The document discusses the relationship between commitment to a social doctrine of the Trinity and panentheism. It raises the question of whether understanding God as a sovereign Other in the Trinity is compatible with the idea in panentheism that God is in and encompasses all things. The response is that throughout history, and most clearly in the incarnation, God re-embraces creation back into the divine, eternal relationship of the Trinity. Panentheism need not provide a metaphysical description if understood phenomenologically as speaking more about human experiences of and responses to God rather than describing God itself.

1. 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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2. 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 above-
categories 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
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3. “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 self-
aware 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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4. 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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