Process Theology

By David Ray Griffin

Although the term "process theology" is occasionally used more broadly, it usually refers to the theological movement based primarily on the "process philosophy" of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) and Charles Hartshorne (b. 1897).

After having focused on mathematics and the philosophy of nature in his native England, Whitehead came to Harvard University at age sixty-three and quickly created the most extensive philosophical cosmology of the twentieth century. In Science and the Modern World (1925), he argued that our cosmology should be based on aesthetic, ethical, and religious intuitions as well as on science, and that scientific developments themselves were pointing away from a mechanistic toward an organismic world view. This new world view led Whitehead, who had earlier been agnostic, to an affirmation, on strictly philosophical grounds, of the existence of God as the "principle of limitation," which accounts for the basic order of the world. In later books, especially Religion in the Making (1926), Process and Reality (1929), and Adventures of Ideas (1933), Whitehead developed his idea of God far beyond this suggestion of an impersonal principle.

Hartshorne had formed his own philosophical theology considerably before coming to Harvard, from 1925-1928, where he served as an assistant to Whitehead. Although Hartshorne has had his own emphases and has even differed with Whitehead on some issues, he has adopted large portions of Whitehead's thought (see Lewis Ford, ed., Two Process Philosophers: Hartshorne s Encounter with Whitehead). He has given special attention to the idea of God and to arguments for the existence of this God, most thoroughly in Man's Vision of God (1941). His overall theistic metaphysics is expressed most comprehensively in Reality as Social Process (1953) and Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method (1970).

Based on the thought of Whitehead and Hartshorne, process theology is one of the few types of theology in the twentieth century grounded in a metaphysical position in which theism is defended philosophically and science and religion are included within the same scheme of thought. The term "process" signifies that the "really real" is not something devoid of becoming, be it eternal forms, an eternal deity, bits of matter, or a substance thought to underlie changing qualities. The really real things, the actual entities, are momentary events with an internal process of becoming. This internal process, called "concrescence" (meaning becoming concrete), involves some degree of spontaneity or self-determination. It is also experiential. Actual entities are thus said to be "occasions of experience." The experience need not be conscious; consciousness is a very high level of experience, which arises only in high-grade occasions of experience. But, even though events at the level of electrons, molecules, and cells do not have consciousness, they have feelings and realize values, however trivial. The term "panexperientialism" can be used to describe this view, but it means not that all things, but only that all individuals, have experience: Things such as rocks are aggregates, which have no experiential unity, therefore no feelings or purposes

This view provides a solution to the modern mind-body problem created by the assumption that' 'matter'' is completely devoid of spontaneity and experience and therefore different in kind from "mind." Because the mind is different only in degree from the brain cells, not in kind, the interaction of brain and mind is not unintelligible. One can therefore avoid materialism's reductionistic treatment of mind and idealism's reductionistic treatment of matter, affirming instead the equal reality of the human mind, with its freedom, and of the rest of nature, with its integrity apart from the human perception of it. This resolution provides the basis for a theology of nature that not only reconciles science and religion (see Ian Barbour, Religion in an Age of Science) but also supports a religious ecological vision and ethic. Four features of the portrayal of nature are crucial for this ecological vision.

First, there is no dualism between humanity and nature. All individuals are said to have intrinsic value and therefore to be worthy of respect as ends in themselves. The anthropocentrism of most Christian theology, especially in the modern period, is thereby overcome. God did not create nature simply as a backdrop for the divine-human drama, and certainly not for human plunder, but cherishes individuals of each kind for their own sakes.

Second, unlike Albert Schweitzer and some forms of "deep ecology," process theology does not proclaim the idea that all individuals have the same degree of intrinsic value. A chimpanzee has more intrinsic value than a microbe, a human more than a malarial mosquito. A basis is thereby provided for discriminating value judgments.

Third, the units of which the world is composed are momentary events (not enduring substances), which constitute themselves by unifying aspects of other events in the environment into a creative synthesis. Relations to others are therefore internal to an individual; these relations are constitutive of what the individual is. One's welfare is therefore tied up with the welfare of one's world. This idea completely reverses the picture, pervasive especially in the modern period, of a world made up of substances whose relations to others are mainly external to them. Some have come to refer to process theology as "process-relational theology" in order to emphasize this point; it has also been called the "postmodern ecological world view." One implication for an ecological ethic of this point about internal relations is that it prevents the hierarchy of intrinsic value from leading to the conclusion that species with less intrinsic value should be eliminated to make room for increased populations of those with greater intrinsic value. The ecological as well as the intrinsic value of all things must be considered.

