PantaRhea

Interesting response in lieu of answering a few fundamental questions... So, what are you really saying Earl? That there is nothing about God which can be "grasped"? Does "God" have any meaning then? Is this any different than nihilism? To say that God cannot be grasped is to already grasp something about God. It is to disagree, for instance, with the concept that God is not an exception to all metaphysical categories. Process Theology claims that God can be prehended. In fact, it is not possible to exist and NOT prehend God. This means that God is in every experience. Every experience is of an integrated universe. Harteshorne defines worship as the "consciously unitary response to life." It is the conscious awareness of the integrety of all that is, the inclusive wholeness of the world. Either God is the "Inclusive Wholeness of the World" or God is "Wholly Other". You imply that the concepts are only to be "played" with. And yet you haven't simply played with all concepts, you've made a choice from among them. Is your "play" simply a way of avoiding the critical examination of your assumptions? But, maybe you don't feel that there are any serious repercussions in making assumptions about that which is inevitably our ultimate concern (Tillich)?

Alethia, Disagreement is good! Especially if it leads to better understanding. As Whitehead stated: "There remains the final reflection, how shallow, puny, and imperfect are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things. In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly." Lord save me from folly!!

Yup <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Lolly, Most Excellent Post! I think you captured the essence of co-creativity! The only thing I might disagree with you about is the idea that God somehow "allows" us the possibility of creating - or that God "set into motion creativity". I mentioned in another post that there are TWO ultimates - God & Creativity. God did not create creativity. However, this does not mean that there are two Gods. Creativity is a principle and as such cannot exist without being found in an actuality (the Ontological Principle). But, God could not exist apart from creativity (which doesn't mean that creativity created God). Therefore, both must be ultimate.

Cynthia, Excellent questions! I really appreciate your post because it lets me know the weakness of my communication. Yes, this is a property of human beings. Panentheism insists, in fact, that creativity is a necessary property of reality. But panentheism (or process theology) does not believe that Alethia's proposition #1 is true. Therefore, there is no logical absurdity in the idea that God creates. But, you hit on something very profound or important to understand. Whatever God creates must necessarily be found in God. As Whitehead put it: "God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles.... He is their chief exemplification." But, let's go back to proposition #1 and see why such a God cannot create. First, it is required that we reason from the properties of necessary existence and not from the properties of contingent existence. In other words, we are going to get into trouble if we argue that because we human beings can create (and we have contingent existence), therefore God (the kind of God as presented in #1) can create. So, if #1 is true, what can be said about God? Alethia mentioned a few things: 1. God is alone. If God is alone, the sole existing Being, such a God is not related to any other being - because no other being exists. Therefore, the essence of God (what God IS) cannot be relational. The desire for relationship cannot even be part of God's essence, because it would be a desire for that which has no basis for existence since the cause of all existence must be found within God and desire is for that which one does not have. 2. God does not change. If God does not change, immutability (changelessness) must be God's essence. (This is affirmed by Classical Theology.) This is true for at least two reasons: a. A being can only be what it is. (The Law of Self Identity) b. A being can not change into a being it is not and be, at the same time, what it is now and what it was. (The Law of Contradiction: A cannot be non-A) God cannot be both a God creating and a God not creating and yet BE the same God. The concept of a changing being is logically absurd. OK, you might argue then, that human beings change. However, process philosophy would say that this is a mistaken idea. This is what I have been struggling to get across for some time now - but I've been using the term "substance" rather than "being". There is no human "being" that creates now and then does not create - for the same reason as I noted above. The human "being" which creates now is not the same human "being" which is not creating. Every change is a new "being". Thus reality is a process consisting of "becoming" and "being". Another way of approaching this would be to look at the nature of possibilities and actualities. But I've already tried to do this awhile back and glazed too many eyes.

Oops, sorry, didn't post it correctly: http://www.frimmin.com/faith/godinall.html Earl <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Earl, Excellent site. Not a full explication of panentheism of course, but if others will take the time to read it, I think it answers a lot of the questions asked here. Thanks!!

