Panentheism comes from the Greek words for ‘all’, ‘in’, and ‘God’ — literally, “all-in-God-ism”. On this view, God is neither fully distinct from the universe (as in classical theism) nor identical with the universe (as in pantheism). Instead, the universe exists ‘in’ or ‘within’ God. The prepositions ‘in’ and ‘within’ are obviously not meant in a spatial sense (as in “Bob is in the kitchen”). Rather, they’re meant to capture the idea of ontological containment. God pervades and encompasses the universe in such an intimate fashion that there is an overlap or intersection between the being of God and the being of the universe. While God is more than the universe, there is no clear ontological distinction between God and the universe (which includes us, of course).
-Dr. James Anderson, Why I Am Not a Panentheist
The two common objections to Panentheism is that it isn’t biblical and that it isn’t compatible with a morally perfect God.
i) The major prooftext is Acts 17:28. That has been dealt with before. Their proof texting isn’t very persuasive. They simply misuse text attributing spacial metaphors to God.
ii) The common attempt to get around the issue of Evil’s existence being in God is to deny that evil has an ontological state. I think this isn’t a sufficient answer to the objection. I think we have a difference between the absence of something that is good and the opposite of a thing that is good. We may lack an army, but the enemy may have their presence here. North Korea lacks a Capitalist society, but it does have a totalitarian regime. We may lack the physical presence of Christ, but that isn’t being in the presence of Satan. It is often not the lack of something good that is evil, but the presence of evil.
iii) Furthermore, this doesn’t get God off the hook just yet. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states:
“One problem with the privation theory’s solution to the problem of evil is that it provides only a partial solution to the problem of evil since even if God creates no evil we must still explain why God allows privation evils to exist (See Calder 2007a; Kane 1980). An even more significant problem is that the privation theory seems to fail as a theory of evil since it doesn’t seem to be able to account for certain paradigmatic evils. For instance, it seems that we cannot equate the evil of pain with the privation of pleasure or some other feeling. Pain is a distinct phenomenological experience which is positively bad and not merely not good. Similarly, a sadistic torturer is not just not as good as she could be. She is not simply lacking in kindness or compassion. She desires her victims’ suffering for pleasure. These are qualities she has, not qualities she lacks, and they are positively bad and not merely lacking in goodness (Calder 2007a; Kane 1980. See Anglin and Goetz 1982 for a reply to these objections).”
Dr. James Anderson makes the same observation:
“5. A panentheist, as one commentator suggested, might be tempted to appeal to the privation theory of evil to explain how God need not be polluted by the evil of the world. I don’t think this move will work, for the simple reason that the privation theory must apply to God in the same way that it applies to the world. If a privation of good in the world entails that the world is (partly) evil, by the same token a privation of good in God (by virtue of his containing the world) entails that God is (partly) evil. And presumably the same goes for any other theory of evil. It’s hard to conceive of a containment relation that would serve the panentheist’s purposes but isn’t transitive with respect to evil. (And it’s his burden, not mine, to identify that relation.)”
iv) I just think God is such of a thing that it leads into an issue if everything is in God. If the substance of all things is God, then how do we escape pantheism? If God has attributes of infinitude, timelessness, Moral perfection, omnipotence, then those are the attributes that make up all things. The issue in my mind is that the world is filled with the exact opposite( finitude, evil, temporal, impotent (etc). Either everything, in reality, is contradictory in essence and properties, the distinctions are really illusory, or we have two different kinds of things. Panentheism doesn’t afford that. It gives all things are the same in different forms.
v) Christian theology isn’t compatible with such metaphysical positions. It raises to many questions that are at odds with the God of biblical theism. How does one remain consistent in affirming that God is a se and that the universe is a part of God? If the universe is “a part” of God, then the universe is something he is dependant on. The Bible teaches creation ex nihlo, but this implies creation “ex theos”.
For more:
The Council 