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What is man?

This is a question which has engaged the interest and attention of thinkers in all ages; and the answers which have been given to the question have been many and various. Few representatives of process-thought have devoted themselves to an extended consideration of the question, although almost all of them have made sufficiently clear the approach which they would take to answering it. One of the most explicit discussions of the matter is by Professor Hartshorne, who in a short but stimulating essay entitled "The Unity of Man and The Unity of Nature"(Included in The Logic of Perfection (Open Court Press, La Salle, Ind., 1962.) has dealt with some aspects of the meaning of human nature in relation to the cosmic setting for human life. Scattered references may be found in the writings of Professor Whitehead and these have been collected in a small volume called Alfred North Whitehead: His Reflections on Nature and Man.(Edited by Ruth Nanda Anshan [Harper & Row, New York, 1961]) Logic of Perfection(Open Court Press, La Salle, Ind., 1962.) Of course Père Teilhard had a full-length treatment in The Phenomenon of Man and an off-tangent discussion in The Future of Man as well as in The Divine Milieu, where his main interest however was in making sense of man’s religious experience and showing its abiding significance in a world which is in process. Much of what Teilhard says is of great importance. However, his primary concern is to portray man’s development and forecast man’s future in the light of evolutionary development yet also and specifically in the context of the Christian faith. In this lecture, which like the others in this series is intended as a general exposition of process views rather than a Christian development of them, we shall not make as full use of his teaching as we shall of that in other representatives of the school.

We start our exposition by reiterating that process-thought inevitably regards man not as a "thing" but as a living movement or process. That is to say, human nature is not taken as a static entity, a fixed substance, about which predications may be made with equal fixity. Man is a dynamic being; indeed it is more correct to say that he is "becoming man" than that he "is" man. Hence, if we wish to understand the meaning of manhood we must look to the movement from potentiality to actuality; we must seek to understand something of what psychologists would call "the dynamics of personality". The poet says that "man never is/but wholly hopes to be". The attitude which these words suggest is central in what process-thinkers say about human nature.

In consequence, therefore, man must first of all be seen as a finite process of becoming, with recognition of his dependence upon environmental factors both natural and historical. Certainly no man is isolated from nor independent of his environment; neither is he independent of the long series of past occurrences which have entered into the circumstances of his emergence as a thinking being who, possesses a certain quality of aesthetic responsiveness and a certain capacity for valuation. Man is more than an animal who can think. He is indeed the end-product of a long evolutionary development; yet his appearance as a genuine emergent has introduced novelties which are characteristic of human rather than animal existence. We shall speak of these in a moment.

Not only is man dependent upon his past and upon his present environment; he is also in himself a "projective movement" -- he looks to and moves towards the future. In other words, the very fact that he is in process implies that he has a drive towards fulfillment. He is made for something. One might put it in this fashion: the meaning of human nature is to be found in its ceaseless striving towards fulfillment in manhood. This is man’s subjective aim, to use again the Whiteheadian phrase. Man looks to, moves towards, and is identified by the fulfillment which will establish him as actually being what already he is becoming. Of course this must not be regarded as an always consciously present and vividly realized factor in his experience; most of the time, doubtless, any given man is not thinking about these things at all. But he is living with this reference implicit in all that he does, says, and thinks. This is his project, so to say. Interestingly enough, the Sartrian notion of man’s pour-soi or projective self, as distinguished from his sheer given-ness as en-soi, has a considerable similarity to the general process-idea which we are expounding, whatever may be the differences between the two in statement and interpretation.

Teilhard has spoken of man’s appearance from the realm of biological existence, which he calls the bio-sphere, as the appearance of the noo-sphere, the realm of thought. There can be no question that a specific, although not the only specific, quality of man as emergent is his ability to engage in conscious thought. Hence we may say that man is an unusually strange and complex being; his physiological existence is "complicated" by the presence of intellection, the activity in him which we call "mind". He can and he does think. But the description of man as a rational or intellectual animal, familiar in the Middle Ages, is dangerous unless full recognition is also given to the feeling-tones which are as much a part of human existence as is human rationality. Here once again there is a remarkable similarity between certain emphases in Whitehead as well as in other process-thinkers and the strong insistence of contemporary existentialism on the centrality of the "subjective" feelings and of self-awareness in human experience.

There is a further fact which requires attention. Man is a valuing creature. He is able to concern himself with goodness, truth and beauty -- to use the familiar platonic triad. He finds himself making judgements of good and bad, right and wrong; he speaks of truth and error; he is aware of harmony or beauty and disharmony or ugliness. Furthermore he is able to set before him "ideals", which he then seeks to achieve; and to envisage purposes which he accounts as good for him and also good in themselves, which he then feels called to pursue. He is able to appreciate; indeed it has been suggested that man might be described not so much as the rational animal as the appreciating animal. Doubtless all this has its basis in his instinctual life; nonetheless, the devotion which a man can develop towards that which he "likes" and which he finds "worthy" is at a different level and in a higher degree of intensity -- it is qualitatively of a different order -- than the apparently similar capacity of, say, a dog to react favorable or unfavorably to the various stimuli which are presented to it.

For process-thought, then, man is an organism with an aim. His physical, biological, psychological, and rational life, as well as the emotional and aesthetic aspects so basic to his existence, are more or less in process of integration into a unity of direction; and the "will" of man is directed towards the fulfillment of this aim in a fashion which he judges to be good. It is indeed possible for man to sink into sheer quasi-mechanical or quasi-biological responses; but deep in himself, and sometimes despite himself, he has the feeling that to sink to a level which is less than total organic response (including intellect and valuation) is nothing short of a denial of his manhood. It is hardly necessary to repeat that none of this need be vividly felt nor clearly recognized as present. Man’s purposive existence may express itself in all sorts of hidden ways and under many odd names. But it is there, none the less, as integral to his selfhood and as that which constitutes him distinctively as man.

Acting in and through nature, dependent on nature, existing as an historical being moving in process towards fulfillment, compounded of "body" and "mind", capable of appreciation, valuation, and feeling, man is also supremely a social creature. He is on the way to becoming human insofar as he is in deep communion with his fellows. The kind of individualism which would think of each man as being in and of himself a discrete entity is from the beginning ruled out by process-thought as an absurd impossibility. For in this philosophy, as we have seen, societal considerations are so important that any picture of man must not only include them but must include them in a very high degree of intensity. This is why family and friends, tribe and nation, and many other kinds of grouping are natural to man; indeed, they are essential in making him what he is and they are so much part of him that no man can be understood, or can understand himself, in isolation from these various groups to which by necessity he belongs.

This does not mean, however, that man is simply like an ant in an anthill. He is not lost in the mass of humanity, in which he would be so utterly submerged that he would also be in danger of losing whatever it is that gives him personal identity. On the contrary, it is precisely through his belonging with his fellows that he finds his identity. To be a person means not to be an individual in any isolationist or solitary sense, but to be open to, influenced by, and influencing, other men who are also persons. Each man has his own subjective aim; each man has his own fulfillment. But these are discovered by him in the company of others, with whom relationship is sustained on a more than merely external level. "Deepest commonalty", a phrase we have used earlier, is characteristic of human nature as we know and as we experience it in ourselves and as we observe it in the history of the human race.

Something must now be said of man in his sexuality, although so far as I know this has not been a matter of particular discussion by process-thinkers. Yet its importance in the process-view of man should be clear. The reality of human sexuality is a patent fact; and it would seem to be intimately tied in with man’s total organic movement, which as we have seen includes his physiology, biology, and psychology, as well as his appreciative (and hence his aesthetic), valuational, and feeling qualities. It is also associated with man’s drive to. wards the fulfilment which is available to him only in community or society.

Man certainly is a sexual being; but so also are apes. And so, for that matter, are "organisms" at lower levels of nature! But in man, sexuality is of a different sort from that of the ape. In man it is not simply the drive towards reproduction nor is it merely the satisfaction of physical needs or desires. It includes these, but in man as an emergent of the kind we have outlined, sexual instinct has as its context the thrust towards fulfillment in relationship with another of his own human kind. The feeling-tones and the physical acts associated with human sexuality are characterized by the possibility of self-giving and mutuality, reaching, finally to the establishment of faithful union of one person with another. In that union two lives are brought together in the deepest way, the physical relationship serving as the expression of a fully personal union involving and including the total life of each partner. This qualitative aspect of sexuality in man makes it different from sexuality in the animal world. And with it goes the place of the family in man’s existence. The family is the smallest group or society to which man belongs; but as anthropologists have lately been insisting, it is a society that is an enriching as well as an abiding factor in the history of the race from primitive times to the present day, however various may be the forms which in different cultures it has assumed.

Whitehead and others have written admirably of man in his societal development when it reaches the level of "civilization". So soon as the human race reaches the level of shared appreciation, ordered and agreed convictions as to ends or aims to be sought after and if possible achieved, and a pattern of common life in which the mutuality and sharing known at the personal level can be broadened in more or less formal communal patterns, we can speak of the appearance of civilization. The very word -- having to do with a "city" and hence indicative of social relationships of a high order of intensity -- shows that we have here a reflection of man’s integral belonging-with-others. Whatever may be the level of a given society, it can and does develop such sharing, such participation in agreed values, such mutuality in pursuit of them; and it leads to the appearance of a "culture" which expresses such agreements and aims at their implementation.

All this is clear enough when we consider the long story of man on this planet. As Teilhard has insisted, one of the important developments of the last few centuries of human history has been the growth of a world-view of civilization. Indeed such a view has become essential. The unity of the race, accomplished to a large degree through economic pressures, increased travel, mutual interdependence, and the like, has more and more become a possibility; and it has now been recognized as a necessity if wars are to be avoided, general peace ensured, and true human development allowed. Teilhard relates this movement towards the planetary unity of civilizations with what he describes as the increasing convergence of men in a consciousness which is super-individual and with the passing years more and more super-national; and he has some specifically Christian things to say about that movement and its meaning. But of the fact itself there can be little doubt, whatever may be our religious reading of its significance. The quality of such a world-civilization, along with that which is characteristic of smaller expressions of civilized human life, has been beautifully and movingly described in the last sections of Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas.

One point, so far hardly mentioned in this discussion of man, needs to be introduced here. At any stage of development, man as a person in community and also the community of persons who are moving towards "civilization", may be deflected from following the main "aim", and hence may become either a backwater in the ongoing movement or be victims of maladjustment so serious that damage is done not only to the whole dynamic process but also to the smaller organisms or societies, including man himself as such an organic entity. The results can be tragic and terrible. Anti- social choices and anti-social patterns of behavior, by which we mean choices and patterns harmful to man in community and to each man in his own integration, have occurred and do occur. Through these choices and by acceptances of these patterns each man can harm himself as well as others. That is, he can (and observably he often does) elect to live in self-contained ways, denying his drive towards fulfillment in manhood, failing to share in rich commonalty with his fellows, seeking satisfactions which are so partial, limited, and defective that they impede and damage his basic drive as a total personal organism -- an organism which is on the way to realization of its richest and widest possibilities.

This is what the higher religions of man have called "sin"; it may be given some other name by so-called "secular" thinkers, but the fact itself is plainly to be seen and the tragedy of it is very clear. Process-thought has taken account of this in its own way. We have seen in an earlier lecture that the presence of "evil" is not for a moment denied in such thought; neither is there any minimizing of the reality of its effect in hindering the on-going of creative occasions, with the dreadful results that inevitably follow. It is also said by process-thinkers, however, that there are ways in which evil can be and is being absorbed by the Divine Activity and hence made eventually to serve good. This does not mean that there is no real loss; and it may be that some evil is not as such "redeemable". But a Christian reading of process-philosophy could very well make its own the words of the Psalmist, "God maketh even the wrath of man" -- and the maladjustment and failure in nature too, we might add -- "to turn to his praise" -- which is to say, to be mysteriously transmuted into opportunities and occasions for the realization of possible goods.

The various emphases to which we have alluded in this lecture have illustrated once again, I hope, the way in which process-thought finds the created order a unity of an organic kind and insists that God himself is the supreme exemplification of the principles needed to understand and explain that creation. For man here is both a microcosm of the universe and at the same time and in certain significant respects an anticipation of what Teilhard called the Omega-point or God. Mutual dependence and interdependence, deepening inter-relationship all along the line of advance, community or sociality, participation in a common life, the presence of a drive towards satisfaction of the subjective aim, and above all the directive or projective aspect which is so closely related to that aim: here we have "in little" what in the universe at large we find in other ways. Here too we have the reflection in manhood and in human society of the nature of Deity and the divine agency in the world.

We shall now turn to see how at least some process-thinkers are prepared to relate all this to the strange and compelling, yet unquestionably human, figure of Jesus of Nazareth. He is One with whom many of them feel obliged to come to terms, for (as Emerson once said) his name is "not so much written as ploughed" into the history and experience of the human race.

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Many process-philosophers, a general summary of whose views we have been presenting in these lectures, are not directly interested in theological matters; many of them who are sympathetic to the insights of Christian faith would not wish to adopt for themselves the designation of "believing Christian". Why then should some of them write as they do about Jesus Christ? One would hardly expect a discussion either of the life or of the significance of Jesus of Nazareth in such philosophically oriented studies of nature and history, or even in what little about human nature they have written. It is all the more interesting, therefore, that we do in fact find in certain of these thinkers frequent reference to the Man of Nazareth and in one or two instances evaluations of his significance which one might expect more from theologians than from philosophers.

I believe that part of the answer to my question -- why some process-thinkers have written as they have about Jesus -- is to be found in some remarks from White-head which I shall quote later in this lecture. In the picture of Jesus presented to us in the gospels and treasured in the Christian "memory" (to use a word of Professor John Knox), they see a "revelation in act" of that which a sound philosophical understanding of the world can discern "in theory". But perhaps there is also something else. I have heard Professor Hartshorne say that one must take with the utmost seriousness two biblical texts: "God is love" (I John 4:16) and the "Great Commandment" ("Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind" [Matthew 22:37 and parallels]). The One who said the latter and who in his life embodied a human expression of the former is on any reckoning an "important" person. So a thoughtful man is led to ask who he is and what his life can mean.

Of course in one process-thinker we should be surprised if there were not such a theological interest -- Teilhard de Chardin, who was both a Christian and a Jesuit priest. In his writings there is explicit acceptance of the traditional Catholic doctrine about Jesus and yet also a development of that doctrine with special emphasis on the cosmic Christ adumbrated in the Pauline literature and expounded by Teilhard in the evolutionary perspective. We shall rely, however, on three representative English process-thinkers -- C. Lloyd-Morgan, Hartshorne, and Whitehead -- who are not theologians and whose interest is not directed specifically towards elucidating Christian ideas. The variety of their thought about Jesus will be apparent but so also will be their agreement that the person and action of Jesus is of importance in any thorough-going metaphysical system and above all in such a scheme as evolutionary or process views of the world demand. Our procedure will be by the use of quotations from each writer, followed by comment. I believe the quotations, in each case fairly brief, are indicative of the general position of the writers.

First, then, and very briefly, some words from Lloyd- Morgan. In concluding his Gifford Lectures (C. Lloyd-Morgan: Life, Mind, spirit [Williams & Norgate, London, 1911]) Lloyd-Morgan explicitly avows his own Christian faith and asserts that ". . . the Divine Personality shines through the Unique Individuality of the Christ". This statement he interprets in the light of his conviction that "to be emergent in some human persons falls within the Divine Purpose". The Nisus working through the whole course of events has in Jesus revealed himself in a specially vivid manner. This is perhaps the most definite statement from any process-thinker of the significance of Jesus. Yet Lloyd-Morgan is not alone in his estimate of the importance of Jesus for the philosopher who would take account of all the facts in nature, history, and human experience.

Professor Hartshorne, who has much more to say on this matter, believes that "the Christian idea of a suffering deity" "symbolized by the Cross, together with the doctrine of the Incarnation"(C. Hartshorne: Philosophers Speak of God, p. 15 [University of Chicago Press, 1953]) may legitimately be taken as a symbolic indication of the "saving" quality in the process of things which despite the evil that appears yet makes genuine advance a possibility. He tells us in Reality as Social Process (C. Hartshorne: Reality as Social Process, pp. 150-53[ Collier-Macmillan, New York, 1963]) that he is sure that "the doctrine of the Incarnation enshrined important religious truth"; on the other hand he is very doubtful whether the traditional dogma of "two natures in one person" can withstand criticism. None the less, he is prepared to allow the legitimacy of the language which speaks of Jesus as "in some sense" divine, provided we "remember that in some sense or degree every man" may also be said to be divine. He has other objections of this same sort to traditional theological interpretations -- objections with which one must have a large measure of agreement. I have myself discussed these at some length in a book (W. Norman Pittenger: The Word Incarnate [James Nisbet & Co. Ltd., and Harper & Row, New York, 1959]) on the person of Christ; a consideration of them would not be relevant in our present context.

Yet for Professor Hartshorne, and I give here an extended quotation,

Hartshorne remarks that while "many theological and philosophical doctrines" of the traditional kind have asserted that "being divine means precisely, and above all, being wholly immune to suffering in any and every sense", yet in his judgement the insight of faith in Jesus as the Christ would rather point logically to the truth that "there must be suffering in God". Jesus himself "nowhere asserts or, so far as I can see, even suggests that God is immune to feeling, suffering, or passivity". Hence if Jesus is to be taken seriously as a disclosure in symbol of the divine, God as Jesus reveals him as one who shares in human anguish even though this is not the last word.(All these citations are from the essay "A Philosopher’s Assessment of Christianity" in Religion and Culture, p. 175 (S.C.M. Press, London, 1959 and Harper & Row, New York).

Again, in Reality and Social Process, Hartshorne says that while he himself has no special christological formulation to offer the reader, he would make

He affirms his own conviction that "Jesus was, and can still be, a living and unique symbol";(Page 152.) and he argues that the doctrines about him "name a mystery which is felt rather than thought; and people may very well feel differently about different ways of phrasing the mystery". There can be no doubt of the importance which Hartshorne finds in the life of Jesus nor of the Christian intention in his writings.

We have left to the last a remarkable paragraph from Whitehead, found in Adventure of Ideas.(A. N. Whitehead: Adventures of Ideas (Cambridge University Press, 1933). Whitehead’s views we have found very useful in these lectures. Whether at the end of his life Whitehead would have thought of himself as a Christian is a debatable matter. Some have considered that his comments in the reported dialogues with Lucien Price clearly show that he was not then a Christian. However this may be, his many references to Jesus seem to me of singular interest; and as a matter of fact I believe that Whitehead was and remained a Christian, although not an "orthodox" one.

In the chapter in Adventures from which I shall quote, Whitehead is speaking of the contribution of early Christian thought to the developing understanding of the nature of the world’s relationship to God. He will go on, in later pages, to make a case for the importance of this contribution for our own time and even to align himself, although with some reservations, with the need for what he calls a "new reformation". I do not know whether this phrase -- so often heard to-day and used by him in 1933 -- had here its first appearance in modern writing. However, this "new reformation", he believes, will incorporate the early Christian insights but will provide for them a new philosophical context in the light of science, philosophy, and other modern ways of seeing the creation and the relationship of God to that creation. Then come these important words:

I shall not comment on the great insight found in these beautiful words, save to remark that they seem to me to sum up most of what a Christian would wish to say about Jesus. But the point of the quotation, for our present purpose, is found in the first sentence. The "essence of Christianity" is seen by Whitehead as being "the appeal to the life of Christ as revelation of the nature of God and of his agency in the world". There can be little question that Whitehead himself accepted this; he believed that the tenderness, sympathy, and love which were shown in Jesus’ life and death are in fact the disclosure of the nature of the Divine Reality who is the chief -- although not the only -- principle of explanation for all that has been, is, and will be. Furthermore, he believed that the "agency" of God in the world -- or what in an earlier lecture we have called "the Divine Activity" -- is also of the kind disclosed in the life to which the New Testament bears witness. God in his working, and in his ways of working, is persuasive not coercive power; he is that creative, dynamic, energizing love which was seen by men in the person of Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ’s own working and ways of working. In fact, on the very same page, Whitehead goes so far as to assert that Jesus was the "revelation in act" (that is, in concrete historical occurrence) of what others, and here he cites Plato, have discerned "in theory". This acceptance of what he takes to be "the essence of Christianity" explains why it is possible for Whitehead, in other books such as Religion in the Making and in the chapter on science and religion in Science and the Modern World, to reveal himself as generally sympathetic to the Christian enterprise. At the same time he has his own very serious reservations and questions, some of which are frankly stated in these particular books, as they are elsewhere in Adventures of Ideas and in some of the "table-talk" recorded by Lucien Price in the dialogues.

One of these difficulties comes from his conviction that there is a very sharp contradiction between the despotic deity who as he thinks is dominant in the Old Testament literature and the picture of a loving God taught and revealed by Jesus. It is not, I think, that Whitehead is a modern Marcionite, who would have two "gods": one the creator god of the Old Testament, the other the loving redeemer god of the New. On the contrary, as it seems to me, Whitehead’s intention is to say that in much of the Old Testament the nature of the Creator was seriously misunderstood; he was thought of after the model of an oriental sultan because the writers in many instances failed to develop whatever insights they possessed into his nature as creative love. We may wish to disagree with this criticism but we must concede that the "first lessons" in Matins and Evensong which Whitehead had heard read at church-services in his youth could certainly have given him the impression which he seems to be reporting here.

Another difficulty for Whitehead follows from his uncomfortable feeling, more often hinted than actually expressed, that in traditional Christian theology Jesus has usually been seen as the great anomaly. He is assumed to be the exception to everything else men have learned about God’s nature and his "agency". Despite verbal insistence on his humanity, he tends to be portrayed as one who is un-related to the human race save as being intrusive into our midst. As a special case in the sense of being totally unique, he is thought of as the entirely extra-ordinary "act of God" rather than as the exemplary instance of self-disclosure by God. As we noted in an earlier lecture, for Whitehead God himself is not an exception to basic metaphysical principles but rather is their supreme exemplification. So too, it seems to me, he regarded Jesus as being the supreme exemplification, but definitely in terms of genuine human life and experience, of the way God always is and always works. For a Whiteheadian and indeed for any process-thinker, any claim for the uniqueness of Jesus and any notion of his "finality" would require careful re-statement if they are to be accepted; they would need to be brought into congruity with the general line of thought appropriate to such a view of the world as the evolutionary and societal interpretation would provide.

But to return to Whitehead’s explicit position, we should observe that he believed that the great virtue of Christianity has been that it is not so much a metaphysic seeking some historical grounding as it is an historical fact and focus (found in Jesus) seeking for metaphysical explanation. The point here, in his own words, is that "Christ gave his life: it is for Christians to discern the doctrine".(A. N. Whitehead: Religion in the Making, p. 56 [Cambridge University Press, 1926]). On the other hand, the metaphysic which Whitehead -- and with him other philosophers of process -- believe to be valid is indeed a metaphysic which is congruous with what is thus disclosed in Jesus.

We have, then, a sort of two-way movement. We can proceed from what men have found in the impact of Jesus. They have been led, often unwillingly, to affirm that Love in its infinite capacity for relationships and its profound participation in that in which it is at work, is the very nature of God himself; they have found in that love the clue to God’s way of working in the world. Or on the other hand, we can proceed from what we know about the world itself, about human history, and about human experience. Here the thinker is led to the conclusion that the only adequate explanatory principle of the creation is an energy which is patient, tender, participant, ceaselessly at work in the world, enhanced by that world’s happenings as they provide new ranges of possible ways of adjustment, and moving always towards greater good in every nook and cranny.

It is in this context that at least some process-thinkers are prepared to set Jesus of Nazareth. For the Christian, and a fortiori for the Christian understanding of the meaning of Jesus’ person and work, it may well be that they have made a significant contribution to which we should give the most serious attention.

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In his Gifford lectures, Process and Reality, Professor Whitehead wrote the following words:" God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles to save their collapse. He is their chief exemplification."(A. N. Whitehead: Process and Reality, p. 521 (Cambridge University Press, 1927-28).

These words provide an excellent starting-place for a consideration of the concept of God which is to be found in process-thought. First they make it clear that what Whitehead in another place referred to as "paying God metaphysical compliments" is for this sort of philosophy a basic error of method. Rather, the task is to find the necessary principles for making sense of the world, while at the same time it is clear that any principles which properly can be said to make sense of things will be those which are not in stark contradiction of all that realm of which, in fact, sense is being made. If the world is a world in dynamic movement, then God as its chief principle of explanation will himself be in dynamic movement; if ceaseless adaptation to novel possibilities is found in the order of creation, the meaning of creation will itself include a factor which in the highest degree is adaptable. For sound explanation it is essential that we look for genuine congruity between God and his world, rather than that we attempt to find ways in which God can be removed from all contact with and reflection in that world and hence treated as nothing other than the great "exception".

A consequence of this approach is that for process-thought deity is not understood as characterized chiefly by "aseity", as if God could be said to "exist" without the continuing relationships and the ceaseless activity which in another way we see reflected in the world which we observe. It has indeed been a strange perversion of the theological mind to employ for our picture of God the "model" which we find most reprehensible when we see it in human form. A man who is utterly self-contained and whose chief ambition is to be "self-existent" and hence to exist without dependence upon relationships of any sort, is a man whom we regard as an unpleasant if not vicious specimen of the race; and it is odd that deity has been regarded, and this even in Christian circles, as more like such a self-contained human being rather than as like a man who in every area of his life is open to relationships and whose very existence is rich in the possibility of endless adaptations to new circumstances.

Recognition of the need for an interpenetrative societal view of the world, perhaps more than any specific philosophical requirement, has led process-thinkers to place their emphasis upon "becoming", as a dynamic movement of development in relationship, rather than upon "being"; here, they insist, is the best "model" for our understanding of God. This is not to say that there is no sense in which God "is". His self-identity, established by his "subjective aim" or purpose of self-realization in all his relationships, is always the same: he is God. But if the world provides any clue to the nature of deity, for God to be God must imply vital actuality and ceaseless capacity for adaptation; and this may properly be said to define deity as "living" and not as a static entity.

If this way of thinking is correct, it follows that God is not "abstract" but is richly "concrete". This divine concreteness is at least in part derived from his participation in the world itself, whose processive nature he both explains and supremely exemplifies in his own processive nature. There is a considerable variety in the ways in which process-thinkers have attempted to state this position. The way which we shall follow here is largely that of Whitehead and Hartshorne, since this seems the most consistent and coherent. Let us begin by noting that the reason there must be deity is that there must be some reason why things are as they are and why they "go" as they "go". Among all the possibilities which are open in the total scheme of things, there must be a reason why the particular actual achievements which we know to be there are in fact present. God is taken to be that principle which will explain why this rather than that set of possibilities for good has been actualized in the world we experience and observe. He is "the principle of concretion" who by his "decision" has established the good which is in the order of things as it is. As "primordial" -- abstract and in this sense "eternal" -- God may be said to "contain" all that might ever be. But among all the possibilities of "whatever might be", certain specific occasions do in fact come to be. It is to explain this concrete world, with its emergent order and value, that the concept of God is required metaphysically.

Yet it is also true to say that what comes to be has its consequences in creating new possibilities for what may happen hereafter. As a process, the future is based upon the past; what has happened and what does happen determines, in a general way, what is to happen. If God be the supreme exemplification rather than the contradiction of metaphysical principles required to explain the world, then it can be said that what happens enters into the continuing decisions which are made by deity for the establishment of further actualities. In his "consequent" nature, which is as real as but much more concrete and specific than his "primordial" aspect, God is affected by that which occurs in the created order, for what happens enters into his life and influences his "decision" by providing new possibilities for his further activity. While he always remains God as the chief principle of explanation for such concrete emergents of the good -- in all its variety -- as do in fact appear, he is "enriched" both by satisfaction in what happens and by the provision of possibilities of future action by that which has happened.

Therefore time -- or succession as the world exemplifies it -- is real to God. He is not above and outside all temporality, in an eternity which negates succession; rather temporality is both a reflection of his own dynamic life and also enters into his own reality. What happens matters to God. And it matters to him in more than a superficial sense, as if he simply observed and knew in an external way what was going on in the world. On the contrary, what goes on in the world is a genuine manifestation of the living process which is his own nature; and it also makes a difference to him, for it makes possible the novelty of adaptation, the emergence of new actualities, and the appearance of real possibilities, which otherwise would not be available to him. History, historical occurrences in time, are real to him, for him, and in him.

Now what is involved here is a radical historicizing not only of the order of nature and of all that is in nature, but also of deity in his concrete reality. A Christian may be allowed to say that, if ever there were a philosophy which took seriously the kind of portrayal of God in relation to his world which we find in the biblical record, it is the philosophy of process. But just as in the biblical record God remains God throughout the story, not in spite of but precisely because of his capacity for relating himself afresh to every exigence, every human action, every event in the natural order and in the historical sequence; so in process-thought God remains God, forever "creating" new possibilities and forever employing the world’s occasions for the fulfillment of his purpose, which we may describe as the specific "subjective-aim" which is characteristic of deity. God is faithful, the Bible tells us; the world in process, and the chief principle of explanation in that processive world, are self-consistent and harmonious, the philosophers of process affirm. These two assertions are remarkably similar.

If God is the source of all possibilities, as "primordial deity", there is a sense in which he may be called abstract and "eternal"; but God is also infinitely related to and influenced by the world, and hence as "consequent deity" is concrete and "everlasting". In other words, while the possibilities are "eternal" and while they are "abstract" until in one way or another they are actualized, the actualizations which are selected and used by God for further achievement of his purpose of good in the world are themselves concrete and in process; when taken into God they establish deity as being himself also concrete and processive. But it is the dynamic, processive, and becoming aspect which, in one sense, is more important to us than the abstractive aspect. Thus there is a polarity in this concept of God: he is both abstract and concrete; he is both "eternal" and "everlasting"; he is both himself and yet endlessly related; he is both transcendent and immanent; he is both the chief principle of explanation and yet participant, working with, and influenced by, all that is to be explained. But the priority is with the concrete, not with the abstract, set of terms.

