"Your God is too small"
[Origen, Priest and Theologian, d. c.254, Treatise on Prayer. This is a
significant patristic witness to the importance of recognizing that the
language of Scripture has to use human analogies to express divine
realities, and that we must be careful not to let our idea of God be
limited by such comparisons.]
When "the Father" of the saints is said to be "in heaven", we are not to
suppose that he is circumscribed in bodily fashion and dwells "in heaven";
otherwise, if the heaven contained him, God would be found less than,
because contained by, the heaven; but we must believe that by the ineffable
power of his Godhead all things are contained and held together by him.
And, speaking generally, sayings which taken literally are supposed by
simple folk to assert that God is in a place, must instead be understood in
a manner that befits grand and spiritual conceptions of God...
I think it necessary to consider these sayings carefully in connection with
the words "Our Father which art in heaven," in order to remove a mean
conception of God held by those who consider that he is locally "in
heaven"; and to prevent anyone from saying that God is in a place after the
manner of a body (from which it would follow that he is a body) - a tenet
which leads to most impious opinions, namely, to supposing that he is
divisible, material, corruptible.
This is a excerpt from the book, "The Anglican Tradition", #15; Origen
wrote before c.254. "The Anglican Tradition" has a lot of good early
writings in one spot and is available in paperback.
Regards,
Alice
E-mail: alice-fulton@uiowa.edu