We in God and God in Us
Theologians sometimes spend a lot of time and energy thinking about
things that other people never think about at all. That is actually one of the
theologians’ gifts to the church. The fact that most of us never think about
something doesn’t mean that that thing isn’t important. It means most of us get
by most of the time without whatever the thing is that theologians are
wrestling with. Yet if we ever stop to pay attention to what the theologians
are doing we realize that it really is important. Becoming aware of it may
deepen our faith and clarify our relationship with God. Sometimes what the
theologians are wrestling with is not something we don’t think about but
something we think we know as established truth. Leave it to the theologians to
insist that it isn’t established truth at all. So it is with the theological
issue I want to wrestle with here.
Faith in God raises a basic question even though most people of faith don’t
think of it as a question at all. It is the nature of the relationship between
God and creation visualized in terms of distance. There are actually three ways
of imagining that spatial relationship. By far the most common way that people
of faith imagine God’s relationship to creation starts with a basic assumption,
namely that God and creation are two separate and distinct realities. There’s
God, and there’s creation; and though God may be the creator of creation God
and creation are not the same thing. We can call this image of the spatial
relationship between God and creation classical theism. It’s theism because it
posits a reality we call God. It’s classical because it is a very ancient way
of understanding how God sits in relationship to creation. It is essentially
the way the Bible views that relationship although as we will see below there
is a verse in the Bible that see the relationship differently.
In classical theism the distinction between God and creation is quite sharp.
God and creation subsist in different realms. For classical theism God is “up”
there and we are “down” here. God is in God’s heaven and we are here on earth.
There is a gap between God and creation. For an image of classical theism see
the imaged labeled Classical Theism at the end of this document. (I wrote this
piece with the referenced illustrations at the end. They won’t show up when I
post it to my blog. You’ll have to rely on the descriptions of the
illustrations. Sorry about that.) There are two circles. A larger one sits
above a smaller one. The larger one represents God. The smaller one represents
creation. They don’t touch. They don’t overlap. The gap between them is
significant. For God and creation to connect with each other somehow the gap
must be crossed. Different theologians have different ideas about how we can
cross that gap. Karl Barth said the movement across it can come only from God’s
side. Paul Tillich and others said that we humans initiate movement across the
gap in our longing for connection with God. Either way there is a significant
gap that we must cross.
Although in classical theism God and creation are separate realities,
classical theism contends that God can and from time to time does enter into
creation to accomplish something or other. God comes into creation because God
knows what’s happening in creation. God “looks down” from heaven, sees what’s happening
on earth or elsewhere in creation, and may from time to time “come down” to do
something about it. The most dramatic and meaningful instance of God coming
into creation of course is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ.
Passages in the Bible that express the cosmology of classical theism are
easy to find. The Bible opens with a great mythic statement of God as Creator
of all that is. In the great creation poem of Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 God creates
the earth and the heavens as something quite separate from God. When Elijah leaves
the earth and goes to God he is taken up in a whirlwind. See 2 Kings 2:11. Jacob
has a vision of a ladder connecting earth and heaven. Angels ascend and descend
on it between heaven and earth. See Genesis 28:10-13. In Christianity when the
risen Christ returns to heaven he rises up. See Acts 1:9. Often when people of
faith talk to God they look up because they think that’s where God is.
Classical theism’s vision of the spatial relationship between God and creation
is deeply ingrained in most of us.
Classical theism has the virtue and also the vice of emphasizing God’s
total otherness from creation. In classical theism it is easy to see God as
above and beyond creation. Seeing God that way is a virtue because if God is
truly God and not something less than God then God must be totaliter aliter,
totally other. Classical theism’s positing of God as apart from creation makes
it easy for us hold onto that aspect of the reality of God.
Like every theological proposition, however, classical theism’s emphasis
on God’s otherness has a danger in it as well as a virtue. The danger in
classical theism’s view of the relationship between God and creation is that it
makes God too remote. It can even drive in the direction of Deism. Deism is a
perfectly rationalistic way of understanding God. It accepts the reality of God
as Creator of all that is, but it sees God only as the Great Clockmaker. God
created the world, established all of the natural laws that science discovers
and explains, then stepped back into heaven leaving creation to run according
to those natural laws with no need for further divine intervention. God becomes
so remote as to be essentially irrelevant to us. Few classical theists take the
matter that far, but the danger of it happening definitely exists within
classical theism.
A second way of understanding the spatial relationship between God and
creation is to say that God and creation
are one. This view of the matter is called pantheism. For a visual image of
pantheism’s conception of the spatial relationship between God and creation see
the image labeled Pantheism at the end of this document. It looks like there is
only one circle. Actually there are two circles, but they are of exactly the
same size with the same center point. Thus they sit one on top of the other and
appear to be only one circle. The “pan” in pantheism means all. God is all, and
everything that exists is God, is divine. God and creation are the same thing.