What then of "evil" in the world? Here three things are to be said. First, in a world which is in movement, which is an evolutionary process, and which is at the same time "open-ended", in which novelty is present and new possibilities are always becoming available, there is inevitably the chance of error. Error here means that the adjustment of means to end, the fulfillment of end by means, and the consequent adaptation of each succeeding occasion to the aim which is its basic identity, may be missed in this or that given instance. If the world were conceived as in some fashion a static entity, such error would hardly be possible to understand; but in a world which is processive and dynamic, error is not only possible but on occasion it is highly likely. There is always some element of "risk" in such a process. Furthermore, as the process goes on there is always the possibility that what we might call "backwaters" will remain. Here and there, in this instance and in that, there will be a certain recalcitrance, negativity, a refusal to move forward for the creation of greater good and towards more widely shareable and more widely shared life. And since the world has a radical freedom, being in fact the realm of choice, such as we know at the human level in conscious decision but which in differing mode is present at every level, this may be not only a "natural" recalcitrance but a quite definitely elected refusal to move.

In the second place, it is characteristic of God, in his consequent aspect, to take into himself all that has in fact occurred. Whether this be good or evil, whether it be directed to further prospective fulfillment or a denial of that end, whether it be adjustment or maladjustment: all is accepted by God and in one way or another can be used by him. None the less, he remains God, which means that he is ceaselessly working towards the most widely shared good. Hence a mysterious but genuine part of the divine agency in the world (of which more will be said later in this chapter) is the way in which the error, the maladjustment, the refusal to move forward, the "evil" in the world, precisely because (and precisely in the degree that) it enters into the divine concern, can become the occasion for new possibilities of good. In other words, God makes the best of everything, even of that which we can only describe as "evil"; and out of it is able to distil goods, some of which otherwise would not have been in the realm of genuine possibility.

The third point in respect to "evil" may be approached by noting that in speaking of the creative process we have been obliged to use the word "good" to describe what God is "up to" in the world. The word has been employed to indicate that which can be shared for mutual enrichment; and this use leads us to the description of God as being essentially "Love". It is of the nature of love to pour itself out for others; to take into itself all that is made available to it; to absorb the evil which is there and out of it to distil something good; and to do all this not for self-aggrandizement but for the benefit of the entire relationship in its widest and richest sense. Love is both self-giving and unitive. Thus we may say that God is love because he is infinitely related; he is love because he enters into and participates in his creation; he is love, supremely, because he absorbs error, maladjustment, evil, everything that is ugly and unharmonious, and is able to bring about genuine and novel occasions of goodness by the use of material which seems so unpromising and hopeless. So the third point about evil is that in the concrete world of experience, and especially in human relationships, we see that it may provide the opportunity for deepening love and for widening participation in the good -- although this must never be taken to mean that evil is, in itself, a good. It is not; but it may be used for good.

The objection has been raised by some that such a view of God as that found in process-thought may be satisfactory enough on the basis of philosophical enquiry, but that it provides no "religiously available" deity for men. This suggests two questions about which something must be said.

First, does this concept of God in fact arise from genuine experience or is it purely theoretical? To this we have already given the answer; the God who is here portrayed is not derived from theoretical considerations alone, although of course these have entered into the picture since God is taken to be "the chief principle of explanation". But the way in which he has been described has come in the main from the observable facts of experience and from our observation of how things go in the world. Hence God as here "described" (an almost blasphemous word!) is God as he has been encountered or seen in his workings in the creative process. But -- and this is the second question -- is such a God in any sense describable as "personal"? Here we are obliged first of all to define what should be meant by the adjective. Whitehead, for example, seems to have been in two minds about the viability of the idea of God as "personal", largely because he felt that as commonly used the term was overtly anthropomorphic and did not provide adequate explanation of that kind of experience which stresses the sheer "given-ness" of process. We must agree that if "personal", when applied to deity, means that God is to be taken as an enlarged replica of what we know as person, as if he were (so to say) "a very big man", then it is obvious that the adjective is entirely inappropriate. If, on the other hand, we define more carefully what is meant by "personal", perhaps there can be no objection to employing the word when speaking of deity. By "personal" we can and I believe we should mean such characteristics as awareness and self-awareness, capacity to communicate or enter into active-reactive relationships, freedom of action within the limits of consistency and possibility, etc. All these characteristics are quite readily applicable to deity as seen in process-thought. In that sense, then, God may properly be called "personal" -- provided of course, that we are constantly on guard against restricting the sense of these "personal" elements in him to the merely human level on which we ourselves know personality.

So far we have not discussed the area of human life which is known as the "religious experience", the awareness of the "more-than-human" impinging on ordinary experience. Yet this kind of experience is certainly central in the historical and theological development of the concept of God. In the main, it should be noted, process-philosophers have been quite ready to use such religious experience as part of the data which must be taken seriously in the effort to understand the world. They have accepted the fact that vast numbers of members of the human race have spoken or written about some such awareness, however it may have been conceived, of a presence which is believed to be more than human, and they have told us that they have experienced a power that seems to come from beyond, above, and below the level of human enabling. How this sense of presence and power has been expressed in words is another matter, differing from age to age, place to place, and culture to culture. But the awareness of "the sacred" is too widespread to be dismissed by any responsible thinker. The history of religion is the continuing story of the refining of the meaning of such awareness. In primitive man, sheer power may well have been dominant in his conception of the meaning of the sacred. But as men became more and more aware of moral principles and as their thinking was "rationalized", the way in which the sacred was understood, the way in which men came to interpret the more-than-human, was in terms of love and of "persuasion" (as Whitehead put it), although it never lost the awesome quality which evoked from them worship and adoration. There was a gradual substitution of tenderness for sheer power, of goodness for omnipotence, and of deep and intimate concern for arbitrary dictatorship. So the religions of the world, as they have developed through the centuries, have tended to react against despotic conceptions of deity and to regard the sacred as holy love.

As this movement has proceeded, there has also been an increasing readiness to relate the so-called religious experience to the aesthetic experience -- to the sense of the harmonious and the beautiful as this was perceived by a deeply felt appreciative capacity in man. And here we come to a matter of quite enormous significance. We have already emphasized that in the refusal to separate primary from secondary qualities process-thought has reversed the over-rationalizing philosophical tendency of western man. Feeling-qualities, the sense of empathetic identification, and the valuational aspect in all human experience have been given serious attention by most process-thinkers; this was why words like "good" and "love" and "harmony", and their opposites, could be used with some freedom in the preceding discussion. What this suggests to us is that religion, as an inescapable element in that human experience, is one of the ways -- indeed it may be the chief way -- in which man feels his way into, finds identification with, and becomes participant in, the ongoing "movement of things".

If this is so, the experience is not only with the "movement of things" but with the dynamic power which makes that movement actual; in a word, with God himself. There can be no doubt that countless men have felt themselves caught up into what in more thoughtful moments they have regarded as the working of supreme actuality as it operates ceaselessly in the world. They tell us that they have known themselves to be empowered in this relationship. Their limited concern for their own self-hood and for self-assertion has been redeemed, they insist, into concern for others and for greater good. They say that they have been refreshed, invigorated, renewed, made better because of it. And they declare that they have experienced the judgment of an all-inclusive love on their pettiness and pride, while at the same time they have been the recipients of a forgiveness or acceptance which comes when their previous stupidity and cupidity have in some strange fashion been taken away and they have been given the opportunity and occasion for genuine enrichment in fellowship with their human brethren. In other words, they tell us that they have known the energizing of God in their own experience as the loving Companion who is also the sovereign Ruler -- not the despot, not the oriental sultan or dictator, but the One who "rules" and who works for good which can be in "widest commonalty spread". They are sure that precisely in his boundless creativity God can guarantee the eventual triumph of good, no matter what may be the evil with which he must work and the risks which such working necessarily implies. Through suffering, they say, we can know joy; and this is because God’s patient self-identification with his world enables him to use its anguish, which he knows and shares in himself, for the accomplishment of gloriously good ends.

In our common human experience, God is often "the void", as Whitehead once said, although he said it in a very different context. We are not aware of him, in any vivid sense or perhaps in any sense at all; he is present to us in the very fact of our feeling of his absence. Again, his activity as participant love can make him seem to us our "enemy", which once more is Whitehead’s word; God’s supreme goodness makes our lives look shoddy and cheap and we are brought to a self-imposed judgement by the love which is ultimately sovereign over all things. But there can also come times, as Whitehead went on to say, when "God the void" and "God the enemy" becomes "God the companion", the One who is somehow sensed as "with us" -- perhaps dimly and vaguely sensed, perhaps more vividly and acutely sensed, but none the less sensed, in this or that moment of our experience.(A critic may point out, correctly enough, that Whitehead uses the terms "void", "enemy", and "companion" to describe the historical development of the concept of God. However I think that my "existential" use of the terms here is not alien to his more general line of thought; and in any event I find the words extremely apt in making the point I am arguing in this paragraph.) The basic act of faith, which is open to any and every man, is to live his whole life on the assumption that such moments, when love is known and life ts shared in a deep relationship of love one with another, are in very truth the disclosure of the structure of things and of the dynamic power which moves in and through the world; and hence that the "actual entity" which men have called God has both "the nature and the name" of Love.

In a beautiful passage, which comes after his criticism of more traditional concepts of God as despotic ruler, moral governor, or unrelated first cause above and beyond the creation, Whitehead once wrote:

B

For our purposes it has been convenient to follow the traditional sequence in philosophical theology, in which it is customary for a presentation of the nature of God to precede rather than follow the discussion of his manner of operation in creation. This, as I say, has been the usual procedure; and yet in the Christian theological structure God in fact is known for what he is through a study of what he does. In theological language, this means that his revelation or self-disclosure, which is made primarily through what are sometimes styled his "mighty acts" in nature and history, has been the clue to his nature. In process-thinking, certainly, the same is true -- the meaning of the concept of God is not derived from abstract theory but from observation of the world and its concrete actuality. Let us then proceed at once to a discussion of the Divine Activity as this is generally understood by process-thinkers.

The first point is to repeat what we have already noted, namely that for process-thought God’s relationship to his world, and his working within it, are never conceived as an external relationship or as an arbitrarily intrusive action. God is in his world; or perhaps it would be better to say that the world is in God. For the most part process-thought has been panentheistic in tendency. "Panentheism" was first used by the German writer Krause during the last century. It is to be sharply distinguished from pantheism, which would identify God and the world. For the panentheist everything which is not in itself divine is yet believed to be in God, in the sense that he is regarded as the circumambient reality operative in and through, while also more than, all that is not himself; or conversely all which is not God has its existence within his operation and nature. Here of course we are using pictorial language; but from this there can be no escape, no matter what philosophical orientation we may adopt.

It is very important to see that panentheism is intended to be a mean between the absentee-God of deism -- who is indeed also the God of much popular Christian teaching and preaching and of much supposedly orthodox theology -- and the pantheistic God who is simply identified with the world as it is -- an identification sometimes without qualification but more frequently with certain reservations that are thought to safeguard moral distinctions. Spinoza’s phrase Deus sive natura is a succinct statement of pantheism. Panentheism, on the other hand, attempts to preserve the relative independence of the world-order, while at the same time it insists that God cannot be envisaged as totally separated from or alien to that order. Indeed we might say that the adoption of such a panentheistic view is the only way in which genuine theism can be maintained, if by theism (as distinguished from pantheism and deism) we mean that God and the world are not thought to be identical even though they are taken to be intimately and necessarily related one to the other. In theism generally, however. God is seen as "cause" and the world as only "effect", in such fashion that without God there could be no world at all. The corollary of that view is that one could say that without the world God theoretically speaking might indeed still be God. But for the process-thinker if God is in fact creator, with creative activity in love as his very heart, then he cannot be the God he is, and hence not really God, unless there is a world in which his creativity is expressed and which itself is an expression of that creativity, and unless he is "affected" by that world and what happens in it.

Since for process-thought God and the world are thus most intimately related, the world may be described as "organic" to the divine reality. It is not an afterthought of God, who before it was "made" had existed in isolation. (Incidentally the Christian doctrine of the triunity of God does not really demand this, despite frequent assertions to the contrary.) Neither is the world adjectival to God in the sense that what happens in it is expressive of, but without real effect upon, the divine reality. We have already noted this point and we shall be returning to it again later in our discussion.

Furthermore, process-thought does not build on so-called "intrusions" or "interventions" of deity in the created world. Since nothing is "outside" God and since he is the chief explanatory principle in arid for all things, although the fact of creaturely freedom demonstrates that he is not the only one, it would be absurd to speak of his "intruding" or "intervening" in his world. He is always there, or else the world could not and would not be there either. Yet this does not deny the possibility that there may be "fuller" or "deeper" or "richer" instances of the divine operation in this or that particular area or aspect of nature and history. What Gerard Manley Hopkins so beautifully styled "the dearest freshness deep down things" is by no means excluded in process-thought; indeed it is emphasized. Nor is the particularly vivid manifestation of that "freshness" in given times and places ruled out of the picture. On the contrary, it is precisely in such a picture as that which is provided by process-thought, that particularities of this kind are given point and significance in respect to the entire dynamic movement of creation. But they are not seen as un-related instances, to be taken simply by themselves; rather they are indicative of the total structure and of the dynamic of God’s operation. Hence they may be seen as possessing a peculiar importance for our interpretation of its meaning.

We are thus brought back to the notion of "importance", to which reference has been made in our earlier discussion. In that discussion, we spoke of moments which objectively have an unusually striking quality and subjectively evoke an unusually vivid response, providing us with significant clues to the nature of the process in its entirety. As we then said, such moments have their "importance" in that they illuminate what has gone before, are in themselves a kind of concentration of what is actually present, and provide new opportunities and possibilities both for understanding (which is the "subjective" side) and for that emergence of novelty in concrete experience (which guarantees "objectivity") which is the occasion for further creative advance as the process continues on its way. The emergence of living matter, the appearance of consciousness in such living matter, and the coming into existence of moral valuation and appreciative awareness in human life are instances of "importance" which should be obvious to any observer of the world-process.

But since this is true, the creation is best understood as an order in which new levels do in fact make their appearance. They are not to be explained reductively in terms of what has preceded them; on the other hand they are not to be seen as entirely unrelated to all that has gone before. They are indeed genuinely new, they have the quality of emergent novelty, yet they are not in total contradiction to the preceding sequence of events which has prepared for them and made their appearance possible. And once they have occurred, they inaugurate new possibilities on their own level and they open up a range of experience which without them would not be available. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin has made much of this in his widely read The Phenomenon of Man, but long before the publication of that volume C. Lloyd-Morgan in his Gifford lectures had indicated the significance of such "emergents", along with the "importance" (although this is not his, but Whitehead’s, word) which they possess both in the ongoing movement of the world and as a way of our grasping of the meaning of that world in its on going movement. In some sense they are the activity of God, just as the whole process is also in some sense that activity.

How then does God "act" in his world? Before discussing this question, in general, following the line of Whitehead’s picturing of the matter, there are some prior considerations to which brief reference must be made.

First, process-thought would insist that it is always through the activity of God that things come to pass, although God is not the only agent in creation. On the one hand, the divine activity is the ultimate grounding for events; it provides the ultimate efficient cause which turns mere possibility into sheer actuality. On the other hand, God is the final end of all that comes to pass, since it is for the fulfillment of his purpose (or, in Whiteheadian language, for the "satisfaction" of God’s "subjective aim") that the process goes on, with its consistency and with its new emergents. This should not be taken to mean that God is introduced as a sort of "stopgap" for man’s ignorance. He is not understood as the God who functions only in those "mysterious" areas in which we are not able as yet to see the connections of past and present. His all-inclusive functioning is the basic ground of each and every occurrence; he is Alpha and Omega, both the origin -- although not necessarily in the ordinary temporal sense -- of all things and the goal towards which they move. Thus he is the sufficient ultimate explanation of what occurs. He is adequate to explain what happens; and he is increasingly shown to be adequate as the process goes forward. Each new event rests back upon and is an expression of, while it also provides genuine fulfillment for, the originative and final purpose which is divine -- in one sense, even the "evil" occasion has this reference, although God is not "responsible" for it.

Second, this adequacy does not depend upon God’s being recognized as such. The divine activity in the world is for the most part an incognito activity, by which I mean that it is divine activity in and through, by and under, "creaturely" occasions. As we emphasized in the preceding lecture, God does not exist nor does he act only to the degree in which he is explicitly seen by the human mind to exist and to act. He is greater than that. He is not simply a mental concept devised by man for his own purposes, but rather he is inescapable as the supreme (I repeat, not the only) "cause" in the total process of creation and in every moment within that process. The radical freedom found in the world cannot finally overthrow him; his love is supreme over all. In this sense, it matters little enough whether he is given any particular proper name, although there are other reasons for calling him "God" and certainly we are right in describing him as "Love".

Third, since God is not the great exception, metaphysically speaking, but is himself "the supreme exemplification" of the principles which actually and concretely operate in the world, a study of how the world goes will be the best way in which we can come to understand the nature of the divine activity itself. As we become aware of new and particular concretions which are grasped (or as Whitehead would say "prehended") by us, we are given an insight into the God who provides the data for these and effectively brings them about. As there are enrichments in the process which contribute to new possibilities and hence to the provision of new actual data for "prehension", we are given some understanding of how God is in himself "enriched", so that he is capable of a variety of novel adjustments to which he is entirely adequate without his becoming "more" God than he is -- although his deity can be, and is, more adequately expressed and active, and hence more adequately disclosed, in consequence of them.

When, therefore, we use the phrase "God acts", what we are really saying is that the divine causal efficacy, moving towards the fulfillment of the divine aim, is in varying degrees the dominant element in each successive occasion. Were this not the case, there could be no occasion at all, since (as we have seen) God is precisely that factor which provides both the "control" and the "efficacy" which brings the occasion about. On the other hand his control and efficacy operate not by arbitrary (that is to say, independent and "omnipotent") overruling, nor by being the only active elements in the occasion; but by the persuasive molding of new possibilities, by redirecting the pressures of prior actualities, by providing new opportunity for advance, and by offering the "lure" which evokes from each occasion in the ongoing process the movement towards satisfaction of its "subjective aim". This aim, it must be remembered, is the identifying quality of each specific actual event as it goes along its own particular routing within the process as a whole. So God as the "principle of concretion" can operate without for a moment reducing the value of, or in any way negating the role played by, the freedom of the creation.

In this conception of the divine activity we see clearly that radical historicizing of the creative process to which we have already called attention as characteristic of process-thought. Notions such as "satisfaction", "subjective aim", "realization", "actualization", "movement", and even "process" itself, have been introduced into the explanation of the world. This is not because such words are supposed to have some kind of vitalistic tinge which will redeem what we have to say from apparent mechanistic suggestions, but because they are in fact required for any genuine understanding of the world and any sound explanation of how things come to be.

The teleological aspect of the picture drawn in process-thought is indeed very clear. In the real world there is no monotonous repetition, no grinding-out of an already predetermined routine, no re-shuffling of a pack of cards. On the contrary, there is a genuinely epigenetic advance in the order of nature and in the realm of history. The mechanisms are certainly there; but they are mechanisms of the kind that we know as elements in an organism, not those which might be more appropriately ascribed to an engine or a machine. They subserve the "ends" of the whole. So novelty does occur; there are real supervenient occasions; the world is no rigid corpse but is a living and organic (or societal) process.

Finally, genuine, not Pickwickian7, freedom is seen to be a genuine constituent of the process. For God does not dictate. He is no tyrant, nor can he act without regard for the created occasions. He persuades, draws out, elicits, provides data for, and is himself enriched by, the new occasions as they occur. He uses the materials of the world as they have come to exist. He works in and through, with and by, for and on behalf of all those actual entities which at any given moment are present. Through his "tenderness" and by means of his "lure", he moves them towards those self-decisions which can bring about great and greater good. He offers ever more widely shared opportunities for enhancement; and throughout the process he works towards the appearance of a realm in which his own satisfaction of aim in a realm of love becomes also the satisfaction of the creaturely aim and hence a sharing in love, as the creation moves forward towards richer life.

Suggested diagrammatic representation of Divine

Activity in the world

(The author is indebted to two of his former students, the Reverend Gary McElroy and the Reverend William F. Starr, for the suggestion that Whitehead’s view of Divine Activity might be represented by some such diagram as is here shown.

(Another possible diagramming will be found in the note appended to this chapter. For this second diagram the author is indebted to Professor Donald Sherburne of Vanderbilt University, U.S.A., who has kindly consented to its use. The special value of Professor Sherburne’s diagram is that it avoids the possible suggestion, in the diagram above, that one is, so to say, moving backwards in following lines A and C, since line B (both B¹ and B²) are intended, in loyalty to process-thought, to represent the forward thrusting of creativity.)

Some explanation is required of the accompanying diagram, in order to make clearer the way in which the divine activity is presented in Whitehead’s thought -- a presentation which to the writer seems the most adequate description available to us. It should be apparent, as we proceed, that this presentation is no merely speculative scheme but is in fact a description of that which occurs in the world as we know it. It is an explanation which, in Plato’s phrase, "saves the appearances" by providing a coherent and meaningful account of what goes on and of why it goes on as it does.

1. In the diagram the vertical line represents deity. The upper point stands for God in his "primordial" aspect, abstractly understood as the eternal reality whose awareness conceptually includes all the possibilities ("eternal objects") denoted by the extreme left point of the horizontal line; this includes the abstract, aspects or patterns of all that might come to pass in the created order, envisaged as possibilities for actualization. The lower point of the vertical line stands for God in his consequent aspect as the recipient of all that has occurred in the order of creation, hence as concrete and everlasting in that the factuality of the occasions in the process have entered into and helped to mould the divine experience in its capacity for infinite adjustment and relationship. This aspect of deity is called "physical" because it is inclusive of the events in "nature" (physis) and is not abstractly conceptual or theoretical.

2. The horizontal line "B¹--B²" represents the process of the created order. In the first place, the line as a whole is established on "creativity"; that is, on the potentiality of things to come into existence as concrete actualities. Here we can perhaps find analogies in the "first matter" of Aristotle, the given materiality of Plato, or the initial potency of which Aquinas speaks. In any event, we are concerned to stress the patent fact of a potentiality for event or occurrence as the pre-requisite to our understanding of the world which we know. This horizontal line moves from possibilities of actualization, as they are available for the actualization which will produce real entities, through the "creative nexus" (of which we shall speak in a moment), to the concrete occasions with which we are confronted in their presentational immediacy to us. That is, the horizontal line includes all that actually is going on in the world.

3. The line "A" represents the divine activity through which the possibilities of actualization are brought into concrete and factual existence. Deity, as the principle by which possibilities are actualized, may thus be said to select or "decide for" this or that set of possibilities; hence deity in this aspect may be styled "first" (prior) principle of causation. The line "C" indicates that actual occasions -- things as they are brought to be in the world -- return to God, or better are received by God. As they are received by him and thus enter into his very life, they bring about that kind of "enrichment" of the divine reality to which we have frequently referred. Once again, it must be made clear that talk of enrichment is not meant to suggest that God becomes any more "God" than he always has been; what is intended by such language is simply that, because God is supremely related to all occasions, these various occurrences provide material for his fuller expression in relationship with creation and at the same time bring about an enhancement of the divine joy as well as a participation through "suffering" (or sharing as participation) in all that takes place in the world.

4. The line "D¹ -- D² " represents the way in which emergence of novelty in the world takes place. The enhancement of the divine life in its consequent aspect has opened up new possibilities of relationship with the creation and has also provided new material through which God may act upon creative potentiality, thus bringing to pass that emergence of novelty which is so genuine an element in our experience and (as our observation informs us) of the world at large. A simple illustration for this might be the historical development of a given human culture. This development, in combination with the natural setting of that culture which provides its locus, moves forward to a point at which, out of the rich congeries of events and responses to events made by those who are involved, a new type of response becomes available. The prophet, for example, makes his appearance. He is not just the same as the dervish who preceded him; he is not simply a "wise man or sage; he is not only the precipitate of a particular historical milieu with its context in the order of nature. He is indeed all of these, but he is something more too. In him there is the appearance of a novel response to a complex situation; and as such, he brings about new ways of understanding and new kinds of adjustment to the world which then may be shared and developed by those who hear him and accept his message.

5. The point of emergence is called the "creative nexus". While there is preparation for it (D¹), there are also consequences of it, but these are not only along the line of creative advance (B²) to which we have just referred. There are also new and enhancing opportunities (line D²) provided for deity, which he employs in his continuous activity of bringing possibility (left point of the horizontal line) into actuality (along line A). This emergence thus will permit enhancement along the line of creativity (B¹), towards the actualizing of still newer occasions of novelty or freshness.

6. Finally we must remember that all this is an ongoing process. Our diagram is at best a kind of "cross-section" of the dynamic movement which is the given reality of the world and of the Divine Activity in the world. So far as we know, there is no "ending" of the movement. It is everlasting in the sense of a continuous and unceasing development, on the whole moving towards fuller realization of heterogeneous yet organically inter-related goods, even though there is "evil" with maladjustments, "backwaters", and elected failure to advance at many points along the line.

The Christian thinker may wish to add to, or to modify, this diagram in the light of his distinctive faith. But what is at once apparent, I believe, is that the diagram portrays an onward movement towards continually greater realization of the purpose or "subjective aim" of Deity. And this realization is, at the same time, the increasing satisfaction of the various subjective aims" or purposes that are the binding-identity of the several actual entities which are "less" than, and have been brought into existence through, the patient, loving and overcoming work of the divine activity. God "expresses" himself in his ceaseless relationship with and participation in the world, whose future in many respects is "open". The limits set are those given by the divine intention for fulfillment or "satisfaction", by the possibilities which at any given moment are available for use in this way, by the "decision" of each actual entity, and by the finitude of creativity itself which will permit only specific creaturely occasions to emerge. Each creaturely occasion, however, is always open to further divine activity in, upon, and through it. And the divine activity is always present and at work in each occasion. Hence each occasion (and more particularly every "good" occasion) may be seen as an "incarnation" of deity under the conditions of finite creativity.

Appended Note to Chapter 2

Another diagram, in this case suggested (as has been said earlier) by Professor Sherburne, to illustrate the fashion of the divine activity in the world, would be as follows.

There are three useful points about this diagram. In the first place, it indicates the way in which what White-head has called "the we of God’s physical feelings upon his primordial concepts" constitutes the consequent nature of God -- that is, how what God "accepts" into himself as "affects" modify the future on-going occasions through a modification of God’s own use of the possibilities offered him (X in the diagram). Second, in thus modifying occasions, it will be seen, subjective aims are provided for the further generation of occasions (Y in the diagram). Third, the new possibilities (relevant to the past, of course) are seen and felt by God and become the "lure" (in Whitehead’s own word) to which occasions may respond, to their (and to God’s) enrichment.

A

A contemporary poet has written of the dilemma of the modern man who, with his sense of confusion, lack of meaning in life, and anxiety about the future, comes to a church service in the hope that something may be said there which will speak to this condition:

Whatever we may think of the literary quality of this bit of verse, we can have no doubt that the un-named writer is expressing a widely felt attitude to the preaching and teaching given by many of those who today speak for the Christian faith. It may well be that only the sophisticated -- or those who in some lonely moment have felt what Thoreau called "a quiet sense of desperation" -- would wish to say that their condition is properly described as compounded of anxiety, meaninglessness, and confusion. Yet as one reads much that is being written and listens to much that is being said these days, one is more and more inclined to think that some such awareness is much more general among our contemporaries than surface-appearances might indicate. In any event it is plainly the fact that the way in which Christian faith has been and is being presented in many quarters has seemed and does seem to vast numbers of people simply a mixture of uncertainty, nonsense, and "miracle", the last of these in the sense of an appeal sometimes made by Christian apologists and preachers to what strikes the modern man as an absurd and unintelligible violation of the pervasive regularity which he has come to believe is a mark of the universe as he knows it to be. It is also the fact that the choice frequently offered him is between being "a Christian" of a very narrowly "orthodox" type or being "a modern man"; I need cite here only a recent English publication, H. A. Blamires’ little book The Christian Mind, as a popular, if extreme, expression of this supposed dilemma.

In Honest to God the Bishop of Woolwich has said that he himself is both a modern man and a Christian believer. There is no escaping the former for a man living today, he has rightly told us; and there is no reason why such a man should not also be a Christian. He was entirely correct in saying this, but the difficulty, as Dr Robinson also recognized, is that the way in which all too often we are given to understand Christian faith makes the combination impossible. It is my own belief that the explanation for the enormous sale of Honest to God is simply that great numbers of men and women who wish to be both modern and Christian found in that book a presentation of Christianity which on the one hand they felt was absolutely honest and which on the other hand (and for the first time) opened to them the basic meaning of what we may style "the religious question": what man is, what his world is like, how one can find significance and dignity for living, and the like. It did this, they thought, in a fashion which was not in outrageous contradiction to everything else that as persons living in the mid-twentieth century they believed to be true.

Dr Robinson relied very largely on the philosophical theology of Paul Tillich for his suggestions about the reconception of Christian faith. There can be no doubt that Dr Tillich was outstanding among the distinguished thinkers of our day who have been working towards a reconception of the faith in the light of contemporary knowledge and contemporary experience. No one, least of all myself (who would acknowledge an enormous debt to Dr Tillich’s work and a valued personal friendship with that great and good man), would wish to question his pre-eminence in this field. However, it is my own conviction that there is another kind of thought which is even more suitable for use in the task of Christian reconception. This is the line taken by what in North America today is frequently described as "process thought"; its greatest exponent was the late Professor Alfred North Whitehead in his works Process and Reality (his book has been re-arranged, and provided with excellent explanatory notes by D. W. Sherburne, under the title of Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality), Science and the Modern World, Modes of Thought, Adventures of Ideas, Religion in the Making, and Symbolism, all of them written after Whitehead had joined the faculty of Harvard University in the United States in the 1920’s.

But Professor Whitehead was only one of a number of thinkers in the years 1920-35 who were taking the same general approach to an understanding of man and his world. Professor C. Lloyd-Morgan’s Emergent Evolution and Life, Mind and Spirit, Professor Samuel Alexander’s Space-Time and Deity, General Jan Smuts’s Holism, and other works of a similar nature were appearing during those years. While there were many differences among them, there was also a consistent use of evolutionary ideas which gave them a genuine unity. In our own decade, the works of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the noted Jesuit palaeontologist, have been published posthumously; they too follow the same general line as the English writers I have mentioned. Furthermore, in the United States, for over a quarter of a century the writings of Professor Charles Hartshorne, including Beyond Humanism, The Vision of God, Reality as Social Process, The Divine Relativity, The Logic of Perfection, and A Natural Theology for Our Times, as well as many occasional articles and essays, have eloquently argued the case for "process-thought". Happily Professor Hartshorne is still at work among us and further books from his pen may be expected in the next few years.

