For Ibadis the doctrine guards divine unity (tawhid) by refusing to place anything alongside God in eternity, and it connects to their denial that the blessed will see God with physical eyes in the hereafter, another point on which they part from the Sunni majority. The affirmation marks Ibadism as a distinct third branch of Islam alongside Sunni and Shia, preserving in its theology positions that the wider community debated and largely set aside in the classical period. The denial of a literal beatific vision follows the same logic as the createdness doctrine: Ibadi theologians hold that a literal sight of God with the physical eye would require God to occupy space and face a direction relative to the viewer, which they judge incompatible with divine transcendence, and they read the Quranic verse most often cited for the vision, "faces that day will be radiant, looking at their Lord" (75:22 to 23), as figurative for awaiting God's favour rather than literal sight.
Sunni theology, particularly in its Ashari and Hanbali forms, affirms the vision as real and future, resting on this and other texts alongside hadith reports, and treats denying it as a serious theological error, a disagreement that runs parallel to, and reinforces, the older dispute over whether the Quran itself is created or eternal.