fact about how a God who has no size relates to things that do.
Three misreadings should be set aside at the outset. The first pictures God as a thin, invisible substance spread through the universe, so that more of Him is in a mountain than in a pebble. The second identifies God with the universe, so that to be everywhere is simply to be everything. The third treats the doctrine as a figure of speech, a pious way of saying that God knows what happens in every place without actually being present to it. The classical tradition rejects all three, and so does Scripture.
Theologians list omnipresence among the incommunicable attributes: God shares His goodness, wisdom and love with creatures in finite measure, but no creature can be whole in many places at once. The distinction between what God shares and what He does not is the subject of our piece on incommunicable attributes. Our survey of the attributes of God walks through each of the classical perfections in turn, and it is the natural companion to this article.
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Is God everywhere? What Scripture says
Scripture never uses the word omnipresence, but it teaches directly that God is everywhere. The best-known passage is David's:
"Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast." (Psalm 139:7-10)
The psalm is a meditation on being fully known, and it closes not with escape but with surrender: "Search me, O God, and know my heart" (Psalm 139:23). The same truth sounds very differently in Jeremiah, where the LORD addresses the false prophets who spoke lies in His name as though no one were listening:
"'Am I only a God nearby,' declares the LORD, 'and not a God far away? Can anyone hide in secret places so that I cannot see him?' declares the LORD. 'Do not I fill heaven and earth?' declares the LORD." (Jeremiah 23:23-24)
Here God's omnipresence is inescapable knowledge and judgment, not comfort. Solomon, dedicating the temple, adds the limit that no place can hold Him: "But will God really dwell on earth? The heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built!" (1 Kings 8:27). And Paul tells the Athenians that God "is not far from each one of us. 'For in him we live and move and have our being'" (Acts 17:27-28).
Yet Scripture also speaks of a presence that comes and goes. In the same prayer, Solomon asks that God's eyes be open toward the temple, the place of which He said, "My Name shall be there" (1 Kings 8:29). Paul writes, "Don't you know that you yourselves are God's temple and that God's Spirit lives in you?" (1 Corinthians 3:16). Jesus promises that the Father and the Son "will come to him and make our home with him" (John 14:23). And James, calling double-minded believers to repentance, writes: "Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded" (James 4:8).
So is God everywhere? Yes: God is omnipresent. But the same Scriptures that say He fills heaven and earth say He comes, dwells and draws near. A doctrine of omnipresence that cannot hold both bodies of text has not finished its work. Volume One is free to download and sets out the method the later volumes use on questions of exactly this kind.
The classical answer: whole everywhere, contained by nothing
Augustine's questions in Confessions I are still the sharpest statement of the problem: "Since, then, You fill heaven and earth, do they contain You?" If they do not, does something of God remain over? Do larger things hold more of Him? "Is, then, one part of You greater, another less? Or is it that You are wholly everywhere while nothing altogether contains You?" Augustine takes the last option. God is whole wherever He is, and no place encloses Him. The point is also personal: "I could not therefore exist, could not exist at all, O my God, unless You were in me."
Anselm, in the Monologion, held both that the Supreme Being exists in every place and that it exists in no place, and held the two together by distinguishing being contained from being present. As the Stanford Encyclopedia renders his conclusion, "the Supreme Being must be present as a whole in every different place at once." Anselm's wider argument is engaged in Resolving the Free Will Dilemma.
Thomas Aquinas gave the doctrine its working form in the Summa Theologiae (I, q. 8). God "is in all things; not, indeed, as part of their essence, nor as an accident," but as an agent is present to what it acts upon. Since God's proper effect is being itself, "as long as a thing has being, God must be present to it," as "light is caused in the air by the sun as long as the air remains illuminated." Hence: "God is in all things, and innermostly."
