God’s Body at Work: Rāmānuja and Panentheism

Abstract

In recent decades philosophers of religion espousing traditional Christian viewpoints of divine action as well as those who have offered substantial revisions of these doctrinal positions have grappled with the question of whether, and in what sense, God can be said to be "embodied" in the world. Thinkers with or without specific Christian commitments from different standpoints, such conceptualized as the grand monarch timelessly exercising unilateral power over creation, but that a more immanental understanding of divine action can be developed by viewing the world as in fact the body of a temporal God. Setting themselves against the "perfect being" theology of Augustine, Aquinas and Anselm, with its specific formulations of maximal power, aseity, simplicity, necessity and timelessness, they have instead developed various patterns of "panentheism" which they argue can highlight the real communication and interrelationships between God and the world. Along with emphasizing God's intimate presence in all finite entities, they believe that this notion of the embodied divine can help to dissolve various paradoxes and perplexities that have beset Christian orthodoxy, such as the compatibility or otherwise of human free will with divine omniscience, petitionary prayer with divine eternity, the Biblical account of Jesus' suffering with divine impassibility, and so on. Mainstream Christian thinkers, who are otherwise sensitive to the charge that God's relation to the world has sometimes been viewed in extrinsic terms as the distant deity or the cosmic clockmaker, have nevertheless rejected this notion of God's embodiment in the world, their primary charge often being that it dilutes