Steven Nemes writes in "Another Argument for Qualified Monism":
And if God and the world as both absolutely distinct and related to one another are contained within a greater context that includes them both, then this greater context is greater than either of them considered individually. But nothing can be greater than God. He is not contained by anything . . . The world is a part of God that he causes to exist. And this is what qualified monism says.
If one does not accept that God is the greatest context, does it follow that God is not the greatest? I do not think that such a conclusion should necessarily be accepted.
Perhaps God would not be the greatest if a greater context preceded him. However, what if it were instead argued that the world's existence emerges from God himself (creatio ex deo), and that because of his loving nature (and hence a nature that is motivated to share), he creates a shared environment (greater context) for him and the world to exist within. This view avoids the paradoxes of God creating the world out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo) and the awful difficulties of evil existing within God that qualified monism faces (more on this below). On the view that I am suggesting, God remains the greatest even if him and the world exist within a greater context, because God causes that greater context to exist. God is the greatest in terms of his place in the causal chain, and that is enough to make him the greatest.
What does it mean to say that God is not contained by anything? This is confusing to think about in terms of the relationship between God and the world because, according to standard ontological categories, one is not physical while the other certainly is. Given our embodied nature, as humans we think of words like "contain" as denoting space. If God is not spatial, however, this will not do.
It is not easy to say that there is any meaning for the word "contain" that does not denote space. Nemes takes this to mean that everything is contained within God, since God is the greatest. He cites 2 Chronicles 2:6 as support: "But who is able to build him a house, since heaven, even highest heaven, cannot contain him?" As far as I can tell, however, all this verse implies is that God cannot be contained locally; it says nothing about the world being contained in God.
For the sake of charity, allow me to give qualified monism the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps the world is contained in God in some senses, but not all of them. In the sense that God exists necessarily and the world exists contingently, it could be said that the world's existence is somehow situated in God, if it is true that nothing apart from him can exist. There is some biblical support for this. Job 12:10 reads: "In his hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of every human being." John 1:3 also says "All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being."
The world may also be said to be in God in the sense that God is omniscient: knowledge about the events of the world are contained within God's mind. Of course, there is a difference between knowledge about events and the events themselves.
In some ways, the world does not appear to be in God though. Think about God's character. Any instance of evil that occurs in the world is surely not contained within God's character, since God is good.
Suppose God's existence and essence can be separated, contrary to classical theism. Could we say that evil is contained in the former but not the latter? Existence itself seems like a neutral fact—but values, such as evil, have a moral dimension to them and are not neutral. I do not think it is right to conceive of evil as being within God's existence. Evil is a better fit for some shared environment that God created for himself and the world—a place where the free will of God's creation is capable of contingently producing good and evil results.
The view that God is the greatest context and that the world is a part of God is thus rejected in favor of a view that wagers that God and the world exist within a shared environment that God created. The closest this view comes to qualified monism is in affirming that the world's mere existence and God's knowledge about the world are contained in God. However, moral ambiguities only exist in God's creation and the shared environment that God created for himself and the world. There is no place for evil in God himself.