For a century or more after Newton, creation was still thought of as an act at a point in time when God created something external to Godself in a framework of already existing space – not unlike the famous Michelangelo depiction of the creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.2 This led to a conception of God which was very ‘deistic’: God was external to nature, dwelling in an entirely different kind of space and being of an entirely different substance which by definition could not overlap or mix with that of the created order. In practice, and in spite of earlier theological insights (to which we will come in chapter 10), there was an excessive emphasis on God’s transcendence and on the separation of God from what is created. However, cracks in this conceptual edifice began to appear in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when the antiquity of the Earth inferred from geological studies was being stretched from the 4004 BCE, deduced by adding up the ages of the biblical patriarchs, to a process lasting many hundreds of thousands of years or more. But it was Darwin’s eventually accepted proposal of a plausible mechanism for the changes in living organisms which led to the ultimate demise of the external, deistic notion of God’s creative actions. In particular, those Anglican theologians who were recovering a sense of the sacramental character of the world stressed God’s omnipresent creative activity in the world. Thus Aubrey Moore in 1889:
The one absolutely impossible conception of God, in the present day, is that which represents him as an occasional visitor. Science has pushed the deist’s God further and further away, and at the moment when it seemed as if he would be thrust out all together Darwinism appeared, and, under the disguise of a foe, did the work of a friend. It has conferred upon philosophy and religion an inestimable benefit, by showing us that we must choose between two alternatives. Either God is everywhere present in nature, or He is nowhere.3
Moore and his co-religionists were not alone – the evangelical Presbyterian Henry Drummond saw God as working continuously through evolution:
Those who yield to the temptation to reserve a point here and there for special divine interposition are apt to forget that this virtually excludes God from the rest of the process. If God appears periodically, He disappears periodically ... Positively, the idea of an immanent God, which is the God of Evolution, is definitely grander than the occasional Wonder-worker, who is the God of an old theology.4
Similarly Frederick Temple (see p.70, and chapter 4, note 5), together with the Anglican evangelical Charles Kingsley, in The Water Babies, could affirm that ‘God makes things make themselves’.5
For a theist, God must now be seen as creating in the world often, as we have seen (pp.75ff.), through what we call ‘chance’ operating within the created order, each stage of which constitutes the launching pad for the next. The Creator unfolds the created potentialities of the universe through a process in which its possibilities and propensities become actualised. We have seen (p.77) that God may be said to have ‘gifted’ the universe, and goes on doing so, with a ‘formational economy’ that ‘is sufficiently robust to make possible the actualization of all inanimate structures and all life forms that have ever appeared in the course of time’.6
So we have emphasised the immanence of God as Creator, ‘in, with and under’ the natural processes of the world unveiled by the sciences in accord with all that the sciences have revealed since those debates in the nineteenth century. For a notable aspect of the scientific account of the natural world is the seamless character of the web that has been spun on the loom of time – at no point do modern natural scientists have to invoke any non-natural causes to explain their observations and inferences about the past. The processes that have occurred display, as we have seen (pp.48–9), emergence, for new forms of matter and a hierarchy of organisation of these forms appear in the course of time. New kinds of reality emerge in time.
Hence the scientific perspective of the world, especially the living world, inexorably impresses upon us a dynamic picture of the world of entities, structures and processes involved in continuous and incessant change and in process without ceasing. This has impelled us to reintroduce into our understanding of God’s creative relation to the world a dynamic element. This was always implicit in the Hebrew conception of a ‘living God’, dynamic in action, but it has been obscured by the tendency to think of ‘creation’ as an event in the past. God has again to be imagined as continuously creating, continuously giving existence to, what is new. God is creating at every moment of the world’s existence through the perpetually endowed creativity of the very stuff of the world.
