Question:
Answer:
You ask a deep and important question. However, using the word “where” implies that God in his divine essence is like us human beings—that is, with a bodily, three-dimensional nature. And that’s not true, although it’s human understandably that we initially ask questions in terms of our human experience.
Although we fully acknowledge the Incarnation, in which God became man in the person of Jesus Christ, fully human and fully divine (CCC 456ff.; John 1:1-3, 14), we nevertheless hold that, in his divine essence, God is pure, uncreated Spirit. Which means he surely exists but not in a place, which implies materiality, i.e., a three-dimensional reality,
If God had materiality as part of his divine nature, he would be like us—a body-soul composite, i.e., a composite of spirit and matter. But that would mean he couldn’t be God, because everything composed requires a cause for its composition, i.e., its creation.
But God is necessarily uncreated, the Uncaused Cause, or he wouldn’t be—couldn’t be—God. So while God existed before he created anything, he didn’t exist anywhere, because time and space, which are constitutive of creation, didn’t exist.
As the eminent lay Catholic apologist Frank Sheed says of God, “Because he lacks the limitation of having parts, he is free from the consequent limitation of occupying space. Space cannot contain him. He transcends space, and the things of space, and indeed all created things. He lives his life in utter and absolute independence of them” (Theology and Sanity, 2nd Edition, 1978, p. 31).
So before creating the heavens and the earth, God existed in a perfect exchange of eternal love—Father, Son and Holy Spirit (see CCC 232ff; 249ff.)—“beyond” the limiting confines of created time and space. Thus even using the word existed, a term related to time, is a misnomer. How God existed exceeds human comprehension. But along with King Solomon, we can certainly proclaim, “Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you” (1 Kings 8:27).