None of these books, nor the metaphysical position which they advocated, has received in recent years the attention which they deserve in Christian theological circles. One reason for this has been what Dr H. J. Paton in The Modern Predicament styled "the linguistic veto" on all metaphysical speculation. The linguistic philosophers, whether in their earlier phase of "logical positivism" or in their later phase which would confine philosophical enquiry to an examination of "language games" (in Wittgenstein’s phrase), have somehow contrived to make the older philosophical task of metaphysical construction appear silly or pretentious-although things are changing today, as may be shown by a remark made to me not long ago by one of the leading British empirical philosophers. This thinker, whose name I shall not disclose, said that he was becoming more and more convinced that there was "something in the older metaphysical -- he called them "ontological" -- claims; at the moment he was much concerned, he said, to find a way of giving more than linguistic status to such propositions as "personal God", for it appeared to him that these statements somehow pointed to a truth about the universe, about the nature of things, that must be reckoned with in any honest description of the "way things are".

Another reason for the neglect of Whitehead and the other process-thinkers, especially among theologians, has been the long period (from which we now seem to be emerging) when philosophical theology itself, and especially such philosophical theology as employed scientific data as part of its material, was looked upon as a highly dangerous and even sinful intrusion of non-biblical and secular thought into the Christian faith. What some call "biblical theology" has been taken to rule out, once and for all, any such philosophical approach to faith. Not only has it been thought that this is improper; it has been suggested, as I have just noted, that to engage in philosophical theology is even blasphemous or sinful. God has revealed himself either in the pages of Holy Scripture or in the events which the Bible records; nothing else is needed and anything else diminishes or denies the unique adequacy of biblical revelation. This attitude, which has been widespread in non-Roman and non-Orthodox theological circles, is responsible for the contemptuous dismissal of those theologians (sometimes conveniently tagged "outworn liberals" or "old-fashioned modernists") who attempted in the past or who still attempt in the present to employ in their work the insights of the process-philosophers.

For example, during the twenties and thirties of this century, a group of theologians at Cambridge University was engaged in the task of re-conceiving and re-stating Christian faith in the light of what was then called "emergent evolution". I refer to such men as Professor

J. F. Bethune-Baker, Professor A. Nairne, Canon C. E. Raven, all of whom are now dead, and Dr J. S. Boys-Smith and Dr A. C. Bouquet, both happily still with us. At the same time Father Lionel Thornton published The Incarnate Lord and Dr W. R. Matthews The Purpose of God and other books; while in the United States Professor E. W. Lyman produced his great work on The Meaning and Truth of Religion, and other writers, far too numerous to mention, were attempting the same task. But for a variety of reasons, not least among them the growing influence of Karl Barth and the continental theologians who at the time were associated with him, this entire effort was rejected in the mid-thirties by a large number of Christian scholars. A sermon preached at that time by Sir Edwyn Hoskyns and later reprinted in Cambridge Sermon (Cambridge Sermons, pp. 34-35 (Faith Press, London, 1959) may perhaps be taken as the symbolic moment of the change. In that sermon Sir Edwyn remarked in effect that while the Lady Margaret Professor (Dr Bethune-Baker) was urging that the task of theology was to bring about a reconciliation of evolution and faith and to re-state faith in terms congruent with such evolutionary ideas, in his (Hoskyns’) opinion the theologian’s task was precisely the opposite: it was to show the inadequacy of such ideas and to make clear the incongruity between evolutionary thought and Christian faith.

The recent publication in French, and then in English translation -- and this some years after his death -- of Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man and The Divine Milieu, and the avid reading which these and other writings by the same French Jesuit have received, may be said to mark the return in many circles to the possibility of a philosophical theology which is prepared to employ evolutionary motifs. As the publication of Teilhard’s work has continued his influence has grown. There are sections- in his The Future of Man, which is a fascinating collection of papers, essays, and lectures given by Teilhard during the years 1924-50, which clearly point the theme and purpose of the present lectures. For example, Teilhard spoke of the "general and growing state of dissatisfaction in religious affairs" (P. T. de Chardin: The Future of Man, p. 260 [W. Collins, London, 1964]) -- he was writing in 1949. "For some obscure reason he wrote, "something has gone wrong between Man and God as in these days he is represented to Man". The italics are Teilhard’s own; and the succeeding pages of the essay from which the quotation comes show that for him "what has gone wrong" was the failure of much traditional Christian teaching and preaching to see that the world -- the whole created order in its materiality, along with man’s grasp of the importance of secular effort and achievement -- is an ongoing movement in which significance is given to human life. Teilhard pointed out that it has been the rejection by many modern men of "an ‘extrinsical’ God, a deus ex machina whose existence can only undermine the dignity of the universe and weaken the springs of human endeavor", which poses Christian thinkers with their problem. He asked if they were prepared to reject such a false conception of the meaning of Deity, not only because the rejection was forced on them by honesty but also because such a "pseudo-God" was a denial of the profound Christian rootage in Incarnation.

It would appear that evolutionary or process motifs are again being forced upon our attention; and Christian thought will neglect them to its own peril. Yet we reiterate that throughout the earlier period in question -- from 1935, say, to 1960 -- a few theologians such as Canon Raven in England had continued along the lines laid down in the twenties, while Professor Hartshorne and some others in the United States (notably E. E. Harris, in such books as Revelation Through Reason) were carrying on the work on the strictly philosophical side. Professor Tillich himself, to whom we referred at the beginning of this lecture, although not at all identified with process-thought, was insistent on the necessity for the development of a modern philosophical theology and was increasingly finding himself in sympathy with many of the conclusions of thinkers such as Hartshorne; and more recently, as he himself acknowledged in the preface to the third volume of Systematic Theology, he associated his own views with those of Teilhard.

It may be said, I believe, that once more the enterprise of reconception in the light of process-thought is at least a "respectable" one in theological circles. The linguistic and biblicist vetos have been seen to be both arbitrary and unwarranted -- which makes it all the more pathetic that Dr Paul van Buren in The Secular Meaning of the Gospel still seems to accept them as valid and to rule out "God-statements" as "meaningless" while at the same time his excessive Barthian christocentrism and bibliocentrism turns the patent intention of scriptural statement into a parody of their proper meaning. On the other hand, the work of other younger theologians like Schubert Ogden, in his book Christ without Myth and more recently (and admirably) in The Reality of God, has shown a way of employing the insights of a soundly based biblical hermeneutic within the context of a specifically process-thought understanding of the human situation and the world in which man’s existence is set. Furthermore it is to be noted that through the years that have passed since 1936, Professor Daniel Day Williams, Professor Bernard M. Loomer, and Professor Bernard Meland, all three teaching in the United States, have written extensively in theological journals and occasionally in books, all of them engaging in this same task of employing the main tenets of process-thought for the explication of Christian faith. Professor Williams’s recent book entitled The Spirit and Forms of Love is a sustained application of the concepts of process-thought to the Christian understanding of love as the cosmic ground and the basic meaning of all existence.

Finally, two or three very recent books may be mentioned which are valuable as attempts to state Christian belief in terms of the conceptuality provided by process-thought: John B. Cobb’s A Christian Natural Theology, Peter N. Hamilton’s The Living God and the Modern World, and F. H. Peters’ The Creative Advance. Professor Cobb has also written another volume, which will be published before the present book appears, in which he explores the historical claims of Christian faith with relation to Whitehead’s philosophy; this is entitled The Structure of Christian Existence.

The present lectures are intended to present, in brief outline, the main emphases of process-thought as one theologian has understood them and to argue for the use of these emphases in the reconception of Christian faith today. It makes no pretence to be exhaustive; it is at best suggestive, perhaps provocative. If the job is done, and when it is done, much in the commonly understood picture of Christian faith may be altered; but I am convinced that nothing that is centrally important will be lost. A former student of Whitehead’s once reported in my hearing that the philosopher himself said, when questioned, that Christian "orthodoxy" could not be reconciled with his philosophy. The meaning of this reported remark depends upon what one understands by "orthodoxy". If one means, as Whitehead seems to have done, a rigid adherence to the letter of past formulations of the Christian faith, what he said is of course true. If one means, however, an insistence on the great affirmations of God as love, God revealed in Christ, God the sustainer of human life and the upholder of man’s destiny, then the situation is different.

But it. seems to me that we should be wiser if we did not here use the term "orthodoxy" at all; rather, we should speak of the truth which Christian faith grasps and by which the Christian believer is grasped. In that case, to repeat, nothing will be lost and much will be gained, both for the understanding of the faith in God self-revealed in Christ and for the Church which with all its imperfections and inadequacies has proclaimed this faith to the world through twenty centuries of history.

In any event, the task of reconception is required. Whitehead himself has some telling words about this:

What are the assumptions with which process-thought begins? And why should Christian thinkers be interested in process-thought? Here are two preliminary questions to which we should turn before we begin our exposition of the attitude which process-thought in its wider significance takes towards problems such as the nature of deity, the meaning of divine activity in the world, and the nature of man and society.

The first and perhaps the basic assumption of the kind of interpretation of the world which we are here considering, is simply that we are confronted, both in our own human experience and in the description of things with which modern scientific enquiry has made us familiar, with a dynamic rather than with a static reality. Those who take this view would say, for example, that it is absurd to speak of "human nature" as if it were an entity that could be described in categories of substance, if by substance we mean immutable and unchanging thing. Man is "on the move"; he is a living, changing, developing creature. If he is to be described at all, the dynamic quality of his existence must be recognized and grasped, even if it is also the fact that through all the changes there are persistent qualities which preserve his identity as human. Likewise the world of nature is not a static affair in which things "continue in one stay"; on the contrary, it is evolving, changing, "in process". Down to the lowest levels of matter, if we may so style them, this capacity for and presence of change and development is to be seen. Indeed Professor Whitehead was prepared to go so far as to say that the electron itself is a "society" or an "organism", marked by movement and dynamic activity. Of course the sense in which such words may be used to describe the various levels in the world will vary according to the particular level which is under consideration at any given time and by any particular science. An electron is not a dynamic society or organism of the same order as an amoeba; certainly it differs vastly from the activity which we note in a living cell, in a plant, in a dog, and a fortiori in a man. Yet the world as a whole is in process and is a process; it is not a finished and settled system composed of discrete entities which are inert, changeless, static.

We are led then to a second assumption which is basic to process-thought. Not only is the world and all that is in it a dynamic movement; it is also an inter-related society of "occasions". Nor is there the possibility of isolating one occasion from another, so that each may be considered in itself alone. On the contrary, it would be a "false abstraction" from the deliverance of experience and of observation to attempt to do this. Into each of the given occasions there enter past events as well as the surrounding and accompanying pressures of other occasions, not to mention the "lure" of the future. To illustrate once again from the area best known to us, this is obvious enough at the human level. A man does not and cannot exist in complete isolation from other men, or from his present environment, or from his own past history and the more general history of the human race of which as man he is a part, or from the natural order to which he and his whole race belong, or from the possible developments which are before him and mankind in general. Each man is a focusing, a concretizing, of all these. Thus in being "himself" he is not himself alone; he is all that has gone to make him up, all that surrounds him, all that presses upon him, all that he himself enters into and in which he shares, all which he may be. And that which is true of man, is likewise true in its appropriate way throughout the universe. We live in and we are confronted by a richly inter-connected, inter-related, inter-penetrative series of events, just as we ourselves are such a series of events. Whatever is our own specific identity, it can be asserted of us only when this fact of our sociality, of our organic nature, is grasped and given due emphasis. The same must be said of the world as a whole.

This means that we are not able to make sharp distinctions of an ultimate and definitive kind. We cannot do this between "selves", for (as we have seen) they are inter-penetrating. It also means that in the rich experience which we possess, as we grasp it in that kind of double awareness which Whitehead calls "presentational immediacy" and "causal efficacy", we are given a full and compresent encounter with the world. Hence it is impossible, for instance, to reject the aesthetic and valuational elements in experience, as if these were to be seen as merely "subjective", while the primary qualities of hardness, etc., are taken as genuinely "objective". The fact is that our experience gives us all this together, as being profoundly one in impact upon us; we cannot cut up the world of experience, after the fashion of an earlier philosophy, and speak as if that which in its aesthetic quality has subjective appeal must lack any genuine reality in the world itself, simply because it does not lend itself to a particular kind of analysis by measurement or testing. It is of course true that we can and do make abstractions. We are obliged to make them for practical purposes as well as for a theoretical understanding of this or that special question; but they are exactly what they are called, they are "abstractions" from the richness of experience as we concretely know it.

This many-sided experience as it presents itself to us in its immediacy carries with it the corollary of "causal efficacy". By this, process-thought (as expounded by Whitehead) means that there is given to us, in our experience at all levels (including our "bodily" as well as our intellectual awareness), the sense of a variety of relationships which have played upon us and brought our experience to us in the particular way in which in fact it has been brought. Causation, then, is to be taken as another word for describing the way in which given occasions are brought to a focus and in which they make their impact upon those to whom they are presented. This rather than that particular occasion is known; we experience this, not that, possibility. The converging process, whatever it may be, that brings this rather than that to a focus is a genuine and necessarily given factor which is present in whatever it is that we are experiencing, sensing, feeling, knowing, understanding. What in an older kind of philosophy would have been called the chain-of-cause-and-effect is here seen as being very much richer; it is a congeries of occasions, events, pressures, movements, routes, which come to focus at this or that point, and which for their explanation require some principle that has brought and still is bringing each of them, rather than some other possible occurrence, into this particular concrete moment of what we commonly style "existence".

But what secures such persistence or identity in occasions as we do in fact know, both from observation and from our own experience of ourselves? The answer to this question is given in the concept of the "subjective aim" which is proper to each series of occasions. This aim, which has always about it a directive quality, is to be understood as the goal or end towards which a given process moves, yet it must also be seen as in some sense immanently at work in that process moving it towards its goal or end or actualization. There is an element of teleological concern in all process-thought, whether or not the particular description we have offered is accepted. But this does not mean that each set of occasions is "conscious", in anything like our human sense, of the aim which is before it and which gives it the distinctive identity that it possesses. An acorn is certainly not aware of the aim which keeps it moving towards its proper development into an oak-tree. But none the less, what does thus keep it moving towards its proper development is the given subjective aim which is proper to the acorn. And so, in appropriate measure and of course with vast differences at each level, throughout the cosmos. Thus we are delivered from a purely mechanical view of the universe, in which nothing is going on but the re-shuffling of a series of originally given entities. Yet we are not delivered into the hands of the vitalist who would wish to introduce some kind of mysterious psyche or entelechy or spirit (or whatever equivalent term he might use) as an addition to the process. God himself is possessed of a subjective aim; and every entity in the process, understood as dynamic, inter-related, inter-penetrative of every other entity (and hence better described as an occasion or instance along some "route"), is also characterized by such an aim. This is a truly organic and hence integrative view of "the way things go".

Finally, because of the nature of the world as we know it, we cannot grasp it with that kind of absolute clarity which a Cartesian type of thinking would demand. Indeed we must always seek clarity, as Whitehead once said; but he went on to say that at the same time we must always distrust it. For the difficulty is that simple explanations, which tend always to assume an omnicompetent knowledge, are likely to give us falsely simple explanations. If we accept experience as we know it, there will be some things which will appear relatively clear, but they will be set in contexts which are not so clear. Hence the picture of truth is much more that of a small area of fairly straightforward knowledge which shades out into more and more mysterious and unclear, knowledge or intimation or hint or apprehension, than it is that of "clear and distinct ideas" which leave no room for doubt and presume to give a simple and direct explanation of any given moment of experience.

A consequence of these assumptions is the rejection of all those dualisms which would make simple divisions or disjunctions between subjective and objective, between man and his world, between mind and matter, between natural and supernatural, and the like. This is one world, however diversified it may be; it is all held together in the kind of unity which we know in ourselves -- as beings who are not "souls" or "minds" inhabiting "bodies", but who ourselves are the rich unity of all those ranges of experience with which we are familiar, so that (if this kind of language is permissible at all) we must recognize that we are minds and we are bodies -- or better, we are ourselves as we know ourselves in the uncomplicated immediacy of our experience of ourselves as being precisely ourselves and not something other or less.

A concluding comment may be appropriate here in respect to our first question. The use of human language is for process-thinkers not restricted to the games we play with words. On the contrary, there is for them a more "realistic" insistence on the use of language as being of necessity the symbols for that which we experience or observe. Of course words are arbitrary in one sense, for other terms and other languages are possible. But in another sense they point towards and alone make possible some grasp of that which is really there to be known. They are not empty sounds but have acquired and now convey meanings; they possess an evocative and denotative quality. Inadequate as they are, subject to modification from time to time, needing correction and supplementation, our various human languages (verbal and pictorial, aural or graphic) are both necessary for us and useful to us; they help to make sense of, and they help to give sense to, the richness of experience and the given-ness of the world as we observe and grasp it. Man is a symbol-making and symbol-using animal, but his symbols are not merely subjective. The activity of symbolization is part of his equipment for understanding himself and his world. It is possible therefore -- and it is entirely legitimate -- to engage in the metaphysical enterprise with the use of such languages as we possess. To refuse to engage in this enterprise, or to reject it as an impossibility, is equivalent to denying to man any capacity to understand who and what he is and what his experience tells him about the world in which he lives.

Our second preliminary question concerned the reason or reasons why Christian thinkers should be interested in process-thought. An approach to an answer may be found by mention of a particular insistence found in one way or another in all the thinkers of this school. Professor Whitehead has used the term "importance" to describe this insight, but there are many other possible ways in which it may be stated and other process-thinkers have their own terms to describe it. But using Whitehead’s word, we may say that "importance" is appropriately employed to indicate the fact that some specific occurrence, some particular event or series of concrescent events, some particular stance or attitude, provides for any responsible thinker the "clue" which he takes for his understanding of "how things go". For example, we are all aware of the way in which a moment in the life of a man which to him seems to have decisive importance will give him his criterion of interpretation for all that happens to him. Some historical event, as we well know, can have a determinative significance for our comprehension of a whole series of preceding and succeeding historical events. That which in this sense is "important" not only seems to sum up or to crystallize (so to say) our prior experience, but also opens up for us new avenues of possibility, leading to future interpretations which will be enriching and deepening in our experience. Even more significant, the "important" will actually inaugurate a new level of understanding and thus give rise to a new level of experience for us and for those who follow us. It has an objective as well as a subjective quality. To this concept of "importance" we shall return in other contexts. At the moment it is helpful in our endeavor to see why process-thought has interest for Christian theology.

The point is of course obvious. The Christian believes that in the events of which Scripture is the record, and supremely in the events which find their focus in the life and activity of Jesus Christ, there is a disclosure of something which in the highest degree is "important". Since the Christian is convinced that this is the case, a kind of philosophy which is congruous with such a conviction should be very welcome indeed. Furthermore, if it can be shown that there are many points in which the Christian conviction of what is "important" is illuminated by such a philosophy, the Christian will inevitably have more than academic interest in the way in which that philosophy interprets the world and human experience.

Many of us are certain that this relationship of congruity and illumination which we have noted in respect to the concept of "importance" is true also between many other assertions of Christian faith and the conclusions of process-thought. Of course to say this is also to say we are certain that the biblical narrative and witness demand a metaphysical interpretation. In other words, it is to say that we believe that implicit in the pictorial language of the Scriptures and the historical events to which the Bible points and with which its language is concerned, there is a basic view of the world which is grounded in reality itself. It is obvious that the Hebrew mind Aid not think about and certainly did not handle this view in conceptual terms such as the Greeks, for example, were ready to employ in their philosophy. But despite the assertions of certain biblical scholars, this does not mean that no metaphysic is implicit in Hebrew thinking; it means only that the language in which the implicit metaphysic was stated was for the Hebrew highly imaginistic, pictorial, symbolical. The Hebrew mind, as represented in the Scriptures, did its thinking in a metaphorical fashion; indeed it might be said that the Jews thought mythologically, if by this word we mean that they thought in pictures and in stories, rather than in abstract concepts and Greek philosophical ideas. But they thought.

Granted this difference, It would seem that there is a remarkable correspondence between the biblical insistence on the living God who is active in nature and in the affairs of men, and the recognition by process-thought that the world is a dynamic process of such a kind that whatever explanatory principle or agency there may be must be of that sort too -- it also must be dynamic and processive. The Jewish-Christian tradition has never really been content with an "unmoved mover" as the final principle of explanation, however often the notion has been found in classical theologies. It has been uneasy when the God about whom it talks is described in substantial terms of a kind which leave little room for his boundless energizing activity in the world; it has been obliged to seek all sorts of verbal devices for putting life into such language. Process-thought in fact is much closer to the biblical way of seeing things, with its recognition of the profound importance of activity, movement, and development.

Furthermore, the whole creation itself, both what we call nature and also the realm of historical happening, is for the biblical writers open at every point to the action of the living God. They do not see it as a fixed entity, already made and finished; for them the creation is a directed movement in which novelty occurs, in which the unexpected may and indeed often does happen, and in which great ends are in process of achievement. A view of the world which regards it as a finished product has little relation to the world as the Bible sees it; while a world that is nothing but a complicated mechanism, like a machine which grinds along engaged in nothing but repeating standard patterns of behavior, is not the world of movement and change of which the Scriptures speak. The Bible tells us of a faithful God whose purpose is unchanging; hence whatever he does will be consistent with his ultimate objective, while the created world will not be the scene of irrelevant and meaningless intrusions. But with all his faithfulness God is living and active, and the creation is not a "finished" world, much less a dead and inert substance. Granted once again that the biblical witness is in highly pictorial terms and that its "science" is outmoded, the fact yet remains that the biblical witness is to what we have styled an "open" world in which new things occur; that biblical witness always recognized the possibility of novel as well as significant developments.

Once again, the insistence of process-thought on interrelationship as basic to the world should be welcome to Christian theologians. The great biblical affirmations about God are always made with reference to "God-and-his-world". Whatever is said in Scripture about "God-in-himself" is always to be understood as inference from what is known of his activity in creation. And if he is indeed, what the Christian believes him to be, a loving as well as a living God, then it is obvious that he cannot be seen in abstraction from the world which he loves; for love signifies relationship, and the richest perfection possible is perfection in relationships and not "absolute power" or unchanging substance. An approach to the world and God in terms of process-thought can bring one very close to the Christian conviction that God is genuinely, not simply verbally, describable as "love" -- and as love which participates, shares, and even suffers.

The emphasis (to which we shall turn later) of process-thinkers on what Whitehead called the "consequent nature" of God -- that is to say, on God’s being affected by and actually enriched in his activity by that which occurs in his world -- can provide some "secular" confirmation for the Christian’s conviction that God not only "cares" for the creation but also finds satisfaction in his world. As Hartshorne has insisted, God is not made more divine by that satisfaction, but his deity is given a real enhancement and a genuine delight by what happens in creation; furthermore, the implementation of his purposes is made fuller by these happenings. In other words, the creation matters to him. Contrariwise, failures in the creation and a turning-away from its purpose of augmented good are equally real to God, although in the ongoing process he is able to absorb them into himself and to make them serve his ends in ways which would not otherwise be available.

All this should be of interest to the Christian thinker, for it enables him to find (as we have said) a "secular" confirmation for his belief in the God whose suffering love shares in the world’s pain while at the same time his triumphant joy is in part derived from the happiness which the world can know. The reality of evil and of good, of pain and of joy, is recognized. But it is seen in relationship to the basic activity which is God himself who is able both to bring good out of evil and at the same time to rejoice in the good which is achieved in the creation. God is vulnerable and shares the world’s pain, yet he can use evil (once it has occurred) to accomplish good. The Cross, in itself an "evil" thing, was used by God; and Christians believe it was used by him to bring about greater good than would have been possible without it. If at this point they go beyond process-thought, they do not contradict its insight.

Again, the insistence on the societal nature of the world, and on man’s genuine participation since he himself is organic to that world, illuminates the Christian belief that man belongs to the creation and that the whole natural order, as well as human history and personal experience, is integral to the purpose of God. This applies both to creation and to redemption. A false spirituality which would try to remove man from his material and embodied situation and regard him as an "angel" is seen for the blatant absurdity which it is; on the other hand, the attempt to think that God purposes to "save" man out of the world is seen to be a denial not only of the Christian gospel but of a sound understanding of human nature. Man is a body, as he is a mind and a spirit. He is, in fact, man; and as man he is a developing unity in relationship with his fellows, with history, and with nature. Therefore what happens in society, in the historical process, and in the natural order of events, has significance for him, because he is participant in this total pattern. God deals with him in this fashion, not as if he were an isolated "soul".

Finally, the stress of process-thought on experience, and the richness of "presentational immediacy" coupled with "causal efficacy", should interest the Christian because it demonstrates that in what nowadays it is fashionable to call "meeting", participation in life, and genuine acquaintance by sharing, we come to the fullest knowledge both of ourselves and others and also of the world and God. God is not "up there" or "out there". He is here, in the immediacy of our experience; and it is here that he is to be known, obeyed, and adored.

Whatever may be said about transcendence must be said with all this in view. The transcendence of God is his inexhaustibility, not his remoteness. He is richer and fuller in his life than any awareness of him which is possible for us, yet he is not far off but close at hand. He is the "depth" of things, as he is the "depth" of ourselves; but he is more than that -- he is himself, yet always himself in relation to that which he is doing, loving, using for the world whose final explanation he is. Even when he is not recognized under some conventional name -- even when he is not "named" at all he is the inescapable energy which moves through all things and which works in all things for the richest possible good. Hence men do not need to be introduced to him as if they had never met him; what they need is to identify him where he is, to recognize him as being what he is, and to see him as doing what he does -- which, in Christian faith, is to see him as the dynamic, living, loving "Father of our Lord Jesus Christ".

I have not exhausted, by any means, the reasons for a Christian interest in process-thought. But I hope that I have indicated a few of the reasons and thus have prepared the readers for the consideration of some of the main emphases in process-thought as they have relevance for the task of Christian reconception.

I must begin with a brief account of my growing appreciation of what in recent years has come to be called process-thought or process-philosophy. As long ago as the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, a reading of certain Cambridge theologians of the time introduced me to this sort of understanding of human life and the natural world. The work of Professor J. F. Bethune-Baker, Professor Alexander Nairne, Canon Charles Raven, Dr A. C. Bouquet, and the Reverend J. S. Boys-Smith -- all of whom were members of an informal group in Cambridge which was developing this line of thought -- opened for me the possibility of a re-conception of Christian faith in terms of what was then being described as "emergent evolution". Later in the 1930’s when I became a theological teacher, I found the opportunity to read C. Lloyd-Morgan, S. Alexander, Jan Smuts, and above all A. N. Whitehead; it was in those years that I began to work out my own version of this re-statement of the Christian faith. Finally, in the 1940’s and thereafter, Charles Hartshorne’s books came to be for me the most valuable explication of the process background for my Christian thought.

In 1944, when I published Christ and Christian Faith, I was already wrestling with the doctrine of Christ in the light of process-philosophy. Eleven years later in Theology and Reality (1955), I sought to apply its concepts to certain other areas of theology; and in the following year, publishing lectures originally given to parish clergy conferences on Rethinking the Christian Message (1956), I urged the use of these ideas in the necessary and thorough re-working of the popular presentation of basic Christian themes. My large study in christology, The Word Incarnate (1959), was an extended essay in interpretation of the person and work of Jesus in process-terms. Finally in The Christian Understanding of Human Nature (1964) I used process-thought, along with some of the insights of existentialism, the new approach to history, and some of the findings of depth psychology, to elucidate the Christian view of the meaning of manhood.

With this continuing interest and with my enormous respect for what Cambridge theology had been attempting in the years before what Canon Raven called "the great blight" (which followed the exaggerated biblical theology of the 1930’s and later years), I was delighted to be asked by the Divinity Faculty of that university to lecture for them in November 1964. My public lecture in that year was followed by other invitations, three in Britain and one in the United States, to give a brief and popular account of process-thought and its importance for Christian theology. The result was the expansion of the original lecture into four lectures which in varying forms were delivered as the Lightfoot Lecture for 1964 at the University of Durham, at the Episcopal Theological College in Edinburgh in 1964, at St. Augustine’s College, Canterbury in 1965, and as the Beattie Lectures at the University of the South in the United States in April 1966. I thank the authorities of these institutions for their invitations to lecture and for the kind hospitality shown me when I was their guest.

This book might have been, perhaps should have been, much longer and more detailed; and unquestionably it may be faulted as being altogether too much a reporting of what one theologian has found interesting and useful in his study of the process-philosophy. In extenuation I should plead that in a series of four lectures, intended in each instance of delivery for a general educated public rather than for philosophical and theological experts, of necessity one must be brief and must deal with the topic in a broad way; furthermore, I have not intended to claim that every representative of process-thought would agree with what I have selected as significant nor would find my use of what in fact has been selected compatible with his own particular approach or his own individual conclusions. I have not attempted a thorough analysis of all the available material but have sought to give a survey which conveys my own impressions of a body of literature that I have studied over many years. Nor should I have published the four lectures had not many who heard them urged that they be made available to a larger public which knew little or nothing about process-thought and its availability for Christian use. My original intention in the lectures and my hope in the publication of this book has been and is that I may stimulate younger colleagues in the theological world to pursue the task with more competence and greater discernment, and perhaps much more radically, than I have been able to do.

In conclusion, I am grateful to Professor D. D. Williams of Union Theological Seminary, New York City, and Professor D. W. Sherburne of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, for reading the typescript and making many valuable suggestions; and above all to Professor Charles Hartshorne, who has not read the typescript but who, during a recent short visit to England, discussed with me many of the ideas which are found in this book. I have ventured to dedicate to him this introduction to the Christian use of process-thought, as a token of my gratitude for his help and also for the enormous resource that I, with many others, have found in his long years of work in the development of this philosophical conceptuality. Of course none of these persons, but only I, have responsibility for what is said in these pages.

Norman Pittenger

King’s College Cambridge

We have come to the end of this part of our journey together. Intended for a non-specialist general reading audience and not explicitly theological, at least in the typical way the term is used and traditionally defined, I have sought to provide an exposition of the major tenets of the process-relational vision and their applicability to the understanding of the self, society, politics, psychology, the natural sciences, and education. I hope that in some measure (and my readers will ultimately have to decide) I have succeeded. Above all, I hope I have challenged my readers to think and spurred them on to further reading and reflection on the relational vision.

