Very nice example, Dave. 
and I agree with this…
Still working out the implications of this… 
Me too
For a wonderful read, there is “The Harmony Within” amazon.com/The-Harmony-Withi … 0940895439
…which just now came to mind. I have a copy in my library and need to re-read it; I remember first reading it a number of years ago and thinking about panentheism (not the kind based on Hartshorne’s work or that train of thought) and wanting to believe it; but at that time I was locked into TULIPian ECT (I just made up the word “tulipian” and am very happy with myself 
) and could not reconcile the two - too much cognitive dissonance.
Now though, I can see more clearly , and further - UR and its appurtenances open up much wider vistas.
I’m now off to a) continue building that guitar and b) finding that book and reading it again.
Just opened up the book “The Harmony Within: The Spiritual Vision of George MacDonald” by Roland Hein, and ran across what I think may be the key to understanding GMac’s ‘worldview’:
“Law is the soil in which along beauty will grow;
Beauty is the only stuff in which Truth can be clothed;
And you may, if you will, call Imagination the tailor that cuts her garments to fit her” GMac
This reminds me a bit of Keats’ dictum :
“'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all. Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” - except that GMac thinks we also need to know about law, and about imagination. Law, because because what is beautiful is not just our personal preference - it is based on the deep structure of existence from God; a kind of beauty that is not growing out of that soil is to a great extent an aberration, and is harmful, like some of the ‘beautiful’ beings in GMac’s novels that are temptresses and lead to ruin. In other words, I think - beauty is not necessarily truth.
Imagination, because truth must be ‘clothed’ ( a wonderful metaphor) - the question for me is: by whom? Whose imagination do we trust? How do we ‘see’ and understand the truth?
The panentheism I’m interested in is in fact a clothing of the Truth - a way of seeing and yes - feeling - that does away with the ‘realmism’ (Jerry Gill’s term) of ‘this is spiritual’ this is ‘natural’ this is ‘mechanistic’ this is ‘doctrinal’ - and gives the (truthful, I hope) feeling of interpenetrating dimensions, a way of seeing the wholeness of things.
Obviously I have a lot of thought yet to be done.
Wonderful, Dave!
I do have The Harmony Within and looked through it for the first time in ages when starting this thread. I need to go back and read it more closely now that I’ve “grown” a bit in understanding…
Speaking of Keats, here’s a GMac quote referencing Keats in his “Wordsworth’s Poetry” essay…
Nicely put, Dave. I too am interested in developing the vision to see God’s work and messages everywhere…sort of spiritual “X-ray vision”… 
Thanks for the reference to that essay, Steve - I’ve not read it, but will now. Wordsworth has always intrigued me; in fact, at one time - and maybe we will do it, by golly - my wife and I wanted to do a walking tour of the Lake District.
Here’s a link to the essay, Dave. It’s probably the most informative piece he wrote in regard to his panentheism…gutenberg.org/files/9393/9393-h/9393-h.htm#link2H_4_0011
Yeah, this is a pretty cool discussion.
I really gotta read MacD one of these days… I’ve only ever read his sermon Justice, so I gotta read some more of his stuff… I’ll get around to it eventually though.
Anyways, I’ve heard of Panentheism, and I always figured, in the simplest terms, that it just meant that God is both within creation and beyond creation at the same time, or both immanent and transcendent, to put it in theological terms, and this makes sense to me.
In short, God is everywhere.
A couple verses in the Bible that come to mind in relation to this:
“Am I only a God nearby,” declares the LORD, “and not a God far away?” - Jeremiah 23:23
“If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.” - Psalm 139:8
My two cents
The question for me is : what do we mean by ‘immanent’? That’s the concept I’m working on.
One answer is: ‘immanent’ means that God pervades the world - and the universe for that matter.
But that leaves me in the same situation - what do we mean by ‘pervade’?
One answer is: God’s presence is everywhere, that is how He ‘pervades’ the universe.
I think GMac goes far beyond that.
For a panentheist, God must some in some way ‘interpenetrate’ the actual matter that makes up nature BUT, He cannot be ‘exhausted’ by that fact - He is more than the pantheist would allow, not less.
Tillich believed that God is the power of being, not a being; He gives being to each particle in existence, and by that power all particles and all things made up of those particles continue to exist. I understand that concept, but don’t find it particularly appealing.
I’m more and more thinking that Jerry Gill’s idea of interpenetrating dimensions is going to be a part of the answer.
