50 Key Concepts in Theology

Identity in an Age of Cultural Anxiety (Blackwell, 1997)

---

Transcendence
Our sense of a divine reality beyond the apparent world.
‘Transcendence’ means literally to ‘go beyond’, and in theology it refers
to a dimension of divine reality that exceeds everything we can sense or
know. To speak of God as ‘transcendent’ is to say that he is outside of and
beyond the world – as it is expressed in the hymn:
Immortal, invisible, God only wise,
In light inaccessible hid from our eyes.
The transcendence of God is complemented in most theologies by the
idea of God’s immanence, meaning God’s presence within the world. Most
orthodox theology argues that God is both transcendent and immanent. If we
suggest that he is purely transcendent, we end up with an utterly remote and
unknowable God. If, on the other hand, we suggest that God is purely
immanent, we reduce God to something this-worldly.
In the Old Testament the transcendence of God is described in physical
terms. For example, God says to Job (Job 38): ‘can you bind the chains of the
Pleiades or loose the cords of Orion?’ The Old Testament God is materially
transcendent, a creator whose physical power, majesty and glory exceed
anything we can do or know. He stands physically aloof, speaking through the
burning bush or the whirlwind. Even Moses is not permitted to see God’s face
but only glimpses his ‘hindquarters’ (Exod. 33).
In the New Testament God’s transcendence is more spiritual and
intellectual: ‘no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of
God’ (1 Cor. 2:11). St Paul sees Christ as the bridge to God’s transcendence,
because Christians have ‘the mind of Christ’ and have been drawn into God’s
mysteries and purposes.
Plato’s classical idea of transcendence provided the perfect philosophical
basis for a Christian theology of God’s transcendence. For Plato, the highest
level of reality is called the ‘The Good’, which is ‘beyond being’ (epekeina
tes ousias – The Republic, 508b) and therefore beyond human cognition and
description. A number of neo-Platonic theologians – for example, Proclus and
Pseudo-Dionysius – conceived God’s transcendence as ‘beyond being’.
Thomas Aquinas argued that God’s transcendence is a necessary
consequence of his perfection, which places God beyond us in every possible
way. However, there is a remote analogy between our existence and the
existence of God, which means that we can speak meaningfully of God’s

---

transcendence.
Mystics of various kinds have believed that it is possible to experience
God’s transcendence through special forms of spirituality and prayer. St Paul
said that he had been transported in prayer to the ‘third heaven’ (2 Cor. 12).
The Renaissance Platonists – Ficino, for example – believed that God’s
transcendence was accessible through rational contemplation.
With Kant, in the eighteenth century, the idea of transcendence took on a
whole new realm of meaning. Kant could see no point in trying to investigate
transcendent objects beyond human understanding, because we can never
know anything about them. The point of philosophy, he said, should be to
help us understand the things that we can know, and how knowledge itself is
possible. So he reapplied the idea of transcendence, coining the term
‘transcendental’ to describe the inner structures of thought and meaning that
we use to make sense of our experience of the objective world. (To
complicate things, Kant continued to use the word ‘transcendent’ – as
opposed to ‘transcendental’ – to refer to that aspect of the objective world
about which we can know nothing.)
Kant’s choice of the term ‘transcendental’ was deliberately provocative,
implying that theology was now a question of trying to understand human
cognition rather than trying to understand God. So he spoke about a form of
this-worldly ‘spiritual’ experience of wonder, beauty and the immensity of the
cosmos that he called ‘the sublime’.
Kant’s philosophy played a significant part in the modern loss of belief in
any idea of divine transcendence and the growing sense, particularly among
liberal theologians, that God is completely immanent in the world and its
history. This view does not necessarily mean that transcendence is impossible,
because transcendence can be thought of – as it is by Gerard Manley Hopkins
– as the inner structure of the immanent world. Transcendence is the sheer
excess of God’s presence in the created order.
Some post-modern theologians have been asking what the word
‘transcendence’ can now mean in a secular culture. Emmanuel Levinas has
suggested that God’s transcendence is glimpsed through the otherness of other
human beings. Kevin Hart has suggested that Kant’s idea of the ‘sublime’ is
in fact a way of speaking about God’s transcendence. Graham Ward has
suggested that silence may constitute a dimension of divine transcendence.
THINKERS
Karl Barth (1886–1968) reacted against the liberal emphasis on God’s

---

immanence, arguing that God is ‘Wholly Other’: ‘The power of God can be
detected neither in the world of nature nor in the souls of men. It must not be
confounded with any high, exalted, force, known or knowable’ (The Epistle to
the Romans).
Paul Tillich (1886–1965) argued in The Courage to Be that God is so
utterly transcendent that he is ‘the God above God’, leaving us in a state of
‘absolute faith’. So the Christian must pass through a moment of atheism and
meaninglessness to grasp a pure faith beyond ‘the God of theism’.
IDEAS
Deism: the view that God is completely transcendent.
Pantheism: the view that God is in everything and therefore not at all
transcendent.
Transcendental: an adjective referring to transcendence, but since Kant
this word has taken on a technical use referring to structures of knowledge.
Transcendental
concepts:
Scholastic
theologians
identified
six
transcendental concepts: essence (ens), unity (unum), goodness (bonum),
truth (verum), thing (res), and substance (aliquid).
Transcendent fall: the Platonic belief that our embodied earthly existence
is a ‘fall’ from a higher disembodied realm of pure form.
BOOKS
Regina Schwartz (ed.), Transcendence: Philosophy, Literature and
Theology Approach the Beyond (Routledge, 2004)

---