I would like to close on a rather personal note. I first encountered process thought as a first year student at the School of Theology at Claremont, California, in the fall of 1971 in a class entitled "Process Theism," taught by John Cobb. At that time, deeply searching, I knew I believed in God, the experience of whom, to use William James term, was "ineffable," and that somehow this belief was related to Jesus Christ, but I could not articulate what I really believed in. The class and the person of John Cobb had a lasting impact on me. A scholar and creative thinker who can resume a lecture at precisely the point where he left off maybe as long as a week before with just a word or two on the back of an envelope to serve as a reminder, John is unpretentious, affirming of his students, with an uncanny knack for drawing out the best in them, utterly committed to the living out of his vision. Through the sequence of readings, particularly in preparation for the oral final exam as well as the course as a whole, I found the process-relational vision intellectually compelling. My reading, research, and reflection since then has strengthened this conviction.

The lived experience of my professional career, like the landing of the airplane on the ground in Whitehead’s analogy, has borne this out all the more. Having served in a wide variety of settings, urban, rural, suburban, having dealt with "all sorts and conditions of people," street people, substance abusers, kidney and cancer patients, prison inmates, prison officials, wealthy suburbanites, small town people, cowboys, miners, union people, management people, college students, faculty and staff, I have often thought that I have experienced quite acutely the fundamental interdependence of all things and all people. As I dealt with what often seemed like insoluble problems, I quickly realized that they were not the problems of individuals alone but of ever-widening circles, wholes, societies. The poverty with which I was dealing every day (let alone in the Third World) was directly related to the increased wealth of the rich, the neglect of the problems of small towns and the inner city, to the growth of the suburbs. Both with individuals and institutions, I experienced vividly the propensity to fear losing the meaning of the past, getting stuck in that past, thus obstructing the ability to respond to the new needs and challenges of the present and the possibilities of the future. The almost total lack of knowledge and comprehension about the openness to the lived experience and frame of reference of the poor on the part of the rich and middle class, of prisoners on the part of the free, of the rural people on the part of urbanites and vice versa, and the consequent deprivation of the opportunity for contrast and richness of experience, so vital to the art of life, was appalling.

Increasingly, by the late 1970s, I began to have a sense of urgency about the relational vision; in fact, I see it as a matter of life or death for our planet. In the early ‘70s, while finding process thought intellectually compelling, I was quite dubious about the steady state economics advocated by some of its adherents. While sensitive to environmental issues, as I was dealing daily with the unemployed, I was more concerned with the human suffering wrought by the world-wide recession. However, as I looked at the unplanned growth of the city of Phoenix, where I spent over half my life, whose population and geographical size doubled while I lived there, with consequent climatic changes and the advent of the most poisonous air pollution in the United States, the result of an unhampered economy on which the well-being of all citizens depended, I changed my mind. To me, these developments illustrated the fundamental interconnection (something about which I was quite convinced although I had still been thinking in terms of "trade offs" and more concerned with the human suffering brought on by unemployment than the non-human matrix) of all issues of peace and eco-justice. I began to have a sense of urgency about the need for steady state economics, and the need to work on the interdependence of environmental issues and economic problems, such as unemployment, simultaneously.

Convinced of the need to organize our socio-politico-economic-cultural life around a relational conception of power, the issue became quite existential for me as I was very conscious of being the only male and the only authority figure at Sunday services in the prison, among women a large percentage of whom were incarcerated because they thought they were nothing without their men and felt they were obliged to do anything to "keep" them. The proliferation of weapons capable of omnicide and the increased threat to planetary survival on account of our despoliation of the non-human natural world, enactments of the unilateral conception of power, reinforced my convictions.

The last year and a half I lived in Arizona was spent in the town of Globe, 80 miles east of Phoenix, 3,500 feet high in copper mining country. At one time, in fact as recently as 1980, mining was Arizona’s number one industry. With copper prices plummeting, today it is not even among the top ten.

Globe is a microcosm of our world’s complex interrelatedness and interconnectedness. The mines closed in 1982, reopened in 1983 with half the previous work force. When I moved there in April, 1985, people were jubilant that the unemployment rate for the county had gone down to 17%! Not surprisingly, Gila County, of which Globe is the county seat, had the highest rate of domestic violence in the United States. It also had, often unadmitted and unacknowledged, a high rate of alcoholism and other forms of substance abuse.

In its ethnic and cultural makeup as well as economy, Globe is no less a microcosm of our world, collapsed in a small town. Heavily Hispanic with a high percentage of peoples of Slavic origin, with a number of nearby ranches and their cowboys, the town is five miles from an Apache reservation. A very male oriented, macho culture, rarely seen in the cities to this extent, is dominant.

The copper mines are now owned by companies with interests in South Africa and based in Bermuda, a great example of multinational corporations. Because of the low wages they pay workers in South Africa and Latin America, treating their financial losses as tax write offs, when labor negotiations were going on and violence threatened, the companies certainly had the upper hand; the unions accepted a substantial cut in wages and benefits.

To everyone’s delight at the prospect of new jobs, a new company moved into the adjacent town of Miami. We found out later that it was engaged in the construction of nuclear missile parts. My friend, the Rev. Robert Keefer, pastor of El Divino Salvador Presbyterian Church in Miami, commented that this was a marvelous example of the Niebuhrian understanding of the ambiguity and tragedy of human existence. It is also a call to live out the relational vision.

One evening in the spring of 1986, I was driving from Globe to Phoenix, a beautiful drive through the mountains, to teach a class. I was thinking of what brilliant, eloquent, creative, novel way I could present process thought.

Just past the town of Superior is Gonzales Pass at the end of which, as you come off the mountain, you can see almost all of the Valley of the Sun, the greater metropolitan Phoenix area. It is truly an awesome sight. As I was coming down the mountain, I could see the skyline of the city, with the beautiful, bright red desert sunset in the background. The desert was virtually blooming, the flowers on the Saguaro cacti blossoming. Of course, barely above the top of the high rise buildings, one could also see the brown rings of the most poisonous smog in the United States.

As I was watching this overwhelming sight, one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite rock bands from an earlier, heady era, 1969-70, was playing on the radio: "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" by Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Stephen Stills had written the song for folk singer Judy Collins, with whom he had lived for several years, following their breaking up. As I think of the substantialist view of reality and its devastating consequences from which we need to be liberated, and the urgent need to live out the relational vision, a line from that song often rings in my ears: "Don’t let the past remind us of what we are not now."

For Further Reading

I would like to take this opportunity to tie together some loose ends. For a fine exposition of the process-relational vision, appropriating the insights of psychology, and concrete in its orientation, dealing with the issues of death and dying, loss and bereavement, see Kinast, Robert L., When a Person Dies: Pastoral Theology in Death Experiences (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1984); also by the same author, an excellent delineation of the major tenets of process thought and process theology in particular, is "A Process Model of Theological Reflection" The Journal of Pastoral Care 37 (June, 1983), pp. 144-156.

I would be remiss not to mention the important dialogues between process thinkers and James Hillman, a highly creative and unorthodox Jungian psychotherapist. I refer the reader to his writings. More information about the dialogues may be obtained through the Center for Process Studies.

The process view of the self has much in common with George Herbert Mead’s understanding of the social self. The interpersonal theories of psychotherapy of Harry Stack Sullivan and perhaps Karen Homey would seem to be at variance with the excessive individualism and the dominant substantialist view in the field. The discipline of social psychology is oriented to the relational aspects of personality development but is ambiguous as to whether or not the substantialist view dominates.

For an early work integrating the new biology, emergent evolution, and aspects of process thought, see Smuts, Jan, Holism and Evolution (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1926).

One of the finest collection of essays on ecological issues by a diverse group of authors, including representatives of process thought and creation centered spirituality, is the previously mentioned Joranson, Philip N., and Butigan, Ken, eds., Cry of the Environment: Rebuilding the Christian Creation Tradition (Santa Fe, New Mexico: Bear and Company, 1984).

Notable contributions in the areas of theology of ecology, environmental ethics, and the Christian-Buddhist dialogue have been made by Jay McDaniel. See, for example, "A Feeling for the Organism: Christian Spirituality as Openness to Fellow Creatures," Environmental Ethics, Vol. 8, Spring 1986, pp. 33-46; "Christianity and the Need for New Vision," in Hargrove, Eugene C., Religion and Environmental Crisis, (Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1986), pp. 188-272); "Zen Buddhism and Prophetic Christianity," Encounter, 45:4, Autumn, 1984, pp. 303-323; "Mahayana Enlightenment in Process Perspective," Inada, Kenneth K., and Jacobson, Nolan P., eds., Buddhism and American Thinkers (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), pp. 51-69; "Physical Matter as Creative and Sentient," Environmental Ethics, Winter, 1984.

Although I have not used the terms in this book, "modern" is often referred to by philosophers and theologians as the Newtonian, Cartesian mechanistic view of reality. "Post-modern" thinkers seek to go beyond the limitations of the modern vision, an endeavor and a term with which advocates of the process-relational vision identify.

I.

There has been much groaning and moaning, weeping and gnashing of teeth over the State of contemporary education in the United States. Much of this concern has been over the rise of functional illiteracy (and just plain illiteracy), and the need to go back to basics, ‘readin’, ‘ritin’, and ‘rithmetic.’

As one who has taught on the college/university level for eight years, to some degree I share this concern: I take delight in a student’s paper that is well written, with few grammatical and spelling errors. I have also learned not to take for granted students’ knowledge in some general academic areas that may have been expectations at the high school, or dare I say, even junior high level, in my generation.

However important and well intentioned the back to basics movement may be, there are some more fundamental educational issues that this movement fails to take into account, and, in fact, tends to obscure. In the Introduction, I used the sprawling campus and geographical layout of Michigan State University as symptomatic and symbolic of the fragmentary character of modern knowledge. To a large extent, this fragmentation is fundamentally related to the proliferating specialization in the various academic disciplines; a scholar specializing in biochemistry, for example, is not very likely to know a great deal about ancient history, let alone have a unified, holistic vision of human knowledge. The compartmentalization of modern knowledge is a magnified expression of the substantialist view that sees reality as composed of isolated, discrete substances.

A problem with the back to basics movement is its presupposition, showing the philosophical influence of John Locke, and shared by much of our educational practice, that the human mind is a "tabula rasa," a blank, empty receptacle waiting to be filled with information and knowledge. Another apt analogy is that of the human mind as an empty bucket about to be filled with the water of knowledge. This is a view with which process-relational thought thoroughly disagrees.

Numerous factors have complicated the workings of our educational system. The rapid changes in our society are reflected in education. One trend is the increasing number of students in institutions of higher learning who return to school or enroll for the first time later in life -- a far cry from the typical stereotype of undergraduates. Such students, who attend school part time while working full time or being a homemaker, certainly a full time occupation in itself, tend to be more serious and better motivated. Part of this trend is the increased realization and stress on education as a lifelong process and the enhancement of opportunities for continuing education, not just for the sake of greater proficiency in one’s skill or area of expertise, but as something intrinsically valuable.

Another trend, especially in the last ten years, has been the increased emphasis on vocational training. This is certainly in line with the main concern of college students in the 1970s and 1980s, the acquisition of skills that will enable them to earn a high level income. The increased focus on vocational education is in large measure a response to the recessions of the mid-1970s and early 1980s and anticipated, feared, increasingly frequent periods of high unemployment.

Part of this trend is the virtual explosion of skills training for high tech industries. Much of this development involves considerable irony: functionally illiterate but very proficient in high tech students are taught by very literate but mechanically inept and computer illiterate instructors. Obviously, I am exaggerating and caricaturing, but nevertheless I hope I am making a point. To put it differently, traditional styles of learning, including those of my generation, have been oriented toward the written word; increasingly, particularly with the impact of television, today’s generation is oriented to learning by images. Certainly, these orientations need not be separated. Nevertheless, with the rapid changes in our society, the perspectives, training, and life experiences of students and teachers, between whom there may not be a great age difference, is at many times so great that it is as though they lived in different worlds.

Yet another trend is the proliferation of community colleges, a movement that seeks to bring education to the people." While at times community colleges have been criticized for a lack of academic rigor, there can be little question that they have made formal education more readily accessible to larger segments of our population, and fostered a sense that education is an ongoing, lifelong process.

These are just some of the recent changes to which the process-relational vision can provide a sense of perspective.

II.

The root of the words "educate" and "education" is a combination of two Latin words, the preposition "ex," meaning "out of" or "from," and the verb "ducere" meaning "to lead." Thus, to educate means literally to "lead out of," "to lead out."

In early April of this year, a group of students and others active in the Episcopal ministry at Michigan State University and I attended a Province V, essentially the mid-west region of the United States, conference for Episcopal college/university students and chaplains. Much of the conference was spent in small group discussion. The facilitator of the discussion group I was in was a young man two years out of college, now teaching in Cleveland, Ohio. With an obvious love for teaching and his students, he stated that he not only tried to teach his subject matter but life.

Whitehead himself was strongly convinced that the purpose of education is to guide people in understanding the art of life. What he meant by this was as a whole an accomplishment of varied activity that expresses the potentialities of individuals interacting with their actual environments as much as possible, if, as Whitehead thought, each individual is the embodiment of the adventure of life, of existence itself, the art of life is the guiding of this advance. And that is the aim of education.

Paralleling the description of the becoming of a momentary experience, Whitehead described what he called the rhythm of education as consisting of three stages. The rhythm of education is quite simply the notion that certain subjects and the appropriate methods of study need to be correlated with the student’s stage of mental development. The three stages that comprise this rhythm are those of romance, precision, and generalization.

The stage of romance is characterized by what Whitehead calls fascination and romantic emotion in relation to the subject matter. In this stage, education consists of tapping the creativity of which any living organism, anything actual at all, is an instance; it is the stimulation of the restless, ceaseless striving that characterizes life itself.

Here we find a fundamental difference between the Lockean presuppositions of contemporary education and process thought. In the relational vision, the human mind is not merely the passive recipient of knowledge and information, as in our analogy of the empty bucket waiting to be filled with water. To be sure, for process thinkers, there is a receptive side to the human mind as there is to anything actual at all. However, as is the case with anything actual at all, there is an active, creative side to the human mind as well. To put it differently, this phase of education is the "drawing out’ of the drive of the human organism to fulfill itself. This has not been one of the strong points of traditional education.

Probably the most perennial problem for educators is that motivation. How do I motivate my students to learn? This is certainly the question the romantic stage tries to address. Ultimately, no teacher can coerce a student to learn anything; the motivation to learn needs to come from the student herself/himself. Nevertheless, the teacher can be a vital stimulus, a midwife, in tapping and "drawing out" the student’s desire to learn.

The second stage in the rhythm of education is precision. This stage is characterized by repetition, rote learning, and memorization. While it can all too easily suffocate the sense of romance, it is nevertheless equally indispensable to the educational process. Discipline, repetition, memorization, are vital to learning or the acquisition of any skill, whether it be in a specific academic discipline, operating a computer, typing or driving a car. The key is to achieve a balance between romance and precision or acquire the ability to be precise without suffocating creativity. Let me illustrate.

Learning to drive is accomplished by practice, repetition, by driving until it becomes a habit that is "second nature" to most of us. Driving requires skills that have become so much a part of us that we use them automatically, unconsciously, and unreflectively: turning the ignition on, stopping at a red light or stop sign, looking frequently through the rear view mirror, etc.

Nevertheless, no matter how skilled and experienced a driver may be, no text book, driver’s manual, or teacher can anticipate every conceivable situation. Each one of us has encountered situations while driving that required creativity and, especially, a quick, spontaneous response. Even though I have been driving for twenty-two years, mostly on California freeways and Arizona highways and back roads, during a period of three months I have witnessed two freeway crashes of a sort I have never seen before: two cars headed in the same direction in adjacent lanes collided, went out of control, with totally unpredictable results for all nearby motorists; it took a great deal of quick reacting and creative maneuvering to avert further accidents.

The final stage of the rhythm of education is generalization; it combines romanticism and precision, and yet is more than a synthesis of the two. It is the fruition of the education process, combining the zest and creativity of the romantic phase with precision, culminating in fulfillment.

The stages of the rhythm of education parallel the becoming of a momentary experience. The romantic stage is similar to the prehension of data from the past and the lure of the possibilities of the future; the stage of precision parallels the stage of the creative synthesis of these data and possibilities; the stage of generalization resembles the final stage of the becoming of a momentary experience, the culmination of an actuality’s drive toward fulfillment, or in Whitehead’s word, satisfaction. The three stages of the rhythm of education are then repeated.

Let me illustrate, once again, with an example from my own teaching experience. Still making extensive use of the traditional lecture method, I first of all try to keep the subject matter interesting, with frequent examples from lived experiences, much in the manner of this book. I not only present content but try to challenge students with new ideas and foster their ability to reflect critically. When I present a new idea, I want students to understand it, to think about it, to wrestle with what impact, if any, it has on their thinking, and to give cogent reasons, for or against, for their reactions. Needless to say, the question of motivation is involved here. If I take a certain position, I encourage students to find the loopholes in the arguments and to critique. As part of the attempt to encourage them to reflect critically, at times I model it for them by presenting my own position, refuting it, then providing counter-arguments to the refutation once they have been appropriately taken into account. I also try to embolden them to ask questions, to comment, affirming them in their personhood and the validity of their ideas, yet challenging them to go beyond where they have been.

In effect, I attempt to model the relational vision. Modeling receptivity, responsiveness, sensitivity, which I described earlier as virtues in a process perspective, I also serve as a proposition, combining actuality with possibility, and hopefully luring students, not to an uncritical abandonment of previous ideas and habits of thought, but to creative transformation. In my mind, an effective teacher is a midwife in the process of creative transformation.

In terms of our previous discussion of the rhythm of education, the subject matter and an interesting manner of presenting it, the challenge of new ideas hopefully touches the recesses of creativity within each student, and stimulates their interest, prompting interest in further inquiry. This is the stage of romance. The expectation that students know the content of the subject matter is analogous to the stage of precision. The assimilation of content and the ability to interact with it critically parallels the stage of generalization.

My method of testing also is an attempt to model the relational vision. My preference, depending on the size, level, and subject matter of the class, is to give "take home" exams. In the "Contemporary Religious Thought" class I taught at Arizona State University, the final exam was a take home that asked students to delineate their own philosophies of life in critical interaction with three thinkers of schools we studied. I found that while most students had not given this question much thought, they found it very helpful in articulating their life orientation and providing an opportunity to learn about themselves. And by making the subject matter so existential, they certainly knew and remembered their material.

This time I beg my reader’s indulgence for personalizing this section to such an extent. I do not know if Whitehead would see my modeling of the relational vision as consonant with his views. Nevertheless, it is an exposition of this process thinker’s appropriation of the process-relational vision in the field of education.

III.

I have mentioned that for Whitehead the purpose of education was for individuals to discover the art of life. Of course, from a process perspective, this involves the enhancement of relatedness and creativity, which is what the previous discussion sought to illustrate. It also involves the mutual transformation brought about by a community of common inquiry. Moreover, if the characteristics of life involve the drive for the experience of beauty, harmony, intensity, contrast, and richness of experience, the educational process needs to embody and facilitate the unfolding of this fundamental drive.

In his book Higher Education and the Human Spirit, process theologian Bernard E. Meland delineates his concept of the appreciative consciousness, which he elsewhere describes as appreciative awareness. What Meland means by appreciative awareness is synonymous with my previous description, with great reliance on the work of Bernard Loomer, of the momentary self’s increasing ability to take into itself more and more of its environment in all its diversity, thus becoming a larger, richer self. Appreciative awareness is not strictly analytical or technical, but takes into account seriously the deeper sensibilities of the human spirit and life itself.

Meland illustrates what this involves in terms of higher education with several classes he taught early in his career at Pomona College. One of these classes was on "The Philosophy of Religion." His basic concern was to gain an understanding of the disillusionment of the modern temper and explorations of the possibilities of the reconstruction of faith. One method used that he considered very effective was the study of the religious response to a good not our own in previous ages, not only through the study of philosophy and theology, but art, literature, hymnody. The study of the existential issues that aroused individuals and peoples to particular responses and solutions stimulated students and enhanced their own understanding of the experience of disillusionment in comparison with the sensibilities of the past. For Meland, this was an example of the appreciative consciousness at work in critical inquiry.

Meland’s notion of the appreciative consciousness is illustrative of a fundamental tenet of process thought highly relevant to the field of education. In the common use of our language, reason and critical inquiry are seen as cold, calculating, detached, unemotional. All too often this has been the goal of dispassionate scholarship, all too often stunting the richness of the emotional life.

In the process-relational vision, reason and emotion cannot be detached from each other nor from their "physical" base. Whitehead described the prehension of the past on the part of a momentary experience as the "feeling of feeling," which contrary to the typical, common usage of language also involves "intellectual feelings"; the greater the presence of intellectual feelings the greater the capacity for novelty. A quick and somewhat obvious example of the fundamental interrelatedness of reason and emotion is the excitement a student may feel about a particular subject matter that impels her/him to learn more.

This aspect of process thought has led some of its leading exponents, including Whitehead, Meland, Cobb, to contend for increased attention to concrete, lived experience in the education process. Process thinkers such as those just mentioned are critical of the rather one-sided emphasis on analytical thought, all too often at the expense of concrete experience. They have also stressed the much neglected role of the imagination.

Given the importance of feeling, intuition, concrete, lived experienced, and the role of the imagination, the process-relational vision has some common elements with the contemporary discussion of the need to be more attuned to "right" brain orientation. Much of our orientation is "left" brain, analytical, active, neglecting the intuitive, receptive "right" brain. Without denigrating the importance of the "left" brain, process thought would concur with the attempt to achieve a greater sense of wholeness between the two sides of mental activity. While I am not aware of significant discussions of this issue among process thinkers, Matthew Fox and Brian Swimme, who though not directly influenced by process thought nonetheless share the relational vision, have incorporated elements of this, particularly through the use of art, in their own education process in order to stimulate the "right" brain, the intuitive and imaginative capacities of the human mind.

True to the holistic, ecological character of the process-relational vision, its adherents have advocated equally holistic practices in education. While that sounds nebulous, it involves integration through exposure to disciplines other than one’s own and interdisciplinary, team teaching. It involves looking at the world holistically rather than as comprised of isolated, discrete substance, viewing reality in terms of wholes rather than constituent parts. It allows for the opportunity to integrate and unify the diverse elements of one’s educational experience.

In many ways, our education has at least begun to do some of this. Some medical schools are requiring courses on biomedical ethics, some business schools are requiring courses in business ethics, etc. Although a good beginning, it barely touches the tip of the iceberg.

Whitehead himself thought there needed to be a greater integration and coordination between what today is called liberal arts, and scientific and technical education. Although one of these areas may be one’s specialization, one’s education is truncated without some sort of coordinated exposure to the other areas. Whitehead thought that the lack of technical manual activity on the part of educated people caused a deprivation of stimuli, vital to creative thought, to the brain. While appreciating the importance of professionals, he contended that the fragmentation seen in specialization, certainly a product and reflection of the substantialist view of reality, is an impediment to progress.

In the best sense of the meaning of the word "university," unifying the diverse areas of knowledge, Whitehead maintained that the most vital function of the university is in preserving the relationship between knowledge and the zest for life and adventure. It does this by uniting young and old alike in an imaginative quest for learning. The university imparts information and knowledge, hopefully, in an imaginative way.

In their stimulating, original, and creative work entitled Christian Identity and Theological Education John Cobb and Joseph C. Hough, Jr. (the latter is not a process thinker) advocate some thoroughgoing reforms of theological education. Much in the manner of my previous discussion of tradition, they advocate the formation of a dynamic Christian identity through an active appropriation and reappropriation (prehension) of the tradition as it wrestles with important problems from a global perspective and the context of world history. Theologians need to be reflective practitioners or practical theologians as they deal with problems of importance: hunger, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, poverty, sexism, racism, anti-Judaism, the despoliation of the environment, the quest for liberation in all its forms, self-consciously as Christians. The curriculum they suggest, along with participation in the community of faith, is designed to shape Christian identity by an intense study of how groups and individuals created themselves as Christians as they responded to felt needs and wrestled with issues of ultimate significance in their age just as we do in ours.

Without any necessary connotation of Christianity or theological education, the proposals of Cobb and Hough are highly suggestive for other fields. In the training of professional ministers, they advocate training for thinking while practicing. That is, in fact, what most professionals do. Physicians when making diagnoses or performing surgery, as Cobb and Hough point Out, are reflecting while practicing.

In terms of the relevance of proposals advocated by Cobb and Hough for other disciplines, it might entail, let us say, a regular, ongoing exploration on the part of scientists on the effect of their research on society. It may involve consideration of the ethical dimension of certain kinds of research. Or it may involve business schools inquiring into the role and ethics of business management in an interdependent world. Or the role of schools and departments of agriculture in relation to the problems of poverty and hunger. The possibilities are tantalizing and nearly endless.

The process-relational vision also illuminates other dimensions of the problems we face in education. As we have seen, process thought not only affirms pluralism, which is reflected in our schools, universities, and colleges no less than in our society, but advocates such an attitude of openness towards individuals, groups, cultures, and ideas different from ourselves and our own groups, cultures, ideas that the possibility of increased contrast, richness of experience, of mutual transformation, without loss of integrity, is enhanced. This is particularly evident in process thinkers’ advocacy of the appropriation of the histories and experiences of groups and peoples whose histories, life experiences, and subjective agency has been denied: women, blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, Third World peoples, etc. Moreover, it is vital for teachers to model this appropriation in the classroom.

If, as we have seen, the emergency of richer, larger selves capable of taking into account larger and more diverse dimensions of their environments is enhanced by environments which are conducive to such emergence, educational environments make a profound difference in learning. Moreover, there is the significance of the home environment in which students live. It is almost a truism today that pupils who come from homes where learning and education are valued do better in school than those that do not. Finally, there is the impact of the larger societies of which we are a part. For example, in dealing with our educational problems, we might very well ask about the effect of the rampant anti-intellectualism of our society on the education process and institutions of learning. The process-relational vision has no ready-made solutions for these problems. But it does set forth a vision and a context within which the problems and the possible solutions can be creatively explored.

There are also the perennial issues involved in the various dimensions of education in a democracy. One aspect of the problem is administration; particularly in institutions of higher learning, treatment of various departments and their faculties is as discrete, isolated substances, seeking their own competing self interests, that need to be balanced, instead of a community of common inquiry embarked on the quest for a common vision. Throughout this book, I have emphasized the notion of reality as participatory. Consonant with this view is an understanding of education that is participatory, involving scholars, teachers, students, parents and the community at large in a common journey.

Much of today’s emphasis is on the instrumental value of education, a means to a better job and higher standard of living. In accord with Whitehead’s stress on civilization and the civilized human being, process thought, to be sure, sees education as certainly of instrumental value but also of intrinsic value.

There is a marvelous story in Hasidic Judaism about a man lost in the forest. The more he tried to find his way, the more he got lost: the foliage got thicker, the trees taller until he could barely see the sky. Finally, he stumbled onto a clearing where he found an old man. He asked the old man if he would show him the way out of the forest. After a long pensive pause that seemed like an eternity, the old man replied, "No, I won’t show you the way out; but together we’ll find the way." With the caveat that teachers do have something to impart and do serve as midwives in the learning process, the story captures the vision of a community of co-learners embarked on the common journey of learning the art of life.

For Further Reading

Whitehead’s ideas about education are contained in Whitehead, Alfred North, The Aims of Education and Other Essays (New York: A Mentor Book, The New American Library of World Literature, Inc., 1963), and in the final chapter of his Science and the Modern World (New York: A Mentor Book, The New American Library of World Literature, Inc., 1956), Chapter XIII, "Requisites for Social Progress," pp. 192-208.

For a different view within the process perspective, the empirical side, see Wieman, Henry Nelson, Man’s Ultimate Commitment (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967), Chapter 9, "Education under Commitment," pp. 186-204.

For other works on education from a process perspective, see Brumbaugh, Robert S., and Lawrence, Nathaniel M., eds., Philosophers on Education: Six Essays on the Foundations of Western Thought (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1963), pp. 154-184); Brumbaugh, Robert S., Whitehead, Process Philosophy, and Education, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982); Ferre, Frederick, Shaping the Future: Resources for the Post-Modern World (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1976), especially Chapter 8, "Hope in Educational Institutions," pp. 144-163; Johnson, Allison H., "Whitehead’s Discussion of Education," Education, 66, 1946, pp. 653-671; by the same author, Whitehead’s Philosophy of Civilization (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1962); Meland, Bernard E., Higher Education and the Human Spirit (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1965).

The proposals of John B. Cobb, Jr., and Joseph C. Hough, Jr., for the reform of theological education may be found in Christian Identity and Theological Education (Chico, California: The Scholars Press, 1985). See also Cobb’s "Theology as Thoughtful Response to the Divine Call," in Jennings, Theodore W., Jr., ed., The Vocation of the Theologian (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985, pp. 104-119).

For a suggestive work on religious education from a process perspective, see Moore, Mary Elizabeth, Education for Continuity and Change: A New Model for Christian Religious Education (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1983).

For the ideas of Matthew Fox and Brian Swimme, see their previously mentioned works at the end of the last chapter. I saw their use of art in the educational process at the annual meeting of Educators and Trainers for Ministry, where they held a symposium on "Space and the Spirit," held in April, 1987, at Los Altos, California.

There have been several conferences held between process thinkers and educational theorists. A new, ongoing group has been established under the leadership of the previously mentioned Robert S. Brumbaugh. A forthcoming issue of the journal Process Studies will be devoted to process thought and education. For further information, contact the Center for Process Studies, School of Theology at Claremont, 1325 N. College, Claremont, California 91711.

I.

It would be a cliché and an understatement to claim that the advances of the natural sciences in the modern world have been nothing short of incredible. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of scientific discoveries in the history of the human race have occurred in the last couple of centuries. The experimental method and attitude of the sciences have been pervasive in modern industrial civilization. The practical impact of modern science can be discerned in the emergence of constantly changing technologies that have given rise to what is commonly called "modern scientific civilization."

In spite of its innumerable positive contributions, modern science has played its part in the creation of phenomena that threaten the planet with extinction: the despoliation of the non-human natural world and the invention of weapons capable of omnicide. The profoundly ambiguous impact of the sciences on our world is very much a product of its implicit and often not articulated, unexplored, vision of reality.

