Have you ever heard someone say, “The Universe is telling me…” That’s pantheism, the belief that God is indistinguishable from the universe he created. That means every dog and every diaper is a part of God and contains the divine essence within it. But you may ask, isn’t that the same as God’s omnipresence? Let’s dive into this fascinating topic.
Pantheism believes that God is creation rather than separate from creation. Pantheists often believe the universe is impersonal and doesn’t act, yet connects everything. Think of the Na’vi in Avatar or the Force in Star Wars. That’s a crude form of pantheism. Christians believe in creation ex nihilo (“out of nothing”), where God created matter from nothing, so it is connected to him but not him. In contrast, pantheists believe in creation ex deo (“out of God”), so all matter contains divine essence and is an extension of God’s being.
People arrive at pantheism either through either mysticism or logic. The mystic (someone trying to directly connect with the divine source without tradition or sacred texts) comes to pantheism after enjoying meditation (probably in an Eastern tradition like Zen Buddhism) and focusing on the oneness of creation. The logician, meanwhile, tries to reason that everything must come from somewhere, so there is an underlying force that connects and incorporates everything within itself. These two routes to pantheism may seem contradictory, but they are similar in that they are both derived from the human mind rather than using God’s revelation to us. Christianity is distinct from pantheism because God revealed himself to us, which is how we grow in understanding him.
Stanford’s Philosophical Encyclopedia defines pantheism as “the view that rejects the transcendence of God. According to the pantheist, God is, in some way, identical with the world.”
Worship in a pantheistic setting looks like appreciating and being mindful of the world around us as divine. Pantheism presents itself as a solution to the ecological and climate crisis. By remembering our unity to the world, that we are the same as the trees and the rocks, we’ll take better care of it.
In practice, pantheistic worship looks quite gnostic, with adherents attempting to empty their minds to supersede the ego and attune to the divine self within. They seek spiritual enlightenment by connecting to the creation around them. Pantheists desire to connect with the circle of life and find the divine within that.
Pantheism is incompatible with Christianity because it misses something that is at the heart of our faith: the creator/creation distinction. One of the fundamental beliefs of Christianity is that God is separate from creation and that it is not an extension of him. Pantheism elevates creation to the level of the creator.
Francis Schaeffer wrote an excellent and accessible book showing pantheism’s shortcomings. Pollution and the Death of Man deals with and refutes pantheism throughout. He says, “Pantheism eventually gives no meaning to any particulars. In true pantheism unity has meaning, but the particulars have no meaning, including the particular of man. Also, if the particulars have no meaning, then nature has no meaning, including the particular of man. A meaning to particulars does not exist philosophically in any pantheistic system, whether it is the pantheism of the East or the “paneverything-ism” in the West, beginning everything only with the energy particles. In both cases, eventually the particulars have no meaning. Pantheism gives you an answer for unity, but it gives no meaning to the diversity. Pantheism is not an answer.”
Pantheism does not give adherents a meaningful way to make sense of the world. Schaeffer discussed Pantheism as a response to the climate crisis. This is still a popular narrative today— that by remembering our oneness with nature, we will change ourselves and heal the world.
This denies a critical factor of reality as we know it: in our default state as sinners, we are at odds with nature.
Some strains of mystic Christianity can be confused for pantheism, but they are more accurately described as panentheists. Panentheism is pantheism plus a transcendent God outside of time and space. However, panentheism is still an issue because it rejects the transcendence and distinctiveness of God as the creator. Richard Rohr is a popular Christian author and a panentheist. In his book The Universal Christ, he highlights statements like 1 Corinthians 15:28 (“When everything is reconciled in him…God will be all in all”) and Colossians 1:19-20 (“All fullness is found in him, through him all things are reconciled, everything in heaven and everything on earth”) as proof Christ is in everything. “This is not heresy, universalism, or a cheap version of Unitarianism,” Rohr writes. “This is the Cosmic Christ, who always was, who became incarnate in time, and who is still being revealed.”
