What the Bible Talks About When It Talks About God (part 9)

Note: This post is meant to be read after reading part 1 of this series, where I lay some groundwork and introduce some important concepts. I would also advise reading the other preceding parts, but this is not completely necessary.

Panentheism 

We are coming close to the end of this series, and some of my readers might be thinking: when is he going to talk about the Trinity? And we're going to do that. But I think that before we do, we should talk about a concept that some Trinitarians may never have thought about. They may not have even heard this term before. And the term that this concept goes by is panentheism: the belief that what is called "God" is present in every part of the universe - that all is in God and God is in all, but that God also transcends the universe. Or to put it another way, panentheism is the belief that whatever it is that we call God is more than a thing which exists, but is rather the ground of existence itself. As the Christian theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich put it:

God does not exist. He is being-itself beyond essence and existence. To argue that God exists is to deny him.

And some might protest: but that's not a Biblical view of God! And at one point in my life, I would have agreed. But then I found that I had been trained to read right past many statements from Paul the apostle.

A depiction of Paul preaching on Mars Hill in Acts 17

One of the most fascinating examples of Paul's panentheism comes from a story about him in Acts - so he might not have even said this. But in Acts 17:16-34 there is an account in which Paul was in Athens, where he argued in the Synagogue and with "Epicurean and Stoic philosophers". And in verse 28 he quotes their own philosophers, drawing from the Cretan philosopher Epimenides in the first half of the verse, and the Cilician Stoic philosopher Aratus in the second half of the verse. And he uses their words to describe the God that Paul saw through Jesus:

In him we live and move and have our being...[f]or we, too, are his offspring."

And as I said, we don't know for sure if Paul actually said those things or if the writer of Acts put those words in his mouth. But they are not unlike statements from Paul's own epistles, such as this statement from Romans 11:36:

For from him and through him and to him are all things.

Here Paul describes the presence of God as not only the origin of all things, but the animator of all things.

And in Colossians 3, Paul writes about the concept of the death of the false self, resulting in being raised with Christ. And in verse 11 he describes the result of this as being raised to a state where the separation that we experience through the various societal labels and categories are erased - he says that "there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, enslaved and free", and goes on to state that "Christ is all and in all." 

Earlier in the book of Colossians, Paul writes (Colossians 1:16-17):

[I]n him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

Here Paul states that not only does he believe that all things were created by Christ, but that all things are held together by Christ. 

And while I feel I must note that some scholars do not think Paul actually wrote this, we find another similar statement in Ephesians 4:4-6:

[T]here is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.

Note here that the formulation of these various statements ought to challenge certain views of Christianity, because Paul doesn't say that Christ/God are through and in just the Christians or the things Christians do. Paul says, simply: all. God is simply over all things, in all things, and through all things. For Paul, God is in and through the nonbelievers as well, and they are also his offspring, and they are for Him, and held together by Him.

Once you begin to see the panentheistic thought patterns in Paul's writing, you may begin to even see this way of thinking through more subtle statements, such as when Paul writes in I Corinthians 3:16 that "you are God's temple and [...] God's Spirit dwells in you." In ancient thought, temples were necessary dwellings for the gods they worshiped - this is why the Hebrews worried and mourned over their exile from Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple, and why it was necessary for the prophet Ezekiel to write about a vision of YHWH departing from the temple in Jerusalem in Ezekiel 10. This vision was a sign to Ezekiel's readers that YHWH's presence was no longer limited to the space within the temple, but was now accessible to them wherever they were. And Paul extends this thought by stating that we are the temple, and that God's spirit dwells in us.

And later on in I Corinthians, Paul writes about the concept of spiritual bodies in I Corinthians 15:35-49. And it should be noted that when Paul wrote this, there was no concept of a separation between earthly and spiritual planes of existence like many people have today. They didn't think of the idea of "spirit" being something that existed outside of normal space and time - rather, the word "spirit" comes from is also the word for "breath" or "wind". It is this way in both Hebrew and Greek - the Hebrew word being ruach and the Greek word being pneuma (from which we get English words like pneumatic). And when Paul talks about "spiritual bodies" in this passage, it should also be noted that in the original Greek, this did not carry the sense of "bodies made out of spirit", but rather, the original Greek word - pneumatikos - carried the sense of bodies which were animated by spirit, as the suffix ikos has to do with what animates or powers the thing it is speaking of. So for Paul, he wants the Christian to undergo a death of ego and be crucified with Christ (as he writes in Galatians 2:20) so that they will then be animated purely by the wind or the breath of God/Christ. Only through this metaphorical death of ego can we eliminate the societal religious and economical categorizations that we use to label and separate people like he talks about in Colossians 3:11.

And we see a similar thought pattern in the gospel of John as well as in the first epistle that is attributed to John. In John 17:21-22, Jesus prays for his disciples, "that they may all be one... [a]s you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us", and then repeats the request that "they may be one, as we are one." And as I pointed out in the last post when I talked about the Logos, this challenges traditional concepts of Trinity. Because traditional Trinitarians hold that Jesus is One with God in a way that no human could ever be, but here Jesus is praying that we would be One with God and "in us" in the very same way that the Father is in Jesus and Jesus in the Father he prays to. 

My favorite passage in the Bible is like this as well - the writer of I John (who may or may not be the same writer who wrote the gospel of John) writes in I John 4:7-21 writes that "everyone who loves is born of God and knows God" and that "[w]hoever does not love does not know God, for God is love." He speaks of living in Christ, and says that "[n]o one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us, and his love is perfected in us." And he repeats these thoughts, writing that "God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them."

For the writer of the epistle of I John, Christianity is not a system of belief statements. It is an experience that is only accessible through selfless love - and this kind of love does not seek to condemn others who do not make the same belief statements, but also live lives full of compassion and kindness. Rather, it sees the presence of God in them. For the writer of this epistle, Christians do not need to condemn followers of other religions who love, because "everyone who loves is born of God and knows God." And this way of thinking about the mark of a disciple is affirmed in statements of Jesus, such as John 13:35, where Jesus says that love for one another is the mark of a disciple, not a system of belief statements. Or when Jesus told the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25:31-46, where the defining mark that distinguishes the sheep from the goats is not their belief statements, but how they treated other people. And this is how one learns to experience God in all things, as Paul writes about - because when we believe that people who do not belong to the artificial label of "Christian" are not also bearers of the presence of God, we limit the presence of God.

The subject of panentheism is one I have written in other posts, and if you would like to read more, I invite you to read these older posts:

Paul and the Greek Poets 
Love is Like the Wind
Oneness: A Collection of Quotes Illustrating a Common Theme  

In the next, and final post of the series, we will explore the development of the concept of Trinity, and how one might conceptualize this way of thinking in a healthy way in our time.