I have tried in this book to steer clear from the sometimes forbidding technical jargon of both process thought and philosophy in general. However, at this point, I would be remiss were I not to clarify the meaning and use of a word I have used before. The word "vision," as in the expression "the process-relational vision," I have used in a way synonymous with the word "metaphysics." A combination of two Greek words, "meta," meaning "above" or ‘beyond," and "physics," it literally means beyond or above physics or the world of physical appearances. As a traditional branch of philosophy, it refers to a comprehensive worldview or vision of reality, coherent, consistent, and adequate to the facts, that seeks to set forth the categories for the interpretation of all experience and the most general characteristics of all events.

Many, if not most, scientists would deny that their work is governed by, at least, an implicit metaphysics. Some would deny the plausibility of metaphysics in the modern world. They deny the very feasibility of creating a comprehensive, consistent, coherent, and adequate worldview; all that is possible and legitimate is the use of the scientific method, empirical (identified with sense experience) observation, not subject to governance by a metaphysical system nor a manner of proceeding from which a worldview can be constructed.

Process thinkers influenced by the speculative side of the philosophies of Whitehead and Hartshorne argue to the contrary. In fact, they would claim, if I may put a twist on Carl Becker’s address, "Everyman (sic) His (sic) Own Historian," that everyperson is a metaphysician. (I would imagine many of my readers never thought of themselves as metaphysicians!) All too often not explored, clearly thought out, or articulated clearly, nevertheless implicit in the way we live is a vision of reality. The key is to explore, to examine critically, articulate, and be intentional about the vision of reality by which we live.

The dominant vision of reality or metaphysics behind the work of the natural sciences is mechanistic, deterministic, and substantialist. Reality is treated as a machine, made up of isolated, discrete parts whose behavior is utterly and totally predictable. So called physical matter is inert and lifeless. In its very methods, science studies its fragmented part as an object, all too often to be manipulated.

This rather oversimplified characterization of the worldview of modern science is sometimes referred to as scientific materialism. This vision of reality is reductionistic: it isolates one dimension of reality as paradigmatic and explanatory of all at the exclusion of everything else. In scientific materialism, reality is reduced to inert, lifeless matter; life is explained in terms of the lifeless; biology becomes physics and chemistry at its lowest common denominator.

There is no room for purpose or the immediacy of subjective experience in such a world; it is very much like the image of the absurdity of human existence captured by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus, where Sisyphus, symbolizing the human condition, is condemned to roll a boulder up a hill, with the boulder always rolling down upon reaching the top, a process that is repeated for all eternity.

Metaphysically scientific materialism is a form of ‘monism,’ isolating one aspect of reality, matter, and treating it as explanatory of and subsuming all else. A corollary of this view, on the part of some scientists, is that the phenomenon of mentality in human beings can be explained by the complex interaction of molecules and atoms in the brain, as epiphenomenon of matter.

Paradoxically, in spite of their metaphysical monism, many other scientists are dualists in their epistemology, the theory of knowledge. Culminating in the philosophy of Descartes and his philosophical descendants, even today, such a dualism accents the primacy of the human mind, viewing everything outside it as lifeless and inert.

Needless to say, the paradox between metaphysical monism and epistemological dualism in much of modern science presents immense philosophical difficulties. Contemporary science assumes the fact of evolution (as opposed to the advocates of Creation-Science, who claim it is "merely theory"). If evolution is a fact and if the most basic meaning of evolution is that the complex forms of life emerge from the simple, how can the dualistic forms of evolutionary theory account for the emergence of the human mind from inert lifeless matter, the animate from the inanimate? Another form of this dualism is the commonly made claim that the evolutionary process continues on the human level with cultural evolution, which is totally distinct from biological evolution. The rift between the human mind and a lifeless, inert cosmos is thus widened, contributing to the modern experience of meaninglessness.

In a mechanistic universe, evolution is the rearrangement of already existing parts. The mechanism of the evolutionary process is natural selection, the successful, that is to say capable of survival and propagation of the species, adaptation of species and populations to their environment. Change is due to chance; the replication of multiplying cells is not exact, with consequent mutations occurring. Of course, most mutations make organisms less well adapted to their environments, explaining the extinction of so many species. Some mutations do confer essential features that offer the possibility of survival and reproduction. These characteristics, acquired or random, become a part of the genetic inheritance of succeeding generations.

A small but growing number of scientists have been critical of the materialistic, mechanistic, deterministic, substantialist premises of modern science. The discoveries of the "new physics," the theory of relativity, quantum physics, the principle of indeterminacy, all helped undermine these premises, and lead to the conclusions that energy events, waves, vibrations, and electronics are the fundamental constituents of reality. Developments in the "new biology," which deals with wholes of increasing complexity in the organization of interrelated parts rather than with discrete and isolated segments, especially in molecular biology and the growing field of ecology, with its discoveries about the basic interdependence of living organisms with other living organisms and with its larger environmental context, have further undermined these traditions assumptions. It is in the dialogue with the natural sciences, particularly in light of these new developments, that the process-relational vision has made one of its most important contributions, a topic to which we now turn.

II.

In its epistemology, process thought is a form of critical realism. That is to say, it maintains that there is a world outside of my experience of it. The world is not a construct of the human mind. In response to the age old question whether or not there is a tree falling if there is no one present to see or hear it fall, process thought answers that indeed there is such a tree.

It is important to note that critical realism is quite distinct from what is commonly called naive realism. An objectivist view that sees the nature of reality writ large in the universe and waiting to be discovered by the human mind, that claims theories are exact replicas of reality, is typical of naive realism. The critical realism of the process-relational vision, on the other hand, while stressing the independent reality of the world outside of myself, does not neglect the role of the subject in knowing. Object and subject, which, as we have seen throughout this book, are not absolutely distinct from each other, as momentary subjects prehend the objective past and become objects to be prehended by other subjects once their immediacy perish, known and knower, are included in a reality consisting of interrelated and interdependent events rather than isolated substances. Mutual interaction between subject and object, knower and known, is the context for the rise of knowledge rather than that context being in the object or subject alone.

The new physics, the theory of relativity and the principle of indeterminacy, have shown the involvement of the observer in the process of observation. In the process of measurement, for example, the result depends on the observer’s relation to what is measured. The scientist is also involved in selective subjective abstraction from the totality of a situation. The personal judgments and assumptions of the scientist influence the choice of methods and results. Even in the natural sciences, as I once heard John Cobb remark, the beginning of objectivity is to admit one’s lack of it.

This discussion of the "participant observer" gets at the crux of the difference between the mechanistic, deterministic, substantialist presuppositions of much of modern science and the process-relational vision. If I may reiterate a point I have made repeatedly, unlike the substantialist view in which reality is composed of discrete, isolated substances that have external relations, in the process understanding everything flows into the inner self-constitution of every momentary experience; reality is thoroughly participatory, characterized by internal relations. Let me illustrate further with two contrasting views of scientific observation.

A little while ago, I stepped outside to take a break and have a cigarette while I formulated the precise way I wanted to express my thoughts. Two young women, in the typical attire of college students, walked by drinking pop, having an animated discussion, with a good deal of laughter. In my description of the behavior of the two young women, I am attempting to imitate how a mechanistic scientist might recount her/his observations: I described what I saw and what I heard. A mechanistic scientist may recount the conversation verbatim, describe the muscular activity involved in movements, and the interactions of atoms and molecules,

What the mechanistic view fails to account for adequately is our common experience of subjectivity. I experience myself as valuing, feeling, thinking, acting. When I stepped outside I was not motivated only by the desire for a cigarette, nor could my behavior be explained merely in terms of the lowest common denominator in physiology and chemistry; I was equally motivated by my thoughts and the desire to communicate these thoughts as effectively and intelligibly as possible. There is even evidence in recent physiological studies that thoughts affect chemical processes. In a similar fashion, while I do not know their subjective feelings, I do not think surmising that laughter of the young women was prompted by feelings of joy and happiness would be unwarranted. Certainly in conflict with mechanistic views, nevertheless process thinkers claim that taking seriously subjective experiencing is scientific, corroborated by developments in the new physics and the new biology.

This way of looking at reality coupled with developments in the sciences has had a profound impact on other related issues. In physics, for example, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle or principle of indeterminacy has been interpreted in three ways: 1) that the "laws of nature" are deterministic, and that any uncertainty is due to human ignorance, which in due time will be resolved by science (Einstein), 2) uncertainty can be always explained by present experimental limitations (Neils Bohr), and 3) indeterminacy is an objective characteristic of reality Werner Heisenberg). If indeterminacy is an objective feature of reality, contrary to the mechanistic, deterministic view, there is real potentiality and novelty in the universe. Physicists and some process thinkers, such as the physicist and process theologian Ian G. Barbour, are cautious about making the long jump from indeterminacy in sub-atomic particles to human freedom and purpose,

While human freedom, agency, and purposive activity are different from the indeterminacy of microscopic particles, nevertheless they do not preclude the operations of chance. Indeterminacy is the denial of total determinacy and predictability, and as such is a foundation for the notion of creative freedom in the universe.

Another way of looking at this problem of chance and purpose is in terms of "the laws of nature." In the mechanistic, deterministic, substantialist view, laws of nature are inflexible, static, and inviolable. However, in the new physics, whose understanding process thinkers have utilized, the laws of nature are treated as statistical. That is to say, probabilities are statistical, subject to random variation, flexible, denying total determinism, and leaving room for creativity and genuine novelty. Thus, chance and purpose are seen as complementary.

That chance and purpose are complementary, and present in anything actual at all, is further illustrated by some recent developments in the new biology. In the dominant mechanistic view, the information stored in a DNA molecule was seen as totally determinative of the future development of the organism. However, molecular biology, which is more accurately called molecular ecology, has shown that the way the DNA molecules develop, which can be in a wide variety of ways, is contingent on the environment of the cell and molecule. The chemical environment of the molecule and the molecule itself are in constant, dynamic interaction, influenced by the magnitude of physical forces and configuration of chemicals within the cell. The chemical pathway chosen, although not consciously, shows not total determinism but statistical probability. In a molecule, the degree of self-creation and self-determination may be quite rudimentary, even negligible; a mechanistic molecular biologist might argue that this can be explained (away) as the defective working of totally deterministic systems. That, however, is exactly the point since if accidents are possible, the system is not totally deterministic and choice and purpose become real possibilities.

Another illustration is provided by the discussion of whether or not adaptive behavior not initially programmed by the genes, whose working has usually been interpreted in a deterministic fashion, can be inherited. Biology has not found any empirical evidence for the Lamarckian notion that the origin of genetic variation is the inheritance of acquired characteristics, that is to say, behavior traits acquired in adapting to environmental changes lead to bodily and genetic change passed on in a particular species. Consequently, the dominant neo-Darwinian view has been that organisms’ life experiences are not a part of the genetic information passed on to future generations.

Nevertheless, recent developments have resulted in the modification of this view within a neo-Darwinian framework. The work of C. H. Waddington, for example, showed what he described as the genetic assimilation of environmental effects.

A similar but better known example is Sir Alister Hardy’s description of the tits in England. By exploring, the tits learned to open milk bottles, beginning with the cardboard top, then the metal tops, in order that they may drink the milk. Ensuing generations learned the new pattern of behavior, which spread from England to the tits of continental Europe. It is reasonable to conclude that what began as an advantageous behavioral change can become a genetically determined characteristic. The genetic assimilation of learned adaptive behavior has been further corroborated by the work of Rupert Sheldrake.

The importance of these examples is that they point to purposive behavior in the restless exploring of non-human organisms. Process-relational thinkers here find scientific backing for their contention that there is an element of freedom, mentality, purpose in anything actual at all, and that needs to be the case in a consistently evolutionary view where the complex forms of life emerge from the simple.

To be sure, the mechanistic, deterministic, substantialist view is still dominant in the sciences. Nevertheless, as we have seen, there is a small but growing number of scientists, both in physics and biology, who operate with a relational model, who see some correspondence between the constructs of the mind and reality itself, however inexact, and who also see the possibility of restoring the experience of meaning if the non-human natural world is perceived as dynamic, creative, full of life and purpose, whom process thinkers have engaged in conversation; together they have attempted to explore new visions of reality better suited for adaptation to the urgent needs of the contemporary world.

III.

The mechanistic, deterministic, substantialist view of reality dominant in the sciences has had a profound impact on the development of what is commonly referred to as "modern scientific civilization." It goes without saying that modern technology has made innumerable contributions to the rise of modern civilization. Yet, it has contributed equally to the possibility of the extinction of human species and the planet through the discovery of weapons capable of omnicide and the technologies that devastate ecosystems.

Modern technology incarnates the mechanistic, deterministic, substantialist view of the theoretical sciences with all its devastating consequences. Nothing is more symptomatic of this than our love affair with the automobile. A symbolic image that comes readily to mind is that of the single passenger car on a six lane freeway that required the demolition and uprooting of thousands of homes and households, styles of human relations, cultural patterns, and the destruction of the non-human natural environment. The ideal of the private dwelling and the normativeness of the nuclear family embody, cut off from those outside the immediate household and deliberately limited in the opportunity to interact with others, reflects the substantialist view of reality as composed of discrete, isolated substances. In a different vein, over 90% of the arable land in the United States had been destroyed by the year 1900 simply due to methods of plowing that were utilized.

It is often argued that technology is neutral in and of itself; it is up to human beings to be more responsible in its use. For a process-relational thinker, this is not enough. We need technologies consonant with an ecological, relational vision of reality in a just, sustainable, and participatory society.

In The Liberation of Life: From the Cell to the Community, one of the most creative encounters between science and the relational vision, John B. Cobb, Jr., a process theologian, and Charles Birch, an Australian biologist and quite a lay theologian of the process persuasion in his own right, develop an ecological, relational view of reality and the sciences. Based on that view, they attempt to develop an ethic of life with concomitant public policy proposals.

No twentieth century scientist has been willing to define life (which I find supremely ironic as some physicians testify before Congress about when life begins!). Nevertheless, basing their position on developments in molecular, organismic, and population ecology, Cobb and Birch characterize life as an increasingly complex special form of the organization of molecules and atoms that also involves a temporary and local decrease in entropy; there is no absolute, dualistic distinction between the living and non-living, animate and inanimate. According to their view, an organism’s life may be described as the emergence, maintenance and disappearance of order. The gradual and progressive appearance of order is an apt description of development, most appropriately viewed in an ecological context. Individual development is the result of the interaction between internal operations originating from the genes and the environment. Physiology is the individual organism’s maintenance of order, ever changing and creative as it interacts with an equally ever changing and creative environment.

Life is characterized by the capacity for contrast, intensity, richness of experience. The degree of contrast and richness of experience depends in large measure, as we have seen, upon the environments of which organisms are a part and with which they interact. Needless to say, as we have also seen, the human and non-human environments of which human beings are a part and with which they interact need to provide the maximum opportunity for contrast, intensity, and richness of experience in a society that is just, sustainable and participatory.

The public policy proposals put forth by Birch and Cobb are consonant with ones we have discussed in a previous chapter: "steady state" economics, simplified life styles, participation by all in the decisions that shape their futures, and the development of "appropriate" and ecologically sound technologies. They also include shifting from the use of the private automobile to more environmentally sound means of public transportation, dwellings that insure sufficient privacy while fostering a greater sense of community and interconnectedness in the manner of Paolo Soleri’s model city, Arcosanti, and decreased use of non-renewable sources of energy and the increased use of solar energy.

The Liberation of Life is a creative synthesis of contemporary developments in the natural sciences and process thought that is mutually transformative, the very model of what the process-relational vision is all about. Recognizing the need for liberation from inward and outward sources of oppression, it also proposes a liberating vision free from the suffocating constraints of the mechanistic, deterministic, substantialist view of reality, it is all the more remarkable in having been written by two professional theologians, although one of them, to be sure, is a professional biologist. Only one chapter is explicitly theological, dealing with Life, based on the Whiteheadian understanding of God, exploring what enables the development of life, its increased complexity and capacity for intensity, harmony, contrast, and richness of experience through the lure of novel possibilities to be actualized and the abiding acceptance of all experience, preserved everlastingly with no loss of immediacy. In the consonance of their public policy proposals with the comprehensiveness of the process-relational vision, mutually transformed in its encounter with the natural sciences, Cobb and Birch model a public practical theology at its best.

IV.

If one reads the newspaper or watches the news on television or listens to the radio, one gets the impression that the relationship between science and religion is fraught with irreconcilable differences. The attention of the public media has focused on the issue of creation and evolution. The nuances and subtleties of the issues are ignored; the picture presented is that ‘never the twain shall meet.’ In describing evolutionary theory, the position of scientific materialism is treated as though it were the only possible position, ignoring developments in the new physics and the new biology, although, to be sure, some of the most eloquent spokespersons on the evolution side of the debate, such as Carl Sagan, are certainly mechanistic, deterministic, substantialist in their orientation. In a similar fashion, the uncritical literalism of fundamentalism is presented as the only religious option in interpreting Creation, ignoring the fact that outside of fundamentalist circles, that has not been the position of any contemporary religious thinker of any repute.

To be sure, within the widespread acceptance of the findings of modern science on the part of contemporary religious thinkers, one finds a wide variety of approaches and views about the relation between science and religion. In Roman Catholicism, for example, one goes from the official condemnation of the "modernists" in an early part of this century to what might be appropriately described as the dominant position today, found in Pope Pius XII’s Human generis (1950), which, concerning the relation between evolution and creation, accepts evolution yet insists on the special, "second" creation of the human soul. Within Protestant circles, 19th century liberalism, if I may oversimplify, adopted evolutionary ideas to support the notion of automatic progress. Neo-orthodoxy, rejecting what it considered the facile optimism of 19th century liberalism, accepted the finds of modern science, but drew a distinction between the realms appropriate for scientific and theological study. In the theology of Karl Barth, for example even though scientific discoveries are affirmed within the realm proper to science, the only way to know God is through God’s free decision to reveal herself/himself in Jesus Christ; any other way of attempting to know God, such as through the exercise of human reason, of which science is an example, is pretentious idolatry on the part of humans trying to play God. Rudoif Bultmann, often treated as within the neo-orthodox school but whom I prefer to see as a bridge figure between neo-orthodoxy and later developments in contemporary theology, adopted existentialism in his effort to render the Christian faith intelligible for today. In doing so, he also adopted the dualism of existentialism concerning the relation between lifeless, inert so-called physical matter, a mechanistic view of the non-human natural world, and the subjectivity of human beings. Theologians influenced by positivism, whose adherents saw reality as strictly that which can be experienced through the senses and knowledge as that which can be obtained through a narrow definition of the scientific method, and linguistic analysis, which purported that the only proper function of philosophy is the study of the usage of words and sentences, also treated science and religion as separate realms, distinct ‘language games,’ each with its own set of rules. Each of these approaches bifurcated the relation between science and religion, and adopted the dominant mechanistic, deterministic, substantialist view of reality.

Process theology is substantially different in its approach to the relation between science and religion. Whitehead himself saw his metaphysical vision firmly grounded in the discoveries of the new physics and studies of evolution. He never considered his own word as in any way final, but open to modification by further developments in the sciences.

Process theology no less claims to be firmly grounded in the findings of the new physics and the new biology. However, it has also sought to make its own distinctive contribution to the scientific endeavor. In its encounter with the sciences, process thought has not only appropriated new scientific insights but has attempted a mutual transformation through which the sciences are liberated from the dominance of the mechanistic, deterministic, substantialist view into a holistic relational vision that is more coherent, consistent, adequate to the facts, and congruent with the best in the contemporary scientific enterprise itself.

In addition to the examples already provided in this chapter, process thought is engaged in dialogue with physics concerning its understanding of time. The typical conception of time in modern physics allows for no distinction between past, present, and future, thus denying the significance of time. The problem with this view is that it is deterministic. The process-relational view and the common experience of time is that the past is determinate, where options are foreclosed; the present, into which the past flows, is the area of decision; the future is indeterminate. In dialogue with physicists such as David Bohm and Ilya Prigogine, process thought maintains that its view of time is more adequate, does not violate the fundamental tenets of physics, and upholds the concept and experience of freedom.

Since the issue of the relation between creation and evolution has been so prominent, and since the contribution of process thought is so distinctive in this discussion, I shall focus on it as paradigmatic of process theology’s treatment of the relation between science and religion. Accepting evolution as fact, not theory as the advocates of Creation-Science contend, process theologians see God creating through the evolutionary process. Moreover, creation is not just something that happened at the beginning of time and then stopped, it is still ongoing. In fact, most, but by no means all, process theologians deny the traditional doctrine of "creatio ex nihilo," creation out of nothing, the creation of the world as the beginning of creaturely beings altogether, affirming instead a form of creation out of chaos. God’s activity and relation to the world is the luring of the creatures with novel possibilities for their fulfillment in all their interdependence, and the eminent experiencing of creaturely experience and its everlasting preservation with no loss immediacy within the divine life; it is what God has always done and continues to do.

Needless to say, process theologians are not biblical literalists. Coming from a wide variety of denominational backgrounds, they accept the findings of biblical scholarship. Accepting the notion that biblical narratives are the product of many layers of oral tradition, they see scripture as paradigmatic of humanity’s interpretation of the experience (there is no such thing as uninterpreted experience!) of its ongoing relationship with God. Of course, as we have seen, not all of the tradition is equally illuminating or helpful in addressing contemporary problems. A literalist interpretation of the accounts of creation is neither illuminating nor helpful nor truthful.

One of the most distinctive contributions of process theology has been its correlation between the doctrine of creation and a theology of nature. Utilizing its relational view of reality, process theologies of nature have developed a comprehensive vision where all actualities, interdependent and interrelated, dynamic, pulsing, throbbing, with God as the supreme instance of creativity and relatedness, and as experiencing subjects, are of intrinsic value.

Process theologians see this in fundamental accord with the biblical accounts of creation. In the first verse of the first chapter of Genesis the connotation of the word "created" is that of continuing action -- Gods ongoing creative, sustaining, liberating activity in the world. While one cannot read evolution into the first chapter of Genesis, the gradually increasing complexity of the organisms reflected in each day of creation shows at least a dim awareness of growth, development, complexification. More importantly, God beholds creation and declares it good. For process theologians, creation reflects the glory of the Creator.

Much has been made of the deleterious effects of the commission to subdue the earth, a part of being made in the image of God. The scientist Lynn White, for example, has stressed the connection of this idea to the kind of values that have led to our despoliation of the environment. While this is a matter of some dispute among theologians, those of the process persuasion tend to take Lynn White’s criticism with the utmost seriousness, and respond with the development of a relational, ecological vision that goes beyond the encouragement of responsible stewardship in external relations to the non-human natural world.

According to biblical scholars, the original intent of the idea of dominion over the earth, part of P or priestly source (Genesis 1:1 - 2:3) [the Creation accounts come from two separate traditions: P, as we have mentioned, and J, "the Yahwist," Genesis 2:3 ff] in the creation account, which may have been a hymn sung in the Temple in Jerusalem, is quite contrary to the interpretation that has had such deleterious effects. Instead, the intent of this notion is to depict humanity as the priest of creation. By definition, a priest is a mediator. As the priests of creation, human beings mediate between God and creation, representing creation to God and God to creation. Instead of fostering an anthropocentric attitude, this image enhanced a tremendous sense of responsibility. As part of creation yet transcending it, as is true in varying degrees of all creatures, this image of human beings, while not drawn directly from process thought, is certainly a powerful evocative image that captures the relational vision.

Another powerful image in the biblical tradition that is helpful in the development of a theology of nature is found in the second chapter of Genesis where God commissions Adam to name the animals. In the Hebrew mind, to name something or someone was to confer identity on it/him/her. This involved a rather heavy sense of responsibility and humility: in effect it was seen as partaking of God’s ongoing creation of the world as God’s junior partners. In the contemporary world, many people, groups of people, women, blacks, the handicapped, Third World peoples, the earth itself as co-victim, have been denied the opportunity to name their world. As parts of the world we are called to name, we are equally called to enable others to take their rightful place in doing the same.

In seeking to develop a theology of nature, process theologians are supportive of endeavors to appropriate other images from the tradition, such as St. Francis’ compassionate love for the poor and treatment of animals as sisters and brothers, the Orthodox view of the church as inclusive of all of creation, and the use of the elements of bread and wine in the Eucharist, products of the interworkings between God, the non-human natural world, and human labor, that speak, to contemporary needs. In this, process theologians have much in common with the work of people like Matthew Fox and Brian Swimme. Fox and Swimme, affirming developments in the new physics and new biology, are highly critical of what they call the Sin/Redemption tradition in Christianity, which has led to the denigration of the non-human natural world, the human body, and people thinking all too little of themselves. They have attempted to recover the much neglected and suppressed creation-centered tradition that affirms the goodness of creation and human beings as the image of God.

Along with feminist theologies, as well as thinkers such as Fox and Swimme, process theologians have seen a profound relationship between the substantialist, mechanistic, deterministic view of reality and its unilateral conception of power prevalent in the sciences, the male experience of self-sufficiency, independence, domination, the despoliation of the non-human natural world, and subjugation of women and indigenous peoples traditionally seen as close to nature. With feminist theologians and advocates of creation centered spirituality, mutually transformed by the encounter with the new physics and the new biology, process theologians have sought a vision of the relational matrix of creativity, and to learn from the wisdom of the earth and the embodiment of that wisdom in the all too long suppressed and neglected traditions of women, blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, of Africa and Asia.

Once again I beg my readers’ indulgences in this rather lengthy digression into theology. I hope it has served as a fruitful illustration of process theology’s quest, in its encounter with the sciences, for the kinds of values and vision we need if we are to wrestle with the problems that threaten us with extinction.

I began this section with an allusion to the prominent attention the debate over evolution and creation has received. In the most recent form of this debate, the courts have ruled that Creation-Science is not science but the propagation of particular religious beliefs, and as such the mandatory requirement of it being taught in public schools violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution. With this assessment, process theologians would agree. However, some process theologians, Delwin Brown and Jay McDaniel for example, see some fundamental issues lurking beneath the surfaces of these debates. They advocate the inclusion the new physics and the new biology in the high school science curriculum instead of the more typical one-sided presentation of the dominant view of scientific materialism. They also argue for the inclusion, not in the science curriculum but in the humanities, of the comparative study of creation accounts in the history of the human race: various scientific understandings, various understandings in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions, the Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto, Native American, and African traditions. Only through such a study can a truly global perspective in our interdependent and interrelated world be attained.

But I am getting ahead of myself into the next chapter, the process view of education.

For Further Reading

In the first section of this chapter, in the discussion of metaphysics, I refer to those process thinkers who follow Whitehead’s speculative philosophy. One of the current debates among process thinkers is the felt need on the part of some to recover the more empirical side of Whitehead’s philosophy as well as process thought in general. While I am in great sympathy with this endeavor, I do not see the empirical and the speculative as mutually exclusive. In spite of the protestations of some on the empirical side of the debate, I see an implicit metaphysics in the most thoroughgoing empiricism. While I concur that the empirical side of the tradition has been neglected, it is certainly present in Whitehead’s philosophy and the development of the speculative side by his followers (just think back to the analogy of the airplane in the Introduction).

For excellent discussions of the need to recover the empirical side of the process tradition, see Lee, Bernard J., SM., "Two Process Theologies," Theological Studies 45 (1984), pp. 307-319; Axel, Larry E., and Peden, W. Creighton, eds., Dean, William, Special Guest Coeditor The Size of God: The Theology of Bernard Loomer in Context (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1987), also published simultaneously as the special January and May, 1987 issue of the American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, Vol. 8, Nos. I and 2; see also the May and September, 1984 issues of the same journal, Vol. 5, Nos. 2 and 3, devoted to "Bernard Meland and the Future of Theology.’ A.J.T.P. is devoted to the study of religious empiricism. For further exploration of these issues, see the following excellent studies: Dean, William, American Religious Empiricism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986); Frankenberry, Nancy, Religion and Radical Empiricism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987); and Hynes, William J., Shirley Jackson Case and the Chicago School (Chico, California: Scholars Press, 1981).

For some of the older authors on the empirical side of process thought, in addition to the articles mentioned at the end of Chapter I, see Loomer, Bernard M., "Whitehead’s Method of Empirical Analysis,’ in Cousins, Ewert H., ed., Process Theology: Basic Writings by the Key Thinkers of a Major Movement (New York: Newman Press, 1971), pp. 67-82; and by the same author, "The Size of God,’ in the book and A.J.T.P volume of the same title, pp. 20-51 in both volumes. See also the writings of Bernard E. Meland and Henry Nelson Wieman for religious empiricists influenced by yet distinct from Whitehead. Wieman introduced Whitehead’s works at the University of Chicago Divinity School, but later broke from the British philosophers metaphysics in favor of what he saw as a more thoroughgoing empiricism.

For an earlier work in the new biology, that has an affinity with process thought, see Agar, W.E. A Contribution to the Theory of the Living Organism (Victoria, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 1951).

For works of related interest in the new biology, alluded to in this chapter, see Waddington, C.H. The Strategy of the Genes: A Discussion of Some Aspects of Theoretical Biology (London: Allen and Unwin, 1957); Hardy, Sir Alister, The Biology of God: A Scientist’s Study of Man the Religious Animal (New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1976); by the same author, The Living Stream: A Restatement of Evolution and its Relation to the Spirit of Man (London: Collins, 1965), and The Divine Flame: An Essay Towards a Natural History of Religion (London: Collins, 1966), Vols. I and II of the Gifford Lectures, 1963-65; Sheldrake, Rupert, A New Science of Life (Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, Inc., 1981). For a classic exposition of the view of scientific materialism emphasizing the role of chance, see Monod, Jacques, Chance and Necessity, tr. by Austryn Weinhouse (New York: Vintage Books, 1972). Ecological views based on systems theory may be found in von Bertalanffy, Ludwig, General Systems Theory (New York: Braziller, 1968). For an early work exploring the new physics and influenced by process thought, see Capek, Milic, The Philosophical Impact of the Contemporary Physics (New York: Van Nostrand Press, 1961).

