Ben Pearce: Lanscapes of the Sacred 2 Post 10

Place and Placelessness

(Landscapes of the Sacred)

A Post on God’s Location

            Were I to ask someone, “where is God?”, I would get many different answers. He’s in Heaven, He’s at church, He’s among the outcasts, He’s in my heart, He’s everywhere. All of these are true answers for a Christian, but do they show the whole picture? Do they give a full answer of where God is? If God exists in place outside of the material creation, does He fill it yet spill outside it? The Early Church Father Augustine would say so. Many religion philosophers would say so. The Christian Scriptures declare it to be so (Jeremiah 23:24, 1 Kings 8:27). Does this mean God is not focused specifically anywhere like we would like to say? It seems He was specifically focused in the Tabernacle when He says “Have them make me a sanctuary, so that I may dwell among them” (Exodus 25:8). It seems He is focused in the person of Jesus Christ when He says, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen His glory, the glory as of a Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).

 Is there an axis mundi, a center of sacredness where God is especially present? In the chapter, The Imagined Landscape, of the book, Landscapes of the Sacred, Belden Lane reminds us that Jeremiah said God is not exclusively in the temple. God is not like the false gods of the Canaanites. He is not bound to one location, and His presence can never be extinguished from an area. There is a strange tension here in the traditional idea of a sacred place. If he is present everywhere, then isn’t everywhere a sacred place?

When Moses saw God in the burning bush, God declared the ground to be sacred (Exodus 3:5). Did it cease to be sacred after God was finished in his appearance to Moses, or does it remain sacred to this day? Is there such thing as a fixed sacred place, or is a place sacred because that is where we experience God? How do we know we have experienced God there unless it is like the manifestations we see in the Scriptures? How much weight should we put into one of these places? Should we seek experience with God at a specific place, or should we seek for Him to come to us as he pleases, wherever He pleases?

These are all questions I had after reading Landscapes of the Sacred by Belden Lane. Some of the questions I haven’t come to conclusions on myself. We should think about the importance of these questions and think about the weight we put into places rather than the weight we put into what God has spoken to us in the Scriptures.