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With respect to the question of divine power, as we saw in the last chapter, classical theism came to accept the model of efficient causation. This model can make good sense of many of the biblical traditions, but not of all: God’s particular involvement in human history, his apparent lack of knowledge concerning the future in some of the earlier narratives, his suffering, his willingness on occasion to change his mind. These traditions could be comfortably suppressed as crude anthropomorphisms as long as confidence in the model of divine efficient causation remained strong, but that model has become vulnerable in recent centuries because it cannot do justice to the problem of evil or account adequately for creative freedom. An alternative, now emerging in theism, is the model of divine persuasion.

Given these two philosophical perspectives, the coercive and the persuasive, the biblical witness to divine power seems inconsistent. Each can explain what the other cannot. Between them they can account for all the texts, broadly speaking, but they seem mutually incompatible. From another perspective, however, this mixture of persuasive and coercive elements becomes readily intelligible. One of the basic biblical images, particularly with respect to the symbolization of divine power, is the figure of the king. A king does not rule by being the efficient cause or maker of anything. His rule is largely persuasive; it is effective insofar as his subjects are obedient to the royal commands. That rule, however, is not purely persuasive, for the king has access to coercive measures to apply to those who refuse to comply.

In a discussion of power and obedience in the primeval history, George W. Coats has recently outlined the logic of this position.¹ He emphasizes the element of persuasion involved in the divine commands given to the man and the woman in the garden. This element of persuasion respects their freedom and integrity. "So, as long as the human creature can be persuaded to obey the limitations placed on him by his creator, creation will be in its proper order. Yet, what happens when the human creature remains unpersuaded?"² "God kicked man out of the garden to his death, away from the tree of life. And he made it impossible for man to get back in. There is no divine persuasion here. There is only divine coercion, a divine sentence of death for the disobedient creature."³ Later on, he concludes:

Persuasion and coercion stand in tension, but the same God can apply both if he is primarily conceived of as a king exercising his royal authority. In the Priestly creation story, persuasion was sufficient. The cosmic ruler commanded, and the world faithfully executed those commands. Because of this faithful obedience, the created order could meet with God’s full approval: "behold, it was very good" (Gen. 1:31). But as Coats points out, problems arise with disobedience, particularly when man oversteps the limits of his power. God may be patient and long-suffering, but sooner or later he must intervene to vindicate his rule. As king God is judge, the one charged with maintaining justice by overthrowing the oppressor and rescuing the oppressed.

There is no question but that this image of God as king poses serious difficulties for process theism, for it not only highlights elements of divine coercion but offers a coherent account of their presence. In moving back from philosophical to biblical concepts, however, we find ourselves in a domain of shifting and fluid patterns, and the image of God as king is no exception. Generally speaking, this poses no problem as long as both the persuasive and the coercive elements are balanced against one another, and the only issue concerns the relative importance of each. But the inner dynamic of Israel’s experience of God’s sovereignty over history leads inexorably to the view that he exercises absolute control over the future. In that moment there is no longer any divine persuasion remaining, nor logically any creaturely freedom. At this juncture, however, just when it appears that there is no room at all for any affirmation of divine persuasion, Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God introduces a radically new way of experiencing God’s sovereignty as the power of the future. As the power of the future, God’s activity is not only purely persuasive but does not need coercive measures to achieve its purposes. Thus while process theism can only do partial justice to many of the images of divine kingship in the Bible, and none to some, it may be the model most appropriate to the final image emerging from this tradition.

The shift from a prophecy to apocalypticism gave an important stimulus toward views of divine determinism. As long as God is conceived as operating by persuasion, he must effect his purposes indirectly, through the agency of historical forces. For persuasion depends upon obedience, whether that obedience is freely given, or unwittingly exacted as in the case of Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus. For this reason divine persuasion must work with existing historical realities to shape them toward desired ends. Once, however, God is conceived as exerting his power directly, or by means of heavenly creatures wholly subservient to his will, the actual deployment of historical forces becomes irrelevant to the realization of divine purposes. Thus the imagination of the apocalyptic seer is freed from the constraints imposed upon the prophet. He is freed to dream of God’s decisive, unambiguous act to eradicate all evil, as the ambiguities of divine action in the historical process recede into the background. History becomes simply an interval of waiting, negatively contrasted to this coming, glorious day. But it is fully known and measured, else why should it endure so long? Since God is fully in control, he should vindicate himself right early. The apocalypticist’s task is only to explain the delay and indicate signs of its coming.⁵

The seeds of this transition from prophecy to apocalyptic may be found in part in the trial speeches in Second Isaiah.⁶ In these scenes the gods of the nations are brought before the ultimate judge, the Lord of Israel:

At stake here is the reliability of divine promise and threat. The Lord declared to Israel ‘‘the things to come" in his threats to destroy Israel and Judah for their sins, and he made good on those threats. Now he is about to fulfill his promises and bring the captives back to Jerusalem. The Lord has the power to bring about the aims he envisages; he accomplishes his purpose. These other gods may declare what they are going to do through their prophets, but nothing ever happens. They don’t come through on their promises.

So interpreted, Second Isaiah’s message remains wholly within the prophetic framework. We can rest content in the reliability of God’s promise, while also looking about to discover what will be the instrumentality for achieving this purpose. God can bring about his goals by one means or another as he seeks to exercise his persuasive powers.

But the passage can also be interpreted another way. The gods of the nations cannot declare the future because they do not know it, and it is this lack of knowledge which proves that they are not gods. Moreover, God knows the future because he has the power to control it, and the future must conform to that control. God’s declaration of what is to come is them a prediction based on certain knowledge, not a promise he intends to fulfill. Omnipotence here becomes the foundation for omniscience, and the groundwork has been set for a thoroughgoing determinism. This never occurs in apocalypticism, however, for in that vision God only controls the major events of history. He does not interfere with the freedom of those addressed, who are urgently summoned to repentance and obedience.

The very human yearning for vindication in the midst of ambiguous circumstances thus generates an inexorable pressure upon the logic of divine sovereignty. We seek to be sure of God’s actions, and not to rest content with his promises. This pressure undermines the unstable balance that existed between persuasion and coercion, leading ultimately to the elimination of human freedom, at least theoretically, in the face of a completely determined future. And yet, paradoxically, the apocalyptic contains within itself the seeds of human freedom, which achieved their decisive breakthrough in the proclamation of Jesus. For the apocalyptic transposed the decisive locus of divine sovereignty from the present to the future. As we shall see, this understanding of God as future, or more precisely, as the power of the future effective in the present, permits a renewed appropriation of divine persuasion and human freedom.⁷

Apocalyptic Judaism acknowledged God’s lasting, ever-present sovereignty in his lordship over Israel, but in a rather perfunctory way. This sovereignty at best was a limited and hidden one, for Israel was in slavery to the Gentile nations who reject the reign of God. God’s reign and the reign of the Gentiles over Israel form an intolerable contradiction. So all hope and concern was directed toward God’s future reign, when Israel would be freed, and the whole world would see and acknowledge God as king.

Jesus shared this focus of concern toward God’s coming, future reign. Jeremias reports as an assured result: "Nowhere in the message of Jesus does the basileia (kingdom) denote the lasting reign of God over Israel in this age." ⁸ But unlike Jewish apocalypticists before him, and Christian apocalypticists after him, he refused to speculate concerning the signs of the end that must be fulfilled. He does not seek to explain why God’s kingdom has been delayed so long, for he was grasped by its immediacy. With John the Baptist (cf. Matt. 3:2), Jesus proclaimed that ‘‘the kingdom of God is at hand" (Mark 1:15 par.) "God is coming, he is standing at the door, indeed, he is already there." ⁹ He promises his disciples that some of them will "see the kingdom of God come with power" in their lifetimes (Mark 9:1). The incident concerning the barren fig tree (Mark 11: 12-14) may portray this expectation of an imminent end even more vividly, if Jeremias is correct in suspecting an Aramaic imperfect with an originally future significance behind the Greek text. Then Jesus, in finding the tree merely in leaf, uttered not a curse but a prediction: ‘‘No one will eat fruit from you again" because the end-times will be upon us even before those figs become ripe.¹⁰

The consummation of the kingdom is a purely divine act. Only the Father knows and decides when that will be. When it comes, it will come suddenly. We can do nothing to hasten its day, nor avert its coming. Jesus scorns those who would try to bring the kingdom about through their own efforts: "From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and men of violence take it by force" (Matt. 11:12). Nonetheless, the very imminence of this coming great event exerts tremendous power over the present moment, endowing it with extreme urgency. Elisha was allowed to say farewell to his family (1 Kings 19:20), but Jesus does not grant his disciples this permission (Luke 9:61-62). Nor can he permit a son to fulfill the elemental duty of mourning his father the customary six days: "Leave the dead to bury their own dead" (Luke 9:60). Those who fail to heed the call, who are not galvanized into action by the presence of this errupting kingdom, are simply dead, perpetuating the existence of this old age. Every hour is precious, too precious to be taken up with mourning. The dead must be called into the world of life before it is too late.¹¹ When the crunch is on, we must act quickly, and decisively, taking extraordinary measures. Even conniving old stewards about to be thrown out of work know this (Luke 16:1-7). Jesus’ instructions when he sent forth the disciples to preach the kingdom also express this urgency to lose no time. "Salute no one on the road" (Luke 10:4): do not tarry in exchanging greetings, or join caravans traveling the same direction. This command was more offensive then than now, because of the deeper significance of salutations then in communicating the peace of God.¹² Likewise each town was given its chance, but if its inhabitants do not respond, move on quickly. "When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next; for truly, I say to you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel, before the Son of man comes" (Matt.10:23).

Something momentous did happen shortly with the resurrection of the living Christ as the dynamic, coordinating agency energizing a radically new communal reality,¹³ but this was not the expected consummation of the kingdom. Insofar as Jesus’ expectations are to be understood out of the traditional apocalyptic which he undoubtedly shared, they went unfulfilled. But Jesus also spoke of the present immediacy of this future kingdom, for this future reality exerted its power upon present actions. The kingdom of God in Jesus’ preaching cannot be interpreted as either simply future or simply present; recent New Testament scholarship has abundantly shown this. It is in this peculiar tension between the future and the present that Jesus introduces a novel element ultimately destructive of the apocalyptic framework within which most of the New Testament is articulated.

Jesus proclaimed: "The kingdom of God has come near,"¹⁴ which means more than simply that it was expected to arrive at some not too distant date in the future. Its nearness is also a qualitative measure of its power in affecting the present, a power which has already come to be felt. This future reality exerts its own power, more or less felt in varying degrees of nearness or distance. As this nearness was experienced in all of its power and poignancy, it was natural to assume, given the apocalyptic expectations of the day, that the long awaited kingdom of God was also chronologically near as well. But the experienced nearness of the kingdom may be independent of its chronological date, since it applies directly only to the power which the future exerts in the present.

This proclamation is also coupled with a summons to repentance and faith. The power of this nearness does not affect us indifferently, shunting us to and fro in the manner of a physical force acting in terms of efficient causation. This power addresses our freedom, eliciting a response of acceptance or hostility. Its power lies precisely in its capacity to call forth our freedom, for it stirs us to our very depths. The possibilities of repentance and faith require the fullest exercise of freedom, as they involve the transformation of our own selfhood.

For the purpose of a fuller analysis, we introduce a threefold distinction between the power of the past, the power of the present, and the power of the future. These three powers interpenetrate; they require each other, as all contribute to the actualization of each action or event. These are the ways process philosophy sees the three modes of time to be ingredients in causation. Whitehead conceives of the actuality as producing itself out of the way in which it appropriates its antecedent causes. The locus of productive activity thereby shifts from the past causes to the present event, which is active in virtue of its own power. The past causes determine the content of the present actuality, but only as this content is appropriated and unified by the present activity. Causation is here understood on analogy with perception: nothing is perceived unless we actively engage our attention in perceiving, yet what we perceive is dependent upon content derived from our environment. The power of the present selects and unifies this past content, so that the past is effective in the present only insofar as it is taken up into the present by the power of the present. Not all past actuality can be appropriated by the present because it contains conflicting and incompatible tendencies. Our freedom lies in the power of the present to select and to organize that which we inherit from the past.

In the absence of direction, however, such freedom would merely effectuate random combinations of the past. Freedom is responsibly exercised in the light of future possibilities, which become lures insofar as they are valued. Thus we may describe free actualization as the bringing of the past into the present by the power of the present responding to the lure of the future. The future is just as causally effective as the past, though each in its own way. This would be denied on the ordinary assumption that causes produce their effects, for all productive agency must be vested in actualities, and there can be no future actualities. But in Whitehead’s reversal of our ordinary assumption, productive agency is vested in the actuality presently coming into being, so that its causes are merely passive objects to be appropriated. Future possibilities are just as objective as such past actualities, and hence are equally capable of exerting causal power to the extent that they are taken up into the present. The particular valued possibilities which shape our actions come from many sources, but ultimately, Whitehead argues, they derive from the creative activity of God. God is the ultimate power of the future, rescuing the world from degeneration into chaos by the relentless provision of ever-new creative possibilities for the world to actualize.

The interacting roles of these three powers may be seen in Paul’s contrast between flesh and spirit (Gal. 5:16-24). The flesh cannot simply mean the body, since the works of the flesh include idolatry, enmity, jealousy, and the like -- passions not obviously rooted in our biological makeup. Yet the word "flesh" indicating our biological heritage is enormously suggestive. It embraces all of our habits and "natural" desires, and constitutes the power of the past as effective in our lives. Spirit, in contrast, testifies to the power of the future. Flesh and spirit are forever in tension with one another, for in every decision we determine whether our fi4ure goals will shape our past inclinations, or vice versa, and to what extent. They require each other, for without the past, there is nothing which can come into being in the present, while without the future, there is nothing for the present to become. Their constant struggle, moreover, indicates that these two powers alone do not determine what is. There must also be the power of the present, which is our inmost being, by which we respond to the future by means of the past, and to the past by means of the future.

The power of the future does not reside in some future actuality. This is a contradiction in terms if, in our freedom, we face a genuinely open future, such that nothing is actual until it has been actualized in the present. Moreover, it is not as if this awaited actuality first exerts power when it becomes actual in the present. For any power it exerted then would be the power of the past or the present, not the power of the future. To understand the power of God, then, we must focus our attention on how the future can be effective in the present. It is precisely on this point that Jesus’ teaching is liberating, for it portrays this future kingdom as it impinges upon the present. Both dimensions are crucial. If the kingdom is simply a present reality, then it is just one more actuality among others in our present world, mysteriously hidden from view. If the kingdom is simply future, then it exerts no power to which the present must respond, but remains merely an inert possibility we hope someday might be realized. It is the energizing of possibilities by divine appetition that constitutes the power of the future in the present, the nearness of God’s reign.

In the controversy concerning Beelzebul, Jesus declared: "But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you" (Luke 11:20; cf. Matt. 12:28). This manifestation of divine power signifies the nearness of the kingdom, which in the apocalyptic expectation Jesus shared might be imagined to be casting its shadows before it, if not already breaking into their midst. Apart from the association of experienced nearness with chronological nearness, however, this saying takes on almost the character of an analytic truth: the exercise of God’s power is the way in which he reigns among us. The kingdom of God is not a political commonwealth but signifies rather God’s active ruling, which must be present where the divine power is manifest. By using the term "kingdom of God," with its indelible future orientation, however, Jesus implies that God’s power is this power of the future, for it is this future reigning of God which is actualized in the present by means of this ministry of exorcism.

If this future reigning is already effective in our world, then we may anticipate the conditions of the age to come here and now. The experienced nearness of God’s reigning power justifies Jesus’ anticipatory actions: his table-fellowship with the lost sheep of Israel looking forward to the messianic banquet; the gift of God’s forgiveness, reserved for messianic times (Mark 2:5); his preaching of a new, eschatological Torah designed for this new coming age. This was a time for new wine, for new garments, bursting through the limits of the old (Mark 2:21-22). While this power is near, this is not a time for fasting, but for the feasting of the wedding (Mark 2:19).

The apocalyptic hope powerfully expresses our very human longing for an unambiguous display of God’s activity. Israel characteristically looked for a future Day of the Lord, but Isaiah may have had the discernment to recognize that a Day of the Lord may have occurred in the events surrounding Sennacherib’s attempted invasion of Judah in 701 B.C.¹⁵ But it is difficult to discern the decisive action of God in the vicissitudes of this life. If our analysis of God’s reigning as the power of the future is correct, it is not hard to see why this is so. The power of the future is effective only insofar as it is responded to by the power of the present, and that response is usually highly fragmentary, since it is also colored by the power of the past. None of these three powers actualizes anything independently of the others. This means that God as the power of the future is necessarily effective in all things, but it also means that nowhere is he the sole agent. If so, the straightforward apocalyptic hope is an idle dream, resting upon a misconception of how God acts.

There is also another difficulty. If the kingdom of God were to become a present reality, it would no longer be future. Thus the reigning of God is forever future, never capable of surrendering its futurity to present realization. This emphatically does not mean that the kingdom is infinitely distant and therefore unrealizable. It means rather that it is precisely as future that God’s reign exerts its power, affording the opportunity for its realization here and now, however fragmentarily. We can confess, however, that God’s sovereign majesty did draw nigh unto man in the person of Jesus Christ. Through Jesus’ faithful response to the Father, his human activity became the vehicle for divine activity, for Jesus’ own power of the present allowed the divine power of the future to be fully effective.

It is our contention, then, that Jesus’ response to the present power of the coming kingdom implicitly undermined the apocalyptic expectation for an unambiguous display of divine majesty in this world, although he continued to share that hope. If so, what then happens to the consummation of the kingdom and the last judgment? Are these simply mythological accompaniments of this now unfounded apocalyptic hope?

The final judgment, which Jesus conceived as preparatory to the consummation,¹⁶ cannot be lightly dismissed in our time. The possibility of major human catastrophe, whether by nuclear holocaust or by irreversible ecological disaster, is all too real. Seen in a wider perspective, the threat of destruction has always been present in a world containing a vast multiplicity of free centers of power potentially in conflict with one another. These are all held together in loose harmony by the pervasive influence of God as their coordinating agency. "If he should take back his spirit to himself . . . . all flesh would perish together, and man would return to dust" (Job 34:14-15). The entropic forces toward increasing disorder would take over to reduce this cosmos into chaos. If this coordinating activity is God’s universal function, then it is by God’s power that our own catastrophe has been averted this long. Jesus understood that God could both shorten (Mark 13:20) and lengthen the present time, as the parable of the barren tree indicates (Luke 13:6-9). "All human existence, hourly threatened by the catastrophe, lives in the interval of grace: ‘Let it alone this year also, in case it perhaps bears fruit’ (Luke 13:8f)." ¹⁷

Catastrophe as such is the result of destructive causal forces existent in the world; its power derives from past actuality as it impinges upon us, and not directly from God. Nevertheless, these destructive forces may on occasion be acting in response to divine directives.¹⁸ They express the wrath of God, insofar as God judges existing orders and structures as worthy of destruction.¹⁹ Existing structures may be obstructing the realization of new relevant values, and to that extent be evil, deserving to be destroyed. The revolutionary fervor of the oppressed may be inspired by a holy zeal. But the judgment of destruction is always ambiguous; many values only possible in terms of the old order will never be realized, even though the destruction of that order permits other kinds of value to emerge. The destruction is experienced as disaster by those who cling to the values of the old order, but is welcomed as liberation and opportunity by those seeking the new order. Because God’s judgment is always for the sake of some further ideal, it can never be final in any absolute sense. His is always the power of the future, and therefore cannot motivate any absolute termination beyond which there is no future. Nevertheless, divine judgment may be final with respect to this present age and the ideals it seeks to exemplify.

