Panentheism means God is “in” everything, but exactly what that means, both literally and theologically, has been the subject of much debate. Not only does the notion of a physically immanent God run afoul of the more traditional Deist argument that God is completely separate from the world, but it’s difficult to define what “in” means without reducing God to some force of nature (which is the panpsychist position). One popular approach is to adapt the emergent model of the mind-body relationship to explain the “in”. It’s common sense to most of us that our mind is “in” our body, but is somehow separate from it. My inner “I” feels pain but I somehow know that my bruised arm is not the same as my sense of pain.
What makes the mind-body / God-world relationship so intriguing to theologians is that both personal experience and neurological research indicates that the mind-body relationship is two-way. While our physical shell of a body may incur damage, the pain itself is felt in our mind and “exists” there. More importantly, although the mind can be driven by the body it can also overcome the body – as in addiction and addiction recovery. So the causal relationship between mind and body is not simply upwards – body to mind – it can also work downwards – mind to body. Who “we” are emerges from activity in our neurological and biochemical system, but that “we” is not reducible to the laws of biology and chemistry, because it can effect how the ‘lower’ systems behave. For theologians, if God is “in” the world as the mind is “in” the body, then we have an immanent God who is not physical per se.
Steven D. Crane sums up the theological implications of using the mind/body relationship this way: “The world exists in God, while at the same time God’s being infinitely surpasses the world. The finite world is, as it were, embedded within the infinity of God’s being.” ([1], p.666) For Crane, the two-way interaction between the human mind and body suggests that we don’t have two separate entities – God is not the “up-there-not-physical” entity the Deists (and most practicing Christians) claim God is. Jettisoning the millennia-old cosmology of the Church and the philosophy that put God “up there somewhere”, he suggests “God is the body of the world”.
God does not have a body, doesn’t look like a Homo sapiens and is neither a father nor a human biological male. Instead, God is us, all of us, and the entirety of the environments in which we and all other entities on the planet live, move and have our being.
The difficulty with this view is that it explains the what – the ontology of God – but leaves us wondering what that means for religious beliefs, codes, and actions. Ontology is not ethics. If the world is the body of God then God’s ‘body’ is both Auschwitz and your lover’s embrace, Christian Nationalist rallies and PRIDE marches, yearning and satiety. As the philosopher David Hume pointed out long ago, you can’t derive “ought” from “is”: the work of the Panentheist theologians is not over until they can explain how that illuminates human behavior and, more importantly, codes of conduct.
The solution can be found, I think, in Mikael Stenmark’s astute observation about panentheism: “…panentheism essentially contains the doctrine of symmetrical ontological dependence, that is, the relation of ontological reliance goes both ways. Not just from God to the world, which the doctrine of asymmetrical dependence says, but from the world to God: not only no God, no world; but also no world, no God.” ([2], 27)
So let’s look at this form of panentheism from a personal, rather than purely theological, perspective.
Our mind-body world is not just “things”; it includes intentions, actions, repercussions, discoveries and losses, independence and dependence, our ephemeral moods and our physical interactions with those solid objects we call other people. Our bodies signal to us “aches” and “pains”, we suffer diseases of mind and body, we create acts that spurn regret. If our experienced “world” – that is, our physical and mental experiences – is part of God’s body then presumably our actions (and the ideas, emotions, and ideologies that ‘motivate’ them) are also part of that immanent, divine body.
This means God is pervasive, and God is a “constitutive” factor in our selves and in our experiences. God is not some one thing or some one entity “outside of me”. If God is the body of the world, then everything I experience – my headache, my encounter with friend or foe or the family dog, my memories of events in my past and my experience of new encounters – are all instances of God’s body and thus in some yet to be specified degree, instances of God itself.
And, more significantly, other life forms that encounter me are also encountering God.
This is what transforms “God is the body of the world” from a theological position into an ethic. The ethical issue in these God-embodied actions of ours is their universality: what benefits the body of God in its totality, not just in my social, religious, or cultural niche?
In God’s body, suffering is as normal – and necessary – as happiness. Whether we like it or not we lose loved ones, and eventually we sicken and die leaving the survivors to mourn; we kill plants and animals to sustain ourselves; we alter physical environments to suit our social needs. Other parts of God’s body – the animal kingdom, for example – have similar experiences. On the other hand, our responsibilities to the God-in-this-world are greater than those of, say, a hyena, because we possess ‘more sophisticated faculties’ and ‘greater potential’ to overcome mere bodily needs and pursue personal, societal, and environmental development.
What sets us apart in the body of God is our potent but Godself-destructive agency. We alter our environments only to find we have put species, ecosystems, and perhaps even the societies that rely on those ecosystems at risk. And we persecute and even kill each other over ideations – we call them doctrines or self-evident truths or teachings from a “holy” book or political positions – and we kill each other over differences in behaviors, preferences, and skin color. We can perhaps excuse ourselves in the first example because we cannot always know the long-term effects of any action. But the second example seems perilously close to deicide.
If the world is God’s body, and the world is home to so many different entities, ideologies, and environments, how are we to honor that diversity and disparity? Ironically, the answer is: by recognizing our isolation.
Disagreements, be they ideological or practical, always have reasons – principles, rationalizations, fears, or values. It is in these ‘reasons’ that our mind lives. My mind can override my need for sleep, control my anger, share my sorrow, even understand another’s inner situation when they are hiding it from themselves. It can also move me to hate, disparage, or physically attack another human. Are both of these situations the appearance of God’s body in me?
I suggest they are not, because the first emphasizes my situation within the world and the second separates me from it. In the first instance, I am in control of myself, and my actions are outward focused. In the second, I am fearful, a self-referential and isolating emotion. In the first instance I am open to others as they are and aware of my shortcomings; in the second I am reacting to ideas that equate some characteristic of the other with a threat (in some sense) to me that I believe I can eradicate.
Whether we use the Biblical Golden Rule, or Aleister Crowley’s “Love is the Law, Love under Will,” or Jean Paul Sartre’s view that when we decide we decide for all humankind, whenever we decide on an action the dynamics of that decision forces us to acknowledge “the other” as separate from, different from, but yet the same as “us”. They are as isolated as we, they experience fear and suffering as we do. And they can ‘lose themselves’ in the emotion of the moment just as we might. In that moment, we acknowledge our apparent isolation, see it mirrored in another, and accept the challenge to live in a body greater than ours.
Stenmark’s “ontological dependence” – no God no world, no world no God – has an ethical counterpart: no me no God-in-us, no us no God-in-me.
[1] Crain, S. D. (2006). God Embodied In, God Bodying Forth the World: Emergence and Christian Theology. Zygon: Journal of Religion & Science, 41(3), 665–674.
[2] Stenmark, M. (2019). Panentheism and its neighbors. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 85(1), 23–41.