Contemporary Theology II: From Theology of Hope to Postmodernism ST507 LESSON 16 of 24 John S. Feinberg, PhD University of Chicago, MA and PhD Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, ThM Talbot Theological Seminary, MDiv University of California, BA In our last few lectures we have been discussing process theology, and I want to continue with that. I want to turn most immediately to look at what process thinkers say about God and evil. Then we ll pick up a few more process concepts, and then I want to begin our evaluation of process theology. But before we get to any of that, let s bow for a word of prayer. Father, we thank you so much for the opportunity to study these modern thinkers and modern movements in theology. Lord, as we complete our description of these views, we pray again for the enabling ministry of the Holy Spirit. We pray then as well, Lord, as we begin our evaluations we would be fair but also accurate in what we have to say. Help us then as we study. For it s in Christ s name we pray it. Amen. In terms of God and evil, process theologians believe that their handling of the problem of evil is far superior to the way that traditional theism deals with this altogether. Of course, you have to accept the process notion of evil in order to buy into their answer, but that goes without saying. According to Whitehead, and here again I quote him from Process and Reality, this is page 517, The ultimate evil in the temporal world is deeper than any specific evil. It lies in the fact that the past fades, that time is a perpetual perishing. As Peterson notes, this is Michael Peterson in his article God and Evil in Process Theology that was anthologized in Ronald Nash s volume Process Theology that was published by Baker Book House in 1987. As Michael Peterson says, This undercuts the moral aspect of evil in favor of evil as the metaphysical principle that everything perishes. So there are different ways to conceive of evil: there s natural evil, moral evil, metaphysical evil, or a lack somehow in things and fundamentally what process theism is giving to us is not so much a moral concept of evil, that actions are wrong or right morally, but rather a metaphysical sense of evil. 1 of 14
Despite emphasis on a metaphysical rather than a moral notion of evil, process thinkers do handle God s culpability or His blameworthiness, if He is blameworthy, for moral evil. They simply say that God s power is finite so that He can t be expected to get rid of it. God Himself does nothing evil; evil arises from the free choices of God s creatures and God can only stop such choices by limiting their freedom, but we ve already seen that God won t do that. So God s role is to present each actual entity with its ideal subjective aim and to try to lure it or persuade it to choose that ideal, but He cannot guarantee that good is going to be chosen; that s the nature of free will. You can t abridge it with guarantees. Nonetheless, God Himself is still not guilty for evil, and hence the traditional problem of evil is solved, or so process thinkers say, God isn t guilty for evil because He is powerless to stop it. Although God can t remove evil, we shouldn t reject Him as an adequate God because God is deeply sympathetic toward our plight, so that religiously He would be adequate, we might say. In fact, we re told God suffers with us, so He clearly cares very deeply about what s happening. Schubert Ogden says, Our sufferings also may be conceived as of a piece with a reality which is through and through temporal and social. They are partly avoidable, partly unavoidable, products of finite free choices and, like everything else, are redolent of eternal significance, because they too occur only within the horizon of God s all-encompassing sympathy, they are the very opposite of the merely indifferent. When they can be prevented, the responsibility for their prevention may now be realized in all its infinite importance, and when they must be born with, even that may be understood to have the consolation which alone enables any of us to bear them. This is from Ogden s Reality of God [Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University, 1992]. If I can summarize what is being said here, I think I can do so by paraphrasing 1 Peter 5:7. It s as if Peter were saying cast all your cares upon Him, for though He can t do anything about them, He does in fact care for you. We re told that at least this God is much more religiously adequate than the God of traditional theism, who has not removed evil, although He s supposed to have the power to do so, and as impassible can t feel for us, can t feel and suffer with us. We re told that this process God is supposed to be better than that. 2 of 14
Let me turn to another major issue for process theism; namely, process theology and pantheism. From what you ve heard me describe in the previous lectures, you might have come to the conclusion that process theology actually amounts to pantheism, the view that everything is God or God is everything. But process thinkers deny that their position amounts to pantheism, and I think two of the clearest explanations of why they make this denial come from Hartshorne and from Schubert Ogden. Let me begin with Schubert Ogden. Ogden claims that process thought differs from both pantheism and traditional theism in that process notions are dipolar, while both other views, pantheism and traditional theism, are monopolar. As a result both traditional theism and pantheism deny that God can be in any way conceived as genuinely temporal and related to others. Now what Ogden means here is that traditionally there have only