God’s judgment takes place through the instrumentalities of this world, but the consummation of the kingdom we long for must be an unambiguously divine event. For that very reason it cannot be a future event, as every event in this temporal world requires the conjoint activity of both God and creatures. Our irreducible freedom, moreover, means that we finally determine, through our own present power, how effective God’s future power will be. This is a paradoxical and intolerable result from the standpoint which assumes that all power is measured in terms of the capacity to produce results, and God’s supreme power is manifest in his productive creation of this world ex nihilo. Denying God the power to replace this world by another would be tantamount to reducing him to impotence and inactivity. On the other hand, if productive activity is vested in becoming, in our present power to produce ourselves, then God’s supreme activity lies in his creation of himself, not the world. Rather than seek the consummation in some future event in which God affects the world, we should find it in the continuing way in which the world affects God.

Apart from the world God has neither past nor future, but is pure presence. Nontemporal, he creates himself as the envisagement of the infinitude of all pure possibilities.²⁰ Just as the world acquires a future from God, so God acquires a past from the world. Each individual creature receives its past from the other creatures of the world, and its future ultimately from God, and out of these creates a new present. God’s presence is internal to himself, derived from his nontemporality, but out of that and the past which he receives from the world he creates a new future, as he transforms his pure possibilities into real possibilities, that is, realizable possibilities under the conditions of the world. Thus we do not say that God is a future reality which does not yet exist. Most properly, he is a nontemporal actuality who influences us by the future he now creates; by means of the real possibilities he persuades the world to actualize.

To be sure, the existence of nontemporal actuality is different from that of temporal actuality, for temporal actualities influence us as past efficient causes. That does not make him any less existent, but it does mean that his presence is felt through an entirely different mode, the future.

Moreover, this creation of the future provides God with a way of achieving the final consummation. For it is by means of the conceptual richness of his inexhaustible pure possibilities that God is able to absorb into himself the multifariousness of the world, overcoming the evil of its destructive conflicts through the higher harmonies this infinite imagination provides. God experiences

This weaving together of the actual and the ideal is the consummation of the world in God’s experience,²² but it is also our future, since the Ideals used to bring the actuality experienced by God into harmonious unity thereby also become ideals and lures for actualization in the temporal world. "For the perfected actuality passes back into the temporal world, and qualifies this world so that each temporal actuality includes it as an immediate fact of relevant experience. For the kingdom of heaven is with us today. . . . It is the particular providence for particular occasions." ²³ The kingdom of heaven, as Whitehead understands it, is the perfected actuality of God as incorporating within himself the ongoing process of the world. It also provides the power of the future as operative in the present as the source of those aims we seek to realize in faith.

This sense of the kingdom of God is eloquently evoked in another passage from Whitehead’s writings. Its explicit topic is religion per se, but perhaps it describes more accurately the epitomization of religion that we find in Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom:

Jesus’ proclamation of the coming kingdom of God was open-ended, although clothed in the specific apocalyptic imagery of the day. In this particular form the kingdom has not come with power, at least not as soon as the early Christians eagerly awaited it. Yet the sovereignty of God was effectively manifest in those days. This Jesus, who was killed, God raised up and made both Lord and Christ (Acts 2:32, 36). The resurrection of Jesus whereby he became the dynamic directing agency of a new corporate reality, the body of Christ, exhibits the creative power of God for man in a way never before achieved. This was a new biological emergence, a vital breakthrough in the evolutionary history of the world, made possible by the creative order made available by God in that specific situation. In the resurrection Jesus became the Christ as the incarnation or actualization of the divine Word addressed to the human situation, thereby realizing the kingdom or sovereignty of God in our midst.

This is our theme in chapter five. It is also our Christology, specified in terms of the resurrection. We understand by the Christ the realization of that specific aim or future possibility appropriate to our human condition, an aim which Christians confess was fully actualized in Jesus of Nazareth. Since this christological proposal emphasizes the contingent specificity of the divine aim in Christ, it is not an aim given to everyman, nor is it an aim which primarily reveals to us the character of God rather than his specific address to man. On these counts it considerably diverges from other proposals in process Christology. Thus we shall preface our examination of the resurrection by a consideration of several other Christologies formulated in a process vein, indicating the strengths and difficulties of each. In this way we shall see more clearly the criteria proposed for an adequate process Christology, and be in a position to judge how well they apply to an interpretation of the resurrection, the central event in the life of the church, both then and now.

Our proposal also entails a distinction between the Christ, that Word or creative possibility specifically addressed to the human situation and actualizable by a man, and the Logos, which is the totality of creative possibilities inherent in the primordial or nontemporal nature of God, actualizable by the diverse creatures appropriate to them, including intelligent living beings on other worlds. In limiting their concerns to man, the church fathers made all too quickly an identification between the Christ and the second member of the Trinity. It is difficult to persuade ourselves of the untenability of this identification without a full exploration of the problem of extraterrestrial life, so we shall undertake this as well in the next chapter in preparation for our christological proposal. In this way, too, we shall see the close correlation that exists between creation and salvation.

NOTES:

I. George W. Coats, "The God of Death," Interpretation 29/3 (July 1975), 227-39.

2. Ibid., pp. 230-31.

3. Ibid., p. 231.

4. Ibid., p. 238. For a vigorous defense of the claim that a process model of divine power includes both coercive and persuasive elements, see J. Gerald Janzen, "Modes of Power and the Divine Relativity," Encounter,’ 36/4 (Autumn 1975), 379-406. Janzen’s essay originated as a response to an earlier version of this chapter. Its exegetical insights, particularly concerning Job and Romans 8, are daring and challenging. Although we differ on at least one point in the interpretation of Whitehead’s philosophy (he holds the system to require that God acts efficiently by mediating to present events finite efficient causes derived from the past), I do not see how his God acts coercively in any of the senses outlined in the previous chapter. To act coercively God would have to restrict the range of real possibility otherwise available to a given event. Since past events already restrict this range, it is not further restricted by having these events mediated to the present event through God. Other than mediating the past, his God seems to act in a purely persuasive manner.

5. The apocalypticist typically believes that God must come quickly because he cannot any longer tolerate the evil of the world. As we shall see, this was not Jesus’ reason for proclaiming the nearness of the kingdom.

6. See Isa. 41:1-5, 21-29; 43:8-15; 44:6-8, 21-22; 45:20-25.

7. The phrase, ‘‘the power of the future effective in the present," is borrowed from the writings of Wolfhart Pannenberg, though perhaps I use it in a different sense than he intends, As Pannenberg correctly notes, Whitehead himself gives no constitutive role to the future in his philosophy: see John Cobb’s Theology in Process, ed. David Ray Griffin and Thomas J. J. Altizer (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1977), p. 136. Pannenberg convinces me that he should, and I believe such an extension of Whitehead’s philosophy is not inconsistent with its basic principles. See my proposal, "A Whiteheadian Basis for Pannenberg’s Theology," Encounter 38/4 (Autumn 1977), 307-17, and my conversation with Pannenberg, ‘‘A Dialogue about Process Philosophy,’’ ibid., pp. 318-24.

8. Joachim Jeremias, New Testament Theology: The Proclamation of Jesus (New York: Scribners, 1971), pp.101-2.

9. Ibid., p. 102.

10. Ibid., p. 132.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., p. 133.

13. See Chapter 5.

14. Luke 10:11; cf. Luke 10:9; Mark 1:15; Matt. 3:2; 4:17; 10:7.

15. See Isa. 22:1-14, interpreting the perfect tense as past rather than as "prophetic future." See also A. Joseph Everson, "The Days of Yahweh," Journal of Biblical Literature 93 (1974), 329-37.

16. See Jeremias, New Testament Theology, pp. 122-41.

17. Ibid., p. 140.

18. God’s activity may be understood as indirectly coercive, but it is directly persuasive, becoming coercive only insofar as his aims are actualized in creaturely response. Here we diverge somewhat, perhaps, from Daniel Day Williams, who writes; "Certainly it is true that God does exercise coercive power. We cannot escape the fact when we look at the way in which the structures of life coerce us, smash our plans, seize us in the grip of their inevitabilities. God is not identical with those structures but His wrath is in then, as they are related to the ultimate structures of value which is His own being’’ ("Time, Progress, and the Kingdom of God," in Process Philosophy and Christian Thought, ed. Delwin Brown, Ralph E. James, Jr., and Gene Reeves [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971]; p. 461.

Williams’s qualification, that God is not identical with those structures, indicates that the coercion itself ultimately comes from that which is not God, though perhaps mediated by him. It is true, however, that these structures themselves may in turn be derived from the actualization (at least in part) of values provided by God.

19. "Wrath" here is most appropriate, for as our minds feel and transmit the anger (and other passions) of our bodily feelings, so God internalizes those destructive intentions which conform with his solemn sense of justice. Otherwise his judgments would be cold and unfeeling, not drawing upon a rich undercurrent of passion ultimately derived from the world itself. On this point, see my essay on ‘‘Our Prayers as God’s Passions,’’ pp. 429-38 in Religious Experience and Process Theology, ed. Harry James Cargas and Bernard Lee (New York: Paulist Press, 1976). Yet as I. Gerald Janzen has masterfully shown in a careful exegesis of God’s speech in Hos. 11:8, which he translates as "My heart transforms itself upon me/My change of mind grows fervent," God’s love can overwhelm and transform such wrath, although preserving and including it within a greater integration: "Metaphor and Reality in Hosea 11," Society of Biblical Literature 1976 Seminar Papers, ed. George MacRae (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1976), pp. 413-45.

20. See chapter 7 outlining a process trinitarianism, note 5. The nontemporal act whereby the Father begets the Son ‘‘before all worlds’’ can also be conceived as the act whereby God creates himself.

21. PR, p. 525.

22. 1 have explored this theme more fully in "Divine Persuasion and the Triumph of Good," pp. 287-304 in Process Philosophy and Christian Thought, especially in the final section.

23. PR, p. 532.

24. SMW, pp. 267-68.

The philosophies of Whitehead and Hartshorne are undoubtedly deeply theistic in intention, but Christians looking them over for possible theological appropriation have often complained that they lack any Christology. Neither has developed any explicit theory concerning the nature of Christ, nor have any of their earlier followers, with one exception. This historical result used to be frequently regarded as evidence suggesting that no real Christology could be developed on process principles. This objection seems to stand refuted, prima facie at least, by the spate of essays during the past few years proposing a variety of process Christologies. We propose to examine some of these proposals to see what they achieve. Are they efforts to show how various christological assertions, derived elsewhere, can be rendered consistent with process categories, or are they genuinely dependent upon, and emergent from, the more distinctive features of process thought? In what ways can they be reconciled with one another? In summarizing the positive results of this survey we hope to prepare the way for the distinctive thrust of our own christological proposal that the body of Christ with the risen Lord as its head constitutes the next evolutionary emergence beyond man.

Before looking at these recent proposals, it will be instructive to take a glance at that one early exception, Lionel Thornton’s The Incarnate Lord. The failure of this ambitious attempt to fuse an evolutionary concept of nature with a high Christology and an orthodox Trinitarianism has won few adherents among either students of Christology or process thinkers, and has probably discouraged others from entering this thicket. Hence the long delay in the emergence of process Christologies. Thornton’s example had to be forgotten before others would venture forth with their own proposals.

Thornton did not intend to write a Whiteheadian Christology, although that is what many who read him were looking for. He is primarily a church theologian presenting a high Christology in conversation with Whitehead’s analysis of experience. He is decidedly not a process theist: "As long as there is genuine religious experience remaining, the religious attitude will never give up its treasured truth that God is the eternal and unchanging Creator, who utterly transcends the changing drama of this present world and all that it contains."¹ Nevertheless he was an enthusiastic Whiteheadian, profoundly influenced by Whitehead’s philosophy of nature. This was still possible in 1928, for the dynamic, temporal character of God’s consequent nature was first introduced in Process and Reality (1929). At the time Thornton had closely read The Concept of Nature (1920) and Principles of Natural Knowledge (2d edition, 1925), tended to interpret Science and the Modern World (1925) in line with these earlier works, and was acquainted with Religion in the Making (1926) though somewhat unsure what to make of its doctrine of God.² He took comfort in Whitehead’s remark concerning the immortality of the soul, and evidently wanted to apply it to all theological issues: "There is no reason why such a question should not be decided on more special evidence, religious or otherwise, provided that it is trustworthy."³ Whitehead’s proposal to develop a strictly metaphysical concept of God with secular functions was not picked up.

Thornton was attracted by Whitehead’s evolutionary conceptions of nature, and particularly by his dissolution of scientific materialism into organic events. Especially in his earlier writings (including the earlier sections of Science and the Modern World), Whitehead develops a theory of overlapping events characterized by reiterated patterns, showing how sub-events may be organically influenced by the patterns of the events within which they are included. Such influence modifies and transforms simpler organisms into component elements of more complex organisms, thereby allowing for evolutionary growth.⁴ From this Thornton develops a hierarchy of stages: matter, life, mind, and spirit, each as a new emergent from its predecessor.

Yet the doctrine of real emergence in nature is balanced by an awareness of the ancient principle ex nihilo nihil fit: "The new cannot properly speaking emerge out of an existing situation. It may appear as thus emerging; but it must enter from beyond. . . . What cannot emerge out of the process of events in the series enters into that series from beyond it, that is, from the eternal order." ⁵ This is a remarkable anticipation of Whitehead’s view in Process and Reality that God’s primordial ordering of the world’s possibilities (the eternal objects) is the ultimate source of novelty in an emergent universe, except that Thornton understands these possibilities to be everlasting rather than timeless.⁶ This reification of what for Whitehead is purely possible, needing concrete embodiment in the actual world, leads Thornton to conceive of the eternal order as absolutely actual in its unchangeableness, identical with God. Then the world becomes an unnecessary appendage to God, a strange reduplication in time of that which is already unchangingly actual in God. The reciprocal interplay and mutual dependence between God and the world, so characteristic of Whitehead, are here absent. Like Hartshorne, Thornton argues that God is essentially self-giving love which must find expression in another, but he uses this argument not to establish the necessity of creation, but to demonstrate the existence of a social trinity of interacting persons.⁷ This Trinitarianism, moreover, leads to an interesting identification of two of Whitehead’s formative elements in the creation of actual entities, the realm of eternal objects and creativity, with the second and third persons of the Trinity respectively.⁸

Nevertheless, given these principles, Thornton could have devised an evolutionary Christology such that God’s creative Word, already manifest in each emergent process, has been decisively actualized for man in Jesus of Nazareth. The man Jesus could then be the bearer of that divine activity carrying man beyond himself. Such a view would have been a consistent development of the process interpretation adopted in the first half of the book, integrating both man and the divine activity in the world into the total process of nature. But Thornton can envisage no evolutionary advance beyond man,⁹ and sees in spirit, the distinctively human characteristic, primarily an openness and receptivity (when not thwarted by sin) to the eternal order. This in turn is tied to a concept of God as ‘‘Absolute Actuality’’ which is the identification of universality with concrete individuality.¹⁰ Apparently relying here on F. H. Bradley’s concrete universal, Thornton conceives of divine individuality as an all-embracing unity, and it is this principle of unity which must be incarnate in Christ. Since this divine individuality cannot be gradually introduced into the creative process, that process cannot be allowed to progressively culminate in the Christ, but must be seen merely as the material basis for the sudden irruption of the Logos-Creator from beyond. "Each stage in the incorporation of creative activity produced a new level of the series. But the Eternal Word is very God. His self-incorporation into the organic series does not, therefore, constitute a new level of the old series."¹¹ "The Incarnation brings creation to its true end in God,"¹² which constitutes a new creation decisively different from the old creation in gradual evolution. "The Christ whom Christians worship as God is not a product of creative activity . . . . not simply the projection and continuation of the curve of ascent which marks the pathway of creative activity in its incorporation into the organic series,"¹³ but the descent of God from beyond.

From the standpoint of process thought, this conception of the incarnation presupposes a self-sufficient creator who need not seek fulfillment in creaturely actualization and whose incorporation within the world is wholly discontinuous with its ongoing process. It is strikingly similar to the traditional Catholic doctrine of a divinely infused soul into the first man Adam, who otherwise may be understood as the product of the evolution of the primates, and bristles with the sharp dualisms between creator and creature which process theism has sought to overcome. Norman Pittenger,¹⁴ Charles E. Raven,¹⁵ and Dorothy Emmet¹⁶ have criticized Thornton on this score.

Quite apart from these concerns, students of Christology have objected to the implication of Thornton’s argument that Christ’s individuality must be divine rather than human. Thornton’s defense against the charge that he denies Christ’s humanity is not wholly convincing:

This overlooks the fact that each new principle of individuality creates a new species, and Christ is here depicted as belonging to a different species from man. Christ is both divine and human on Thornton’s account in the same way that man is both human and animal.¹⁸ Jesus cannot be one with us in our humanity unless he is also a man, not a divine being who subsumes humanity within himself.

We may generalize the issues raised by Thornton’s proposal by asking whether any high Christology is possible within a process perspective. Is it possible for the divine subjectivity to become actualized in some way within the man Jesus? Our answer is negative, for none of the alternatives seem to work. Either we adopt a social trinity in which only one of several divine subjectivities becomes incarnate, or the one and only subjectivity of God is realized in Jesus. But a social trinity is impossible on Whitehead’s terms, since "person" in the sense of an individual center of subjectivity must be identified with "substance" as the underlying unity of an actuality. For the unity of an actual entity in its process of coming to be is precisely its unification or growth together (concrescence), which is its subjectivity as experienced from within. Subjectivity and substantial unity cannot be displaced from one another, so the time-honored formula, una substantia in tres personae collapses unless "persona" is understood rather as an abstract aspect or mode of activity of a single concrete subjectivity. If that single divine subjectivity is realized in Jesus, then either not all of God is taken up in Christ, or Christ is identified with the totality of God, or God is in some sense diminished or altered in Christ. The first possibility would treat God the Father or the Godhead as some sort of vacuous actuality devoid of subjectivity; at any rate it would, like the second possibility, ascribe all divine subjective attributes to the subjectivity of Jesus (who can only have one unified subjectivity, not one divine and one human), which is both implausible and heretical. If to avoid such doceticism we adopt the radical kenoticism of Thomas Altizer, accepting a successive trinity such that in Christ God (the Father) died to be received by us as wholly immanent Spirit, then we must explain how universally necessary divine attributes (such as God’s full experience of every actuality) can have such an abrupt and contingent end.

None of the process Christologies we have examined propose that the divine subjectivity has become actualized within the man Jesus; rather, they contend that God was in Christ objectively, the way any actuality can be present in another according to Whitehead’s principles, though with considerably more profundity and richness. J. E. Barnhart comes the closest to articulating the concerns of high Christology as to how God

could become man in Christ.¹⁹ "Through empathy with the man Jesus, God did become not a man but, rather, became human. By ‘identifying’ with Jesus, God experienced certain human predicates, especially singular care for a dearly beloved and the dread of being estranged from him."²⁰ God could not become a man without thereby abandoning his divinity (as in Altizer’s Sabellianism), but he becomes fully human in intimately incorporating into his own being peculiarly human experiences and sensitivities, thus accepting an inexhaustible concern for human purposes, achievements, and failures. But in this sense God became human not with Christ but with Adam. "The primordial divine will-to-experience-humanity," which Barnhart identifies with the "potential Christ in God"²¹ becomes actualized within God with the first emergence of man. It is true that ‘‘in the historical Jesus, God’s will-to-value-and-fellowship"²² met a special fulfillment in a peculiar, reciprocal intensification of mutual involvement, but this in itself is not the way God became human, although from a human perspective it may make accessible to us the richness of God’s concern for us. Christology cannot be the locus for God’s becoming human, although it may reveal to us the depth of his humanity for us.

