In honor of the new 3rd Edition of the classic Genesis Creation and Early Man by Hieromonk Seraphim Rose of Blessed Memory

Panentheism is a 19th-century term developed in German philosophy as a neo-classical word echoing in construction the more ancient pagan term pantheism, but in opposition to it. Plain-old pantheism meant that God (or the divine) is in all things. That is a typically neopagan view today, equatable with materialism but appealing to a “spiritual but not religious” attitude common in the customized consumerist techno-pagan worldview of the global West. Yet pantheism can be rooted in a modern but older materialistic and mechanistic view of the world, too.

Panentheism by contrast (with the difference of one syllable) has the meaning of “all things in God.” This would seem to be compatible with the Apostle Paul’s biblical expression that “In Him we live and move and have our being,” as recorded in Acts of the Apostles. However, the term panentheism, from its modern German philosophical roots with the idealist Schelling, has currency in New Age circles because it can be taken as (falsely) erasing the distinction between God and Creation, or contributing to the delusional sense of the “man-god” of techno-paganism.

Abbot Damascene Christiansen, compiler of Genesis, Creation, and Early Man by Hieromonk Seraphim Rose of Blessed Memory (now in a beautiful hardbound 3rd edition), rightly notes that panentheism in the above sense has landed in the false spiritualities that often are today’s successors to the crudities of earlier mechanistic atheisms. He writes of this:

Here we refer to panentheism according to its commonly accepted definition: 'The doctrine that God includes the world as a part though not the whole of his being' (Webster's Third New International Dictionary). According to Orthodox Patristic teaching, God is present and participates in His creation through His energies (grace); however, the world is not part of His being. In the words of St. John Damascene: '[God] penetrates everything without mixing with it, and imparts to all His energies in proportion to the fitness and receptive power of each.... All things are far apart from God, not in place but in nature' (On the Orthodox Faith 1.13). (Genesis Creation and Early Man, 3rd edition, p. 60, footnote)

That said, the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, known in Orthodox terms as fully God and fully man, made possible the Apostle Paul’s quotation from Greek poetry in his missionary sermon in Athens to the pagan philosophers, that, “In Him we live and move and have our being.” The Russian Priest-Martyr and modern apologist Daniel Sysoev develops the Orthodox scriptural basis for this when he writes:

What does the beginning of the creation of God [Rev. 3:14] mean? The book of Genesis begins thus: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth (Gen. 1:1). In whom did God create them? In Jesus Christ. Christ is He in Whom the world was created. Who set the world in motion and who at its end will say, "Amen." He says, I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending (Rev. 1:8). In other words, "I hold all things in my hands, and hence the beginning of creation is in Me." (p. 52)

In other words, “In the beginning…” (Gen. 1:1) is fully explained by “In the beginning was the Word…” (John 1:1). Thus the account of Creation can be spiritually interpreted (as well as literally) as “In the Word,” or in the Logos in the biblical Greek language of both the Septuagint Genesis and the Gospel. In the Septuagint, the verb in Gen. 1:1, translated “created” in English from the Masoretic Hebrew, is more properly “made,” and related to the Greek word poiesis, or shape, from which comes also poetics. This has a more personal and relational connotation than created. It also in English can imply more of a sense of being made from something. But Orthodoxy definitely teaches that Creation was made from nothing. Nonetheless, being “made” in Jesus Christ (from the Greek), as Priest-Martyr Sysoev notes, involves a relational sense and also a kind of personal dwelling, intepretable also as the Church as the Body of Christ, rather than the slightly more abstract tenor of “created” from the Hebrew, while still telling of creation from nothing. In other words, again, not orphaned.

In this way, it is possible to speak of a “Christian panentheism,” when the understanding of the term clearly relates to the personal Incarnation of Jesus Christ as fully God and fully man, His role as both Creator and Redeemer, and the fullness of the dogma of the Holy Trinity in Orthodoxy (without the false individualism of the Western filioque), involving also the distinction between the mystery of God’s Essence and the uncreated nature of His energies as sparkling in Creation. The term “Christian panentheism” may be helpful in Orthodox apologetics to those today in reaching out kerygmatically to many today who are immersed in the delusion of a variety of techno-pagan pseudo-spiritualities. But use of this terminology, as Abbot Damscene indicates clearly, is problematic on its face. The term in effect needs to be “baptized” (or in St. Basil the Great’s terminology gathered up to be made into honey) and used with the qualification “Christian panentheism,” while clearly undergirded by the foundation of Orthodox dogmatic theology as suggested above.

St. Ambrose of Milan summed this up in the fourth century in his Hexaemeron (1.5), as quoted in Genesis, Creation, and Early Man (145), referencing Genesis 1:1:

A beginning in a mystical sense is denoted by the statement: “I am the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Apoc, 1:8)…. In truth, He Who is the beginning of all things by virtue of His Divinity is also the end…. Therefore, in this beginning, that is, in Christ, God created heaven and earth, because “all things were made through Him and without Him was made nothing that was made” (John 1:3).