Having established God’s transcendence, Paul then turns in his argument to assert both God’s immanence and God’s desire to reveal his God-self to human beings. This is the context in which he states: “in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). But for Paul, God’s supreme act of self-revelation was not through the sublime aspects of creation but in the person of Jesus Christ. Paul presented the Athenians with a call to face up to a coming judgement, to be delivered by Jesus, whose credentials for this task had been established by his resurrection from the dead (Acts 17:30–31). There is no room for doubt about the direction of Paul’s argument: the signposts in creation pointing to God are a preparation for the fuller revelation of God in Jesus Christ. 

Another snippet of Scripture used to support panentheism is 1 Corinthians 15:28, which looks forward to a moment when “God will be all in all.” The focus of the chapter in which this phrase appears is the reality of resurrection. Paul stakes everything on the claims that “Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day” (1 Cor 15:3–4). If these historical events, the truth of which Paul had verified for himself, including by talking to the other witnesses to them (1 Cor 15:4–8), had not happened, then Paul and the other witnesses were false witnesses (1 Cor 15:15), the message they were preaching was a lie, those who had believed their message were deceived, and death and sin remained the unconquered realities of human existence (1 Cor 15:15–18).

Having summarised the evidence which caused him to change his mind about Jesus, Paul reminds his readers that he has been prepared to risk death many times (1 Cor 15:30–32), in the hope of resurrection and for the truth which he has witnessed. It is between those passages, the first of which sets out the evidence for the resurrection of the Son of God and the second of which expresses the depth of Paul’s conviction that this decisive event had occurred, that Paul gives an account of how the Son of God will overcome all of humanity’s enemies, including death (1 Cor 15:26) before returning all things to God (1 Cor 15:28). Paul’s extraordinary claim is that the sublimation of evil and the resolution of all things is not some inscrutable mystery but takes a shape defined by events which took place around 30 AD, when one homeless Jewish rabbi was executed as a blasphemer and traitor, before being brought back to life by God in confirmation that he did, in fact, have authority over creation, evil, and death.