Alethia, Thank you!!! You've managed to make explicit the hidden assumptions behind so many of our conversations. I think this really gives us a opportunity to examine the relationship of God/dess to the world. I'd like to begin here: #1 God is alone. God is all that is. There is no "where" God is not. There is no "thing" for God to relate to. God does not change. #2 God creates/manifests finite beings within Godself. There is a huge problem of logic in going from #1 to #2 which goes all the way back to when humans first began asking these kind of questions. If the universe is rational, both statements cannot be true. If both statements are true, the universe is irrational and truth loses its meaning. There are many ways this can be shown but I'll try to stick to just one. We can immediately see that these two propositions represent two modes of existence. #1 = Necessary existence. This is implied in "God is..." There is no explanation for God's existence; nothing "causes" God to exist. #2 = Contingent existence. How does that which exists necessarily create contingent existence? All the properties of necessary existence must also be necessary. In other words, for God to exist as stated in #1, essence and existence must logically be synonymous. Proposition #2 states that God creates. This must be a necessary property of God's existence. God cannot BE creative and then NOT BE creative. Necessary existence cannot NOT BE. If, therefore, God creates, he must do so necessarily. This means that God can never notcreate. Therefore, God can never exist in a state in which there is no creation. Therefore, #1 cannot be true. If there is something here that is not understandable or doesn't make sense, please ask me about it, or challenge my premises. It won't hurt my feelings at all to discover I've erred in my thinking.

It is easier, isn't it. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Yeah, until the person you assumed to be ignorant makes you look like a total dumbass. But it's not the first time it's happened to me. I am curious though, was Harteshorne included in your philosophical education?

Hey, that's ok Fred. I'm sorry if I offended you. I considered asking what you meant by "substance" and how you could reconcile panentheism and a substance ontology, but it seemed so much easier to simply assume that you were ignorant. As you are not what I assumed, we could discuss the basic differences between Parmenides and Heraclitus and see where panentheism fits in. Ahhh, better not. We'd bore the others to death!

I just had to follow up my last post with this from Duane's philosophy text (http://www.processphilosophy.com/text.htm). There are too many really good nuggets which shouldn't be missed in this topic: Not only does our personal and social history affect how we conceive divinity, but our concept of God/dess affects how we feel, act and interpret the meaning of life. Living in a country founded on religious freedom, does not mean all religious beliefs and rituals are equally true or valuable. It only means we have agreed not to kill and torture, nor even harass, those who do not believe as we do. Uni, one name for the Goddess whose womb is filled with the universe, inspires actions that are different from Yahweh, the Lord of Hosts, who sees the world as a battleground for testing the worthy. Theism is not illogical, though many formulations of theism are. Religious rituals express much that is nonrational (recall that “nonrational” is not the same as “irrational”), but may also make irrational utterances. To declare God is beyond knowing is to know more than one can know. To say God is apart from the world, is to require an explanation of how they are related. God/dess must be unique but the uniqueness cannot be a “complete difference” or uniqueness of the categories used to understand God/dess. If there were such a “complete difference” between divine and worldly things, we could not know there was, and such a theistic reality would be “completely” irrelevant to us, that is, meaningless. The uniqueness of theism is in the categorical application of the same categories or concepts that underlie all possible explanations: God/dess exhibits metaphysical categories without any qualification. S/he is what the categories mean. For example, God/dess is not beyond knowledge or beyond our ability to know anything about him/er, rather s/he has complete, or unsurpassable knowledge, whereas we are deficient in knowledge. Or again, s/he loves; we love some things, to some degree.

The difference basically boils down to whether we accept Aristotle's concept of God or Jesus'. Either God is love and feels our pain, or God has no awareness of our existence. I don't think it is necessary to be careful about which side of the fence I place my faith. There is a difference between the "mystical" knowing of God and that which we can know by reason. I think we are mistaken if we think theology is useless, that by reason we can't discern that which God is in general terms such as all-loving or all-inclusive. It is the conscious experience of God's essence that we can't capture through reason and which is mystical by nature.

PantaRhea: Can God experience the universe. I can but can God? If He can, then He can be a becoming God IMO. Can we interpret Exodus's "I am that I am" as "I am becoming that I am becoming" I think so! <{POST_SNAPBACK}> That's exactly my point, Jeep. I experience the universe and God experiences the universe and you experience the universe. That means that there are at least three subjects, doesn't it?

