religious revolution now 269Th e power of the idea of God as person is to resonate with our in-
sight into our most important attribute: our inexhaustibility by the
conceptual and institutional orders that we inhabit. Th e defect of this
idea, however, is to reduce the idea of God to the dimension of our
experience and of our capabilities, as if God could be simply a bigger
person, a Gulliver to the Lilliputians who we are. Th e view of God as
person can never be wiped clean of the taint of an anthropomorphic
projection. In this sense, it seeks to contain the infi nite within the fi -
nite. It verges on idolatry.
Th e idea of God as being is free from this taint. It achieves this free-
dom, however, only at the cost of confl icting with the narrative of God’s
creative and saving work and of affi rming the primacy of the impersonal
over the personal. Th is narrative is not an accidental feature of the reli-
gion, a transposition of its message to the language of ordinary experi-
ence, the better to render the incomprehensible susceptible to under-
standing. On the contrary, it is the heart of the faith, if anything is.
Impersonal being cannot be the living God. It is the God of the phi-
los o phers, not the God of Abraham or of the New Testament. Th e em-
brace of the idea of God as impersonal being leads to one or another
form of panentheism, if not of monistic pantheism. For the monist or
the pantheist, God and world are one and the same. For the panenthe-
ist, God constitutes the world, or the world God, but God, as imper-
sonal being, is the world plus something else. Th is something else may
be imagined spatially and spiritually, as a reality that exceeds manifest
nature. With greater force and plausibility, it may be represented tem-
porally, as the yet unrealized and undetermined future of the world.
All that now seems settled will be scrambled and transformed in the
course of time.
Panentheism may be attractive to a mind that no longer knows in
what to invest the sacred other than to invest it in the world, but that
recoils from the overt reversal of the dialectic between transcendence
and immanence— a dialectic informing the higher religions. Panenthe-
ism is, however, powerless to bring us to the promise of salvation that is
central to the Christian faith. It cannot connect to the par tic u lar events
that comprise, in this faith, the narrative of redemption: from the cov-
enant with Israel to the advent, passion, and resurrection of the re-
deemer and the continuation of his work by the Church. Th is whole