Panentheism or Theoenpanism?
A Whiteheadian Response to Thomas Oord
One of the fundamental weaknesses of open and relational theology—amid its many virtues—is that, in many of its articulations, it is overly preoccupied with how God acts in the world and insufficiently attentive to how God lovingly receives the world and is formed by the world. It overemphasizes initial aims and underemphasizes divine receptivity. The late process philosopher Bernard Loomer spoke of two kinds of power: the power to influence others and the power to be influenced by others. Too often, open and relational theology emphasizes the first but not the second.
Beneath this weakness lies a neglect of the power of listening in divine life and, for that matter, in human life. Many people do not expect God to work miracles; they have long recognized that much of what happens in the world is beyond divine control. Yet they still hope that the universal mind of the universe—God—might take up their suffering and that of all others, remember the lives of their loved ones, and be, as Whitehead put it, a “fellow sufferer who understands.” They seek God the companion, not merely God the change-agent.
When open and relational theology overemphasizes the persuasive power of God in the world, while underemphasizing the immanence of the world in God’s own life—the way in which God is affected by all that happens in a loving and receptive way—it misses a deep existential need.
It is at precisely this point that Whitehead’s understanding of the consequent nature of God—as a profound empathy and deep listening at the heart of the universe—becomes, for me, tremendously helpful and powerful. I miss this side of God when I hear Tom Oord recommend Theoenpanism (God in everything) over a Whiteheadian-influenced Panentheism (everything in God). I know this is not his intention, but I miss it.
My sense is that, in order to arrive at this gentler way of thinking about God—one sensitive to God’s capacity for companionship, deep listening, and friendship with the world—it is necessary to dethrone God: that is, to get God off the throne of kingship and onto the plane of reciprocal love. And I sense that, behind Oord’s attempt to promote Theoenpanism, there remains a hint of re-throning not de-throning. Everyhing has to be about God in the world, but not about the world in God. This is why I emphasize the immanence of the world in God in what follows, and encourage Thomas Oord to do the same. I want to help readers recognize divine friendship.
Beneath this weakness lies a neglect of the power of listening in divine life and, for that matter, in human life. Many people do not expect God to work miracles; they have long recognized that much of what happens in the world is beyond divine control. Yet they still hope that the universal mind of the universe—God—might take up their suffering and that of all others, remember the lives of their loved ones, and be, as Whitehead put it, a “fellow sufferer who understands.” They seek God the companion, not merely God the change-agent.
When open and relational theology overemphasizes the persuasive power of God in the world, while underemphasizing the immanence of the world in God’s own life—the way in which God is affected by all that happens in a loving and receptive way—it misses a deep existential need.
It is at precisely this point that Whitehead’s understanding of the consequent nature of God—as a profound empathy and deep listening at the heart of the universe—becomes, for me, tremendously helpful and powerful. I miss this side of God when I hear Tom Oord recommend Theoenpanism (God in everything) over a Whiteheadian-influenced Panentheism (everything in God). I know this is not his intention, but I miss it.
My sense is that, in order to arrive at this gentler way of thinking about God—one sensitive to God’s capacity for companionship, deep listening, and friendship with the world—it is necessary to dethrone God: that is, to get God off the throne of kingship and onto the plane of reciprocal love. And I sense that, behind Oord’s attempt to promote Theoenpanism, there remains a hint of re-throning not de-throning. Everyhing has to be about God in the world, but not about the world in God. This is why I emphasize the immanence of the world in God in what follows, and encourage Thomas Oord to do the same. I want to help readers recognize divine friendship.
In “Panentheism and Theoenpanism,” Oord consciously shifts from the traditional idea of panentheism--“all is in God”—to a different formulation: “God is in all.” He knows that panentheists typically speak of the experiences of sentient beings in the universe as flowing into God, and he agrees with this. but given his interest in divine providence, he changes the emphasis:
"It’s not simply that all creation is in God’s experience. An account of providence that takes love seriously says God is in every creature’s experience. The Universal Lover affects all others, from micro to macro. This is theoenpanism: God is in all."
