Unreasonable Force
Panentheism: The Other God Of the Philosophers—From Plato to the Present
by John W. Cooper
Baker Academic, 2006
(358 pages, $34.99, hardcover)
reviewed by L. P. Fairfield
“In mainline intellectual circles, panentheism has gained the position held by Deism in the Enlightenment,” writes John W. Cooper, professor of philosophical theology at Calvin Seminary, in his lucid survey of the idea’s rise to dominant influence in Western thought over the last two centuries.
It is widely regarded as the universal “natural religion” or “rational theology” implicit in the various positive religions. Like English in international affairs, panentheism has become the common language in the mainstream dialogue of world religions.
It is high time for orthodox Christians to take a comprehensive view of this rival religion.
Bits of Deity
“Panentheism” means “God in everything” and, conversely, “everything in God.” Unlike pure pantheism, it does not merely identify God one-for-one with the sum total of everything in the cosmos. But unlike biblical Christianity, it does not separate God and the universe either.
It distinguishes between God and the universe, normally by employing the analogy of the mind and body or by arguing that God is the “soul” of the cosmos. When panentheistic systems address creation at all, they generally view the universe as an emanation from “the divine.” And thus we human beings also manifest or express the “Deity.” As New England panentheist Ralph Waldo Emerson modestly allowed, “I am part and parcel of God.”
Just as we are bits of deity, so “the divine” is part of us. Panentheistic worldviews tend to agree that no divinity exists apart from specific “beings.” And the deity needs the cosmos in order to be fully divine. This mutual interdependence of “God” and the cosmos comes to prominence in nineteenth-century panentheism and its modern descendents.
After tracing the Western roots of panentheism from Plotinus and third-century Neo-Platonism onwards, Cooper focuses on the period from Hegel (1770–1831) and Schelling (1775–1854) to the present. With the Industrial Revolution and the acceleration of social change, the West gradually ceased to think of reality as static, and embraced a dynamic and progressive view of the cosmos. “Becoming” replaced “Being” as the hallmark of reality.
Cooper shows how the nineteenth-century evolutionary worldview induced the old, static “World Soul” of Neo-Platonist panentheism to unfold into a new, dynamic spirit of historical progress. The “Spirit” needs the developing cosmos in order to actualize itself. The trajectory of this new “Spirit” is invariably positive.
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