Abstract
Panenetheism is the claim that God and the cosmos are intimately inter-related, with the cosmos being in God and God being in the cosmos. What does this exactly mean? The aim of this paper is to address this question by sheding light on four possible models of God-world-inter-relatedness. Being critical of those models, which understand maximal immanence in a literal, spatial sense, the paper argues in favor of a model, which cashes out immanence in terms of divine activity. God is, where God acts. Since God acts upon all of creation everywhere and anytime, God is omnipresent to it at all times. Thus, the proposal is to read the ‘en’ in ‘panetheism’ in an ‘agential sense’: God is in the cosmos by creating and sustaining it and the cosmos is in God by constantly being within the sphere of divine activity.
Highlights
Panentheism has gained increased attention among theological circles in the last decades
Panenetheism is the claim that God and the cosmos are intimately inter-related, with the cosmos being in God and God being in the cosmos. What does this exactly mean? The aim of this paper is to address this question by sheding light on four possible models of God-world-inter-relatedness. Being critical of those models, which understand maximal immanence in a literal, spatial sense, the paper argues in favor of a model, which cashes out immanence in terms of divine activity
The proposal is to read the ‘en’ in ‘panetheism’ in an ‘agential sense’: God is in the cosmos by creating and sustaining it and the cosmos is in God by constantly being within the sphere of divine activity
Summary
Panentheism has gained increased attention among theological circles in the last decades. It presents a traditional strand in theology on its own[1] with such prolific and productive representatives as Charles Harthshorne, Jürgen Moltmann, Arthur Peacocke, John Polkinghorne, Joseph Bracken and Philip Clayton to name just a few. Rather than a monolithic block, panentheism is better characterized as a cluster of different theological accounts sharing some common features.[2] For this reason, I consider. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion (2019) 85:43–62 panentheism to be a theological research program rather than a specific theological thesis. A research program consists of a hard core, that is, its most essential presuppositions, and auxiliary hypotheses. Seeing panentheism as a research program brings with it a couple of consequences
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