Panentheism and Theoenpanism

As part of the systematic theology of love I’m writing, I address providence. And part of a chapter on providence explores God’s relation with creation. Below is an excerpt of that chapter, and it explains panentheism and theoenpanism. To read the whole chapter and eleven previous ones, check out my Substack account.

Panentheism

The intimate connection between the universal Spirit and all creation is sometimes called ‘panentheism.’ Although coined in the 19th century, the label gained attention in the 20th thanks to the process philosopher Charles Hartshorne.^[1] It depicts a model of the God-universe relationship that differs from pantheism and most systematic theologies. In panentheism, ‘pan’ means ‘all,’ ‘en’ means ‘in,’ and ‘theism’ means ‘God.’ All creation is in God.^[2]

At least a dozen versions of panentheism are on offer, and each builds from ontological and theological claims.^[3] At stake in this diversity is the meaning of ‘in’ and various views of God. I do not find helpful versions of panentheism that understand ‘in’ spatially. They imply that all creatures are inside a divine container. In other versions, panentheism is understood as the finite within the infinite. This confuses, because ‘infinite’ is ambiguous at best and a negation of the finite at worst.^[4] In other unhelpful forms of panentheism, the world is said to ‘participate’ in God, with little explanation of what ‘participate’ means.^[5]

When it comes to the meaning of panentheism, confusion reigns.

In the Divine Experience

When I affirm panentheism, I’m embracing at least three ideas. First, panentheism as I understand it says all creatures and all creation are in God’s experience. The universal, becoming Lover experiences creaturely others moment by moment, and all creation affects God. Everything influences the Living One.

Let me illustrate what it means to be in someone’s experience. As you read or hear the words of this book, they enter your experience. They affect you. Although you are distinct from them, they influence your thinking and, therefore, your living. When you feel a change in temperature, your experience also changes, because the temperature affects you. And so on. Analogously, panentheism says every creature — great and small — affects the universal Spirit’s experience. Moment by moment, we all enter God’s experiential life.

I use the word ‘influence’ often when describing panentheism. The word has Latin roots and means ‘to flow into.’ In terms of God’s experience, influence describes the causal and emotional sway of creatures upon the experience of the Loving One. All creatures flow into the divine life.

Directly with and Entangled

The second idea central to panentheism denies that the Spirit is located somewhere outside creation. It rejects the popular idea that God sits upon a throne in the clouds or resides at the edges of the universe.^[6] Panentheism says the universal Spirit entangles with creation, in the sense that creatures directly relate to and affect deity.^[7] God is never “over there” but always “right here.” I call this theo-cosmo-entanglement.

I add to this second point the claim that God has never existed without creaturely others.^[8] The loving Spirit everlastingly and necessarily relates, creates, empowers, inspires, and loves creation. It’s God’s nature to relate with whatever God creates. Therefore, a necessary relationship exists between the universal Spirit and creation, although individual creatures and universes come and go.^[9]

My claim that God necessarily relates with creation is uncommon among systematic theologies.^[10] The Christian scriptures don’t deny this view, but they also don’t explicitly endorse it. It’s a metaphysical claim. But I agree with Terence Fretheim when he says, “God and creation must be considered together, because again and again the [biblical] texts keep them together.”*^[11] When drawing from Jeremiah’s witness, Fretheim puts it simply: “Where there is world, there is God; where there is God, there is world (Jer. 23:24).”^[12] 

This necessary relationship between Creator and creation is affirmed by other voices. “God is always a God for a world,^[13]” says Raimon Panikkar. Teilhard de Chardin puts it this way, “the universe contributes something that is vitally necessary to God.^[14]” Henri Bergson says, “the mystics unanimously bear witness that God needs us, just as we need God.” And he asks rhetorically, “Why should [God] need us unless it is to love us?^[15]” I put it this way: The Spirit is both the Ever Creator and Ever Relator, because creating and relating are necessary aspects of the One whose nature requires loving entanglement with creation.

God and Creation are not Identical

The third key idea to panentheism says God is more than and not identical to creation. Although the Spirit and creation always entangle in intimate mutual influence, deity is not another creature nor the whole of creation. It would make no sense to say, as I do, that the Spirit and creation entangle if the two were identical. ‘Entangle’ requires difference. God transcends the universe by differing from it, but deity is not so radically different as to have no similarities with creatures.^[16] God is numerically distinct from but relationally entwined with the universe.

The analogy of the mind’s relation to the body — if carefully explained — helps make sense of God as entangled with but not identical to creation. For the analogy to work well, we must think of the mind as a series of experiential entities with material and mental dimensions. And we must think the mind directly influences the body (especially brain), and the body directly influences the mind. We cannot see this mutual influence by opening our craniums, of course, but we infer it through our experience.^[17]

Analogously, the divine Spirit is a series of divine moments with material and mental dimensions. The Spirit has direct influence upon every creature, each of which also has material and mental dimensions. All that exists, therefore, directly influences God, and God directly influences all. But God and creation are not identical. And just as we cannot open our craniums to see our minds at work, we also cannot see the invisible Spirit working in the world. But we infer the Spirit’s work by what we observe and directly experience.

Theoenpanism

It’s not simply that all creation is in God’s experience. An account of providence that takes love seriously says God is in every creature’s experience. The Universal Lover affects all others, from micro to macro. This is theoenpanism: God is in all.^[18] The view also supports the long-standing claim that the universal Spirit sustains all creation. God is in us.

Typical accounts of providence portray God’s sustaining activity through external causation. Many theologians assume a transcendent and unaffected deity exerts causal force upon what amounts to the ‘machine’ of creation and its creaturely ‘cogs.’ Divine power so described is not inherently empowering or invitational; it overpowers and imposes. This construes God like a football player tackling another or, as the Heidelberg confession puts it, “a fatherly hand.” But unlike football players and hands, deity is immaterial and invisible. This way of talking often erases any analogy between a primary divine cause and secondary creaturely causes, rendering God’s action inconceivable.