The stubborn, persistent problem of classical Christology, how one person could be both fully divine and fully human, practically disappears within a Whiteheadian framework. In that framework events and activities are primary, while enduring substantial personhood is derivative. No concrete, actual event, moreover, can be understood as either wholly the work of God or the work of man (or of any other creature). Each event requires the persuasive power of God to provide the lure or possibility or initial aim to be realized, but it also requires the creaturely power to actualize that aim by integrating together the totality of efficient causes derived from the past. Without God there would be simply chaos, for the individual occasion would lack any ordering principle to initiate its process of integration, but without the world, God’s aims for the world would never be realized, since God acts solely by the power of persuasion, which can be effective only so far as it elicits concrete response. This means that every creaturely activity is also a divine activity, incarnating God’s purposes in the world, to greater or lesser degree. Only those actions which are fully responsive to God’s aims, to be sure, reveal God’s action in the world, for only they realize his intentions without distortion. Other events may thwart or frustrate or only partially realize the divine intent, but they still necessarily involve divine action, though with diminished effectiveness. "The world lives by its incarnation of God in itself." ²³

Whitehead’s recognition of this incarnational universe is implicit in his high praise for "the schools of thought mainly associated with Alexandria and Antioch. . . . These Christian theologians have the distinction of being the only thinkers who in a fundamental metaphysical doctrine have improved upon Plato. . . . They pointed out the way in which Platonic metaphysics should develop, if it was to give a rational account of the role of the persuasive agency of God." ²⁴ For Plato, the world can only contain copies or images or Imitations of God and the Ideas which he contemplates. The Nicene fathers were faced with the problem of understanding how God could be present in Christ. "On this topic, there can be no doubt that the Arian solution, involving a derivative Image, is orthodox Platonism, though it be heterodox Christianity."²⁵ In contrast the church fathers decided for the direct immanence of God in the world, restricting its application to the one instance of the person of Christ. For all of their advance on Plato, these theologians failed to generalize their results because of an unfortunate presupposition: "The nature of God was exempted from all the metaphysical categories which applied to the individual things in the temporal world. . . . They made no effort to conceive the World in terms of the metaphysical categories by means of which they interpreted God, and they made no effort to conceive God in terms of the metaphysical categories which they applied to the World." ²⁶ Whitehead does, and hence conceives of the Platonic Ideas (his "eternal objects") as directly immanent in each actual occasion as the means whereby God’s directing activity is really present in every creature. In a world where every actuality incarnates God, even if in a very diminished way, the christological problem must be put quite differently: what is the special characteristic of general human significance defining a Christ-event, enabling Christians to confess that they find it decisively realized in Jesus of Nazareth?

Since the degree to which God’s aims are incarnated depends upon the quality of creaturely response, it is not surprising that some process thinkers such as Norman Pittenger, Peter Hamilton, and Ronald Williams have taken Jesus’ total obedience to God as the clue to the specialness of the Christ-event.²⁷ This criterion, however, is entirely too general to describe the specific characteristics which ought to pertain to the Christ. It only describes "sinlessness" or "creaturely perfection" or "saintliness." The Christ may well have all these properties, but are they sufficiently distinctive to single him Out from amid a host of other good and holy persons? Complete human response to the divine prompting may be a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the Christ-event if we define such response in relative rather than absolute terms. There is creaturely perfection wherever there is optimal achievement of value, given the antecedent causal conditions that creature unifies in its actualization.

Once we take into account the crucial role such antecedent conditions play, we see that there are as many different kinds of possible optimal achievements for persons as there are different situations confronting them. At every moment in our lives we have the opportunity of achieving the maximum value potentially inherent in each situation, but should such optimal realization be classed forthwith as ‘‘Christ-events’’? The question may be put historically: could Socrates, as a fourth-century Athenian, possibly have become the Christ? Not if our understanding of what the Christ is presupposes in any way the historical circumstance of Israel’s expectation of a coming Messiah. If all such historical conditions, on the other hand, can be systematically ignored as irrelevant, it becomes highly problematic on what grounds we award the title of Christ to Jesus and yet continue to withhold it from Socrates or from Gautama.

Let us then specify "Christ-events" as one particular species of human events characterized by the successful achievement of "christological aims," as yet unspecified as to content. In this fashion we may readily grant that Socrates and Gautama and any number of saints or just plain good people have frequently achieved the maximum value possible in given situations without thereby claiming them to be Christs, on the grounds that the aims they so richly actualized were not specifically christological. Such christological aims depend upon the grace of God, and he bestows them on some and not on others. Nevertheless, God’s activity is not arbitrary, since he inexorably seeks the best possible aims appropriate to the circumstances. It is only in certain special situations, however, that these specific aims can embody christological aims.

In A Process Christology, David R. Griffin notes the same difficulties we have raised about these proposals: "They have not made use of the notion that the content of God’s ideal aims for men varies. . . If this notion of Whitehead’s is not used, the resulting Christology has a somewhat Pelagian quality, suggesting that Jesus’ specialness is due solely to human initiative -- if Jesus was God’s decisive revelation, this did not result even partially from any special activity on God’s part in any sense."²⁸

Griffin therefore focuses his attention upon what we have called the christological aim, although he generalizes it beyond the scope of mankind: ‘‘In actualizing God’s particular aims for him, Jesus expressed God’s general- aim for his entire creation." ²⁹ This generalization is possible because of the specific content he assigns to the christological aim: "The aims given to Jesus and actualized by him during his active ministry were such that the basic vision of reality contained in his message of work and deed was the supreme expression of God’s eternal character and purpose." ³⁰

Clearly the event of Christ does reveal to us the personal character of God. Christians have seen, and will continue to see in Jesus as the Christ the supreme revelation of God’s personhood. Surely Griffin’s position is sound to this extent. Nevertheless, we do not feel that he has made full use of the resources available in process theism when he restricts what is revealed in Christ to the eternal essence of God. In classical theism, which insists upon God’s simplicity, immutability, and eternality, the eternal essence of God was all that could possibly be revealed of God. Process theism, on the other hand, makes a formal distinction between God’s abstract, necessary essence and its concrete, contingent embodiment which is responsive to the vicissitudes of the world. Griffin stresses that this contingent dimension is necessarily involved in God’s provision of initial aims, including those which express the special christological aim, since the content of such aims is constantly changing, contingent on circumstance. Clearly there is also additional contingent content in the special aims for Jesus’ life which accompany and embody the christological aim for Griffin, but these are dismissed as only of historical significance. They are relevant only to the particularities of those occasions which gave rise to the supreme revelation of God. Doubtless many aspects of those complex special aims have little systematic import. Yet a third factor may be present in these aims, a contingent component distinct from the eternal aim which, nevertheless, may have significance for the entire human situation.

God’s personal character is revealed in the contingencies of his particular dealings with his creatures. Insofar as God has an eternal, permanent essence, this is exemplified in every interaction where there is an adequate response to God. This is the character of God’s general revelation, and is fully accessible to metaphysical investigation. Theology’s focus, in contrast, should concern the special, contingent dimension of God’s personal relationship to the human situation. Humanity is a contingent species, which need never have existed. If so, the special character of God’s salvific action on man’s behalf must also be contingent. This means that theology has its own intrinsic subject matter, since this contingent dimension can never be discovered by metaphysical analysis, but must await historical disclosure. Metaphysics reveals what God is like for all creatures, as Hartshorne tells us, but religion makes manifest what God is like for us. In our religious faith we are not primarily concerned with the universal character of God’s loving response. We are concerned with the specific way that loving response is directed toward us in our own particular existential predicament. This can only be revealed in contingent historical particularities.

"In actualizing God’s particular aims for him," Griffin assures us, "Jesus expressed God’s general aim for his entire creation."³¹ We agree, but insist that this is too abstract and general for the purposes of theology. Theology is properly concerned with God’s specific aim for mankind. Since this specific aim must be contingent, it can only be discovered if historically revealed.

This distinction becomes all the more important once we place Christology within the context of possible intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. In Christ God has become incarnate as man, and for man, but is he thereby incarnate for other forms of intelligent life as well? Previously this question could be dismissed as idle speculation, but since the Second World War, there has been a dramatic upsurge of interest in life on other worlds. For many people, particularly those engaged in the natural sciences, the notion of extraterrestrial life is no longer merely an exotic possibility but a virtual certainty. The issue chiefly turns on our confidence in the regularity of planetary development and of evolutionary growth. If both of these occur regularly, spontaneously, then we should expect the universe to be populated with myriads of planets sustaining life, many of which could be technical civilizations far in advance of ours. On the other hand, if the origin of life, or the formation of planets, is a chance, freak occurrence, then we may well be alone in the universe.

Both views of planetary development have been with us for a long time. The French naturalist Georges de Buffon (1707-1788) proposed that the birth of the planets resulted from a glancing collision of our sun with a passing comet. In contrast, Immanuel Kant and Pierre de Laplace argued that planetary development was part of a normal process to be expected in the life of almost every star: they assumed the young sun was surrounded by a thin lens-shaped gaseous envelope (solar nebula) which later condensed into planets. During the late nineteenth century the Kant-Laplace hypothesis was severely criticized by the British physicist Clerk Maxwell, who argued that the forces of differential rotation between parts of the solar nebula would break up any such condensation as soon as it began to form. In the face of this objection, which seemed quite decisive at the time, cosmologists increasingly turned to some version of Buffon’s glancing collision. Forest Ray Moulton and Thomas C. Chamberlin in the United States supposed that the sun, under the gravitational pull of some passing star, erupted gigantic globs of matter which in time formed planets, and a comparable theory was proposed by Sir James Jeans and H. Jeffreys. Yet the collisions or near misses dictated by these theories are inherently very improbable, perhaps only ten for the entire life of our galaxy during the past five billion years.³² With so few planets in existence, we could hardly assume that there would be much life elsewhere, at least not in our galaxy.

Both types of theories developed difficulties, but Maxwell’s objections to the Kant-Laplace hypothesis were overcome toward the end of World War II by C. F. von Weizsäcker, who argued that the original objections were based on the assumption that the chemical composition of the sun resembled that of the earth. We now know that the heavier, terrestrial elements compose less than one per cent of the sun’s mass, the rest being essentially a mixture of the two lightest elements, hydrogen and helium. Von Weizsäcker argued for a differential treatment between the hydrogen-helium and heavier elements with respect to the angular momentum of original solar mass. With the issue thus resolved in favor of a regular formation of planets, the chance of there being other planets capable of sustaining life is so high as to be practically certain. Even if only one planet out of every 150,000 contained life, there would be one million life-worlds in our galaxy, some of which we can reasonably assume contain intelligent life, for whom, we presume, God would also be concerned.

As Paul Tillich has seen:

Now what can we say about God’s relation to such intelligent beings on other planets? Here our approach cannot be existential, for we cannot participate in the self-understanding such beings might possess, nor can our reflections significantly influence, or be derived from, our own quest for a meaningful selfhood. The issue is quite theoretical, but it is one which helps us to see the boundaries and implications of one particular faith-stance in the wider context of others. Christian thinkers have reflected on these boundaries with respect to their fellow human beings in other cultures, and even with respect to the other animals which share our planet, but rarely with respect to the rest of life populating the universe.

Moreover, the issue entails cosmological assertions bearing on our scientific understanding of the universe. For we must show the possibility of God’s involvement in the emergence of other forms of intelligent life before any claim can be entertained concerning their existential standing before God, and this task invites dialogue with scientific accounts of evolutionary processes.

While it may not express itself in these terms, the scientific community has become increasingly confident in the tremendous potential inherent in the universe for evolutionary growth. If the proper conditions are present, for example, surface temperatures permitting large bodies of liquid such as water or ammonia or methane, atmospheres permitting of energy-exchange, some source of light, etc., most scientists expect that sooner or later life will emerge. The extreme resiliency and buoyancy of the evolutionary thrust make it unlikely that, if all necessary environmental conditions are met, prebiotic molecules will not eventually emerge to be followed by some form of life.

In 1953, Stanley L. Miller, a collaborator of Harold C. Urey at the University of Chicago, prepared a mixture of methane, ammonia, and water vapor in simulation of the primitive atmosphere postulated for the earth. Stimulated by an electrode discharge passing through the mixture, within a week it yielded a variety of organic molecules: amino acids, acetic acid, simple sugars. Some of these are the building blocks used in the formation of living cells. If such dramatic growth was possible in such a short interval of time, under the proper conditions we can expect the same sort of process to occur on other worlds. This does not mean to imply that precisely these organic compounds must first be synthesized in order to allow life to emerge, but that these could have been the compounds used here on earth for the formation of life. On other worlds it is conceivable that an original atmosphere rich in hydrogen cyanide would have produced other organic building blocks. We anticipate some sort of growth toward increased complexity: increasingly larger organic macromolecules, then the convergence of many macromolecules to constitute a simple living system, either as a cell with its protective wall and vital nucleus or as some functional analogue, then the convergence of many cells to form larger organisms.

Since Darwin, this process of evolutionary growth, whereby levels of Increasing complexity are seen to emerge from simpler ones, has been explained in terms of the double mechanism of natural selection and chance variation. Natural selection affords a measure of stability and durability, for those populations which happen to be best adapted to their environments continue to survive as other populations tend to die out. By itself, however, natural selection provides for no evolutionary advance, for it introduces no novelty, and hence no possibility of anything more than that which already has been. We must recognize that in this context ‘‘adaptation’’ is strictly defined in terms of survival values and that, generally speaking, it is the simpler forms of organization that possess the greatest staying power: living systems, no matter how fantastically intricate- and well organized they might be, have a much shorter span of existence than, say, a rock crystal, or a single stable atom.³⁴

The stability of natural selection must be balanced by the novelty of chance variation, which permits the introduction of new forms of existence. In principle this is as far as a scientific explanation can go if it proceeds by strict limitation to efficient causal explanation. Seen most broadly, any efficient causal explanation restricts itself to that which is traditional, for it explains the present in terms of the past. Efficient causality is the way in which the past persists into the present, and the task of scientific analysis is to discover whatever regularity exists in this transfer from past to present. Everything that happens either follows regularly established patterns or just happens quite accidentally. Ultimately, then, regularity and chance are our only options, and chance signifies little more than the absence of scientific causal explanation. Yet, without chance, nothing new could ever occur, that is, new in the sense of establishing novel causal patterns and forms of organization. If everything happened strictly according to deterministic physical laws, there would be no possibility for the emergence of life, if one assumes that the organization of life, while dependent upon physical principles, is not reducible to them. Fortunately, physical laws are probabilistic, with an indeterminacy that permits the emergence of novelty. Without chance, there can be no evolutionary advance, yet, strictly speaking, chance explains nothing. It is merely the absence of any efficient causal explanation.

Now the evolutionary process is essentially the emergence of new levels of complexity. Given the character of scientific explanation in terms of efficient causes, it is quite understandable that such evolutionary advance should be explained in terms of natural selection and chance variation as the best possible scientific theory. Chance supplies the novelty, while natural selection permits the consolidation of gains. Nevertheless, as an account of the whole story, it is quite incredible.

Essentially, what is lacking is any account as to why new levels of complexity should ever be achieved. Chance variation will produce novel forms of organization which may be more or less complex than that which preceded it. But should there be any greater tendency for the more complex rather than for the less complex to persist from such variation? Random activity should actually tend to favor the less complex for three reasons. (1) The simpler depends upon fewer specific conditions and has fewer, less demanding needs; human life, for example, depends upon so many more factors than single-celled marine life does. (2) The less complex is more in accord with entropy, the principle that any closed system tends to decrease in order over time. (3) With time, the possibility that random variation should produce anything with greater order should decrease as entropy increases.

God’s cosmological function consists in supplying that impetus toward greater complexification that we discover to be operative throughout the natural order. This does not mean that God acts efficiently as one of the causal antecedent conditions out of which the present event emerges. Rather he serves as a lure for actualization, providing novel possibilities of achievement. Persuasion entails response, not conformation, and the response is free either to embrace or to reject the novel aim. We do not mean to suggest that there is much free response in the universe: atoms and molecules are extremely traditional in their habits, behaving largely as they have always behaved. Plants, animals, and even humans are not much better, blindly reiterating that which went on before. Yet if there is to be any emergence of greater complexity, then there must be at least a modicum of spontaneous response possible even on the atomic and molecular levels, occasionally permitting the actualization of some evolutionary advance. Divine persuasion is the urge to maximize the possibilities inherent in such indeterminate response.

In a very real sense this theory of divine initiative and creaturely response commits us to some form of neo-Lamarckianism, for we are affirming that the inheritance of acquired characteristics is fundamental to evolutionary advance. In appropriating the divine possibility as its own aim, the creature is acquiring some characteristic which is then transmitted by means of efficient causality to subsequent generations. Free response becomes blind habit; novelty becomes tradition; final causality passes over into efficient causality. As we have noted, the realm of activity not wholly governed by efficient causal patterns may be vanishingly small on the simplest levels of existence, but that quantitatively negligible amount is all important in furthering any increased complexity. Random mutation is incapable of explaining the directedness of evolution such response can introduce. Once introduced, however, the new characteristic may be simply transmitted through blind habit.³⁵

Generally speaking neo-Lamarckianism, as usually understood, has been properly discredited, but for the wrong reasons. It is not the inheritance of acquired characteristics which is erroneous, but the failure to distinguish properly between "levels" of response. How a given person or animal responds to his environmental situation will not affect the genetic makeup of his descendants, for that genetic makeup is determined on the cellular, perhaps even on the molecular level. If sufficiently original, human response may shape the common culture inherited by our fellows, for every tradition blindly received originally had its purpose and justification, however feeble that might have been. But if we restrict ourselves to biological inheritance, then we must examine cellular and molecular response, ignoring all higher responses on the level of the total organism. Here we can only conjecture, for it is difficult to appreciate what aims DNA molecules may strive to actualize. It may be doubted, however, that such alms would embrace even the relevant aims of the cell to which the DNA molecules belong, let alone the aims of the total animal body. Precisely in this sense, we can say that any gene mutations introduced by novel actualizations by such DNA molecules are random with regard to the future of the total organism in much the same way that the realization of our personal goals is usually random with respect to the future of the human race as a whole.³⁶

Creaturely response through the appropriation of a novel aim supplied by God, on whatever level, whether atomic, molecular, cellular, or organismic, becomes the chief means whereby divine purposes become effective in the world. This does not mean, however, that the created order proceeds according to some set plan. Divine persuasion is highly opportunistic, seeking to maximize possibilities for increasing complexity which are consistent with the actual conditions imposed by the past through efficient causation. Moreover, this persuasion is not coercive, so there is no necessity that every creature must embody the maximum of its potentialities. Whatever happens, happens as the result of the creature’s self-activity in utilizing its causal conditions to achieve its ends, but God is everywhere and at all times seeking that which is best, given the circumstances. Such gracious activity will not always be thwarted, so that evolutionary advance, as actualized through free creaturely response, gradually comes into being.

Thus, for the universe at large, divine persuasion seeks to evoke life wherever possible, in the form appropriate to particular local conditions. We assume that there are comirnon physical laws for the entire observable universe, and these laws yield universal laws of chemical bonding. We can be reasonably certain that the way molecules are formed is invariant throughout the universe, and that the most promising chemical elements for organic evolution will be the lighter elements toward the center of the periodic table capable of very supple and complex co-valent bonding.

From this point on, however, the evolutionary process may branch in many directions, for the macromolecules formed out of these elements will vary considerably depending upon the composition and distribution of such elements in the early stages of that world. One-celled microorganisms, in developing their metabolism, will depend in turn upon whatever macromolecules are available, so we should expect every world to have its own way of organizing simple living systems. As we know from the past history of evolution on this earth, the development of multicelled organisms with or without central coordination (that is, animals and plants) can take many different routes, but these routes might be even more varied if the basic cellular structure were also radically different. The possibilities are naturally enormous.

The increase of freedom may be a divine purpose appropriate to all worlds. Freedom is essentially self-creation, requiring both the absence of restraint and the introduction of order by the free agent. On the atomic and molecular level there is a minimum of spontaneity, for each response is overwhelmingly the product of blind habit, endlessly reiterating the same pattern of activity it has inherited. We may think of molecules as societies of atoms, and molecules have been discovered to have preserved their structures intact for a good billion years. The decisive difference between living and lifeless matter, as Whitehead saw, is the difference between novel and habitual response. This may be a matter of degree, such that what we designate as living may simply be those instances where novelty dominates over habit. Homeostatic adjustment within the living cell requires that it respond to its surroundings in original ways which supersede the customary behavior of molecules.

