Divine Immanence Research Articles

Animism, Eco‐Immanence, and Divine Transcendence: Toward an Integrated Religious Framework for Environmental Ethics

ABSTRACTIt is intuitive to think that divine transcendence is incompatible with the sacredness of nature, especially when transcendence is combined with the idea that God alone is valuable. Divine transcendence seems to demote this‐worldly values in favor of union with God in a disembodied afterlife. Divine transcendence also seems to legitimize hierarchies, including male–female and human‐nature hierarchies. Divine immanence seems a better alternative. This set of intuitions about transcendence appears regularly in the field of Religion and Ecology, sometimes as an implicit backdrop rather than an explicit position. This backdrop needs to be thematized and evaluated. For those with ecological concerns, divine transcendence and divine immanence need not be mutually exclusive. Rather, divine transcendence (understood non‐contrastively) complements divine immanence and is compatible with both animist and polytheist cosmologies. The extent of this mutual compatibility and its importance for environmental concerns has yet to be fully articulated.

Infinity, Divine Transcendence and Immanence in Or Hashem

Hasdai Crescas (1340-1411) was a philosopher, rabbi and public person, who lived in a very turbulent period for the Iberian and Provençal Jewish communities of the late Middle Ages. Crescas made a vehement critique of the Aristotelian paradigm received from falsafa, which was used by Maimonides to support and prove the existence, unity and incorporeality of God, conceptualized in the Guide of the Perplexed as the necessary being which is absolutely transcendent in relation to contingent beings, that is, to the world. In Or Hashem, Crescas elaborates an alternative concept of the necessary being, in which the two antithetical notions of divine immanence and transcendence are related to the distinction within the necessary being between its simple essence and its infinite attributes. The simple, one, ineffable essence of the necessary being is expressed in infinite attributes in the eternal and constant act of giving in the univocality of being its good and its actuality to the infinite contingent beings. Crescas advocates that the universe, though ontologically contingent, is infinite in its actuality. God is thus conceived as the eternal and constant first cause, entelechy and Place of the World.

Reading the self through a hermeneutic of divine immanence

Research in the field of Sufism and gender attests to the patriarchal and elite male foundations of the tradition. Scholars highlight how patriarchal renderings of Sufism emphasize divine transcendence and frame Sufi training of the self (nafs) through punitive mechanisms. Through a case study of Shaykha Fariha al-Jerrahi, the grand Shaykha (Sufi guide) of the Nur Ashki Jerrahi Sufi community, this article explores approaches to Sufism that resist its patriarchal formulations. Shaykha Fariha’s teachings about the self, Sufi training methods, and pedagogical relationships show critical reflection on the effects of patriarchy on individuals with varying social and embodied experiences. She resists patriarchy by engaging in a hermeneutic of divine immanence, a multi-faceted way of interpreting the body and material elements of creation as the divine immanent. This article demonstrates scenarios in which a hermeneutic of divine immanence informs Shaykha Fariha’s pedagogy and her approach to training the self through embodied self-exploration.

Divine Immanence in the Panentheistic Cosmology of Arthur Peacock

Divine Immanence in the Panentheistic Cosmology of Arthur Peacock

When Believing in Divine Immanence Explains Vaccine Hesitancy: A Matter of Conspiracy Beliefs?

This article analyzes the relationship between religiosity and vaccine hesitancy by highlighting the role of a specific dimension of religiosity that makes some people more prone to explaining health conditions as a divine agency—the belief in the immanent presence of the divine in everyday life. Accordingly, these people may undervalue the role of vaccination as a solution to cope with a pandemic and may be more skeptical of vaccines. We suggest a mechanism explaining the relationship between religiosity and vaccine hesitancy by focusing on the mediating role of beliefs in conspiracy theories, given that belief in divine immanence and conspiracy theories share the common trait of attributing agency to hidden forces. Beliefs in conspiracy theories, in turn, have been shown to be among the strongest predictors of vaccine hesitancy. By using a moderated mediation analysis on Italian survey data collected during the Covid-19 pandemic, we show that such a mechanism helps explain the relationship between believing in divine immanence and vaccine hesitancy among people not adhering to institutional religiosity. In contrast, this mechanism does not apply when the immanent conception of the divine is framed within a system of beliefs belonging to institutional religion.