All of this reinforces the need to reaffirm (p.58) more strongly than at any other time in Christian (and Jewish and Islamic) history that in a very strong sense God is the immanent Creator creating through the processes of the natural order. The processes are not themselves God, but the action of God as Creator. God gives existence in divinely created time to a process that itself brings forth the new – thereby God is creating. This means we do not have to look for any extra supposed gaps in which, or mechanisms whereby, God might be supposed to be acting as Creator in the living world.
To revert to our musical analogy (pp.77–8) – when we are listening to a musical work, say, a Beethoven piano sonata, there are times when we are so deeply absorbed in it that for the moment we are thinking Beethoven’s musical thoughts with him. Yet if anyone were to ask at that moment (unseemingly interrupting our concentration!), ‘Where is Beethoven now?’, we could only reply that Beethoven-as-composer was to be found only in the music itself. Beethoven-as-composer is/was other than the music (he transcends it) but his communication with us is entirely subsumed in and represented by the music itself – he is immanent in it and we need not look elsewhere to meet him in that creative role. The processes revealed by the sciences are in themselves God acting as Creator, and God is not to be found as some kind of additional influence or factor added on to the processes of the world God is creating. This perspective can properly be called ‘theistic naturalism’.
The scientific picture of the world has pointed to a perspective on God’s relation to all natural events, entities, structures and processes in which they are continuously being given existence by God, who thereby expresses in and through them God’s own inherent rationality. In principle this should raise no new problems for Western classical theism when it maintains the ontological distinction between God and the created world. However, classical theism also conceived of God as a necessary ‘substance’ with attributes and there was a space ‘outside’ God in which the realm of the created was located – one entity cannot exist in another and retain its own (ontological) identity if they are regarded as substances. Hence, if God is also so regarded, God can only exert influence ‘from outside’ on events in the world. Such intervention, for that is what it would be, raises acute problems in the light of our contemporary scientific perception of the causal nexus of the world being a closed one (pp.56ff.). Because of such considerations, this substantival way of speaking has become inadequate in the view of many thinkers. It has become increasingly difficult to express the way in which God is present to the world in terms of ‘substances’, which by definition cannot be internally present to each other. This inadequacy of Western classical theism is aggravated by the evolutionary perspective which, as we have just seen, requires that natural processes in the world need to be regarded as such as God’s creative action.
We therefore need a new model for expressing the closeness of God’s presence to finite, natural events, entities, structures and processes and we need it to be as close as possible to imagine, without dissolving, the distinction between Creator and what is created. In order to respond to this pressure, we have already used the notion of ‘panentheism’ – that the world is in God but God is more than the world. This led to deploying the analogy of this interaction to that of the whole–part influences observed in complex systems (p.111). To say, as in the definition of panentheism, that the world is ‘in’ God evokes a spatial model of the God–world relation, as in figure 1 and St Augustine’s picture of the world as a sponge floating in the infinite sea of God (p.114). This ‘in’ metaphor has advantages in this context over the ‘separate-but-present-to’ terminology of divine immanence in Western classical theism. God is best conceived of as the circumambient Reality enclosing all existing entities, structures and processes; and as operating in and through all, while being more than all. Hence, all that is not God has its existence within God’s operation and Being. The infinity of God includes all other finite entities, structures and processes, as figure 1 attempts to indicate. God’s infinity comprehends and incorporates all. In this model, there is no ‘place outside’ the infinite God in which what is created could exist. God creates all-that-is within Godself.
This can be developed into a more fruitful biological model based on mammalian, and so human, procreation. The Western classical concept of God as Creator has placed, as we have seen, too much stress on the externality of the process – God is regarded as creating rather in the way the male fertilises the female from outside. But mammalian females nurture new life within themselves and this provides a much-needed corrective to the purely masculine image of divine creation. God, according to panentheism, creates a world other than Godself and ‘within herself’ (we find ourselves saying for the most appropriate image) – yet another reminder of the need to escape from the limitations of male-dominated language about God.
