Why Panentheism Misunderstands Classical Theism | Sarah Coakley

Ajouté : 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]Jared, used to be that my struggle was between theism, the existence of God, and a scientific atheism. Now I find myself in a blizzard of new ideas. Take panentheism, which is what I used to call pantheism, that God is the world, the world is God, but with an extra component that God exceeds that which is God's own body.

[00:00:25]What should I do?

[00:00:27]It's a strange kind of discourse, isn't it, because it's like a a kid going into a candy shop and saying, "What kind of God should I have?

[00:00:37]>> [clears throat] >> Should I have licorice or What about this pink one?"

[00:00:43]And I think that's what's bizarre about this conference, that it has a sort of suggestion of you know, preferentialism here, liberal preferentialism. If you don't like one kind of God, chuck it, try another.

[00:00:55]And what's odd about that is that if God exists, one would presume that it would make a huge difference to your life.

[00:01:06]And this is where I get rather Wittgensteinian, and I want to say, "Um believing in God isn't just choosing between various theoretical or abstract possibilities, but actually having a whole picture of your life transformed, um embedded in practices. Um So, I think maybe that's part of your confusion. But if we want to really think seriously about why one would opt for panentheism over what is generally thought to be a classic Christian notion of God, then actually one of the first things you have to worry about is whether the people who are opting for panentheism are setting up a straw man when they're rejecting what they think it betters.

[00:01:52]That is, is it that they have not completely rightly understood the notion of God that they think is defective.

[00:02:00]And I'm afraid I'm belong to the set of people who think that there are serious misunderstandings of the classical scholastic notion of God amongst those moderns like Hartshorne and Whitehead for instance who opted for panentheism instead. Well, let's first understand at least in the panentheist mind what they think they're correcting for.

[00:02:24]>> Right.

[00:02:25]>> What do they think the problem is? Well, they think that the classical scholastic God is distant, um, as it were, abstract and above all static.

[00:02:38]And they very peculiarly completely misunderstand the, uh, thought of Thomas Aquinas here about what it is for God to be actus purus.

[00:02:51]Uh, in Thomas's view, God is infinite action, not ontological staticness or lack of empathy or, um, incapacity to understand suffering, um, or, uh, human forms of transformation. So, I think that there's a a rather weird straw man dimension to the rejection of the classical notion of God because the presumption is that God is somehow distant. God is somehow unable to enter into our empathize with the sufferings and transformations of the created realm.

[00:03:28]When actually, on a classical Augustinian or Thomistic view, God is in absolutely no way noetically displaced from our created realm. In fact, God knows us more intimately than we even know ourselves. Is there a reaction against this so-called perfect being theology? It's like God is immutable, God doesn't change, God is is impassible, God is not affected emotionally So you got a great >> called for shorthand the omni-god. The omni-god. [laughter] Of of classical theism.

[00:03:59]But you see I think that that is a as it were a misunderstand set of misunderstandings of those characteristics has been pervade in modernistic thinking. And so um oddly if you begin to understand afresh what it is to talk about the classical scholastic God and not just an abstracted father God but a God who is also the father of the son who suffered and died um then a lot of the objections I think fall away.

[00:04:31]But conversely a rich form of panentheism which wants to talk about everything that happens being within God and God being implicated in all that unfolds in the evolutionary spectrum in our suffering and changing lives can I think also be catered for or perfectly adequately on the scholastic view when rightly understood. Some of the panentheists that I know have a it seems like a a a sense of trying to harmonize their belief in God with a scientific worldview.

[00:05:09]>> And it concerns them to see what in the traditional religion they would see as conflicts whether it's miracles or violations of physical law and and they seem to feel somehow that if they can bring all of the physical reality into God itself it eliminates the need for supernatural um interventions in the world.

[00:05:34]>> I'm not saying that the problem of supernatural interventions um isn't a severe one for any modernistic Christian believer.

[00:05:45]But I think there is equally a misunderstanding about the problem that such a supernatural intervention would cause if you are not thinking properly about the absolute ontological difference of God from God's creation.

[00:05:58]Well, help me through that.

[00:05:59]>> Okay. So, a classic mistake made in many um modernistic understandings of divine causality is to presume that God is a sort of very big version of us. Um but in the same as it were spectrum of reality. So, God is an extraordinary large personal being, bigger than any others and responsible for the rest of us, but in some sense competing for space. Um and it was perhaps a natural reaction of Christian believers panicking in the face of the incursions of science to try and leave some spaces which only God could fill, the classic God of the gaps. Whereas actually a more classic perception of God is that God is that without which there would be nothing at all, and therefore there is nothing from which God is separated, but equally nothing in which God isn't present. Um now of course, as a Christian believer I actually do want to leave um uh space is not quite the right word because it's re-summons that that notion of um as it were competition and um insertion from outside. I do want to continue to say that for instance God is responsible for the resurrection in a particularly unique way, and for all I know God may be intervening in miraculous ways in, you know, day-by-day holding me in existence. Um but I think that the particular way um that starting from the modern period when there is this sense of the battle um beginning between a apparently retreating um theistic universe and a scientific one, there is a danger of getting the wrong picture. And in response to that wrong picture, you then get various attempts to adjust, one of which, a very sophisticated one with which I have some spiritual affinities, is the panentheistic one.

[00:07:54]But the vision that panentheism gives to us, I think, is ultimately actually compatible with the theistic classical position rightly understood.