Ecotheological Community and the Question of Non-Human Animals Understood as Persons

Ecotheological Community and the Question of Non-Human Animals Understood as Persons

Liberation Theology: A Pragmatist Perspective

Liberation Theology: A Pragmatist Perspective

Endangered or Dangerous? YHWH’s Presence and Impurity in Levitical Perspective

The working assumption in much secondary literature on Leviticus is that unchecked sin and impurity threaten, even endanger, YHWH’s earthly presence. Accordingly, purgation within the Israelite cult is primarily viewed as a means of securing and safeguarding divine immanence. Support is drawn from ANE concepts of sanctuary desecration, the exit of YHWH’s כבוד from the temple in Ezekiel 8–11 and tannaitic formulations. Nevertheless, this article contends that Leviticus nowhere indicates or assumes the departure of YHWH’s presence from the sanctuary. On the contrary, Leviticus asserts the permanence of divine presence and the resulting danger posed to impurity and its sources. This dynamic better coheres with the wider texture of the Pentateuch. In fact, importing motifs from ANE, Ezekielian and rabbinic sources arguably distorts the rhetorical force of Leviticus in its literary setting.

Religion, Animals, and Black Theology: The Spiritual Praxis of Sparing

This article compares an interspecies moment in Howard Thurman’s classic text, Jesus and the Disinherited, and Gwendolyn Brook’s novella, Maud Martha, to consider how Black liberation theology might reimagine the animal-human binarism it has assumed from the Western Philosophical tradition. I contend that an animal-human binarism attenuates the liberationist ethos of black theology, particularly when the animal is centered. To explore this, I first parse out the theological anthropology of Black liberation theology to demonstrate how it has historically occupied a complicated relationship to Western depictions of the human. Then, I argue on the grounds of its own theological convictions, that black theology is obligated to move beyond this ambivalence. As an example, I assess Howard Thurman’s classic essay to discover what insights might be revealed if we reconsider his reading of the mouse’s squeal, considering a comparison to a similar encounter between a human and a pest in Gwendolyn Brook’s novella, Maud Martha. This comparison reveals that Thurman may very well be limited in his capacity to recognize something in the mouse’s defiance. On the other hand, Brooks’ ecowomanist lens may better affirm the defiant mouse. Maud Martha identifies with the mouse so much that she, in contrast to Thurman, spares its life. This moment resulted in her undergoing an unexpected spiritual experience. This experience, according to my reading, is an example of what I am describing as “catching a glimpse” of a liberating deity’s interiority or, what I am considering as a new relation with divine immanence. In other words, in sparing the animal, in seeing the animal as of equal significance, she consequently felt a connection with God. This moment of liberation and divine connection is the ultimate aim of Black liberation theology. An aim we can try to reach by including the animal into our liberationist objective.

“There Is No ‘Away:’” Ecological Fact as Jewish Theological Problem

The “second law of ecology”—that all matter remains part of the earthly ecosystem—poses a theological challenge to Jewish monotheisms. Climate change has further underscored the urgency of understanding and acting in light of the interconnected materiality of the world. Yet Jewish theological discourse has remained largely detached from broader planetary conditions and from the metabolization of these conditions in the environmental humanities. The few contemporary Jewish theologians who recognize ecological crisis as worthy of comment have largely responded to it by propping up apologetic accounts of Jewish theology and ethics that rely on a construction of the divine as outside of the world. I argue that ecological crisis reveals the inadequacy of extant approaches to Jewish theology, which either promote ethical monotheism and a stewardship model of relation to the nonhuman world or claim to promote divine immanence while nonetheless reinscribing human dominion.

