Page History

...

3. A still stricter sense of "the transcendent" is that in which it is used in a significantly different kind of metaphysical interpretation of experience – one that explicitly affirms the reality or existence of an extraordinary or generically different actual entity or existent such as might otherwise be designated "God or Nature" (in the sense of Spinoza's Deus sive natura), "the Universe," "the Whole," "the Absolute," or "the Encompassing.If " Thus any interpretation that explicitly affirms the existence of an extraordinary, generically different actual entity or existent may be said to affirm "the transcendent" in this third sense of the term. And this may be said even if the interpretation denies that what it means by "God" or "Nature," "the Absolute" or "the Whole," is in all respects independent of the world of ordinary actual entities or existents. In this third sense, some forms of absolute idealism, and even of so-called neoclassical, or "process," theism explicitly affirm "the transcendent."

...

² In the past I have characterized classical theism as "supernaturaI[istic] theism." What I've had in mind in doing so is the third kind of metaphysical interpretation clarified above (¶ 4), according to which the extraordinary reality or existent properly called "God" is related to the world only external1yexternally, or logically, not internally, or really. At the same time, I have never been comfortable accepting "natural[istic] theism" as an apt characterization of my own metaphysical interpretation, which I take to be of the second kind (¶ 3), according to which "God" refers to an extraordinary, generically different reality or existent that, being literally "the universal individual," is as eminently related to the world internally, or really, as externally, or logically. In other words, God, on my position, is "dually transcendent" (Hartshorne), in that, in one respect, God is eminently related to all things, externally , or logically, even while, in another respect, God is just as eminently related to all things internally, or really – at once the unsurpassably concrete as well as the unsurpassably abstract.

...