At a higher level, motility frees animals from spatial confinement and renders them open to a great variety of situations to respond to. Yet without sentience, such motility would simply lead to random behavior; sight and smell and touch enable animals to achieve purposeful results meaningful to them. Intelligence is simply the next step in the quest for greater freedom; imagination increases our field of action by including the possible as well as the actual, while reason enables us to order these possibilities in significant ways.

As the capacity for novelty expands, consciousness emerges. We cannot define consciousness in terms of a centralized nervous system, for there is a great deal of neurological activity lying below the threshold of consciousness. Habitual patterns of response, such as getting dressed, riding a bicycle, using a typewriter, so painfully and self-consciously learned at the time, become quite unconscious.³⁷ A centralized nervous system or its close analogue may be the necessary basis for consciousness, but consciousness itself is the inner concomitant of the presence of some novelty which has not yet faded into the background through incessant repetition.

Once intelligence appears, cultures may develop, varying enormously among themselves, but sharing the common biological inheritance and common general environment for that planet. Thus we should expect cultural differentiation on other worlds, but despite their diversity all would be characteristically stamped by that biological situation, just as all our cultures by contrast will be found to have certain peculiarly "terrestrial" features. We may leave open the question whether intelligent cultures must further develop into technical civilizations, that is, into civilizations seeking to transform environmental conditions to suit their own purposes and needs. It may be that human technology is essentially an accident owing to the fact that man is biologically so poorly adapted to his natural surroundings. It is quite possible, for example, that the dolphins possess a highly refined culture transmitted orally from generation to generation, but that they have developed no technology because they have no need of it. Man is a tool-using animal, but it may not be necessary that all intelligent species must also become tool-using.

With the emergence of conscious alternatives of action, ethics becomes possible, for now some options may be experienced as better and others as worse. What goodness means for other intelligent beings may well be beyond the bounds of our imagination, but it might be just possible to define a general criterion underlying all concrete embodiments. That which fosters the expansion of freedom and the intensity of experience may be regarded as good, although the ways in which freedom and intensity are fostered will depend upon the biological, psychological, social, cultural, political, economic, and possibly religious situations in which particular intelligent beings find themselves.

Throughout this multifarious universe the divine creativity is operative, evoking greater and greater levels of complexity, thereby permitting the expansion of freedom and the emergence of intense conscious experience. With consciousness it becomes possible for creatures to be aware of God’s directing activity, although on earth this seems to be generally rather sporadic and intermittent. In general the basic way in which God acts on the human level is through ethical persuasion; it is by the worthiness, the attractiveness, the importance of specific ethical ends envisioned that God lures us on to actualize a world better than what we have known. Such divine persuasion can be effective wherever man is willing to be ethically sensitive, quite apart from whether he consciously affirms or denies the existence of such divine reality. In this context, we may define God as that dynamic source of values which lures the evolutionary process to an ever-richer complexity productive of increasing freedom and intensity of experience. As such, God is necessarily operative in the development of every life and in every culture, whether terrestrial or extraterrestrial.

Now in terms of these speculations, is it possible for us to do justice to the Christian claim that God acted decisively in Jesus of Nazareth for the salvation of all mankind? We have sketched a liberal theology for the cosmos, but is it also appropriate for our existence here and now? Or need we surrender the claim of Christ’s decisiveness in the name of some unproven conjecture?

John bears witness that the Logos of God, by which he created the world, became flesh and dwelt among us. Are we then to conclude that God’s only Son became uniquely incarnate once and for all on the third planet of a rather ordinary outlying star of a thoroughly undistinguished galaxy? Paul Tillich argues to the contrary: "Incarnation is unique for the special group in which it happens, but it is not unique in the sense that other singular incarnations for other unique worlds are excluded. Man cannot claim to occupy the only possible place for Incarnation." ³⁸ Accordingly, we find it useful to make a distinction ignored by our forefathers in the naive assumption of the uniqueness and exalted status of man. We understand by the Logos or divine creative Word the sum totality of all God’s specific creative purposes for all creatures. The Word or speech of God symbolized the divine activity whereby new structural possibilities for the emergence of greater complexity become lures of feeling for further actualization. Yet this creative purpose is hardly invariant in its specific manifestations: what God says depends upon the particular situation confronting that individual in his own world. The speech appropriate to macromolecules capable of converging to form the nucleus of a living cell is characteristically different from the ethical imperative addressing twentieth-century Americans. Both differ sharply from that Word addressing intelligent creatures who may dwell in some super-civilization centuries ahead of our own. God’s dynamic Word knows no single form, but assumes that character expressive of God’s general aim at intensity of experience appropriate to each circumstance. By this Word the worlds were created, and by this Word also God has sought the salvation of his people, Israel.

The Logos, then, refers to the totality of God’s creative aims. We may distinguish this from the Christ, which signifies that one specific divine creative purpose addressed to the human situation, designed to bring about our salvation. To affirm that Jesus is the Christ is to confess that in Jesus of Nazareth we behold the embodiment of the divine intent addressed to mankind. The Word appropriate to our condition becomes incarnate by becoming fully actualized in the words, deeds, and suffering of Jesus. God has spoken before and since to man, with fragmentary success; his Word has come down again and again, but never before has it so taken root and become flesh. For it must be recognized that the divine Word depends upon creaturely response for its actualization. All of God’s urging will do no good unless we act; but then again, we would not be inclined to act at all unless our ethical and religious sensibilities were aroused by God’s prompting.

In Christ we have the promise of God’s salvation for all people, but what does this salvation mean? When the aged Simeon beheld the Christ child who would save his people from their sins, he probably understood the liberation of Israel from Roman oppression, the consequence of the people’s sin against their God. Paul then took this common formula, and transformed the meaning of salvation, so that we are being saved from the sins themselves and not merely from their consequences. In its deepest sense, salvation is that which overcomes our guilt, meaninglessness, and alienation from the creative source of all value, that which saves us from ultimate futility.

Salvation is the application of God’s creative purpose to intelligent life. Everywhere God’s creative urging toward the establishment of increased levels of intensity is present, but only with intelligent life can there be any awareness of this. At the same time, only with intelligent life can there be any sense of alienation from divine creativity, any awareness of our capacity to thwart the divine purpose by self-centered activities randomly conflicting with one another. As the only apparently intelligent creature on earth, man can sense the meaninglessness of his life apart from God. Even though the individual life may be cherished by God forever, its purposes by itself are ridiculously puny. But the individual need not experience his life in and of itself, but as participating in the broad sweep of divine creation, contributing in its small way to the increased intensification of divine experience, making possible the emergence of new forms of existence beyond man. We shall consider what one of these newly emergent forms might be in the next chapter. Here it is important to appreciate the intimate connection between salvation and creation. Creation in the sense of the emergence of levels of intensification in concert with divine persuasion is universal, and the salvation of each (intelligent) level depends upon its participation in the creation of the next higher level. For creation is the ultimate, all-inclusive context of meaning and value in terms of which we can be saved.

Jesus as the Christ is the incarnation of God’s dynamic Word addressed to us as confessing Christians, but should we say that he is the only incarnation for mankind? If we think of incarnation primarily in terms of the actualization of the divine creative purpose creating that which takes us beyond man, we may be tempted to reply affirmatively. But John Cobb, addressing himself to just this problem in Christ in a Pluralistic Age, is teaching some of us to consider "incarnation" in an additional, more extended meaning. Here "incarnation" does not refer so much to the actualization as to the embodiment of divine aims in the lives of people, whereby the very abstract aims conceptually entertained in God’s primordial experience are transformed into concrete possibilities or effective lures for our action and self-understanding. In this sense God is incarnated in every religious tradition through every image or symbol which effectively expresses its deepest response to God’s leading, although the Christian can confess that for him Christ, the incarnation of God, is supremely exemplified in Jesus.

This may be an idiosyncratic reading of Christ in a Pluralistic Age,³⁹ yet it follows naturally from Cobb’s proposal that Christ should be accorded the status of a Whiteheadian proposition.⁴⁰ Such a proposition is neither an actuality nor a pure possibility but a hybrid of both. It functions normally as real or concrete possibility for the future, sharing with the pure primordial possibilities their unactualized status, yet being also rooted in the actualities of the past which form the causal conditions by which it could someday become actual. Pure possibilities as such are irrelevant to the ongoing course of the temporal world. They must first become ‘‘incarnate’’ in the sense of becoming interwoven with the concrete vicissitudes of historical circumstance in order to become effective lures for the future. Only those possibilities which are realizable under present circumstances (or which may shortly become realizable) are live options for future actualization. The divine Logos, as the primordial mind of God, contains an infinity of pure possibility, but only those possibilities specifically addressed to the human situation can save us. These possibilities are addressed to our situation by becoming incarnate in our living religious traditions, which clothe abstract divine aims with the symbolic imagery which speaks to our concrete needs.

As St. Ambrose has said, it is not by dialectic that God has been pleased to save his people.⁴¹ Pure abstract concepts have no saving significance. Religious symbols, not concepts, mediate to us the divine. These symbols are rooted in historical circumstance, not human contrivance; they are ‘‘born,’’ "live,’’ and ‘‘die’’ within the life of the communities shaped by them. We must be wary of reducing the symbols of other traditions to the bare concepts they embody. This may enable us to understand them in terms of our own conceptualities, but it robs them of their particular salvific power. If we see that the very generation of such effective concrete lures is the incarnation (in this extended sense) of divine aims, then there is a deeply Christian reason for affirming the positive valuations of other traditions on their own terms.

While Cobb’s proposals about "incarnation" address the problem of the pluralism of faiths in a most exciting manner, we have deep reservations about his analysis of incarnation in the more usual, restricted sense as applying to how Jesus can be the Christ. For Jesus’ specific individuality, Cobb suggests that the center of his subjectivity is co-constituted by the divine Logos, understood as the unity of the ideals, aims, and possibilities that God cherishes for the world. This theme was first announced in "A Whiteheadian Christology, "⁴² and here it is carefully developed in terms of the peculiar authority Jesus claimed which contemporary witnesses attested to according to recent New Testament scholars as diverse as Rudolf Bultmann, Norman Penn, Ernest C. Colwell, and Milan Machovec. Jesus may well have possessed this peculiar authority, but can we therefore ascribe to him a unique psychic structure of experience not shared by other human beings? The problem is not the uniqueness of this structure, for Cobb has already argued that humanity has possessed a wealth of such psychic structures in the course of history.⁴³ If there are a great many differing types, all of which are authentically human ways of experience, Jesus could possess a unique type and still be fully human. The problem is rather epistemological: how could we possibly know the inner psychic experience of another to ascertain uniquely differing features of his structure? By an analysis of our own structure of experience we can ascertain its common, generic features, and by the analysis of a large class of human beings perhaps we can postulate the particular features of that group’s psychic structure, but the inner structure of an individual, particularly when it is claimed to be uniquely different from any other, seems beyond our powers. If we cannot know but only believe, then the question becomes whether we can have any confidence that our belief in such a unique psychic structure is even meaningful.

All of these christological proposals with process theology are strongly influenced by the classical problem, how the Christ can be both fully divine and fully human. But as we have seen, this is no longer the central problem within a Whiteheadian framework. Nor was it the central basis upon which the proclamation of the early church was founded. The basis for the early church was the resurrection. Thus Luke records Peter’s speech at Pentecost: "This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses. . . . Let all the house of Israel therefore know assuredly that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified" (Acts 2:32, 36). The classic problem of the status of the Christ came much later. The initial question, which is also the more central question within process Christology, centers on what basis we proclaim Jesus to be the Christ. Our own christological proposal shall follow the lead of the early church, and finds its basis also in the resurrection of Jesus.

NOTES:

1. IL, p. 112.

2. See ibid., Appendix C, "Objects and Events," pp. 456-69, which explores Thornton’s appropriation of Whitehead’s categories.

3. RM, pp. 110-1l; Thornton quotes this sentence, IL, p. 463.

4. SMW, pp. 156-57; IL, p. 460.

5. IL, p. 84.

6. To be sure, he assigns them "an altogether different kind of permanence" (IL, p.459) from that of enduing objects, but this difference is left unexplained.

7. IL, p. 396:

But if the Trinity be understood in a purely economic sense, so that the distinctions correspond only to aspects of God manifested in His activities of creation, revelation, inspiration or the like, then there are no eternal relations of self-giving within the divine life of Absolute Actuality. Thus the principle of self-giving in God, which is acknowledged to be essential, can find expression only ad extra, in relations with creation. But this is to make creation necessary to God, in the sense that the full actuality of God’s life is incomplete apart from creation. This is to place God under a necessity external to Himself. God becomes dependent upon creation for the expression of His nature.

This is meant to be a reductio ad absurdum, but the absurdity is self-imagined One can almost feel Thornton’s horror at the possibility that any aspect of God might be contingent upon the world

8. Ibid.. p. 417:

The created universe is the product of the twofold creative activity of the Word and the Spirit. The Word is the eternal object [= Whitehead’s realm of eternal objects as internally ordered] of the Father’s self-expression, and the Spirit is the Immanent principle of actuality and unity in their mutual relations. So we discern in the organic series a transcendent formative activity of creation weaving patterns of objects upon events, and an immanent energizing activity underlying events, and binding their succession into the unity of series and process upon which enduring objects may be patterned.

9. Ibid.. pp. 158-59;

With man we stand at the summit of the ascending series, where the progression of the universe and of its modes of revelation and mediation can apparently advance no further.

10. Ibid., p. 223.

11. Ibid., p. 228.

12. Ibid., p. 225.

13. Ibid., p. 227.

14. Norman Pittenger, The Word Incarnate (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959), pp. 107-9. fly insisting that Christ enters the series from beyond, ‘‘he denies the significance of the whole series as the vehicle of God’s action. For in fact the world is not patient of deity in any real sense, if at the crucial point it is required that God thus break into his own ordering of things" (p. 108).

15. Charles E. Raven, Natural Religion and Christian Theology, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), p. 102: "Dr. Thornton’s own doctrine was rendered inconsistent by his insistence that although the creative process disclosed a series of emergents, life, mind, spirit, and thereby foreshadowed the culmination of the series in the coming of Christ, yet that event differed radically from all its predecessors and signalized not the consummation of the process but the intrusion into it of a Being wholly distinct and independent."

16. Dorothy Emmet, Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism (London: Macmillan, 1st ed. 1932, 2d ed. 1966), p. 254, n. 2:

He can indeed claim Whitehead’s support for the view that our apprehension of the eternal order depends upon the fact of a developing incorporation of that order into the successions of events in Space-Time through an ascending cosmic series [IL, p. 98]. But this has really no bearing on the Christology of the latter half of the book, since he claims that Christ is not a product of the creative organic series but an irruption of the Logos-Creator (or the absolute eternal order) into the series.

17. IL, pp. 237 38.

18. See the criticism of D. M. Baillie, God Was in Christ (New York; Scribner’s, 1948), pp. 91-93, who suggests that The Incarnate Lord might be understood as a modern version of "the impersonal humanity of Christ" proposed by Cyril of Alexandria. Baillie refers us to a similar critique by J. K. Mozley, The Doctrine of the Incarnation (London: G. Bles, 1949), pp. 146-47.

19. J. P. Barnhart, "Incarnation and Process Philosophy," Religious Studies 2 (1967), 225-32.

20. Ibid., p. 229. Italics his.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid., p. 231.

23. RM, p. 151.

24. AI, pp. 214, 216; cf. pp. 166-67.

25. Ibid., p. 216.

26. Ibid., pp. 216, 217.

27. For an extensive bibliography on process Christology, see Ewert H. Cousins, ed., Process Theology: Basic Writings (New York: Newman Press, 1971), pp. 200-2, 215-16, and 226. See also Delwin Brown’s bibliographic discussion in Process Philosophy and Christian Thought, ed. Delwin Brown, Ralph E. James, Jr., and Gene Reeves (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), pp. 58-61. I have specifically criticized Ronald L. Williams’s article as paradigmatic of this approach in "The Possibilities for Process Christology," Encounter 35/4 (Autumn 1974), 281-94, esp. pp. 283-86. For my additional comments on Griffin’s A Process Christology, see pp. 286-94.

28. PC, p. 218.

29. Ibid., p. 220; italics his.

30. Ibid., p. 218. Here God’s eternal character and purpose refer to his personal attributes which can to some extent be embodied by a finite being sharing the same character and purpose, in contradistinction to God’s metaphysical attributes, which indicate his uniqueness from all finite beings (PC, pp. 191-92). Nevertheless, both are aspects of God’s uncreated abstract essence. Griffin does not avail himself of the distinction proposed by Pailin, whereby God’s personal attributes are those values which God has in fact chosen for all occasions in this actual world, in either case, however, such personal attributes would be knowable in the same way that his metaphysical attributes are, namely, by way of philosophical inquiry. See David A. Pailin, "The Incarnation as a Continuing Reality," Religious Studies 6/4 (December 1970), 303-27, and my response, ‘The incarnation as a Contingent Reality,’’ Religious Studies 8/2 (June 1972), 169-73.

31. PC, p. 220.

32. I. S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan, Intelligent Life in the Universe (San Francisco: Holden-Day, 1966), p. 166.

33. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 95.

34. Individual cells within a complex organism, to be sure, apparently have a shorter life-span than their host. It may be, however, that the kind of organization whereby the individual cells are knit together is itself simpler than the organization of the cell. Bureaucracies and institutions are less organically structured than individual human beings, yet they can outlast a score of human life-spans. If survival, that is, that persistence of a given state of organization, is our sole criterion of value, then there is a lot to be said for institutional inertia. It is highly adaptive in its ability to survive most anything.

35. Sir Alister Hardy, The Living Stream: Evolution and Man (London: William Collins, 1965).

36. The argument of this paragraph is heavily dependent upon Richard H. Overman, Evolution and the Christian Doctrine of Creation (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967), pp. 203-1l.

37. Erwin Schrodinger, Mind and Matter (Cambridge University press, 1959). pp. 4-5.

38. Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 2, p. 96.

39. Cobb’s theory of incarnation is complex, and perhaps best understood by considering it in a simpler version, as presented in chapter 6 of Process Theology, An Introductory Exposition. by John B. Cobb, Jr., and David Ray Griffin (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976). There Christ signifies not only Jesus but any incarnation of the Word or Logos of God. Since the Logos is identified with God’s primordial nature, that is. with the totality of the possibilities God envisages for the world, Christ, its incarnation, is seen in the actualization of any radically new and creative possibilities derived from God. Hence we can see that such actualization must result in creative transformation. This theme of Christ as creative transformation is emphasized in Christ in a Pluralistic Age, but it is overlaid by another account of Christ, namely, as the particularization of divine aims in images or symbols capable of evoking deep human response. There are thus two layers of meaning as to Christ in this work, neither of which allows for the conventional simple identification of Christ with Jesus only.

40. Cobb acknowledges his indebtedness for the idea to William Beardslee, A House for Hope (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1972): see CPA, pp. 14-15.

Beardslee reports that the thesis of Donald W. Sherburne’s A Whiteheadian Aesthetic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), that a work of art has the ontological status of a Whiteheadian proposition, suggested the idea to him.

41. Whitehead quotes these words from the frontispiece of Cardinal Newman’s Grammar of Assent, AI 380: ‘Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populum suum.

42. John Cobb, Jr., "A Whiteheadian Christology," in Process Philosophy and Christian Thought, pp. 382-98.

43. John Cobb, Jr., The Structure of Christian Existence (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967) describes eight types for human existence. Now Cobb sees these types as ranged along a continuum.