God's omnipresence is not a second fact added to creation. It follows from creation out of nothing and from conservation. Whatever exists is held in being by God at every moment, and to be held in being by God is to have God present to you. So "by the very fact that He gives being to the things that fill every place, He Himself fills every place," and fills it whole: "as the soul is whole in every part of the body, so is God whole in all things and in each one."
Aquinas then distinguishes three modes: "God is in all things by His power, inasmuch as all things are subject to His power; He is by His presence in all things, as all things are bare and open to His eyes; He is in all things by His essence, inasmuch as He is present to all as the cause of their being." He adds a mode by grace: God "is especially in the rational creature which knows and loves Him actually or habitually."
This account sits easily beside divine simplicity, since a God without parts cannot be present in pieces, and it is the root of the classical description of God as the ground of being. Its strength is that it explains why God is everywhere. The weakness its critics press is that "presence" can sound like nothing more than causal dependence, and a cause is not obviously a companion. The tradition behind this answer is set out in our article on Thomism.
Pantheism and panentheism: God and world overlapping
Pantheism holds that God and the universe are identical, so that God is everywhere because God is everything. Panentheism is more careful. In the Stanford Encyclopedia's definition, it "considers God and the world to be inter-related with the world being in God and God being in the world." Unlike pantheism, it "maintains the identity and significance of the non-divine," and unlike classical theism it allows the world to affect God. Process theism, as a school, is its best-known modern form.
The case for these positions is strong. They take divine immanence seriously where much popular theism treats God as a distant engineer. They can read Acts 17:28, "in him we live and move and have our being," without strain, and they promise a God whose intimacy with creation is as close as a self is to its own life. The encyclopedia calls panentheism "an increasingly popular alternative to classical theism," and the popularity is earned: it speaks to a real hunger for a God who is not absent from the world He made.
The weaknesses are equally real. Critics charge that "the panentheistic God is a limited God," because a God whose being includes or depends on the world is bounded by it. John Cooper concludes that panentheists "reduce the scope and power of God's immanence," and others argue that on this view God loses His metaphysical independence from creatures, which is the doctrine of aseity given up. Even the key word is unstable: the encyclopedia notes that "numerous meanings have been attributed to the 'in' in panentheism."
Underneath, the deeper difficulty is the one Augustine refused. If the world is part of God, or God's body, then God is present to places the way a body is present to its regions: more here, less there. That is the spread-out picture again, only warmer. The two whole positions in this dispute are set side by side in our piece on theistic personalism.
Can a non-spatial God be anywhere? The analytic debate
Yes, on both leading analytic accounts, though they disagree about what being somewhere means for a being with no body. The narrower analytic question is whether God is omnipresent literally, or only by knowing and acting.
The first reduces presence to knowledge and power. Richard Swinburne, as the Stanford Encyclopedia reports, holds that God "can cause effects at every place directly" and "knows what is happening at every place without the information coming to him."
William Lane Craig defends a version of this account in his Reasonable Faith answers: God "can be said to be omnipresent in the sense that He is causally active at and cognizant of every point in space," so that "God's omnipresence is explained by and reducible to His omnipotence and His omniscience." Craig's instinct here is sound. It keeps God off the map; it refuses to make Him material; and it reads heaven as God's realm in a way meant "to underscore, not God's spatial location, but His transcendence of the world." It also tracks two of Aquinas's three modes almost exactly, which links it to omnipotence and omniscience.
What it leaves out is the third mode, presence by essence. If God's presence is only His knowing and acting, then presence proper has become a courtesy title for two other attributes. Everitt presses the point from the other side: if divine presence is only analogical, "it would be clearer to say straightforwardly that God is not omnipresent at all." The reduction protects transcendence at the cost of the very thing the psalmist could not flee.
The second account goes the opposite way and takes location literally. Hud Hudson defines entension this way: "an object entends a region r just in case it is wholly and entirely located at r," and he offers a "literal occupation account of omnipresence as ubiquitous entension." God is wholly located at the region that includes all space, and wholly at every part of it. Alexander Pruss endorses a version adjusted to allow for divine timelessness.