Theoenpanism thinks about God’s presence differently. Without reducing deity to a mere ‘spark’ or ‘energy,’ it says the Spirit indwells all creation. All creatures are always affected by a loving deity, because the Spirit is truly within the experiences of all. Here, again, material-mental monism is at play. Theoenpanism also affirms creaturely union with God, without characterizing that union as complete identification or a loss of creaturely identity. The Spirit is united with creation by being within every creaturely experience, but God is not a creature.

The strong version of theoenpanism says the loving Spirit is necessarily in each creature’s moment-by-moment experiencing. No entity, organism, creature, world, or universe can exist without divine influence. As John’s gospel puts it, without God’s empowering, we can do nothing (Jn. 15:5). But the requirement of divine influence extends to all creatures. The Spirit will never withdraw nor abandon creation, because the Universal Lover necessarily indwells the experiences of creaturely others. God can’t leave us.

In loving providence, panentheism complements theoenpanism, and vice versa.

(For the rest of this essay, see this link to my Substack account.)

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^[1] The word ‘panentheism’ was apparently coined by Karl Christian Friedrich Krause. On this and Krause’s particular version of panentheism, see Benedikt Paul Göcke, The Panentheism of Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781–1832): From Transcendental Philosophy to Metaphysics (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2018). On Hartshorne’s use of the term, see Charles Hartshorne and William L. Reese, Philosophers Speak of God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953).

^[2] For an articulate explanation of panentheism, see the work of Michael W. Brierley, including “Naming a Quiet Revolution: The Panentheistic Turn in Modern Theology,” in In Whom We Live and Move and Have our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World, Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke, eds., (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004), 1–15.

^[3] For an example of the variety, see Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke, eds., In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004). See also Philip Clayton, “How Radically Can God Be Reconceived before Ceasing to Be God? The Four Faces of Panentheism,” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 52, no. 4 (December 2017): 1044–1059. For more on the history of panentheism and its various meanings, see John Culp, “Panentheism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2023/entries/panentheism/>, (accessed 6/19/2005).

^[4] In several books, Philip Clayton advocates for this form of panentheism. See, for instance,  Adventures in the Spirit: God, World, Divine Action, (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008).

^[5] John Cooper’s criticism of panentheism draws from or is predicated upon various theories I also find problematic. Cooper’s helpful criticisms do not apply to the version of panentheism I offer. See John Cooper, Panentheism—The Other God of the Philosophers: From Plato to the Present (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006).

^[6] See Amos Yong, The Spirit of Creation: Modern Science and Divine Action in the Pentecostal-Charismatic Imagination (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2011).

^[7] Kirk Wegter-McNelly offers something similar in The Entangled God: Divine Relationality and Quantum Physics (New York, NY: Routledge, 2011).

^[8] Many versions of panentheism do not say God necessarily and everlastingly relates to creatures. See some of this variety in In Whom We Live and Move and Have our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World, Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke, eds.

^[9] Women and Non-White People. Some strongly criticize pantheism by associating it with women and non-white traditions (see Mary Jane Rubenstein, Pantheologies). These critics worry that the God of pantheism was intimately related to creatures, lacked independence, and endorsed radical differences in creation rather than uniformity. Panentheism as I conceive it proudly embraces the idea of divine intimacy with creation and creaturely plurality. It affirms that God is not identical with creation but emphasizes a God-universe entanglement.

^[10] My claim is rare among the contributors to the more accessible book on panentheism edited by Andrew Davis and Philip Clayton. See How I Found God in Everyone and Everywhere: An Anthology of Spiritual Memoirs (New York: Monkfish Book Publishing, 2018).

^[11] See God and the World in the Old Testament: A Relational Theology of Creation (Nashville: Abingdon, 2005), xvi. For more on the meaning of theocosmocentrism, see Thomas Jay Oord and Wm. Andrew Schwartz, “Panentheism and Panexperientialism for Open and Relational Theology,” in Panentheism and Panpsychism: Philosophy of Religion Meets Philosophy of Mind, Godehard Brüntrup, et. al., eds., (Mentis Verlag/Brill, 2020).

^[12] Fretheim, Suffering of God, 37-38.

^[13] Raimon Panikkar, The Rhythm of Being: The Unbroken Trinity, The Gifford Lectures (New York: Orbis, 2013), 207.

^[14] Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Christianity and Evolution: Reflections on Science and Religion, René Hague, trans. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 1974) 177.

^[15] Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (London: Macmillan & Co., 1935), 255.

^[16] Michael Brierley argues similarly in “The Potential of Panentheism for Dialogue between Science and Religion,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, Phillip Clayton and Zachary Simpson, eds., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 635–651.

^[17] On the fruitfulness of combining panentheism and material-mental monism, see Panentheism and Panpsychism: Philosophy of Religion Meets Philosophy of Mind, Godehard Brüntrup, et. al., eds., (Munich: Mentis Verlag/Brill, 2020).

^[18] Others use “theoenpanism” and related words, but they mean something different than what I mean. See Joas Adiprasetya, “Dua Tangan Allah Merangkul Semesta: Panentheisme dan Theenpanisme,” Indonesian Journal of Theology, 5:1 (2017): 24-41; Alan J. Torrance, “Creatio Ex Nihilo and the Spatio-Temporal Dimensions, with Special Reference to Jürgen Moltmann and D.C. Williams,” in The Doctrine of Creation, Colin E. Gunton, ed. (London: T & T Clark, 2004), 91; N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 1093.