God’s Omnipresence and Sovereignty in Creation and Salvation
God is omnipresent, an attribute that converges with his sovereignty over creation and salvation. In the following article, the analogy of a carpenter making a chair is used to explain how different theological traditions—Semi-Pelagianism, Arminianism, and Calvinism—understand the relationship between God’s role and human responsibility in salvation, arguing that while each tradition captures some essence of truth, how God’s omnipresence and timeless sovereignty hold all things—creation, history, and salvation—within himself and without contradiction. The aim of the article is not to settle any disagreements between classical soteriological perspectives, but to inspire deeper thinking on the matter.
God’s Omnipresence
Omnipresence refers to God’s existing everywhere at once. It is commonly listed as an immutable attribute of God, unique to him alone and unchanging in his nature, as opposed to mutable attributes that humans can learn and share with God. Created objects are limited by time and space. As humans, we occupy only one place at a time. But since God created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1) and through the Son, he sustains all that has been created (Hebrews 1:3), God is present to all creation. As a biblical proof, King David famously wrote that there is nowhere in the cosmos or on earth that he could go to flee God’s presence (Psalm 139:7-12). Not even darkness could hide him from God, as even death, Sheol, and the abyss are ultimately caught up in his sovereignty, under God’s purview (12).
There are various ways to understand God’s omnipresence. The tendency is to think that there is no “place” God isn’t. If I look in the house, there is God, and if I look outdoors, there is God, and so on. But God’s presence is not like the presence of a created thing, which is present by existing in a particular time and space; otherwise, God could not be, if not for creation. As I move through a room, my body becomes present in new spaces. Yet, properly, God is spirit (John 4:24) and is not limited by space. In fact, he doesn’t even exist in the same way places exist. To exist is to have objective reality or being, but God is not defined by reality or being—he defines them. He needs no body to experience the passage of time or to exist in space. He simply is, as fundamental to his being, as he emphasized his name to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM” (Exodus 3:14; cf. Isaiah 43:10-11), an expression of the Hebrew word for being. Therefore, God is the only one who has being beyond existence itself.
Omnipresence, it follows, cannot be defined as God existing in every place. Rather, if all things exist in God, every place exists in him. (Likewise, God is not properly speaking in all time, but all moments exist in him.) This is confusing if we try to imagine space existing within an extra-spacious god or time existing within an extra-temporal being. But from a metaphysical perspective (relating to first principles, including being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space), this is why God is omnipresent; there is nothing that exists that does not have existence in his preexistent (or extraexistent) being. It could actually be said that God is the source of all existence, because in his divine creativity, all creation comes under his preexistent being.
God as Source
Consider a carpenter as a point of illustration. If I make a chair, it has its source in me. In this sense, I am sovereign over it. But, in another sense, the chair’s source is the trees that it was made from, and in even another sense, the source is the Home Depot I bought the wood from, or even the lumberjacks who harvested the wood. And this is without considering the tools necessary to create the chair or the physical universe that exists, so that a chair can even be made. Even still, God makes the trees grow (1 Corinthians 3:7) and God created Adam (Genesis 2:7) that I might exist. God even created the societies and systems that allow me to buy the wood from Home Depot in the first place.
Further, children come from their parents. Children are the product of human action and activity, but they are also under the sovereign control of biological realities that govern their being and existence. Furthermore, they are only considered children of their parents if they are defined as such sociologically. Do children, then, have their source in their parents? in biology? in sociology? or in God? Indeed, the Scriptures testify that children come from God (Psalm 127:3), who sovereignly orders all things (Ephesians 1:11). Yet children still have their source in their parents without contradiction.
These illustrations demonstrate a perspective on sources, where God is the ultimate source of all things, but there are reasonable ways to view sources that are less than God, such as human sources, scientific sources, or institutional sources. And yet, in this, it is nonsense to think that any lesser source is greater than God, the ultimate source of all that exists in time and space. In other words, I am authentically the father of my children in every sense—biologically, sociologically, etc.—yet in an ultimate sense, they exist because of God.
