Divine transcendence means that God created history and guides history and is in control of history as the First Cause of all the secondary causes now operating freely in the world. All this is possible only because God is not part of history or subject to the limitations of time. 

Something very big changed in the history of Western intellectual thought during the period of the European Enlightenment, which can be dated from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Wars of Religion, to the death of Kant in 1804. Actually, many things changed and books like Peter Gay’s magisterial, two-volume work on the Enlightenment struggle to articulate those changes adequately. As a theologian, I am particularly concerned with the effect of the changes in modernity on the doctrine of God. To get to the heart of what changed, I think, we can say that after the Enlightenment what was lost was the transcendence of God.

Losing Transcendence

Throughout the history of Christian thought from the church fathers to the period of post-Reformation scholasticism, God was understood to be one, simple, immutable, eternal, perfect, self-existent, First Cause of the cosmos whose existence is intuitively grasped by all people and also can be demonstrated with certainty by reason. If coming to know the First Cause was the first step, the second step was to proclaim that this same One has spoken through the OT prophets and become incarnate in Jesus Christ. God, therefore, was understood to be prior to or above history, and outside of time, that is, not subject to time as are all created things. In a word, God is transcendent.

Faith in the veracity of Scripture is required to believe that the one, simple, immutable, eternal, perfect, self-existent First Cause of the cosmos has spoken and acted in history. This is not demonstrable by reason, although there are historical arguments, such as miracles, to support the Gospel proclamation that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Faith does not require believing a logical contradiction or going against reason, but faith goes beyond reason to accept in reverence the mystery of the Triune God’s self-revelation in history. Faith and reason go together in theology.

There is thus a vast gulf between the being of God in himself and the speech and actions of God in history (theologia and economia). It is the same God in both cases, but Divine transcendence means that, while we can say true things about his eternal being on the basis of what he has said (for example in naming himself) and on the basis of what he has done (saving and judging in history), we can never comprehend God’s being or fully describe it in univocal, creaturely terms.

In the Enlightenment David Hume brought the criticism of the proofs for God’s existence to a climax by denying the principle of causation. The Aristotelian proof, as developed by Thomas Aquinas, began with the indubitable fact that change is occurring right now in the world and used the principle of causation to reason that all change requires a cause. The causal chain must have a beginning, or it would not be working now and that beginning – the First Cause – must itself be unmoved or uncaused. All potential is actualized by a cause that is at least partially actual and the causal chain must terminate upon a First Cause that is pure actuality, thus requiring no cause itself.

Now, at this point, human reason reaches its limit. All creatures, including humans, are mixtures of potentiality and actuality and we cannot even imagine what a being that is pure actuality would be like. It simply is beyond our comprehension. Aristotle thought the First Cause or Unmoved Mover was part of the cosmos, but Thomas Aquinas and the Christian tradition has identified the Creator of Genesis 1 with the First Cause of the cosmos. Pagans and Christians agree that there must be a First Cause, but Christians say that special revelation in Scripture tells us that the First Cause is not immanent within the cosmos but rather is transcendent of the cosmos. In other words, Christian theology teaches that God created the world ex nihilo at a point by his will and power. Thus, he cannot be part of the creation. All being is divided into two parts: divine being and created being. The Christian doctrine of creation says that all that is not God has been created by God. So, John Webster calls the doctrine of creation a “distributed doctrine” by which he means that it conditions every other doctrine that describes things in relation to God.

Therefore, the history of the creation is determined by the fact that it is the creation of the transcendent God and this means that history has certain characteristics that distinguish the Christian view of nature and history from the pagan view. Since creation had a beginning, so it also has an end or telos. History is created though Jesus Christ and is moving toward its telos in Jesus Christ. Thus, Jesus Christ is the center or hinge of history. All history leads up to him (the incarnation) and flows from him and yet also toward consummation in him. For Christianity the meaning of history is transcendent not immanent because that meaning resides in the Creator.

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