Full Transcript for The Illusion That We Are Separate: Panentheism, the Cosmic Christ, and Our Radical Interdependence

00:02:10.719 --> 00:02:19.039 It expresses me, affects me, and belongs to me, but I cannot be reduced to one cell, one organ, or even a list of my physical components. 00:02:19.280 --> 00:02:23.360 In a similar way, some panentheists speak of the universe as the body of God. 00:02:23.520 --> 00:02:28.560 The world participates in God and reveals God, while God also exceeds the world. 00:02:28.800 --> 00:02:30.800 Every metaphor eventually breaks down, of course. 00:02:30.960 --> 00:02:36.560 God is not simply a very large person with the Milky Way for an elbow, but the metaphor offers something valuable. 00:02:36.800 --> 00:02:40.479 Intimacy without identity, distinction without separation. 00:02:40.719 --> 00:02:44.000 Traditional Western Christianity has often emphasized transcendence. 00:02:44.159 --> 00:02:47.199 God is holy, holy other, beyond creation. 00:02:47.360 --> 00:02:48.080 And that matters. 00:02:48.240 --> 00:02:53.439 Any God small enough to fit inside the universe or inside my theology is not much of a God. 00:02:53.680 --> 00:02:59.280 But Christianity also speaks of divine eminence, God within, among, and sustaining all things. 00:02:59.520 --> 00:03:03.199 Panentheism tries to hold these two affirmations together. 00:03:03.439 --> 00:03:08.800 God is infinitely beyond the universe, and God is nearer to every creature than the creature is to itself. 00:03:09.039 --> 00:03:12.400 The most direct biblical language appears in Acts chapter 17. 00:03:12.560 --> 00:03:17.520 Paul is in Athens speaking with a group of philosophers with religious traditions different from his own. 00:03:17.759 --> 00:03:22.080 Rather than beginning by condemning everything they believe, Paul looks for a point of connection. 00:03:22.240 --> 00:03:26.319 He refers to an altar dedicated to an unknown God, and he quotes their own poets. 00:03:26.479 --> 00:03:28.240 Then he says something extraordinary. 00:03:28.479 --> 00:03:30.879 God does not live in temples made by human hands. 00:03:31.039 --> 00:03:32.879 God is not far from each one of us. 00:03:33.039 --> 00:03:37.759 And then comes the declaration, in God we live and move and have our being. 00:03:37.919 --> 00:03:39.680 And notice what Paul does not say. 00:03:39.840 --> 00:03:44.159 He does not say that God lives within our religious buildings, our doctrines, or our tribe. 00:03:44.319 --> 00:03:46.800 He says that we live within God. 00:03:47.120 --> 00:03:48.960 That's the language of immersion. 00:03:49.199 --> 00:03:51.039 God is not one object within the world. 00:03:51.199 --> 00:03:54.080 God is the reality within whom the world exists. 00:03:54.319 --> 00:03:57.439 Now, Paul was not writing a modern philosophy of panentheism. 00:03:57.520 --> 00:03:58.719 We shouldn't pretend that he was. 00:03:58.879 --> 00:04:08.240 The phrase itself came from Greek poetry, and Paul is using it as a part of a larger argument about humanity's dependence upon the Creator, but the resonance is unmistakable. 00:04:08.400 --> 00:04:10.960 Our lives are not conducted at a distance from God. 00:04:11.120 --> 00:04:13.360 We do not occasionally enter God's presence. 00:04:13.599 --> 00:04:14.879 We exist within it. 00:04:15.120 --> 00:04:25.360 Every movement of our bodies, every firing of a neuron, every breath filling our lungs, every moment of consciousness arises within a reality already permeated by God. 00:04:25.600 --> 00:04:27.600 And this changes the spiritual question. 00:04:27.759 --> 00:04:30.399 Instead of asking, how do I get God to come near? 00:04:30.560 --> 00:04:35.279 We might ask, what keeps me from recognizing the nearness in which I already live? 00:04:35.519 --> 00:04:44.079 Instead of imagining prayer as sending words across an infinite distance, we might experience prayer as becoming attentive to the divine life already holding us. 00:04:44.319 --> 00:04:55.360 Instead of treating sacred places as location where God is present and ordinary places as location where God is absent, we might recognize sacred places as those that help us notice what is true everywhere. 