The account's strength is that it honours "Do not I fill heaven and earth?" without paraphrase, and it recovers Augustine's wholly in a precise vocabulary. Its cost is that Hudson accepts that God would then count as a material object, a conclusion Ross Inman, though sympathetic to the approach, rejects. And Gasser argues that the view struggles to explain the idea that "God acts differently at different places," which is the special-presence problem from Scripture appearing again. Volume Six, Resolving Rest & Relativity, takes up what "location" means once physics has its say.
The personalist worry: can a timeless God be with us?
On the personalist reading, no: a God who is timeless and non-spatial cannot be with anyone in the sense the word carries for us. This is the sharpest objection to the classical account of the omnipresence of God, and it is relational rather than metaphysical. It is pressed by theistic personalism, the name Brian Davies gave to the view that God is a person in much the sense we are, without our limits, and pressed hardest by the open theists Clark Pinnock, John Sanders and Gregory Boyd.
To be with someone, the worry runs, is to share a here and a now. A God who is timeless and non-spatial is present to everything in exactly the same way, and a presence that is the same everywhere looks, from where we stand, like a presence that is nowhere in particular. If God never comes nearer or goes farther, then "Come near to God and he will come near to you" names nothing on God's side at all.
The worry comes from Scripture and from the life of faith. The Bible narrates a God who comes down, dwells, withdraws His glory and returns. Believers know seasons of nearness and seasons of wilderness, and they do not experience these as changes in their own mood alone. A doctrine that can only say "God was equally present the whole time" seems to deny something the saints report. The personalist reads presence from our human, finite frame, and from that frame the objection is entirely fair. Whether God is in this sense a person like us is the deeper question beneath it.
The weaknesses appear when the remedy is applied. To make God nearer to one creature by moving Him toward it is to locate Him competitively, nearer here and so farther there, the way bodies are located. That costs His immensity and makes Him an object among objects. It also turns James 4:8 into a transaction inside one frame, in which God waits for our move and then answers it, the picture the open theists accept and the classical tradition denies. The same pressure drives the question of whether God can change His mind. Volume Four, Resolving Immutability & Interaction, carries the relational question at full length.
How Frame-Indexed Classical Theism answers
Frame-Indexed Classical Theism begins from a single principle: a being's nature determines the frame through which it perceives and relates to reality, and so a term like presence has a meaning native to God's frame and a meaning native to ours. The dispute between Thomists, panentheists and theistic personalists persists because each side defines presence from one frame and requires the other to satisfy it.
In God's own frame, presence is absolute. Volume Four defines God's relationship to His creatures as "perfect, timeless communion: complete interaction, absolute presence, and undivided love." Volume Three draws the parallel with time: just as God's omnipresence "means that every location in the cosmos is immediately 'Here' to Him," every moment of history is immediately "Now" to Him (Resolving Time & Eternity). Nothing is far from God; He is at no distance from anything. He upholds the creature "from within at every moment of the exchange, nearer to each word than the speaker himself."
In our frame, presence is located and relational, so we meet God's whole presence locally: not a portion of God allotted to this room, but the whole God received here, in the measure and manner a creature at this place can receive Him. This is the step that dissolves the puzzle of special presence. The temple, the indwelling Spirit and the drawing near of James 4:8 are not a second presence added to the first. They are the one whole presence met by a creature at a place. Aquinas had already said that God is "especially in the rational creature which knows and loves Him"; this reading locates the "especially" in the reception, where Aquinas's own wording puts it.
Volume Four applies this to James 4:8. The creature's drawing near is "a real, free, sequential act." God's drawing near is "the eternally willed profile of His one act meeting that approach, received by the creature as new nearness … at exactly the coordinate where the creature turns." Jesus' parable has the same structure:
"So he got up and went to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him." (Luke 15:20)
The compassion was already watching the road. The embrace is no less real for that. It is certain.
