panentheism

PANENTHEISM I begin this project by writing that 'images from nature can act as symbols in mediating grace to us.’ My theological perspective belongs to Panentheism, which allows God to be in creation, and creation to be in God in a special way. The New Catholic Encyclopedia defines Panentheism : "Panentheism views all things as being in God without exhausting the infinity of the divine nature. Panentheism stands as a kind of surrelativism holding for a real convertible relation of dependence between God and the world - not only is the world dependent upon God, but God is dependent upon the world. It regards the world as an actual fulfillment of God's creative possibility. Today it describes the views of those who introduce a polarity in the notion of God as both eternal and temporal and as including yet transcending the world. " (4)...

... Taking this definition line by line, we see that 'Panentheism views all things as being in God without exhausting the infinity of the divine nature. This means that God exists within creation without being limited to, or encompassed by, nature. ln this way Panentheism differs from pantheism, which holds that God is in nature in such a way that creation is identical with God. (5) In addition, Panentheism offers a model for Creation different from that commonly imagined, and sympathetic to a feminist perspective as well. Arthur Peacocke, in delivering the 1983 Mendenhall Lectures, talks about bringing together the two concepts of God's transcendence and God's immanence in Creation. He suggests we visualize this as a "spatial-model (which can picture) the 'space' of different kinds of distinction, as in a venn diagram."(6) He writes "Because there is no part of the world where God is not active and present in the events and processes themselves and because there is infinitely more to God's being than the world, we could say that the world is in God there is nothing in the world not in God. This understanding of God's relation to the world is sometimes called 'Panentheism' which has been defined as the belief that the Being of God includes and penetrates the whole universe, so that every part of it exists in him, but that his being is more than, and is not exhausted by, the universe." (7) Further, Peacocke thinks an improvement can be made on the spatial model by adopting a "biological model” (8) based on human procreation. (9) This conception of God can also shift the emphasis from our traditional male image of God to include a new, much needed and complementary female image of God as Creator. Peacocke writes, "The concept of God as Creator has, in the past, been too much dominated by a stress on the externality of God's creative acts - he is regarded as creating something external to himself, just as the male fertilizes the ovum from outside. But mammalian females, at least, experience creat- ion within themselves; the growing embryo resides within the female bodv. This is a proper corrective to the masculine picture - it is an analogy of God creating the world within herself we would have to say. This is yet another of the prices we pay for having in the past been more ready to predicate of God the active, powerful external adjectives. conventionally and inaccurately associated with masculinity, rather than the more passive, responsive, internal adjectives, equally conventionally and inaccurately associated with femininity. God creates a world that is, in principle and in origin, other than 'himself' but creates it, the world, within ' herself'. ‘9 Human freedom, that category, so important to any discussion of Christian theology, is maintained in any Panentheistic model of creation. To continue the analogy above, the human mother can influence her offspring, even while it is in the womb, in many ways, and she can in turn be influenced by it, but she cannot determine how it will act, she cannot deprive it of its freedom. She can eat chili peppers and disturb the foetus, but it can wake her up at night with its kicking as well. Process theologians can also describe Panentheism intelligibly, and provide a sound philosophical basis for it. The basic category of process philosophy is Experience. "Because both God and creatures are experiences, both can be correctly described as mutually inexistent. Whatever is experienced stands within experience and makes it to be the kind of experience it is. God is the supreme experience - the experience of all that could conceivably be experienced. God experiences the world. The world therefore stands within the divine experience. It exists in God. This is not to say that the world is God or the body of God. The world is simply what God experiences. It is not the one thing He (sic) experiences. For God also experiences Himself. But a world experienced by God exists in God." (10) 'The term 'inexistence' does not imply nonexistence but 'existence in' something else. It is a technical term derived from trinitarian theology. Father, Son and Spirit are understood as 'mutually inexistent' . That is to say, they are dynamically interrelated yet relationally distinct. " (11) Next, Panentheism stands as a kind of surrelativism holding for a real convertible relation of dependence between God and the world - not only is the world dependent upon God, but God is dependent upon the world. This means not only that the freedom of creation is preserved, but that the freedom inherent in creation, and seen especially clearly in human beings, is co-creative of the universe, of reality, and even of God.” (12) In the words of Charles Hartshorne, "A creationist philosophy holds that it is not God alone who acts in the world; every individual acts. There is no single producer of the actual series of events; one producer (God), to be sure is uniquely universal, (and) unsurpassably influential. Nevertheless, what happens is in no case the product of (God's) creative acts alone. Countless choices. including the universally influential choices (God's), intersect to make a world, and how, concretely, they intersect is not chosen by anyone, nor could it be. A multiplicity of choosers means that what concretely happens is never simply chosen; rather it just happens." (13) God is not solely responsible for the world, God is not sole Creator of the universe, but rather Co-Creator along with other (though created) co-creators. The freedom of creatures is, indeed, the decisive factor. 