His shift is from emphasizing the immanence of the world in God to one of emphasizing the immanence of God in the world. And while he accepts the flow of the world into God, he simultaneously critiques the spatial metaphor often implied in panentheism, where God is imagined as a container in which the world resides. Such imagery, he argues, improperly spatializes God.
God as Numerically Distinct
Amid the shift in emphasis, Oord insists that God is “numerically distinct” from the world, and proposes that this very influx can make sense only if God is different from the world. This means that, for him, and contrary to some versions of panentheism, God is not the whole of the universe. Here is how he puts it:
“Although the Spirit and creation always entangle in intimate mutual influence, deity is not another creature nor the whole of creation. It would make no sense to say, as I do, that the Spirit and creation entangle if the two were identical. ‘Entangle’ requires difference. God transcends the universe by differing from it, but deity is not so radically different as to have no similarities with creatures. God is numerically distinct from but relationally entwined with the universe.”
What does it mean to say that God is "numerically distinct"? It does not mean that God is spatially distant or that God is in one region of space but not others. Or even that God is omni-spatial in the sense of being everywhere at once. It means instead that God is non-spatial, that the category of space does not apply to God. The God who is "in" the whole of creation theoenpanically is not another creature located in space or even the whole of creation with its spatial expanse. Oord's appeal here is for us to avoid thinking in terms of images or pictures, but rather to think more mathematically and in conceptual, non-spatial terms. God is 'numerically' distinct - a One who is 1.
In this flight from spatial thinking, however, there is a price paid. God becomes so disembodied that the meaning of the world flowing into God - the immanence of the world in God - is lost. It would be better, I believe, if Oord affirmed rather than denied that God is indeed the living whole of the universe even as God is also and at the same time a novel entity. Toward this end I recommend Whitehead's idea of a novel entity.
God as a Novel Entity
In Process and Reality, Whitehead speaks of a novel entity as a “singularity.” A “singularity" is an act of subjectively feeling and a gathering together many actualities of universe into a living whole. A novel entity is indeed an entity and the one being, but its oneness is not captured by appeal to numerical distinctness. Whitehead puts it this way:
“The term ‘one’ does not stand for ‘the integral number one,’ which is a complex special notion. It stands for the general idea underlying alike the indefinite article ‘a or an,’ and the definite article ‘the,’ and the demonstratives ‘this or that,’ and the relatives ‘which or what or how.’ It stands for the singularity of an entity. The term ‘many’ presupposes the term ‘one,’ and the term ‘one’ presupposes the term ‘many.’”
What, then, is the oneness of an novel entity? Whitehead explains:
“The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the ‘many’ which it finds, and also it is one among the disjunctive ‘many’ which it leaves; it is a novel entity, disjunctively among the many entities which it synthesizes. The many become one, and are increased by one.”
The Unity and Multiplicity of God
As applied to God, this means that God, too, is an instance of the many becoming one, and also the one who emerges from the many. God is not a whole in the sense of an mathematical totality, but rather living whole who, to use Whitehead’s term, synthesizes the many entities of the universe into one.
This means that God is, like any other entity, a togethering of many and one, As Whitehead puts it:
“It is as true to say that God is one and the World many, as that the World is one and God many.”
And it means that the universe is truly immanent in God:
“It is as true to say that the World is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the World.”
This immanence is not merely an effect of the world on God, as if the world were not really present in God, and as God were a container, a black box, into which information flows. The immanence of the world in God is the flow of the world into God. Here Whitehead's concept of 'superject' becomes relevant. The many beings in the universe are subjects of their own lives, they are also, once they come into existence, superjects in God's life. The flow of the world into God is ongoing, because new entities are added to God continuously. Thus God is not only a living whole but also a perpetually novel whole.
Divine Transcendence
And yet the fact that they are superjects in God's life does not contradict the fact that God also transcends them in the very act of synthesizing them:
“It is as true to say that God transcends the World, as that the World transcends God.”
God transcends the world by transforming what is received into a deeper harmony, as best God can, and by availing the world of fresh possibilities (initial aims) in light of what is felt. And it is also true that the world transcends God in its freedom to respond to the world and to God, moment by moment, in spontaneous acts of self-creativity.