00:04:55.680 --> 00:04:58.160 The letter to the Colossians goes even further. 00:04:58.319 --> 00:05:04.319 In what many scholars believe was an early Christian hymn, Colossians describes Christ as the image of the invisible God. 00:05:04.480 --> 00:05:09.920 It says that all things in heaven and on earth were created in Christ, through Christ, and for Christ. 00:05:10.079 --> 00:05:14.079 And then it makes this remarkable claim: in him all things hold together. 00:05:14.319 --> 00:05:17.680 This is a much larger vision of Christ than many of us inherited. 00:05:17.920 --> 00:05:23.680 Christ is not presented only as Jesus forgiving individual sins, so that the individual souls can go to heaven. 00:05:23.920 --> 00:05:31.360 Christ is a divine pattern and presence through whom the entire cosmos comes into being and within whom it remains connected. 00:05:31.519 --> 00:05:34.240 And the historical life of Jesus matters profoundly. 00:05:34.480 --> 00:05:38.160 In Jesus, Christians encounter the human face of divine love. 00:05:38.399 --> 00:05:44.000 But Colossians stretches our imagination beyond the boundaries of one life in first century Galilee. 00:05:44.160 --> 00:05:52.319 The Christ revealed in Jesus is also the Christ through whom galaxies form, ecosystems emerge, bodies evolve, and creation holds together. 00:05:52.560 --> 00:05:55.680 The prologue of John's gospel offers a similar vision. 00:05:55.920 --> 00:06:00.959 All things came into being through the divine word, and without the word not one thing came into being. 00:06:01.199 --> 00:06:05.759 The light and life revealed in Jesus were already woven into creation from the beginning. 00:06:06.000 --> 00:06:11.279 Jesus of Nazareth is the historical embodiment of the infinite word, the Christ. 00:06:11.519 --> 00:06:13.360 And this does not make Jesus less important. 00:06:13.519 -->

00:06:14.959 It makes Christ larger. 00:06:15.199 --> 00:06:18.240 Jesus does not bring God into a previously godless world. 00:06:18.480 --> 00:06:22.319 Jesus reveals the divine presence in which the world has always existed. 00:06:22.560 --> 00:06:25.439 The incarnation is not God entering matter for the first time. 00:06:25.519 --> 00:06:29.600 It is matter becoming transparent to the love that has held it from the beginning. 00:06:29.839 --> 00:06:35.519 This vision is not only theological, it corresponds with something we are learning again and again about the world itself. 00:06:35.759 --> 00:06:37.439 Nothing exists alone. 00:06:37.759 --> 00:06:44.000 John Dunn famously wrote, No man is an island entire of itself, and that language is dated, but the insight's enduring. 00:06:44.240 --> 00:06:47.439 No person is an island because no living thing is an island. 00:06:47.600 --> 00:06:51.680 Biologically, you are less like an isolated object and more like a community. 00:06:51.920 --> 00:06:54.800 Your body contains trillions of microorganisms. 00:06:54.959 --> 00:07:03.279 The best current estimates suggest that the number of bacterial cells in and on a human body is roughly comparable to the number of human cells. 00:07:03.519 --> 00:07:05.920 These organisms are not merely unwanted passengers. 00:07:06.079 --> 00:07:13.519 Many help digest food, educate the immune system, produce important compounds, and maintain the condition under which human life is possible. 00:07:13.759 --> 00:07:17.519 Even the cells we call human carry the memory of ancient relationships. 00:07:17.839 --> 00:07:28.560 Mitochondria, the structures that help provide energy inside most of our cells, appear to have descended from bacteria that entered into a cooperative relationship with other cells more than a billion years ago. 00:07:28.800 --> 00:07:34.319 One of the most basic processes keeping us alive is the legacy of an ancient partnership. 00:07:34.560 --> 00:07:40.240 Your lungs receive oxygen, produced through the life of plants, algae, and other photosynthetic organisms. 00:07:40.399 --> 00:07:46.319 You are breathing in the exhalation of forests, and you exhale carbon dioxide that will nourish the trees. 