Turning the Tables on Christian Panentheism

A Phenomenological Approach to the “In” Problem

In what follows, I’ll use italics when referring to any panentheist deity, but follow the conventional capitalization when referring to the Christian theologians’ God.

The Various Interpretations of Panentheism

Panentheists hold that god is in (“en”) everything. But what does “everything” mean? Is god in all things or is god also in non-physical events and structures — such as the laws of physics and our thoughts and our emotional-cognitive experiences?

And what does “in” mean? Is god literally, physically, in the world as atoms are in wood and wood is in chairs? Or is god a potential that is exhibited in or by means of physical things — as the quantum forces establish or instantiate atoms, which in turn affect the potentials of wood, one of which is wood’s ability to be manipulated into a chair? Or is god a structural and behavioral matrix that determines how ‘the world’ is, in the same sense that the laws of physics determine the states and interactions of matter?

Christian Panentheism’s Dilemma

Most Christian panentheists cling to a traditional, doctrinal theism. The Christian God is not worldly, and while God may be described by worldly terms such as energy or potential, God ontologically is not energy, law, matter, etc. God is “in, with, under, and as” the world (in Niels Henrik Gregersen’s widely discussed formulation [1]), but not the same ‘entity’ as anything in the world.

But even the contemporary theologians sympathetic with their cause have pointed out that the Christian panentheists don’t convincingly resolve the incongruity between the doctrinal view of God and the panentheist view of God. Christian panentheism still takes a naïve, objectivist view of “the world,” which means both “the world” God en-habits and God itself must share some characteristics of thing-like realness. How does an all-powerful, eternal, immutable God outside of time, space, and energy infuse mutable matter, in time, in any physical manner without becoming thing-like and somehow diminishing the Divine’s characteristics?

The Phenomenological World God “en-habits”

Instead of trying to understand how an ‘unworldly’ God gets into the world, let’s take a different approach, using the phenomenological perspective to examine how we experientially encounter the world to begin with. That’s prerequisite to finding the god we think is in it.

From the phenomenological perspective, the world is not a thing-out-there, it’s an entanglement of “events”. Events are phenomenological appearances in our inner mental world — ideas, feelings, realizations, or the perception (often called a “disclosure”) of things and of seemingly external forces. I don’t experience the external world an sich. That world is really a set of concepts and other mental phenomena stimulated by and situated within events and things seemingly external to me but, in and of themselves, often inscrutable.

The immediately experienced world is what “I” or “my self” live in: it surrounds and limits and invites me into it. Sometimes I consciously perceive it, creating from electrical impulses in my body a felt-sense of the presence, coherence, and attributes of inner experience that I then attribute to me and to the world. The world is a combination of my movements, my position with respect to the ‘things’ I see, my emotions, intuitions, perceptions, and habits of thinking and behaving that may highlight or obscure aspects of the visual and auditory and sensual field I am in.

The self that is experienced within the confines of a physical case that I call my body is both the creator of and a creation of my experiences. I can extract my ‘self’ from that world, contemplating ‘my own history’ in memory that I call my self. But I can also be the expression of that world, e.g., when I non-consciously display social habits I was raised in, or when my body can still ice skate after years of not hitting the rink without any intercession from my conscious self.

If God is “in, with, under, as” the world, then God’s existence is not merely a perception or a concept. It must be an omnipresent event in the history of the me-world relationship. The god-event must be present to, instantiated in, my non-conscious and self-conscious existence which is in the world and, in some sense, helps constitute that world. God lies within my sudden flashes of insight and brilliant ideas, but also within my muscle cramps, stomach upsets, and (perhaps most importantly) my longing or caring for someone.

The Event of god — Your Best Friend

The phenomenological view paints a very intimate relationship with God that will certainly seem absurd to those who believe God must be somewhere “Up There” and aloof from the mundane world. But that God is the conceptual one — a product of doctrinal disagreements about “God’s nature” that remain unresolved even after centuries of debate. If god is intimately within our world, then perhaps we should dispense with theology and look at something more mundane: how we know our best friend. By “best friend” I do not mean our longest acquaintance or our best social buddy. I mean someone who deeply understands us, perhaps better than we understand ourselves — someone whom, using the term without any erotic implication, we love and cherish.

Your best friend wasn’t always your best friend. It took time for you to become BFs, sharing words, being in the same place at the same time, hearing stories from the other about something that happened to them and ‘resonating’ or ‘understanding’ what they went through. You created a bond, one that helped each of you not just hear but also understand and empathize with the other, maybe even understanding what their real motives were even when they were blind to the truth.

Once again, strictly speaking, you don’t know “your BF”. You hear noises something emanates; you see motions something makes; your brain reconstructs from those noises and actions a ‘someone like me’, and you can ‘share’ with that someone experiences, feelings, ideas. The closer you get, the more you ‘learn about the other’ — which is often also a learning about yourself — and the more the two of you learn, the closer you get. “Your” relationship is more than your senses of hearing and sight and the mirror neurons in your brain that support it; it is a physical-emotional-psychical habitat you indwell for a time.