Soteriology and God’s Sovereign Decree
Views about the nature and agency of salvation are diverse in Christian history. Semi-Pelagianism exists in the shallow end of the theological pool, measuring at best, half an inch deep. Yet, this is a dominant theological view existing just inside the bounds of theological orthodoxy. Semi-Pelagianism is the idea that the initial step toward God—such as the desire to repent or believe—comes from human will apart from prevenient divine grace. Semi-Pelagians believe, however, that the human choice to commune with God requires divine grace to be effective.
(Semi-Pelagianism contrasts with Pelagianism, which denies that divine grace is necessary for the initial discovery of or turning to God in any way. Pelagius (354-418) taught that human beings were created with the natural ability to obey God’s law and without a propensity towards sin. Even sin, for Pelagius, is a choice. Therefore, a person must choose, apart from divine initiative, to live a good life honoring God and to turn away from sin, a highly unorthodox form of monergism.)
Semi-Pelagianism can arguably be observed in Hebrews, “Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God” (3:11-12). The author of Hebrews seems to think there is not nothing you can do to keep from an evil, unbelieving heart that leads you away from God. Theologically, it’s unclear here to what degree God is involved in this perseverance.
Arminianism steps a bit deeper into the theological pool, relying on the idea of prevenient grace. The Reformation preacher Jacobus Arminius taught that God’s grace was required preveniently to draw the human soul out of darkness into the light of Christ. Yet, it remains the individual’s responsibility to turn to Christ according to their own will and decision. The Apostle John taught that those who ‘recieve Christ,’ receive “the right to become children of God” (John 1:12). Indeed, Jesus taught that, “the work of God” is “that you believe in him whom he has sent” (John 6:29) and thus “whoever believes has eternal life” (John 6:47). Yet it is only those “who…heard and learned from the Father” that come to Christ (John 6:45) because, as Jesus says, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him” (John 6:44). The Arminian therefore emphasizes Jesus’s words about his resurrection, that, “when I am lifted up from the earth, [I] will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32). Both Semi-Pelagianism and Arminianism are widely considered to be orthodox forms of synergism.
The teachings of Calvin present an even deeper dip in the theological pool, attempting to answer philosophical questions about the means by which a person comes to Christ from a systematic line of reasoning. Calvin was a philosophical determinist, meaning that all events, including human actions, are causally determined by preceding events. This could be by the laws of nature or by God’s decree, in either case, leaving no room for free will. Calvin believed that everything in the universe was decreed before creation by God himself, or else comes under God’s continued purview, including those marked as God’s people and those marked as the reprobate. Calvin writes that “[God] adopts as sons those whom he foreknows will not be unworthy of his grace; he appoints to the damnation of death those whose dispositions he discerns will be inclined to evil” (Institutes III, xxii, 1). That foreknowledge cannot merely mean what men do, but what God sees, as Calvin clarifies, “God chooses some, and passes over others according to his own decision” (Ibid.). This is often called double predestination as it includes the election of both the saints to God’s presence and the reprobate to destruction. Modern Calvinism often denies double reprobation, contra Calvin. But what all Calvinists agree upon is that “God sent forth his Son…to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons” (Galatians 4:4-5). It is God who sends, redeems, and adopts. For Calvin, God is the only acting agent in salvation, an orthodox form of monergism.
Omnipresence and the Sovereignty of God over Salvation
Semi-Palageanism observes the chair, concluding that the maker of the chair is the originator. Indeed, when you buy a chair, you rarely see the unfashioned wood, and likely never the forest or the God who caused the trees to grow. For the Semi-Palagean, faith comes from the individual. God thereby acts upon that independent faith to bring salvation (violating the doctrine of divine impassibility). In this way, God is subordinated to the status of a tool necessary for the carpenter to make the chair, which is theologically troubling to say the least.
