pansemioentheism

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Tony Jones: Are the Social Trinity and Panentheism Incommensurable?

May 10, 2011

in dissertation,theology

Last week, I wrote about a question at my dissertation defense over which I stumbled. There was one other question that tripped me up.

Stacy Johnson is one of my favorite professors at Princeton, though I never took a class from him. (He is also the author of possibly the very best book on GLBT issues in the church, A Time to Embrace.) Stacy is not, however, a fan of Jurgen Moltmann, my theological muse. And at my defense, he asked me a question that he really has for Moltmann:

How can someone be committed to a social doctrine of the Trinity, in which the godhead is seen as an eternal, interpenetrating relationship of three divine persons, and also a panentheist, in which God is in all things and all things are in God?

It’s a good question, for it would seem that a commitment to the social Trinity requires an understanding of God as sovereign Other, whereas panentheism seems at odds with that commitment.

Moltmann is also committed to the Jewish Kabbalistic belief that God was all before the creation, but God withdrew Godself just enough to make room for a creation that is other than God. This was God’s first act of self-limitation. As a Christian theologian, Moltmann goes on argue that, as Paul memorializes in the great hymn of Philippians 2, the incarnation/crucifixion event is the ultimate act of self-limitation by God, to the point of humiliation.

So, the Moltmannian answer — and mine — to Stacy’s question is that throughout the “trinitarian history of God,” and most poignantly in the incarnation/crucifixion/resurrection, the eternal relationship that is the Trinity re-embraces all of creation back into Itself. We

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are ever-invited into this divine, loving relationality.

PS: the thesis of my dissertation is that our church structures should reflect this eternal, egalitarian relationality. They don’t, but they should.

Johnboy May 10, 2011 at 10:49 am

Tony, with qualifications, I do not see an incommensurability, especially if our panentheism pretends to say more about us than God per se.

I call my own approach a pan-semio-entheism precisely because I choose to prescind from any robustly metaphysical descriptions (an ontology) to a more vague phenomenological perspective, which categorizes our experiences of God in relational terms based on our intuitions, evaluations and performative responses that ensue in the wake of these experiences. Those categories include 1) intraobjective identity – regarding our vague intuitions of an absolute unitary being 2) – intersubjective intimacy – regarding our unitive strivings 3) intrasubjective integrity – think of Lonergan’s conversions & formative spirituality and 4) interobjective indeterminacy – which hints at the methodological constraints and putative ontological occulting that thwart natural theological inquiry, as some claim in-principle (which is too strong a position to defend philosophically) and as I acknowledge (instead for all practical purposes) at least, at this stage of humankind’s sojourn.

So, a suitably nuanced panentheism is not an ontology or metaphysic or natural theology but, instead, a theology of nature, which employs metaphor, analogy, myth, koan, song and dance. It does not aspire to describe what remains indescribable, to say more than we can possibly know, does not attempt to prove too much or to tell untellable stories. The abovecategories certainly have ontological implications (which get analytically frustrated) that might flow from those distinct phenomenological categories of our God-experience but they honor, with reverent silence and respectful apophasis, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. Our panentheism is then saying much more about the value-realizations that grow out of our God-encounters but much less about causal joints and divine mechanics. We affirm THAT values are being realized from experiences without specifying HOW.

It is worth noting that in our other metaphysical adventures, nowadays, we know better than to use a modal ontology of possible, actual and necessary but now substitute 2


“probable” for necessary. Confronted with epistemic indeterminacy and ontological vagueness in navigating proximate reality, how much more folly we would engage when attempting to describe ultimate reality? Still, everywhere in reality, necessity suggest itself even as, nowhere in reality, have we found it physically instantiated. Charles Sanders Peirce speaks of our abduction of the Ens Necessarium and I resonate with that inference, weak though it may be. I precisely make the same appeal to the Jewish intuition of God’s shrinking to make room for reality and my own theology of nature then sees emergent reality participating in various degrees of semiotic freedom in an ontological-like hierarchy (crowned by the imago Dei).

So, I don’t embrace some neo-Platonic participatory ontology of proodos, mone and epistrophe as a description of metaphysical reality, much less God ad intra or ad extra in a natural theology. But I do believe it is enormously helpful to honor and thereby categorize the many human phenomenal experiences of God that ensue from our subjunctive (as if) encounters of God in creed, cult, code and community in a theology of nature that is selfaware of its metaphorical, mythical, liturgical nature as qualifed by suitable kataphatic, apophatic and relational predication and generally revealed. The Trinity and God’s relational nature is specially revealed as Love, exceeding anything we could otherwise infer empirically, logically, practically or morally from nature.

At least this is my attempt to grapple with the same issues.

Johnboy May 10, 2011 at 10:58 am

I’ve seen two other parsings of panentheism: a fundamentalist take, panen-theism, which sees God as part of all things but more than the sum of all things; a more orthodox parsing, pan-entheism, which sees God indwelling in all things (and which could square with the Whiteheadian-Hartshornean process approach).

tripp fuller May 10, 2011 at 1:29 pm

i videoed a reply…..Elgin doesn’t let me type. http://youtu.be/rqFOhSTFVl0

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Johnboy May 10, 2011 at 3:11 pm

I enjoyed your disquisition, Tripp. I like the eschatological distinction, a panentheistic reality I believe we nevertheless realize proleptically via a putative telic dynamic (pneumatologically even). Still, I rest comfortably with vague conceptual distinctions and resist more robust ontological descriptions, which introduce as many problems as they aspire to resolve.

Below is an excerpt from Amos Yong’s dissertation that raises other considerations:

“Neville, however, would object to speaking about the immanent trinitarian persons apart from or prior to the creative act. He would be very cautious about the ‘vice versa’ at the end of the axiom, ‘the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity,’ heralded by Rahner. … … [S] ince theology (God in Godself) derives from the second moment of reflection on oikonomia (God in relation to the world), we must be wary of proceeeding too quickly from a conceptual distinction of immanent-economic to an ontological equivalence. As LaCugna has summarized, the two major problems that arise with an uncritical equation of the immanent and economic Trinity are the loss of divine ineffability, and, ironically, the implicit denial of the divine freedom given the symmetry asserted of God ad intra and ad extra. It has already been mentioned that Neville’s interpretation of creation ex nihilo preserves both the divine mystery and freedom, precisely via the asymmetrical act of creation.”

from Amos Yong, Discerning the Spirit(s): A Pentecostal-Charismatic Contribution to Christian Theology of Religions. Journal of Pentecostal Theology Supplement Series 20. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000

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