A Phenomenological Solution
The Various Interpretations of Panentheism
Panentheists hold that god is in everything. (I’ll use italics here when referring to any panentheist deity, but follow the conventional capitalization when referring to the Christian God.) But what does “everything” mean? Is god in all things or is god also in non-physical events and structures, for example the laws of physics and our thoughts and our emotional-cognitive experiences such as aesthetic appreciation of artworks?
And what does “in” mean? Is god literally, physically, in the world as atoms are in wood and wood is in chairs? Or is god a potential that is exhibited in or by means of physical things – as the quantum forces establish or instantiate atoms, which in turn affect the potentials of wood, one of which is wood’s ability to be manipulated into a chair? Or is god a structural and behavioral matrix that determines how ‘the world’ is, in the same sense that the laws of physics determine the states and interactions of matter?
Christian Panentheism’s Dilemma
Some of these options push panentheism towards panpsychism, where god is not “in” the world, god is the world. That’s an unwelcome outcome for Christian panentheists, who on the whole cling to a traditional, doctrinal theism. The Christian God is not worldly, and while God may be described by worldly terms such as energy or potential, God ontologically is not energy, law, matter, etc. God is “in, with, under, and as” the world (in Gregersen’s formulation [1]), but not the same ‘entity’ as the world.
The difficulty is Christian panentheists don’t have a good alternative. Even the contemporary theologians sympathetic with their cause have pointed out that the Christian panentheists haven’t yet convincingly resolved the incongruity between the doctrinal view of God and the panentheist view of God. How does an all-powerful, eternal, immutable God outside of time, space, and energy infuse mutable matter, in time, in any physical manner without somehow “diminishing” the Divine’s characteristics?
I believe Christian panentheism’s dilemma can be resolved by a change of perspective and of priority. Instead of trying to understand how an ‘unworldly’ god gets into the world, we need to examine how we experientially encounter both the world and god in the first place, and then worry about “where” God ultimately is conceptually.
The Solution: Phenomenologically Reinterpret Gregersen’s “as”
Christian panentheism needs to adopt a different interpretive perspective. To avoid the Scylla of classical idealism (no longer a tenable position in philosophy or theology) and the Charybdis of panpsychism (which doesn’t require a God), Christian panentheism often takes a naïve, objectivist view of “the world,” which means both “the world” God en-habits and God itself must share some characteristics of “realness”. God’s realness cannot be metaphorical, nor can it be “semiotic” in the sense that the world is a sign that signifies or points to God’s realness.
Further, Christian panentheism needs to change the priority of the prepositions in “in, with, under, as”. If we make the in-ness of God primary, we can’t escape the incongruity: God exists somehow “in” the universe, supporting it, and appearing to us through (as) the world, but God “itself” is assumed to be somehow different from that world.
However, if our experience of God is the same phenomenological experience that constitutes “the world” as the world, then God’s in-ness in the world is instantiated by and within experience. In this case, God would be another event in, another instance of, the world disclosing, “in” us, both itself and ourself. To understand this more fully, we need to take the phenomenological point of view to delineate what that ‘world’ is in which God “appears” to be “in”.
The Phenomenological World God “en-habits”
From the phenomenological perspective, the world is not a thing-out-there, it’s an entanglement of events, of the disclosure of things, ideas, and feelings, of innate processes of understanding, and of seemingly external forces. I don’t experience the external world an sich. That world is a set of concepts and other mental phenomena stimulated by or situated within events and things seemingly external to “me” but, in and of themselves, often inscrutable.
The immediately experienced world is what I live in; it surrounds and limits and invites me into it. Sometimes I consciously perceive it, creating from electrical impulses in my body a felt-sense of the presence, coherence, and attributes of inner experience that I then attribute to “me” and to the “world”. I can extract my self from that world, contemplating ‘my own history’ in memory that I call “my self”. But I can also be the expression of that world, e.g., when I non-consciously display social habits I was raised in, or when my body can still ice skate after years of not hitting the rink without any intercession from my conscious self.
That world is a combination of my movements, my position with respect to the ‘things’ I see, my emotions, intuitions, perceptions, and habits of thinking and behaving that may highlight or obscure aspects of the visual and auditory and sensual field I am in. If God is “in, with, under, as” the world, then God’s existence, whatever ‘existence’ means, is not merely a perception – a moment in the history of the me-world relationship – it must be present to, instantiated in, my non-conscious and self-consciousness existence which IS in the world and, in some sense, helps constitute that world. My self is experienced within the confines of a physical ‘case’, but that case, “my body”, is both the creator of and a creation of my experiences – immediate feelings, emotions, remembered or intuited ideas, muscle cramps, stomach upsets, and (perhaps most importantly) longing for someone.
Christian Panentheism, looked at phenomenologically rather than theologically or philosophically, can’t legitimately hold God as a separate entity and at the same time claim that the God-entity is actually, really, “in, with, under, and as” the world. What I experience is all that I know of the world: if God drops into my office and introduces Itself, I experience It as separate from me; If I experience God as a feeling or another ‘voice’ inside my head that answers my questions or intercedes while I am debating what to do about something, it is still my head, my nerves, my inner ‘self’ at work. The phenomenological experience of god is a series of events in “my world”, in which and through which I come to “know” god.
