I posted the term panentheism four years ago and thought I’d update the entry because there’s been a bit of discussion about it lately in my little corner of the internet. Most of the discussion centers around Ann Voskamp’s book One Thousand Gifts, with some criticizing her alleged “panentheism.”
My tentative take on it all is this: You know how the term “gnosticism” is sometimes used for a belief system that shares one or two elements with full-fledged gnosticism? I think something similar might be happening with panentheism. [Tim Challies is careful to say only that her mysticism sometimes seems “to border on the view that the divine exists within and extends to all parts of nature (a teaching known as panentheism).”]
I’m no expert, but as I understand it, if Voskamp is saying that the being or essence of God exists in the material world, then that’s panentheism. If she’s saying that the material world exists because God is actively causing it to exist, and that’s the sense in which he is “in everything,” then that’s orthodoxy. I am open to correction, so please, if you know better, help me out.
I don’t know which of the above she’d agree with. I haven’t read the book and probably won’t because I find her writing style a bit difficult and I already have a long list of books I want to read. But even if I did read it, I’m not sure I’d know on which side of the line above she stands because her writing is poetic and not the sort of things that can be pinned down precisely doctrine-wise.
Enough of that. Here’s what I updated in my theological term entry on panentheism:
- Added a link to Part Two of Norman Geisler’s Panentheism.
- Added a link to Panentheism from Elwell Evangelical Dictionary.
- Added related terms aseity, creation ex nihilo, omnipresence, open theism.