Sand Dancer
Crazy Cat Lady
I'm curious what type of church panentheists attend.
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What type of church do you attend?
- Thread starter Sand Dancer
- Start date
The Sum of Awe
Brought to you by the moment that spacetime began.
I'm guessing most attend UU churches
Sand Dancer
Crazy Cat Lady
Just any panentheist is fine. Our family loves our Presbyterian church, but right now I feel kind of fake. The UU church that is close to me was really...generic. There was nothing at all about God. It made me sad.
I attend a Hindu temple that is primarily south Indian in style, customs and representations of the deities. The presiding deity is a southern representation of Vishnu known as Sri Guruvāyūrappan.
underthesun
Terrible with Titles
Panentheists do not necessarily feel the need or have the desire to attend a church, so you're bound to have plenty of different answers to this question.
I, for one, feel closest to the divine when I am not in a church or any building at all, but out in a natural setting, far from others and farther from "civilization". I am going to a Unitarian Universalist church this weekend though, for the first time, just to try it out and see if I could find a community of others there. But I do not think that any service there would make me feel closer to the divine than I do when I am out in nature.
I, for one, feel closest to the divine when I am not in a church or any building at all, but out in a natural setting, far from others and farther from "civilization". I am going to a Unitarian Universalist church this weekend though, for the first time, just to try it out and see if I could find a community of others there. But I do not think that any service there would make me feel closer to the divine than I do when I am out in nature.
fallingblood
Agnostic Theist
An ELCA Lutheran church. The minister is a panentheist as well.
Primarily a UU church as well as a Hindu Temple with the deities & architecture in both South and North Indian styles
My local Orthodox church (depending on how you define "panentheist", that is)
Where in GA do you live/attend?
I went to a UU church in Savannah a couple of years ago and there were about 20 people there,
which I figured was good the GA, so curious how prevalent UUism is there.
Is that 'depending' a comment on your church?
How prevalent/do you define panentheism in the Orthodox faith?
sojourner
Annoyingly Progressive Since 2006
My metaphor of choice is Christian, whether it be RCC, Anglican, or other Protestant body. I call myself a Celtic Christian, because the Celtic Way is more panentheistic and organic than what I've found in other forms of Xy. I include rituals from other systems. I follow some Peruvian Shamanistic practices, as well as some Native American practices.
No, it would be a comment on the definition of "panentheism" itself, since different people have different versions of what the term even means. If you mean to say that panentheism is "God in all, or all in God" as the etymology of the word suggests, then Orthodoxy is very, very much panentheistic, and Scripture itself supports panentheism. But if panentheism means that the universe is a part of God, then no, we're not panentheistic.
We do hold in Orthodox Christianity (as you know) that the creation is not the Creator, and that the universe was made out of nothing (not out of a part of God). Yet God's Energies pervade the universe, and without His constant sustaining of everything in the universe, it would no longer exist. God is closer to us than our own hearts, and as St. Paul said in Acts 17:28, "in Him we live, move and have our being."
sojourner
Annoyingly Progressive Since 2006
You should read Sallie McFague -- The Body of God: An Ecological Theology. She both agrees and disagrees with what you've said here. She asserts that the world is God's body -- that is, that creation ex nihilo is not the case, but that the stuff of creation is, at its base, the stuff of God. Yet, she avoids pantheism. I think she's more incarnational in her theology than you present here.
Perhaps so. So, Sallie essentially says that, at its base, the stuff of creation is the Divine Essence? Or is it the Divine Energies?
Orthodoxy, because of its full OT canon (if you include all the OT books and don't take any out), has Scripture that addresses creation ex nihilo. 2 Maccabees 7:28 says the following: “I beg you, my child, to look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them, and recognise that God did not make them out of things that existed.”
Shepherd of Hermas, while apocryphal, was considered by many to be legit Scripture. This work states even more clearly, “God, who dwells in the heavens, and made out of nothing the things that exist…” (Vision 1.1)
These two are big parts of the reason that Orthodoxy (along with most denominations of Christianity) has always held to creation ex nihilo, as opposed to saying that the universe was made of something that already existed. Another big reason is the almost universal witness of the Fathers.
sojourner
Annoyingly Progressive Since 2006
I get that. But McFague would answer that it's not creation ex nihilo because God existed. She cites a scientific law which states that matter merely changes form. I'd have to read the book again, but I seem to remember that she doesn't differentiate much between matter and energy.
She kind of places God at the Big Bang -- that the Big Bang was God sending matter and energy out into space to congeal into creation.