Konsep Tuhan dan Agama Menurut Alfred North Whitehead

This article discusses the concept of God and religion according to Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy. The main issue is how to describe Whitehead's concept of God and its implications for religious life. Whitehead's critique of scientific materialism is an entry point to understand the characteristics of his thought. This criticism leads to Whitehead's cosmology in which each actual entity is in the process of becoming. God is not excluded from this cosmological scheme. In this way of thinking, God is the source of eternal objects or values. God experiences every actual event that occurs in the temporal world. Thus, God can be understood from two perspectives: the former refers to a cosmological frame, while the latter refers to religious experience. In Whitehead's language, God has two distinct natures, a primordial nature, and a consequent nature. From the perspective of religious life, Whitehead's concept of God seems to put more emphasis on divine immanence.

Traces of Mysticism in Wordsworth’s Aesthetics of Nature: A Study on William Wordsworth’s Nature Philosophy in the Light of Ibn Al-‘Arabi’s Ontology

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is generally known as a nature poet or a “worshipper of nature”. Yet, his nature poems are not merely confined to the portrayal of the physical elements of nature but are marked by his enlightened spiritual vision. The belief in one life flowing through all, which is a prominent feature of Wordsworth’s nature poetry is a prevalent theme also in the treatment of man and the universe in Ibn al-‘Arabi’s philosophy_ a Sufi mystic whose philosophy is most famously associated with the doctrine of wahdat al-wujud or “the oneness of being”. This paper is an attempt to critically analyze the traces of pantheistic and mystical elements underlying Wordsworth’s poetry, and more importantly compare this with Ibn al-‘Arabi’s stand on the matter. Through analysis of Ibn al-‘Arabi’s ontology, particularly his concept of unity of being and his emphasis on the importance of the faculty of imagination, this study first meets the controversy surrounding the pantheistic elements in Wordsworth’s nature philosophy and then attempts to demonstrate that the mystical doctrine of unity in all beings and the reliance on intuition and imagination as a means of perception of divine immanence is evident in both Ibn al-‘Arabi’s ontology and Wordsworth’s nature poetry. This study also reveals that Wordsworth’s attempt to get to coalescence of subject and object via imagination and its sublime product, poetic language, resembles the mystic’s yearning for transcendental states of consciousness and unification with the divine.

The Speech of Anchises and Arguments for Monotheism in Minucius Felix and Lactantius

This paper explores how one text—the speech of Anchises from Vergil’s Aeneid 6—was of great use for two Christian apologists: Minucius Felix and Lactantius. Both authors used Vergil’s text to make important arguments regarding monotheism. The problem, however, is that the speech of Anchises not only refers to divine immanence, but Stoic pantheism. This latter idea would be seemingly problematic for Christians to espouse given that their sacred text makes a clear distinction between creator and creation. To deal with this particular difficulty, both Minucius Felix and Lactantius appeal to the doctrine of the powers to explain how God can be both transcendent and immanent. Minucius Felix and Lactantius employ the Mantuan poet not merely for rhetorical flourish, nor to display their erudition, but rather to make important apologetic points. In so doing, the Latin authors under discussion answer, in various ways, the difficult question of how much is too much reliance upon pagan literature and learning. What is at stake is a subject no less important than their own cultural identity.

The use of the Bible in theology: Theology as a ‘lived experience’ of God

If the theme of this special edition can be reformulated as a question (what was and is the current use of the Bible in theology?), it would be challenging and very difficult to answer the question because of a diverse usage of the Bible throughout history and today, stretching in a continuum of both vertical and horizontal probabilities: vertically, theism vs. atheism and horizontally, worldliness vs. holiness. The objective of this essay is to argue for the incorporation of the ‘spiritualities’ of divine immanence and divine transcendence in the composition of theologies, facilitated by a comprehensive and multidimensional reading of the Bible and the acknowledgement of contributions from the sciences. In this research, the reasoning will address the following relevant aspects: (1) taking into account the epistemology of the ‘Bible’ and ‘Theology’; (2) the consideration of postmodernity, post-secularism and spirituality and (3) the composition of neo-theologies. Contribution: This article pleads that biblical analyses should play a more comprehensive and determinative role in the composition and formulation of theology, pointing more explicitly to the transcendence and immanence of God. The reading of such theologies then must create different lived experiences of the immanence and transcendence of God.

