Naturalist conception 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.

This theology lets the movement retain the vocabulary and practice of prayer while reinterpreting it as the focusing of ideals rather than petition to a personal deity. It distinguishes Reconstructionism from the other Jewish denominations, which affirm a personal God in traditional terms, and it flows directly from the movement's view of Judaism as the evolving creation of a people. Reconstructionist thought itself contains a range of positions on God, but the naturalist strand associated with Kaplan is its most distinctive theological signature.

Kaplan's theological colleagues at the Jewish Theological Seminary, notably Abraham Joshua Heschel, developed sharply different, explicitly personalist accounts of God as one who addresses and is addressed by human beings, and criticised naturalist theology for reducing prayer to self-address and revelation to human insight rather than genuine divine disclosure met by the worshipper. Kaplan's defenders respond that the naturalist account does not deny meaningful religious experience but relocates its object from a supernatural person to the very real, describable power for good operative in nature and history, an argument about whether "God" must refer to a being capable of will and address, or may instead name a process, that remains unresolved among Jewish theologians generally, not only Reconstructionists.