What is PanENtheism??
"We have all been enclosed within God. We are in God and God, whom we do not see, is in us." -Julian of Norwich (c. 1342-1415)No, not pantheism--panENtheism. Very different. This image should help some, but let me try to explain...
I'm currently reading the book, how I found GOD in everyone and everywhere, and the book's main topic is panentheism. Each chapter in the book is a short spiritual memoir of sorts by different spiritual giants of today: Deepak Chopra, Richard Rohr, and many more.
One of my favorite chapters so far was written by Matthew Fox. I'll start here...
"There are four ways I know of to name our relationship to the Divine: 1) Theism--God is out there, we are here; 2) Atheism--a rejection of theism; 3) Pantheism--Everything is God; and 4) Panentheism--All is in God and God is in all."I find these succinct definitions to be very helpful. Theism and panentheism are related because both ideologies are found in Christianity, theism being the majority and panentheism the minority. The same can also be said for Islam and Judaism, where you'll find Sufism and Kabbalah being the minority ideologies also. Panentheism has been kept alive by the Christian mystics through the ages--think Desert Fathers, Monastics, etc.
Back to what Fox is saying. Theism and Atheism are clear opposites. Although Pantheism and Panentheism may be spelled similarly, they are very different concepts. A Pantheist would say, "That rock is God," where a Panentheist would state, "That rock is a manifestation of God because God is in everything and is everywhere." It may sound subtle, but it truly is a drastic difference.
It can also be said that an atheist is one who rejects theism, but an atheist might very well be a panentheist. As Fox says (and it has also been my experience) most atheists are rejecting the God of theism, not the God of panentheism. Meaning, atheists are rejecting the Big Man upstairs who looks down from afar and really only intervenes for those who pray enough or act good enough. It's rather below Him to get involved at all, especially when it has to do with that dirty little word SIN but he knows he must do His part so that things don't quickly fall to pieces. This God is too holy to look upon sin and sinners, and really doesn't truly love them or help them until they ask for forgiveness and start going to church and behaving like a good little girl or boy. The God of panentheism is happily involved in the mess and can't imagine going anywhere else. Where else is there to go after all? Fox says...
"I have pointed out previously that 'a theistic imaging of God is essentially adolescent, for it is based on an egoistic mindset, a zeroing in on how we are separate from God.' Adolescence is valuable for its development of an ego consciousness, a consciousness of separation from parents and development of one's own selfhood. But our spiritual consciousness has to mature beyond mere ego separation to mysticism, the consciousness of union and communion. A panentheistic awareness champions confidence."
"The consciousness of union and communion"....WOW!!! I don't know about you, but I eat this stuff up like a tasty piece of dark chocolate! I wouldn't even really be able to call myself a Christian if it wasn't for this kind of mysticism. I love love love it.
Then there's the gospel of John which just so happens to be loaded with panentheist language...
"May they all be one. Father, may they be one in us, as you are in me and I am in you..."
"On that day you will understand that I am in my Father and you in me and I in you.Then there's Paul who authored numerous New Testament books. He uses the phrase "in Christ" or a variation of it 164 times!! Here's what the Biblical scholar Gustav Adolf Deissman tells of Paul's use of "in Christ"...
"This primitive Pauline watch-word 'in Christ' is meant vividly and mystically, as is the corresponding 'Christ in me.' It is really the characteristic expression of his Christianity...The constitutive element in mysticism is immediacy of contact with the deity.""Immediacy of contact with the deity"...WOW WOW WOW. That's an incredibly amazing portrayal of just how close God is to us all the time. This panentheist theology is really really good news. I think it might have been what Jesus was trying to communicate JUST ABOUT THE ENTIRE TIME HE WAS WALKING AND TALKING! The Jews had mostly become theists and Jesus was trying to point them toward panentheism. All is in God and God is in all. The End.
That is an incorrect conclusion. This is what Jesus actually said regarding having God:
ReplyDelete"Jesus answered him, “If a man loves Me, he will keep My word. My Father will love him, and We will come to him, and make Our home with him." - John 14:23
IF being the condition, without that condition being fulfilled, God does not make His home with you, because sin separates you from Him. Unless that sin is addressed, you cannot have God anywhere near you - His presence would destroy you. He being holy, inherently annihilates whatever is unclean, i.e. anyone sinful.
