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Neither Simply Beyond nor Simply Identical

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Neither Simply Beyond nor Simply Identical

Charles Hartshorne's dipolar theism, developed as a philosophical grounding for process theology, argues that God has two aspects, an abstract, unchanging essential nature, and a concrete, ever-changing actual state that genuinely includes and is affected by everything happening in the world at each moment, so that the world's joys and sufferings are, quite literally, felt by and included within God's own concrete experience, without God's abstract essential nature or transcendent identity being reduced to or exhausted by the world in the way pantheism claims; the container metaphor Hartshorne and others reach for, God as containing the world the way a mind contains its own experiences, or a person contains their own body's cells, captures the position's central move, real inclusion without total identity. This lets panentheism claim an advantage classical theism, on the panentheist's own telling, lacks: a God wholly separate from and unaffected by the world, classical theism's God of pure, changeless transcendence, can seem religiously remote from genuine suffering and change, while panentheism's God, genuinely affected by and inclusive of the world's becoming, can be intimately present to it, weeping with what suffers and growing with what grows, without simply being identical to the world the way pantheism holds. The technical cost is a God whose nature changes over time in at least one respect, the concrete pole, a revision classical theists have generally found difficult to square with traditional divine attributes like immutability and impassibility.

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