Embracing Paradox: Maimonides and Kierkegaard on Divine Transcendence and Immanence

Negotiating the relation between divine transcendence and divine immanence lies at the heart of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed and of Kierkegaard's philosophical works. The purpose of the paper is to explore the manners in which they do so. I argue that despite various differences between them, both engage with the tension between divine transcendence and immanence by turning away from objectivity to subjectivity and, moreover, by placing paradox, riddle and secret at the heart of their philosophical works. In other words, I argue that they do not attempt to solve or dissolve the great paradox of God's immanent transcendence but to present it in its most acute forms as the paradox within which the religious life is lived.

Sufi Qur'ānic Exegesis and Theomorphic Anthropology

Of all the various ideological controversies in the history of Islamic thought, one of the most highly contentious areas are those surrounding the ontological nature of the Divine attributes (Ṣifāt Allah). Such questions surrounding God’s attributes, and what delineation, if any, is to be made between the nature of God in his Divine attributes and in his Being (Dhāt Allah) preoccupied some of the greatest classical participants in the ‘ilm al-kalām systematic theological disputation tradition. This study engages Qur’ānic paradigms of theomorphic anthropology and re-interrogations by Sufi thinkers. There is a rich debate within Islamic Scholarship on the nature of the Divine attributes, and their interrelationship, if any, with Banī Adam. Many of the mystical Sufi scholars, such as Ibn ‘Arabī, Mūlla Sadra, Nāṣir Khusraw, and Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī all articulated onto-theological concepts in their writing that became known as Waḥdat al-Wujud, Tajallī Allah, Tajallī al-Nafs’ Nafs-e ‘Aql, and Nafs-e Kūl. This paper argues that the idea of Divine immanence articulated in concepts like ‘Tajallī al-Nafs’ is not a later retrojection onto Qur’ānic material. Rather it is the Qur’ānic material that exegeted with a meaningful and consistent hermeneutic resulted in their theosophical understandings.

Dr. Tsippi Kauffman, z”l: 1970–2019

Dr. Tsippi Kauffman, z"l1970–2019 Uriel Gellman Since she left this world in September 2019, the unique being that was Tsippi has transformed itself into fragments of memories clothed in the conversation, thoughts, and words engraved in her writings and in the hearts of her students, friends, and loved ones. Dr. Tsippi Kauffman was a senior lecturer in the Department of Jewish Thought at Bar-Ilan University. She was an esteemed teacher, a brilliant and original researcher, a wonderful colleague and, above all, a woman of intellect and a fabulous human being. Tsippi wrote many important works in the field of Jewish mysticism and was among the best-known and most influential scholars in the study of Hasidism. Her first book, Bekhol derakhekha daʿehu. Tfisat haʾelohut vehaʿavodah begashmiyut bereshit haḥasidut (In All Your Ways Know Him: The Concept of God and Worshiping God through Corporeality in the Early Stages of Hasidism, Ramat Gan, 2009), which was based on the doctoral dissertation she completed under the supervision of Professor Moshe Idel, is a broad-ranging and incisive exploration of Hasidic conceptions of the divine. This issue continually preoccupied Hasidic thinkers and had many practical implications for the development of Hasidism as a socioreligious movement over the generations. The book focuses on how the first Hasidic thinkers, members of the circle of the Baal Shem Tov and his disciples, conceptualized the relationship between the divine and the material world and between a human being and their God. Tsippi laid out a comprehensive phenomenological analysis of divine immanence and of the concept of "worship through corporeality," showing how, even in the earliest circles of Hasidic thinkers, there was a range of different understandings of these foundational concepts of Hasidic theology. [End Page 344] Her scholarship was rigorous and scientific to the highest degree. But her approach to the subjects she was researching was not simply that of a detached external observer. She was connected with every fiber of her being to the spiritual realities of Hasidism, to the teachings, tunes, and tales of the Hasidim. When she taught or spoke, the profound feeling and soulful connection she brought to these topics was palpable. But this true love never interfered with her keen discernment, her integrity, her down-to-earth honesty. The topics she wrote about reflected her character, her curiosity, and her ambition to uncover new depths and to describe them with precision and nuance. Along with her research into Hasidic thought, Tsippi also turned to the literary realm and became an outstanding scholar of the Hasidic tale. She pioneered a new and innovative discourse that brought to bear theological and gender readings of the Hasidic tale, which she saw as a variegated phenomenon, rich in multilayered meanings. She aspired to forge connections between her two great loves—the hagiographic and the homiletic Hasidic literature—constructing new methodologies and tracing the literary influence of various works from the long and multifaceted tradition of Jewish mysticism. Tsippi also wrote on a host of other topics, including the figure of the legendary Tsaddik Rabbi Zusha of Hanipol, the teachings of Rabbi Abraham "the Angel," son of the Maggid of Mezrich, and the practical kabbalistic rituals in the Hasidic practice of immersion in a mikveh, on which she authored several groundbreaking studies. Tsippi's critical sense often led her to conclusions that diverged from the established consensus in Hasidic studies. For example, her work on women and gender in Hasidism offers a complex vision of the movement, which recognizes the unfavorable status of women in the social fabric of Hasidic society yet highlights the participation of women, in their own distinct manner, in the Hasidic religious experience. Tsippi presented her position in a dispassionate and balanced manner, while respectfully differing from colleagues with whom she took issue. Indeed, her amiability and gentleness manifested themselves clearly in her relationship with her intellectual opponents. I recall an episode that took place when Tsippi was invited to give a talk at an evening program dedicated to a book I coauthored. A few days before the event, I met with Tsippi, and she shared with me the gist of her talk, which, in addition...

