Immanence vs. transcendence
This is one of the key dichotomies which drags the various arms of Christianity apart. There are those which emphasize God’s transcendence – i.e. the holiness, pentecostal religions whereby God is seen as far and above us and what is sought is the transcendent moment – the power encounter (slain in the spirit), the great time of worship etc. These types can be very easily removed form culture and inaccessible to the outsider with their message that negates human life; to go that far is error;
The immanence religions are the ones that see God in human life and emphasize natural theology. These seek to see God in all people and in all good works and in all of our inclinations and culture. The danger could be to equate our culture with God’s ideal, and to lose the transcendent and transforming element in our religion. God can become so close as to think that we are God or even to descend into pantheism
The ideal is to transcend dichotomies (Dialectics?) and to see how the truth of these two poles can be embraced together. This would be the approach of the mystic who finds the transcendent in the ordinary – who sees the infinite in the finite and is transformed by the encounters had in the everyday – through peak experiences, transcendent moments etc. Surely this is one way forward for Christianity
Some of this thinking comes from Erich Fromm’s book “The Art of Loving”
which said that real love is an attempt to transcend ourselves and our separateness from each other.