Thus if you are not in Christ you are dead, as the New Testament lays out. "In Christ" means to have accepted God's atoning sacrifice for your sin, so that you can be made right with the Father, i.e. through Jesus' death on the cross, and alive again in Christ. Whoever is out of Christ is still dead.
The entirety of the Bible points in that direction, and definitely not in the direction of panentheism.
That's why the Bible is incompatible other religions, because it is of God, whilst most religions or spiritual doctrines are not of God, but of the fallen angels and of their leader, Satan. The two worldviews are entirely incompatible, just as the simplistic worldview of panentheism is incompatible with theism.
It's actually the other way around, panentheism is a childish version of God's truth (which you can see for yourself by reading God's words all throughout the Old Testament, and the New, in the form of Jesus, and later through the Holy Spirit), a reduction, a simplification, sweeping sin and the Fall of man under the carpet, and then calling everyone godly, without really addressing any fundamental problems. It's just one of Satan's tricks to keep you pacified and apathetic, to keep you ignorant of the complexity of what has happened on this world, in order for you to go along with what is coming and in the end, perish.
Evil works in all those who have no salvation in Christ, by first programming them with false concepts, then through them shaping the world, so that more and more people accept the satanic worldview and way of living as normal. That can be said of panentheism, like any other false modality, because of the way it makes you reject the true Creator, who wishes to correct you, and instead exalts in your own mind your own god, whatever you want him to be - even if that god ends up being YOU.
DeleteOuchi,
Unfortunately, your understanding is only a couple hundred years old and a modern Theism view. The early church views are not even taught in western seminaries and have infiltrated western society with heretical views of God being out there and not coming close to sin. Jesus demonstrated the opposite. You need to go back to the patristic fathers and to “the Way” that was clearly laid out by the early church fathers, who by the way didn’t even have New Testament scripture to go off of. You are picking up Western theology that came from the likes of John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards who are not early church fathers but were modern pushers of western theism that pits God against people and doesn’t demonstrate who God is at all, but the exact opposite. Jesus is perfect theology. If your view was correct you would see Jesus touching the sinners & therefore causing them to implode with His holiness and die on the spot, instead His Holiness & touch actually cleansed the sinner and made them well. His nearness is our good. This theism view is the cause of mental illness and people hating God and pushing Him away or only following him out of fear of punishment. If a family operated this way the government would take the parents and put them in jail. The children would hate their parents. Bring it down to the family test when considering the validity of theology. God is all about family and Father, Son and Holy Spirit are the first family and they created humanity for family.
Imagine if you went home to your dad and he was like this God of war that you project? I will only love you if you love me, my son. I will only love you and give you an inheritance if you act perfectly and perform just perfectly in a way that’s pleasing to me, my son. I have to withhold love from you because it’s the only way to “teach you a lesson”. 🤮 yuck. That’s why it doesn’t work. Sure you can play the mind games but your heart will be a broken child and your intimacy will be non existent or only relating to God as your captor and you the trafficked slave. Yes it’s possible to have a relationship with a captor, there is a name for it in the human trafficking world. A victim can fall in love with their captors and actually have feelings, but it’s twisted and disgusting and makes true love impossible because of the loss of oneself, once’s personhood is destroyed in that kind of relationship as there is no freed will, their will is held captive by their captor. If they had a freed will they would not be in that relationship even though they experience false love in that twisted relationship. True love is by choice, God loves us whether we love Him or not. He doesn’t demand love, instead His perfect love draws us to love and we love with the love He gives us. He is love. Therefore we are love, made in His image. Love is our nature just like it’s His nature. Jesus demonstrated that His love transcends “sin” and “behavior issues”. The woman caught in Adultery sees the one Jesus who could have condemned her to death but did not, nor did it enter His mind. But it was in the minds of all of her accusers standing there with their rocks. But death and condemnation was not in the mind of the God man Christ Jesus, who is exactly like His Father: If you have seen me, you have seen my Father, He said. Jesus work was to eliminate condemnation and judgment and to show that neither He nor the Father judge anyone. The Father gave judgement to Jesus and then Jesus says “I judge no one”. Bless you on your journey into finding a life worth living in a family of perfect love. May your will be freed and may you choose true love, not fake captor love that only loves out of fear to stay alive and then ultimately only loves out of the Stockholm syndrome
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ReplyDeleteBtw, Deepak Chopra and similar teachers are followers of Satan, by their teachings you can know them. They do not claim salvation, and hence are not of God. Christian mystics aren't Christian (followers of Christ), because being a Christian supersedes mysticism. It's kind of like comparing a human being to an ant, mysticism being the ant. True Christianity does not require mystical interpretations or practice, because that's actually a diminution of its actual message. The fact that you need extra elements immediately says this: you aren't Christian, but you find some of its teachings and values beautiful, so you adopt them. But you shape the rest according to your will.