My sense is that panentheism needn't specify a mode of God's transcendence and immanence. I can't see any logical reason why you couldn't be a substance panentheist. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Huh???? Well no, there's no logical reason other than the fact that it's almost an oxymoron. If you really want to appeal to logic you might want to get a good philosophical grounding in the issues. An excellent place to begin might be here: A Process Introduction to Philosophy

Darby, Is your name possibly a pseudonym for John Nelson Darby? It would be interesting if it was, because my background is in the "Plymouth Brethren". Anyway, my answer to your question is that not all paths are equally valuable or meaningful, as not all lives are equally valuable and meaningful. Value depends upon how much of God we incarnate. The more inclusive our love is (which is how I interpret the verse, "Be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect.") the greater the amount of beauty that we add to the Whole. Our lives can make God more beautiful! Some lives are just plain ugly. Ugliness comes in the comparison to "what could have been" and "what happened". However, I don't believe there is any form of existence that is without value. I love the way Whitehead puts it: "The revolts of destructive evil, purely self-regarding, are dismissed into their triviality of merely individual facts; and yet the good they did achieve in individual joy, in individual sorrow, in the introduction of needed contrast, is yet saved by its relation to the completed whole.... The consequent nature of God is his judgment on the world. He saves the world as it passes into the immediacy of his own life. It is the judgment of a tenderness which loses nothing that can be saved. It is also the judgment of a wisdom which uses what in the temporal world is mere wreckage." - Process and Reality, p. 346.

You're a twicky one, Soma. Let me try again. Right now, right at this moment when you are reading this, how many experiencing subjects are there? Or, maybe another way of asking, is my experience of the universe different than God's experience? If so, are there at least two experiencers (subjects) or do you still insist that there is only (1)?

I'm figuring out (slowly because of my fundamentalist background) that the issue is not really whether one belief is right and another is wrong, the issue is how complete or inclusive one belief is in comparison to another. The problem is not that Walter Wink has thrown out huge portions of the Old Testament, it's that huge portions of the Old Testament have a very undeveloped understanding of God. We find this understood by the New Testament writers who saw a more complete picture of God in Jesus than the Old Testament prophets had available to them. I think one of the things which divide the "conservatives" and the "progressives" is our understanding of the work of the Spirit of Christ. Does the Bible complete God's revelation of Himself? Is the Spirit of Christ sitting on his spiritual ass in heaven waiting for everyone to finish reading the Book? Or do we have the "mind of Christ" actively engaged in history, further revealing the nature of God for our understanding? Do we see evidence of the Spirit of Christ at work in Feminist, Liberation, and Process Theologies, for instance? Or is this evidence that Satan is still deceiving the hearts and minds of people who fail to recognize that the Bible = the Word of God?

Getting back to the topic (sorry): * Is it possible in a progressive context to affirm the divinity of Christ? * If so, how? Metaphorically, mythically, allegorically, spiritually, literally? * If not, what do we make of this claim? Can we do without it? * How does Jesus relate to Christ? I think it is important to understand that the early Christians had an insight into something "true" about Jesus when they equated him with divinity. There is something which "resonates" with me when I read that Jesus said, "If you've seen me, you've seen the Father." The problem was with their ontological view of reality and the problem still exists today in the form of DesCartes' ontological dualism. It was understood that there is a "God substance" and a "human substance". How could it be that Jesus was of both God substance AND human substance? This was the basis (or the hidden assumption) for the debate about the trinity, transubstantiation, the virgin birth, the bodily resurrection, etc. The debate continues today in the form of the mind/body question. Can I affirm the divinity of Christ? Yes. But not with the same assumptions about reality that lie in the history of the question. Do I agree with Marcus Borg that only the post-resurrected Jesus was divine? No. If we discard our understanding of the "self" as being some kind of substance, and understand reality with an "event (or act) ontology" we can understand that a human act can also be a divine act, or, if you will, when a human's subjective aim is synonymous with God's subjective aim, we can become witnesses to the God/Man. What else can we call it when God's will = man's will?

Hi Earl, I wasn't able to make your link work for some reason. However, if you go to the site I linked to, you will see that Nolan mentions emanationism as one of the proposed solutions to the problem of "becoming" for the Perennialist. However, it doesn't really solve the problem (that I am aware of). If the universe is a "flowing out of" a primal undifferentiated substance, why doesn't it share the same ontological properties as its source? Other ways of putting it is, how is the particular derived from the universal? Or the contingent derived from the necessary? How does Being become?

All right. I've already kind've admitted that I didn't express my concern about the analogy of the ocean and fish, circle within big circle very well. And, I would think it would go almost without saying that analogies are problematic. But, again, I wasn't picking on Alethia, I was trying to draw attention to the fact that we use concepts like "interconnectedness" and "inclusion" and stop short of really understanding how one person can be included in another, and how God/dess can really include the world. I stated some really radical things... but was never challenged or questioned. How come? Is everyone in agreement with me on this? I'd like to suggest that the time we use here might be much more meaningful if we ask more questions before offering answers. Of course, I have to apply this suggestion to myself as much as anyone.

