Page History

...

My seventh and -- for our purposes here -- final presupposition is that this point of religious development had already been reached by the societies and cultures in whose concepts and symbols the first article of the Apostles' Creed, and the Creed as a whole, was formulated. Both among Jews, particularly Jews of the diaspora, and also among enlightened gentiles, "God" had come to be used in the radically monotheistic sense to refer, not to one being among many, not even the highest or the greatest, but to the being – the being that is somehow all being because it is the unique, all-encompassing whole of reality of which all beings are parts and in which each being has both its primal source and its final end. Thus, when Paul, for one, speaks of God in 1 Corinthians 8:6, he speaks of "one God the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, "we" here referring, I think, to human beings generally as well as to Christians in particular. Or, again, in Romans 11:36, Paul presupposes that the God who is to be glorified forever is the One from whom and through whom and for whom are all things. -- I don't know about you, but, so far as I'm concerned, if this isn't as good a definition of the one all-encompassing whole of reality as you're likely to find, it'll certainly do until such a definition comes along.

n.d.