Panentheism

• 1. Introduction

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  Panentheism poses a question that has troubled philosophers and mystics across cultures for millennia: what if God is not simply the universe, but also something more than it? The word itself comes from the Greek meaning "all in God," and the belief it describes holds that the divine intersects every part of the universe while also extending beyond space and time. The German philosopher Karl Christian Friedrich Krause coined the term in 1828, but the idea itself is far older. Hindu philosophical treatises had explored it for millennia before Krause gave it a name. Zen Buddhist abbots would later borrow that name to explain their own tradition to Western audiences. Catholic mystics would claim it was Christianity's original understanding all along. What draws such different traditions to the same word? And what exactly distinguishes panentheism from its close cousin, pantheism, which simply says that God and the universe are one and the same thing? Those questions run through the history of this concept, from ancient Greece to the Aztec empire to the teahouses of Hasidic Poland.

• 2. Naming a Difference

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  Karl Christian Friedrich Krause, who lived from 1781 to 1832, coined the term panentheism not to describe a new idea but to draw a precise boundary around an old one. He was reviewing Hindu scripture and trying to separate the philosophies of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling from what he saw as the pantheism of Baruch Spinoza. That distinction mattered because pantheism collapses God and the universe into one identical thing. Panentheism, by contrast, insists on an ontological gap: God contains the universe, but God is not exhausted by it. Spinoza's own position has been debated ever since. He wrote that "whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived," and that "individual things are nothing but modifications of the attributes of God." Yet in a letter to Henry Oldenburg, Spinoza objected strongly to the reading that he simply identified God with corporeal matter. The German philosopher Karl Jaspers later argued that Spinoza's phrase "Deus sive Natura" -- "God or Nature" -- was not an equation of equivalence but a statement about God's immanence in two knowable attributes, Thought and Extension, while God retained infinitely many other attributes that have no presence in our world at all. Martial Guéroult went further and proposed that panentheism, not pantheism, is the better label for Spinoza's actual view. The American philosopher Charles Hartshorne disagreed and called Spinoza's philosophy "classical pantheism," separating it firmly from the panentheism he himself developed through process theology. Hartshorne, who lived from 1897 to 2000, formulated God as a being capable of becoming "more perfect": holding absolute perfection in categories where absolute perfection is possible, and relative perfection in categories where it cannot be precisely pinned down. That dynamic, relational picture of God is what panentheism, in Hartshorne's hands, most distinctively offers.

• 3. Ancient Roots

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  Plotinus, the great Neoplatonist, taught that the universe flows outward from a single ineffable transcendent God he called "the One." From that source emanates the Divine Mind, known as Nous, and then the Cosmic Soul, known as Psyche. Plato's Timaeus, as read by Neoplatonists, held that the world itself is God. Iamblichus and others tried to refine this by adding a further hypostasis -- an all-pervasive monad that encompassed all creation and its original uncreated emanations -- above the first principle. The idea that a single rational principle pervades the cosmos had roots even earlier, in Heraclitus, who lived around 535-475 BC. His Logos, the governing reason of all things, was the source from which all thoughts and all objects arise. Heraclitus put it directly: "He who hears not me but the Logos will say: All is one." The earliest datable panentheistic thinking in Hindu philosophy appears in the Purusha Sukta, a text compiled before 1100 BCE and found in the later section of the Rig Veda. It describes Purusha, the cosmic being, as both fully present within the manifested world and simultaneously transcendent to it. That original creative will, the Purusha Sukta holds, is what projects the vast universe across space and time.

• 4. Hindu and Sikh Expressions

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  Advaita Vedanta, the most influential and dominant school of Indian philosophy, insists that Brahman -- ultimate reality -- is "without parts or attributes, one without a second." Because Brahman has no properties and contains no internal diversity, it cannot be understood as an anthropomorphic personal God. The relationship between Brahman and creation is nevertheless widely understood as panentheistic. The Bhagavad Gita makes a similar move directly. In verse IX.4, Krishna declares: "By Me all this universe is pervaded through My unmanifested form. All beings abide in Me but I do not abide in them." Several schools within Hindu thought develop this further in distinct ways. Nimbarka's Dvaitadvaita, Ramanuja's Vishistadvaita, Saiva Siddhanta, Kashmir Shaivism, and Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's Gaudiya Vaishnavism -- with its doctrine of Achintya Bheda Abheda, or inconceivable oneness and difference -- are all regarded as panentheistic. Shaktism, or Tantra, is treated as an Indian prototype of panentheism. Shakti is both the cosmos itself and the primordial energy that holds all creation and destruction within herself, yet remains greater than the sum of all of it. Shiva provides the transcendent masculine ground of being. The tradition insists: "There is no Shiva without Shakti, or Shakti without Shiva. The two... in themselves are One." In Sikhism, older exegeses including the Faridkot Teeka and the Garab Ganjani Teeka have consistently described Sikh metaphysics as a non-dual, panentheistic universe. The Sikh poet Bhai Nand Lal used Sufi terminology to describe this, writing about wahdat ul-wujud in his Persian poetry. The Sikh symbol Ik Oankaar carries a monist meaning that older scholarship has always read as pointing beyond simple monotheism.

