Meaning Without the Supernatural

This theology lets the movement retain the vocabulary and practice of prayer while reinterpreting it as the focusing of ideals rather than petition to a personal deity. It distinguishes Reconstructionism from the other Jewish denominations, which affirm a personal God in traditional terms, and it flows directly from the movement's view of Judaism as the evolving creation of a people. Reconstructionist thought itself contains a range of positions on God, but the naturalist strand associated with Kaplan is its most distinctive theological signature.

Kaplan's theological colleagues at the Jewish Theological Seminary, notably Abraham Joshua Heschel, developed sharply different, explicitly personalist accounts of God as one who addresses and is addressed by human beings, and criticised naturalist theology for reducing prayer to self-address and revelation to human insight rather than genuine divine disclosure met by the worshipper. Kaplan's defenders respond that the naturalist account does not deny meaningful religious experience but relocates its object from a supernatural person to the very real, describable power for good operative in nature and history, an argument about whether "God" must refer to a being capable of will and address, or may instead name a process, that remains unresolved among Jewish theologians generally, not only Reconstructionists.