This differentiation between persuasive and coercive power moves somewhat beyond the Old Testament context which rarely addresses itself to this particular contrast. Nonetheless its dominant experience of divine power seems to emphasize coercive elements, with the symbols for power drawn heavily from the military and political spheres. Its roots are found in the very early tradition that Yahweh is a God of war:

Throughout its history Israel relied upon the military prowess of Yahweh, first in the prosecution of holy war in defense of the tribal amphictyony, then against the enemies of the Lord’s anointed (Psalm 2), and finally in expectation of the destruction of all powers oppressing Israel in the last day. ‘‘Does evil befall a city, unless the Lord has done it?’’ (Amos 3:6b). He has all power, both to create and to destroy, and that destructive power could also be turned against Israel itself. The entire prophetic corpus ends on that note of dire warning, "lest I come and smite the land with a curse" (Mal. 4:6).

Exclusive concern with divine power, however, distorts the texture of biblical experience, which does not systematically articulate a series of doctrines carefully correlated with one another, such that each may safely be considered on its own merits. Rather, Israel bore witness to that action of God directly impinging upon the situation at hand, letting the total cumulative context make the necessary adjustments and modifications. God is free to act as he wills (Ex. 33:19), so the experience of what God is now doing is neither determined by nor could it possibly repudiate what God has already done. But by his covenant with Israel all of God’s actions could be accepted and understood as expressions of his age-long struggle and personal confrontation with his people and not as mere displays of raw, naked force. Divine power was interfused with moral purity, as witnessed, for example, in the experience of Isaiah the year King Uzziah died (Isaiah 6). Yet no matter how august, how holy, or how destructive God’s power might be, it was always experienced as the expression of a divine will in personal interaction with his people.

That context, however, is no longer our context. The history of God’s dealings with Israel can no longer serve as the all-embracing horizon for our understanding of God, which must now be correlated with a greatly expanded world history, a scientific understanding of nature and man, and a drastically altered social and ethical situation. It would appear that only a philosophical structure can provide a sufficiently inclusive context suitable to our needs. Therefore the hermeneutical task calls for the translation of Israel’s experience into a contemporary systematic and conceptual framework, one that can do justice to its historical concerns. Much hermeneutical discussion today centers upon options within existential thought. Without question existential emphases upon risk, subjective appropriation, and decision must be affirmed, and the call to authentic openness may be appreciated as a protest against impersonal ethical norms. But as a total context existential philosophy is methodologically too restrictive If faith can only be expressed in terms of human encounter, such that we are precluded from using any cosmological framework in expressing our understanding of God, then we have no way of appreciating God’s activity and manifestation of concern toward the rest of the created order. We are in danger of succumbing to a global anthropocentricity in our existential preoccupation, precisely at a time when members of the scientific community are reckoning with the strong probability of intelligent life inhabiting other worlds within our universe.

It is no accident, however, that the present hermeneutical concern in biblical circles received its impetus from existential concerns. For the problem was not so much how to update a first-century world view, as how to express the biblical experience within any systematic, cosmological framework. Insofar as a cosmology was able to articulate the biblical sense of divine sovereign power, it seemed destined to minimize any creaturely contribution to creation and to transform providence into determinism. In the official formulation of Christian doctrine, Whitehead complains, "the deeper idolatry, of the fashioning of God in the image of the Egyptian. Persian, and Roman imperial rulers, was retained. The Church gave unto God the attributes which belong exclusively to Caesar." ³

Process theism involves the persistent effort to conceive God’s activity primarily in terms of persuasion. It firmly opposes those views which from its perspective imply certain kinds of coercion within divine power. Here it is necessary to be precise as to what we mean by coercion. Not every cause which is not persuasive is therefore coercive. Nor is every efficient cause coercive, and every final cause persuasive. Coercion is readily understood on the experiential level of social or physical behavior, but its proper metaphysical definition is difficult to ascertain.

Not every limitation is coercive. The laws of logic, metaphysics, and nature (causal uniformities) in one sense limit what is possible, but they also structure it. I am not coerced by demands of consistency, nor by the law of gravity, nor by my inability to fly. Even within the realm of possibility so structured by logic, metaphysics, and causal regularity there is the further limitation that my present possibilities conform to the particular causal conditions of my past. What I can now become must emerge out of the totality of those past conditions impinging upon me. These dictate the overwhelming improbability of my becoming the next astronaut, or the next president. These past conditions may sometimes be felt as coercive, but they are not coercive as such. They are also the enabling conditions where I am presently able to actualize myself, since I can only actualize myself as the outcome of the past.

We may define coercion generally as any restriction upon the range of real possibility which would otherwise be available. This definition cannot be made fully precise, for it is impossible for the same event to have other causal conditions or actualizable possibilities than it in fact has. If they were different, that would be a different event. The event can only be compared with contrary-to-fact conditions, and then only in terms of those properties we intuitively feel would "ordinarily" or "normally" apply. A judgment about coercion is thus always comparative and relative.

In general, there are two ways in which effective real possibility can be restricted. The first way concerns what is usually thought of as efficient causation, the way in which past causal conditions affect present decisions. The nature, variety, and complexity of these conditions may either expand or restrict the range of alternative possibility open to us. Any external alteration of these past causal conditions which restricts the range of possibility otherwise available acts as a restraint, and is thus coercive.

On its own terms, classical theism is hardly coercive. God’s efficient causality is that which creates each being as it is, enabling it to exercise whatever freedom it is capable of. If, however, freedom is precisely that which cannot be derived from any external agency, including God, because it is the intrinsic self-creativity of each occasion, then divine efficient causality may be perceived to be coercive. Here we are comparing alternative metaphysical frameworks. If, in terms of process theism, God acts fundamentally through final causation, and the range of real possibility is correlated solely to finite past causal conditions, then the addition of some divine efficient causality may act as a restraint.

Suppose God’s efficient causality acts as one causal condition among the others. Then there is an additional factor the occasion must conform to. This additional factor cannot be an enabling factor, since the totality of finite causal factors was sufficient in itself to allow the occasion to actualize itself. It can only be a restricting factor.

Suppose the divine efficient causality unifies all the other causal conditions. If it does no more than simply transmit the totality of past finite conditions, it would not itself be peculiarly coercive, but then it would be difficult to see how God’s causality made any difference. If this divine efficient causality transcends the past conditions in some unlimited way, then the occasion would be completely determined by its past, and could not exercise its own self-creativity. Such absolute determination would be coercive.

This consequence is usually mitigated in classical theism by the supposition that when I act, it is also God acting through me. Finite and ultimate causation coincide. This identification is not possible in process theism, which sees self-decision and divine persuasion, along with the multiplicity of past causal conditions, as distinct but indispensable and complementary aspects of every act of freedom. Moreover, if efficient causation is identified with past causation, then if God exercises complete efficient causation, the past usurps all the space for present self-determination. Strictly speaking, if God is omnipotent, having all power, we can have none.

There is also a second form of coercion which primarily affects final causation. The range of real possibility relative to past causal conditions may remain constant, but the effective options within this range may be curtailed by threat. Such threats disturb the evaluation of future possibilities for their own sakes by attaching to these possibilities further consequences which are so undesirable as to eliminate them from serious consideration. While threats are generally most effective in restricting our options, promises of rewards may also work in this way. A possibility may no longer be judged on its own merits, but in terms of the reward it promises. In the absence of such coercive measures, however, the evaluation of real possibilities is genuinely persuasive, and influences purposively creaturely decision. The absence of complete causal determination is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for persuasion; there must also be the evaluation of alternative possibility. For process theism, this evaluation ultimately stems from God and constitutes the way he acts in the world by divine persuasion.

Both Plato and Aristotle proposed that God acts upon the world by persuasion, but this suggestion was not picked up by the early church. Christian theology would be vastly different if the church fathers had done so instead of adhering closely to the Greek ideal of perfection as Immutability. As a result the biblical tradition has rarely been interpreted in terms of divine persuasion. Yet there are a good many biblical themes that the concept of divine persuasion can appropriate and illuminate, particularly themes which are a source of embarrassment to exponents of classical omnipotence. In the remainder of this chapter we shall isolate features that illustrate divine persuasion drawn from the areas of creation, providence, and biblical authority, reserving for the next chapter the difficult theme of the interaction of persuasive and coercive elements within the biblical image of God as king.

Quite apart from biblical precedents, the temptation to interpret God’s role in creation in terms of efficient power is extremely great. If the entire created order is dependent for its existence upon his will, then it must be subject to his full control Such control of the creative process entails efficient causality, for the divine initiative must be prior to the outcome, and the effect must conform to its cause. Since this divine efficient causality was essentially unlimited, it was preeminently conceived as calling forth being from nothing. Man, like his fellow creatures, was a created substance ultimately brought into being solely through divine power. Yet once in being, man is capable of exercising his own freedom to the extent that God is willing to relinquish some areas within his complete control.

This basic model of divine creative control through efficient causality, however, is seriously defective in confronting the problem of evil, for then God ought to reduce the amount of unnecessary evil to a minimum and to curtail that exercise of human freedom which he foresees will go astray. Insofar as God controls the world, he is responsible for evil: directly in terms of the natural order, and indirectly in the case of man.

Divine persuasion responds to the problem of evil radically, simply denying that God exercises full control over the world. Plato sought to express this by saying that God does the best job he can in trying to persuade a recalcitrant matter to receive the impress of the divine forms. But the early church rejected this solution on the grounds that it establishes a cosmic dualism between God and evil which undercuts human responsibility for sin and denies the biblical witness to the essential goodness of creation. Process theism therefore faces the double task of making creation without control credible and of overcoming these objections to Plato’s doctrine.

The notion of divine persuasion entails a twofold expansion of our traditional understanding of freedom. It cannot be limited solely to man as an exceptional privilege to be enjoyed on divine sufferance, but some degree of freedom or spontaneity must be accorded to all of God’s creatures, even the lowly atom. Secondly, it is not so much that a being is first treated and then acts, as that its responsive activity in actualizing its own potentiality is part of the creative process itself. Divine persuasion maximizes creaturely freedom by respecting the creature’s own integrity in the very act of guiding its development toward greater freedom. God is not the cosmic watchmaker, but the husbandman in the vineyard of the world, fostering and nurturing its continuous growth throughout the ages; he is the companion and friend who inspires us to achieve the very best that is within us.

God’s dialogue with his creation is not limited to man, but is manifest in the entire evolutionary process. The world’s general advance toward increased complexity does not emerge by chance, but calls for a transcendent directing power constantly introducing richer possibilities of order as the occasion arises. God proposes and the world disposes. The creature may or may not embody that divine urge toward greater complexity, but insofar as that ideal is actualized, an evolutionary advance has been achieved. This process is directed but not controlled, for the necessary self-activity of the creature requires spontaneity of response. This spontaneity may be extremely minimal for elementary particles but it increases with every gain in complexity. Spontaneity matures as freedom. On the level of human freedom it becomes possible for this divine urge to leave the biological sphere and be directed toward the achievement of civilization, and for the means of divine persuasion now to be consciously felt in terms of ethical and religious aspiration.⁴ Not only we ourselves but the entire created order, whether consciously or unconsciously, is open to this divine persuasion, each in its own way.

Conceived in terms of persuasion, creation is the emergence of that which is genuinely new, requiring the new initiatives God is constantly introducing. It is not simply the recombination of the old, but depends upon novel structuring possibilities hitherto unrealized in the temporal world. The emergence of life is perhaps the single most dramatic example on this planet, yet even life also requires a material substratum of organic macromolecules out of which this radically novel form of existence could emerge. Creation is the fusion of novel form with inherited matter by the self-creative decision of the emergent creature. It cannot be simply conceived in terms of a creation out of nothing. In themselves the Old Testament traditions concerning creation, whether in the Priestly (Genesis 1) or Yahwistic (Genesis 2) accounts, or in Second Isaiah, Job, or the Psalms, do not insist upon this. Creation out of nothing is first mentioned in the Apocrypha: 2 Macc. 7:28.

Basically this doctrine was designed as a protective measure against Greek speculation designed to safeguard the essential goodness of God’s creation and man’s responsibility in the fall. It affirms that there is no recalcitrant evil external to man and the other creatures out of which the world must be made. Process theism can certainly agree with the intent behind this safeguard. God’s creative persuasion is wholly good, and the symbol of the fall may be generalized to apply to the gap between divine purpose and creaturely actualization in every creature. This is the point of identity between creation and fall to which Tillich has alluded.⁵ Evil enters the world through creaturely response, not from some preexistent chaos God is forced to work with.

Divine persuasion illuminates our understanding of the creative Word. Classically, the divine Word in John’s prologue is the Logos, that basic structuring principle whereby the world is a cosmos and not a chaos. While true, this suggests a certain static character inconsistent with the emergent, improvisatory, evolutionary nature of our universe. God speaks in creation to each of his creatures, according to its particular situation, persuading it to bring forth the best that is within it; this speech is continuously being uttered anew. Here the consecutive acts, "And God said, let there be

. . ." of the Priestly creation story, more adequately symbolize the dynamic character of the Word. Eight acts of divine speech schematically represent the untold multiplicity of divine urgings whereby God shaped this world, originally without form and void, into that which we may celebrate as a fit habitation for man.

The Word once spoken calls for a hearer, one capable of responding, whether on the human or subhuman level. If God says, "Let the earth put forth vegetation," we may understand the earth’s bringing forth vegetation as its response to that divinely evoked aim (Gen. 1:11-12). As king of the universe, God’s commands deserve such response. Speaking of the sun and the moon and the shining stars, the Psalmist writes: "For he commanded and they were created" (Ps. 148:5). It is not the case that he who commands our allegiance and obedience merely happens to be the creator of the world. It is the same Word spoken in creation that addresses us now, for the same purpose, which is the evocation of ever-increasing fulfillment of creaturely possibility. That Word spoken in the creation of the natural order also brought Israel into existence, and that Word incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth became the means whereby the church, the body of Christ, was created.

Israel itself was profoundly aware of the continuity of God’s activity in the formation of the natural order and in the emergence of Israel. Psalms 135 and 136 directly juxtapose these two events in successive stanzas, while Second Isaiah fuses God’s assault against the primeval waters of chaos with his assault against the waters of the Red Sea:

The collective memory of Israel concerning its own creation in the total Exodus event places the emphasis upon the intervening power of Yahweh, who "with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great tenor, with signs and wonders" (Deut. 26:8) brought them out of Egypt into a land flowing with milk and honey. At the same time, however, this memory preserves traditions concerning the utterance of a divine Word calling forth obedient response: the commission to Moses at the burning bush, and the commandments of Yahweh at Sinai. The covenant between Yahweh and Israel clearly symbolized the reciprocal character of effective creative activity: divine initiative and creaturely response. Israel’s emergence and continued existence depended upon the conjoint presence of the divine Word and its own faithfulness to that Word, and this may serve as the paradigm for understanding creation.

From the standpoint of divine persuasion, providence is simply another way of looking at God’s guidance of the historical process already manifest in creation. Classical omnipotence, however, in affirming God’s sovereign control over the future, must look for a final break with the ambiguities of history in which God’s goodness is unambiguously made manifest. Whatever the historical causes for the apocalyptic world view might be, its logical basis is a belief in God’s full control of that which is to come. If God’s activity is not readily apparent within the present Vicissitudes of good and evil, that is because his hand is now stayed, but if God has the power to actualize the good unambiguously, then his goodness requires that he do so, and that right early. The more we feel the tension between God’s sovereign omnipotence and the wickedness of the world, the greater will be our sense of expectation that the end must come quickly; any delay becomes increasingly intolerable. Moreover, since it is God alone who can bring about this good, independently of the course of creaturely activity, it can be determined "from the foundations of the world" when and how this should be brought about.

Process theism cannot share this apocalyptic expectation because it sees the future as organically growing out of its past. All such actualization depends upon the vicissitudes of creaturely response. This does not preclude faith and hope, but such faith is a trusting and loyal devotion to God’s purposes in the face of a risky and uncertain future, not belief in a divine timetable. Insofar as the whole creation trusts God to realize the purposes he proposes to us, then the good will triumph. The continued presence of evil, both in man and in the natural order, testifies to the very fragmentary realization of creaturely faith in God. Nonetheless, we may hope that the grace of God may be received and permeate all beings and in that hope do our part in the great task. Such hope prohibits other-worldly withdrawal, but calls upon us to redouble our efforts to achieve the good in the world.

Divine providence cannot be understood as the unfolding of a predetermined course of events. Prophecy is not prediction, but the proclamation of divine intent, dependent for its realization upon the continued presence of those conditions which called forth that intent and upon the emergence of the means whereby that intent may be realized. Isaiah’s proclamation of the destruction of Judah was dependent upon the further, persistent opposition of Israel to God’s commandments and upon the power of Assyria. For the prophets, then, God becomes the great improvisor and opportunist seeking at every turn to elicit his purpose from every situation: if not by the hand of Sennacherib, then by the hand of Nebuchadnezzar. If the nation of Israel will not actualize his redeeming purpose for man, then the task must be reserved for the faithful remnant. If that faithful remnant fails, we may then confess that God’s aim becomes focused upon a single carpenter from Nazareth. This history is quite contingent and open-ended in its making, but it becomes the way in which God achieves his purposes in one way or another.

God’s general, everlasting purpose is everywhere one and the same: the elicitation of the maximum richness of existence in every situation. Yet because creaturely response varies, the achievement of this good is highly uneven and follows many different routes. In biological evolution many other lines were tried -- amphibians, reptiles, marsupials -- before mammals emerged, and of the mammals only certain primates were responsive to the call to become human. Among men the response to God varied considerably, and even when that response was intense, God’s address must be radically different depending upon their particular circumstances. The Word addressed to Abraham was not the same as the Word addressed to Ikhnaton or Gautama or Lao-Tzu.

Once that response has been made, it establishes a new situation permitting the intensification of divine purpose. Now God has increased potentialities with which to work. Abraham’s journey establishes the nomadic conditions favorable to the emergence of a patriarchal cult whose God is no longer tied down to one particular locale. The cherished memory of a promised land then forms the background for the possibility contained within the call of Moses, while the traditions of the Exodus and Sinai in turn provide the framework in which the struggle between the prophets and the kings could occur. This enabled the prophets to declare their higher patriotism in proclaiming the destruction of their own land. It is the contingent character of this human response to the divine Word which generates the particularities that God then uses in the furtherance of his general aim at the intensification of value. The history of Israel assumes such religious importance because it proved to be the arena of a very dramatic intensification of divine purposes, generating both the expectation of the Lord’s anointed and the awareness of God’s involvement in the suffering of the world.

In addition to these themes of creation and providence, let us look briefly at the problem of biblical authority. As we all know, the God of the philosophers is not the same as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But why is this so? I think that classical theism found no really satisfactory answer to this question insofar as it maintained that all of God’s attributes are strictly necessary. If God’s control over the world is absolute in that it is independent of all creaturely contingencies, then God’s activity may flow directly from his unchanging nature which was deemed wholly necessary and self-sufficient. But it is the business of philosophy to ascertain that which is purely necessary and universal, and any limitation placed upon philosophical reason ultimately appears to be arbitrary. If God’s nature and activity are wholly necessary, then Hegel is right in supposing the biblical God to be an historically conditioned, concrete guise of that which finds its purest expression in the philosophical Absolute.

Classical theism has a penchant for universality, thus encroaching upon the proper dominion of philosophy, which has its own specific procedures and canons for evidence. Yet classical theism is acutely aware of its divergence from most philosophies. We are urged to believe various doctrines concerning the incarnation, the atonement, and the resurrection of Christ for which philosophical evidence or argument is quite inadequate, on the grounds that in these religious matters human knowledge can never suffice. Yet as Brand Blanshard has recently written:

It is no accident that the leading exponents of process theism have shied away from revelatory or kerygmatic theology. Even Charles Hartshorne, whose "metaphysics of love" seeks to portray the salient features of Christian faith, establishes his conclusions solely upon philosophical and even rationalistic criteria. There is an unspoken skepticism of traditional beliefs which lack sufficient philosophical justification. Yet this need not be so. The logic of divine persuasion, moreover, requires us to recognize the limitation of the philosophical approach to God, not within its proper domain, to be sure, but with respect to the totality of divine activity. Process theism recognizes that God possesses both necessary and contingent features, while philosophy can only satisfactorily examine the necessary ones. Regarding these contingent features, we must resort to other methods, and here respect the evidence of historical testimony. Only because classical theism tended to conceive of all of God’s attributes as universal and necessary, and thus properly within the scope of philosophical scrutiny, did such a problem ever arise.