00:07:46.480 --> 00:07:50.560 The carbon in your cells was forged inside ancient stars. 00:07:50.720 --> 00:07:56.959 Most of the oxygen and iron in your body was formed through stellar processes long before Earth existed. 00:07:57.199 --> 00:08:01.199 The hydrogen in your body reaches back toward the beginning of the universe itself. 00:08:01.439 --> 00:08:05.199 You are not merely in the universe as though you were dropped into it from somewhere else. 00:08:05.360 --> 00:08:07.199 You are an expression of the universe. 00:08:07.360 --> 00:08:09.600 You are the universe come to consciousness. 00:08:09.759 --> 00:08:11.839 You are earth that learned to breathe. 00:08:12.000 --> 00:08:14.319 You are stardust that learned to love. 00:08:14.480 --> 00:08:19.439 You are a community of relationships temporarily gathered into the person whose name you carry. 00:08:19.680 --> 00:08:23.279 And this does not mean that individuality is an illusion or that you don't matter. 00:08:23.439 --> 00:08:26.399 Interconnectedness does not erase distinction. 00:08:26.560 --> 00:08:31.920 A healthy body depends upon different cells remaining different while participating in a shared life. 00:08:32.080 --> 00:08:38.960 The spiritual invitation is not to disappear into the whole, it is to discover that our deepest individuality is relational. 00:08:39.279 --> 00:08:48.320 I become myself through relationship with parents and teachers, friends and strangers, ancestors and ecosystems, communities and histories I did not create. 00:08:48.480 --> 00:08:51.360 There is no isolated self beneath all those relationships. 00:08:51.600 --> 00:08:54.000 Relationship is part of what a self is. 00:08:54.240 --> 00:09:02.480 Albert Einstein expressed this insight with unusual tenderness in a letter of consolation written in 1950 to Robert Marcus, whose son had died. 00:09:02.720 --> 00:09:11.840 Einstein wrote, He experiences himself, his thoughts, and his feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. 00:09:12.000 --> 00:09:22.639 He went on to describe the spiritual task as widening our circle of compassion beyond the narrow confines of the individual self until it embraces other living creatures and the beauty of nature. 00:09:22.879 --> 00:09:27.200 It is our work to heal the optical delusion of consciousness that we are separate. 00:09:27.519 --> 00:09:39.279 Einstein was not offering a Christian doctrine of God, and it would be dishonest to recruit him as a secret theologian, but he was naming something that theology, ecology, and contemplative practice each recognize in their own ways. 00:09:39.519 --> 00:09:44.240 We experience ourselves as separate, but that experience is radically incomplete. 00:09:44.480 --> 00:09:51.039 The problem is not that the self is unreal, the problem is that we mistake the boundaries of the self for the boundaries of our belonging. 00:09:51.279 --> 00:09:57.120 I have a distinct body, history, and responsibility, but the air in my lungs was outside me moments ago. 00:09:57.360 --> 00:10:00.960 The food that becomes my body comes from lives beyond mine. 00:10:01.200 --> 00:10:05.120 The language with which I form my private thoughts was given to me by a community. 00:10:05.279 --> 00:10:08.639 Even my sense of who I am has been shaped through relationship. 00:10:08.799 --> 00:10:11.919 Our separateness is real, but it is not ultimate. 00:10:12.240 --> 00:10:16.240 Panentheism is especially important within process theology as well. 00:10:16.480 --> 00:10:23.919 In many forms of classical theism, God creates the world from outside of it, remains essentially unaffected by it, and exercises power over it. 00:10:24.080 --> 00:10:28.240 God may