been two apparent answers to how God relates to the world. Either God is totally independent from it, and he thinks that is the way traditional theism responds, or God is absolutely identical to the world, and that is the position of pantheism. This means for traditional theists that God is neither related to the world nor in any sense is temporal. For pantheists this means that since God is the world, He cannot be related to anything outside of it; there isn t anything outside of it, and this particular world then becomes necessary if God Himself is a being how has to exist and His being is equivalent to the being of the world. But now that just means that this world had to be actualized, all contingency is ruled out in that respect. It also means that whatever God does the world does, if one buys the pantheist approach, but in that case free action of individuals is an illusion. Ogden says the way to solve this problem is with a dipolar view, and the dipolar view solves this problem because it allows God to be really related to the world while at the same time He is independent of it so as to ensure freedom and contingency in the world. We might respond that being dipolar merely means that God has an eternal as well as a physical pole and that that s the only real difference between process views and pantheism, but process thinkers say, No, there s even more of a difference. Hartshorne claims that the difference between pantheism and panentheism, which is his term for process views, panentheism means all in God. The difference between pantheism and panentheism is that pantheism identifies God s being with the world s being while panentheism, process view, claims that deity 3 of 14
is in some real aspect distinguishable from and independent of any and all relative items and yet taken as an actual whole includes all relative items. Now this means more than just that God has a mental pole plus a physical pole; it means that in both poles, God s being encompasses all reality while at the same time it somehow or other remains distinct from it. In other words, God is present with and interpenetrates everything so that the world and He are mutually interdependent, but He does not interpenetrate everything in such a way as to be literally identical to the world. As Hartshorne explains, panentheism agrees with traditional theism that God must be logically independent of the world and hence necessitates no particular world. Contingency is maintained in the sense that we could have wound up with some different world than the one we have, but on the other hand, panentheism also incorporates the insight from traditional pantheism that God cannot in His full actuality be less or other than literally allinclusive. In sum then, what we re being told is that panentheism is not pantheism because panentheism is dipolar, not monopolar, but this means more than merely saying God has a physical and a mental pole. It means that even in God s physical pole, God must be distinct from everything else, while at the same time including everything else. Let me turn to another process notion: namely, process theology s concept of immortality. In spite of claims that process thinkers make that everything is perishing, process thinkers do speak about immortality. However, they make a distinction between subjective immortality and objective immortality. Let me explain the difference. Subjective immortality, which involves continuing the present stream of consciousness that one has, continuing that consciousness after death, that kind of immortality is usually denied by process thinkers, though not always. John Cobb, for example, at times leaves open the logical possibility of such immortality even though he s not ready to say, Yes, there is this kind of subjective immortality. Likewise, another process thinker, Peter Hamilton in his book The Living God, while not affirming subjective immortality, at least thinks that it is logically possible [The Living God and the Modern World (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1967)]. On the other hand, when he discusses, that is, when Hamilton discusses Christ s resurrection, he generalizes about all resurrections, and I quote Hamilton, All I can do here is to suggest that there is a place today for a general concept of resurrection that sees permanent meaning and value in our lives without depending upon belief in individual life after death. So 4 of 14
we re sort of being given resurrection and we re given subjective immortality while we re also having it taken away. That s subjective immortality. Either it s denied entirely or we re not very sure whether this happens, but possibly it could. On the other hand, process thinkers uniformly affirm what they refer to as objective immortality. What they say here is that each occasion as occurring has subjective immediacy to the actual entity, but once a given occasion is complete, one phase in the process of an entity s becoming is complete, the entity moves on, and the previous occasion perishes perishes in the sense that it leaves subjective immediacy. I explained that idea in the last lecture by way of the illustration of the sentences that I was speaking. When there is this loss of subjective immediacy, though, that doesn t mean that what has perished has been annihilated; rather it has become objective as part of the entity s past. It is also stored in God, since every actual entity is part of God s body. It is stored in God, and it s remembered by God as part of His superjective nature. That s what process thinkers mean by objective immorality, and it clearly differs from subjective immortality, a conscious