God’s generic attributes are necessary, and his steadfast purpose is everlasting, but his experience and activity are dependent upon the contingencies of the world. God’s total experience of the world is constantly growing and being enriched by the world’s growth. God’s concrete response to the world in evoking the maximum value from every situation must be constantly shifting with new circumstances and can only be fully relevant to the world insofar as it is sensitive to these contingent developments. But if philosophical inquiry thus discovers contingent aspects in God’s full actuality, it also discovers the intrinsic limits of its own inquiry into the mystery of God, for no amount of ingenious argument can deduce the concrete, historical character of that which happens to be, but which could have been otherwise.

Process is the abstract, necessary matrix whose contingent actualization is history. It is quite appropriate to speak of the history of God’s activity if this is bound up with concrete response to creaturely activity, as both biblical traditions and process theism can affirm. The Old Testament is above all a theological document, although we often fail to appreciate this in supposing that all theology must express itself in systematic, universal concepts. Its medium of expression is historical recital, which concentrates not on what God necessarily is but on what he has contingently done.

Process philosophy can complement this biblical recital by providing a description of the necessary conditions whereby such contingent divine activity is possible, just as the biblical recital can complement this abstract philosophical outline by giving it specific, concrete historical contours. This historical development is completely open-ended, for process thought does not impose any particular pattern of historical development upon history, since God is ever resourceful in finding new perfections for creation to strive for. The perfections aimed at are concrete and particular, arising out of the historical contingencies: a promised land and a long-awaited Messiah for Israel. Process theism need not dissolve these particularities into symbolic manifestations of universal truth, since it can proclaim a God vitally interested in precisely these particularities whose activity is shaped by their peculiar character. These aims do not lose their particularity in being broadened to embrace all mankind, since from the divine perspective man is only one particular form of creation.

Our justification for the appeal of divine persuasion is broadly philosophical: its inherent reasonableness, its applicability to all we know about the world we live in, and its consonance with our best ethical and religious insights. As such, it is at least a partially alien criterion by which to appreciate biblical traditions, since their understanding of divine power is rather different, a subject we shall turn to in the next chapter. We can recommend process theism, however, for the hermeneutical task of translating these traditions into a systematic context appropriate to our contemporary situation, without thereby losing Israel’s peculiar witness to the action of God in its history.

History need not be solely an immanent process which can at best point only symbolically to the divine, for that historical involvement may also shape the concrete actuality of God himself. Since it is in the particular, historical way that God was able to intensify his purposes through the agency of Israel that we experience our salvation, the Bible as the historical record of that way possesses authority for our lives. That authority cannot be found in its particular concepts of the divine nature, for these concepts must be open to correction and revision from whatever source is open to us. Yet in the absence of any comparable witness to the intensification of divine purpose for man this historical recital is indispensable. We may perhaps want to explain and understand Isaiah’s experience somewhat differently, but that Isaiah did experience God’s glory can only be discovered from the historical record. We can best proclaim God’s saving acts for us by retelling Israel’s history. If our retelling is selective, being told in systematic terms appropriate to our own age, we are only following the practice of the judges and the prophets themselves.⁷

NOTES:

1. RM, p. 55.

2. AI, p. 213.

3. PR, p. 520.

4. See RM, p. 119.

5. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1957), pp. 39-44.

6. Brand Blanshard, ‘Rationalism in Ethics and Religion" in Peter A. Bertocci, ed., Mid-Twentieth Century American Philosophy: Personal Statements (New York: Humanities Press, 1974), p. 40.

7. Two such examples of this selective retelling of Israel’s past may be found in Joshua 24 and Ezekiel 20

In this book we shall be considering how the particular conceptuality of process theism can illuminate our understanding of biblical and Christian traditions. By process theism we largely mean the particular conception of God which the mathematician Alfred North Whitehead fashioned in later life. The understanding of God that he came to is sharply critical of many of our inherited notions, particularly concerning divine omniscience, omnipotence, and immutability. Whitehead’s thought suggests ways we might free ourselves from the problems and difficulties that have burdened theology for centuries, and even allows us some dimensions of the biblical message which we have neglected and have not really appreciated.

Before we embark on a theological appropriation of process theism, however, it will be instructive to see how Whitehead himself came to espouse it. He once wrote: ‘‘Aristotle found it necessary to complete his metaphysics by the introduction of a Prime Mover -- God. . . . in his consideration of this metaphysical question he was entirely dispassionate; and he is the last European metaphysician of first-rate importance for whom this claim can be made. After Aristotle, ethical and religious interests began to influence metaphysical conclusions."¹ This same claim can be made in Whitehead’s case: he came to incorporate the existence of God within his system largely by philosophical reflections on the problem. William Ernest Hocking, one of Whitehead’s Harvard colleagues, reports that, concerning the idea of God, Whitehead told him, ‘‘I should never have included it, if it had not been strictly required for descriptive completeness. You must Set all your essentials into the foundation. It’s no use putting up a set of terms, and then remarking, ‘Oh, by the by, I believe there’s a God.’ "²

Whitehead was born in 1861, two years after Darwin’s Origin of the Species was published, on the Isle of Thanet, the easternmost tip of southern England. His father was an Anglican clergyman of the evangelical school. Whitehead studied at Sherborne which, while he was a student there, celebrated its thousandth anniversary. It had begun as a Benedictine monastery and then later became, under Edward VI, one of the public schools of England. During his senior year he lived in what was thought to have been the abbot’s cell, and became steeped in Anglican piety and tradition. Then he went up to Cambridge. Professionally, Whitehead studied and taught only mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge during his years there, from 1880 to 1910. As an undergraduate he talked openly and freely about his interest in religion, especially about foreign missions. "We may not know precisely what many of Jesus’ sayings mean," he is reported to have said, "but the commandment to go into all the world and preach the gospel is very clear." ³

Bertrand Russell reports that at one point "as a young man, he was almost converted to Roman Catholicism under the influence of Cardinal Newman."⁴ However, these early convictions faded and Whitehead became doubtful and uncertain. The cause for this may well have been the problem that faced many Victorians, the problem of God’s omnipotence and the presence of evil in the world. If God is all-powerful then he must be negligent in doing anything about evil. So Whitehead decided to take up the study of theology. Lucien Price records: "This study went on for years, eight of them, I think he said. When he had finished with the subject, for he had finished with it, he called in a Cambridge bookseller and asked him what he would give for the lot."⁵ He gave up the subject, sold all the books, and gave up on theology. The theologians failed to persuade him. Russell confirms this: "Throughout the time that I knew him well -- that is to say, roughly, from 1898 to 1912 -- he was very definitely and emphatically agnostic." ⁶

During all these years a revolution was occurring in physics. With the advent of Einstein’s relativity theories, both special and general, the foundations of physics to which Whitehead had grown accustomed were completely shattered. He belonged to the generation that really was convinced that physics was on a firm foundation, that practically everything in the discipline had been discovered. Its principles were set; they had been that way ever since the time of Newton -- and would remain that way. Now the whole theory was up for grabs. He said he was fooled once about the certainty of the foundation of physics and he was sure he would not be fooled again. Thus Whitehead’s thinking thereafter always had an element of tentativeness; he was painfully aware of the difficulties in discovering the final foundations of things.

He then undertook a series of studies on the foundations of natural science: An Inquiry into the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919), The Concept of Nature (1920), and The Principle of Relativity (1922). The last book is a critique of Einstein’s theory of relativity, proposing a comparable theory to put in its place. It has not received much of a hearing principally because his objections to Einstein are primarily philosophical. The book is written in three parts -- a philosophical introduction, a section on physics, and a section on mathematics, requiring expertise in all three areas. I doubt if many readers have really understood the work.

In the meantime, after thirty years at Cambridge, Whitehead pulled up stakes and moved to London. Eventually he became Dean of the Faculty of Science at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, and was very heavily involved in administration. As he was approaching retirement, after a lifetime of teaching mathematics, with publications in mathematics, the philosophy of nature, and logic, he was offered a chair in philosophy at Harvard. It was in this country that his metaphysics, and with it his philosophical theism, developed.

His first metaphysical synthesis was presented in the Lowell Lectures of February 1925, later incorporated in Science and the Modern World. These lectures are largely consonant with the philosophy of events that Whitehead had already developed in his philosophy of nature. These replaced the traditional elements of space, time, and matter with spatiotemporal volumes (events) having certain characteristics (objects). In this view we may conceive of anything material as a series of events having persistent characteristics that are constantly exemplified over a period of time. The material object is simply an expression of the stability and persistence of these characteristics exemplified in the events. Such events express the static repetition of the past, whereas any dynamic activity constitutes an ever-changing series of events.

These Lowell Lectures polemicize against the prevailing scientific materialism inherited from the seventeenth century, and propose an alternative "philosophy of organism" based upon events and objects ordered in terms of organic mechanism. Although the lectures examine the interaction of science and religion, they are quite neutral with respect to the existence of God. Yet when he came to publish these lectures in June of that same year, he included several additions, among which was a chapter on "God," arguing for God’s existence and describing his nature as Whitehead then conceived it. We must scrutinize these additions very closely for clues they might give to the development of his philosophical theism.

In his earlier philosophy of nature, and in the original Lowell Lectures, Whitehead conceived of actual events as being divisible into smaller events ad infinitum. However, in a section appended to his lecture on "Relativity," Whitehead changed his mind.⁷ On this atomic theory of events, there was a lowest threshold for actual events, below which it cannot be subdivided into smaller actual events. We are familiar with this in terms of atomic theories of matter in which it is argued that elementary particles cannot be actually subdivided, although they are extensive and hence mathematically (or potentially) divisible. Whitehead applied this argument, not to material particles but to events, atomic events which he henceforth called "actual occasions."

This has certain implications, such as the denial of determinism. The way the past persists into the present is the essence of efficient causation, and observes the regularity of scientific law. Scientific explanation seeks to account for the present event insofar as it can be understood in terms of its causal antecedents. The ideal of complete explanation, coupled with the assumption that only efficient causation is effective, necessarily yields causal determinism, a methodological postulate widespread among the more hardheaded practitioners of the social sciences, though now less prevalent among natural scientists, especially physicists. I find nothing to object to the ideal of complete explanation, even though it is unrealizable in practice, but I do question this exclusive attention to efficient causation.

Causal determinism follows naturally enough, to be sure, from our ordinary notion that the cause produces its effect. Here productive activity is vested in the antecedent cause, and its effect is merely a passive outcome. But if the event is atomic, it requires a lapse of time in order to become the event which it is. It does not instantaneously arise out of its antecedent causes. Yet, if these totally determine it, it should. This may well be a possible anticipation of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, that the past conditions for any event only determine its outcome within certain parameters. Below those parameters the physicist sees only random action, that is, a determination not caused by the past conditions.

A second implication involves a reversal of our ordinary understanding that causes produce effects. The cause must precede its effect in time, yet it must be presently existent in order to be active in producing its effect. If, however, temporal atomicity requires a lapse of time in order to bring the effect into being, its causes are already past and gone before the effect arises. This generates a contradiction: the cause must precede the effect in order to be its cause, yet if it precedes the effect by any lapse of time, the cause can no longer be active or effective in producing the effect. The usual theory managed to bridge this gap by claiming that the cause is instantaneous with its effect, thus it is present with the effect while at the same time it precedes the effect. But if there is a lapse of time, then the cause is past and gone. Whitehead challenged customary thinking by reasoning that it is the event in the present that should be taken to be active. Instead of an active cause producing a passive effect, he argues that there is a present event producing itself out of its passive past causes.

We do have a model we might adopt for this sort of causation, which is perception. In perception the sensory impressions which we receive are objective causes in that they determine the character of what it is that we are perceiving. But the way in which we perceive things, the meaning we attach to them, the way we integrate these sensory impressions into a coherent whole involves, as Kant would say, the spontaneous activity of the mind organizing its sensations. Whitehead suggests that this model of perception can be generalized as our model for understanding all causation. Therefore, he takes the word "apprehension," a conscious taking account of other things, and deletes the prefix "ap-" to give us the word "prehension." Prehension is the opposite of the way we generally conceive causation. Therefore, if A causes B, B prehends A. B is constituted by the way in which it prehends A and all its other past causes.

The use of perception to understand causation means that we are now able to bring into one account both causation and perception. Thereby we can overcome the usual dualism by which causation is regarded as a feature of the realm of matter, while perception is conceived as belonging only to mind. It also involves a transformation of our understanding of subjectivity and objectivity. If all (efficient) causes are past, as past they are also objective. They form the data of prehensions. They suggest that what we mean by subjectivity is simply present immediacy. The shift from object to subject is essentially one of temporal terms: that which is objective is past, and what is subjective is what is immediately present to us.

This means, among other things, that subjectivity has nothing particularly to do with human consciousness or mentality. The reason we regularly associate subjectivity with human awareness and consciousness is that this is the only subjectivity of which we are immediately aware. We only know ourselves subjectively. We infer that other persons also enjoy subjectivity, but this we do not know directly. Whitehead argues that if subjectivity is really another way of talking about the felt sense of present immediacy, as opposed to what is past to us, then this is a feature of all events. All events without exception have their own interiority, their own subjectivity. Therefore the language which we should use to describe the coming into being or the emergence of individual events should be subjectivistic language, purged of its associations with human existence, with consciousness, and with mentality. This is really the project that Whitehead undertakes in his major work, Process and Reality (1929).

If one purges the notions of mentality and physicality of their associations with subject and object, one comes to a different understanding of them; at least Whitehead did. He came to hold that what we mean by the physical is simply the repetitive, the reiterated, the habitual. The character of molecules reveals them to be most conservative. They can continue to reiterate the same patterns of existence for billions of years. Mentality, on the other hand, is coordination directed toward novel intensity. Insofar as events differ meaningfully from their past, not simply reiterating that which they have inherited, they display some degree of mentality. As for consciousness, Whitehead is not suggesting that there is any more consciousness in the world than we ordinarily assume. This is basically an empirical matter to determine. But it is not necessary for an entity to have either mentality or consciousness for it to be subjective. All enjoy subjectivity in their present immediacy, with varying degrees of physicality and mentality, depending upon how they repeat, or revise, their inherited past. Only a few have any degree of consciousness.

Now, if events produce themselves out of their causes rather than causes produce events as passive effects, then there is an element of self-production in every event which may be understood in terms of spontaneity and freedom. For there is no necessity that a given set of causes must be unified by the event in exactly the same way in each case. Rather there is an influx of a great many causal factors which the occasion in coming into being uses to unify itself. It makes its own actuality out of these causal factors. Whitehead speaks of decision as the mark of actuality, because the occasion decides or cuts off the alternative possibilities of Integrating the past in order to become the one single actuality that it is.

This means that there is a place for purpose and for value in the process of actualization. For if one argues that past causes produce the effect, this purports to be a total explanation. One simply has to exhibit what the past causes are in order to explain the present event. If, on the other hand, the present event creates itself by the way it decides how to unify its past, then it is necessary also to introduce purpose to explain how possibilities influence the process. There are real possibilities as to what that particular event can become. These possibilities are valued in that some are better than others with respect to actualization in this event.

Now, it finally developed in Whitehead’s thinking that God is the ultimate source of these possibilities. He provides the possibilities for each event, the values in terms of which it can become what it is. To put this argument another way, we can say that God’s role is to provide the origin of the occasion’s subjectivity. This is a question, I think, that has been rarely faced by philosophy. Philosophers fail to explain how subjects come into being. For example, in Kant’s philosophy there is a great deal of discussion concerning the nature of subjectivity. Every rational being uses certain capacities, the categories and the forms of intuition, by which he experiences and orders the world. Very little is said as to how these come into being. If we take a biological account, somehow our subjectivity or consciousness emerges somewhere around the ages of one and two. We cannot remember back in our subjectivity any further than that. Where this subjectivity comes from is just an inexplicable mystery.

Whitehead was faced with this problem acutely because each event enjoys its own subjectivity. How does it acquire this subjectivity? How does it have the capacity to feel or prehend its various causal data and bring them into unity? Whitehead proposes that it begins with an ideal of what it can become, given its particular circumstances. This ideal is what it receives from God, and it achieves its own actualization by the way in which it fuses together all of its efficient causes by means of this ideal of itself. The event is not determined by God because it is capable of using the past causes it inherits to modify that aim. Nor is it determined by its past because it can also use that aim to modify and to influence the way in which it will appropriate the past. Thus both can be played against one another to secure its own spontaneity or freedom.

This theory is only barely hinted at in Science and the Modern World, and receives its first full expression in Process and Reality. At first God was conceived merely as the principle of limitation or selection, selecting among the infinity of possibilities which otherwise would become available for each occasion. As such he was one of the formative elements of the world, and not an actuality like the actual occasions enjoying his own subjective immediacy. But, as Whitehead saw it, some such principle of limitation was required.

While God’s existence was first philosophically required in the revision of Whitehead’s first metaphysical synthesis which he appended to his Lowell Lectures of 1925, it would be presumptuous of us to claim that these reflections first caused Whitehead to become a theist once again. Such personal shifts are gradual, often imperceptible. It is unlikely that he remained the emphatic agnostic that Russell knew after the war. In fact, Russell thinks that the death of Whitehead’s younger son, Eric, in air combat in 1918, significantly shifted his views: ‘‘The pain of this loss had a great deal to do with turning his thoughts, to philosophy and with causing him to seek ways of escaping from belief in a merely mechanistic universe." ⁸ Some sense of this may be gleaned from the dedication of The Principles of Natural Knowledge to Eric’s memory: "Killed in action over the Forêt de Gobain giving himself that the city of his vision may not perish. The music of his life was without discord, perfect in its beauty."

Moreover, we must remember that the flower of English manhood, including many whom Whitehead taught at Cambridge and London, also perished in this war. Apart from religion, Whitehead was to write, "human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience." ⁹

"Religion and Science," originally delivered as an address in the Phillips Brooks House at Harvard on Sunday, April 5, 1925, immediately before his discovery of temporal atomism, gives no hint of the philosophical theism Whitehead came to espouse in his chapter on "God." Yet it shows a very high appreciation for religion, defined as ‘‘the reaction of human nature to its search for God." ¹⁰ "It is the one element in human experience which persistently shows an upward trend. It fades and then recurs. But when it renews its force, it recurs with an added richness and purity of content. The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism.’’¹¹ Yet this is the search for God, a search whose goal is most elusive. "Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest." ¹²

At the same time, Whitehead notes that ‘‘there has been a gradual decay of religious influence in European civilization."¹³ He predicts that ‘‘religion will not regain its own power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science." ¹⁴ For science, "a clash of doctrines is not a disaster -- it is an opportunity." ¹⁵ Conflicting theories, often buttressed by fresh evidence, provide the opportunity for the expansion, revision, or qualification of existing theories for their improvement. So likewise the expression of religious principles requires continual development, so as to be hospitable to new sensibilities nourished on this scientific advance. At the time, Whitehead appears to have no such revision of our concept of God to offer, although he was shortly to have one. He seems then to be most sympathetic to the religious quest, perhaps himself participating in it, but relegating it primarily to theological concerns. In any case it did not have any place in philosophy, unless strictly required by its fundamental principles.

