What is pantheism?

The writer has lately been in India and heard it argued for the eternity of matter, that matter is simply an extension of God, that God is in each flaming bush, in mankind, in animals, in trees, in streams, in fact in everything. Pantheism is the doctrine that God and the universe are identical.

But clearly Genesis 1 refutes Pantheism. We read, “In the beginning God created.” If God created He existed before He created. The carpenter must exist before he can make a table. God is transcendental, that is, He exists before and outside the universe, which is the result of Divine mental conception, so that through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that “things which are seen were not made of things which do appear” (Heb. 11:3). The writer of Hebrews 11:3 is in accord with the writer of Genesis 1:1.

Pantheism is the belief that is current in the heathen world today. It asserts the eternity of matter. It declares that mind and matter are one. It declares that there is no God apart from nature or the universe. The pantheist believes that he himself, the flowers that grow in the field, the fruits on the trees, the water that flows to the ocean, the ocean itself, the elephant, the cow—in short, organic and inorganic matter are all God, immanent and inherent as part of the Supreme Being.

It also contains a denial of Pantheism — an idea of the ancients and of the heathen world, but more recently revived in Christendom as one of the buttresses of "New Theology." The god of the Pantheist is simply the spirit or essence of Nature. He expresses himself in Nature, but is not to be known or even conceived of as outside of or apart from Nature. The Pantheist professes a god who is immanent in Nature but not transcendent above it. The God of verse 1 is clearly One outside of Nature and infinitely above it, seeing He made it, and therefore existed before it. From Him all that which we call Nature proceeds.

Another thing that is negatived is the very popular idea of PANTHEISM, that God is not to be thought of as outside nature and above it, but as only dwelling in nature, somewhat as the electrical current dwells in insulated cables. God is immanent — that is the word they use — and they do not believe in a transcendent God, a God that stands outside of and distinct from nature. You must merely think of Him as a Supreme Mind, a Sense dwelling in all things; that is the 'New Theology'. This Pantheistic idea is plainly denied. You have God before creation, and God outside of nature. The 1st of Genesis clearly presents Him not as an immanent God, but as a transcendent God, One that stands outside of and distinct from creation.

It is clear that if God created, He existed before He created. Pantheistic theology is about as sensible as if I were showing you a table, and told you that the carpenter, who made it, was not only in the table, but that the table was the carpenter himself, that you could not distinguish between the carpenter and the table he made. Dr. Paley’s well known illustration of a watchmaker and the watch he made, that the watchmaker existed a good many years before he made the watch, and that he existed apart from the watch, still holds good. A table requires a carpenter; a watch requires a watchmaker, and surely this earth needs a Creator. So we read in the sublime words of Moses, “In the beginning GOD created the heaven and the earth,” words unmatched by any description of the creation in the writings of the ancients. GOD existed before creation. He is apart from creation. His almighty power brought it into being, and sustains it.

Last of all, we have "one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in you all." (Ver. 6.) Evidently in this we stand before a still vaster compass. There is an immense mass of mankind that does not profess Christ at all. The bulk of men have gone on with their idols, spite of law and gospel. Are there no claims there? We own "one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in you all." That is, it is a personal God: not at all the idea that everything is God, which is infidelity in its worst shape, or Pantheism. We own "one God," not a number of divinities, like the Gentiles, but "one God and Father of all." The Jew did not believe that He was the Father of all, nor even properly Father for the chosen nation, but rather their Governor, even Jehovah. The Christian revelation brings out God in an infinitely larger, as well as for us more intimate, character; but larger, too, as embracing all creaturehood — "One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all" (His supremacy and providence, but more than these), "and in you all." There is His near connection with some, and not with all. For it is not said, "in all," but "in you all." The Holy Ghost is speaking of the Father's peculiar relationship to the Christian. Thus nothing can be more full, and beautiful, and orderly than these unfoldings of unity in and around Christ our Lord.

34 I admit creation is an object of faith, not of knowledge; I can only know it when created. But it is no coming out of God as emanation, and going back. What I am in relation to, God has formed according to the apprehensions of it He has created in me. There is no existence independent of Him, nor place where He is not sustainingly; but He does not exist in it. All these difficulties the simple words of scripture make as plain as possible: "God created"; but "by him all things consist." Their difficulties arose from making pure intellect God. Then you must have the intelligent and the intelligible (that is, ideal objects in the mind at least).

Thus, when men have made the Logos the human mind or the human reason - the impersonal reason - with a vast system of philosophy to give it a body, there is a germ of truth; for there is that spirit in man which comes from the inbreathing of God originally. Yea, in wretched Pantheism there is a germ of truth; for God is above all and through all. All too live and move and have their being in Him. By Him all things consist. But where God is not known objectively, this centres in self: "Ils ne sont autre chose que l'esprit humain" (the most degraded of sentences); and centring in self is the perfection of degradation. But all these germs of truth, the truth (the word of God) gives us as certain truth in two words without the cobweb spinning of philosophy which proves its incompetency, the mind of man vacillating between systems formed from their germs without the true object of them; for that is philosophy.

Clearly if phenomena disguise, instead of revealing, knowledge is impossible even to man endowed with mental powers beyond other creatures on earth; phenomena would be worse than useless. It is the Maya that suits an Oriental Pantheist, as Mr. A. argues, not an observer unprepared for its moral and social corollaries. Brahm in that scheme is alone the true existence, and man peculiarly under illusion who thinks of himself as separate from Brahm, the ever-acting power, who wishes, designs, discriminates and causes (Bhagavat Gita, § x.; Upanishads), though inconsistently man bears the penalty of demerit, and has pain and pleasure, while God does all. This is not universal identity. Such "inconsistency is far from being the effect of a transient lapse of attention. It has a far deeper cause. The reality of which phenomena are the appearances are not to the Agnostic, as to us, a substance proper to each thing taken individually and specially indicated by appropriate appearances. On the contrary, the Reality is one universal substance, sole and continuous in time, sole and continuous in space, which appears within us, which appears without, which is in itself the All-Being. Hence appearances are not truly appearances, but disguises — the antitheses of appearances, which are the manifestations of one person to another, or of a thing to a person; whereas disguises are expedients for preventing an appearance from conveying the truth; and in the case supposed for deceiving parts of the same being by giving them an impression that they are distinct from the whole, and hold intercourse with it. If there is in existence but one substance, and no other being to which it can be manifested, and if all appearances are no more than tremors in that one substance, then manifestly each appearance indicative of a separate individual, is a sheer delusion, and phenomena in the total are properly called all-nothingness. They may seem to be heavens and earth, forces and motion, form and thought, war and repose, but they are only curls of foam on the same stream; not even that — all only oscillations on the same cord; not even that — they are All-nothingness.

This is getting near to Pantheism. That pagan philosophy teaches that the material universe is God, that God is immanent in nature, that the clothes we wear, our very bodies, the table from which we eat, all is God, mixing up the thought of the Creator and of that which He created. Here we have Christ presented as a universe of spiritual laws, principles and forces. Mr. Austin-Sparks allows that Christ is a Person, but he likewise makes the assertion that “Christ is a vast unity, a marvellous harmony” (p. 36).