The literature exploring the relationship between science and process theology is vast. See Barbour, Ian G., ed., Earth Might Be Fair: Reflections on Ethics. Religion, and Ecology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1972); and Barbour, Ian G., ed., Finite Resources and the Human Future (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1976). See also Barbour, Ian G., Issues in Science and Religion (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1971); by the same author, Myths, Models and Paradigms (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1974); also, Barbour, Ian G., ed., Science and Religion: New Perspectives on the Dialogue (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1968); see also by the same author, Science and Secularity: The Ethics of Technology (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1970); also, Technology. Environment, and Human Values (New York: Preager Publishers, 1980). A very helpful introduction is Birch, L. Charles, Nature and God (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1965); also by the same author, "A Biological Basis for Human Purpose," Zygon, 8,1973, pp. 244-260); "Nature, Humanity and God in Ecological Perspective," in Shinn, Roger L., ed., Faith and Science in an Unjust World: Report of the World Council of Churches Conference on Faith, Science and the Future, Vol. I (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980); also his "Participatory Evolution: The Drive of Creation," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 40,1972, pp. 147-163; by the same author, "Purpose in the Universe: A Search for Wholeness," Zygon, 6,1971, pp. 4-27; and "What Does God Do in the World?" Union Seminary Quarterly, 30, 1975, pp. 75-83.

See also the previously mentioned works of Kenneth Cauthen, Christian Biopolitics: A Credo and Strategy for the Future (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1971), and The Ethics of Enjoyment (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1975). Also helpful is his Science. Secularization, and God: Toward a Theology of the Future (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1969). We have already mentioned and discussed at some length Cobb, John B., Jr., and Birch, Charles, The Liberation of Life: From the Cell to the Community (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Helpful in the discussion of the philosophical issues involved is Cobb, John B., Jr., and Griffin, David Ray, eds., Mind in Nature (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1977). Another excellent study is Ferre, Frederick, Shaping the Future: Resources for the Post-Modern World (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1976), especially with its public policy proposals in the realms of religion, politics, economics, and education based on the relational vision.

In a much more philosophical vein but pertinent to our discussion of chance, indeterminacy, and purpose are the works of Charles Hartshorne. See for example, Hartshorne, Charles, The Logic of Perfection (La Salle, Illinois: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1973), and Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984).

Still other excellent studies of the relation between science and religion from a process perspective are Haught, John F., The Cosmic Adventure: Science. Religion, and the Quest for Purpose (New York: Paulist Press, 1984), and by the same author, Nature and Purpose (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, Inc., 1980). Also helpful as an overview and creative in its own right is Hamilton, Peter N., The Living God and the Modern World: Christian Theology Based on the Thought of AN. Whitehead (Philadelphia and Boston: United Church Press, 1967).

For a fine correlation of evolution and creation, see Overman, Richard H., Evolution and the Christian Doctrine of Creation (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1967). Yet another elaborate and good study of a wide range of issues in the relation between science and religion is Schilling, Harold K., The Consciousness in Science and Religion (Philadelphia: United Church Press, 1973).

Although not about process thought but advocating a form of the relational vision is Carolyn Merchant’s excellent and useful historical work in The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1980).

For the discussion between physics and process thought, see the essays in Griffin, David Ray, ed., Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986). For treatments of the subject along with the new developments by physicists see Bohm, David, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (Boston: ARK Paperbacks, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983) and Prigogine, Ilya, From Being to Becoming (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1980).

Influenced by Whitehead’s metaphysics but highly critical of the process doctrine of God is the important and insightful work of Langdon Gilkey. See his Creationism on Trial: Evolution and God at Little Rock (Minneapolis: The Winston Press, 1985). In addition to recounting his experiences as a theological witness for the ACLU, at the 1981 Creationist trial in Little Rock, Arkansas, the author provides one of the most cogent analyses of the relation between science and religion. See also his Message and Existence: An Introduction to Christian Theology (New York: The Seabury Press, 1980), and Religion and the Scientific Future (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1970). His earlier Maker of Heaven and Earth: The Christian Doctrine of Creation in the Light of Modern Knowledge (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1965) is still a useful, comprehensive work. Unlike most process theologians, Gilkey defends the importance of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.

A process philosopher influenced by substantialist modes of thought and who also affirms the notion of creatio ex nihilo is Robert C.Neville. See his Creativity and God: A Challenge to Process Theology (New York: The Seabury Press, 1980), and God the Creator: On the Transcendence and Presence of God (Chicago: The University Press, 1968).

Although not a process thinker and considered a dualist by John Cobb, important is the work of Arthur R. Peacocke, a physical biochemist and Anglican priest and theologian. There are elements, in my view, in his thinking common with process thought. Describing himself a panentheist, one who believes God is in all things and that all things are in God, and the use of the analogy of the composer still writing the musical score, responding to the musicians, as descriptive of God’s relations to an ongoing, creative evolutionary process, does share common themes and ideas with the process-relational vision. See his Creation and the World of Science (New York: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1979); also by the same author, God and the New Biology (San Francisco: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1987); also his Intimations of Reality: Critical Realism in Science and Religion (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984); Science and the Christian Experiment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); and Peacocke, Arthur R., ed., The Sciences and Theology in the Twentieth Century (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).

I have alluded several times to Paolo Soleri’s innovative model city Arcosanti near Cordes Junction, Arizona. For some of Soleri’s better known writings, see Arcosanti: An Urban Laboratory? (San Diego: Avant Books and Consanti Foundation, 1984); Fragments (San Francisco: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1981), and The Omega Seed: An Eschatological Hypothesis (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1981). Soleri’s vision is profoundly influenced by the writings of the French Jesuit paleontologist and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who although often considered within the process school also has some substantial differences from Whiteheadian thought. For an excellent discussion of the topic, see Barbour, Ian G., "Teilhard Process Metaphysics," in Cousins, Ewert H., ed., Process Theology: Basic Writings by the Key Thinkers of a Major Modern Movement (New York: Newman Press, 1971), pp. 323-350.

Several works previously mentioned contain some of the finest and best known expositions of a theology of nature from a process perspective. See Is It Too Late: A Theology of Ecology (Beverly Hills, California: Berziger, Bruce and Glencoe, Inc., 1972) by John B. Cobb, Jr., and Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1976), pp. 63-79, co-authored by Cobb and David Ray Griffin. For a theology of nature that diverges at certain points from process theology in relation to the doctrine of God and written from within the Roman Catholic tradition, see Carmody, John, Ecology and Religion: Toward a New Christian Theology of Nature (New York: Paulist Press, 1983). For a theology of nature from a Reformed perspective not directly influenced by process thought but one that sees the image of God in relational terms, see Hall, Douglas John, Imaging God: Dominion as Stewardship (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1966). An excellent development of a theology of nature from an Orthodox perspective is provided by Gregorios, Paulos, The Human Presence: An Orthodox View of Nature (Geneva, Switzerland: World Council of Churches, 1978).

In its attempt to develop a theology of nature, recover suppressed traditions, and in seeing a profound connection between the traditional Western denigration of the non-human natural world, process thought has much in common with feminist theology. For explorations of these themes from the perspective of the experience of women and feminist theology independent of process thought, see Christ, Carol P., Diving Deep and Surfacing (Boston: Beacon Press, 1980); Goldenberg, Naomi R., Chancing of the Gods (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979); Ruether, Rosemary Radford, New Woman. New Earth (New York: The Seabury Press, 1975) and especially her excellent systematic theology from a feminist perspective, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1983). See also the previously mentioned works of Beverly Wildung Harrison.

Matthew Fox is a prolific author. For what I consider the best and most representative of his writings, see Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality (Santa Fe, New Mexico: Bear and Company, 1983), and A Spirituality Named Compassion and the Healing of the Global Village. Humpty Dumpty and Us (Minneapolis: The Winston Press, 1979). See also Fox, Matthew and Swimme, Brian, Manifesto for a Global Civilization (Santa Fe, New Mexico: 1982). Very readable is Brian Swimme’s The Universe is a Green Dragon: A Cosmic Creation Story (Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1984) which touches on many of the scientific issues discussed in this chapter.

Of related interest are the previously mentioned papers from the conference "Toward a Post-Modern World" in Santa Barbara, California, January, 1987. Also of interest is the journal Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science which is dedicated to the exploration of the relation between science and religion and fostering a link between the two. Under the able editorship of Professor Karl E. Peters, Zygon’s editorial offices are at Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida 32789.

I.

The language of psychology has become a communicative tool in the United States. Whether we read an advice column in the newspaper or watch a soap opera, crime drama, even a televangelist attacking the evil effects of psychology, we hear the language of pop psychology. Words and phrases like "acceptance," "self-esteem," "self-actualization," "inferiority complex," "superiority complex," "appropriate" and "inappropriate behavior" have become a part of common, everyday language.

I remember an incident, funny, sad, and tragic at the prison in Arizona where I was serving as a chaplain. I was sitting in on an initial classification in the maximum security section. When an inmate was incarcerated, she went to the maximum security section, part of which was also used as an intake unit, where she underwent a battery of tests and was observed intensely for thirty days. After a maximum period of thirty days, she appeared before the Classification Committee for initial classification to maximum, medium, or minimum security, depending on "time and crime," psychological profile, notoriety, adjustment and recidivism. During the process of initial classification, the Program Supervisor, who chaired the committee, would question the inmate closely about the circumstances leading up to and the commission of the crime itself. The pre-sentence report, written by a probation officer for the benefit of the sentencing judge and a social history of the inmate as well as the details of the crime, at times vivid and gruesome, was available to the members of the committee.

During the particular incident I am recounting, the Program Supervisor, fascinated, was questioning an inmate about the circumstances leading up to the commission of her crime. Increasingly intrigued, he kept asking her, "Then what happened?" Finally, as all of us present listened in wonder, she calmly concluded, "I shot the s.o.b." Losing all semblance of professionalism, the Program Supervisor angrily retorted, "I would say that was most inappropriate behavior."

The process-relational vision has much in common with the language, concepts, and theories of modern psychology. For example, I used the psychological term "internalize" in attempting to explain the words "to prehend," with its technical meaning, in process thought. Also, there is an affinity between the process view of the drive of a momentary experience to realize itself and the psychological concept of self-actualization, particularly prevalent in the writings of psychologists belonging to the "the Third Force," such as Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls, Victor Frankl, Erich Fromm, and Rollo May.

The discovery of the subconscious is probably modern psychology’s greatest contribution to our world. Process-relational thought is in fundamental agreement with modern psychology’s estimate of the singular power of the unconscious. However, it is in respect to the role of the unconscious in human development and its connection to temporal passage, the relation of past, present, and future, that some of the key differences between process thought and much of contemporary psychology emerge.

Sigmund Freud, for example, stressed the way a person’s development is hindered or arrested by a fixation in one of the infantile stages of development, usually the Oedipal phase. Or, being a smoker, a notion that hits close to home with me is that people who habitually stick things in their mouths (smokers, alcoholics, overeaters) are fixated in the even earlier infantile oral phase. The habit and urge of constantly having something in the mouth is symptomatic of a whole lifestyle reenacting the infant’s sucking the mother’s breast (I cannot resist mentioning that Freud was a cigar smoker himself).

In the thought of Carl Jung, the self, which is more than the ego, emerges in the process of individuation, the integration of the unconscious and conscious elements of the psyche into a unified whole. Part of the unconscious that has a profound impact on the development of the human personality are the "archetypes" of the "collective unconscious," primordial, formative images of the human family from its beginning replicated in each individual. While for Jung there is nothing fixed, eternal, in the process of individuation, nevertheless he also claims that there is from the very beginning a dormant ground plan in each person that makes human behavior quite predictable. The role of the therapist is to unleash the creative energy and potentiality latent in this ground plan.

The highly influential work of Abraham Maslow highlights his theory of self-actualization. He divides human needs into a pyramidical hierarchy. At the bottom are the basic safety needs, food, shelter, etc.; higher up on the scale is the need to be loved; and, finally, at the top, are the self-actualization needs. In Maslow’s view, the basic or what he calls deficiency needs have to be met before one can become a self-actualizing person. All needs, including those of self-actualization, are biological and instinctual. In other words, self-actualization is the unfolding of latent potentialities inherent in the human organism. In a manner similar to Jungian theory, the role of the therapist is that of midwife to this birthing process.

Freud, Jung, and Maslow are highly influential representative thinkers in contemporary psychology. I have chosen their thought to highlight some of the basic differences between modern psychology and the process-relational vision.

If the individuation and self-actualization are unfolding of a person’s potentialities inherent to her/his "nature," if those potentialities are present from the very beginning and making human behavior very predictable, in spite of some ambiguity of language, these representative figures operate with a substantialist view of the self. The self is a centered self, an isolated substance whose essential nature does not change in spite of transcience and the passage of time. The potentialities of the human personality may be actualized and individuation achieved, but that does not change the core of one’s personhood.

The substantialist view of the self in these thinkers is also deterministic. In a manner analogous to the unfolding of history as a previously written scroll in our discussion of God’s omniscience in the Introduction, the actualization of potentialities latent in the human personality is like the printout of a computer, provided the right buttons are pushed. If potentialities are present from the beginning, if they are biological and instinctual in nature, inherent to the human organism, there is no room for genuine novelty.

Needless to say, as we have seen, process-relational thought rejects such substantialist and deterministic views of the self. Process thinkers have appropriated the insights of contemporary psychology, of thinkers such as Freud, Jung, and Maslow. However, they have and continue to do so, without violating the integrity of their vision, only by not accepting the prevalent substantialist and deterministic understanding of the self. In this regard, there is much contemporary psychology can learn from the process-relational vision.

II.

Temporal passage, the relation of the past, present, and future, provides another illustration of the similarities and differences between contemporary psychology in all its diversity, and the process-relational vision. I have claimed above that psychology’s greatest contribution to our world has been the discovery of the subconscious, an assessment with which process thought agrees.

In traditional psychotherapy, the focus is on the past. For Freudians, for example, a person’s unconscious early childhood memories shape, in fact determine, one’s personality development. Life is a complex psychodrama reenacting these early memories. In the case of Jungians, the power of the unconscious, particularly the collective unconscious, with its archetypal images, is no less determinative. The full development of the human personality is individuation, the integration of the conscious and the unconscious, cultivating an openness to and allowing the unconscious to do its work.

Other contemporary therapeutic models provide a powerful critique of this emphasis on the past. in the manner of the self-fulfilling prophecy discussed in the last chapter, if you concentrate solely on a person’s past, she/he will be fixated on that past, blocked from moving beyond it. In my professional career, I have dealt with numerous people who have undergone the traditional kinds of therapy. Without exceptions, conversations would dwell on the past, displaying an almost total inability to deal with the present and face the future, and a constant justification and search for the reasons explaining one’s feelings, thoughts and behavior.

The prototypical example of this kind of critique of the traditional psychotherapeutic model is Gestalt therapy. The most popular representative of this school is Fritz Perls. Instead of focusing on the past, Perls and other Gestaltists emphasize living in the present, on the "here and now." As far as they are concerned, dwelling on the past is an avoidance of the "here and now," all too often an all too convenient way of escaping dealing with one’s feelings through rational explanation and the use of abstraction. Even though the past is the "background" for one’s development, that is precisely where it needs to stay if one is to live in the all important present.

The process-relational vision is different from the traditional therapeutic model and Gestalt therapy yet able to do justice to their quite different concerns. Process thought is indebted to the insight that at least 90% of the psychic life is unconscious. But the unconscious does not totally determine our development.

As we have seen, mentality and freedom are not synonymous with consciousness as far as process thinkers are concerned. If at least 90% of the psychic life of humans is unconscious and there is some degree of mentality and freedom in anything actual at all, on no matter how rudimentary, even negligible a level, then most expressions of mentality and freedom occur at the level of the unconscious. Even unconsciously or subconsciously, a momentary experiencing subject creates itself as it prehends the past of the possibilities of the future.

In one very important sense, process thought agrees with Gestalt therapy on the importance of the present; the present moment, in its immediacy and intensity, is all we have. However, the relational vision is not of one mind with Gestalt therapy’s disparagement of the past.

As important as feeling the immediacy of the present is in a vision that highlights the momentariness of the self, the constitutive role of the past cannot be neglected. The past, not only my own but that of the entire universe, enters into and is formative of my present moment of experience, even as I also display care about the immediate and long range future.

Fritz Perls and other advocates of Gestalt therapy as well as other notable thinkers in the field of psychology such as Abraham Maslow, Erich Fromm, Rollo May, Ludwig Binswager, Carl Rogers, and Victor Frankl have been profoundly influenced by existentialist philosophy. If I may oversimplify, much of existentialism has depicted human life as a train ride toward death. Human beings, the only creatures as far as we know conscious of the fact that they are going to die, have a great deal of difficulty handling the awareness of their mortality; it produces anxiety. Humans do all sorts of things to escape having to deal with their own death; they fall prey to the vast pressures toward conformism, putting their antennae out to see what is expected of them, "to keep up with the Joneses," or participate in totalitarian movements and support totalitarian regimes. This is what existentialists describe as the fall into inauthentic existence.

For existentialists, every moment is totally novel, discrete, isolated, disconnected from every other moment. Every moment is a moment of decision in which a human being creates himself/herself. And in every moment, human beings are confronted with the choice of living authentically or inauthentically.

Existentialism can be and has been religious or atheistic. In Christian versions of existentialism, the decision to live authentically that we face in every moment is a decision for or against the grace, the unbounded, unconditional love of God in Jesus Christ. In other forms of religious existentialism, every moment is a moment of decision to live authentically or inauthentically; authentic existence is being in touch with the Transcendence that is fundamental to the character of reality. In the thought of the Jewish Martin Buber, the equivalent of authentic existence is the cultivation "I-Thou’ relationships, treating others including non-humans as subjects instead of getting caught up in the endless web of inauthentic "I-It relations, which though necessary for emotional survival, treats others as objects. Atheistic existentialists maintain that authentic existence is choosing to live as oneself, with integrity, in every moment.

With a pervasive sense of depersonalization in many segments of Western societies, existentialism has struck a responsive chord. There is much in existentialism with which process thought can agree: the importance of the present moment, in all its subjective immediacy, as the moment of decision through which the momentary self creates itself. In process theology, the present is the moment to decide for or against (or fall somewhere in between) the lure, the ideal possibility God beckons us to realize in every moment.

However, there are two points in existentialism with which the process-relational vision takes issue. One concerns the notion of authentic existence. As attractive as this idea may be, as much as we may resonate to it, the typical uses of the words authentic existence have a culturally relative slant. The concept has a Western ring to it, and even though culturally limited, is made normative for all humans by existentialist philosophers. This certainly goes against the grain of the process-relational vision.

A second issue is much more problematic. If each moment is totally novel, discrete, disconnected from every other moment, existentialism is unable to account for any connection and relation between past, present, and future. A theme I have emphasized throughout this book, fundamental to the process-relational vision, is the basic interconnectedness of the past, present, and future, and of all things.

Some Gestalt therapists have argued against my interpretation of their understanding of the relationship between past and present. I am sure what I have written here will be subject to debate. Nevertheless, I still maintain that Gestalt therapy denigrates the past, and that existential psychologies and psychotherapies, profoundly influenced by the existentialist philosophy, are unable to account adequately for the relation between past, present, and future.

III.

Much of traditional psychotherapy has been highly individualistic. Most therapy is conducted on a one-on-one basis between therapist and patient. To be sure, the one-on-one kind of counseling can be highly effective. This type of therapy, also utilized by Gestalt therapy and other forms of existentialist psychiatry, deals with "problems" in strictly personal terms. There is much to said for the enhancement of a sense of personal responsibility and of coping skills to deal with life’s problems. However, such therapy excludes the broader questions and problems of the impact of relations and environment, except to the extent of how can a person deal with them, what she/he can do about them. Such individualism should not be surprising from a therapeutic practice so deeply rooted in a substantialist view of the self.

The last quarter of a century has seen the proliferation of a wide variety of group therapies. Some are for specific groups, youth, the bereaved, couples, etc., providing people with a sense that they are not alone with their own peculiar set of problems. Others, such as conjoint and family therapies, are based on organismic and systemic approaches. They maintain that families, as we saw in Chapter II, are systems or organisms, wholes made up of interdependent and interrelated parts; instead of trying to "cure" the "identified patient," a skilled therapist will work on the relationships; change the relationships and the individuals will change as well.

Other forms of group therapy have taken an approach that deals simultaneously with people’s personal problems as well as taking responsible action in being change agents within the larger environments of which they are parts. This kind of therapy resembles the psychoanalytic theories of Alfred Adler, who, like Jung, was a disciple of Freud who broke away from the master. Adlerian psychotherapy, like most traditional therapies, is insight oriented. That is to say, as persons gain insights into their feelings, thoughts, and the reasons for their actions, they are enabled to deal more constructively with their problems and change patterns of behavior destructive to themselves and others. However, along with existentialist and "growth" therapies, exposing the reasons, the whys of one’s behavior does not guarantee automatic change and can lead to excessive self-preoccupation; part of the therapeutic process is release from such excessive self-preoccupation through engagement in projects that are beneficial to others as well as oneself. The kind of therapy that has taken the dual approach of dealing with one’s personal problems and cultivating one’s skills as a change agent, through such activities as community organizing, has been tried successfully among segments of our population who experience a pervasive sense of powerlessness and fatedness, blacks in inner city ghettos, Hispanics in the barrios, the elderly in cities, in suburbs.

With these recent developments process thought can only heartily concur. As we have seen, in the process-relational vision, reality is both social and individual; human beings are both social-relational selves and precious individual, unique persons. While humans transcend their environments and are radically responsible for their self-creation in every moment, the momentary selves that they are are profoundly shaped and constituted by the totality of their environments. Thus, healing cannot be restricted to individuals but needs to be extended to the environments that make us who we are.

I can remember at the prison where I worked how we would attempt to provide the opportunity for inmates to participate in professional counseling. Virtually all of us realized the futility of this unless members of the inmate’s family, a human environment that all too often contributed to the circumstances leading up to incarceration, were also involved in this counseling. Most of us were also keenly aware of the impact of larger environmental conditions, violent neighborhoods with few or no opportunities for employment, which were to a large extent seen as outside the purview or influence of the staff.

A development related to the growth of therapies that deal with personal problems, in part by trying to provide the opportunity to resolve them by responsible engagement in social change, in transforming one’s environment, is the increased questioning of the use of psychology to help people adapt and adjust to the world in which they live. To be sure, there is much in life, much in our environment, to which we can only adapt. For example, the psychological dynamic of many inmates upon the initial occasion of incarceration, particularly among first time offenders, was similar to the process of grief and bereavement. Indeed, for many of them it was very much a time of grief, dealing with loss of freedom, family, friends, familiar surroundings. Of course, repeat offenders were so institutionalized that, once released, they would shortly thereafter, often unconsciously, commit a crime just to be incarcerated again. The initial thirty day intake period was a period of adjustment during which inmates were not only tested and observed, but, hopefully, let go of their denials of the commission of their crimes, of their incarceration, and accepted what they could not change. As indispensable as this process was to an inmate’s psychological survival, an uncritical and fatalistic acquiescence to the inmates’ and the institutions’ way of doing things and values was immeasurably destructive of the psyche and of the integrity of the personality.

Contemporary psychology, with few exceptions, such as to some degree the thought of Carl Jung, has also been profoundly misogynist, and recently women, as well as men, have sought to rid the field of its sexism. Also, much of therapeutic practice has had a white middle class bias. For example, the methods and techniques of pastoral counseling learned in seminary, while certainly helpful, are geared to relatively well-educated white middle class people; the people I have dealt with in much of my career have been in large measure the marginalized of our society, and I found many of the skills I had acquired of limited use, having to acquire new ones on my own.

Although there are many circumstances in life that we can only accept and to which we can only adjust, there are many others to which we simply should not acquiesce: the violence and arbitrariness of our prison system, both on the part of inmates and staff; death squads in Central America; violations of human rights, torture, murder all over the world; apartheid in South Africa; hunger; sexism; racism; working for companies unscrupulous in their dumping of waste, etc. Process thinkers are critical of the abuse of contemporary psychology in attempting to adapt people, to help them become uncritical and unquestioning, to unacceptable circumstances; they see such misuses as contrary to and distorting of the fundamental relational and creative character of reality.

IV.

Since so much of process thought has been theological in nature, it should come as no surprise that most of the work exploring the relationship between the process-relational vision and psychology has been in the field of pastoral care and counseling. Taking into account my critical comments throughout this chapter, I need to say that process thinkers have been quite eclectic in their use of the various schools of contemporary psychology; there is no process-psychology "party line."

Process theologians concerned with the field of pastoral care and counseling have focused particularly on the singular significance of unconditional acceptance in the therapeutic process, and the ontological dimension of acceptance. That is to say, acceptance is grounded in the very structure of reality. Most psychotherapeutic schools do emphasize the unique importance in the therapist’s conveying unconditional empathetic acceptance to the client, which is not the same as approving of all one’s actions, thoughts and feelings, if there is to be any movement beyond the repetition of the past that impedes a positive response to the novel possibilities of the future. An exceedingly important part of this dimension of the therapeutic process is treating the client as an experiencing subject rather than an object or a case to be studied or manipulated; in therapy, the client is not told what to do and how to live but enabled to draw on her/his own resources to resolve problems and actualize his/her potential. In the context of this discussion, the unique contribution of the process-relational conceptuality is its exploration of the grounding of acceptance in the structure of reality itself.

In the discussion of a process interpretation of character and virtue, we saw the importance of responding to and accepting the sensitivity, receptivity, responsiveness, empathy, unconditional love and acceptance we receive from others; our response cultivates and nurtures these virtues in ourselves, enables us to become larger selves, and respond to the novel possibilities we are offered in each moment. We have also seen that God is the supreme instance of sensitivity, receptivity, responsiveness, relatedness, and creativity; the very nature of the divine is unconditional love and acceptance as God takes all experience into the divine experience, preserves it everlastingly with no loss of immediacy, and offers new possibilities to be actualized based on the divine experience of creaturely experience. Our fundamental intuition and response to God’s acceptance of our lives into her/his life provides a powerful sense of the meaning of life and bestows a profound sense of dignity.

At this point, it might be helpful to refer to the notion of a "proposition" in Whitehead’s philosophy. A proposition is a lure, provided by God, that combines something actual with a possibility, since that is how possibilities become relevant for actualization. What is actual includes stories, gestures, actions, colors, people. Thus, the person, gestures, words, facial expressions of the therapist all serve as propositions that provide the reassurance, and they convey acceptance that empowers the client’s response to novel possibilities.

If to be religious is to imitate the divine, and if a pastoral "carer" represents the divine, that imitation and representation needs to reflect the divine sensitivity, receptivity, responsiveness, unconditional love and acceptance that empowers us to see the destructiveness of the past as meaningful and leads us to a newness of life, the very pattern of grace. This movement of grace, reflected in the therapeutic relationship and the healing process, is mutually transformative of both the client and the carer. Moreover, God is supremely involved, as she/he is in all experience, in the therapeutic process.

A criticism sometimes made of the process God, in a play on Aristotle’s words describing God as the "unmoved mover" that process thinkers are fond of attacking, is that he/she is the "moved unmover." In a similar fashion, if pastoral carers re-present the "moved unmover," they themselves can function only as "passive-aggressives" in the therapeutic process.

Needless to say, in my mind, this criticism is unwarranted. God is not only "moved," the supreme instance of receptivity, but also quite a "mover," the supreme instance of creativity who envisages all possibilities, orders them in graded relevance to the needs of the creatures, and lures, prods, beckons all actualities to their fulfillment in interdependence with all others.

The concern of pastoral carers critical of the process conceptuality is its perceived inability to deal with confrontation in pastoral care. This certainly does not necessarily follow; process thinkers acknowledge that novel possibilities often confront where we are and where we have been. All pastoral carers influenced by process thought are saying is that for confrontation to be effective in the therapeutic process there needs to be a relationship of trust and acceptance.

I also need to refer to a number of other points in this discussion of pastoral care. In adapting the methods and models of psychotherapy, the distinctively religious dimension of pastoral care was obscured. Since the early and mid 1970’s, many in the field of pastoral care have moved to recover their distinctively religious roots while affirming the very positive gains made by their appropriation of psychotherapy.

Process theologians have been quite involved in this development. Don S. Browning, who earlier in his career made significant contributions to the discussion about the ontological dimensions of acceptance, has had a vital role in the movement to recover the roots and identity of pastoral care and all ministry in an ongoing, dynamic religious tradition. Still very much influenced by the process-relational vision yet following an independent direction, he has been instrumental in recent attempts to reclaim the connection between ethics and pastoral care.

Intriguingly, the contemporary conversation about the relationship between ethics and pastoral care is the counterpart in that field of the recovery of the tradition of the ethics of character and virtue. In its own way, contemporary psychology has had its own implicit version of the ethics of character and virtue, its own vision of the "good" person: an integrated, self-actualizing human being. Much of contemporary pastoral care has appropriated this vision, and while affirming this, has recently sought its distinctively religious basis.

Browning compares the ethics of character and virtue, which he also calls the ethics of disposition, with his predilection for an ethics of principle. He correlates the insights of an ongoing, creative religious tradition, psychological needs, and ethical reflection in an endeavor to do a "public" "practical" theology open to the tests of common human experience and rational inquiry for its truth claims.

My own preference and that of other process thinkers is for an ethics of character and virtue. However, such ethics need not be separated from an ethics of principle. Although the predominant focus of Brownings’s work is on the ethics of principle, he correctly points out that an ethics of character and virtue is contingent on an ethics of principle. Traditionally that has indeed been its use, a vital ingredient for the formation of character and the concomitant cultivation of virtues. This remains an issue open for further discussion and exploration.

Finally, the recent discussion of the different stages of the life cycle has been a significant development in contemporary psychology. The resolution of the "issues" in each stage of the life cycle affecting all ensuing stages yet open for further completion parallels the ideas of perpetual perishing, the flow of the past into the self-constitution of the present, and the genuine novelty of the present and the future. Penelope Washbourn, basing her work on women’s experience as well as the process-relational vision, renders a particularly articulate account of women’s lives as cycles of numerous deaths and resurrections, with genuine transformations and novelty. Process theologians have also been sensitive to the importance of symbols and rituals in the resolution of the psychological issues involved in each stage of the life cycle.

Two other points of importance need to be mentioned. Process thought is highly critical of reductionism, the attempt to reduce existence to one of its dimensions, such as biological drives or instincts, in contemporary psychology, in the natural sciences, as we shall see in the next chapter, and in all academic disciplines. In the process-relational vision, all events are complex and multi-causal.