Soma wrote: "Health, happiness and prosperity come easily to one who knows that God's pure consciousness is operating through him." I don't know why this bothers me so much, but it does. When I read this, I get this surreal picture of someone "tip-toeing thru the tulips" blissfully ignoring the gardener in the background weak from hunger, slowly dying from cancer, grieving the loss of his son from a soldier's bullet. Is the gardener failing to let God's pure consciousness operate through him? I think this is related to Cynthia's question: "It occurs to me that there is a part of me/a force I eperience regularly that does not strike me a being part of God... the drive to do wrong/to exclude/to pride/etc... what does panentheism make of this????" The simple answer, from a Process perspective, is that evil exists because the "Initial Aim" from God/dess rarely becomes our "Subjective Aim". The more complicated answer can be found in David Griffin's book, Evil Revisited.

I just googled "initial aim" to see what came up and saw this: Initial Aim There is so much confusion and vagueness about panentheism and Process Theology and Alan Anderson's site is (at least it seems to me) probably one of the most complete sources on the internet. Even though he labels it "Process New Thought", it could also be labeled Process Buddhism, or Process Mysticism, or Process Panentheism, depending upon what background you bring to it. I don't see anything in his "Characterization of Process New Thought" that is different from, or in addition to anything in the writings of Harteshorne, Griffin, Suchocki, or other Process Theologians. The differences are in the finer details which would probably bore everybody to death. Anyway, it seems to me that a lot of the confusion can be cleared up if everyone can at least get on the "same page". In the end, there will continue to be disagreement, I'm sure, but isn't it better to have understanding before disagreement?

AlethiaRiver... you're like... awesome. Of course I have to think that anyone who thinks like me is awesome, don't I? I didn't know or didn't remember that you read Ken Wilber (and have read his views on Perennial Philosophy). I've been alone in my thinking so long that I've built up all these defenses and walls in my mind... and now I discover so many others that are moving in the same direction!! It's getting sort'a weird in the universe, I think!

This is a great point. The pantheistic view has got a really hard time making sense of the inifinte creative freedom of God: something I imagine most of us here want to continue to emphasize. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> It's not just pantheism but the Perennial Philosophy as well. The problem is well presented in Richard Nolan's article from which I include a section here (btw, the Perennial Philosophy does not have a monopoly on mystical religion. Mysticism fits perfectly well within panentheism which avoids the problem of the ONE in the Perennial Philosophy): THE STATUS OF THE EVERYDAY WORLD Creation is the Fall That the natural world exists at all is an acute issue for mysticism; it has supplied a definition for what is “really real” and has given that reality certain characteristics: ultimate reality must be unlimited, unified, and transcendent. A central issue for perennial systems comes into focus when one compares these three qualities to the world of nature; in each case it is obvious that none of the qualities are present. Indeed, the natural world is the antithesis of real reality. But if this is true, why does the universe exist at all? What explanation does perennial philosophy offer to justify a second realm? It is fair to state that mysticism has no final solution to this problem. There is no necessity for a finite world based on the assumptions already made about the One; it appears contradictory to have a perfect unity existing simultaneously with an imperfect, multiple world. Perennial philosophy can only accept the human experience of the natural world and attempt to deal with its nature.

If I say that "God loves me", and "I love God", what is the "I" and "me"?

Ok, in a word. Pantheism says that God and the Universe are materially equivalent: God is precisely, no more or less than, the Universe. Panentheism (according too all my popular sources, mainly Matthew Fox, Borg, Spong) says the Universe is in God, BUT that God infinitely transcends the Universe: God and the Universe are assymetric and non-equivalent. The Universe begins and ends (ontologically) in God. I'm claiming the same about Time and Eternity. Time is IN Eternity (everywhere -- everywhen? -- you go, you're thoroughly engulfed in Eternity. But Eternity infinitely transcends Time: without Time, Eternity still exists. Time begins and ends in eternal timelesness. It's hard to be precise about this, I mean, we're really approaching the boundary of language and concepts! But it's worthwhile, and fun to meditate upon. That's my $.02. Hope this helps! <{POST_SNAPBACK}> thinking.... I understand time as created. Every act, every event is a creation of time. I understand that time is included in eternity as I do that contingent existence is included in necessary existence. That is panentheism. Pantheism, on the other hand, can only be necessary Being. It has no place for creativity and cannot include time. So yeah. I think I understand.

If there is only one subject, what are "we"?