This is Rohr’s best defense of panentheism: because Christ fills all things and sustains all things, they are, in their essence, Christ. God also exists outside of his creation but is inextricably bound to it. However, there are several issues here. First, Rohr provides his own translation of Colossians 1:19, which is different from all verified Bible translations. Second, Rohr removes the fact that the verse talks about Jesus, the man, being fully indwelt by God. It is a pointer to Jesus’ Christ-consciousness, which Rohr believes all of us can attain.
The biblical view starts with God revealing himself to us. This is what separates Christian meditation from Eastern meditation. As former Zen Buddhist Ellis Potter and others have noted, Christian meditation involves filling one’s mind with God’s truth and thinking on it, while Eastern meditation involves emptying one’s mind to tap into the divine within. Only extreme forms of Christian mysticism believe we can tap into the divine within us by our own efforts.
God’s omnipresence is one of his most confusing attributes, so let’s turn to one of the greatest minds in the church’s history: Thomas Aquinas. His influential work Summa Theologica systematically goes through philosophical ideas in a question-and-answer format.
Here is what Aquinas says about God’s existence and how his essence affects the world in Summa Theologica Part 1, Question 8:
“Objection 1: It seems that the mode of God's existence in all things is not properly described by way of essence, presence and power. For what is by essence in anything, is in it essentially. But God is not essentially in things; for He does not belong to the essence of anything. Therefore it ought not to be said that God is in things by essence, presence and power.”
Reply to Objection 1. God is said to be in all things by essence, not indeed by the essence of the things themselves, as if He were of their essence; but by His own essence; because His substance is present to all things as the cause of their being.”
Pantheism believes that God’s essence is identical to that of creation. He holds it together but remains separate at the same time.
We believe that God creates all things and that in him all things hold together (Colossians 1:16). However, as Christians, we recognize that we ourselves are not divine, nor are the things God has created.
Pantheism is the underlying belief of most non-Christian “spiritual, but not religious” people. It is distinct from, but holds some elements of, Advaita Vedanta—a Hindu school of thought that believes Brahmin is all. This spiritual pantheism became popular in the 1960s with the rise of the hippie movement and the influence of Eastern religions on the West.
Stoicism has been revived in the past ten years—more as a tweetable philosophy than a worldview. Stoics were one of the first groups of pantheists in the West. Most people who quote the Stoics are not aware of this. Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, posited a divine reasoning entity in which all parts belong to the whole. He also believed in the divine spark that produces all that exists.
Many people who believe in pantheism do not follow any religious structure because the pantheistic god is impersonal. Albert Einstein, for example, didn’t practice worship but believed in Baruch Spinoza’s concept of God. Carl Sagan wrote in his book Broca’s Brain that God is the laws governing the universe and holding everything together, which many have viewed from a pantheistic sense. They may have affirmed this view to stop them from being viewed as atheists, which carried a high cost in some circles in the twentieth century, especially among everyday people.
Talking with a pantheist can be challenging because the language will often be similar on the surface, but in reality, the two parties may end up talking past each other.
One helpful way to understand and get an idea of where someone stands can be to use the Spiritual Baseball Model developed by Bob Walz. Walz stars with BASE: we seek to understand how the world (B)egan, What is our (A)im, What (S)tandards we use to treat each other, and what happens at the (E)end of our life.
Having productive conversations with pantheists about the Gospel must start with sharing the distinction between creator and creation.
Another helpful thing to consider when talking with a pantheist is their belief in sin and the fall. Pollution and the Death of Man shows the failure of pantheism to address these issues. Schaeffer asserts that five relations were broken in the fall:
Pantheism’s answer for the brokenness is to look inward and remember that we are all one. The Bible asserts that the brokennes can only be healed by Christ’s death on the cross. Through Christ, God sets each of these relationships right. He has begun doing so and will finish the work in the new creation. Rather than coming to a oneness with the universe at the end of time, we will be in perfect union with God as separate beings because God is God and we are not. That is the defining difference between pantheism and Christianity.
Further Reading:
What Do Pantheists Really Believe about God?
God is Omnipresent - Meaning & Significance from the Bible
Photo Credit:©GettyImages/dani3315
Ben Reichert works with college students in New Zealand. He graduated from Iowa State in 2019 with degrees in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, and agronomy. He is passionate about church history, theology, and having people walk with Jesus. When not working or writing you can find him running or hiking in the beautiful New Zealand Bush.