You can leave that habitat. You can go back to your home or off to your job, entering a new habitat of different ‘relationships’ with others. But when you encounter each other again, neither of you need to re-think or remember who “we” are or who “I” should be. “Your” relationship is your co-created, enduring entanglement of cognitive, emotional, and physical events.

Think of god’s presence “as” the world and “in” the world in the same way. God is never “out there” or “up there” and separate from my phenomenal self. I can conceptualize God as something “up there” just as I conceptualize my best friend as “over there” — but what that’s not what either really is, or means to us, experientially. The phenomenological experience of god is a series of events in my “world”, in which and through which I come to “know” god. (Gregersen actually approaches this position when, following Luther, he suggests the apprehension of God is the ‘immersion’ of Christ in the world.)

Whether one or three or 50 ‘persons,’ god comes to us though the same senses that help us co-create our best friends. God is revealed to us in and as our experiences; God evolves with hominins as they evolve, and grows with us as we grow. We speak of people “growing” into their faith, struggling to understand their relationship with this special Other. The more sympathetic or resonant of us can, without believing in their God for a moment, appreciate the depth and dynamics of the struggle of an Augustine or a C.S. Lewis to understand who they are, or could be, in their relationship with the divine. And anyone who has had a close friend for whom they would do anything they could, simply because they felt and knew they had to, knows well what Marcus Borg calls “the Sacred” — even if they are not Christian.

What a Phenomenological Panentheism Offers Us

It is not transactional.

One doesn’t buy salvation with good behavior, where “good” is defined by a code of conduct ensconced in religious doctrine.

In my view, the greatest weakness of much of Christian panentheism is that it does not create an “in”nate ethic — God’s presence “in” the world has to be supplemented with cognitive directives extracted from scripture and theology. On Gregersen’s view and on mine, suffering is not a ‘price’ we pay for an original sin or for living in a sinful world. The suffering of our best friend is something we must endure in order to learn how to help that person (Gregersen would add, and to be like Christ). It’s the difference between cleaning up your land to make it “look nice” as you see it, as opposed to trying to improve your land to support the needs of the flora and fauna that reside there.

It is not doctrinal.

As an entanglement of time, space, minds, and events it is not codified, it is not predictable, and it is not within human control. However, aspects of the entanglement may be more salient than others, or they may be dismissed or ignored through ‘rational’ reflection. Different religions enact their relationship with their god by means of different doctrines. Christian panentheism could retain its objectivist, theist preference as a specific way of seeing God in the world, acknowledging that it is merely one response to the felt-mystery of encounters with god.

It is inclusive.

No one person, ideology, or religion ‘has it right’, and discrimination, repression, or extermination of ‘alternative’ views cannot be justified on its basis. The “world” is created in our interaction with it, and we are created through our interaction with and in the “world”. We can of course decide to fence off some of the physical and/or spiritual landscape and call it our own, but the phenomenological view of panentheism offers no justification for disparaging or suppressing what grows on the other side of that fence.

How many times have humans tried to manage an environment only to ultimately find we’ve damaged it — from exterminating wolves to ubiquitously installing air conditioning units, we’ve sacrificed some aspect of the ecosystem to benefit a small subset of it. If god is experienced as the world, then intolerance or disregard of any aspect of it approaches sacrilege. When one prunes a tree for its own sake and not for the image it provides to your hominin guests, it is the tree that tells you what to cut and where to cut it.

It redefines “evil” or “sin” as self-isolation.

Gregersen’s “as” already forces us to understand suffering as something God incarnated into during the event of His Deep Incarnation, but on Gregersen’s view God is also with us in suffering. That is an important insight: suffering is natural, unavoidable, and essential — it is part of being best friends with the divine.

I can’t hide from god, I can merely choose to ignore it or find some temporary but ultimately useless means to avoid confronting the dynamics, insecurity, and fecundity of all possible manifestations of god as and in the world. Gregersen, and the phenomenological approach to god, require us to engage with that suffering and that dynamic — not to eradicate it, but to create something better for all entities through it. The phenomenological perspective adds a non-anthropocentric responsibility to that insight: we must understand the world, and the evil, suffering, and despair within it, as something we help manufacture — initially perhaps for other living entities, but ultimately perhaps for ourselves.

It makes us in, with, under, and as.

We do not suffer because of evil or sin or because the physical world is somehow deficient. Those are abstract concepts, a view of the world that we wrap around ourselves to shed the blame for all the uncertainty, fear, and egoism that is a part of every human’s “world”. The Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre held that we when make a decision we make it for all mankind. The phenomenological perspective makes that challenge even greater, for the decision is not just for Homo sapiens, it is for the “world” in its entirety.

[1] Gregersen, N. H. (2013). Deep incarnation and kenosis: In, with, under, and as: A response to Peters. Dialog, 52(3), 251–262.