Indeed, in Whitehead's philosophy God transcends the world in still another way, in what Whitehead calls God's primordial oneness:
God is primordially one, namely, he is the primordial unity of relevance of the many potential forms; in the process he acquires a consequent multiplicity, which the primordial character absorbs into its own unity. The World is primordially many, namely, the many actual occasions with their physical finitude; in the process it acquires a consequent unity, which is a novel occasion and is absorbed into the multiplicity of the primordial character. Thus God is to be conceived as one and as many in the converse sense in which the World is to be conceived as many and as one.
Love and Providence
The general point is that, for Whitehead, God is transcendent as a primordial oneness and as the living whole of the universe. Living wholes are subjects in their own right—centers of experience that include but transcend the parts of which they are composed. Mechanical wholes, by contrast, are merely the sum of their parts, with no agency of their own. In Whitehead’s philosophy, the consequent nature of God is the living whole of the universe, possessing an agency not reducible to the agencies of the world. This living whole saves the world by receiving it into divine experience, weaving its fragments into a unity of feeling, and returning that unified love to the world as the lure toward renewed life. As Whitehead puts it:
For the perfected actuality passes back into the temporal world, and qualifies this world so that each temporal actuality includes it as an immediate fact of relevant experience. For the kingdom of heaven is with us today. The action of the fourth phase is the love of God for the world. It is the particular providence for particular occasions. What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world. By reason of this reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again into the world. In this sense, God is the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands.
In effect, Whitehead offers a robust form of relational panentheism, even though he did not use the term. He shows how everything can be in God yet more than God, and how God can be in everything yet more than everything. Each is present in the other while also distinct from the other. I call this relational panentheism—a vision rooted in the idea that entities can be, in Whitehead’s words, “present in” one another even as they transcend one another, and that they can transcend one another even as they are “present in” one another. Whitehead proposes that the fundamental aim of his philosophy is to show how this mutual immanence and transcendence is possible. As he puts it:
The principle of universal relativity directly traverses Aristotle’s dictum, ‘A substance† is not present in a subject.’ On the contrary, according to this principle an actual entity is present in other actual entities. In fact if we allow for degrees of relevance, and for negligible relevance, we must say that every actual entity is present in every other actual entity. The philosophy of organism is mainly devoted to the task of making clear the notion of ‘being present in another entity.’ (PR. 50)
The virtue of Oord’s Theoenpanism is that it highlights the possibility of a dialogical theism in which God and the world are different from one another yet mutually influential. It honors the transcendence of each. The liability, however, is that it so emphasizes God’s presence in everything that it unwittingly lapses into a relational monadism—a view in which the divine monad is “present in” the world in loving ways but the world is not equally “present in” God.
Why is this a problem? Because it risks collapsing the dynamic reciprocity that constitutes genuine relationality. In Whitehead’s philosophy, relation is never one-directional or hierarchical; it is always mutual, involving both immanence and transcendence on each side. Every entity prehends others and is itself prehended in return. If God alone is “present in” the world, but the world is not likewise “present in” God, the divine–world relation becomes asymmetrical—more akin to radiation than communion. Such asymmetry undermines the very creativity and responsiveness that define both divine and creaturely life in process thought.
In short, Oord’s Theoenpanism preserves the idea of divine love as influence but neglects divine love as reception. Whitehead’s vision, by contrast, envisions a God who both gives and receives, who is affected by the world as deeply as the world is affected by God—a God for whom the world is not merely an object of relation but a
Why is this a problem? Because it risks collapsing the dynamic reciprocity that constitutes genuine relationality. In Whitehead’s philosophy, relation is never one-directional or hierarchical; it is always mutual, involving both immanence and transcendence on each side. Every entity prehends others and is itself prehended in return. If God alone is “present in” the world, but the world is not likewise “present in” God, the divine–world relation becomes asymmetrical—more akin to radiation than communion. Such asymmetry undermines the very creativity and responsiveness that define both divine and creaturely life in process thought.
In short, Oord’s Theoenpanism preserves the idea of divine love as influence but neglects divine love as reception. Whitehead’s vision, by contrast, envisions a God who both gives and receives, who is affected by the world as deeply as the world is affected by God—a God for whom the world is not merely an object of relation but a