know our suffering, but nothing that happens can alter the divine life. 00:10:28.480 --> 00:10:31.440 Theologians call this God's immutability. 00:10:31.679 --> 00:10:34.399 But process theology offers a different picture. 00:10:34.639 --> 00:10:38.399 The world exists within God and genuinely affects God. 00:10:38.559 --> 00:10:42.080 Every joy and every wound is received into the divine experience. 00:10:42.320 --> 00:10:47.279 God is not an unmoved observer of creation, but is its most intimate companion. 00:10:47.440 --> 00:10:51.679 And this doesn't mean that God and the world are equal or that God approves of everything that happens. 00:10:51.840 --> 00:10:53.840 It means that nothing is lost to God. 00:10:54.000 --> 00:11:01.200 Every experience becomes part of the divine life, where it is held, remembered, and woven into God's continuing work of healing. 00:11:01.440 --> 00:11:04.879 God's power in this understanding is not coercive control. 00:11:05.200 --> 00:11:07.600 God does not manipulate every event from the outside. 00:11:07.759 --> 00:11:13.759 God works within creation, calling each moment towards greater beauty, truth, freedom, and love. 00:11:14.000 --> 00:11:19.279 Panentheism, therefore, offers a way to speak about both divine presence and creaturely freedom. 00:11:19.440 --> 00:11:22.399 The world is within God, but the world is not a puppet. 00:11:22.639 --> 00:11:27.919 Creation possesses real agency, real creativity, and therefore the real capacity to cause harm. 00:11:28.240 --> 00:11:32.639 God is present in every moment without being the cause of everything that happens. 00:11:32.799 --> 00:11:34.480 That matters when we face suffering. 00:11:34.879 --> 00:11:40.960 A distant ruler who could prevent every tragedy but chooses not to is difficult to reconcile with love. 00:11:41.120 --> 00:11:50.000 But a God who is present within every life, absorbing every wound and working within every circumstance towards healing offers another way of understanding divine power. 00:11:50.240 --> 00:11:52.559 God is not above the suffering world watching. 00:11:52.720 --> 00:11:54.799 God is within it, bearing it. 00:11:55.120 --> 00:12:00.480 Panentheism is not merely an interesting idea about where God is located, it changes how we live. 00:12:00.720 --> 00:12:08.399 If every person exists within God, then contempt for another person is not only a social failure, it's a failure to recognize where we are. 00:12:08.559 --> 00:12:10.799 It is missing God and our neighbor. 00:12:10.960 --> 00:12:16.480 If the earth exists within God, then creation is not simply raw material placed here for human consumption. 00:12:16.639 --> 00:12:19.840 A forest has value beyond the lumber we can extract from it. 00:12:20.000 --> 00:12:21.679 A river is more than a resource. 00:12:22.000 --> 00:12:26.399 Species we may never see participate in the same sacred life that holds us. 00:12:26.639 --> 00:12:31.200 If our lives are genuinely interconnected,

then injustice cannot be contained. 00:12:31.440 --> 00:12:37.679 Poverty, racism, violence, ecological destruction, and exclusion damage the whole community. 00:12:37.840 --> 00:12:42.559 The suffering may be distributed unequally, but it never remains entirely someone else's problem. 00:12:42.879 --> 00:12:44.960 And healing is relational too. 00:12:45.120 --> 00:12:49.120 Compassion given to one person moves outward through families and communities. 00:12:49.279 --> 00:12:51.600 Repairing soil restores more than a field. 00:12:51.759 --> 00:12:55.120 Welcoming someone who's been excluded changes more than one life. 00:12:55.440 --> 00:12:59.679 Love alters the web because nothing within the web exists alone. 00:12:59.919 --> 00:13:02.159 And this does not mean that healthy boundaries disappear. 00:13:02.320 --> 00:13:07.519 Interconnection is not an invitation to remain in an abusive relationship or take responsibility for everything. 00:13:07.679 --> 00:13:09.600 A cell without a boundary cannot live. 00:13:09.840 --> 00:13:13.200 Difference, distance, and limits are part of a healthy relationship. 00:13:13.360 --> 00:13:16.399 Panentheism does not say that everything dissolves into sameness. 00:13:16.559 --> 00:13:19.600 It says that our differences exist within a deeper communion. 00:13:19.759 --> 00:13:22.799 Now, many of us were taught to search for God outside the world. 00:13:22.960 --> 00:13:23.919 We looked upward. 00:13:24.080 --> 00:13:26.720 We tried to become spiritual enough to escape ordinary life. 00:13:26.879 --> 00:13:30.960 We divided reality into sacred and secular, spirit and matter, heaven and earth. 