The notion of God as the principle of the limitation of possibility was the first version that Whitehead developed as to the nature of God, but this concept was considerably modified over the course of the next three or four years. For example, by March 1926, in Religion in the Making, Whitehead had come to the conclusion that God could be conceived either as a principle or as a person. Conceived as a principle, God really is very much like Plato’s Form of the Good, that is, the principle of order or value in terms of which all the possibilities are organized. Alternatively, one could conceive of God as a personal being who "thinks on thinking," to use the Aristotelian phrase. That is, Whitehead conceived of God during this period in either Platonic or Aristotelian terms. Ultimately, he argued, it did not make any difference. Therefore, he proposed the questionable thesis that all civilized religions really center around the same basic point, namely, that there is a permanent rightness at the center of things. These religions primarily differ as to whether this is to be described in personalistic language as God, or an impersonal language as Brahman, Nirvana, or Tao.

Insofar as God is conceived as personal, God is alone with himself, thinking his own thoughts, apart from the world. In classical Christianity, Aristotle’s ideas were taken over, but characteristically modified. In that tradition, instead of thinking of God as a persuasive power who acts as a kind of lure toward which things move, which was Aristotle’s conception, Aquinas and others adopted the understanding that God creates by being the ultimate efficient cause for the world. Thus God knows the world by the way in which he creates it. God becomes the ultimate efficient cause, the primary cause of things, separate from the world with all of its secondary causal processes.

Whitehead, however, remains true to the original Aristotelian conception that God acts in terms of final causes, because God’s function is to provide the lures for the individual occasions to actualize. Within two years, however, Whitehead saw that the actuality of God also requires that he be influenced and enriched by the world. One of the reasons he came to this conclusion was his insistence that God ought to exemplify the same principles that other actualities in the world have. As he writes in Process and Reality, "God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles, invoked to save their collapse. He is their chief exemplification." ¹⁶

A second reason stems from Whitehead’s claim that every actual occasion has two different kinds of prehensions. It possesses a set of physical prehensions, the way by which it prehends other past actualities which causally influence it. It also has conceptual prehensions which provide the way by which it is influenced by values, ideals, possibilities, and concepts. It needs the latter in order to be oriented toward the future, and the former in order to be oriented toward the past. So every occasion is seen as the fusion of these two types. Yet God was conceived as a being which had an infinite number of prehensions of ideals, possibilities, and values, but did not experience the world in any sense. Aristotle was perfectly content with this. He argued that God couldn’t care less about knowing the world, for the world was too mundane, too inferior. It wasn’t worth knowing. Therefore, God simply contemplates his own thoughts in solitary splendor.

Whitehead became convinced that in order to render his metaphysics coherent, conceiving of God as one actual entity among other actual entities, God would also have physical prehensions. If so, he also directly experiences the world. Therefore, in this vision, God and the world form an ecosystem, wherein both contribute to each other. God provides each event with its aim or lure toward which it moves. The event actualizes itself, influenced by the possibilities that God has provided, but also becoming something in its self-production by appropriating elements Out of its past. This result is then experienced by God. In this way, the world enriches God.¹⁷

In the classical view, God is what he is quite apart from whether the world exists or not. God’s perfections are complete whether or not there is a world. If that is true, the world has no ultimate significance. For process theism, the world ultimately has its significance because of the way in which it enriches the divine experience. The classical view conceives of God as immutable and unchanging. It is based on the Greek idea that any change in a perfect being leads to corruption. Whitehead’s argument, rather, is that the perfect is that which is capable of indefinite enrichment, capable of being enriched by that which is emerging.

We need also consider the matter of omniscience. In the classical view, God knows the future in detail. For him it is all mapped out. The problem always was to ascertain in what sense then we are free. We may be free in the sense that we are not compelled to act the way we do, but it remains an illusion to think that we could really act in an alternative way if God already knows the way we will act. There is only one way we can go. Whitehead argues that God does know everything there is to know, but he challenges the notion that the future can be known as if it were already actual. To know the future in the concrete detail which it will become is to know what is possible as if it were already actual. This is to know a contradiction. So God is always in process of experiencing what is new for him, namely, the course of the world as it fully actualizes its possibilities.

Even more drastically, process theism revises our understanding of divine power. Classically, God’s power is seen in terms of omnipotence, and God is creator as the sole primary efficient cause of the world. In process theism God is primarily persuasive, creating more indirectly by providing the lure for each occasion whereby it can create itself.

It might seem, at first glance, that such modifications of God’s knowledge and power are quite foreign to the biblical tradition. This may be, however, because we have grown accustomed to interpreting its message exclusively in classical categories. Process theism may provide a revised hermeneutic enabling us to understand and appropriate that message in a new and living way. As a philosopher, Whitehead was not overly concerned with this task, but for our purpose in providing an application of his thought to Christian theology, it is basic and central. Hence in the next two chapters we shall sketch some of the ways in which our understanding of the Bible can be enriched by the conceptuality of process theism, starting with selected themes from the Old Testament.

NOTES:

I. SMW, p. 249.

2. Alfred North Whitehead: Essays on His Philosophy, ed. George L. Kline (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 16.

3. See Victor Lowe, Understanding Whitehead (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962), P. 231.

4. Bertrand Russell, Portraits from Memory (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), p. 96.

5. Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, as recorded by Lucien Price (Boston: Little, Brown, 1954), p. 151.

6. Letter to Victor Lowe of September 26, 1959, as recorded in Understanding Whitehead, p. 232.

7. For the nature of the original Lowell Lectures (1925) and Whitehead’s appended material on the character of time see my study, "Whitehead’s First Metaphysical Synthesis," International Philosophical Quarterly 17/3, (September 1977), pp. 251-64.

8. Russell, Portraits from Memory, p. 93. Frederic R. Crownfield argues that Whitehead’s revised rationalism, based upon his own reflections on Paul Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent, gradually led him out of his earlier agnosticism. "Whitehead: From Agnostic to Rationalist," The Journal of Religion 57/4 (October 1977), 376-85.

9. SMW, p. 275.

10. Ibid., p. 274.

11. Ibid., p. 275.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid., p. 269.

14. Ibid., p. 270.

15. Ibid., p. 266.

16. PR, p. 521.

17. Ibid., p. 532.

Al Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1933)

CPA John B. Cobb, Jr., Christ in a Pluralistic Age (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1975)

IL Lionel S. Thornton, The Incarnate Lord (London: Longmans, Green, 1928)

PC David R. Griffin, A Process Christology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1973)

PR Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1929)

RM Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (New York:

Macmillan, 1926)

SMW Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1926), second edition

In recent years, since the "death of God’’ movement heralded the collapse of neo-orthodoxy, process theism has become a viable alternative for the contemporary appropriation of the Christian faith for an increasing number of people. Theologians are recognizing the need for a wider conceptuality which frees theology from the ghetto of sacred history and places it within the whole sweep of human and natural history. Process thought, reflecting upon the mutual interaction among God, humanity, and natural actualities, conveys a sense of ecological balance between both nature and God. This challenges many of the presuppositions of classical theism by overcoming their felt conflicts and contradictions.

Yet much of what has been written as "process theology" is really simply philosophy written within the context of a Christian perspective. It is a sustained reflection upon the generic features of experience, taking seriously those dimensions of experience most fully apparent within the religious life. This sense of Christian philosophizing has been carefully articulated by John B. Cobb, Jr., in the final chapter of A Christian Natural Theology.¹ In times past, from the Middle Ages down to Hegel and Kierkegaard, most philosophizing was written from within the Christian tradition, however much it sought to emancipate itself from the church. This, in turn, dictated much of the theologian’s apologetic method. He ferreted Out these implicit Christian elements in the reigning philosophies and related them to the more historically conditioned symbols of the church’s faith. More and more, however, philosophy’s attempt to become radically secular, divorcing itself from all ties with Christian theism, has become successful, leaving fewer avenues of approach open to the theologian. As a result the theologian is forced to become his own philosopher. This need not interfere with the rigor he brings to the task, provided his speculative thinking subjects itself to the recognized philosophical canons. His theory must be both consistent and coherent in itself, and adequate and applicable to human experience. But it has meant that Christian philosophizing has become less and less the task of the professional philosopher and has been relegated more and more to the theologian.

This task of Christian philosophizing is well worth doing, and we should be grateful to the many process theologians who have been willing to devote themselves to this end. As a result, however, the distinctively theological task has been comparatively neglected. This study seeks to redress the balance. While using a conceptuality largely framed by process philosophy, it addresses for the most part the historically contingent elements within the Christian tradition: the biblical witness to Israel and to Jesus, his role as the Christ, the meaning of his death and resurrection, and the implications of the Christian proclamation of the Trinity.

Oftentimes traditional theism has seen itself as the legitimate heir of the biblical faith. Process theologians are then cast in the role of radical, even iconoclastic, innovators. I wish to indicate those aspects of the biblical tradition that have been suppressed by this reigning orthodoxy, and to show that process theism has as good (or even better) a purchase on this tradition as classical theism.

Process philosophy is a convenient label designating the thought of Alfred North Whitehead and his intellectual associate Charles Hartshorne. For theological purposes, Hartshorne is clearly the more accessible, and most, including myself, have been introduced to process theology through his wise tutelage. Nevertheless, there are subtle but important differences between them, and where they differ I find myself siding with Whitehead.² Since Whitehead’s conceptuality is presupposed in my extensions and applications, it seemed best to introduce the reader to this thought by way of an intellectual biography tracing the development of his theism. Thus those unfamiliar with Whitehead or Hartshorne’s philosophy can feel at home with this book. While it delves into some of the intricacies involved in applying Whitehead’s thought to basic Christian doctrines, it addresses the general reader, explaining these Whiteheadian categories as they are needed for this task.

Although this is properly an essay in Christian theology, my professional background lies in philosophy and, to a lesser extent, in biblical studies. This may be an unorthodox preparation for theology, but I am persuaded that it is a necessary one in this day and age. Too much theologizing is based merely upon the pale reflection of itself which it sees in philosophy, and needs a more thorough grounding in biblical studies. On the other hand, theology is often insufficiently rigorous philosophically. Philosophy and biblical studies are the two extremes which need to be fruitfully married in the theological enterprise. Whether this marriage is successful or not must be left to the reader to decide.

While this essay has been planned as a continuous whole with its own integrity, portions of individual chapters have appeared elsewhere. Two were originally presented as lectures: chapter one was presented at the Moravian Theological Seminary, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on February 14, 1974; chapter three was given at the Conference on Biblical Theology and Process Philosophy at the Christian Theological Seminary, Indianapolis, Indiana, on March 1, 1974. An earlier version of chapter two appeared in Interpretation 26/2 (April 1972), 198-209, while chapter four has drawn on materials originally appearing in "Lionel S. Thornton and Process Christology," Anglican Theological Review 55/4 (October 1973), 479-83; "The Incarnation as a Contingent Reality: A Reply to Dr. Pailin," Religious Studies 8/2 (June 1972), 169-73; "The Possibilities for Process Christology,’’ Encounter 35/4 (Winter 1974), 281-94; and "Theological Reflections on Extra-Terrestrial Life," originally given as the Faculty Research Lecture for the Spring of 1968 at Raymond College of the University of the Pacific, Stockton, California, and published in The Raymond Review 2/2 (Fall 1968), 1-14. Most of chapter five appeared in Religion in Life 42/4 (Winter 1973), 466-78; while chapter seven is an abridged and simplified version of "Process Trinitarianism," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 43/2 (June 1975), 199-213.

Many friends have helped this endeavor by commenting on individual chapters. To others I am grateful for their comments on the entire manuscript: particularly Delwin Brown, Dwayne Cole, Bernard Lee, Marjorie Suchocki, Andrew Tunyogi, and Philip Verhalen.

NOTES:

I. John B. Cobb, Jr., A Christian Natural Theology (Philadelphia; Westminster Press 1965).

2. See the monograph I edited, Two Process Philosophers: Hartshorne’s Encounter with Whitehead (American Academy of Religion: AAR Studies in Religion 5, 1973).

The purpose of this book ought to be clear from its title. It is an attempt to sketch briefly, mostly by way of suggestion, what significance may be discovered, for men and women living today, in the traditional scheme of the ‘last things’ -- death, judgement, heaven, and hell. It admits frankly that this scheme, as it has come down to us, is incredible, however valuable and helpful, not to say apparently ‘true’, it was for many who have gone before us in the path of Christian discipleship. But it tries to point out certain indispensable realities in human, above all in Christian, life which that outworn scheme somehow managed to present to those who accepted it.

I should like to emphasize that at best this is a ‘sketch’; and that it is ‘mostly by way of suggestion’. I should be the last to assume that I have said everything that might be or ought to be said on the subject, and I am very conscious of serious omissions as well as of many shortcomings. In extenuation, however, I plead that in the compass allowed me -- for these chapters were originally lectures -- nobody can say everything. What I have done is to select, according to my best judgement, what seemed of crucial importance and hence could not be omitted. And that is all that I can say, as an excuse for this book’s inadequacy to the theme with which it attempts to deal.

It remains to thank the authorities of the several divinity schools in the United States which were kind enough to ask me to lecture in February 1970. The principals, deans, and other officials, as well as the theological students and others who heard the lectures, will know how deeply indebted I am to them all. The lectures, practically in their present form, were delivered at the Episcopal Theological School, Cambridge, and the Boston Theological Institute.

Two further chapters (on The Centrality of Love and After the ‘Death of God’) have been added, since they deal with related subjects. The second of these (Chapter Eight) originally appeared in The Church Quarterly for April 1969; I am indebted to the Editor for permission to reprint it here.

Norman Pittenger

King’s College

Cambridge

The furore over the ‘death of God’ theology seems to have died down in the United States, but to Continue undiminished in Britain. Perhaps this is because the publication in Britain of the writings of the advocates of this position was rather delayed; hence the impact which they make is very much a present reality. In the States, William Hamilton, among the first who talked and wrote in this vein, has said that the ‘death of God’ emphasis belongs to the past -- the recent past, surely -- and that today we must go beyond it. Whatever may have been the contribution it made, the contribution has been made; what comes next?

I do not myself subscribe to the view that theology works in the fashion which Hamilton’s remark suggests -- a sort of drunkard’s progress, with no real direction and without obvious continuities. But I agree on three points: first, that the ‘death of God’ literature has made a contribution to theology, even if it is not the contribution which its spokesmen might think; secondly, that the movement is just as dead as its leaders said that ‘God’ was dead; and thirdly, that we must go forward to a doing of theology, in the Christian mode, which will take account of what that particular literature had to say. I wish to speak about these three points.

The talk about the ‘death of God’, I believe, was an extraordinarily misleading, even if highly provocative, way of saying something important. For what was really involved in the talk was the death of certain concepts of God, rather than a supposed death of God himself. One realizes that this interpretation has been denied by Thomas Altizer and other advocates of the view; they insist that they are talking about a genuine death of God as an historical occurrence. But even they show that the contrary is the case, as Altizer himself demonstrates when he claims that he is talking about the absolute immanence or ‘presence-in-this-world’ of the Word or Spirit, in consequence of the radical kenosis or self-emptying of the transcendent deity usually denoted by the word ‘God’. That Word or Spirit most certainly is not dead; and Altizer’s ‘gospel’ is precisely the reality in human experience and in the world-order of that Word or Spirit with whom men must reckon whether they wish to do so or not.

I am convinced that what has died, that whose death has been announced, is a series of models, images, pictures, or concepts of deity which for a very long time have been taken by considerable numbers of people to be the Christian way of understanding God. It is important in this connection to note that each of the three leading advocates of the position is in reaction against a notion of God that represents just such a series of models. Paul van Buren was a disciple of Karl Barth, under whom he wrote his excellent doctoral dissertation on Calvin’s teaching about Christ as the true life of men; Hamilton was an opponent of natural theology in all its forms, even if he studied at St Andrews under Donald Baillie -- but it was the so-called ‘rico-orthodox’ line which had attracted him, theologically; Altizer is a slightly different case. He worked under Paul Tillich and with Mircea Eliade, but his reaction has been against the aspects of Tillich’s thought which stressed ‘being-itself’ in God and for those aspects which emphasized the need for radical re-conception of Christian thought.

Whitehead, to whom I shall return, wrote in Process and Reality many years ago that the Christian theological tradition has tended to conceive of God in three ways, each of them mistaken: as ‘the ruling Caesar, or the ruthless moralist, or the unmoved mover’. It has failed to give central place to what he styled ‘the Galilean vision’, in which God is shown as persuasion or love. Hence, in his striking phrase, ‘the Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar’, seeing him ‘in the image of an imperial ruler’, ‘in the image of a personification of moral energy’, or ‘in the image of an ultimate philosophical principle’. With certain qualifications I should say that Whitehead stated the facts here.

In various combinations and with differing emphases, the concept of God with which many Christian thinkers have tended to work has been composed of exactly those ingredients; absolute power, stark moral demand, and unconditioned (essentially unrelated, in the sense of a two-way movement) ‘being-itself’ as the ultimate cause of everything not-God, but not in anyway affected by that which was not itself -- and the neuter here is highly significant, ens realissimum. Great theologians, like Augustine and Aquinas (to name but two), have worked in this fashion; but they were also strangely discontented in doing so, since their real faith was in the biblical God of unfailing love-in-action, effecting his purpose of love in nature and history, and most profoundly open to and receptive of what went on in the world. Hence the ambiguity which (as I think) one can see running through so many of the great theologies.

But it was the stress on power, on ‘ruthless moralism’, and on transcendence in the sense of non-relationship, which many took to be demanded when one talked of God, although one might also add, as a kind of afterthought, ‘Oh yes, he is also loving’. I do not parody here, for I myself have found often enough that when I have tried to present a theological point of view which made the reality of love absolutely central, and put the other so-called divine attributes in a place secondary to that love, I have been met with the response, ‘Of course God is loving, but we have to begin with His omnipotence, or His transcendence, or His aseity (self-contained and self-existence), or His absolute righteousness with its consequent demands on men.

This procedure seems to me to be entirely wrong, however traditional it may be. What we ought to do is to start with God self-disclosed in human affairs as love-in-action. Then, and only then, can we use (adverbially, as it were) the other so-called attributes. God as love-in-action is more than any particular expression of His love (hence He is transcendent); God as love-in-action is always available (hence He is onmipresent); God as love-in-action is able to envisage every situation in its deepest and truest reality and accommodate Himself to it, so that He can indeed achieve His loving ends (hence He is omniscient and omnipotent); God as love-inaction is unswerving in His love, unfailing in its expression, unyielding in His desire to confront men with the demands of love (hence He is righteous). If we had worked in that way, we should have been saved from many of. our supposedly insoluble theological problems, most of which are based on taking the other, and as I think wrong, approach.

However this may be, the fact is plain that for contemporary men and women, not only of a sophisticated sort but also of quite ordinary attainments, the notion of God as absolute power, as unyielding moral dictator, and as metaphysical first cause never Himself affected, has gone dead. There are many reasons why this has happened; this is no place to discuss them, but among others we may mention scientific constructions, psychological discoveries, awareness of sociological conditions, and all that Bonhoeffer summed up in saying that man has ‘come of age’ (by which he did not mean that man is an entirely mature and adult creature who now can take the place of God, in a fashion not unlike the claim made by the Provost of King’s in his recent utterances; but he did mean that we now know our own responsibility and that God treats us, not like slaves nor like little children, but like sons to whom He entrusts such responsibility). This ‘going dead’ of the notions I have mentioned is stated plainly for us in the writers who speak of ‘the death of God’.

So much for my first point. My second is that the movement called by that name is now itself a matter of the past; it has made its contribution and that is that. It has taught us something, and by now we ought to have learned what it had to teach us. Of course the learning has not been done simultaneously in all parts of the Christian world or anywhere else. Hence for some of us, it might be said, the situation is still pre-’death of God’; and, for those who are in this situation, the lesson is still to be learned. But for those who have got an inkling of what this is all about, who have learned the lesson, the situation is post-‘death of God’; we must now go on to the constructive task.