As well, the idea of the ‘affirmation of images’ is a Way of believing that I aim to follow, and it fits in with the panentheism that I find attractive. Finding the ‘harmony within’, where the various dimensions that make up reality are harmonized into one’s emotions, one’s way of ‘seeing’ - I like the idea. Of course at my age, I will finally pin it down, and then die. But it is what I’ve wanted my entire life, without knowing how to articulate it.
Charles Williams articulated the two Ways - the affirmation of images, the denial of images; the Positive way of knowing God, and the Negative way. Like this:
“Williams was a thinking Christian yet his ideas have much broader utility than one might expect. One of his most important concepts deals with two of the basic ways of approaching life. Williams called these The Way of Affirmation and The Way of Negation. Instead of seeing the two ways as diametrically opposed, Williams demonstrated that they are in fact closely related. For Williams, affirmation means seeing and accepting (actually experiencing) the good things in life as signs or hints of greater joys to come in the afterlife. One enjoys the good things now while expecting even better things in the future. Negation means deliberately forgoing (renunciation) the good things in life in the belief that since they are only lesser signs and hints it is better to wait for the greater joy in the next life (heaven).”
That’s from here: thomascotterill.wordpress.com/20 … oach-life/
I like that affirmation means seeing, accepting AND experiencing the ‘good things’ that are pointers to God. I think that GMac would agree and in fact would call some of those experiences - encounters with God.
Very interesting, Dave.
I need to revisit Charles Williams who I haven’t read in quite some time.
I’m currently reading* In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World* edited by Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke. Very informative and fascinating. I’ll give a summary when I’m done. (I think you’d enjoy it, Dave, one other book to add to your list… )
Hi Matt!
Glad you’re enjoying the conversation. I’m really learning a lot and appreciating more what the immanence of God means and in the essays in the book I mentioned above, really learning more about God being “the ground of our existence”. You said :
I think that’s a good basic definition, Matt. The big question is how is God* in* creation and what does that mean? I’m exploring some different ideas about that in the book I mentioned.
One thing I thought worth mentioning regarding the “creation ex nihilo” discussion above is this quote from the book from Christopher C. Night regarding Philip Sherrard, someone who was well-versed in Orthodox theology and had collaborated with Father Ware whose chapter in the book was linked to above:
This, is I think *exactly *what George MacDonald was getting at when he said:
I think Father Kimel can be quite reassured in that George MacDonald took a view of God’s immanence and of creation that was extraordinarily “Orthodox” (in the big “O” sense). (If Sherrard’s views are accurate)
Yeah, I hear ya Dave… when it comes to God, there’s always gonna be stuff we don’t understand… well, stuff I don’t understand anyway. 
I guess I was just saying how I would put the concept of panentheism in the simplest terms I could, at least as I understand it, even if it doesn’t really explain everything, because no matter how few words we use or how many, I don’t think any of us can grasp the depths of God, let alone describe them, and especially when we all see ‘through a glass darkly’ as we do. We’re just reaching our hearts and minds out there into the dark, trying to make sense of things, and sometimes we may be closer to the mark, other times further from it, but I doubt any of us are ever gonna be right about everything, or will know or understand everything, or at least not as long as we’re on this side of the grave.
I guess how I look at it, and why the concept makes sense to me, comes from my experience of God in my life, or at least as I understand that experience.
For example, I feel like I’ve experienced God’s closeness in some of my darkest times (though I feel like I’ve also experienced a sense of God’s distance, or even a sense of abandonment, or a perceived abandonment anyway, in those times), or the sense that God was closer than my heartbeat, or inside of me somehow, the spirit of God at one with my spirit, holding me together, keeping me from caving in or falling apart… and I also feel like I’ve experienced this closeness in moments where in my heart I was touched by something in a story, a song, an image, or, most of all, in a gesture of love from another person…
But on the other hand, I feel like I’ve experienced the distance of God (though a different kind of distance, a more positive distance, if that makes any sense) when looking up at the stars at night out in a field by myself, or looking out over the ocean, or walking through the woods… there is this sense of greatness, of some presence that is vast and mysterious and hard to define, though it is felt as something wonderful, something beautiful, even though it is beyond me, while, at the same time, being right there with me.
So God is both like the lover who intermingles with us intimately, we are inside of God and God is inside of us, and the stranger whose name and story we don’t really know, but who fascinates us and still attracts us despite our lack of full knowledge and understanding.