That is a very intimate view of the divine-human relationship, and to appreciate just how radically intimate that relationship is, let’s illustrate it with something quite obviously “mundane” – how we “know” our best friend. By “best friend” I do not mean our longest acquaintance or our best social buddy. I mean someone who deeply understands us, perhaps better than we understand ourselves – someone whom, using the term without any erotic implication, we “love” and “cherish.”
Changing How We See “God”: Our Best Friend
Your best friend wasn’t always your best friend. It took time for you to become BFs, sharing words, being in the same place at the same time, hearing stories from the other about something that happened to them and ‘resonating’ or ‘understanding’ what they went through. You created a bond, one that helped each of you not just hear but also understand and empathize with the other, maybe even understanding what their real motives were even when they were ‘blind’ to the truth.
Once again, strictly speaking, you don’t know “your BF”. You hear noises something emanates; you see motions something makes; your brain reconstructs from those noises and actions a ‘someone like me’, and you can ‘share’ with that someone experiences, feelings, ideas. The closer you get, the more you ‘learn about the other’ – which is often also a learning about yourself – and the more the two of you learn, the closer you get. “Your” relationship is more than your senses of hearing and sight and the mirror neurons in your brain that support it; it is more like a physical-emotional-psychical habitat you indwell for a time.
You can leave that habitat; you can go back to your home or off to your job, entering a new habitat of different ‘relationships’ with others. But when you encounter each other again, neither of you need to re-think or remember who “we” are or who “I” should be. “Your” relationship is your co-created, enduring entanglement of cognitive, emotional, and physical events.
We should think of god’s presence as the world and in the world in the same way.
Whether one or three or 50 ‘persons,’ god comes to us though the same senses that help us co-create our best friends. We speak of people “growing” into their faith, struggling to understand their relationship with this special Other. The more sympathetic or resonant of us can, without believing in their God for a moment, appreciate the depth and dynamics of the struggle of an Augustine or a C.S. Lewis to understand who they are, or could be, in their relationship with the divine. And anyone who has had a close friend for whom they would do anything they could, simply because they “felt” they had to, knows well what Marcus Borg calls “the Sacred” – even if they are not Christian.
What the Phenomenological Solution Offers Christian Panentheism and “Religion” in General
It is not transactional.
One doesn’t buy salvation with good behavior, where “good” is defined by a code of conduct ensconced in religious doctrine.
In my view, the greatest irony of much of Christian panentheism is that it does not create an “in”nate ethic – God’s presence “in” the world has to be supplemented with cognitive directives extracted from scripture and theology. “Suffering” remains the price we pay for sin or at least living in a sinful world, whereas on Gregersen’s view and on mine, the suffering of our best friend is something we must endure in order to learn how to help that person. It’s the difference between cleaning up your land to make it “look nice” as you see it as opposed to trying to improve your land to support the needs of the flora and fauna that reside there.
It is not doctrinal.
As an entanglement it is not codified, it is not predictable, and it is not within human control. However, aspects of the entanglement may be more salient than others, or they may be dismissed or ignored through ‘rational’ reflection. Different religions enact their relationship with their god by means of different doctrines. Christian panentheism could retain its objectivist, theist preference “as” a specific way of seeingGod, acknowledging that it is merely one response to the felt-mystery of encounters with god.
It is inclusive.
No one person, ideology, or religion ‘has it right’, and discrimination, repression, or extermination of ‘alternative’ views cannot be justified on its basis. The “world” is created in our interaction with it, and we are created through our interaction with and in the “world”. We can of course decide to fence off some of the physical and/or spiritual landscape and call it our own, but the phenomenological view of panentheism offers no justification for disparaging or suppressing what grows on the other side of that fence.
How many times have humans tried to manage an environment only to ultimately find we’ve damaged it – from exterminating wolves to ubiquitously installing air conditioning units, we’ve sacrificed some aspect of the ecosystem to benefit a small subset of it. If god is experienced as the world, then intolerance or disregard of any aspect of it is surely sacrilege. When one prunes a tree for its own sake and not for the image it provides to your hominin guests, it is the tree that tells you what to cut and where to cut it.
It redefines “evil” or “sin” as self-isolation.
Gregersen’s “as” already forces us to understand suffering as something God incarnated into during the event of His Deep Incarnation, but on Gregersen’s view God is also with us in suffering. That is an important insight: suffering is natural, unavoidable, and essential – it is part of being best friends with the divine.
I can’t hide from god, I can merely choose to ignore it or find some temporary but ultimately useless means to avoid confronting the dynamics, insecurity, and fecundity of all possible manifestations of god as and in the world. Gregersen, and the phenomenological approach to god, require us to engage with that suffering – not to eradicate it, but to create something better for all entities through it. The phenomenological perspective adds a non-anthropocentric responsibility to that insight: we must understand the world, and the evil, suffering, and despair within it, as something we help manufacture, not just endure.
It makes us in, with, under, and as.
We do not suffer because of evil or sin or because the physical world is somehow deficient. Those are abstract concepts, a view of the world that we wrap around ourselves to shed the blame for all the uncertainty, fear, and egoism that is a part of every human’s “world”. The Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre held that we when make a decision we make it for all mankind. The phenomenological perspective makes that challenge even greater, for the decision is not just for Homo sapiens, it is for the “world” in its entirety.
[1] Gregersen, N. H. (2013). Deep incarnation and kenosis: In, with, under, and as: A response to Peters. Dialog, 52(3), 251-262.