nd, or Einsteinian, insight here. God's power andGod's love are relative to the requirements of the current cosmicsituation, and God, at any given moment in time, is limited to theexigencies of that situation. Divine immanence is stressed over divinetranscendence. As the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead put it, "It isas true to say that the World is immanent in God as that God is immanentin the World."GOD AS EVERYTHING Whitehead developed a notion of the "consequent nature" of God thatencompasses all of reality, every puff of trivial existence. A similaridea of God and His relation to the world can be found in a grandsynthesis developed by the French Jesuit thinker, Pierre Teilhard deChardin, for whom God is all in all, the final cause of reality,overcoming all evil and drawing all things into his ultimate Self. This image of God is in some ways similar to the Eastern (especiallyHindu) idea of pantheism, which literally means that God is all. Everybit of matter and energy is a part of God; every event is amanifestation of divine Being. God is these things, not a cause of themand not separate from them. God is material because reality is material;God is in time because reality is in time. The Western counterpart of pantheism, as expressed by Whitehead andTeilhard, for example, can better be called panentheism, which meansthat God is all, yet more than all. Like pantheism, it identifies Godwith the totality of reality, but it also asserts that God is more thanthe sum total of everything. It is based upon the notion that the wholeis actually more than the sum of its parts, just as a person is morethan the sum of his cells or organs. In other words, the whole (God) ismore than the sum of His parts (all the elements of reality), yet He ismade up of these parts.MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU While few Americans would call themselves pantheists orpanentheists, I am convinced that this general way of thinking about Godwill become more ...
