Fatherhood Quote by Orson Pratt

Pratt is doing something audaciously practical with the Trinity: turning a mystery into a kind of metaphysics you can diagram. In most Christian theology, omnipresence is not a logistics problem God has to solve; it is part of what it means to be God. Pratt reverses that intuition. He makes the Father and the Son localized beings - not “everywhere present,” not even able to occupy two places at once - and assigns the heavy lifting of divine presence to the Holy Spirit, described in almost physical terms, “extend[ing] through all space, with all other matter.”

The intent is polemical as much as devotional. Pratt, a nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint theologian, is defending a distinctly Mormon materialist theology against creedal Christianity’s immaterial, paradox-friendly Godhead. His God is not the infinite abstraction of classical theism; it’s a cosmos with rules. The Spirit becomes the mechanism that preserves God’s intimacy and surveillance without requiring the Father’s body to be infinitely thinly spread across the universe.

The subtext is modernity’s pressure on religion: if the world is governed by laws and space is real, then theology should stop sounding like wordplay and start sounding like an account of how things work. Pratt borrows the authority of scientific language (“extends through all space,” “with all other matter”) to make spiritual presence feel less like metaphor and more like a property, almost a medium. It’s a rhetorical gamble: by making God more intelligible, he also makes God more constrained, trading the traditional grandeur of transcendence for a universe where divinity is immanent, distributed, and materially embedded.