life after death. Let me turn now to look at what process thinkers believe about Jesus Christ and His redemption of the human race. As we might expect, process theologians uniformly deny that Christ was anything but totally human. Language that is used says that He was inwardly as well as outwardly a man, according to Hamilton. Hence, the doctrine of two natures in Christ, one of the human, one of them divine, that orthodox doctrine is rejected. John Cobb says that this is so because substances are spatial temporarily located and no two of them can occupy the same space, but for God literally to enter Jesus would entail displacing something of His humanity, and if you can t have two substances spatial temporarily in the same place, then this couldn t happen. So Christ could not be fully human and fully divine at the same time, and the best bet is then that He must be fully human. This I take from Cobb s article, A Whiteheadian Christology that s anthologized in Brown, James, and Reeves, editors of a book entitled Process Philosophy and Christian Thought published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1971. Despite these denials, process thinkers usually like to retain traditional language about Christ, though they reinterpret its meaning. For example, Christ s resurrection is understood along the lines of objective immortality, that concept that I just 5 of 14
explained a few moments ago. The idea of Christ as the Logos is also retained, but the Logos is defined as nothing more than the phenomenon of creative transformation. As Cobb and Griffin say, Christ has been defined as the Logos incarnate which operates as creative transformation. Christ in this sense can be found in all things and especially where there is life. This is Cobb and Griffin s Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition, page 106 [Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976]. Of course, since all entities are involved in the creative activity of becoming, Christ as Logos is not only found in all, but in a sense all are the Logos as well, all of us, that is, all actual entities. Process thinkers also claim that God was in Christ, but not in a way that is not in principle true of all of us. As Hamilton explains it, The phrase, the idea, God in Christ, is just Whitehead s idea of divine imminence. Hamilton explains, Whitehead s theory of prehensions here offers a significant contribution. It attempts to describe the manner in which one entity is actually, not just metaphorically, immanent in another. Actually immanent in that it contributes to and is constituent in the other subjectivity. For Whitehead there is actual immanence, yet each entity, each experience, retains its own subjectivity. Hamilton likens this to a husband entering into his wife s joys and sorrows. As she rejoices, joy is central to her experience and insofar as her husband makes this joy his own, he makes an element of his wife an element constitutive of himself. How much one identifies with one s wife s experience depends on how sympathetic and compatible this husband is to his wife. Hamilton concludes, and I quote, Thus the belief that God s self-expressive activity was supremely present in the person and the decisions of the historical Jesus, implies the belief that Jesus was supremely sympatique to God, and that God is supremely compatible to Jesus. The preceding suggests that Christ is apparently not unique, but process thinkers claim otherwise. Interpretationsof that uniqueness differ depending on which process thinker you re looking at. Cobb s exposition, I think, is especially thorough here. He says that God s uniqueness in Christ can be explained in four respects. First of all, the content of God s initial aim for Christ was radically different from that of anyone else. Second, Jesus realized; that is, He obeyed divine expectation more completely than anyone else. Thirdly, God s aim for Christ was not only that Christ prehend God s aim for His life, the content of that aim, but also that He prehend the source of that aim; namely, that he prehend God as a concrete entity. Finally and most unique in 6 of 14
regard to Christ, prehension of the divine aim was not experienced by Christ as one aim to be synthesized with others, but was, in fact, the center from which everything else in His psychic life was integrated. What then should we say about Christ as Savior and this whole matter of redemption of mankind? In 1 Corinthians 15:17, as you re well aware, the apostle Paul says that without Christ s resurrection there is no forgiveness of sins. However, David Griffin says that belief in Jesus resurrection is optional for Christian faith. His claim betrays, I think, the fact that if process theology has a concept of redemption, it is not going to look a whole like the biblical notion. What is it s concept of redemption? I think Norman Pittenger is especially explicit on this issue, and I think you d find that his views are generally held by a number of process thinkers. Pittenger claims that the atonement must be understood along the lines of Peter Abelard s moral influence theory. In addition, the human condition as he sees it is one of alienation, lovelessness, and loneliness. Sin is defined as failure to choose God s subjective aims for ourselves, since God s aims are the ideal. If we would choose them, it would transform our reality. How then can God get us to choose what we should choose? The answer that Pittenger gives that in Christ God shows how much He loves us in spite of our feelings of loneliness and lovelessness. Of course, God always enters into all that we do, so He is always demonstrating