A further pointer to the cogency of a panentheistic interpretation of God’s relation to the world is the way the different sciences relate to each other and to the world they study. For it transpires that a hierarchy of sciences from particle physics to ecology and sociology is required to investigate and explicate the embedded hierarchies of natural systems. The more complex is constituted of the less complex and all interact and interrelate in systems of systems. It is to this world discovered by the sciences that we have to think of God as relating. The external God of Western classical theism can be modelled only as acting upon such a world by intervening separately at the various discrete levels. But if God incorporates both the individual systems and the total System-of-systems within Godself, as in the panentheistic model, then it is readily conceivable that God could interact with all the complex systems at their own holistic levels. God is present to the wholes as well as to the parts.
At the terminus of one of the branching lines of natural hierarchies of complexity stands the human person – the complex of the human-brain-in-the-human-body-in-society. Persons can have intentions and purposes that can be implemented by particular bodily actions. Indeed the action of the body just is the intended action of the person. The physical action is describable, at the bodily level, in terms of the appropriate physiology, anatomy, etc., but also expresses the intentions and purposes of the person’s thinking. The physical and the mental are two modalities of the same psychosomatic event. To be embodied is a necessary condition for persons to have perception, to exert agency, to be free and to participate in community.
Personal agency has been used both traditionally in the biblical literature and in contemporary theology as a model for God’s action in the world. Our intentions and purposes seem to transcend our bodies, yet in fact are closely related to brain events and can only be implemented in the world through our bodies. Our bodies are indeed ourselves under one description and from another perspective. In personal agency there is an intimate and essential link between what we intend and what happens to our bodies. Yet ‘we’ as thinking, conscious persons appear to transcend our bodies while nevertheless being immanent in them. This pychosomatic, unified understanding of human personhood reinforces the use of a panentheistic model for God’s relation to the world. For, according to that model, God is internally present to all of the world’s entities, structures and processes in a way analogous to the way we as persons are present and act in our bodies. This model, in the light of current concepts of the person as a psychosomatic unity, is then an apt way of modelling God’s agency in the world as in some sense ‘personal’.
As with all analogies, models and metaphors, qualifications are needed before we too readily draw a parallel between God’s relation to the world and our relation as persons to our bodies. The first is that the God who, we are postulating, relates to the world like a personal agent is also the one who creates it, gives it existence and infinitely transcends it. Indeed the panentheistic model emphasises this in its ‘more than the world’. Moreover we do not create our own bodies. The second qualification of the model is that, as human persons, we are not conscious of most of what goes on in our bodies’ autonomous functions such as breathing, digestion and heart beating. Yet other events in our bodies are conscious and deliberate, as we have just been considering. So we have to distinguish between these, but this can scarcely apply to an omniscient God’s relation to the world. God’s knowledge of the world would include all patterns of events in it – both those implementing God’s general providence in giving existence to the world’s entities, structures and processes, and also those patterns of events that may be pertinent to God’s particular intentions. Both would be implementing various intentions in and through what we, through the sciences, observe as natural events. The third qualification of the model is that, in so using human personal agency as analogous to the way God interacts with the world, we are not implying that God is ‘a person’ – rather that God is more coherently thought of as ‘at least personal’, indeed as ‘more than personal’ (recall the ‘more than’ of panentheism). Perhaps we could even say that God is ‘supra-personal’ or ‘transpersonal’, for there are some essential aspects of God’s nature which cannot be subsumed under the categories applicable to human persons.
In my view, the panentheistic model allows one to combine a strengthened emphasis on the immanence of God in the world with God’s ultimate transcendence over it. It does so in a way that makes the analogy of personal agency both more pertinent and less vulnerable than the Western externalist model to the distortions corrected by the above qualifications of any model of the world-as-God’s-body. In regarding God’s interaction with the world to be an intra-worldly causality, it is also more consistent with those reflections on the implications of scientific perspectives which led to the propositions with which chapter 7 began (pp.129–30).