Christianity is the exact opposite of that: God shapes you according to HIS will, and you are made a better soul for it. In other words, you surrender to God, through His Son, instead of wanting to control.
Deepak's and other forms of spirituality is all about YOU remaining in control of all things, your entire life, through gaining both the knowledge and the power to do so. That's the way of Satan. The way of God is faith in God Himself, so that HE might do great things in you, in His time according to His way. All you have to do is obediently learn from Him, and only Him, as children learn only from their parents during early childhood.
You need extra elements, unchristian elements, because you do not know Christ, or His way. So you think they are inadequate, not as full of what you think you need... but Christ alone is sufficient. If you only do things His way, you will find yourself overflowing with more joy, work and understanding than you know what to do with.
I need only to have faith in my experience of God, not yours.
DeleteStockholm syndrome describes the psychological condition of a victim who identifies with and empathizes with their captor or abuser and their goals. Is Stockholm syndrome love? Stockholm syndrome is not love, though it can exist alongside deep emotional attachment, and the two may feel similar. If you are in an abusive relationship, for instance, it can be extremely difficult to disentangle this survival mechanism from genuine love.
DeleteThe western gospel that sells a God who must be appeased with sacrifices (God said he didn’t want sacrifices) is peddling fear and actually creating a trauma induced psychological condition that creates mental illness like Stockholm syndrome in it’s listeners, and all the psychological schisms’s etc that put humanity in psyche wards. People weren’t made for separation and teaching them that separation is where they are heading if they don’t behave is the same thing as telling a child if they don’t behave they will be cut off from the family and removed the the safety of the home and put on the streets where they will be destroyed. It doesn’t work. You can’t love a God like that and not split your psyche to survive. It’s Stockholm syndrome for survival if the believer truly believes God is like that.
I never met the God of fear or war when I was swept off my feat at the age of 19 years old by God coming into my room and showing me who and what love really is. My entire life was changed by His perfect love. There were no conditions added to it. Just belonging and perfect love without a list of conditions. I knew inside his love were promises of healing and wellbeing for my inner most person. It’s never about losing our personhood, that’s captivity, it’s about freed will so we can be who we truly are, not bound by sin or vices, but free indeed to follow His blueprint for our lives. His blueprint is within us, within our very unique design. How much we would love our children to experience this kind of love and freedom. Can you imagine if your child walked up to you and said: dad, I don’t want my will to be done, I want yours. I want my life to look however you want it to look. As a father you would say: my child, I love you and who you are and I want the real you to shine. My will is to help you become the truest version of who you were made to be. That is what pleases me. That child's will then becomes free and they can make choices with the help of others to become who they truly are, not who they think someone else wants them to be. This is the same as our Father in heaven. He created love and designed love after all. He isn’t a hypocrite with double standards. He is either a good father or he isn’t. We aren’t better father’s yet it seems like we are when you put the western gospel of a God needing to be appeased as the epitome of a father. It’s repulsive and doesn’t work in the context of family, only in the context of religion. Jesus is the answer to sin and separation, but it wasn’t to appease an angry God, it was to appease humanity and to bring them out of their false beliefs about who they thought God was / is. Jesus brought a brand new start for humanity to enter into the Christ life, to enter into the truth of their being as image bearers of the likeness of God. We are not God, we are in Him and like Him and the more we believe it the more we become it. As we see Him in truth the more we see ourselves in Him and we know Jesus came as us, not just for us. The old is gone, the new has come. We go from death to life. That’s the old Adam whose mindset was against God to the new Adam whose mindset is “in God”. It’s in Christ that we find our Identity, Worth, Value, Significance, Security, Meaning, Purpose, Destiny, Community and especially Love. And none of it is conditional. It’s family. Family as God intended is not conditional.
DeleteThis is an absolute beautiful read. It enlightened me very much as a wandering mind. I very much have found myself over the years gravitating towards this type of belief. Thank you for writing what many of us feel, but cannot find the words for!
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