The concept of infinity has a long pedigree in philosophy. Taken on its own terms, it surely exceeds all the efforts of our understanding, but the story of its appropriation by Christian theologians can be briefly told. The ancient Greeks equated the infinite with matter in its unformed and thus chaotic state. The infinite was just another name for everything we can never know, since we know material objects only according to their form. When Christian theologians realized that an infinite nature is also eternal, they concluded that God’s freedom and power should not be limited. So they transferred the concept of infinity from matter to the divine, which laid the foundation for most of the philosophical moves that have come to be associated with classical theism. That’s where the matter rested until Karl Barth rejected the whole thing.
We are still too close to Barth’s theology to grasp the revolutionary potential of his doctrine of God, but his discussion of divine omnipresence in the second volume of Church Dogmatics is a good place to start. Barth begins this discussion by redefining the idea of divine simplicity to mean that “at no time or place is He composed out of what is distinct from Himself,” instead of opting for a more typical definition such as “no parts.” God cannot be divided, not because he is immune to quantity, but because he is wholly himself. Beginning with this clarification, Barth begins to dismantle the conceptions of God provided by classical theism, pointing out the ways in which they impoverish our understanding of Jesus Christ.
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