There have been very few if any true Christian pantheists, although on
theologian Sallie McFague uses an image of the universe as God’s body that
comes very close to pantheism. The notion that God and creation are separate
realities is so strongly ingrained in us that pantheism has never gotten much
traction among us. You’ll find it in some New Age spiritualities and nature
religions but really not in Christianity.
Pantheism’s virtues and vices are essentially the opposite of those of
classical theism. In pantheism God is immediately present everywhere and always because everything is
God. It is I suppose easier for us to see nature as divine than it is for me to
see the coffee cup I’m drinking out of as I write this as divine. Useful yes,
divine no. In pantheism, in theory at least, everything is divine, even my
coffee cup. That’s what the word means. “Pan” comes from the Greek word for
all. “Theism” comes from the Greek word for God. Pantheism is All-is-God-ism. To
those of us raised in classical theism God can seem absent much of the time
because classical theism so emphasizes that God is “up there.” In pantheism
that’s not a problem because Creation and God are one. The immediacy of God is
the virtue of pantheism.
The vice of pantheism is that it robs God of God’s otherness and
transcendence. God becomes everything we are familiar with. God doesn’t transcend
reality because God is everything. We human beings have an innate longing for
connection with something greater than we are, something beyond us, something
transcendent. Pantheism doesn’t satisfy that longing. It can’t satisfy that
longing because it robs God of all transcendence. Perhaps that is why pantheism
has never become part of any of the world’s great religious traditions.
So if classical theism satisfies our quest for connection with the
transcendent but makes God too remote, and if pantheism makes God immediately
present but insufficiently transcendent, is there no understanding of the spatial
relationship between God and creation in which God is both sufficiently present
and sufficiently transcendent at the same time? Fortunately there is, although
it is an understanding largely unknown to most Christians. That solution is
called panentheism.
The word panentheism looks a lot like the word pantheism, but it has the
letters “en” inserted into the middle of it. The “en” in panentheism comes from
the Greek for “in.” Panentheism means everything in God. To understand
panentheism’s conception of the spatial
relationship between God and creation look at the diagram labeled panentheism at
the end of this document. There are two circles, one inside the other. They
have the same center point but different diameters. The smaller circle sits
completely inside the larger circle. The smaller circle represents creation.
The larger circle represents God. All of creation is in God. Panentheism is
All-in-God-ism.
Panentheism has the virtues of both classical theism and pantheism while
avoiding the vices of both as well. In panentheism God and creation are not
identical. God is bigger than creation and is in part at least separate from
creation. Yet in panentheism God is not merely separate from and transcendent
of creation. Creation subsists within God. God permeates creation while still
being separate from and greater than creation. In panentheism we avoid the
vices of both classical theism and pantheism while retaining the virtues of
both.
Although Christianity usually overemphasizes the otherness of God and God’s
transcendence over creation you may have heard things in Christianity that
actually reflect a panentheistic view of the relationship of God to creation.
In Christianity we do speak of God as being both transcendent and immanent. We
think of God as being up in God’s heaven yet present with us here on earth as
well. Sometimes we might say something like God the Father is up in heaven
while the Holy Spirit is God present here on earth. That’s actually bad
trinitarian theology because it overemphasizes the distinction between the
Father and the Holy Spirit while ignoring their identicalness. It also leaves
out the Son. Still, it has a certain usefulness in making God both transcendent
and immanent.
Panentheism handles the paradox of an immediately present God who is also
utterly transcendent better than classical theism does. For panentheism God is immediately
present in creation because all of creation exists within God. Yet God
transcends creation because unlike in pantheism God is bigger than creation.
Creation is in God but does not occupy all of God.
Now, most Christians want to have at least some biblical warrant for any proposed
conception of the faith, and there is indeed biblical warrant for panentheism.
We find it at Acts 17:22-28. In that passage Paul is in Athens standing in
front of the Aeropagus, a big rock outcropping in that city. He praises the
Athenians for their religiosity, mentioning an altar he had seen marked “to an
unknown god.” He says that the true God created humans “so that they would
search for God and perhaps grope for him
and find him.” Yet he says that God is actually not far from each of us, “For ‘in
him we live and move and have our being’; as some of your own poets have said.”
The key word here is “in.” We exist in God. That of course is one of the
essential assumptions of panentheism. God is bigger that we are, something Paul
would never deny, yet we have our being in God. Most of the Bible may share
classical theism’s conception of the spatial relationship between God and
creation, but here Paul gives us panentheism, for which I for one am very grateful.
So I and many other Christians today find panentheism to be the best
conception our human minds can create of the spatial relationship between God
and creation. God is in us while being infinitely more than we are. We are in
God. We can’t be anywhere but in God. We can and often do convince ourselves
that God is absent from our lives. With panentheism we can know that that
conviction is a delusion. Any separation from God that we sense is entirely of
our own making. We are in God always and unavoidably. Being in God is how God
created us. Panentheism preserves the divine paradox of an utterly transcendent
yet immanent God better than any other conception we have. That alone is all
the justification we need for making it part of our understanding of both God
and ourselves.
CLASSICAL THEISM
PANTHEISM
PANENTHEISM
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