A fourth point is that the "others" included in each event are not simply the other finite processes in the environment but the all-inclusive process. God. God is therefore pervasive of nature, present in every individual, from electrons to amoebae to birds to humans. Each species is worthy of reverence as a unique mode of divine presence.

The point about internal relatedness can also be made in terms of perception. The idea that all individuals, including those without sensory organs, have experience means that sensory perception is not the basic form of perception. It is a special form of perception derivative from a nonsensory "prehension," which is common to all individuals and in which aspects of the prehended objects are taken into the prehending subject. This doctrine allows process theologians to speak of human religious experience as one in which God is directly experienced and thereby becomes incarnate in the experiencer. This idea provides, in turn, the basis for a Christology in which incarnation is spoken of literally. The task for Christology proper is to show not how God could have been present in Jesus, but how this presence could have been different enough from the divine presence in all people, indeed in all individuals, to justify taking Jesus as of decisive importance (see John B. Cobb, Jr., Christ in a Pluralistic Age).

Correlative with process theology's doctrines of nature and experience are its doctrines of God and the God-world relation. Process theology rejects the idea that the world is a purely contingent product, wholly external to God. Rather, God is essentially soul of the universe, so that God has always interacted with some universe, in the sense of a multiplicity of finite actual entities. Our particular world is contingent, but its creation involved not a creation ex nihilo, in the sense of an absolute beginning of finite things, but a bringing into dominance of new forms of order.

This position has special importance for the problem of evil. It implies that evil exists because all creatures have some degree of the twofold power to determine themselves and to affect others (for good or ill), which can be influenced but not controlled by God, and it suggests that this would have been a necessary feature of any world God had created. This position also implies that the great degree of freedom possessed by humans, which includes the power to go radically against the divine will, is a necessary concomitant of their high level of experience, which includes their language and self-consciousness. Contingency in the world in general, and freedom in humans in particular, are therefore not due to a divine self-limitation that could in principle be revoked now and then to prevent especially horrible evils. Process theologians believe that this set of ideas makes the defense of God's perfect goodness more plausible than it is in those theodicies that say that God does, or at least could, control all events (see Burton Z. Cooper, Why, God? and David Ray Griffin, Evil Revisited).

Implicit in this point that all creatures necessarily have the inherent power both to determine themselves (partially) and to influence others—a power that is not overridable by God—is a distinction between God, as the ultimate actuality, and creativity, as the ultimate reality. Creativity is the twofold power to exert self-determination and to influence others. As the ultimate reality it is that which is embodied in all actualities. It is thus the "material cause" of all things, except that it is not passive matter but dynamic activity, like Tillich's being itself. Unlike Tillich, however, who identified God with being itself, process theologians say that God is not creativity but the primordial embodiment of creativity. This distinction between God and the ultimate reality has provided the basis for a new understanding of the relation between the theistic religions, such as Christianity, and nontheistic religions, on the grounds that creativity is parallel to Buddhist Emptiness and Advaita Vedanta's Brahman (see Cobb, Beyond Dialogue: Toward a Mutual Transformation of Christianity and Buddhism).

Another distinctive feature of process theology is the doctrine of divine dipolarity. Whitehead and Hartshorne portray the dipolarity differently. Whitehead speaks of the "primordial nature" and the "consequent nature." The primordial nature is God's influence on the world in terms of an appetitive envisagement of the primordial potentialities ("eternal objects") for finite realization. This is God as the Divine Eros, who lures the world forward with a vision of novel possibilities. This is the side of God discussed earlier. The consequent nature is God as affected by and responsive to the world. Hartshorne speaks instead of God's "abstract essence" and "consequent states." The abstract essence has most of the attributes given to God as a whole by classical theism—immutability, impassibility, eternity, and independence, leading Hartshorne to refer to his doctrine as "neo-classical theism." But this pole, even more clearly than Whitehead's "primordial nature," is a mere abstraction from God. God as consequent upon the world, for Hartshorne as for Whitehead, is God as fully actual. And this pole, and therefore God, is in process and emotionally affected by the world.

Whereas classical theism, following Greek philosophy, equated perfection with completeness and therefore unchangeableness, Hartshorne argues that we must think of God in terms of two kinds of perfection. God's abstract essence exemplifies the unchanging type of perfection. For example, to say that God is omniscient is to say that God always knows everything knowable; this abstract feature of God does not change. But God's concrete knowledge does change because, given the ultimate reality of process, new things happen and therefore become knowable. God's concrete states thereby exemplify the relative type of perfection, a perfection that can be surpassed. Of course, God in one moment is surpassable by no creature but only by God in a later moment. The same distinction can be made with regard to other attributes. For example, God at every moment loves all creatures perfectly, wishing them all well and feeling their experiences sympathetically—suffering with their pains, rejoicing with their joys.

