[Page 299]Abstract: In this essay, James E Faulconer confronts an age-old issue that seems to divide Latter-day Saint Christians from other Christians, namely, “what it means to say that God is transcendent and embodied.” Early Christians also believed that God is embodied and transcendent, but with important differences in how that seemingly paradoxical combination of assertions can be explained. In his brilliant analysis, Faulconer shows how God “transcends us because He is embodied.”

[Editor’s Note: Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article is reprinted here as a service to the LDS community. Original pagination and page numbers have necessarily changed, otherwise the reprint has the same content as the original.

See James E. Faulconer, “The Transcendence of Flesh, Divine and Human,” in “To Seek the Law of the Lord”: Essays in Honor of John W. Welch, ed. Paul Y. Hoskisson and Daniel C. Peterson (Orem, UT: The Interpreter Foundation, 2017), 113–34. Further information at https://interpreterfoundation.org/books/to-seek-the-law-of-the-lord-essays-in-honor-of-john-w-welch-2/.]

Talk of transcendence is common in theology. In traditional theologies God transcends this world: as the Creator of all that is, he is not part of his creation; the Creator is radically other than Creation, sufficiently so that for traditional theologies it is a question whether the term existence can properly be applied to him. According to some [Page 300]contemporary thinkers it may not make sense to say that God exists.1 This does not mean individuals who subscribe to traditional theologies doubt whether there is a God, but that they wonder, given God’s transcendence, how well the language that applies to created beings can be applied to their Creator, if at all. If we say that created beings exist, then whatever we say of God, it seems odd, they suggest, to apply the same term, exists, to the Creator of those beings. Of course few Latter-day Saints believe in a God who transcends the world in that way. Believing in an embodied God makes it difficult, if not impossible, to believe that God is metaphysically distinct from the physical and temporal world. God cannot be as absolutely other-than-the-world for Latter-day Saints as he is for most other believers.2

As a result, one of the common accusations against Latter-day Saints by other Christians is that we are engaged in a kind of idolatry by worshipping something that is less than God, something created rather than the Creator himself. That charge carries more weight than Latter-day Saints are wont to think. It is not enough simply to assert that we cannot conceive of an unembodied entity; that begs the question and could be explained by lack of imagination. More is needed by way of argument. David Paulsen has done much of the heavy lifting to get our response started; especially by showing that belief in an embodied God was not foreign to first-century Christianity.3

I will add to that conversation by considering what it might mean to say that God is transcendent and embodied. Latter-day Saints sometimes say that God is transcendent, but we don’t mean that he is metaphysically transcendent, so it is not clear what we mean. I have elsewhere argued that Latter-day Saints can ascribe a kind of transcendence to God, using the term transascendence to distinguish our belief from that of the tradition.4 Transascendence isn’t merely superlative being, with God [Page 301]being the most of whatever category properly de...