A Panentheist Theology and Religious Practice

Panentheism is the belief that God is in Nature but is not identical with Nature; God is beyond Nature even as God interpenetrates it. The chapter proposes to articulate its own panentheist theology and religiosity. It centers on the experience of “the miraculousness of existence,” unpacking this experience into three aspects: astonishment, ontological dependence, and ontological supernaturalness. The result is a Something Else that is a wellspring that continually refreshes Nature as its existence-giving waters course their way through it. The chapter is willing to call this transcendent Something Else “God.” However, concepts or terms that are appropriate for accounts of human life make no sense in describing or explaining God. The upshot is that God is inescapably ineffable. Does this mean that we can’t use the concept “God” at all? No: we can still use “God” purely referentially, and that a theology of this God must be apophatic. Can an ineffable God, even a panentheistic one, elicit and support a religious way of being in the world? To respond to this question, the chapter observes that experiences of the miraculousness of existence produce in many people responses that support a religious way of living: religious veneration, existential gratitude, and theological connectedness. The book concludes with a description of the religious life informed by apophatic panentheism: a life that includes prayers of praise and gratitude, rituals and disciplined techniques designed to make God’s presence manifest, and espousing and enacting an ecological ethics by treating all things with the respect and care proper to bearers of the divine. This is the religiosity that emerges out of, and that is meant to embody and express, the fundamental fact that we, and everything else, have our being in God.