Omnipresence & prayer to saints

James Oliver Buswell, Jr. (1895-1977), former President of Wheaton College (Wheaton, IL) and Dean of Covenant Seminary, St. Louis, was a Calvinist theologian.

In his book A Systematic Theology of the Christian Religion (1962), he makes this comment about prayer to saints in a section about the definition of God and the fact that God is Infinite in His Being:

"It is not difficult to grasp the fact that the God of the Bible is an omnipresent Spirit, but there is some difficulty in presenting this fact to our minds in such way that we can assimilate the truth and express it to others. It is probable that the polytheism of the worship of saints and angels is partly due to the difficulty of apprehending God's omnipresence.

"In one way it is simple for a child to understand that God is here and I may speak to Him directly. In another sense, however, the world-weary individual, somewhat unwilling to bare his heart before the holiness of God, might sinfully turn to the concept of some subordinate being, with the difficulty of conceiving God's omnipresence as an unconscious excuse."