One school of contemporary psychology with which process thought has little in common is behaviorism. To be sure, process thinkers acknowledge how profoundly we are shaped by our environments and how much we can be conditioned. Some pastoral carers influenced by the process conceptuality use some of its techniques effectively without violating the dignity of their clients. Nevertheless, the crucial point for the process-relational vision is that no matter how much we are shaped by our environments, no matter how much we are conditioned, no matter how much we have to endure, the spontaneity, the capacity for novelty and creative freedom that makes us who we are, can never be totally eradicated. The relationality that shapes us so profoundly is the very matrix of novelty and creativity, their further emergence and cultivation.

For Further Reading

For a sample of the literature in psychology discussed in this chapter, see the following: Erikson, Erik H. Childhood and Society (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1950), especially for a delineation of the stages of the life cycle: Frankl, Victor E., The Doctor and the Soul (New York: Knopf, 1968), and by the same author, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Washington Square, 1963); Freud, Sigmund Beyond the Pleasure Principle, tr. by James Strachey (New York: Bantam, 1959), and by the same author, Civilization and its Discontents, tr. by James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1961); New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis tr. by James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1965); An Outline of Psychoanalysis, tr. by James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1949), Fromm, Erich, The Art of Loving (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1956); Jung, Carl G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious in Collected Works (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959), Vol. IX, and by the same author, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1933), and The Undiscovered Self (Boston: Little and Brown, 1957); Maslow, Abraham H., The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (New York: The Viking Press, 1972), also by the same author, Motivation and Personality (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1954); Religion, Values, and Peak Experiences (New York: The Viking Press, 1964); Toward a Psychology of Being, second edition (Princeton, New Jersey: Van Nostrand, 1968); May, Rollo, Love and Will (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1969), also by the same author, Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1972); Man’s Search for Himself (New York: The American Library, 1967); Perls, Fritz, Ego. Hunger, and Aggression (New York: Vintage, 1969); Rogers, Carl R., Client-Centered Therapy (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1951), and On Becoming a Person (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961); one of the classics of behaviorism is Skinner, B.F., Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: A Bantam/Vintage Book, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1972).

An excellent example of a systems approach in family therapy is Satir, Virginia, Conjoint Family Therapy (Palo Alto, CA.: Science and Behavior, 1964). For a prolific author whose recent writings show an increased sensitivity to the healing of the human and non-human environments in which we live as part of the therapeutic process, see Clinebell, Howard, Basic Types of Pastoral Care and Counseling: Resources for the Ministry of Healing and Growth, Completely Revised and Enlarged (Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1984); also by the same author, Contemporary Growth Therapies (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1981), and Growth Counseling (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1979).

For the literature in process theology and pastoral care, see Cobb, John B., Jr., Theology and Pastoral Care (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977); for the finest and most creative work in this area, see Jackson, Gordon E., Pastoral Care and Process Theology (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1981); other works relating process theology and pastoral care include Lapsley, James N., Salvation and Health: The Interlocking Processes of Life (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1972); Williams, Daniel Day, The Minister and the Care of Souls, Harper’s Ministers Paperback Library (New York: Harper and How, Publishers, 1977); The Spirit and the Forms of Love (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1968); also by the same author, ‘Suffering and Being in Empirical Theology," in Meland, Bernard E., ed. The Future of Empirical Theology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969), and "Theological Reflections on the New Modes of Pastoral Care," in Lewis, Douglas, ed., Explorations in Ministry, I Doc, 1971, pp. 240-256.

The early works of Don S. Browning have a focus similar to the works mentioned above. See for example Browning, Don S. Atonement and Psychotherapy (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1966); and "Psychological and Ontological Perspectives on Faith and Reason," in Brown, Delwin, James, Ralph E., Jr., and Reeves, Gene, eds. Process Philosophy and Christian Thought (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc.) pp. 128-142). One of his early attempts at the recovery of the religious roots of pastoral care and the connection of that field to ethics is his The Moral Context of Pastoral Care (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1976). For later works that pursue the same theme and also develop an ethics of principle, see his Religious Ethics and Pastoral Care (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), and Religious Thought and the Modern Psychologies: A Critical Conversation in the Theology of Culture (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987). See also his Introduction and "Pastoral Theology in a Pluralistic Age," in Browning, Don S., ed., Practical Theology: The Emerging Field in Theology. Church. and World (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), pp. 1-18, and pp. 187-202 respectively, especially for a fruitful discussion of the ethics of disposition and the ethics principle. For a view different from Browning’s, exemplifying an ethics of character and virtue, see Lapsley, James N., "Practical Theology and Pastoral Care: An Essay in Pastoral Theology," in the same volume, pp. 167-186.

For the most extensive treatment of the relationship between the process thought and contemporary psychology, see the papers available through the Process Psychotherapy Institute.

For an incisive treatment of women’s experience from a feminist perspective at variance with much of traditional psychotherapy, see Gilligan, Carol, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1982). For an extremely creative encounter between feminist thought, the process-relational vision, and depth psychology, see Keller, Catherine, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1986)

I.

Politics deals with power, its exercise, its distribution, its acquisition. The common conception of power, in line with the inherited Western tradition, is the ability to carry out purpose, to produce an effect. It is equated with the capacity to bring about a desired effect, to change, manipulate, control the human and non-human natural world in accord with one’s aims.

Process thinkers see this understanding as "unilateral," that is one-directional; unilateral power is the ability to influence, to affect another. There is no room for reciprocity, for being influenced and affected by others. The unilateral conception of power is based on a substantialist view of reality. If reality is constituted by discrete, isolated substances, which require nothing but themselves and God for their existence, then the values that lead to a meaningful existence are self-sufficiency and independence. Anything that smacks of dependency, receptivity, allowing ourselves to be influenced by others are signs of weakness, and impediments to the actualization of one’s self-sufficient independence.

During the past week, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North has been testifying before the joint House and Senate Committee. Charismatic, bright, articulate, he has become an overnight hero to the public of the United States. In the nightly news, respondents to public opinion polls describe him as a "can do fellow," "a take charge kind of a guy," "admirable for his ability to cut through red tape," "a true patriot" who was "doing what he was paid to do." What people seem to admire about Oliver North is his exercise of unilateral power, his ability to make things, and rather dramatic ones at that, happen regardless of criticisms and consequences to himself, of which he was fully aware.

One member of the committee did point out that if North was telling the truth, it meant that no elected official was aware of the clandestine, covert operations he and the late CIA. Director William Casey had instigated. Of course, the implication of this is that these operations were carried out in the best interests of the United States, its people and government, by people not accountable to anyone but themselves. The attitude displayed by Oliver North typifies the unilateral conception of power and its perversion.

We can see the unilateral conception and power in traditionally stereotyped gender roles. Males are seen as superior because they are active, self-sufficient, independent, making things happen, unemotional, and unaffected by the vicissitudes of life. Women, on the other hand, are supposed to be dependent, passive, the "weaker sex" in need of both the brains and brawn of men. The most perverted and distorted expression of the unilateral conception of power in male-female relationships is domestic violence. Abusive and violent males think they are "manly" asserting their "natural" domination and control over their wives and children. Abused women tend to be passive, putting up with their husbands’ violent behavior in order to "keep" them, often thinking they deserve the abuse, and justifying their passivity and acceptance as their self-sacrificial duty and lot in life.

The significance of the religious dimension of the unilateral conception of power cannot be minimized. In spite of nuanced arguments and philosophical maneuvers, God was, in effect, traditionally conceived as the sole power in the universe, perfect in that power, and, as part of the very meaning of perfection, supremely unaffected by the world. Deism was no less a manifestation of the unilateral conception of power. God still had the power to do whatever God wanted to do, but having set the marvelous machinery of the universe operating according to the regularities of the laws of nature in motion, she/he voluntarily retired, always ready to intervene externally in case of a cosmic emergency or malfunction, and unaffected by the course of events. If as we saw in the Introduction, to be religious is to imitate God, the God that is imitated is the model of a Cosmic Macho Male.

We see another aspect of the religious dimension of the unilateral conception of power in the interpretation of the person of Jesus in one strand of the Christian tradition. All of Jesus’ power is derived from God. The exercise of power on his part is equally one sided: the people he encountered were the recipients of his love, forgiveness, teachings, and healings. In this part of the tradition, Jesus’ very divinity is contingent on being unaffected by others, by the varied changes of life.

Needless to say, the political expression of the unilateral conception of power tends to be hierarchical, authoritarian and dictatorial. If to be affected and influenced by others is a sign of weakness, it is easy to see how that kind of thinking denigrates the opinions, thoughts, and feelings of others, and sees them as obstacles to the realization of one’s goals or those of one’s group.

Since power is equated with the ability to influence others, with aggressiveness, and receptivity with passivity, weakness, and dependency, one of the consequences of the unilateral conception of power exacerbates the divisions and inequalities between groups and individuals; the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, the strong get stronger, the weak get weaker.

If self-sufficiency, independence, being unaffected by others are guiding values in one’s life, another consequence of this view of power is detachment from the depths of existence. One is unable to respond to another in her/his concreteness, to be fully present to him/her and the deeper recesses of one’s being.

In one dimension of the Christian tradition, power and love are seen as contrasting and contradictory. Jesus is the very incarnation of the self-sacrificial love of God Christians are supposed to emulate. He is the supreme example of powerlessness. However, even this voluntary relinquishment of power, as we shall see, is predicated on the unilateral conception of power.

II.

Lord Acton once said, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Process-relational thinkers claim that this statement is true about the unilateral conception of power. They also maintain that advocates of this point of view affirm an important truth about the nature of power, the creative, active dimension of reality. However, to claim that is all there is to any conception of power is fallacious.

In the process-relational vision, anything actual at all, from the tiniest energy event to human beings, has some degree of power. No organism can stay alive without some exercise of some degree of power. With its emphasis on a receptive as well as an active side to all experience, the process-relational vision sees power as both the capacity to affect, to carry out a purpose, and to undergo an effect, to be acted upon. Thus, in process thought, Lord Acton's maxim would not be accurate; power, in itself, is not necessarily evil and corrupting; it simply is, and is necessary at that for there to be anything actual at all.

Earlier, in another context, I used the example of my response to the students in a class. I shall use it again to illustrate the relational character of power in process thought.

Even though I, as the teacher, exert the greatest influence, each person and thing exercise power in the classroom. Our breathing alone is already an exertion of power. The very fact that we exchange body vapors within the first forty-five minutes is illustrative of mutually influencing. My responding to the non-verbal communication of my students and consequent "shifting of gears" is a further example of the reciprocal, relational character of power. Of course, in process thought, it is not just the humans who exercise power but the chairs, the desks, the carpet, the atoms, the molecules, the energy events that comprise them as well, entering into the self-constitution of every momentary experiencing subject.

If the process understanding of reality is thoroughly relational, its conception of power is equally relational. We have already seen the consistent theme in process thought that anything that is is what it is by virtue of its relationships. Everything is interrelated and interdependent with everything else, Reality is not constituted by discrete, isolated substances that require nothing else for their existence.

In our discussion of the process understanding of the self, it was noted how the past, not only of the person, but of the ecology of the human and non-human environment, of the whole universe, enters into the self-constitution of the momentary self. I maintained that a process understanding of character and virtue would cultivate sensitivity, receptivity, responsiveness, to enable the emergence of a larger, richer self, able to take in greater contrast, intensity, leading to greater experiences of beauty. Instead of such sensitivity, receptivity, and responsiveness being signs of weakness, process thought would maintain they are virtues and marks of strength; it takes a very strong person indeed to allow more and wider elements of the world to enter into oneself, to wrestle seriously with new ideas, to penetrate the frames of reference of those different from oneself without being overwhelmed or losing one’s sense of integrity.

Leadership provides a good example of the relational conception of power. A leader may be clear about the goals and purposes she/he may want to accomplish, but is equally clear that without the people he/she is supposed to lead, his/her efforts are for naught. Of what value is the conductor of an orchestra without the players or a band leader without the band behind her/him? A leader is sensitive, receptive, and responsive to the thoughts, feelings, needs, ideas of those she/he leads, sifting through the petty, trivial, irrelevant, inappropriate, yet affirming the personhood of others, guiding, motivating to the realization of new possibilities.

In this context, the tragedy of Oliver North is that the opinions, thoughts and feelings of the people and their elected representatives concerning aid to the contras did not matter; what seemed to matter, in an unabashed exercise of unilateral power, was the provision of such aid, by whatever means, in the name of the national interest, patriotism, and fighting communism, by people who in their actions were claiming they knew what was best for the United States.

Returning more explicitly to our discussion of relational power, God is the supreme instance of power. Since all actualities have some degree of power, God is not the only power, but "that which none greater can be conceived." God as the greatest power is foreseeing all possibilities, ordering them in graded relevance, and luring the creatures with ideal possibilities for their self-realization in all their interdependence. God, thus, always acts persuasively and not coercively. Moreover, as we have seen, God is supremely related to all actualities, receiving all experience into the divine experience, preserving it with no loss of immediacy, and providing novel possibilities for the creatures based on the divine experience of creaturely experience. If God is the supreme instance of creativity and relatedness, then God’s perfect power is supremely and eminently relational.

If Jesus is the decisive incarnation of God in the Christian tradition, then that incarnation needs also to be understood in relational terms. Instead of others being the passive recipients of his person and work, they were indispensable to his sense of self and ministry. If Jesus was in any sense human in the full meaning of the term, then he was profoundly shaped, just as we are, by his human and non-human environment, by the culture and history of his people. Who would he have been without the community that gathered about him? What kind of an impact would he have had had not some, at whatever stage of development of the tradition, discerned his specialness? The consistent picture in the Gospels is thoroughly relational: forgiving, unconditionally accepting and loving, sensitive, receptive, responsive, thus enabling others’ response to the possibility of a newness of life God offers in each moment, and acting it out through table fellowship with sinners, the rejects, the despised, the oppressed, the marginalized of his day.

One consequence of a relational conception of power is the enhancement of the experience of the concrete dimension of life. If I cultivate my capacity for sensitivity, receptivity, and responsiveness, I am more likely to allow the lives and experiences of others to make a difference in mine. I am more likely to be able to share in and to be fully present to the joys and sorrows of others, and, consequently, enable the mutual transformation of others and myself. The relational conception of power also allows me to experience the deeper recesses of myself. The relational vision grounds me firmly in lived experience in all its depth.

There is an extremely wide diversity in how actualities, organisms, exercise power, depending on complexity of organization, capacity for novelty, and immediate environment. Power relations in human societies are intricate and complex. Yet, the relational conception of power is a nonhierarchical, communitarian, egalitarian, democratic, and participatory vision applicable to every dimension of reality.

Even as I claim that the relational conception of power is egalitarian, I would be remiss not to mention that only a few process thinkers deal directly with the issue of equality and justice. Rather, they focus on participation. Reality is participatory through and through; everything participates in everything else as every actuality enters into the self-constitution of every other actuality, as it is both created by and creative of everything else. The way equality has been discussed has the premise of discrete, isolated substances. In the process-relational vision, the enhancement of and opportunity for participation, relatedness, and creative freedom in all levels of life, of participatory democracy in politics, in economic production, culture, in a sustainable and intrinsically valuable ecosystem, is one of its most important themes.

In my view, and that of some more prominent thinkers, in line with the relational conceptuality, the deepest human need is to belong, to belong to a community where one’s sense of "somebodiness," of unique personhood is affirmed, and where one participates effectively in the decisions that affect his/her life. The rebellion of young people of my generation in the 1960s and early 1970s was in large measure against a pervasive sense of powerlessness in relation to and remoteness from the massive institutions that shape our lives. In a different vein, the intellectual and political popularity of neo-conservatism, particularly the Reagan Administration, at least until the Iran-contra controversy, is attributable to its articulation of similar feelings and striking a responsive chord in much of the public. Liberation theology, liberation movements in Central America and the rest of South America, South Africa, Asia, etc., "People’s Power" in the Philippines, student protests and a democratic reform movement in South Korea, as well as the stubborn persistence of dissidents in the Soviet Union, and Solidarity in Poland all bear witness, in their various and fragmentary ways, to peoples’ fundamental desire to belong and to participate effectively in the decisions that shape their futures.

At this point, I need to explore how contemporary sociology and political science are typically divided into two different perspectives: the functionalist or consensus theory and the conflict theory. The functionalist or consensus holds an organismic view of society, maintaining that it is a system composed of interdependent and interrelated parts, with each performing a function contributing to a whole. In this view, social change is gradual and evolutionary, and achieved on the basis of consensus. The conflict perspective, on the other hand, claims that society is made up of competing groups that struggle against each other for scarce resources. Since no dominant socio-politico-economic group relinquishes any of its power voluntarily, social change occurs as a result of conflict, violent or non-violent, between groups with diverse self-interests.

Adherents of the conflict view criticize process thought, with its emphasis on gentleness and persuasion, as unable to account for and deal constructively with conflict either in human societies or the non-human natural world. To be sure, process thought has some affinity with the consensus model. It is also true that the process-relational vision has tended to minimize conflict and could benefit from appropriating the insights of the conflict perspective.

However, process thought has within itself the resources to do justice to the conflict model. Whitehead himself remarked, referring primarily to the food chain but also symptomatic of reality itself, that all life is robbery but that the robber needs to be justified. The writings of Whitehead, Hartshorne, Williams, and other process thinkers are replete with a sense of the tragic character of all existence, possibilities never actualized, perpetual perishing, resistance to the possibility of newness of life and the need to share and be present to each other’s lived experiences, the ambiguity of all instances of creative freedom that can always be used for good or ill. One of the challenges for process thought is the articulation of its resources in responding to the conflict model in a violent world.

III.

The dominant school in political and international relations theory for at least the last forty years has been the school of realism. The prototype of realism is Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), whom I consider the United States’ greatest native-born theologian, and whose influence not only on theology but cultural and political thought cannot be minimized.

Niebuhr was steeped in the theological liberalism prevalent in the 19th and earlier part of the 20th century. This type of liberalism is not to be confused with what is commonly identified today as political liberalism. In fact, Niebuhr himself thought that what have come to be described as political liberalism and conservatism have common roots sharing in the premises of 19th century liberalism; in the last century, both would have been considered forms of liberalism.

The theological and political ethos of 19th century liberalism was a tremendous confidence in human beings; if people became more reasonable, better educated, more loving, and institutions more democratic, history would progress to fulfillment more or less automatically.

Like his European counterparts, whose liberalism was disillusioned by the advent of World War I, Niebuhr was jaded by World War I but even more so by thirteen years in a parish in industrial Detroit and the Great Depression. He sought, as had the liberals, to find a way to articulate what he considered to be distinctive about the Christian faith in response to the disillusioning events of the world in which he lived.

Niebuhr set out to do this by analyzing human existence. He claimed that human beings live at the juncture of nature and spirit, finitude and freedom. Humans have an insatiable capacity for self-transcendence, yet a limited one. Niebuhr used the simile of the sailor climbing the mast, looking at the heights above and staring at the abyss below to describe the human condition of living at the juncture.

Human beings are not very good at handling this situation; it produces anxiety. In our endeavor to cope with anxiety, we tend to deny either our capacity for freedom and self-transcendence, which makes us who we are, or our finitude. When we deny spirit, self-transcendence, and freedom, we get caught up in what Niebuhr calls the vitalities of life, through which we can deny our sense of historical responsibility. Examples that come to mind, in accord I think with Niebuhr’s intentions, are the game of musical beds played by people who attempt to achieve a sense of self-worth through their sexual conquests, alcoholism and other forms of substance abuse, and consumerism. This Niebuhr describes as the sin of sensuality.

When we deny our finitude, our limitations, we tend to treat ourselves as the center of the universe. To use Niebuhr’s expression, we have a propensity toward undue self-regard. This is the sin of pride, which Niebuhr treats far more extensively than the sin of sensuality.

Our undue self-regard is accentuated in the lives of groups, communities, and nations. Not only is there an accumulation of individuals with an undue self-regard, there is a collective pride of nations and groups that has a proclivity toward self-aggrandizement; the self-seeking of institutions, groups, and nations has a life and momentum of its own.

Individuals and communities also have a tremendous capacity for self-deceit. In personal relations, even when we think we are most altruistic and loving, there is always something in it for us. When nations and communities claim to be acting altruistically, they still act in their own interests. Niebuhr advocated an honest and unpretentious admission of this and responsible pursuit of the legitimate self-interests of nations and communities. Thus, human existence is thoroughly ambiguous.

For Niebuhr, the distinctive feature of Christianity is the doctrine of original sin, the propensity toward self-centeredness and self-seeking. Its pervasiveness can be seen in the theologian’s understanding of love. Niebuhr distinguishes between the different traditional understandings of love: "agape," total altruistic, self-giving, self-sacrificial love, that as far as he is concerned is characteristic of the divine love alone, and "philia," brotherly/sisterly love, which is to some extent altruistic, self-sacrificial, self-giving but also inclusive of one’s self-love and self-seeking. Agape is always a judgment, a "transcendent critique" of any partial fulfillment of philia, beckoning to its greater realizations.

Given the magnified excessive self-regard of communities, groups, and nations makes love an impossibility in their relations, although love does serve as judgment and a transcendent critique. The best that can be hoped for in the relations between groups, communities, and nations is justice, the form that love takes in these complex relations. For Niebuhr, justice is the balance of power. The power of dominant groups, which they are not willing to relinquish voluntarily, needs to be checked by the increase of power among less powerful groups; the quest for power on the part of the powerless needs to be checked as well. The balance of power is dynamic and ever shifting, and since no form of justice ever achieves perfection, all approximations of justice are always relative.

Tyranny and anarchy are the twin evils to be avoided. This is done in part by a delicate balance of competing forces, groups, and interests. Niebuhr claims that the system of checks and balances provided for by the Constitution and its approximations in U.S. history are models of what he means. Also, he sees freedom and equality as perennial principles of justice that, like agape in relation to philia and justice, serve as judgment on their approximations (or lack thereof), and call communities to fuller approximations.

I beg my readers’ indulgence in this somewhat lengthy discussion of the thought of Reinhold Niebuhr. I have mentioned previously that his impact cannot be minimized. The previous discussion was for the sake of setting the stage of an exploration of the realist school in political and international relations theory, and the alternative offered by process thought.

IV.

Niebuhr’s influence in the late 1940s was such that he was an emissary for the State Department in different capacities, met with its Policy Planning Council, and helped formulate George F. Kennan’s policy of containment of the Soviet Union.

Niebuhr also had a tremendous impact on political and international relations theoreticians, such as Hans J. Morgenthau and Kenneth W. Thompson, in addition to Kennan. These theoreticians were not concerned with Niebuhr’s attempt to explore the distinctive features and contributions of the Christian faith, and probably thought it had been a while since they had seen an original sin. Niebuhr and the political realists did share some common convictions: the need for an adequate anthropology, understanding of human existence, which they saw as fundamentally self-centered and self-seeking; this being the case, the measure of an effective foreign policy was the responsible pursuit of the national interest. An area of basic disagreement is the role of ethical principles, such as freedom and equality, which most realists, including Morgenthau, who is at times ambiguous on the point, deny. As far as they are concerned, the only standard is whether nor not a certain action or policy promotes the national interest.

Realism provided a pervasive framework and set of assumptions. While sharing that framework, realists have disagreed among themselves about specific issues and policies. In one of the first teach-ins in the spring of 1965, Hans Morgenthau and Zbigniew Brzezinski, then an adviser in the Johnson Administration, later Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, debated the Vietnam War. Disagreeing vociferously, they argued their respective positions on the basis of shared assumptions. Morgenthau eloquently claimed that the conduct of the war was contrary to the national interest, while Brzezinski was articulate in defending the Administration’s policy as promoting the national interest. As different as they are on some issues, in different administrations of two major parties, two successive National Security Advisers, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Brzezinski, epitomize the articulations of a realist basis for the conduct of foreign policy.

The response of process thinkers to Niebuhrian realism was appreciative, appropriating many of its insights about human existence. Some drew positive comparisons between Whitehead and Niebuhr. Daniel Day Williams, no less appreciative and also having appropriated some of Niebuhr’s thought, defended what he saw as liberalism’s positive contributions, and provided a critique that was to have a resurgence later. First, Williams claimed, in Niebuhr’s analysis, human beings never really change; they remain self-centered and self-seeking. Yet, for this process thinker, while certainly remaining ambiguous, humans are really and effectively transformed by the divine grace, a point we shall explore a bit differently below. The second point, as we shall see, is related to the first: his understanding of the different types of love, the relation between agape and philia and their relation to justice, is fundamentally dualistic, presupposing a dualism between self and other, leaving no room for the kind of self-affirmation necessary in any kind of loving relationship.

It was the advent of Latin American liberation theology and feminist theologies in the early and mid 1970s that provided a resounding critique of Niebuhrian realism. Latin American theologians of liberation and their North American sympathizers attacked realism as "the ideology of the Establishment" that served to justify and legitimate oppressive policies. Feminists claimed that Niebuhr’s thought was profoundly mysoginist: his delineation of the sin of sensuality was a rehash of the traditional denial of bodiliness, associated with the oppression of women, and the sin of pride, historically, was not a sin of women but of white middle class males; the sin of women was the lack of self-affirmation, the sin of "hiding" (in the kitchen). Black and Third World liberation theologians shared in this critique of the Niebuhrian view of the sin of pride. If the oppressed are to share in the process of their own liberation, their sin is not pride but the lack of it, but the lack of a sense of self-worth, of being a precious human being.

Liberation theology in its various forms and feminist theology confronted process thought with a need to identify resources within its own vision that provide an alternative to realism. We have seen how profoundly a vision of reality, whether substantialist or relational, affects lifestyle, socio-politico-economic organization, education; we live out our vision, our governing paradigms. And they become self-fulfilling prophecies. If I think I shall have difficulty in dealing with a person I counsel regularly, I am quite likely to create a situation where that happens. If I look at reality a certain way, living out that vision will have its consequences.

If I view politics and international relations from the framework of a realist, I am likely to help shape a world that looks like the one the realists describe. That does not mean that is the way the world really is or should be.

Realists treat the nation-state as though it were normative, forgetting that it is a relatively late emergent in the course of history. They also deal with nation-states as though they have agency and subjectivity; we have seen that in the process thought, individuals alone have agency. Also, the allegiance of human beings is much more to their immediate communities, family, ethnic group, sub-culture, region, even professional associations, rather than nation-states. The various separatists groups within nations, the French in Quebec, the Basques in Spain, the Sikhs in India, the Tamils in Sri Lanka, testify to this phenomenon.

The realist position advocates acting out of enlightened self-interest. It is predicated on a substantialist view of reality, assuming a dualistic understanding of the self-other relationship. In the relational view, as we have seen, there is no absolute distinction between the self and the other. The past of everything in the entire universe is part of the self-constitution of a momentary self, and once its subjective immediacy perishes, becomes a datum to be prehended in the becoming of future selves in the same person as well as that of all actualities.

Quite obviously the premises of the realist positions and the process-relational vision are quite different, and the consequences for political life equally dissimilar. If we, not just humans but all creatures, are literally "members one of another," if the self that I am now is a momentary self that also cares about the becoming of my future selves, immediate and long range, that are different from my past selves, there cannot be an absolute distinction between self-interest and other interest. If my future selves are different from my present and I have concern for them, I can also care about the selves of other persons. To be sure, just as there may be tension between my present self and my future selves there may be tension between self-interest and other interest. There may be a profound distortion of our relatedness, as in the direct dependence of the growth of the wealth of the rich on the increasing poverty of the poor. Nevertheless, in a world that is interdependent and interrelated, there cannot be an absolute distinction between competing self-interests; there is always some degree of coincidence of interests.

Moreover, in a universe so thoroughly relational that everything enters the self-constitution of everything else, humans and all things constantly change. To be sure, existence remains ambiguous. Nevertheless, relatedness particularly as it is engraced in the nurturing, receptivity, sensitivity, responsiveness, and acceptance I receive from others, that enables me to respond to novel possibilities, has real, efficacious, transformative power. The relationality that is the fundamental character of reality can and needs to be lived Out authentically in the relation between nations and communities.

The process-relational vision provides a framework different from the realist position, one that fosters the kind of values and vision we need in grappling with the nagging problems of peace and eco-justice, one that provides the requisite resources for the creation of a just, participatory, sustainable, ecologically sound society. Process thinkers are working on fleshing out the full political implications of that vision.

V.

The literature criticizing the increasing privatization and the lack of a common vision, a sense of the common good, has been proliferating. In our society, with its excessive individualism, the private has been seen as the realm of self-fulfillment. Individuals and groups have been treated as discrete, isolated substances whose competing interests need to be balanced. Political debates have focused on how to balance the budget, as important as that issue is, without addressing the larger question of what our society is all about.

Process thinkers have been increasingly involved in this discussion. Process theologians have argued for a "public" theology not limiting truth claims to a confessional stance with its own internal criteria but open to the public criteria of common human experience and rational inquiry. Some have modeled this in the dialogue between science and religion and their practical policy proposals towards a just, participatory, and environmentally sound society. Influenced by the "steady state economics" of Herman Daly, who advocates a no or slow growth economy as indispensable for ecological survival, many are arguing for an economy theory and policy that is not based on a substantialist view that accents "trade offs," such as between the protection of the environment and increased employment, but a relational one that sees environmental protection, full employment, simplified lifestyles as interdependent and plausible in being realized together. This book, written by a theologian and ethicist, is such an endeavor in drawing out the implications of the process-relational vision for the various facets of our lives.

Just as process-relational thought provides the framework for a new ethics of character and virtue, it also offers the foundation for the usual extension of that ethics in the cultivation of civic virtue. We saw in the Introduction that contemporaries cannot prehend each other, that the momentary subjective immediacy of any actuality is private. Thus, process thinkers prize basic civil and human rights, including the right to privacy.

However, we also saw that this privacy is never absolute; once a momentary experience perishes, it becomes public, a datum in the becoming of all actualities. In spite of valuing highly the right to privacy, process thinkers agree with the feminist slogan, "The private is political."

In a relational vision, no rights are absolute. It would be terribly anthropocentric, human centered, to claim that humans are the only ones with rights: the ecosystem, animals, the human and non-human communities of which we are part, and without which we cannot survive and be ourselves, also have rights. The violation of the rights of any of these is at the risk of our very selves, and needs very careful justification.

