The Divine is not one religion’s God among several. It is the category those Gods are all attempts to name.
Everyday usage treats “divine” as an intensifier (“divine timing,” “divine intervention” for a lucky break) or jumps straight to one tradition’s specific account of God, skipping past the more basic question those accounts are all trying to answer. Philosophy of religion works the other way round: it treats the Divine as a general category, prior to and broader than any single religion’s picture of it, and asks what has to be true of something for it to count as divine at all.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s current framework (drawing on John Schellenberg) proposes that whatever counts as divine or ultimate has to clear three tests at once: it must be metaphysically ultimate (the most fundamental fact about reality), axiologically ultimate (of unsurpassable value), and soteriologically ultimate (a source of genuine liberation or fulfilment for those oriented toward it). Anselm’s classical medieval formula points at the same target from a different angle: God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.”
Traditions that agree the category exists still disagree sharply about what fills it. Classical theism holds the Divine is a personal being distinct from the world it creates and sustains. Pantheism identifies it with the universe itself. Panentheism holds the world is contained within the Divine without exhausting it, as in Charles Hartshorne’s process theology, where the world is described as “God’s body.” Non-Western traditions name the same general slot differently again: Vedanta’s Brahman, described as sat-chid-ananda (“existence-consciousness-bliss”), or Daoism’s Dao, at once the origin of all things and, in itself, no thing. Islam’s doctrine of absolute divine oneness, (tawhid), answers the further question of number and relation directly: the Divine is one, with nothing else sharing in its nature.
The Divine, in this base sense, is the category those more specific positions are all rival theories about. It is also the thing more targeted claims already presuppose: a claim about what God commands (see Divine Command Theory) or about a register of meaning that sits above ordinary utility (see Divine-Level) only makes sense once some notion of the Divine is already in place to ground it.
Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “God and Other Ultimates” (adopting J. L. Schellenberg’s framework for ultimacy).