A Naturalist Idea of God

Reconstructionist Judaism, following Mordecai Kaplan, characteristically affirms a naturalist conception of God: God understood not as a supernatural person who intervenes in the world but as the power or process within nature and human life that makes for goodness, meaning, and what Kaplan called salvation, the fullest human self-realisation. On this account religious language about God expresses humanity's highest aspirations and the reliable order of the world, rather than describing a being outside nature who suspends its laws.

Kaplan's naturalism drew on the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey, under whom he studied, and on sociological approaches to religion associated with Emile Durkheim, which treated the sacred as an expression of a community's own values and self-understanding rather than an independently existing supernatural reality. Kaplan developed and taught this theology for decades as a faculty member at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the flagship Conservative institution, and Reconstructionism began as a loosely organised movement within Conservative Judaism before formally separating into its own denomination with its own rabbinical seminary in 1968, so that its naturalist theology of God grew up, unusually, inside the institutions of a more traditional movement before becoming the founding doctrine of a new one.