ClintGardnerVT - 7 From Theism to Panentheism

God is a universal presence undergirding all of life. —John Shelby Spong

Norwich, Vermont – June 20, 2006 – Looking back on those five months in Paris from the perspective of June 2006, exactly fifty-eight years later, I realize how privileged I was to have that time within the world of Eastern Christianity. I’ll never forget how Father Schmemann’s lectures opened up a world for me. Most of my friends today are only dimly aware of the Eastern Church.

One Westerner who was quite aware of that Church—and who realized that it had preserved certain teachings which were missing in the West—was Pope John Paul. Not long before he died the Pope told the church historian Jaroslav Pelikan that ever since the schism of 1054 (when the Eastern and Western churches split), “Western Christendom has been breathing on one lung.”

What is it that is missing in the West? What does our other lung contain? Obviously many things, but high among them is the East’s panentheistic understanding of God. To me that has seemed a valuable corrective to the West’s tendency to be excessively theistic, with God imagined as a Supreme Being, an entity with a life of his own.

A prominent contemporary Orthodox theologian, who says that we should move away from that theistic way of describing God is Bishop Kallistos (Timothy Ware). In a recent book on panentheism, he writes: “Among all too many Christian thinkers . . . there has been . . . a widespread tendency to speak as if God the creator were somehow external to the creation. . . . All such imagery is sadly defective.”

Thus, we have a paradox. Arguably the most traditional church in Christendom is one of our best resources as we consider how to get beyond theism—and to embrace panentheism.

Two Bishops in Revolt

Among Protestant churches, the Anglican Communion is the closest in spirit and tradition to the Orthodox Church. Therefore, it’s not surprising that two Bishops of that Church have been leaders in the efforts to move toward panentheism. What’s particularly intriguing is how one of these Bishops, John A. T. Robinson, turned to Berdyaev when he sought to express just what he meant by that term. Before I quote him on that, I should provide some background.

As I noted in the Prologue, in 1963 Robinson, who was then the Bishop of Woolwich in England, published a remarkable book called Honest to God. The Bishop’s little book had blockbuster sales, evidently because readers were ready to hear a bishop speak with a fully contemporary voice.

However, it was not until 1967, in a follow-up book called Exploration into God, that Robinson became quite specific about the fact that he was working to articulate panentheism. In the book’s prologue he describes how, as a student, he began to read Berdyaev. Then, toward the end, he writes, “Berdyaev, in fact, probably comes as near as anyone to the theological synthesis we are seeking.” He goes on to quote that same Berdyaev line that Igor pointed out to me: “God is like a whole humanity rather than like nature, society, or concept.” Finding that Bishop Robinson zeroed in on those same words, and had such a deep respect for Berdyaev, gave me a sense of vindication: my decades of pursuing my Russian mentor had not been wasted.

Bishop Robinson died in 1983, but, as I noted in the Prologue, his work has been taken up by his friend and colleague Bishop John Spong. In his Why Christianity Must Change or Die, Spong describes how Alfred North Whitehead and others have contributed to panentheism. He then expounds on Tillich’s panentheistic image of God as the “ground of being” and asks, “Is it possible that we bear God’s image because we are part of who God is?” That’s a question I’ve answered in the last chapter—with a resounding “yes!”

Two Catholic Theologians in Revolt

Thus far I’ve cited only Orthodox and Protestant thinkers in support of panentheism; now I’d like to turn to two prominent Catholic theologians, both from Canada.

One evening in August 1970 Eugen showed me a letter he’d received from Gregory Baum, a teacher at St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto. Baum said that a good friend had just given him a collection of Eugen’s books in German, and he was now looking forward to a study of Eugen’s work.

I’ve never learned if Baum went ahead with that idea, but it’s always been clear to me that Baum and his associate Leslie Dewart at St. Michael’s were pursuing a path remarkably like Eugen’s. I first came on their books, and met Baum, in the mid-1960s when I was leading those ecumenical discussion groups which I’d set up at the Norwich Congregational Church. Dewart’s The Future of Belief and Baum’s Man Becoming both seem to me quite panentheistic. They both were concerned with overcoming our Greek philosophical inheritance which assumes that, to be “real,” God must be conceived as existing—either as a Supreme Being or as some other “outside” power. To many in our discussion group Baum and Dewart appeared as radical, daring, and promising as Bishop Robinson or Harvey Cox.

For example, Baum concludes Man Becoming with these words:

God is not a supreme being or a supreme person. The divine mystery revealed in the New Testament is a dimension of human life: God is present to human life as its orientation and its source of newness and expansion. The traditional doctrine of the Trinity has enabled us to discern an empirical basis for speaking of God’s presence to man: God is present as summons and gift, in the conversation and communion by which men enter into their humanity.

Inspired by the work of Maurice Blondel, a French philosopher who died in 1949, Baum declares that “God is redemptively present to the whole of human history,” and that “every sentence about God can be translated into a declaration about human life.” It follows that “as we speak about human life in all its dimensions, we are in fact also speaking about God.” Baum contrasts the universality of this approach with the exclusivity of Karl Barth’s theology, in which we know of God only through Jesus Christ.

