A netfriend wrote:

mark, by what logical means can you suggest on one hand that God is infinite (eternal) and on the other that God being within each of us would mean that only a successive part of God would be in each of us? or what are you saying?

Mark responded:

My belief is that God is the Ground of all Being (or that which creates and sustains all Being) and that all Being is within God (pinched from Paul Tillich). As such we can only talk about God in metaphor. God is larger than infinite and eternal because those measurements are grounded in God and God is not limited to that which God creates. The finite cannot fully contain the infinite. No believer has the totality of God within them for even the sum of all total finite being is less than God. God is within Being but also outside of Being. This has important ramifications becauise:

1. No church or denomination or individual can claim to know God’s mind totally.

2. Since God is not contained fully by any church or denomination or individual, and none of these can know God’s mind fully, then God may reveal himself / herself / itself in an ongoing manner that is not restricted to the fallible finite bible.

3. If the above two are both true then the concept of God is always evolving and each generation will have a different answer to Bonhoeffer’s “Who is Christ for us today?” and a different concept of God.

4. Sartre said that people can either live with authenticity, completely free to choose ones own values and ways of living or with “bad faith” (self deception?) which is a belief in a lack of freedom (like Calvinists!). The above assumes a god who favours authenticity and freedom of choice.

“Being” I define in the same manner as Jean-Paul Sartre and in his existentialist terms.:

“Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what is is.” Being includes both Being-in-itself and Being-for-itself, but the latter is a nihilation of the former. As contrsated with Existence, Being is all-embracing and objective rather than individual and subjective.

“Being-for-itself” is the nihilation of Being-in-itself; consciousness conceived as a lack of Being, a desire for Being, a relation to Being. By bringing Nothingness into the world the For-itself can stand out from Being and judge other beings by knowing what it is not. Each For-itself is the nihilation of a particular being. It is the human way of Being which is fluid and open to possibilities and imagination.

“Being-in-itself” is non-conscious Being. It is the Being of the phenomenon and overflows the knowledge which we have of it. It is a plenitude, a fixed and complete being, and strictly speaking we can say of it only that it is. It has no relation to itself or to anything else.

Quoting from Sartre in Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre’ (Translated by Patrick O’Brian; Penguin; London:1984) p 436 – 443 … interviews with Sartre just before his death

[DB = De Beauvoir S = Sartre]

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DB: And when you wrote Being and Nothingness did you vindicate or try to vindicate your disbelief in God philosophically?

S: Yes, of course, it had to be vindicated. I tried to show that God would have to be the “in-itself for itself,” that is, an infinite in-itself inhabited by an infinite for-itself, and that this “in-itself for-itself” was itself contradictory and could not consitute a proof of God’s existence.

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Sartre also said “existence preceeds essence” and thus destroyed the majority of Christian thinking up to his time (though many are stuck in the 19th century still talking about the essences of the particular bits of the trinity). To quote Sartre explaining this … “man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards.”

Thus Paul Tillich entered the scene with an answer to this existential problem and this is where my theology is derived from.

For more info see http://www.interchg.ubc.ca/cree/