If we live a relational, participatory universe, where there is at least a partial coincidence of interests, where I cannot be free until all creatures are free, where my self-fulfillment is not found in the splendid isolation of my privacy but in the interdependence of the fulfillment of all, we have the conceptual framework for a vision of the common good.

However, both in my reading and experience as an Episcopal priest and college professor having worked with street people, kidney and cancer patients and their families, inmates and prison staff urban, suburban, rural people, and taught in university and community colleges, suburban and rural, it never ceased to amaze me just how partial and limited our perspectives are, how profoundly shaped they are by diverse life experiences, culture, sub-culture, and socio-politico-economic location. Thus when we talk of the common good, in spite of the coincidence of interests, we need to be aware of whose common good and whose vision of the common good we are talking about. And who determines what is the common good?

I am referring to the fact that most of us in relatively privileged positions, primarily white middle class males, do not share the life experiences and frames of reference of blacks, Hispanics, women, and the oppressed peoples of the Third World. Our values are quite different. How can we then share a common of vision of the common good?

I have alluded several times to the heightened sense of one’s unique personhood and individuality resulting from psychic distancing, the ability to objectify and reflect critically about ourselves and the communities of which we are a part. In a similar fashion, we can distance ourselves psychically from the obstacles, personal, political, economic, social, cultural, that impede our living relationally and creatively. I certainly do not mean to sound like a philosophical idealist or to say that all we need is a psychological detachment from the various manifestations of alienation. What I am saying is that such psychic distancing with our whole person, touching every facet of life, is a necessary first step. Every step of the way, the relationality and creativity envisioned is practiced, in politics and every aspect of life, the means always commensurate with the end. If I may use a play on the words in the title of Whitehead’s greatest work, process is the reality.

Psychic distancing from the obstacles to relationality and freedom is necessary for the enablement of the cultivation of the virtues of sensitivity, receptivity, responsiveness, and creativity through which we can share in the lives, experiences, and frames of reference of those different from ourselves particularly the poor and the oppressed, be in solidarity with them, realize the coincidence of our interests, and together strive to realize the common vision of the common good of all creatures.

For Further Reading

For the classic statement of the difference between unilateral and relational power see Loomer, Bernard, "Two Conceptions of Power," Process Studies, Spring, 1976, Volume 6, Number 1, pp. 5-32.

A similar understanding is found in much of feminist theology. See, for example, Harrison, Beverly Wildung, Robb, Carol S., ed., Making the Connections: Essays in Feminist Social Ethics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), and by the same author, Our Right to Choose: Toward a New Ethic of Abortion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983).

An early work in political thought influenced by Whitehead’s philosophy that stresses reason, individual freedom, and liberal democracy is Samuel H. Beers The City of Reason (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1949).

One process thinker, virtually alone, who does deal extensively with the problems of equality and justice, is Kenneth Cauthen. See his The Passion for Equality (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, Publishers, 1987), and Process Ethics: A Constructive System (New York and Toronto: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1984).

For representative thinkers of the consensus perspective, see Parsons, Talcott, The Social System (New York: The Free Press 1951), and Merton, Robert K., Social Theory and Social Structure, 2nd ed. (New York: The Free Press, 1968). Representative thinkers of the conflict model are Dahrendorf, Rolf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1959); Coser, Lewis A. The Functions of Social Conflict, (Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1956); Mills, C. Wright, The Power of Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956); and, of course Karl Marx.

Of the numerous writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, the most pertinent for the discussion in this chapter are The Nature and Destiny of Man, Vols. I and II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964), and Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960). Under the influence of Erik Erikson, in a later work, Man’s Nature and His Communities (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965), Niebuhr does acknowledge the need for a proper sense of self-worth to live and to love.

For probably the finest biography of Reinhold Niebuhr, see Fox, Richard Wightman, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985). See also Stone, Ronald H., Realism and Hope (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1976), and by the same author, Reinhold Niebuhr: Prophet to Politicians (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1972), especially on Niebuhr’s connection to the school of realism. For various assessments of Niebuhr’s thought, see the essays in Kegley, Charles W., ed., Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious. Social, and Political Thought (New York:The Pilgrim Press, 1984).

Hans J. Morgenthau’s classic work is Politics Among Nations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958).

Daniel Day Williams’ appreciation, appropriation, and critique of Niebuhr are found in his God’s Grace and Man’s Hope (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949); The Spirit and the Forms of Love (New York: Harper and Row, 1968; What Present-Day Theologians are Thinking, Third Edition, Revised (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1967); and "Niebuhr and Liberalism" in Kegley, pp. 269-289. Apart from his relation to Niebuhr’s thought, Williams made valuable contributions to the process understanding of politics. For samples of his other writings, see "The New Theological Situation," Theology Today 24 (1968), pp. 444-463, and "Priests, Prophets and the Establishment," Zygon, Vol. 2, No. 4 (December, 1969), pp. 309-326. See also the author’s unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, "A Comparison of the Concept of Freedom in the Thought of Roger Garaudy and Daniel Day Williams" (Claremont Graduate School, 1982).

For the most articulate critique of Niebuhrian realism from the perspective of liberation theology, see Alves, Rubem, "Christian Realism: Ideology of the Establishment," Christianity and Crisis, 1973, 33:173-176. During the 1986-87, Christianity and Crisis and The Christian Century have carried articles and letters by Michael Novak and Robert McAfee Brown debating the respective neo-conservative and liberationist adaptations of Niebuhr’s thought.

An excellent comparison of Niebuhrian realism and liberation theology is McCann, Dennis P., Christian Realism and Liberation Theology:Practical Theologies in Conflict (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1981).

The best critique of Niebuhr from a feminist perspective is Plaskow, Judith, Sex. Sin, and Grace (Washington, D.C.:University Press of America, 1978). See also Harrison, Making the Connections and "Sin and the Possibility for Social Transformation: Reinhold Niebuhr’s Doctrine of Sin and Self-Sacrifice Revisioned," unpublished paper by Sue Nelson Dunfee.

For a positive assessment of the similarities between Niebuhr and Whitehead, see Griffin, David Ray, "Whitehead and Niebuhr on God, Man, and the World," Journal of Religion, 53, 1973, pp. 149-175. A different interpretation is provided in Brown, Delwin, "Hope for the Human Future: Niebuhr, Whitehead and Utopian Expectation," Iliff Review, 32, 1975, pp. 3-18. See also by the same author a three way conversation between process thought, Niebuhrian realism, and liberation theology, "Some Notes on the Nature and Destiny of Sin or How a Niebuhrian Process Theology of Liberation is Possible," unpublished paper.

Brown’s To Set at Liberty: Christian Faith and Human Freedom (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1981) is a process theology of liberation indebted to Niebuhr.

Works of other process thinkers that are conversations with political and liberation theologies are Cobb, John B., Jr., Process Theology as Political Theology (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1982), and Ogden, Schubert M., Faith and Freedom: Toward a Theology of Liberation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1979). See also the essays in Process Studies, Summer, 1985, Volume 14, Number 2, which contains papers delivered at a conference at Xavier University, Cincinnati, Ohio in October, 1983 on the theme of faith and justice, an interface between process and liberation theologies. Other important works are the essays in Cobb, John B., Jr. and Schroeder, W. Widick, eds., Process Philosophy and Social Thought (Chicago: Center for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1981). Some of the essays deal with different aspects of the process understanding of politics, others are responses to liberation theology.

For an excellent sociological study of privatism and the concomitant lack of a sense of the common good, see Bellah, Robert N., Madsen, Richard, Sullivan, William M., Swidler, Ann, and Tipton, Steven M., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1986). See also Lovin, Robin W., Religion and American Public Life: Interpretations and Explorations (New York: Paulist Press, 1986). Process thinkers whose essays are included in this volume are Douglas Sturm, Franklin I. Gamwell, and David Tracy. See also Gamwell, Franklin J., Beyond Preference (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1984); Sullivan, William M., Reconstructing Public Philosophy (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1981); and Neville, Robert C., The Cosmology of Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), which also has some excellent sections on a process interpretation of participatory democracy.

A remarkable and creative work is The Liberation of Life: From the Cell to the Community (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), by John B. Cobb, Jr. a theologian, and Charles Birch, an Australian biologist and lay theologian. The book offers an alternative to the mechanistic worldview prevalent in the natural sciences through an extended discussion of life and its increasing complexity of organization. The last part of the book makes practical policy proposals for a just, sustainable, and participatory society that the authors see as indispensable for ecological survival. See also Cobb’s earlier work, Is It Too Late?: A Theology of Ecology (Beverly Hills, California: Bruce, A Division of Benzizer, Bruce, and Glencoe, Inc., 1972).

I have already mentioned Kenneth Cauthen’s recent work on equality and justice. Still pertinent are his earlier works, Christian Biopolitics: A Credo and Strategy for the Future (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1971), and The Ethics of Enjoyment (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1975).

For discussions of "steady-state economics" see Daly, Herman E., Steady-State Economics (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman Co., 1977); Daly, Herman E., ed., Economics. Ecology. Ethics (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, Co., 1980); and by the same author, "The Steady-State Economy: Post-Modern Alternative to Growthmania," unpublished paper delivered at the conference ‘Toward a Post-Modern World," in Santa Barbara, California, in January, 1987. Daly and John B. Cobb, Jr. are co-authoring a book due to be published in 1988 on this topic and its grounding in relational vision.

Cobb as well as many other process thinkers, myself included, are profoundly influenced by the pioneering work of Paolo Soleri, whose model city Arcosanti is the embodiment of a simplified, relational, environmentally sound, ecologically sustainable lifestyle.

See also the unpublished papers from the conference on "Process, Peace, and Human Rights" held in Kyoto, Japan May 1987. Also, the papers from the already mentioned conference "Toward a Post-Modern World," held in Santa Barbara in January, 1987. These papers are available from the Center for Process Studies, 1325 N. College, Claremont, CA 91711. The papers from the Santa Barbara Conference are to be published by the State University of New York Press under the title "Essays Toward a Post-Modern World," edited by David Ray Griffin. Volume I The Reenchantment of Science: Post-Modern Proposals is scheduled for publication in August, 1988; Volume II, Post-Modern Spirituality and Society either in late 1988 or early 1989.

For works of related interest to my discussion of psychic distancing, see Lane, Dermot A., Foundations for a Social Theology: Praxis. Process and Salvation (New York: Paulist Press, 1984), and McDaniel, Jay, "The God of the Oppressed and the God Who is Empty," in Ferre, Frederick and Mataragnon, Rita M., eds., God and Globe Justice: Religion and Poverty in an Unequal World (New York: Paragon House, 1985).

I.

Any discussion of the process understanding of society is complicated by its technical definition of the word. A "society" is a nexus, a coming together of energy events extended in space and time that share a common defining characteristic. Thus, quite typically, discussions of "societies" by process thinkers are quite different from common sense usage of the word as well as sociological definitions, and usually do not refer to human societies.

Some process thinkers have used the technical Whiteheadian definition in analyzing human societies. For example, some process theologians think of the Jesus-event and its continual reappropriation as providing the common element of form that is the defining characteristic of the society called the church.

Most process thinkers do not follow this line of reasoning. While, to be sure, the technical use of the word society has certain analogies to the functioning of human societies, these analogies are not complete and, as we shall see later, break down.

The problem emerges when human societies are treated as organisms. In most organismic views of human societies, there is no room for any kind of individuality. Society is an organism, with each person having her or his part in its proper functioning. The common element of form or defining characteristic is the state, which knows what people should think, how they should live, what is best for them. This line of reasoning has been used by totalitarian governments of both the right and the left to justify their existence and their most abhorrent actions.

In modern thought, societies have been treated as individuals and agents; in its organismic expression, states, as the vehicles expressing the national will, have been viewed as individuals, omnipresent, omnicompetent, superior to the individuals and groups on behalf of whose alleged interests they act. Process thought denies these contentions. Agency is located in individuals. Societies are the individuals who comprise it, even though those individuals are social and relational in their very being who they are. Inadvertently, those process thinkers who think of the Jesus-event as the common element of form that is the defining characteristic of the society called the church can be interpreted to depict the Jesus-event as having agency, as the mind of the organism, in a manner of speaking, that subsumes the individuality of it members.

Unlike most organismic views, the profoundly relational and equally organismic vision of process thought is able to do justice to the individual. In fact, to use Whitehead’s own description, it has sometimes been called a vision of the individual-in-community. The self-creation of a unique momentary experience, in its subjective immediacy, as it unifies and synthesizes data from the past and actualizes relevant possibilities, is paradigmatic of this understanding of the individual-in-community.

Human societies are like organisms in the interdependence and interrelatedness of their constituent parts. Change one part and the others change as well. For example, suppose a family goes for therapy on account of the delinquent behavior of one of the teenage sons. Instead of trying to "fix" the "identified patient" or "problem child," a skillful therapist will work on the couple’s relationship and patterns of behavior. The basic presupposition is that if you change the couple’s pattern of interaction, the son’s behavior patterns will change as well. This principle also applies to the larger units of human societies and institutions. When one part of society changes, all the other parts and the larger whole also change. As the role and status of women and minorities alter, the role and status of other segments of the population, particularly white males, the organizations of institutions such as the family as well as the whole of society also shifts.

The organismic view of society on the part of process thought has much in common with systems theory, which holds that human societies are systems, at times sub-systems intertwined in complex ways and parts of a larger system. Change in any part of the system or sub-system causes a ripple effect that changes every other part and the system as whole. Indeed, some process thinkers have been influenced by systems theory. The reverse is also true: some process thinkers have had an impact on systems theory. The process understanding of society also has much in common with Talcott Parsons’ sociological theory of functionalism, which has dominated North American sociology for the last thirty-five years and which is predicated on viewing human societies as analogous to organisms.

What makes the process-relational view different from most organismic interpretations, as we have seen, is, first of all, the notion that unique individuals do create themselves and their societies, as profoundly shaped as they are by them, instead of being subsumed by an omnicompetent and all knowing state that functions as the brain of the organism. Secondly, the process-relational vision is highly sensitive to the complex relativity of the function and role of culture and sub-cultures in the larger framework of society, a view also shared by most sociologists and systems theorists.

It is to the distinctions between society, culture, sub-culture, civilization, and community, in conversation with the discipline of sociology, that we now turn in the rest of this chapter.

II.

Much of modern sociology prides itself on being scientific and deterministic. Most sociological theories hold that it is an empirical, observable fact that humans are products of their socio-politico-economic-cultural environments.

In large measure, process-relational thought affirms this claim. If in any moment the whole of the past, not only of the person but of the subculture, culture, society, human history, the whole universe, flows into the becoming of the self, humans are indeed molded by the totality of their environment. However, as we have seen, no momentary experiencing subject is totally determined; it is literally self-creative, deciding what it is, as it unifies data from the past in creative synthesis and as it actualizes possibilities.

While affirming that there is randomness and chance in the universe, process thought is not a form of indeterminacy in the typical way the word is used, referring to reality being constituted by discreet causally unrelated entities. At the risk of sounding like I am quibbling over words, the process relational vision may be described as a form of "soft determinism." Fully aware that language shapes reality, the very way in which process thinkers use the word "shape" instead of "determine" is deliberate, attempting to show that while partially molded by the totality of the environment, any entity is also an instance of creativity.

Most sociological theories treat the non-human natural world in mechanistic terms, seeing the non-human natural world as inert, lifeless matter, merely a stage on which the human drama is played out (to be sure, sociologists do acknowledge the importance of topography and geography in the diverse development of human cultures and societies). In this regard, they differ substantially from the profoundly ecological vision of process-relational thought. Process thinkers encourage sociologists, political scientists, psychologists, historians, and scholars in other disciplines to take a more holistic approach, taking into account and doing justice to how human organisms interact not only with the human environment of their cultures and societies but also the non-human environments of which they are a part that are throbbing with life, energy, and creativity.

The process-relational vision would also assert that the claims of sociology to be neutral and value-free are pretentious. Any position reflects its partial perspective, culture, and socio-politico-economic location. The beginning of objectivity is to admit one’s lack of it.

Quite typically, sociologists define "societies" as relatively self-sufficient groupings of people sharing common cultures and territories. "Cultures" are usually characterized as the totality of a people’s life-style, comprised of their material objects, knowledge, ideas, and patterns of conduct. Ordinarily, culture is sub-divided into two categories, "material culture," referring to the physical objects people use, such as clubs, pots and pans, automobiles, and "non-material culture," describing such non-physical aspects of human life as ideas, knowledge, language, and conduct. Sociologists also deal with such topics as the components of culture, i.e., beliefs, values, language, and norms; cultural dynamics; cultural integration; cultural change; ideal culture, what people profess to follow, and real culture, how people actually behave in relation to these claims; ethnocentrism, the proclivity to see one’s culture as the best and consequently all others as inferior; and cultural relativity.

Sociology, as is readily apparent from reading the previous paragraph, is technical in its use of terms like "culture," and is highly specialized. Although aware of the philosophical underpinnings of their discipline, sociologists rarely articulate or critically explore these bases of their work. Process thinkers, on the other hand, have focused on the philosophical dimensions and foundations of culture.

A major area of interest to process thinkers, for example, are the myths, images, models, paradigms, and rituals around which people organize their experiences and through which they find significance and meaning for their lives. To be sure, sociologists have not ignored this area. However, sociological work is restricted to the function of myths, images and rituals, and not with truth claims.

An example of how the process-relational vision deals with cultural issues mentioned above is tradition. In most of the history of Western thought, tradition has been viewed in essentialist categories. It has been the task of each age to make intelligible the underlying, unchanging, eternal essence of its traditions. While the manifestation may vary from age to age and place to place, the underlying essence of a tradition, that is its very identity can never be altered.

Process-relational thought takes a very different approach, one that is analogous to the understanding of the self. As we have seen, the self is a momentary experiencing subject that constitutes itself by creatively synthesizing data from the past and responding to the possibilities of the future. Traditions function in a similar fashion. Instead of seeing tradition manifesting in diverse ways an eternal and unchanging essence, process thought views it as living, ongoing dynamic and creative. As it responds to the challenges of the present, if it is to survive, a tradition reappropriates its past and reconstitutes itself. Thus, there is no underlying unchanging essence to tradition, only a constant process of interpretation and reinterpretation.

For example, earlier in this chapter I mentioned that using the complex terminology of process thought, some of its theological exponents have seen the common element of form, the defining characteristic of the church as the Jesus-event. Although not its intention, this position could be interpreted in an essentialist way not easily reconcilable with the process-relational vision. This understanding could also be viewed as attributing an agency to the Jesus-event that subsumes the individuality and creativity of those reappropriating the event. Most process theologians prefer to consider Christianity as an ongoing, historical movement that in each age reappropriates the memory of Jesus, not only through the foundational paradigms of Scripture but through the constant process of reinterpretation found in church history. As Christianity reconstitutes itself in response to the challenges of today and reappropriates its traditions, a problem that arises is that not all of that tradition is very illuminating in meeting contemporary needs. For example, much of Christianity’s inherited past is sexist, racist, and anti-Judaic, a past from which it needs to be liberated.

Another example of our discussion of tradition is the celebration of the bicentennial of the Constitution. Along with the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, the Constitution is the foundational and paradigmatic document of this country, embodying its professed ideals. Throughout the history of this nation, the Constitution has been interpreted and reinterpreted in an ongoing process of reappropriation and application of its ideals. However, in dealing with today’s problems and challenges, not all of the Constitution and its presuppositions are equally illuminating, helpful, and valid. Outside of the most rabid racist and sexist, who would want to go back to considering blacks three-fifths of white people, and deny the franchise to women?

At this point, the crucial issue pertains to the criteria the adherents of a tradition use in the reconstitution of that tradition. For process-relational thinkers, those criteria are whatever contributes to the enhancement of relationality and creativity that are true of the fundamental character of reality itself; whatever contributes to the experience of beauty, intensity, richness through contrast.

These notions seem terribly abstract. However, in the case of Christianity, we see them operating as we acknowledge the disharmony as well as deprivation of greater richness in the sexism, racism, anti-Judaism of its inherited tradition. As it seeks liberation from this dimension of its past, as it encounters feminist theology, the new consciousness of women, blacks, Third World peoples, and their suppressed traditions, post-Holocaust Judaism as well as other religions, Christianity is transformed, becomes more authentically relational and creative, richer, more inclusive, less trivial in its harmony. Some process theologians see this dynamic as the very work of Christ.

This view is relativistic, and has an affinity with the cultural relativism affirmed by the discipline of sociology. In one sense, everything is relative, that is to say, related to everything else. In another, everything is relative in the context of culture, history, geography, socio-politico-economic location; what may be considered right and proper in one culture, even a sub-culture, may be abhorrent in another. The crucial difference between the relativism of sociology and the process-relational vision is that sociology’s treatment of relativism is descriptive while that of process thought is both descriptive and normative. Process thought is deeply concerned with not only the aims and interests around which cultures define themselves and human social activities; it is even more concerned with what appropriate cultural aims and interests should be.

Just as the process-relational vision tries to do justice to the profound ways in which we are shaped by our environment yet denies total determinism, so it affirms relativism while denying total relativism. We have all heard the position of total relativism when someone claims, "It doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you believe." Process thought claims the contrary; what we believe is extremely important; our beliefs profoundly shape the way we live out our lives. Many of the horrors of the twentieth century were perpetrated by tyrants who were not only carrying out their beliefs but were convinced in the rightness of doing so. Process thought itself is an alternative to the substantialist view that has had an adverse practical impact on human history.

It might be more accurate to describe the process-relational vision as pluralistic rather than relativistic. Much has been made recently of the pluralism of people, cultures, religions, life styles, etc. of the contemporary world. Process thought not only affirms this pluralism, it goes beyond most views in advocating such an attitude of openness that through the encounter with other peoples, cultures, religions, life styles, mutual transformation can take place. Once again, for some process theologians this is the very work of Christ.

III.

Much of the literature in sociology, philosophy, theology, particularly those influenced by existentialism, has been an eloquent critique of modern industrial, technological society, its emphasis on rational bureaucratic methods, its conformism in spite of its lip service to individualism, and the mass society that is its product. While process thinkers are in sympathy with these critiques, their focus is different.

In the last chapter, I mentioned how during the Axial Period humans attained a heightened sense of individuality as they started to distance themselves psychically, to stand back and reflect critically about their communities and themselves. Process thinkers, while wanting to preserve the gains made in the heightened Western sense of personhood, feel the sense of community has been virtually lost in industrialized society.

The words "society" and "community" refer to very different realities. The literature on the topic is so vast that in many intellectual circles the word society is virtually synonymous with mass society. As small towns, small firms, inner cities, in spite of and at times, in their own way, because of gentrification, decline, and suburban life styles become increasingly mobile, privatized, and fragmented, the loss of the sense of community is more acute.

Let me illustrate. My family moved to a residential neighborhood in Phoenix, Arizona in 1965. People in the neighborhood generally knew each other, visited each other, had children in the same age group. As their children graduated from high school and went to college or started working, as parents aged and retired, the neighborhood changed. It was gradually made up of older people, some of whom died, others moved away. The younger people who moved in were so busy with working and living their own lives that one couple did not meet their next door neighbors for several months. The contact between neighbors decreased. Another couple did not know for several days that their neighbor three doors down had died. Such a loss of the sense of community is symptomatic of life styles in industrial, technological societies.

The purpose of the preceding discussion has been to set the stage and clarify the definition and importance of community for process thinkers. As I have mentioned. process thinkers do not want to lose the positive gains of our heightened sense of individuality. However, in process thought the individual is always an individual-in-community. The community of which an individual is a part is also a part of the individual. The self is a social-relational self as the entire past is constitutive of the becoming of a momentary experience; as the subjective immediacy perishes, that momentary experience enters into the self-constitution of other selves and momentary experiences. While distinct, the distinction between the individual and the community is not absolute; the more I participate in the community, the more of an individual, in the sense of a richer, larger self, I can become.

For process thinkers, community is where one’s unique personhood in its creative freedom is accepted and affirmed, and where one finds a sense of belonging, rootedness, and intimacy. True to the relational vision that is the foundation of this understanding of community, process thinkers have advocated and experimented with communal, simplified, ecologically responsible life styles. In these endeavors, they have sought something novel rather than a romantic or nostalgic return to previous tribal and pastoral life styles. Some have advocated the enhancement of economically self-sufficient, decentralized, participatory, ecologically sustainable regional units in a way reminiscent of the programs of the Green Parties in Western Europe. Since our interrelatedness and interdependence is not just local but global, process thinkers have been in the forefront in the advocacy of global awareness and world history, human and non-human. The slogan "Act locally, think globally" is an accurate summary of their position and activities, although many have not been reticent about acting globally.

If the communities in which we live shape us profoundly, if the social institutions of which we are a part are also a part of us, the organization of our communities and social institutions is of paramount importance. If the self is a social-relational self, it is not enough to change individuals for social change to occur; social structures need to be changed as well. To be true to the fundamental character of reality, social structures need to foster relationality and creativity, and provide the maximum opportunity for the experience of beauty, of harmony and intensity, with contrast. In this regard, existing social structures, whether capitalist or socialist, are found wanting; in their own way, each gets in the way of the development of full, unique personhood and creativity, and fragments relationality and community; each also denies the maximum opportunity for the experience of beauty by erecting superficial harmony that denies deeper social divisions, and, either through rigidity and/or the social and cultural isolation of groups and individuals, impedes the possibility of increased contrast and richness of experience. I shall explore the political dimensions of these issues in the next chapter.

Lurking in the background of our discussion of both selfhood and society are the issues of stability and order versus novelty and creative freedom. Process-relational thought certainly acknowledges that novelty and creativity and freedom flourish when there is order and stability. If we look at nature, it is the complex social orders that are human beings and animals with central nervous systems which are the ones with the greatest capacity for novelty and creative freedom. However, human societies (and we need to keep in mind the distinction between the more technical Whiteheadian definition of society and its application to human societies) that have emphasized order and stability have tended to be hierarchical, authoritarian, and dictatorial, suffocating novelty, creativity, and freedom. In process thought, while acknowledging the need for stability and order, creative freedom and novelty are the priorities on the scale of values. As we shall see in the next chapter, the process-relational vision is profoundly democratic, communitarian, egalitarian, and participatory.

IV.

Whitehead’s own understanding of society focused on a discussion of Civilization. For him, civilization was the process of humans growing more civilized, the victory of persuasion, not just in the sense of rational arguments but as a manner of living, over brute force. Chief among the features of civilization is the increased sense of the dignity of every human being in all its interdependencies. The characteristics of civilization are Truth, Beauty, Adventure, and Peace.

Lest we digress into a philosophical discussion beyond our subject matter, suffice it to say that Truth is the conformation between Appearance and Reality. One of the functions of Truth in Civilization is the promotion of Beauty, the delicate balance between harmony and intensity. Given the overall aesthetic nature of the process-relational vision, Art serves a vital civilizing function. It serves to adapt purposefully Appearance and Reality as well as promote the experience of Beauty in living.

Adventure is the zest for living, a ceasing restlessness that reaches for novel possibilities. For Whitehead, the zest for adventure is characteristic of life itself, of all actualities. He claimed that all organisms seek " (I) to live, (II) to live well, (III) to live better." The zest for adventure is requisite and necessary for individuals, communities, and civilizations; without it they are unable to respond to new challenges and die of fatigue.

Peace may be appropriately described as a sense of wholeness and serenity in the relationship with oneself, other selves, the world, and, if one is religious, God. It is not merely the absence of conflict. It has the character of a gift, and is comprised of two elements, Youth and Tragedy. The characteristic of Youth is the zest for adventure, life and novelty.) Tragedy is the experience of loss, of possibilities unactualized and lost that tempers Youth and its zest for adventure. Peace is a delicate balance between Youth and Tragedy. It is also certainly a delicate balance between all things. Although Whitehead certainly affirmed progress in the history of civilization, with his emphasis on Tragedy, he was certainly not sanguine about automatic progress as were many of the intellectual currents of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

In Whitehead’s view, religion is vital to the health of any civilization. He identifies four factors in the history of religious expression: ritual, emotion, belief, rationalization. While each is present during different phases, the later phases are promoted by and explanatory of the earlier. The rational faculties purge the unhealthy elements from religion. The culmination of rational religion is world-loyalty.

Although Whitehead defined religion as what an individual does in her/his solitariness, the nurture of character and the cultivation of the inner life, that solitariness can never be absolute; what is attained in solitariness is passed back into the community. In fact, for Whitehead, the problem of religion is the problem of the individual-in-community. It is to the political dimensions of this problem that we turn in the next chapter.

For Further Reading

For a view that applies the technical Whiteheadian view of society to human societies, the theological notion that the Jesus-event is the common element of form that is the defining characteristic of the society called the church, see Lee, Bernard, SM., The Becoming of the Church: A Process Theology of the Structures of Christian Experience (New York: Paulist Press, 1974), pp. 55-207.

For views that stress the importance of individuals, though social and relational, see Cobb, John B., Jr., "Post-Modern Social Policy," unpublished paper presented at the conference, "Toward a Post-Modern World," Santa Barbara, California, January, 1987.

Hall, David, L., The Civilization of Experience: A Whiteheadian Theory of Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 1973), pp. 59-111.

Hartshorne, Charles, The Divinity Relativity: A Social Conception of God (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948).

The Winter, 1986 issue of Process Studies, Volume 15, Number 4 is devoted to the problem of the analogy of society in the technical Whiteheadian sense to human societies.

For a process thinker deeply influenced by systems theory see Laszlo, Ervin, Essential Society: An Ontological Reconstruction (The Hague: Martinus Ni]hoff, 1963). Also by the same author, Introduction to Systems Philosophy: Toward a New Paradigm of Contemporary Thought (Gordon and Breach, 1972).

Whitehead’s most extensive treatment of society is contained in his

Adventure of Ideas (New York: The Free Press, a Division of The Macmillan Company, 1967). Others of his works important for his understanding of society include The Function of Reason (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1968); Modes of Thought (New York: The Free Press, a Division of The Macmillan Company, 1966); Religion in the Making (New York: The World Publishing Company, 1967).

An excellent introduction to the discipline of sociology is Sullivan,

Thomas J., and Thompson, Kendrick S., Sociology: Concepts. Issues and Applications (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1984). Talcott Parsons’ classic work, reflecting both an organismic and systems approach, is The Social System (New York: The Free Press, 1951).