Panentheism

Panentheism (“all-in-God-ism”) holds that although God and the world are ontologically distinct, the world exists “in” God, bound to him by mutual dependence: God is genuinely affected by, and changes together with, the world’s own history.¹ This differs from pantheism, which identifies God with the world outright, though the two are closely related.² It stands against classical theism’s teaching that God depends on nothing outside himself for his being, glory, or blessedness.³ Its most developed modern form is a twentieth-century doctrine of the Trinity opened to, and changed by, the world’s suffering.⁴

Historical Origin

Craig Carter traces panentheism to one of two branches of what he calls the “liberal project,” the modern attempt to revise Christian doctrines to fit the metaphysics of the age. One branch runs from Baruch Spinoza’s historical criticism of Scripture; the other from Friedrich Schleiermacher’s revisionist theology, which “takes a radical form in process theology and Hegelian panentheism,” alongside a milder “conservative version” in what Brian Davies calls theistic personalism and James E. Dolezal calls theistic mutualism.⁵ On the American side, the same impulse descends from Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy, “now called process theology.”⁶

The Hegelian strand runs through the twentieth century to Jürgen Moltmann, whose The Trinity and the Kingdom (1981) states the divine Persons as bound to the world in a relationship he calls reciprocal, the whole creation capable of being united within the divine life itself. John Cooper, quoted by Carter, called this “the most extensive explicitly panentheistic Christian theology of the late twentieth century.”⁴

Core Tenets

Panentheism’s central claim is that the world exists inside God’s own being rather than merely being made and sustained by him from outside. Moltmann, on this account, “embraces a type of panentheism, God is not identical with the world (pantheism), but there is a mutual dependence between God and the world, so that God is in the world and the world is in God.”¹ Carter groups panentheism with pantheism, theistic mutualism, and theistic personalism as the “rampant” alternatives that appear “in an age that rejects the classical metaphysical proofs of God’s existence,” each making God’s being commensurate with the creature’s rather than absolutely distinct from it.⁷

Because God is bound to the world this way, panentheists hold that God is a temporal being who genuinely changes as history unfolds, gaining rather than merely expressing knowledge and experience. The process theologian Charles Hartshorne described creaturely worship itself as “contributing value to God which he would otherwise lack.”⁸

Confessional and Biblical Response

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession and the Congregationalist Savoy Declaration state, in nearly identical language, that God “hath all life, glory, goodness, blessedness, in and of himself” and “is alone in and unto himself all-sufficient, not standing in need of any creature which he hath made… he is the alone fountain of all being, of whom, through whom, and to whom are all things.”³⁹ That clause rules out panentheism’s mutual dependence directly: God’s being, glory, and blessedness are not enlarged, diminished, or completed by anything outside himself, including a world he is said to hold “in” himself.

Scripture answers the same underlying claim, that God needs the world in some way to be fully himself. Paul tells the Athenians that the God “who made the world and everything in it… does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:24-25). Barrett draws the conclusion panentheism denies: a God who depended on the world for his being “would be a God in our world but not a God distinct from our world.”¹⁰

Related Doctrines

References

Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019), chap. 7, “Does God Have Emotions? Impassibility.” ↩ ↩²
Craig A. Carter, “Interpreting Isaiah 40-48 Theologically,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 3. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 2. ↩ ↩²
Carter, “Do We Worship the God of the Bible?,” chap. 9. ↩ ↩²
Carter, “Prologue: How My Mind Has Changed.” ↩
John N. Oswalt, The Bible among the Myths: Unique Revelation or Just Ancient Literature?, Ancient Context, Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009), chap. 9, “Origins of the Biblical Worldview: Alternatives.” ↩
Carter, “What Is Trinitarian Classical Theism?,” chap. 2. ↩
Peter Sammons, The Forgotten Attributes of God: God’s Nature and Why It Matters (Fort Washington, PA: CLC Publications, 2023), chap. 3, “Aseity,” 58-74. ↩
The Savoy Declaration (1658), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 2. ↩
Barrett, chap. 4, “Does God Depend on You? Aseity.” ↩