Panentheism holds that the world is in God, but God is more than the world: coined by Karl Krause in 1828, it became the metaphysics of process theology and the middle way between a distant creator and a dissolved one.
Panentheism — all-in-God-ism — names the position that God includes the world as a body includes its cells, while exceeding it as a self exceeds its body. Krause coined the term; Whitehead's Process and Reality gave it a system, in which God has two natures, primordial and consequent, the second genuinely enriched by the world's becoming; Charles Hartshorne and John Cobb carried it into theology, and it now appears wherever classical immutability is felt to cost too much love.
Ultimate Reality
God and the world are mutually immanent and mutually real, and neither is complete as an abstraction from the other. Where classical theism guards God's independence to the point of timeless detachment, panentheism wagers that a God who cannot be affected cannot be said to love — and that the biblical portrait, of a God who rejoices, grieves, and responds, is data, not embarrassment.
The Human Condition
Creatures are occasions of experience in a universe of occasions, each prehending its past and deciding its inheritance. Evil is real discord, privately felt by God in the consequent nature — the fellow-sufferer who understands, in Whitehead's famous description — so suffering is not merely permitted by a spectator but borne by a participant.
Knowledge and Truth
Whitehead's categoreal scheme is speculative philosophy disciplined by coherence, logicality, and applicability to experience; religious experience counts as evidence within it, not as an exception to it. Truth remains correspondence where correspondence fits, but the system's deeper criterion is the one process thought applies to God himself: adequacy to the whole of what is felt, including feeling.
Right and Wrong
The moral aim, in process terms, is intensity and harmony of experience — beauty as the teleology of the universe, with God as the poet of the world, leading by vision of truth, beauty, and goodness rather than by coercion. Persuasion replaces omnipotent control throughout the system, and ethics becomes the creature's answer to the divine lure toward the richer possibility.
Human Destiny
Every occasion perishes into objective immortality: it becomes fact forever, prehended by God and preserved in the consequent nature with its value intact. Personal survival beyond death the system leaves open and mostly unemphasized; the destiny it preaches is that nothing achieved is lost, because the universe's memory is God himself.
The Conversation
Panentheism asks classical theism whether an unchangeable God can be the living God of scripture rather than its Greek correction, and it asks pantheism what becomes of the world's otherness — its freedom and its evil — if God is simply its sum. Its critics from both sides charge it with wanting each position's comforts at the other's price; its defenders call that the definition of a synthesis.