To say that God grows is not to say that God becomes wiser or more loving; it means only that, as new creatures arise and new experiences occur, the objects of the divine love have increased and therefore the divine experience has been enriched.

Process theologians have used the doctrine of the consequent nature of God to recover the biblical view that God responds to the world and in particular the view, symbolized by the crucified Christ, that God suffers with the world. This doctrine of the consequent nature has also been used to explain our sense that life has an ultimate meaning, even if there be no life after death, because all things are said to have "objective immortality" in God, who cherishes them everlastingly (see Schubert Ogden, The Reality of God).

One division within process theologians is between those who stress God's activity in the world and those who, like Hartshorne, give primary attention to the world's contribution to God. Some process theologians stress both ideas, giving equal weight to the two sides of panentheism as the doctrine that all things are in God and God is in all things.

The distinction between the creative and the responsive sides of God provides the basis for two meanings of salvation, one in which God alone provides salvation and one in which we must cooperate. On the one hand, we are taken up into God's consequent nature willy-nilly, so we are saved from ultimate meaninglessness by God alone. On the other hand, we are saved to the degree that God becomes actually effective in our lives—to the degree that we become "deified," as Eastern Orthodoxy says—so that we feel and act in harmony with the divine grace luring us forward; our salvation in this sense depends upon our free response. It depends, however, not simply on our free response in an individualistic sense, but on the response of others to whom we are internally related, because God is indirectly present in us through others insofar as they are internal to us, as well as being directly experienced by us. Furthermore, the ways in which God can be directly experienced by and present in us are largely determined by the ways in which God is present, or not present, in those around us. These reflections provide the basis for a strong doctrine of the church (see Bernard J. Lee, The Becoming of the Church) and for thinking of process theology as political theology (as in Cobb's work so titled). Although process philosophy allows for the possibility of life after death, as Whitehead recognized, neither he nor Hartshorne has affirmed it; but some process theologians do, so that the process of creative transformation through divine grace would not come to an end with bodily death.

From the 1930s until the late 1960s, process theologians devoted their attention primarily to three tasks: defending the need for a philosophical theology against analytic philosophers of religion and neoorthodox theologians; defending the "heresies" of process theology (especially regarding divine power and becoming) in conversations with neo-Thomists and other classical theists; and showing how process philosophy can be employed to make sense of traditional Christian doctrines and traditional problems of philosophy of religion (such as the relation between science and religion and the problem of evil). The leading theologians of the early decades were Bernard Loomer (who is usually given credit for coining the terms "process philosophy" and "process theology," and who later came to speak of "process-relational" modes of thought), Bernard Meland (who concentrated on the theology of culture), Norman Pittenger (who has written some hundred books, many of which serve as quite readable introductions to process theology), and Daniel Day Williams (whose The Spirit and the Forms of Love has been hailed as the first process systematic theology). Among the next generation John Cobb and Schubert Ogden have been dominant.

Since the 1970s, process theologians have been bringing their perspective to bear on a number of issues of the times, such as liberation theology (Ogden, Faith and Freedom ; Delwin Brown, To Set at Liberty), ecological theology (Cobb, Is It Too Late? A Theology of Ecology; Cobb and Charles Birch, The Liberation of Life; Jay McDaniel, Of God and Pelicans), feminist theology (Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self; Rita Brock, Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power), Christianity and Judaism (Clark Williamson, Has God Forsaken His People ?; Bernard J. Lee, Conversations on the Road Not Taken [3 vols.]), Christianity and other religions (Cobb, Beyond Dialogue), biblical hermeneutics (Lewis Ford, The Lure of God; William A. Beardslee, A House for Hope; Beardslee et al., Biblical Preaching on the Death of Jesus), and postmodernism (Griffin, Beardslee, and Joe Holland, Varieties of Postmodern Theology).

One sign of the growing visibility of process theology in recent decades is the increasing attention, mainly but not entirely negative, given to it by evangelical theologians (Ronald Nash, ed., Process Theology; Royce Gruenler, The Inexhaustible God: Biblical Faith and the Challenge of Process Theism).

Bibliography. Delwin Brown, Ralph E. James, Jr., and Gene Reeves, eds., Process Philosophy and Christian Thought. Harry James Cargas and Bernard Lee, eds., Religious Experience and Process Theology: The Pastoral Implications of a Major Modern Movement. John B. Cobb, Jr., and David Ray Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition. Ewert Cousins, ed., Process Theology: Basic Writings. Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, God-Christ-Church: A Practical Guide to Process Theology.

Source: Musser/Price, A New Handbook of Christian Theology.