Why? What troubles? Why not have the best of both worlds, especially when integrating the religions?
I don't think you can integrate religions at any meaningful depth. And why would you? each religion, if it is what it purports to be, is complete and entire in itself ... it doesn't need integration, a process which can only over-complicate, confound and confuse. It's been tried, and it always ends in a Tower of Babel scenario.
You can draw outward correspondences, but that's because religion addresses man, and man is man everywhere ...
The theist/panthesit/panentheist debate is over the definition of God. Christianity's definition is founded on the Hebrew Scriptures and the data of Revelation in Christ, considered in the light of the Greek philosophic tradition. It's quite rigorously precise.
I would say that anything created is, by that very fact, not God and, as creation is created, it is not God.
Also, God being Absolute, Infinite and All-Perfect, nothing can be added to, nothing can be taken away, nothing can be changed, nothing altered, God does not increase nor decrease ... therefore creation, which is subject to contingency, growth and decay, coming and going, etc, is not divine according to that definition, and does not impact on God in the slightest.
God can be all in all, through and through, and is Immanently present to all creation all the time, but He is not the same stuff as creation is, nor is creation the same stuff God is ... so I think 'panentheism' is a bit of a fudge that relies on indistinct definitions as far as Christianity is concerned. In polytheist religions, it may well be different.
I think:
God within the Father is impersonal: Allaah. The One God.
But He makes His will known to man, and man can communicate with Him (if not, surely 'Allah' is a delusion ... which it is not?)
The Father is personal...
Well hang on ... now you're drawing distinctions within the Godhead, I think, and Christianity does not hold to that. God is One, God is not a composite, and God is simple.
'Personal' and 'impersonal' are human determinations.
and we can "see" him as such, when we see the Son.
True.
The Holy Spirit is God in the world, and can move us to self-knowing
We would shake our heads on that one, as it suggests a mode of God, and moreover is a cosmological determination. The Holy Spirit is God, before the world ever was — God is not Trinity from the human perspective, but rather from an act of self-disclosure.
The Son is the first step up the ladder and can protect us and guide us.
The Holy Spirit leads us to the Son.
I could go with this, but it does not specify impersonal/personal.
I think this debate is often conducted under a misunderstanding of terms.
The first question is whether there can be any communication between God and man
at all. Deists, for example, would say no. God created the cosmos, walked away, and has nothing more to do with it.
The Abrahamic tradition has God deeply involved with His creation. The question then is, how can God communicate His will and intent to man?
First, by signs. The Laws of Nature are His, after all.
But it is axiomatic that He wants to be known, and what greater dignity can a Deity confer on a created nature than to communicate to that nature
as that nature. So God comes to man in a way that man knows, and knows better than any other ... as a person, like himself.
If God is impersonal, then God is either deficient, lacking the qualities that define a person, as Boethius said, for example: "An individual substance of a rational nature"
Or God is simply, and utterly, transcendent, beyond person, indeed beyond being.
It seems to me that the names or classifications of the Divine as expressed in the Vedic Tradition, Brahma, Ishvara ... are human classifications imposed from without.
For this reason they do not apply in Christianity, as we do not classify God in that way. To apply them to Christianity is to misunderstand Christianity.
The Doctrine of the Trinity is Meta-Cosmic. It is not three classifications of God, but rather describes a process within God, the Life of the Unmoved Mover. The Three Persons of the Trinity are accorded the designation 'person' only analogously, for God transcends 'person' and 'being'.
There is a Greek philosophical classification, for example:
Arche Anarchos (The Principle without Principle) is the Father,
Arche (Principle (cf John 1:1)) is the Son ... but that's about as far as we like to complicate it.
The meta-personal discussion of God takes two streams. God as manifest as an Immanent Presence we class as cataphatic theology, which makes positive statements — God is Good, God is Love, and the like. This is the most commonly-met aspect of the Christian Tradition.
God as Transcendent can only be spoken of in apophatic (negative) terms, such as 'Ineffible' or 'Divine Darkness' and 'Beyond Being' — this theology is more discreet, but it is there, and unless you've had it really well explained, you're inclined to get it wrong.
There's much tosh spoken about what Meister Eckhart is supposed to have meant, for example. Another piece of nonsense, for example, says that the Christian mystics outgrew the Tradition ...
God bless
Thomas