His love for us and to us. But Pittenger says that Christ is the classical instance of this. A peculiarly, intensive release of the divine love in act, to quote Pittenger from his article, Redemption: A Process Theology Interpretation from the journal Theology published in 1985. Hopefully this expression of divine love in Christ s life and death will move the rest of us to see that our deliverance, our being set right, and our coming to realize concretely what it is in us to become with and under God is a clue to how redemption is affected, again a quote from Pittenger. Put simply, God s act in Christ should move us to see that God loves us and in response we should express love to Him by following His aims for us. Those aims are ideal, of course, and if chosen they will transform and in that sense redeem our lives. This is clearly a version of the moral influence theory. 7 of 14
What then is the church s mission in respect to this message of redemption? As another process thinker... explains, Cobb sees the Body of Christ Concept as best explained in terms of Whitehead s notion of a field of force. Thus for Cobb, the Church is the community whose purpose is to maintain and perpetuate the field of force generated by the person and life of Jesus. What the Church has to remember in fulfilling its mission is that Jesus in no sense is an exclusive Savior. He s the classic example of God s love, but that only means He is not the only example. There is no finality then, we are being told. If this sound preparatory to Universalism to you, it is. Norman Pittenger quotes Schubert Ogden approvingly in the following way. He says, Only in Jesus Christ must be taken to tell us not that God acts to redeem in the history of Jesus and in no other history, but that the only God who redeems any history, although He in fact redeems every history, is the God whose redemptive action is decisively represented in the word that Jesus speaks and is. Now this note of Universalism and the idea that all religions are okay and that there s no finality to Christ is something that we see ever increasingly in the modernmost contemporary period of theology and we re going to hear these themes not only in this theology, but we re going to hear these again when we talk about New Age thinking and postmodernism. What then is the church s mission is light of all of this? It s not to save from hell those who otherwise would go there if they never heard or accepted Christ. Instead, those who have responded to God s love as displayed in Christ have the obligation to tell others about that divine love and to help them make a similar response to God. But we should not think others have no inkling of this idea because God has nowhere left Himself without a witness. Pittenger then suggests as follows what should be an appropriate attitude toward other religions, and here I quote him again from his article on redemption. He says, Should we not then be prepared to see in the non-christian religious faiths and in the various nonreligious orientations of men and women genuine channels or avenues which God delights to use? And may we not even say with the Roman Catholic thinker, Paul Knitter, in his recent book it was recent at the time that Pittenger wrote his article No Other Name, published in 1985 by SCM Press. May we not even say, Pittenger says with Knitter, that in all such movements God is indeed active and that many non-christian movements in history with their prophets and seers served God as the divinely elected instruments for bringing deliverance to 8 of 14
men and women in their given circumstances and each through its or his or her own way? That last sentence was meant to be a question. May we not say that this is true? And all of these questions require in Pittenger s thinking a yes answer. Yes, there is this great value in other religions. God has revealed Himself in these other places. That completes the description of process theology that I d like to present. Obviously there are other things that could be said, but I think that gives you the basic idea of process thinking. What I d like to now for the remainder of this lecture is to engage in assessment of what you ve heard. Process theology, we ve been told, corrects classical theism s defects. It gives us a better synthesis of philosophy and the Christian faith, and it illumines better the central Christian doctrines than classical theism does. Now we need to see whether that s so. I think that in fairness to process ttheology, we have to note some contributions that it makes, but I would suggest to you that these claims to be superior to classical theism are indeed problematic and process theism, I think, is replete with a series of problems. But first of all let me talk about some contributions that process theology makes to our thinking. There s little doubt that process theology has made significant contributions to contemporary theological discussion, and I think it s safe to say that as we move into the next century, it will continue to do so and will continue to be very influential. For example, process theists are to be applauded for their attempt to do metaphysics and systematic theology at all. As I noted in my discussion of the theological and philosophical backgrounds of process theology, in the twentieth ventury many nonevangelical theologians have concluded that it s mistaken to think that it would be possible to form a system of thought that would integrate all of reality. In fact, the twentieth century, as we ve noted along the way, has seen the production of very few systematic theologies from non-orthodox thinkers; that s been true especially of the first half of the twentieth century. Even if you disagree with the process system, it is, I think, at least encouraging to see a school of theologians who think that it s important to construct a system of metaphysics and don t think that it s impossible altogether to do so. 9 of 14
