The "I AM" and the "I am": Where Your Existence Meets His

Have you ever held a steaming cup of coffee in the morning and pondered its warmth? The heat in your hands isn't the same as the fire that heated the water, yet it's not completely different either. The warmth you feel participates in that original heat source, existing because of it, yet distinctly yours to experience. This simple morning ritual opens a window into one of theology's most profound questions: How does our existence relate to God's existence?

 

The Language of Being

Before we can grasp this mystery, we need to understand three ways we use language to describe relationships between things. Imagine you're teaching a child about love. You might say your love for coffee, your love for your spouse, and God's love are either completely different things (equivocal), exactly the same thing (univocal), or similar but fundamentally different (analogical).

When we speak equivocally, we use the same word for entirely different realities. The "bark" of a tree and the "bark" of a dog share nothing but letters. If God's existence and ours were equivocal, we could know nothing about Him at all—His being would be so utterly foreign that words like "exists," "loves," or "knows" would mean something completely unrecognizable when applied to Him.

When we speak univocally, we mean exactly the same thing. A "triangle" in geometry is univocal—whether drawn on paper or imagined in the mind, it always has three sides. If God's existence and ours were univocal, He would simply be a bigger, better version of us—a superhuman rather than the transcendent Creator.

But when we speak analogically, we recognize both similarity and profound difference. A child's drawing of the sun and the actual sun both "shine" in some sense, yet the difference is immeasurable. This is how Thomas Aquinas understood the relationship between God's existence and ours.

 

The Thomistic Vision: Participation in Pure Act

For Aquinas, following Aristotle and perfecting his insights through Christian revelation, God doesn't simply have existence—He is existence itself. In Exodus 3:14, when Moses asks God His name, the response is stunning: "I AM WHO I AM." This isn't evasion; it's the deepest revelation of God's nature. He is not a being among beings, but Being Itself—what philosophers call ipsum esse subsistens (subsistent being itself).

Consider how revolutionary this is. Everything in your experience exists in a certain way—your coffee exists as liquid, your mug as ceramic, you as a human being. Each thing has existence, but none of these things is existence. They participate in existence like streams participate in their source. As Aquinas beautifully expressed it, creatures don't have existence independently; they receive it moment by moment from the One who is Existence.

This understanding transforms how we see ourselves and creation. We are not independent entities who happen to bump into God occasionally. Rather, as Acts 17:28 declares, "In him we live and move and have our being." Our existence is a continuous gift, a participation in God's infinite act of being. Like the warmth in your hands participates in the heat of the fire, we participate in God's existence while remaining genuinely ourselves.

 

The Nominalist Shift: Flattening the Mystery

However, in the late medieval period, a different vision emerged. Nominalist philosophers like William of Ockham began to think of existence more univocally. In this view, God and creatures exist in fundamentally the same way—God just exists more powerfully, eternally, and independently, while we exist weakly, temporarily, and dependently.

This might seem like a subtle philosophical distinction, but its implications are profound. If God and creatures exist in the same "realm" of being, just at different levels, then God becomes the biggest being in a universe of beings. He's at the top of the ladder, but it's the same ladder we're all on.

This univocal understanding inadvertently sets up a competition between God and creation. If God and I exist in the same way, then more of God means less of me, and vice versa. Divine action and human freedom become rivals. God's glory seems to come at the expense of human dignity. Grace appears to override nature rather than perfect it.

 

The Root of the Great Divide

This difference in understanding "Being" is not merely an academic exercise; it is a biblical and metaphysical fork in the road that lies at the center of many Christian differences. To heal the divides in Christendom, we must understand that our disagreements on the Sacraments, the authority of the Church, and even the nature of salvation often stem from this foundational "Univocal vs. Analogical" split.

Historically, this "competitive" view of God and man was a driving engine of the Reformation. If God and the world occupy the same plane of existence, then for a piece of bread to be the Body of Christ, it must cease to be bread in a way that feels like a chemical displacement. This led to the "disenchantment" of the world. Because many reformers could not see how a finite object could participate in the infinite without one destroying the other, the Sacraments became mere symbols—a way to avoid competition between matter and spirit.

In an analogical framework, however, the material world can "participate" in the divine without losing its own integrity. This is the heart of the divide: do we see the physical world as a barrier to God or as a transparent medium of His grace?

This "move" also changes who we interpret Scripture. If I might be so bold, I think this is the fundamental "difference" that has led to a majority of divisions in Christendom since the 1500s. The issue is, most of us are operating with these ideas subconsciously, we "think" in either a "univocal" or "analogical" way without realizing it. This is why, I think, so much of Christian dialogue ends up with people speaking past each other. It ends up being what Dr. John Bergsma called a "verses versus verses" approach, where I have my Bible verses, you have yours, and now we have to decide whose verses are "clearer" and figure out how to "explain away" the other person's verses.

My contention (or thesis) in today's post/meditation is that the key to holding the entire Biblical witness together is in recovering the analogical understanding of Being/Existence, a more Thomistic rather than a Nominalist conception of the world... which is to say, recovering a more Biblical understanding of what it means to be creatures made in the image of our Creator.

 

Faith, Works, and the End of Competition

This "flattening" of Being is most visible in the historical tension between faith and works. In a univocal framework, we are forced into a zero-sum game. If God does 100% of the work, the human must do 0%. If the human does anything, it is seen as "taking away" from God’s glory.

