Faith & Spirit Quote by Arthur Peacocke

Peacocke is policing a boundary, and doing it with the calm authority of someone who knows the fence posts are already wobbling. In one dense sentence, he reminds readers that “genuine theism” has historically depended on a hard ontological gap: God is not the world, and the world is not God. Classical theism protected that gap by talking in the language of “substances” and “attributes” - metaphysical categories that don’t just describe reality but enforce a hierarchy. God gets one set of predicates (necessary, eternal, uncreated); creation gets another (contingent, temporal, dependent). The architecture is the argument.

The specific intent isn’t to nostalgically praise scholastic metaphysics. It’s to clarify what gets lost when modern theology flirts with softer models of divinity - process thought, panentheism, “God as the depth of the world,” spirituality that blurs creator and cosmos. Peacocke, who worked at the science-theology interface, is acutely aware that contemporary science makes divine “intervention” feel mechanistically crude; the temptation is to redescribe God as immanent pattern, persuasive lure, or emergent meaning. His subtext: fine, revise the model, but don’t accidentally slide into pantheism and still call it theism.

“Necessary for any genuine theism” is the tell: not a neutral historical note but a normative stake in the ground. He’s defending transcendence as more than a devotional mood. Without a real difference in kind, God becomes a poetic synonym for the universe, and worship quietly turns into self-regard dressed up as cosmic awe.