A second contribution is that in attempting to construct a system, process theists, I think, are correct in neither returning to old liberalism nor accepting the Barthian approach to theology. Although Whitehead s earlier works predate neo-orthodoxy, some key process thinkers were working on their system while Barthianism was predominant. Nonetheless, process theists have resisted the temptation to find answers to theological problems in neo-orthodox solutions, and I think this is a positive thing about them. Third, process theists insist that God does enter into relations with the world. He isn t locked out of history, and He cares about what happens. Moreover, sometimes God s relation to individuals do change. For example, repentant sinners are forgiven and God s wrath is assuaged. All of these things reflect biblical teaching, and I think they should be part of our theology and of our teaching. Now, as I m going to argue, it s not true that all or even necessarily that most orthodox evangelical theists have denied these truths or that orthodox theism automatically entails their denial. But those theists who have denied these teachings do present, I think, an inaccurate account of God. The process critique of such teachings is a helpful reminder not to overlook or to misrepresent these facets of biblical teaching that God does care, that God does change relationship. In addition there is little doubt, I think, that some orthodox Christians do tend to focus so much on God s majesty, His power, and transcendence that God is oftentimes portrayed as an austere, omnipotent judge whom His creatures fear but find very, very hard to love. And I think it s helpful to be reminded that while God is transcendent, holy, and is Ruler of the world, He is also a compassionate Comforter. To believers God is Father. To all of us, God is the one who so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son, as John 3:16 tells us, in order to provide redemption from our sin. A related point, I think as well, is that process theists are in essence telling orthodox theists that religion in general and God in particular must be so conceived as to be relevant to modern men and women. I think it s very, very doubtful that process theism meets these needs, but nonetheless, this emphasis is helpful, I think, as a reminder to evangelical theists that in the process of their preaching, as well as the process of their theologizing, they need to show that God is relevant to modern men and women. There s nothing wrong with being careful and detailed in our 10 of 14
descriptions of God and God s activities, but at some point the doctrines and the principles need to be applied to people s lives. Otherwise they will not likely see that God and Christ really have the answers to life s most significant questions. Let me talk about a final contribution of process thinking. Implicit and explicit in process theology is the notion that our knowledge and our understanding of the world grows and changes as time progresses. Every people then is time bounded and culture bounded. The result is that we must always be reexamining and refining our theology. Process theists claim to have articulated biblical truth better at this time in history than any other system on the scene. If nothing else, this should challenge evangelicals, I think, to reexamine their theological formulations in light of Scripture and contemporary time, and I think this is healthy for evangelicals. All theologians need to remember that theology is a human conceptual enterprise. Scripture is inerrant, it is infallible, but there is no guarantee that our theologizing based even on Scripture is going to be infallible. Hence, we need to always hold our theology with humility; we need to be open to reexamining it and reformulating it when necessary. This may also mean that we have to reexamine the language of the historic creeds of Christianity to see if the language there adequately expresses both on the one hand biblical revelation and on the other hand our contemporary understanding of the world. Please do not misunderstand this. None of this means that we should discard the cardinal doctrines of Christianity. It does, however, remind us not to become so rigid in our theologizing as to be incapable of critiquing and correcting our theology whenever it s necessary. Even as process theists like Hartshorne and Cobb and Ford have critiqued and offered correctives to Whitehead and to one another, even so evangelicals need to recognize that no orthodox theist is omniscient, nor is his or her theology incapable of improvement, and I think process theology helps us to see if these things are true and we can make an application to our own theologizing. Having said these positive things, I think there are some major problems with process theology, and let me begin to lay them out for you. The first thing, and I suppose the most significant in many ways, is that process theology, I believe, has a flawed conception of God s being. Let me explain what I mean. Even though process theism s God reflects contemporary science and philosophy and it supposedly describes God more accurately than does any other theology, at least that s what they tell us, I would contend that the process God is either nothing or nonexistent or the process 11 of 14