This competitive mindset forces us to ignore or "explain away" clear texts of Scripture. We find ourselves caught between two seemingly irreconcilable pillars:

Ephesians 2:8-9: "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast."

James 2:24: "You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone."

In a univocal world, these verses are at war. One must be the "real" truth while the other is relegated to a confusing footnote. The only way to reconcile these two verses is by revisiting our understanding of Being, of the very nature of what it means to say "I exist" and "God exists."

When we embrace an analogical and participatory understanding, faith and works are no longer at odds. If our existence is a participation in God’s existence, then our acting is a participation in God’s acting.

In this light, the true opposite of "faith" isn't "action"—it is fear. When we operate out of a univocal mindset, we are driven by a subtle anxiety: Am I doing enough? Is God doing it all? This is the "spirit of slavery" that leads back into fear. It's the anxiety that the reformer Martin Luther, who was trained as a "nominalist" experienced when he couldn't get past his own keen awareness of his sinfulness and his terror over God's justice.

But Scripture tells us we have received the "Spirit of adoption" (Romans 8:15).

Faith dispels fear precisely because it beholds our very existence as an act of sheer generosity. It recognizes that love is overflowing from the God who is existence. St. John reminds us that "there is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear" (1 John 4:18). This perfect love is not a distant sentiment but the very ground of our being.

Our existence participates in both: our being is God’s love manifest and His Being shared. As 2 Peter 1:4 boldly claims, we are called to become "partakers of the divine nature." This participation is the key; our actions are not "works" done to earn God, but the "fruit" that naturally grows when we abide in the Vine (John 15:5). In the Vine, the branch acts, but it acts only because the life of the Vine is surging through it.

 

The Practical Difference: Freedom and Grace

This theological distinction profoundly affects how we understand our spiritual lives. In the analogical view, grace doesn't destroy nature but perfects it. Your growth in holiness doesn't mean becoming less human but becoming more truly yourself. As St. Irenaeus wrote, "The glory of God is man fully alive."

When you struggle with sin, the analogical understanding offers hope without diminishing responsibility. Your actions are genuinely yours, yet God's grace works within you at a deeper level than your own willing. Philippians 2:12-13 captures this beautifully: "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure." Both you and God are working, without competition or confusion.

Notice how in this verse Paul finds no tension at all between "work out your own salvation" and "it is God who works in you." This is precisely because Paul understood what many of us, who are the inheritors of a nominalist worldview, have forgotten.

 

Living in the Light of Participation

So how do we live in light of this profound truth? First, cultivate wonder at existence itself. That morning coffee, the sunrise, your very breath—none of these are self-explanatory. They are contingent gifts, participating moment by moment in the One who IS.

Second, embrace both genuine human responsibility and complete dependence on God. These aren't contradictory but complementary. Work diligently at your calling, knowing that your efforts are real and matter, while simultaneously recognizing that your very ability to work is a participation in God's creative action.

Third, reject the competitive view of God and humanity that creates so much anxiety in your spiritual life. Your flourishing doesn't diminish God's glory—it manifests it. Your freedom doesn't threaten God's sovereignty—it flows from it.

Finally, rest in the security of participated existence. You are not holding yourself in being through your own effort. Every moment, you receive existence from the One who IS. This means your ultimate security doesn't rest in your own strength but in the God who sustains all things by His powerful word (Hebrews 1:3).

This rest is fundmental to understanding the Biblical understanding of Sabbath. It's no mistake that God rested on the Seventh Day, which is the foundation for the Sabbath Day. It's also no mistake that this rest follows day six, when God created mankind. We were created to rest in God, the first day after man's creation was precisely this kind of rest. We were always made to rest with God, to find in our very Being, Him. To understand we exist not separate from God, or as some kind of lesser-degree of our own subsistent being... but as participants in His existence.

This is what Jesus means when he said that man wasn't made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath was made for man (Mark 2:27). It's also why we can say with the author of Hebrews that Jesus Christ is our sabbath/rest (Hebrews 4:9-10). Jesus, who is fully God, meaning He is existence itself, participates in our humanity—not in some kind of zero-sum game where we're trying to cram divinity into a human body, but because the human body was always a vessel that emanated from God's very Being.

 

The Ultimate Analogy

The deepest analogy of being is found in Christ Himself. In Him, divine and human natures unite without confusion or competition. He shows us that God's presence doesn't diminish but perfects humanity. As Athanasius proclaimed, "God became man so that man might become god"—not replacing our humanity but bringing it to its ultimate fulfillment through participation in divine life.

Tomorrow morning, when you hold that warm cup of coffee, remember: the warmth you feel is real, genuinely there in your hands, yet wholly dependent on and participating in its source. So too, your existence is genuinely yours, yet every moment a participation in the One who IS.

In this truth lies both profound humility and incredible dignity—you are nothing in yourself, yet in Him, you are beloved, sustained, and called to eternal glory.

This is the mystery hidden in plain sight: you exist not alongside God, not in competition with God, but in, through, and for God, who is Existence Itself. And in this participation lies your truest freedom, deepest peace, and highest calling.

 

God Bless,

Judah

 

This is the theme I'll be exploring in my next installment of The Unfallen Series: Ipsum Esse.