God’s omnipresence is the stuff of classical divine attributes talk. The Stanford Encyclopedia offers a nice concise and generic definition:

Philosophers and theologians have taken such texts to affirm that God is present everywhere. This passage suggests, first, that God is really present at or located at various particular places. Second, it suggests that there is no place where God is not present, that is, that God is present everywhere. This is the claim that God is omnipresent. Divine omnipresence is thus one of the traditional divine attributes, although it has attracted less philosophical attention than such attributes as omnipotence, omniscience, or being eternal.[1]

Of note is how this discussion takes place among ‘philosophers’ and theologians. The reason this is of note, at least for my two cents, is because if a discussion about God, the Christian God presumably, can be had in an abstract manner, as to his ostensible ‘personal attributes,’ then in what meaningful way can this discussion be said to be Christian? This point continues to be lost it seems, on almost the whole of the Christian theological industry these days. For anyone who traffics in these sorts of theological circles what I am noting is not lost on you, I am confident of that. And yet it is these sorts of classically oriented theological and PHILOSOPHICAL discussions that almost, years ago, turned me completely off to the whole so-called theological endeavor. As a Christian I am only interested in discussions about God that start principially with His Self-revelation in Jesus Christ. Other discussions about God might be interesting, but only if you’re interested in cultivating a curiosity whose lights get bulbs from the flatland of terra firma speculation about ‘metaphysical’ things.

Again, this is why Barth and Thomas Torrance are the go to theologians for me. There are no other theologians, save some Patristics, Luther, Calvin et al. (Lol) who are so dramatically Christ concentrated as Barth first, and Torrance second. This is why it is best to see what Barth has done as a seismic ground shift in regard to the theological tradition; indeed he represents the development of a whole theological tradition that we ought to call After Barth.

The above noted, and in the context of the locus we are considering, here is how Barth discusses God’s omnipresence. You will notice that Barth’s notion of omnipresence has a face (prosopon), Jesus Christ’s:

But this relationship requires us to make a third distinction within the presence of God in His creation. There is a proper presence of God in His creation which is the basis and constituent centre of His special presence, and therefore the meaning and presupposition of His general presence. This is His presence in His Word, in the Word of His revelation and reconciliation as such, in Jesus Christ. He is therefore the place to which every examination of the Old and New Testament witness to God’s special presence must necessarily and unequivocally point in the last instance. If the dwelling of God in Jesus Christ is the fulfillment, the constant factor, to which every other dwelling of God attested in the Old and New Testaments can stand only in the relationship of and impermanent expectation or recollection, this dwelling of God stands out again above every other, and therefore above the totality which we have known as God’s special presence. And it does so, not merely quantitatively, but qualitatively. It is not simply a special instance in a series. It is the origin and the goal, the basis and the constituent centre of the whole series of the special self-representation of God. It is the one unique and simple presence, the proper presence of God as the one and simple God in His creation, in which both His special presence in all its diversity and also His general presence with its dynamic identity possess their beginning and their end. If we maintain that the path from the presence with which God as the triune God is present to Himself leads directly and in the first instance to His special presence in creation, we must now take a further step backwards, making a fresh distinction, and upholding the position that strictly speaking it leads directly and in the first instance, within all the special presences, to His proper presence in Jesus Christ. It is as the one who is present here in this way that He is the God who is specially present in Israel and the Church, and as such generally present in the world as a whole and everywhere.[2]

This is genuinely Christian theology; the sort that will only think God from Jesus Christ. When I ponder God’s presence everywhere (and as some say “nowhere”), I always only do so from the face of Jesus Christ. He is God’s exhaustive limit for us on how we might think God; to say otherwise is to think from a projection of our own fancies.

Personally, I have gone through lots of deception wrought by the spirit of the antichrist in my life. It is because of this that I am so committed to only thinking God from Jesus Christ (at all costs)! Jesus is the Way, the Truth, the Life; no theologian or philosopher can persuade me otherwise. Here I stand. amen amen

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[1] Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 §31: Study Edition Vol 9 (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 46.