• 5. Jewish Mysticism

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  Mainstream Rabbinic Judaism follows a classically monotheistic path shaped by Maimonides, who lived around 1135 to 1204. But within Jewish mystical traditions, panentheism found a home early. The leading Kabbalah scholar Moshe Idel traces the doctrine to the kabbalistic system of Moses ben Jacob Cordovero, who lived from 1522 to 1570. In the eighteenth century, the Baal Shem Tov -- founder of the Hasidic movement, who lived around 1700 to 1760 -- embraced it along with his contemporaries Rabbi Dov Ber of Mezeritch, who died in 1772, and Menahem Mendel, the Maggid of Bar. Hasidism holds that the infinite Ein Sof is incorporeal and exists in a state that is both transcendent and immanent at once. The movement merges the ideal of nullification with a transcendent God through intellectual engagement with Kabbalah and a strong emphasis on panentheistic divine immanence in everything. Whether Isaac Luria's Lurianic Kabbalah, with its doctrine of tzimtzum -- the idea that God contracted to make space for creation -- counts as panentheistic remains an open question among scholars. Mordecai Kaplan, who lived from 1881 to 1983 and whose writings shaped Reconstructionist Judaism, was strongly influenced by Spinoza, and aspects of panentheism show up correspondingly in his theological vision.

• 6. Christianity's Contested Claim

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  Richard Rohr, David Steindl-Rast, and Thomas Keating are among the ordained Catholic writers who have argued that panentheism is Christianity's original theological vision, not a departure from it. Rohr made the case in his 2019 book The Universal Christ, quoting Paul's letter to the Colossians: "There is only Christ. He is everything and he is in everything." Rohr notes that this statement, if written today, would likely be called pantheism, while his own position is panentheism. Steindl-Rast frames the moment differently. He argues that what appears to be the collapse of Christian theism is actually the recovery of a panentheism Christianity always held: "Faith in God as triune implied this from the very beginning; now we are becoming aware of it." Thomas Keating's 1993 article on centering prayer drew on John 17:22 -- Jesus praying "that all might be one, Father, as we are one" -- as evidence of a God who is present in all creation without being identical with any creature. Process theology and Creation Spirituality, two more recent Christian theological developments, also carry panentheistic ideas. Charles Hartshorne, who shaped both, maintained a lifelong membership in the Methodist church while also being a Unitarian; in later years he joined and actively participated in the Unitarian Universalist congregation in Austin, Texas. Process theology is widely considered unorthodox in Western Christianity, and its influence on open theism -- a movement associated mainly with Evangelical Protestantism -- has likewise been viewed with suspicion by most evangelicals.

• 7. Buddhism, Islam, and the Americas

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  The Reverend Zen Master Soyen Shaku, the first Zen Buddhist abbot to tour the United States, traveled there in 1905-6. He collected his essays in a book called Zen For Americans. In one essay titled "The God Conception of Buddhism," he borrowed Krause's term directly, writing that the Buddhist God is "all and one" and "more than the totality of existence." He was careful to separate this from pantheism: Buddhism, he argued, does not identify the universe with God. The essay also explains the Buddhist terms that replace the word "God" for non-Western audiences: Dharmakaya, Buddha, Adi-Buddha, and Tathagata. In Islam, the concept of wahdat ul-wujud -- the Unity of All Things -- is primarily associated with the Asharite Sufi scholar Ibn Arabi. Some Sufi orders, including the Bektashis and the Universal Sufi movement, hold similar panentheistic views, as do the Nizari Ismaili according to Ismaili doctrine. In the Americas, the philosopher James Maffie has argued that Aztec metaphysics was panentheistic rather than pantheistic: the force called Teotl was understood by Aztec philosophers as the ultimate all-encompassing yet all-transcending reality. According to Charles C. Mann's book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, only the lower classes of Aztec society were conventionally polytheistic. Philosopher J. Baird Callicott has described Lakota theology as panentheistic, with the divine both transcending and pervading everything. In the stories of Keetoowah storytellers Sequoyah Guess and Dennis Sixkiller, God is known as the Cherokee word commonly pronounced "unehlanv" -- a figure who visited earth in prehistoric times, then left, a pattern that scholars have compared to Vaishnava cosmology.

• 8. Konkokyo and New Religions

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  Konkokyo is a form of sectarian Japanese Shinto operating within the Shinbutsu-shugo tradition. Traditional Shinto holds that an impersonal spirit pervades the material world, giving all objects consciousness through a system of natural forces called Musubi. Konkokyo departs from that impersonal picture by giving that spirit a personal identity and mind, while insisting that this personal form is non-different from the energy itself and does not reside in any particular cosmological location. The god of Konkokyo is named Tenchi Kane no Kami-Sama, translatable as "Spirit of the gilded heavens and earth." Though Konkokyo's practitioners number around 300,000 globally, the sect has given rise to or shaped a range of Japanese new religions, including Oomoto. Many of those faiths carry on Konkokyo's panentheistic understanding of the divine, making a relatively small tradition a significant source for an entire lineage of religious thought.