God is the God of pantheism after all in spite of process theists claims to the contrary. And I think that this becomes apparent by looking individually at the notions of God s primordial and His consequent natures. Let me explain to you what I mean. First of all let s take a look at the primordial nature of God. When we discussed that, I noted for you different ways in which that s conceived even within and among process thinkers. On the first conception of that nature, God s primordial nature is merely the perceiving and ordering of eternal ideas, but I would suggest to you that without someone to do the ordering, how can the ideas themselves be ordered? The ordering is not an actual entity, and on this interpretation of the primordial nature, there is no actual entity to do the ordering. But now if that is so, then God s primordial nature, I would suggest to you, is nothing more than an idea, a concept that process thinkers talk about. Even on Whiteheadian principles, the notion is itself inadequate. He says, The only real things and real causes are actual entities, but now since the ordering of eternal ideas is not itself an actual entity, then it must be unreal given the terms and definitions of Whitehead s own system. In addition, Whitehead offers no one to do the ordering other than saying it s God who does it. However, God is defined solely in terms of primordial and consequent natures. To say that the primordial nature does the ordering, I would suggest to you, begs the question since the question is whether the primordial nature is any kind of actual entity. You remember, it s only actual entities that act. To say that the consequent nature does the ordering misunderstands Whitehead s notion of God s consequent nature as the world. Hence, I say to you again, if God s primordial nature is just the ordering of possibilities, it is hard to see how possibilities become ordered, and it is harder yet to see the primordial nature as anything other than an idea. What about the other interpretation of God s primordial nature? The idea that it is equivalent to the ordered eternal objects themselves? 12 of 14
Here I would suggest to you that there is still a problem that is at least as old as Western philosophy itself. Are the eternal ideas anything other than generalities abstracting from the concrete world? Hence, in Whiteheadian terms, they wouldn t be actual entities, so are these things anything other than generalities abstracted from the concrete world, and if they are, where are they? Where are they located? Anyone who is unconvinced by Plato s doctrine of forms can hardly find Whitehead s notion of eternal objects compelling. In addition, since eternal objects represent only possibilities, not actualities, it is hard to see how on either a substance metaphysics or even on Whitehead s actual entity metaphysic the eternal ideas are real things. But, of course, if that is so, then if God s primordial nature is just the eternal ideas, it must be a something that is a nothing. What about God s consequent nature? Here I think the trick is to avoid pantheism. I think that this is His consequent nature of the world is something, that s a real thing, but the trick is going to be to show that process views really avoid pantheism. Process thinkers claim that God s consequent nature interpenetrates and contains the world while remaining distinct from it. This doctrine surely avoids pantheism if it s true, but the question is, Is it true? And I would suggest to you that if it is true, it is not demonstrably so. Let me explain my point. God s consequent nature is said to be physical and it is said to be attached to the world, and the world is physical and it is said to be attached to God. Now the problem is where does God s physicality end, or physicalness if you d rather use that word, where doesn t His physical nature end and the world s begin and vice versa? If I have to decide on empirical grounds and those had better be the grounds I use in light of Whitehead s epistemology which is committed thoroughly to empiricism; if I have to decide the answer to that question on empirical grounds, I would suggest to you that it s impossible to know what aspect of any physical thing is the entity itself and what part is part of God s consequent nature, the part distinct from the thing in the world. The net result, I would suggest to you, is that if God s consequent nature really is distinct from the world, it is impossible to prove that that s so. So for all we know, there is no God after all who s distinct from the physical world. On the other hand, if someone insists that God really is there, then since the only thing empirically observable is the physical world, the view it seems to me has to lapse into pantheism where God and the world are equivalent. I think you can see what the dilemma is. In summary then, God s 13 of 14
consequent nature is either just a concept, but not a real thing, or if in fact it is real, its existence is improvable and thus, I think, it is something that is as good as nothing, or God consequent nature is demonstrably real, but it s only demonstrable as pantheism which suggested it. So I think you see the problem that I have with the notion of God. In the next lecture I want to continue with my critique, and the next thing that I am going to suggest is that process theism has an inadequate understanding or an inadequate philosophy of mind, and by that I mean they have an inadequate understanding of the sort of thing that mind is. But more of that in the next lecture, and then we also want to begin in the next lecture toward the end of that looking at New Age thinking. Christ-Centered Learning Anytime, Anywhere 14 of 14