Personal & Geographical Gods: Transcendence

This is the second instalment of a series on the implications of a personal God.

In the previous post, we looked at Joseph Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity, and saw how Judaism option to switch from a god who is connected to a locale (numen locale) to a god connected to a person (numen personale), a seemingly simple choice, has massive implications. In that post, we saw how a personal God, one whose works are no longer tied to any particular locale, increased the intimacy between God and man.

This is, however, not the only fruit of a personal God.

A second upshot Ratzinger observed is the role this switch plays to the human understanding of God’s transcendence. As said in the previous post, Ratzinger argued that unhooking God’s connection to a place and hooking him onto what Ratzinger calls “the plane of I and You” makes him present to us wherever we are. God now has a greater immanence that spans across the whole cartography of a person’s life and is, as Augustine once put it, more intimate to me than I am to myself.

At the same time that a numen personale makes God more intimate, Ratzinger also observed that the move away from a geographical god “moves [God] away into the transcendence of the illimitable” (83). Several important implications flow from this move.

The first, Ratzinger wrote, is that because “He is not anywhere in particular” and is “always to be found”, it makes it more credible to believe of a God “who is always near”. We can put this another way and say that God now makes good on a promise to be always near, and it is now more credible to believe of a God who is Himself faithful to those promises.

The second implication that Ratzinger observed is that because God is transcendent, he is also omnipotent. Recall in a previous post that a numen locale would be apprehended as being more potent only in certain places, and its potency would dissipate the farther someone is removed from the holy site. By contrast, a numen personale, whose potency operates because of his faithfulness to a relationship to a person, has a potency that abides regardless of where that relationship is situated. It is faithfulness, not geography, that charts the exercise of God’s power or its abstention.

The third implication Ratzinger picked up on is a subtle one that follows the first two, and becomes apparent a little later in the same chapter, which we will cover next week.

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