This is kind of how I understand my relationship with my fiancee Kaylyn as well. There is this intimacy I have with her, a closeness, a kind of understanding that is familiar, but at the same there is a mystery about her, things I can’t define or even understand.
She is my mate, but she is also a mystery to me in some ways, and I don’t know or can’t grasp everything about her that makes her who she is.
It’s kind of the same in my relationship with God I think, these two overlapping realities, only increased exponentially, though, if I really think about it, my relationship with my fiancee in particular, and my relationship with others in general, is wrapped up in my relationship with God, because we can all be God’s voice and hands to each other…
Of course I’m coming at this more from the perspective of a poet or maybe a mystic than a scientist or a mathematician… like this one Coldplay song, The Scientist, goes, ‘questions of science, science and progress, do not speak as loud as my heart’, and that’s kind of where I’m at.
But I say all of this as someone who has days where he barely gives God a thought and who enjoys playing video games or chatting about geeky stuff more than discussing theology or my beliefs usually. I have my ‘deep’ moments, times when I wonder why I’m here and what this is all about, and want to be closer to this something or this someone that I’ve wrestled with through much of my life, have at times felt deeply abandoned by and at other times deeply loved by, but most of the time I’m kind of an airhead.
With that said though, I think most people, when it comes to God, are like, to give an example, people who know how to drive, though they know next to nothing about how what they’re driving works, and they honestly aren’t all that interested (though some are, to be sure) about how it works, only that it works, that they can drive it and get from point A to point B.
I think this is kind of where I’m at somewhat.
So I guess in my mind, though there is a part of me that is curious about how God is close to me, there is a bigger part of me that just wants to know that God is close to me, is with me, sharing in my life in some intimate way, that I’m not alone, and though there is a part of me that wonders whether the Trinitarians or the Unitarians or whoever is closer to being right about ‘how God works’, or at least in a more scientific and mathematical sense, there is a bigger part of me that just wants to know that God loves me, and can help me through each day, and can help me find my way home, wherever home is.
I try to see God as spirit and not as some really old dude sitting on a throne in some other dimension, and not flesh and blood, even if He speaks through and works through many things and many people, and shares in the experience of flesh and blood in some mysterious way… and I tend to think of God as something like the Force in Star Wars, though personal rather than impersonal, and without a dark side (well, I’d like to think so anyway) but when it comes down to it, there’s so much that I don’t know or understand about God, or heck, about life itself (although God and life may be synonymous for all I know).
And I just want to know that I’m loved, that I’m not alone. I just want to drive, even if the thing I’m driving is a mystery to me in a lot of ways.
Not sure if I’m making any sense at all. I might be saying something important here, or I might just talking out of my butt, I don’t know. 
Whatever the case, thanks for the interesting discussion, and may you all be blessed
Matt
Hey guys
Sorry I’ve been slow in replying to your post last week, Steve. I’ve been reading along, hoping that the light bulb might go on. But I have to say I’m still puzzled by this panentheism thing . I resonate a lot with what Matt’s just said. As the good Mr Wiley points out, there are some things of God to which we are restricted, because of our finite human nature, to see “through a glass darkly”. For me panentheism is one such thing (the nature of God’s relationship to time and the hypostatic union are two other examples).
Steve, you say God is “not only everywhere, but in everything” - all created beings, all of creation, in fact. I *think *I agree. I don’t understand how this works, don’t understand the mechanism via which God can be “in everything”. But more fundamentally I struggle to see how God is “in” the wanton destructiveness of nature. I’ve got no problem accepting that God is in even the very worst sort of people - the Oskar Dirlewangers of this world. I’ve also got no problem with God being “in” winds and rain and natural events, even when they’re deleterious to human happiness. But I can’t quite get my head around God being “in” bubonic plague, say, or “in” parasitic organisms that destroy their hosts.
Which is, admittedly, just another way of expressing the problem of evil - and while I have big problems with *that * too, they’re not deal breakers for my belief in God.
As for the universe being self-sustaining, I don’t believe it is. I believe everything that exists only exists because God willed it into existence, in freedom. All of creation is very much free to be itself - the cancer cell, the tsunami and the man-eating tiger as much as the psychopath and the sadist - but it is not self-sustaining. If God withdraws his sustaining presence, the ‘life force’ I suppose would be the best term I could come up with, then the Universe and everything in it would ceast to exist.