One line from Baum’s Faith and Doctrine astonished me when I happened on it: “To believe that God is Father is to believe that I am son.” Here was a Catholic peritus, one of the “experts” at Vatican II, describing our role as Son, our subjective I, just as Eugen might have. The Son as a category of being and becoming more fully human, rather than as an “object” of belief in a system of religion. The Son as one of the three ways that God is present to us.

I’ve no idea if Eugen and Blondel, who wrote many of their new insights at about the same time, were familiar with each other’s work. As Baum presents Blondel, there are striking similarities. Take Blondel’s most basic premise: that revelation “is not the addition of new knowledge to human life, introduced from another world,” but rather the discovery of “the hidden...dynamism present in human life everywhere.” Blondel made the actions of men in the world the core of his theology. “We must transport the centre of philosophy to action, for there we also find the center of life....To will all that we will is to place the being and action of God within us.” Baum expands on these words of Blondel when he writes that he understands “divine transcendence as referring to a dimension of history (and possibly the cosmos) which is the source of overcoming the present and bringing forth the radically new.” He contrasts his new idea of transcendence with the old idea that the transcendence “referred to the existence of God above time in eternity, independent of man and his history.”

Baum writes that, among Catholic theologians, this new panentheistic understanding of God had become so widespread in the 1960s that it might be called a “consensus.” Transcendence had come to be associated with “the critical and constructive process, by which man assumes responsibility for this future, personal and social.” In other words: “God is present to man in the action that constitutes his history, and creates an experience that is, properly speaking, supernatural.”

The panentheistic note in Dewart’s work is just as clear. His The Future of Belief in 1966 created as much of a stir among Catholics as Cox’s Secular City had among Protestants the year before. And Dewart was quite familiar with Eugen, acknowledging him as “among the first (1945) to suggest that ‘languages are not means by which we represent the truth after it is perceived, but...means to discover hitherto ignored truth.’”

In The Future of Belief Dewart points to a fascinating fact: in the first millennium of the church, before the birth of theology, God was understood as a Trinity of actions in the world. It was Scholastic theology that destroyed this understanding. After Thomas Aquinas, Dewart writes:

The Christian concept of God no longer “begins with the three Persons”; it begins...with an Aristotelian unmoved Mover and First Cause, or with Subsisting Being Itself....The concept of a “trinitarian” God personally involved in human events out of the abundance of his reality was...gradually subordinated to that of a monotheistic Supreme Being eternally contemplating himself in heaven.

This notion of God, with its origins in the abstractions of Greek philosophy, became so entrenched in theology that we lost the notion of God’s threefold “presence” in us as Father, Son, and Spirit. Instead, we have been given the idea that a single Supreme Being has various degrees of immanence or transcendence. To overcome this Greek form of theism, Dewart in effect asks us to return to the first millennium’s understanding of God. He proposes that theology in the future conceive God in the category of “presence” rather than in the traditional category of “being.”

I remember that one close friend of mine, a Catholic priest in our discussion group, thought “presence” wouldn’t do—not substantial or specific enough. At the time I didn’t feel it was suitable to suggest a way out of his dilemma. If I had, I’d have tried to describe God’s presence in terms of the Cross of Reality. How we made God present in us whenever we spoke as representatives of the whole race and of all creation. That would be whenever we spoke from the beginning and the end of times, and from our inmost selves to all the world. Then our speech attempts to include the whole of creation—and is, therefore, holy. When speech is abused, as Hitler used it to regress to the tribal past of one in-group, we sin against the Holy Spirit.

So God’s presence in us is as his powers, but today we can recognize that those powers are our creative powers of speech. God’s presence in us as speech frames and includes all our actions, making us the historical animal. Christianity, as we have seen, should not make us feel more religious in the sense of dependence on some distant God. It should make us feel less religious! That is because the church teaches that God became man, not in some theoretical sense but actually, right inside history. After Christ we understood that we too were capable of receiving God’s powers.

Jahve and the Elohim

Many people find these things better said in metaphor or art. That’s why one of Eugen’s most effective statements about God’s powers—and how we receive them—is made via an illustration printed near the end of Out of Revolution. It’s Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel painting of God creating Adam. There we see both Jahve, the one God, and the Elohim, representing God’s powers. Eugen interprets the painting as follows:

Michelangelo shows God creating Adam, and keeping in the folds of his immense robe a score of angels or spirits. Thus at the beginning of the world all the divine powers were on God’s side; man was stark naked. We might conceive of a pendant to this picture; the end of creation, in which all the spirits that had accompanied the Creator should have left him and descended to man, helping, strengthening, enlarging his being into the divine. In this picture God would be alone, while Adam would have all the Elohim around him as companions.

In The Christian Future, Eugen wrote about how the Church Fathers had described this process of making man like God:

They called it “anthropurgy”: as metallurgy refines metal from its ore, anthropurgy wins the true stuff of Man out of his coarse physical substance. Christ, in the center of history, enables us to participate consciously in this man-making process and to study its laws.

Among the man-making laws we can study are the laws of language, and the history of their discovery is the topic of the next chapter.

To continue, click: Chapter 8 A Brief History of Dialogical Thinking