Arminianism recognizes that the wood from the trees and the systems for harvest and distribution must exist to undergird the building of the chair, but still emphasizes that the maker is the originator of the chair; that is, for the faithful Christian’s salvation, though it is neccesarily only possible because of the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the faith originates in the individual.
Contra Arminianism, Calvinism tends to sidestep the human will and psyche altogether, suggesting that God made the chair, irrespective of the human maker. The human confession of faith is merely in accordance with God’s sovereign election, a response preceded by the person’s regeneration by the Holy Spirit. The carpenter only makes the chair as a tool of the divine chairmaker.
As discussed, everything is in God (omnipresence), including salvation. Yet, we conceded that everything that is comes most ultimately from God, yet simultaneously from other created things (there is still a carpenter, a human agent, even though the chair most ultimately finds its source in God). The chair analogy helps us to understand how all three can be, in some sense, true.
Semi-Pelagianism rightly calls upon the individual to “choose this day who you will serve” (Joshua 24:14), noting that the call to salvation is one of service and allegiance. That is, the carpenter must want to build the chair before he chooses to do so, a motive internal to the individual human agent. Yet, that internal motive is not where salvation begins, but in God.
Arminianism rightly emphasizes prevenient grace—the Gospel with its call to faith and the urging to come to the Father, by the Holy Spirit (John 6:44, cf. Titus 2:11). That is, the carpenter needs chair plans; at least on some level, though he may be capable of designing furniture himself, he must know what a chair is and have been gifted by the divine Creator with the gift of creativity before he can craft his own chair (still, a schematic for a chair is much more helpful, such as we find in the Gospel regarding human salvation).
The Calvinist further emphasizes that there is no salvation apart from God’s sovereign decree. As the wood must be created by God and the institutional infrustructure must come into being in such a way that the carpenter can obtain materials and tools to build the chair in the first place, so too in salvation, God is sovereignly directing history, so that each person is in precisely the right place to cry out to God and be saved (Acts 17:26-27). Indeed, I cannot flap my wings and fly through the sky, because God has not designed me to do so. Yet, he has designed my adoption as a child of God; therefore, I come.
These three are all true in some sense. And yet, none are true in the fullest sense. Each theological perspective will file away contradictions to God’s sovereignty and/or human responsibility under the mystery of God. Though all analogies are imperfect, I think the carpenter and chair analogy helps us to understand the multifaceted nature of soteriology. We must not assume that one of the three perspectives—or some other idea—is true and try to figure out which, but rather to see the truth in all of them and to ask, In what sense is each true? and furthermore, What are the limitations of each?
In the sense that God created the world and works in the world according to his design, nothing can happen other than that which God knows and therefore has in this sense decreed through his working in both creation and the sustaining of creation. Yet, God created man for dominion (Genesis 1:26-28) with responsibility over the things of this earth. Every man is responsible for their misuse of dominion—sin (cf. Romans 3:23)—and every man is responsible to walk in ways ‘holy and blameless before the Lord’ (Ephesians 1:4). Still, every man is responsible for ascending the mountain of God to journey upward as even God condescends toward humankind (transfiguration).
Many find these three perspectives to be contradictory because they misunderstand God’s omnipresence (and omnitemporality or timelessness). Placing God into every place and time limits him by time and space so that his operation is limited by human free agency or man’s dominion is limited by God’s sovereignty, neither of which makes the fullest sense of the claims of Scripture. Indeed, the deepest theological pool helps us understand how God sovereignly decrees all things, yet not in a way that is contrary to or in contradiction with human liberty—a paradox from the perspective of human temporality, but not a contradiction in God. We should indeed choose Christ with the Pelagians, thanking God for his prevenient grace with the Arminians, and find ourselves secured in God, adopted as sons, by his sovereign decree with the Calvinists. For all things are ultimately caught up in him.
