Panentheism: a brief history.

Panentheism (meaning “all-in-God”) is the belief that the divine pervades and interpenetrates every part of the universe and also extends beyond space and time. The term was coined by the German philosopher Karl Krause in 1828 to distinguish the ideas of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) about the relation of God and the universe from the supposed pantheism of Baruch Spinoza. Unlike pantheism, which holds that the divine and the universe are identical, panentheism maintains an ontological distinction between the divine and the non-divine and the significance of both.<

• In panentheism, God is viewed as the soul of the universe, the universal spirit present everywhere, which at the same time “transcends” all things created.
• While pantheism asserts that “all is God”, panentheism claims that God is greater than the universe. Some versions of panentheism suggest that the universe is nothing more than the manifestation of God. In addition, some forms indicate that the universe is contained within God, like in the Kabbalah concept of tzimtzum. Also much Hindu thought – and consequently Buddhist philosophy – is highly characterized by panentheism and pantheism. The basic tradition however, on which Krause’s concept was built, seems to have been Neoplatonic philosophy and its successors in Western philosophy and Orthodox theology.

Panentheism

Panentheism, literally "all-in-God-ism", "affirms that although God and the world are ontologically distinct [i.e., not the same] and God transcends the world, the world is 'in' God ontologically." ^ [1]^ This is not to be confused with pantheism, which understands God to be the world. For most panentheists, God is intimately connected to the world and yet remains greater than the world. In this view, events and changes in the universe affect and change God, and he is therefore a temporal being. As the universe grows, God learns as he increases in knowledge and being.

Panentheism has been associated with process theology and aspects of open theism, including theologians such as Paul Tillich, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jurgen Moltmann, Robert Jenson, and possibly Karl Rahner.