'It regards the world as an actual fulfillment of God's creative possibility.' God's act of creation is not seen as a once-for-all event, thereafter static, like a stage-set for the human drama to be played out upon, but is an on-going creation, with books and chapters still unfolding: Creation, Exodus, Incarnation, Resurrection, New Creation. Creation is viewed in terms of Eschatology. (14) The concept of on-going creation is in accord with the latest perspectives of scientific opinion. Gordon D. Kaufman develops an evolutionary perspective on the relation of God and creation. He writes, "It is meaningful to regard the fundamental structures of nature and history as grounded in an act (of God), if we are able to think of them as developing in time. An act is intrinsically temporal: it is the ordering of a succession of events toward an end. Prior to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while a static-structural view of nature prevailed, it was very difficult to think of nature as ordered by God's act in any further sense than being created (and sustained) by him (sic). But a scientific revolution occurred in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: geologists began to see the earth not as a more or less static given, but as having a history through which it developed during many ages to its present form; biologists came to see life not merely as a structure of species, but as a unitary evolutionary process in continuous development from lower forms to highly complex ones; and astronomers even discovered that the supposedly eternally stable heavens actually manifested a continuously expanding movement through billions of years, seeming to go back to some primeval originating 'explosion' In short, scientists came to think of nature, in all her levels and forms, as in historical process, as moving and developing in time." (15) For Kaufman, evolutionary science makes faith in a Creator possible and even plausible, from a contemporary point of view: "Thus, to conceive the whole cosmic movement as comprehended within a single 'act' through which God is achieving some ultimate purpose is consistent with the modern understanding of nature as in process of evolutionary development." (16) This notion that creation is 'an actual fulfillment of God's creative possibility' is still a matter of faith, although there is supporting evidence to be found for it in science and philosophy. Kaufman explains his rationale thus: "The purpose that informs an act is an interior connection betveen the various phases of events known to the agent who is performing it, and it is seldom directly visible to external observers, especially to those who can see only a tiny fraction of the total act in question. If God is acting through the process of nature's development over billions of years to accomplish some ultimate objective, this would hardly be apparent in the observations of lowly men, with a life-span of three-score years and ten and careful scientific records going back at most only a few hundred years. (But) one finds it possible to discern, with the help of modern knowledge of nature and history, some of the stages (subacts) through which the created order has moved as God has gradually been performing his master act. The life on earth, the evolution of higher forms of life and finally of man (sic) - each of these (as well as many other natural processes and events) represents an indispensable step toward the realization of God's ultimate objectives for creation." (17) 'Today (Panentheism) describes the views of those who introduce a polarity in the notion of God as both eternal and temporal and as including yet transcending the world. ' Perhaps the primary exponent of a dipolar conception of God is Charles Hartshorne, author of A Natural Theology For Our Time. The New Catholic Encyclopedia writes that, "Hartshorne has done most to give Panentheism formal expression as a view of God." Hartshorne has formulated the theory of modal coincidence: "A being necessarily all-inclusive (God) must be one whose potentiality for change is coextensive with the logically possible. I call this property modal coincidence. All actual things must be actual in God, they must be constituents of his actuality, and all possible things must be potentially his constituents. He is the Whole in every categorial sense, all actuality in one individual actuality, and all possibility in one individual potentiality. "Modal coincidence implies that the traditional identification (of deity with infinity) was a half truth. All-possibility - which is indeed infinite if anything is - coincides with divine potentiality. “Thus, God is infinite in what he could be, not in what he is; he is infinitely capable of actuality rather than infinitely actual. Possibility is in principle inexhaustible; it could not be fully actualized. Actuality and finitude belong together, possibility and infinity belong together." (19) God is thus like a continuum with two poles, actuality and possibility. Opposite and contradictory qualities can be predicated of God, if each quality is applied to the correct pole. Thus, for example, God can be both finite and infinite: finite in actualization, e.g., in relation to creation, but infinite in possibility; or both immutable and mutable: immutable insofar as God is unsurpassable by another mutable insofar as he is capable of surpassing himself, and in fact, any change in creation (of which God is the all-inclusive subject of experience) means an increase in God's experience, and thus in God (and this is how God comes to be influenced and affected, even co-created, by creation itself) Herein is found a way to logically express God's actuality within the finitude of creation without at the same time losing, or compromising, God's absolute and immutable qualities. Hartshorne goes on to demonstrate that contrary to what we usually think, God's greatness exists more fully in His actualizations than in His possibilities, in His finiteness, rather than in His infinity: "The 'absolutely infinite' cannot be determinate; so far from being the fulfillment of all possible richness or plenitude of reality, it is the fulfillment of no possible value, and ( is ) thus empty of contrast and devoid of beauty... since beauty lies in harmonized contrasts and the more definite (actual) a thing is the richer the contrasts it can involve. Here we see what was wrong with the classical, and Kantian, idea of 'most real being'. This was a definition, not with respect to actuality, but with respect to possibilities only. All the value of reality there could be, that God was said to have, no matter what the world might be. But therewith the contrast between actual and possible is hopelessly compromised, and the meaning of both terms is put in doubt. Instead of ascribing to the Unsurpassable the actualization of all possible perfection, we should ascribe to him the actual possession only of all in fact actualized values. We should ascribe to him the potential possession of every possible value. Not completeness, but all-inclusiveness, is what is required (in any concept of the wholeness or 'perfection' of God). Since value lies in harmonized contrasts and the more definite a thing is the richer the contrasts it can involve, it follows that possible worlds, really worldly possibilities or incompletely definite sorts of worlds, are less rich as objects of knowledge than actual worlds." (20) To bring this down to the level of the human, to put us in touch with the God we Christians be1ieve in and also to address the issue of the evil we find a part of 'actuality' or creation, Hartshorne goes on to say: "God is not on one side only of categorial contrasts; he is not merely infinite or merely finite, merely absolute or merely relative, merely cause or merely effect, merely agent or merely patient, merely actual or merely potential, but in all cases both, each in suitable respects or aspects of his living reality, and in such a manner as to make him unsurpassable by another. He is even both joy and sorrow, both happiness and sympathetic participation in our griefs. He is not indeed both goodness and wickedness, but only because the latter is a privation, disregard of the interests of others, and this, like 'ignorance of what is', conflicts with 'unsurpassable by another'. But loving participation in grief, like receptivity to influence in general is no privation, but a positive power, extremely limited in us, unlimited in God."(21) This all-inclusiveness in God of what we humans consider to be both the heights and depths of experience, will recur in this paper, both in our discussions of Jungian psychology and in our consideration of The Canticle of Creatures. Lastly, there are indications from scripture that Panentheism is a Biblically acceptable concept as well. For example, that God can be revealed through nature is affirmed in Romans l:20: "Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made; so they are without excuse." And the notion that creation is present in God in a special way is intimated in Acts 17:27-28: "That they should seek God in the hope that they might feel after him and find him. Yet he is not far from each one of us, for 'In him we live and move and have our being' as even some of your poets have said.“ And lastly, and most significantly in my opinion, are passages like Proverbs 3: 19: "The Lord by wisdom founded the earth; (and) by understanding He established the heavens." For me, this means that 'wisdom' and intelligence are somehow caught up in the warp and weft of this world, and that therefore I can I earn from it something about what it means to be a human beilig, to be in and of creation. (22) Since the development of scientific inquiry, our intelligence has been exercised in the process of discovering the complexity of creation, as well. This passage also says to me that 'heaven' , which is the word we use to denote the possibility of a better reality than we now enjoy (23) has something to do with 'understanding', or Love. Proverbs 8:22-3l talks about creation having been accomplished through and in the presence of a personified female figure named Wisdom. Traditionally, Jesus Christ has been identified with this figure, despite the obvious gender problem. But a case is being made now by theologian Don Gelpi (24) for the identification of the Holy Spirit with Wisdom; and since the Holy Spirit is identical with the mind of Christ, Jesus Christ, and creation through Christ, can still be identified with this Wisdom figure. There are two passages indicating that Biblical writers saw creation panentheistically occurring in and through Christ. "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominations or principalities or authorities - all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together." (Col .l: l5~17) And: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made." John l l - 3 And, once again, Proverbs 3: 19: "The Lord by wisdom founded the earth; (and) by understanding he established the heavens." Taken all together, these passages ought to indicate to us that the earth has wisdom and healing to offer us.