“Deum tolles ex oculis”, ou l’impossible compromis entre mystère et tragédie

As it enabled a straightforward dialogue between God and mankind, the presence of the divinity on the stage of a mystery play, back in the Middle Ages, both appeared like a feature of this theatrical genre and established a fundamental difference with tragedy. This study compares three plays written in the late 15th century and the 16th century, staging the sacrifice of Isaac, and proves how the representation of God on stage forbids any possibility of a transcendent Hereafter, the essential condition for the emergence of tragedy. With such an arrangement, the theatrical universe of mystery plays leads the divinity to justify His decisions, while entertaining a horizontal relationship with the other character. In mystery plays, the balance thus tips towards divine immanence, at the expense of transcendence – the latter, claimed by the Reformation, being necessary to the rebirth of tragedy. It then comes as no surprise that 16th-century humanists, who rejected this genre so closely linked with the theatre of the Middle Ages, felt the need to exclude God from the theatrical area, in order to break away from the medieval tradition and revive the precepts from the Antiquity. Among them, the expression Multa tolles ex oculis, borrowed from Horace, can be modified into a hypothetical Deum tolles ex oculis, thus underlining the transition from mystery plays to tragedy.

The Responsiveness of Pure Actuality: Unmediated Agency, Linguistic Potentiality and the Divine Accommodation of Speech Acts

AbstractThis article builds upon the trinitarian theology of Thomas Weinandy, applying his elaboration of Aquinas' notion of God's pure actuality to the matter of linguistic agency. In particular, the seemingly contradictory claim will be made that God is more responsive to us (properly understood) precisely because he cannot perform the act of response. Rather, God reveals the pure act that is himself through what the article terms notional responses. These are the epistemological accommodations of his pure actuality to finite human persons in the form of speech acts as humans change in their relation to God. In understanding God's communicative agency as such, divine transcendence will be shown to establish divine immanence rather than to stand at odds with it.

Early High Christology in Oneness Pentecostal Perspective

Abstract There is a substantial consensus for the emergence of a high or divine Christology very early and from a Jewish context. Based on insights from Oneness Pentecostalism, the New Testament evidence for early high Christology is best explained within the context of exclusive monotheism by a robust concept of incarnation and a duality of divine transcendence and immanence rather than incipient binitarianism or trinitarianism.