Bracken, Joseph A.  “Panentheism from a Trinitarian Perspective.”  Horizons, Journal of the College Theology Society 22, no.1 (1995): 7-28.

Abstract

In an article that provides secondarily a summary overview of the different Trinitarian models used by a number of modern theologians, Bracken proposes his own Trinitarian field-oriented understanding of the God-world relationship. He begins by reviewing some of the models for a God-world relationship discussed by Ian Barbour in Religion in an Age of Science (SF: Harper and Row, 1990), and indicates his agreement with a Whiteheadian model that he attributes to Barbour.  This is followed by speculation as to how one might modify Aquinas’s classical theism to make it “broadly compatible with contemporary notions of panentheism.”  Bracken then outlines a neo-Whiteheadian approach, designed to produce a true panentheism by considering Whitehead’s creativity and extensive continuum “as the divine nature or principle of the divine being.”  This is true panentheism because “creatures literally exist within God if by ‘God’ is meant the all-encompassing energy-field constituted by Creativity and the extensive continuum which serves as the necessary context for the dynamic interrelation of the three divine persons from moment to moment.” But individual creatures also exist apart from the three divine persons. The broader  concept, Ultimate reality, is not God as a unipersonal reality, not even the three divine persons together with all their creatures. Bracken answers possible objections to his proposals, while relating how the different models of Trinitarianism, modalist, subordinationist, and tritheistic, have been used by various modern theologians, and how each of these presupposes a different philosophical understanding of the One and the Many. (Jerry D. Korsmeyer, McMurray, Pennsylvania)