Each party is right about something. Augustine and Aquinas are right about God's frame; the personalists are right about ours; the pantheists are right that nothing lies outside God's reach; Craig is right that God is not a thing on the map. The shared error is the Many Beings Fallacy: one frame's definition of presence made to govern the other.
Volume Six, the physics volume, adds one more point: "location is already relativity: to be somewhere is to be positioned with respect to other somewheres." A God located at the maximal region would be positioned relative to His own creation. The Ground of every place is therefore no place. Newton called space God's sensorium; Volume Six concludes that it was "not space perceiving, but the omnipresent God sustaining, whom the heavens cannot contain."
Two consequences follow. God's presence does not crowd out our free will, because a presence that sustains an act is not a rival cause; Book 1 argues that what is settled in God's frame makes our choices no less free in ours. And in the Incarnation the Son's body was in Galilee alone while the Son never ceased to be present to all things, the Reformed answer to kenoticism and to the Lutheran claim that Christ's humanity shares divine omnipresence. The statement of Frame-Indexed Classical Theism gathers these conclusions in one place.
If God is everywhere, why does He feel absent?
Presence is not the same as manifestation. God is present to every place in being and power; He does not show Himself at every place, and a creature can stand inside His presence without receiving it as presence. Isaiah names the commonest cause: "But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear" (Isaiah 59:2). The separation is real, and it lies on the side of reception, not of God's location.
Not every felt absence is explained by sin, and the believer who searches for God in the dark is not always being disciplined. That harder case is the subject of divine hiddenness, and Volume Two, Resolving the Problem of Evil, treats it at length. The frame distinction keeps the two questions apart: whether God is present is settled in His frame; whether we perceive Him is a fact about ours.
At the far end of the same line stands the beatific vision, in which the presence that was always there is finally received without veil, though still by a creature and never as God sees Himself. Eastern theology approaches the same question through the essence and energies distinction. And apophatic theology adds a caution every section of this article assumes: "present" is said of God by analogy, never in the sense in which a chair is present in a room. Our article on hiddenness takes up the strongest form of the objection.
Frequently asked questions
Is God in hell?
God is present in hell in being and in justice, since nothing exists that He does not sustain. What hell lacks is His favour. Paul says the condemned "will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the majesty of his power" (2 Thessalonians 1:9). The exclusion is from presence as blessing, not from presence as being.
Is omnipresence the same as pantheism?
No. Pantheism says God is everything; the omnipresence of God says He is wholly present to everything while remaining distinct from it. Augustine's formula marks the difference: God fills heaven and earth, yet "nothing altogether contains" Him. A God identical with the world would be contained by it.
Is God present in the same way everywhere?
On God's side there is one presence, whole and undivided. On the creature's side there are many ways of receiving it: as the cause of being in a stone, as covenant presence in the temple, as indwelling in the believer, as glory in the saints. Aquinas calls the last of these God's special mode in those who know and love Him.
What is the difference between omnipresence and immensity?
Immensity is God's freedom from every limit of place, which He would have even if nothing existed. The omnipresence of God is that immensity related to a created world: God present to every place that actually exists.
Was Jesus omnipresent while He was on earth?
In His human nature, no: His body was in one place at a time, and He walked from town to town. In His divine nature, the eternal Son never ceased to sustain and be present to all things. This is the classical answer, and our article on kenoticism explains why the alternative, that the Son laid omnipresence aside, costs too much.
Where to go from here
Psalm 139 begins as a man trying to find somewhere God is not, and it ends with him asking God to search him. That turn is the whole doctrine in miniature. God is omnipresent in the same way on both sides of it; the presence that cannot be escaped is the same presence that can be welcomed, and the difference lies with the one who receives it. If you want the method behind this answer, Volume One, Resolving the Free Will Dilemma, is free to download.
