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parent from within the field of variously operative forces or influences on one’s life, and for that reason the Christian need neither fear God’s loss nor rue God’s absence as one would such a parent’s. Unlike relations with human others, which are situation-sensitive and thereby susceptible to change of character, rupture, and decline, God, Christians believe, is with one, whatever happens, in exactly the same capacity-- as the creator and sustainer of whatever it is that remains good about one’s life, be that only at a minimum the bare fact that one continues to live. The Christian who believes God is his or her creator is therefore confident that God continues to work for his or her ultimate good, that God is engaged in the effort to increase it, whatever the impediments in human life suggesting the contrary, absent, that is, almost any confirming evidence.

The Problem of Inattention

Although invisibility and apparent absence do not pose the same problem here as they do when God is one’s friend, this rather more impersonal understanding of God’s influence as creator and sustainer has its own problem maintaining a strong sense of connection to God. The diffuseness of influence that lies behind God’s constant invisible presence can prompt simple Christian inattention to God. The very monotony of the always pertinent Christian affirmation that everything is to be attributed to God can make that affirmation recede from focal awareness, make it fail to come focally to mind. Belief in God’s uniform presence would thereby become functionally indistinguishable from the sense of God’s absence. The invisibility of God that follows from a belief in the comprehensiveness of God’s influence simply means in that case that God drops out of sight and mind, drops out of Christian consideration for most intents and purposes, most of the time. Such a God has little to offer as a “para-social” entity, as a factor fomenting or supplementing a sense of social connection.

In the back of their minds Christians may believe that God is the source of everything, but they may not feel compelled to consider that fact actively in the course of their everyday lives. God hides behind, so to speak, all the creaturely influences that God is working through, which become matters of primary Christian preoccupation. At the center of attention are all the ordinary influences and connections with one’s natural and human environments; preoccupation with them pushes out of focal awareness the fact of God as the ultimate source of them all. Apart from specifically religious obligations—say, the demand to give God thanks and praise at times of worship—Christians who believe God is their creator would have no particular reason to dwell on that fact.

Christian theologians commonly tie this sort of practical worry--about what from a Christian point of view amounts to sinful neglect of one’s connection to God--to the understanding of double agency in the account of creation I sketched above.xv According to that account, it is true, God’s influence on human life does not have to go by way of the human and natural causal powers and influences on human life that God creates; God can influence human life without producing sufficient created causes for what God wants to happen in human life. (The Christian claim that Jesus was resurrected from the dead—an event without natural causes-- is a case in point, one that Christians are

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