Theopedia

Pantheism

“…because, although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking… and exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever.”

— Romans 1:21, 25

Pantheism (from the Greek pan, “all,” and theos, “God”) is the belief that God and the universe are identical: that all that exists is God, or an expression of God’s own being, rather than something God made distinct from himself.1 It takes two main forms: one treats the world itself as God’s mode of existing, the other denies the world’s own reality altogether and holds that God alone truly exists.1 Either way, pantheism collapses the distinction historic Christian theism insists on, between the Creator, who alone has being in himself, and everything else, which depends on him for its being.

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession describes God as “the alone fountain of all being, of whom, through whom, and to whom are all things.”2 That formula holds together the very two claims pantheism cannot: all things genuinely flow from God and depend on him at every moment, yet they remain things distinct from him, not modes or extensions of his own being. Bavinck states the same point from the creature’s side: “pantheism, indeed, cannot acknowledge this, but theism stands for the fact that a creature, though absolutely dependent, nevertheless also has a distinct existence of its own.”3 Absolute dependence and distinct existence stand together in historic theism; pantheism can affirm only the first by erasing the second.

Historical Development

Hodge calls pantheism “the most persistent as well as the most wide-spread form of human thought relative to the origin and nature of the universe,” tracing it from the nature-worship underlying ancient polytheism through Brahminical philosophy in India to its modern European form in Spinoza, for whom God and nature were simply two names for a single substance.4 Carter groups Spinoza with later figures such as Schleiermacher as representative pantheists, part of a broader modern drift, discussed at Transcendence of God, away from the Creator-creature distinction classical theism has always maintained.5

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t Scripture’s own language of God’s presence within creation, “in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28), amount to pantheism? No: that same sermon addresses “the God who made the world and everything in it,” distinguishing maker from made in the same breath it affirms his nearness (Acts 17:24). Bavinck develops the distinction through the doctrine of providence: pantheism collapses God’s ongoing preservation and government of creation into “the course of nature as blind necessity,” making nature’s laws simply identical with God’s decrees, a view that leaves “no room for miracle, the self-activity of secondary causes, personality, freedom, prayer, sin, and religion as a whole.”6 Historic theism affirms real divine presence and action within creation without collapsing creation into God himself, the same distinction the confession’s “fountain of all being” language preserves. Scripture treats this collapse as more than a metaphysical error: worshiping the creature instead of the Creator is precisely the idolatry Paul describes as the root of human unrighteousness (Rom. 1:21-25).

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Charles Hodge, “Chapter V. Nature and Attributes of God,” in Systematic Theology, Volume I (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 366-442. ↩ ↩2

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 2. ↩

  3. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 8, “The Living, Acting God.” ↩

  4. Charles Hodge, “Chapter III. Anti-Theistic Theories,” in Systematic Theology, Volume I (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 241-335. ↩

  5. Craig A. Carter, “Prologue: How My Mind Has Changed,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), introduction. ↩

  6. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 10, “Creator of Heaven and Earth.” ↩