Everything is in God, but God is more than everything
Panentheism means all in God. Coined by Karl Krause in 1828, it sits between two familiar options: God as a distant creator, and God as identical with nature. The divine runs through every part of the cosmos yet also reaches beyond space and time, an idea with roots stretching back into Hindu scripture.
Krause invented the word to describe how Hegel and Schelling related God to the world, as distinct from the pantheism attributed to Spinoza. The key difference is ontological: pantheism says God and the universe are the same thing, while panentheism insists they are distinct even though the universe exists within God. Some versions treat the world as a manifestation of God; others picture it as held inside the divine, as in the Kabbalistic idea of Tzimtzum or the Sufi doctrine of Wahdat al-wujud.
Spinoza himself complicates the picture. He wrote that nothing can exist or be conceived without God, yet he protested to Henry Oldenburg that he did not equate God with nature as physical mass. Karl Jaspers read his phrase God or Nature as pointing to a God with infinitely many attributes, only two of which, thought and extension, touch our world. Martial Guéroult proposed calling Spinoza a panentheist, while Charles Hartshorne classed him as a classical pantheist.
Hartshorne did most to popularise the term through process theology. From the 1940s he surveyed ideas of God and chose panentheism over deism and pandeism, describing a God who can grow more perfect in some respects while remaining unsurpassed. Earlier adherents included philosophers such as Thomas Hill Green and Samuel Alexander, and Krause's thinking influenced New England transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson. The theologian Thomas Jay Oord calls his own version theocosmocentrism and argues God has always been related to some world, rejecting creation from nothing.
Three ordained Catholic authors, Richard Rohr, David Steindl-Rast and Thomas Keating, have argued that panentheism was Christianity's original outlook, and the idea resonates in Eastern Orthodox theology. Rohr's 2019 book The Universal Christ says he would be called a pantheist for echoing Paul, when he is really a panentheist. India offers far older precedents: the Purusha Sukta of the Rig Veda, compiled before 1100 BCE, describes a cosmic being both present in the world and beyond it.
Source: Panentheism
