Immanence is usually applied in monotheistic, pantheistic, pandeistic, or panentheistic faiths to suggest that the spiritual world permeates the mundane.
[2] This theology further explains that Zeus is called Demiurge (Dêmiourgos, Creator), Maker (Poiêtês), and Craftsman (Technitês).
[6] Tantric Buddhism and Dzogchen posit a non-dual basis for both experience and reality that could be considered an exposition of a philosophy of immanence that has a history on the subcontinent of India from early CE to the present.
Pope Pius X wrote at length about philosophical-theological controversies over immanence in his encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis.
[12] Traditional Jewish religious thought can be divided into Nigleh ("Revealed") and Nistar ("Hidden") dimensions.
Daily Jewish prayers refer to this inherited closeness and personal relationship with the divine, for their descendants, as "the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob".
Much of the later Hebrew Biblical narrative recounts the reciprocal relationship and national drama of the unfolding of themes of immanence and transcendence.
Kabbalistic, or Hasidic Jewish thought and philosophy describe and articulate these interconnected aspects of the divine-human relationship.
Jewish mysticism gives explanations of greater depth and spirituality to the interconnected aspects of God's immanence and transcendence.
The main expression of mysticism, the Kabbalah, began to be taught in 12th-Century Europe, and reached a new systemisation in 16th-Century Israel.
The Kabbalists identified the final, feminine Sefirah with the earlier, traditional Jewish concept of the Shekhinah (immanent divine presence).
Luria offered a daring cosmic theology that explained the reasons for the Tzimtzum, the primordial catastrophe of Shevirat Hakelim (the "Breaking of the Vessels" of the Sefirot in the first existence), and the messianic Tikkun ("Fixing") of this by every individual through their sanctification of physicality.
Clement Charles Julian Webb explained that "Carlyle had done more than any other nineteenth-century writer to undermine belief in the transcendence of God and the origin of the material world in an act of creation in time, and to put in its place an 'essentially immanentist' theology, drawn largely from the writings of the German Idealists."
[15] His so-called method of immanence "attempted to avoid: (1) the postulate of an independently existing world or a Kantian Ding-an-sich (thing-in-itself), and (2) the tendency of neo-Hegelian philosophy to lose the particular self in an Absolute that amounts to a kind of mystical reality without distinctions.
"[15] Political theorist Carl Schmitt used the term in his book Politische Theologie (1922), meaning a power within some thought, which makes it obvious for the people to accept it, without needing to claim being justified.
Many hold Schmitt to be interested in an immanent polity without anything transcendent involved in its vital operations beyond the very border that separates it from the enemy outside.
[17] The French 20th-century philosopher Gilles Deleuze used the term immanence to refer to his "empiricist philosophy", which was obliged to create action and results rather than establish transcendents.
[18] Furthermore, the Russian Formalist film theorists perceived immanence as a specific method of discussing the limits of ability for a technological object.
Specifically, this is the scope of potential uses of an object outside of the limits prescribed by culture or convention, and is instead simply the empirical spectrum of function for a technological artifact.