So I guess that does make me a panentheist after all?!
All the best
Johnny
Hi Matt!
I agree Matt that there is much we can never know in a strong way about God. In fact, the more I read, the “bigger” God seems. I’ll post this quote from Father Stephen Freeman:
I think I’m* starting* to understand what he means by the Ground of All Being.
I do think that we can get too wrapped up in the intellectual side of “knowing God” where we are more interested in knowing “about God” than knowing what he would have us do, what he wants us to become and how to love others as Christ did. We don’t *need *to have all the answers in order to do that. In fact, I think it’s often the case that people with the most primitive theology live the most Christ-like lives and are closest to and most comforted by him.
That being said, I think there are sometimes things that a “better” theology is good for. We agree that universalism is far better than ECT or annihilationism and shows us a “better” God–one who desires to “save” everyone and has the means to accomplish his desires. Believing in universalism I think does provide a lot of reassurance and comfort to us, I think we’d all agree. Panentheism is not nearly as important, I think, but can add some understanding and potentially can help us understand how God works in Creation by means of things such as evolution.
Hi Johnny!
I’m not sure either how exactly God is in everything. It might be something like Saint Gregory Palamas says when he says God’s “divine energy” is in Creation but not the “divine essence”. (Not sure exactly what that means… 
) Having read about half of the panentheism book I mentioned above, it does appear that there is quite a spectrum of thought on this. The older forms of Pan-enthesim, the Greek Orthodox type and the type the Romantics held to based on Hegel are “weaker” forms and compatible with orthodox Trinitarianism. I think the philosophy is pretty strong for theses types.( Hegel saying that the Infinite must contain the Finite as well or it is not truly infinite.) The “strong” panentheism which seems generally to be developed from the process theology of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne is not compatible with traditional Christianity. As the Immanent aspect of God becomes “stronger” the Transcendent aspect is “weaker” to the point where God is not able to act divinely from outside Nature and, in fact, miracles are impossible, the resurrection didn’t occur and there is no afterlife in most versions. 
The “problem of evil” may not be as large with this God (because he unable to prevent evil) but it’s also difficult to see how he can make amends for evil or provide any real hope. All in all, not a God that invokes a desire to worship Him.
In my reading, it seems that many proponents of the “strong” versions of panentheism (which seems awfully close to pantheism) are hypnotized by the amazing natural processes in Nature, especially evolution, and are making God an “emergent” Being arising from nature in some instances. Some of the scientific portions of the book are very interesting and informative regarding evolution, space-time, relativity and the “block universe”. The essay by Russell Stannard (a physicist and fairly traditional Christian from what I’ve read) regarding space-time is wonderful and might be especially interesting to those interested in open theism. My take-home message from the essay (which doesn’t really address open theism directly) is that open theism isn’t necessary if this model of time is true. It also gives an explanation of how prayer can be efficacious with an omniscient God. I do think that some of the ideas regarding how God can work within evolution without violating natural laws have merit, and, of course, the fine-tuning" of the underlying physical laws that define the universe and allow life is described, as well as laws that allow the wonderful complexity of life that evolution brings about. Many of these ideas can I believe be appropriated by Christians that believe the Transcendent God can still act externally on the universe in miraculous ways at times.
As to why God allowed evolution to bring forth bubonic plague and lethal parasites, well that’s another question. My own opinion is that evolution is not micromanaged but is directed or guided, or “enticed” to some degree from within by God to bring forth things like humans to relate to and fellowship with God. Not sure why apparently “evil” forms of life might be allowed, but they are it seems.
And yes, Johnny, I think you are a pantheist after all.
Something from The Harmony Within:
"But the word of Lilith differs from that of Phantastes in that the reader has a firmer sense of the interpenetrating yet unmingling relationship that exists between it and our own world. The hero, Mr. Vane, not only enters and returns a number of times throughout the fantasy, but Mr. Raven tells him that the two worlds are coincident and co-existent: “…you see that large tree to your left, about thirty yards away?..That tree stands on the hearth of your kitchen, and grows nearly straight up its chimney.” “The hyacinths and roses growing in that world” are responsible for the peculliar sweetness of the music coming from the piano in his home because they are growing coincidentally with the instrument.
I like it, and I like that it resonates well with Jerry Gill’s transcendence that is mediated by various dimensions.