00:13:31.039 --> 00:13:34.320 We imagined salvation as leaving this world for another one. 00:13:34.480 --> 00:13:37.759 But the biblical vision is not ultimately about escaping creation. 00:13:37.919 --> 00:13:40.879 It's about creation being filled with divine life. 00:13:41.120 --> 00:13:42.559 The word becomes flesh. 00:13:42.720 --> 00:13:46.960 The spirit is poured out upon all flesh, creation grown towards renewal. 00:13:47.120 --> 00:13:48.879 All things hold together in Christ. 00:13:49.039 --> 00:13:51.120 In God we live and move and have our being. 00:13:54.639 --> 00:13:59.200 God is not absent from matter, hidden behind the universe or waiting at the end of life. 00:13:59.440 --> 00:14:04.879 God is the living depth of every present moment, and also infinitely more than every moment. 00:14:05.120 --> 00:14:08.000 Prayer then is not calling a distant God down. 00:14:08.159 --> 00:14:10.639 It's consenting to the presence already here. 00:14:10.879 --> 00:14:13.279 Worship is not flattering a celestial ruler. 00:14:13.440 --> 00:14:16.639 It's awakening to wonder, gratitude, and participation. 00:14:16.960 --> 00:14:19.519 Salvation is not an evacuation from the world. 00:14:19.679 --> 00:14:24.639 It is the healing from the illusion that we can live apart from God, one another, or the earth. 00:14:24.960 --> 00:14:39.120 Sin might be understood, at least in part, as the attempt to live as though we were separate, as though my flourishing could be purchased through your suffering, as though humanity could thrive while the earth is consumed, as though God could be loved while my neighbor is despised. 00:14:39.440 --> 00:14:42.480 Grace restores our capacity to belong. 00:14:42.720 --> 00:14:45.519 So maybe the question is not whether God is present. 00:14:45.679 --> 00:14:49.840 The question is whether we awake to the presence in which we already live. 00:14:50.080 --> 00:14:54.480 The next breath you take will be made possible by lives beyond your own. 00:14:54.720 --> 00:15:01.840 The atoms entering your body will have traveled through soil and rain, root and leaf, ocean and atmosphere. 00:15:02.080 --> 00:15:05.120 The carbon in your cells was born inside stars. 00:15:05.279 --> 00:15:09.039 Your life is held within relationships you did not create and cannot control. 00:15:09.360 --> 00:15:14.799 And beneath, within, and beyond all those relationships is the mystery we call God. 00:15:14.960 --> 00:15:18.399 Not everything is God, but nothing is outside of God. 00:15:18.559 --> 00:15:20.960 You don't have to travel somewhere else to find the sacred. 00:15:21.120 --> 00:15:24.399 You don't have to escape your body, the earth, or your ordinary life. 00:15:24.559 --> 00:15:26.720 You are already living within the mystery. 00:15:26.879 --> 00:15:28.720 You are already moving within grace. 00:15:28.879 --> 00:15:30.960 You are already being held in God. 00:15:31.279 --> 00:15:36.320 The invitation is to wake up and then to live as though we belong to one another. 00:15:37.840 --> 00:15:40.399 Thanks for listening to the unintentional heretic. 00:15:40.559 --> 00:15:48.559 If this podcast has been meaningful to you, I hope you'll follow the podcast, give it a like or a rating wherever you listen, and maybe share an episode on your social media. 00:15:48.799 --> 00:15:57.519 The heart of this podcast is to offer a compassionate, expansive expression of Christianity rooted in scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. 00:15:57.759 --> 00:16:06.399 For so many people, Christianity has become associated with nationalism, fear, and exclusion, with so much religion dividing people and leaving them wounded or unwelcome. 00:16:06.639 --> 00:16:13.200 I hope we can make it a safe and welcoming place again, a place where you can bring your whole self, including all your doubts and questions. 00:16:13.360 --> 00:16:19.519 These conversations and episodes help people encounter a faith that deepens our humanity and draws us towards love. 00:16:19.679 --> 00:16:25.360 Sharing an episode is a small way to help that expression of Christianity reach someone who may need it. 00:16:26.080 --> 00:16:28.399 So until next time, stay curious.