Transcendence (religion)

In a religious context, the practice of contemplation seeks a direct awareness of the divine which transcends the intellect, often in accordance with religious practices such as meditation or prayer.

Divine law is any body of law that is perceived as deriving from a transcendent source, such as the will of God or gods – in contrast to man-made law or to secular law. According to Angelos Chaniotis and Rudolph F. Peters, divine laws are typically perceived as superior to man-made laws, sometimes due to an assumption that their source has resources beyond human knowledge and human reason. Believers in divine laws might accord them greater authority than other laws, for example by assuming that divine law cannot be changed by human authorities.

According to Chaniotis, divine laws are noted for their apparent inflexibility. The introduction of interpretation into divine law is a controversial issue, since believers place high significance on adhering to the law precisely. Opponents to the application of divine law typically deny that it is purely divine and point out human influences in the law. These opponents characterize such laws as belonging to a particular cultural tradition. Conversely, adherents of divine law are sometimes reluctant to adapt inflexible divine laws to cultural contexts.

Religion is a range of social-cultural systems, including designated behaviors and practices, ethics, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, or organizations, that generally relate humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements—although there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion. It is an essentially contested concept. Different religions may or may not contain various elements ranging from the divine, sacredness, faith, and a supernatural being or beings.

The origin of religious belief is an open question, with possible explanations including awareness of individual death, a sense of community, and dreams. Religions have sacred histories, narratives, and mythologies, preserved in oral traditions, sacred texts, symbols, and holy places, that may attempt to explain the origin of life, the universe, and other phenomena. Religious practice may include rituals, sermons, commemoration or veneration (of deities or saints), sacrifices, festivals, feasts, trances, initiations, matrimonial and funerary services, meditation, prayer, music, art, dance, or public service.

A creator deity or creator god is a deity responsible for the creation of the Earth, world, and universe in human religion and mythology. In monotheism, the single God is often also the creator. A number of monolatristic traditions separate a secondary creator from a primary transcendent being, identified as a primary creator.

Monotheism—the belief that there is only one deity—is a foundational tenet of the Abrahamic religions, which alike conceive God as the all-powerful and all-knowing deity from whom Abraham received a divine revelation, according to their respective narratives. The most prominent Abrahamic religions are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They—alongside Samaritanism, the Druze Faith, the Baháʼí Faith, and Rastafari—all share a common belief in the Abrahamic God. Likewise, the Abrahamic religions share similar features distinguishing them from other categories of religions:

• all of their theological traditions are, to some extent, influenced by the depiction of the God of Israel in the Hebrew Bible, who is explicitly named Yahweh in Hebrew and Allah in Arabic;
• all of them trace their roots to Abraham as a common genealogical and spiritual patriarch.

In the Abrahamic tradition, God is one, eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, and the creator of the universe. God is typically referred to with masculine grammatical articles and pronouns only, and is further held to have the properties of holiness, justice, omnibenevolence, and omnipresence. Adherents of the Abrahamic religions believe God is also transcendent, meaning he is outside of both space and time and therefore not subject to anything within his creation, but at the same time a personal God: intimately involved, listening to individual prayer, and reacting to the actions of his creatures.

Middle Platonism is the modern name given to a revival and outgrowth of Platonic philosophy, lasting from about 90 BC – when Antiochus of Ascalon rejected the scepticism of the new Academy – until the development of neoplatonism under Plotinus in the 3rd century. Middle Platonism absorbed many doctrines from the rival Peripatetic and Stoic schools. The pre-eminent philosopher in this period, Plutarch (c. 45–120), defended the freedom of the will and the immortality of the soul. He sought to show that God, in creating the world, had transformed matter, as the receptacle of evil, into the divine soul of the world, where it continued to operate as the source of all evil. God is a transcendent being, who operates through divine intermediaries, which are the gods and daemons of popular religion. Numenius of Apamea (c. 160) combined Platonism with neopythagoreanism and other eastern philosophies, in a move which would prefigure the development of neoplatonism.

Conceptions of God in classical theist, monotheist, pantheist, and panentheist traditions – or of the supreme deity in henotheistic religions – can extend to various levels of abstraction:

• as a powerful, personal, supernatural being, or as the deification of an esoteric, mystical or philosophical entity or category;
• as the "Ultimate", the summum bonum, the "Absolute Infinite", the "Transcendent", or Existence or Being itself;
• as the ground of being, the monistic substrate, that which we cannot understand; and so on.

The first recordings that survive of monotheistic conceptions of God, borne out of henotheism and (mostly in Eastern religions) monism, are from the Hellenistic period. Of the many objects and entities that religions and other belief systems across the ages have labeled as divine, the one criterion they share is their acknowledgment as divine by a group or groups of human beings.

The attributes of God are specific characteristics of God discussed in Christian theology. These include omniscience (the ability to know everything), omnipotence (the ability to do anything), and omnipresence (the ability to be present everywhere), which emphasize the infinite and transcendent nature of God. Additionally, God is often described as eternal (without beginning or end) and immutable (unchangeable), indicating a constant and perfect existence.

Other attributes include holiness (moral purity), rectitude (righteousness), justice (fairness), love (compassionate care for creation), mercy (forgiveness and kindness), and goodness (benevolent will toward others). God is also described as sovereign over creation.