'The old doctrine of transcendence is nothing more than an assertion of an outmoded view of the world.' Professor R. Gregor Smith
The trick is to preserve an understanding of God even as its prior conception is being done away with. Not an easy thing to do.
The break with traditional thinking to which I believe we are now summoned is considerably more radical than that which enable Christian theology to detach itself from a literal belief in a localized heaven. The translation from God 'up there' to the God 'out there', though of liberating psychological significance, represented, as I have said, no more than a change of direction in spatial symbolism. Both conceptions presuppose fundamentally the same relationship between 'God' on the one hand and 'the world' on the other: God is a Being existing in his own right to whom the world is related in the sort of way the earth is to the sun. Whether the sun is 'above' a flat earth or 'beyond' a round one does not fundamentally affect the picture. But suppose there is no Being out there at all? Suppose, to use our analogy, the skies are empty?
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