Steven D. Crain , God Embodied In, God Bodying Forth the World: Emergence and Christian Theology, Zygon, vol. 41, no. 3 (September 2006), 665-674.
Like Clayton, Crain adopts a panentheistic perspective, that God is in, but not totally constituted by, all things natural, but in a way that Crain argues is consistent with classical philosophical theism and its grammatical analysis of Christian discourse about divine transcendence. Crain argues that the standard panentheistic metaphor The world is the body of God should be complemented by the metaphor God is the body of the world. The two metaphors together fall short in complementary ways, or, rather, their strengths complement each other. Whereas one successfully suggests the transcendence in immanence of God, the other succeeds at communicating the world’s ontological dependence on God. Crain argues that the grammar of Christian talk about God and creation demands that theologians use the two metaphors together as a complementary pair whose sense is given by emergent panentheism.[1]
Emergent panentheism looks to me one of the stronger candidates for reconceiving God’s relationship to the world in a way that is consistent both with the Christian tradition and with the results of contemporary science.[2]
As causally efficacious, emergent, mental properties possess causal powers whose operations are not determined by subvenient chains of cause and effect and can act downward by modifying those very chains, albeit in ways consistent with natural laws obtaining at the subvenient level.[3]
This panentheistic grammar also implies that God is radically immanent within the world that God radically transcends in virtue of continuously giving it the gift that might not have been: the gift of being.[4]
Crain argues that “both the divine presence in the world and divine action in the world are nonintrusive, noninvasive, and noninterventive.”[5]
Crain and Clayton do not seem to differ on the theology they defend. Contemporary theology should indeed strive to understand how “God empowers the world from within, especially in bringing human free agents among God’s creations” and how God is “continuously sustaining and energizing [the world’s] story, especially its human stories, from within.”[6]
[1] Steven D. Crain , God Embodied In, God Bodying Forth the World: Emergence and Christian Theology, Zygon, vol. 41, no. 3 (September 2006), 672.
[2] Steven D. Crain , God Embodied In, God Bodying Forth the World: Emergence and Christian Theology, Zygon, vol. 41, no. 3 (September 2006), 666.
[3] Steven D. Crain , God Embodied In, God Bodying Forth the World: Emergence and Christian Theology, Zygon, vol. 41, no. 3 (September 2006), 666.
[4] Steven D. Crain , God Embodied In, God Bodying Forth the World: Emergence and Christian Theology, Zygon, vol. 41, no. 3 (September 2006), 670.
[5] Steven D. Crain , God Embodied In, God Bodying Forth the World: Emergence and Christian Theology, Zygon, vol. 41, no. 3 (September 2006), 670.
[6] Steven D. Crain , God Embodied In, God Bodying Forth the World: Emergence and Christian Theology, Zygon, vol. 41, no. 3 (September 2006), 672., cf. Philip Clayton, “Emergence From Physics to Theology: Toward a Panoramic View”, Zygon, vol. 41, no. 3 (September 2006), 685.