The fact of natural (as distinct from human, moral) evil continues to challenge belief in a benevolent God. In the classical perception of God as transcendent and as existing in a space distinct from that of the world, there is an implied detachment from the world in its suffering. This renders the problem of evil particularly acute. For God can only do anything about evil by an intervention from outside, which provokes the classical dilemma of either God can and will not, or he would but cannot: God is either not good or not omnipotent. The offence of the existence of natural evil can be somewhat mitigated along the lines already developed (pp.83–4) but an uneliminable hard core of offence remains, especially when encountered directly, and tragically, in personal experience. For the God of classical theism witnesses, but is not involved in, the sufferings of the world – even when closely ‘present to’ and ‘alongside’ them.
Hence, when faced with this ubiquity of pain, suffering and death in the evolution of the living world (p.86), we were impelled to infer that God, to be anything like the God who is Love in Christian belief, must be understood to be suffering in the creative processes of the world. Creation is costly to God. Now, when the natural world, with all its suffering, is panentheistically conceived of as ‘in God’, it follows that the evils of pain, suffering and death in the world are internal to God’s own self. So God must have experience of the natural. This intimate and actual experience of God must also include all those events that constitute the evil intentions of human beings and their implementation – that is, the moral evil of human society.
The panentheistic model of God’s relation to the world is therefore much more capable of recognising this fundamental aspect of God’s experience of the world. Moreover, the panentheistic feminine image of the world, as being given existence by God in the very ‘womb of God’ (p.139), is a particularly apt one for evoking an insight into the suffering of God in the very processes of creation. God is creating the world from within and, the world being ‘in’ God, God experiences its sufferings directly as God’s own and not from the outside.
In a more specifically Christian perception, God in taking the suffering into God’s own self can thereby transform it into what is whole and healthy – that is, be the means of ‘salvation’ when this is given its root etymological meaning.7 God heals and transforms from within, as a healthy body might be regarded as doing. The redemption and transformation of human beings by God through suffering is, in this perspective, a general manifestation of what is explicitly manifest in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ. In brief, this redemptive and transforming action of God is more congruent with the panentheistic model than with the Western classical externalist interpretation of God’s relation to the world.
I have been referring to this classical kind of theism as ‘Western’ because it has been dominant in Western Christianity (Roman Catholic, Anglican, Protestant), with some notable exceptions, such as Hildegard of Bingen. She certainly stressed the panentheistic character of the world and in The Book of Divine Works asserts,
All living creatures are, so to speak, sparks from the radiation of God’s brilliance, and these sparks emerge from God like the rays from the sun.
And God, as Holy Spirit, addresses her in striking terms,
I, the highest and fiery power have kindled every living spark and I have breathed out nothing that can die ... I am ... the fiery life of the divine essence – I flame above the beauty of the fields; I shine in the waters; in the sun, moon and the stars ... I, the fiery power, lie hidden in these things and they blaze from Me, just as man is continually moved by his breath, and as the fire contains the nimble flame. All these things live in their own essence and are without death, since I am Life ... every living thing is rooted in Me. 8
But it is the Eastern Christian tradition that is most explicitly panentheistic in holding together God’s transcendence and immanence, according to Bishop Kallistos.9 For example, Gregory Palamas (c. 1296–1359 CE) made a distinction-in-unity between God’s essence and God’s energies (see pp.160ff.); and Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662 CE) regarded the Creator-Logos (see pp.158ff.) as characteristically present in each created thing as God’s intention for it – its inner essence (logoi) which makes it distinctively itself and draws it towards God.
I have attemped in this chapter to explicate the idea that it is God ‘in whom we live and move and have our being’, in the words said to have been quoted by St Paul in his address to the ‘cultured despisers’ of his day in Athens. This immanentist and panentheistic strand in the Christian understanding of God’s relation to the world has taken many forms and we now resort in our exploration to one deeply implicit in its liturgies and spirituality, namely, the sacramental.