I shall not spend time in showing how and why we are in that ‘post’ era. I only call in witness the remarks of Hamilton which I have already cited. He at least feels that the ‘calling in question’, the denials, the stark affirmation of the ‘end of sheer transcendence, sheer moralism, sheer power’ (as I like to put it), has been accomplished. So the problem for us, as for him, may be phrased in a typically American way: ‘Where do we go from here?’ And it is with that question that the remainder of this chapter will concern itself. But the one thing that is quite clear is that we do not ‘go back’, as if we could return to the older ideas and concepts, quite unchanged by what has happened during the past few decades. If we cannot retreat, rest content in the denials, the ‘calling in question’, and the like, neither can we into one of the theologies of the past. If I may say so, this is what I find troublesome in the writing of Dr Mascall on the subject. He is usually very sound in his criticisms of the ‘death of God’ school and, indeed, of the whole ‘radical theology’ which in one way or another is associated with it. But because of his failure to understand why such a theology in its various forms has appeared, he is unable to see any other solution than a ‘return’. Leonard Hodgson, in his review in Theology of The Secularization of Christianity, made this point about Mascall; and he made it with such clarity and precision that I need only mention it here.

In going forward, then, with Christian theology after ‘the death of God’, we have several options. Let me mention some of them, assuming that we cannot work with Thomism (either ‘classical’ or ‘revised’), nor with that peculiar Anglican affair known as ‘liberal Catholicism’ in the style of Essays Catholic and Critical or the writings of Charles Gore, nor with ‘liberalism’ in its reductionist form as found in Harnack or Harnack redivivus, nor in sheer biblicism in its fundamentalist dress. So I mention the following possibilities, getting some of them from an excellent little book of lectures given in Chicago a couple of years ago, Philosophical Resources for Christian Faith: (1) existentialism in some mode; (2) phenomenological (and in that sense non-metaphysical) enquiry; (3) analytical philosophy and its talk about bliks and various ‘language games’; (4) process thought in its several forms. To these four I should add the so-styled ‘secular theology’ often advocated today, with a side-glance at revived and restated ‘biblical theology’. Here are six possibilities.

Of some of them I must speak very briefly. For example, the kind of ‘biblical theology’ sometimes advocated assumes that we should go forward by taking with utmost seriousness the biblical images or motifs -- not the literal, textual stuff of Scripture, which would involve us in a kind of new ‘fundamentalism’, but the main-line of biblical images. I am very much in sympathy with this approach, so far as it goes. For Christians the biblical images and patterns are of first importance, since it is from them that the Christian picture of God takes its rise. But it must be pointed out that these images and patterns are most diverse; further, they belong, in their explicit shape, to ages in which we do not ourselves live. Hence what is required is just what Leonard Hodgson has so often, and rightly, demanded: we must ask ourselves what the case really is, so far as we can grasp it today, if people who thought and wrote like that, phrased it in the way they did. Otherwise we shall be using the Scriptures in a very wooden and unimaginative fashion, even if we do not succumb to literalism in its obvious sense. Furthermore, if we wish to communicate the deepest meaning of those images and patterns, we dare not rest content with them as they stand. That would be to resemble the Chinese who, when shipwrecked on a desert island, made their living by taking in each other’s laundry. We must translate if we wish to communicate.

Again, the use of analytical philosophy will help us enormously in the way in which we use words. It will enable us to clarify our language, to avoid contradiction, to stop talking sheer nonsense, to look for some kind of referent which will give the necessary verification to what we are saying as Christians. All this is of great importance, lest we fall into the temptation to use high-sounding words for the evasion of difficulties. It has been said that whenever some older theologians got to a hard place they simply quoted a few lines of Wordsworth or Tennyson, thinking that ended the matter; or they made a few biblical citations as if that were the complete answer; or (at worst), when the attack was most fierce, they used the word ‘mystery’ as a kind of ‘escape-hatch’. But analytical philosophy is a neutral discipline-for which we may be grateful -- and it gives us no working conceptuality for the statement of the theological implications of Christian faith with the claims that faith makes about ‘how things really go in the world’.

The kind of phenomenological method which is often advocated is of a non-metaphysical type; that is, it is interested in description, in terms of how living religion, as a matter of deepest intuitive observation, effectively operates in human experience in the world where men live. This seems to me to be most valuable; a van der Leeuw, an Eliade, and others like these, can help us a great deal. How does faith function, what embodiments does it have, what attitudes does it demand? These are questions which ought to be answered. But I cannot think that their answer will provide the general conceptuality which we require if Christian faith is to be grounded in the stuff of reality and if the case for it is to be made in a manner which speaks meaningfully to the men and women for whom it exists and to whom it is supposed to address itself.

We are left with three possibilities: ‘secular theology’, an existentialist theology, and a process theology. I shall say something about each of them -- and, as my ordering indicates, I shall come down in favor of the last of the three, as offering us the best conceptuality available today as we go forward from ‘the death of God’.

The phrase ‘secular theology’ may be taken to mean one of two things: either a theology of the secular or a theology which confines itself to the secular realm. Since I have spoken critically of Dr Mascall I am glad to say here that I believe that he has written admirably about this distinction in the last part of his recent Theology and the Future. He has pointed out that a theology which is strictly confined to the world of ‘here and now cannot take account of the ultimate questions which men must ask, whereas every sound Christian theology is required indeed to speak of that ‘here and now’, but to relate it to God as a creative principle and to see God at work in the immediacies of human existence in the whole range of what we style ‘secular existence’. In other words, I agree that Christian faith must see God in the world but that it cannot remain content with ‘the world’ as if it exhausted all there is of God. ‘Whitehead once said that ‘God is in this world or he is nowhere’; that is entirely sound. But Whitehead also said that the world and God are not identical; and I should interpret this utterance, along with others by him, to mean that there is in the divine life an exhaustibility which makes possible the wonderful novelty which the created order manifests, disclosing what Gerard Manley Hopkins named ‘the dearest freshness deep down things’.

In any event, if a ‘secular’ approach to theology thinks that it avoids all metaphysical conceptions, it is profoundly mistaken. Of course one can mean what one wants by the word ‘metaphysical’. If one intends to speak of a grandiose construction in terms of supernatural entities, with a schematic ordering of everything according to some superimposed pattern, metaphysics may very well be denied. It seems to me that the present-day attack on metaphysics is nothing more than an attack on idealistic constructions of this type, after the fashion (say) of Hegel or Bradley. But metaphysics can also mean -- and process thinkers would say that it ought to mean -- the inevitable human enterprise of generalizations widely applied, on the basis of a particular point or event or experience taken as ‘important’, to the rest of our experience of the world and the world which we surely experience. It can mean, then, the development of those principles which most adequately express what we experience and know, in the full range of our human encounters; and the result is a ‘vision’ which can be tested by reference back to experience and to the world experienced. Metaphysics in this mode is not some highly speculative system imposed on the world. It is an induction from what is known of the world. Everybody engages in this, usually in a very naive manner; the ‘philosopher’, so styled, is only one who in a more sophisticated and critical manner engages in this attempt at making sense of things, including human experience.

But the self-styled ‘secular theologian’ is doing exactly that. You have only to read Gregor Smith, whose untimely death we all lament, to observe this. Both in The New Man and in Secular Christianity Gregor Smith is actively setting forth this kind of metaphysics, taking as his ‘important’ moment or event the historical encounters of men, specifically with Jesus, and from these developing a view of the generalized situation of man-in-the-world which, in my sense of the word, is inescapably metaphysical, even if he himself rejects the word and thinks that he is also rejecting the enterprise. What he is rejecting, it turns out, is only that ‘supernaturalistic’ species of metaphysics which idealistic philosophers have set forth in a pretentious claim to encompass in their thought all things in earth and heaven.

Thus, as I see it, the options which remain are in fact two: either an existentialist approach or a ‘process thought’ approach, since the ‘secular’ theology in itself does nothing more than deny a particular kind of metaphysic and leaves us open to the possibility of interpreting the secular world, and everything else in human experience, in some appropriate manner.

The existentialist approach in contemporary English-written theology has been associated with two names: one is Paul Tillich, the other John Macquarrie. I cannot mention the name of Tillich without reverence, for that great and good man was a dear friend of mine and I respect, honor, and love him, though he has now gone from us. His theology was an attempt to combine an existentialist analysis of the human situation with a Christian faith interpreted along the lines of German idealistic thought; he himself confessed that Schelling had been his great master. His method of correlation is, I believe, very suggestive and helpful; his masterly analysis of what it is like to be human is almost beyond criticism. But his final ‘system’, as he used to call it, seems to me to be too abstract in its statement to convey the Christian gospel, although in his preaching he was anything but abstract. I think that Professor Macquarrie’s efforts, especially in Principles of Christian Theology, offer a much more ‘available’ approach for most of us. His insistence that every existential analysis presupposes and includes ontological affirmations seems to me right and sound; his way of using Heideggerian thought is instructive. He takes the biblical images with utmost seriousness and employs them effectively as being determinative of the total picture of God -- world -- man in the light of Jesus Christ.

If I were to make any criticisms of this existentialist mode of theologizing it would be to say that it is not sufficiently regardful of nature, in the strict sense of the physical world and the material stuff of things. And I should add that it lacks something of the dynamism which I believe is required of any Christian theology, not only because of the dynamic quality of biblical thought itself but also (and more significantly) because of the evolutionary way of things which men like Teilhard de Chardin have so insistently pressed upon us. But I confess that if I did not find process theology more appealing I should opt for Macquarrie’s approach. At the same time I must say that if those two criticisms of mine were met sufficiently, there would not be too much (I think) to differentiate his way from the one to which I now turn in conclusion.

It is not necessary for me to outline my reasons for preferring process thought; I have already indicated these in my book Process Thought and Christian Faith. It will suffice if I note that process thought regards the world as a dynamic process of inter-related (and hence social) organisms or entities, whose intentional movement is towards shared good in widest and most inclusive expression; and that it interprets deity along those lines. God is no unmoved mover, dictatorial Caesar, nor ‘ruthless moralist’; He is the cosmic lover, both causative and affected, ‘first cause and final affect’ as Schubert Ogden has so well phrased it. He is always related, hence always relational; He is eminently temporal, sharing in the ongoing which is time. His transcendence is in His sheer faithfulness to Himself as love, in His inexhaustibility as lover, and in His capacity for endless adaptation to circumstances in which His love may be active. He does not coerce; He lures and attracts and solicits and invites. He waits for free response from the creaturely agent, using such response (which He has incited by His providing ‘initial aims’) to secure the decisions which enable the agent to make actual his own (the agent’s) ‘subjective aim’. In the historical realm and in human life He discloses Himself, precisely as love-in-action, in the total event which we name Jesus Christ. Since His love-in-operation is His essential nature -- He is love, which is His ‘root-attribute’, not aseity, as the older theology claimed -- the other things said about Him (transcendence, immanence, omnipotence, omniscience, omni-presence, righteousness, etc.) are to be understood, as I have already argued earlier, as adverbially descriptive of His mode of being love rather than set up as separate or even as distinct attributions.

We live in a ‘becoming’ world, not in a static machine-like world. And God Himself is ‘on the move’. Although He is never surpassed by anything in the creation, He can increase in the richness of His own experience and in the relationships which He has with that creation. He is the living God; in that sense, we may say (as the title of a recent book of mine dares to do) that God is ‘in process’. In other words, the basic point of the biblical images of God as the living, active, loving, personalizing agent is guaranteed.

But above all, since He is no dictator after the model of Caesar, no self-contained being after the model of the worst sort of man we know, no moralist after the model of the puritanical and negative code-maker, He is truly to be worshipped. Worship means ‘ascribing worth’; and this we can do only to a lovable because loving One. We cringe before power expressed coercively and arbitrarily; we tremble in the presence of rigid moralism, when we do not react against it in wild and desperate efforts to be ourselves; we can only be puzzled by the kind of absolute essence which is without affects from what goes on around and about it. But we can worship, truly ‘ascribe worth’, to the perfection or excellence which is love in its eminent and supreme form. God is that; hence He is adorable.

What is more, He is imitable. And with that affirmation I must end. We are to imitate God; both Aristotle and Plato said so, whilst Jesus gave it content by saying that we were to be ‘like our Father in heaven’. Known as love-in-action, disclosed as that love by the event in which Jesus is central, caught up into life ‘in love’ (which, if I John 4 is right, is life ‘in God’), we are enabled to become what God intends us to be, created lovers. That is why we are here; that is our destiny -- or else Christianity is a fraud.

Almost a quarter of a century ago Professor Dorothy Emmet wrote these words in her The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking: ‘In the great positive religions, and pre-eminently in Christianity, the life of the founder is directly relevant. The religion does not simply grow from developing the content of the founder’s teaching; the life of the founder is held to be one of the crucial moments, perhaps the crucial moment, of history, in which some new relation to the transcendent has been established. The historic religion seeks continually to re-affirm and express this relation; in rite, celebration, meditation, way of life; and its theology makes it the key to an interpretation of the world’ (op. cit. pp. 155-56).

I believe that what Miss Emmet said is of enormous importance; and I wish to apply her words to the contemporary theological situation, especially in regard to the various ‘radical’ movements of our day.

The first point is that in all significant groups working towards the re-conception of Christianity today, Jesus Christ is taken to be ‘directly relevant’. If there is any one fact universally present in today’s Christian thinking, in all quarters, that fact is its ‘christo-centric’ character. All too often, it seems to me, the christo-centrism is exaggerated, so that Jesus stands in complete isolation from everything else; He is often regarded as being, not the central or definitive fact, but the only one which needs to be considered. This is a great mistake, for it removes Him effectively from His context, de-historicizes Him, and hence reduces (perhaps even negates) that ‘direct relevance’ to which Professor Emmet refers. None the less, Jesus is taken with utmost seriousness.

Furthermore, thanks to the work of a hundred years of biblical study, we no longer regard Christianity as simply ‘developing the content of the founder’s teaching.’ It is His life -- the whole reality of what nowadays it is fashionable to call the ‘Christ-event’ -- which is seen to be ‘crucial’. So we are delivered from the ‘imitation of Jesus’ type of theology and from that kind of reductionist thinking which interpreted Christianity as ‘following a great prophet’ and nothing more.

All this is on the positive side. But I think that a considerable number of ‘radical theologians’ are not prepared to go along with Miss Emmet when she says (rightly, I am convinced) that the ‘life of the founder’, in this instance Jesus, must in authentic Christianity be seen as both establishing ‘some new relation to the transcendent’ and making that life ‘the key to an interpretation of the world’. It is not only that some of the anti-metaphysical theologians, not to speak of the American ‘death of God’ writers (theologians I will not call them, for to do so is to engage in a contradiction in terms), reject any reference to ‘the transcendent’ and hence can hardly talk meaningfully of a ‘new relation’ to it. What I have particularly in mind is that while there is much talk about taking Jesus as a key to the interpretation of human nature, as it is often phrased, or to the meaning of human life, or to the point of man’s existential situation, there is a lamentable tendency to stop there and not to go on to talk about ‘the world’ -- by which Miss Emmet meant, I assume, the totality of things including physical nature; in other words the cosmos in its basic structure and its chief dynamic energy.

Existentialist theologians, for example, seem to forget entirely that human existence, about which they talk so much, has a location in time and space and in a given part of the natural order. As I have put it elsewhere, all history has a geography. I find that many others, too, appear to be content to see Jesus as relevant to human affairs but hesitate to draw any conclusions about His relationship to the cosmic situation in which such affairs take place.

One of the reasons that some of us have been attracted to process-thought is its emphatic insistence on the cosmic structures and the cosmic dynamic. Process-thinkers have seen that man is a product of the evolutionary movement, just as much as anything else. If that is true, as obviously it is, the natural order must be interpreted in such a fashion that it permits us to account for human life -- and if we do that, we must account also for the fact that in human history there has appeared the Man Jesus, with whom also we must come to terms. Or arguing in the other direction, if we take Jesus as significant for human life and history, He must also be seen as having some relationship to the setting of that life and history -- the natural order -- and hence be as much a ‘disclosure’ of that as He is of man’s existence.

Historically the Christian tradition has spoken of Jesus as the incarnation of God, the manifestation of the divine reality ‘in the flesh’. It has not presumed to think that we can get to that divine reality by some escape from the human situation; nor has it taken the view of a friend of mine who once said, to my astonishment, ‘Let’s look at this as God Himself sees it’. We cannot do anything of the sort; we are men and our knowing of anything whatsoever is as men and in terms of human experience. As Aquinas said, all knowledge is ad modum recipientis, and the ‘mode’ of our human receiving is the human mode, which is tautological but none the less true and never to be forgotten. This truth of our human situation is met, in Christian faith, by the claim that God ‘has come in the flesh’. Hence, in St. Augustine’s words, ‘we do not need to climb up to heaven to find him (we could not do that, in any event), since he has come to us where we are’.

But it is God who has come to us where we are, not just the truth about human life in supposed isolation from ‘the transcendent’ and from ‘the world’. I am convinced that until and unless the modern theologians who are calling for a ‘radical’ reconstruction of Christianity recognize this, they will fail us utterly in our need to see Christian faith afresh. The way in which this was done in an earlier day certainly cannot be ours in this time; but the vision, insight, intuition, conviction -- call it what you will -- that Jesus Christ establishes with the transcendent a ‘new relation’ into which ‘in rite, celebration, meditation, way of life’ (to use Miss Emmet’s phrases) we are permitted to enter and to have it made our own -- notice I did not say ‘make our own’, which would deny the divine priority in this event -- is Christianity. And the consequence is a ‘key to the interpretation of the world’ which includes everything and not simply human life in a presumed separation from that ‘everything’.

Somewhere in Appearance and Reality the English idealist philosopher F. H. Bradley remarked that ‘the man who, transported by his passion, feels and knows that only love gives the secret of the universe’, is not engaging in proper metaphysical discourse. That is rubbish, in my view. I do not think that a Christian can for a moment accept Bradley’s pejorative judgement. Precisely that kind of man, ‘transported by his passion’ -- in this case his being caught up into a relationship with God in Christ, although it may very well be true in other ways as well, since to be ‘transported’ by passion is to enter upon the most profound experience possible to human beings -- precisely such a man does feel and know what is nothing other than ‘the secret of the universe’. The secret is that God is love; and it carries with it the corollary that God who is love ‘works in all respects for a good end to those who love him’, in the natural order as well as in history.

Of course this does not mean that everything becomes sweet and cozy; the fact that Love incarnate suffered crucifixion negates any such sentimentality. The ‘good’ towards which God works ‘in all respects’ is not comfort; nor is the Christian religion ‘a research after comfort’ (Whitehead properly denounced such a conception). None the less it is a ‘good’: it is, indeed, the Kingdom of God which is the sovereign rule of love into which those who respond to God’s love are admitted -- and in being admitted given the task of conforming this world of human affairs to the pattern of the Love ‘which moves the sun and the other stars’.

Thus I am obliged to say, with H. H. Price, that theism, at least in a Christian sense, is ‘a metaphysics of love’; and with this, I am obliged to affirm that ‘the world’, including nature in its farthest stretches as well as in the intimacy of human existence, is given its proper ‘interpretation’ only when ‘the key’ to it is found in Jesus Christ. That, essentially, is what Christian faith is all about -- it has a cosmic sweep and is not to be accepted as an affair of human importance only. Its message, accepted on the grounds of faith and in the continuing activity of utter self-commitment to that which is spoken forth in the event of Christ, is precisely that ‘love is all and more than all’, in E. E. Cummings’ telling phrase.

The tragedy of Christian theology is that this faith, this message, has not been given the central place which it not only deserves but demands. For far too many of the great theologies of the Christian tradition, the recognition of love has been a peripheral rather than the central concern. This manifests itself not only in the way in which Aristotelian notions of the ‘unmoved mover’ or neo-Platonic ideas of ‘being-subsisting from-itself’ have been taken to be the proper definition of what is meant when we speak of ‘God’, but also in liturgical language where all too often the basic concept implied or (as most often seems to be the case) affirmed is the utter immutability of deity, along with the rigidly legalistic moralism which it is suggested should mark those who claim to ‘obey’ the divine mandates. Of course I have exaggerated here. There are plenty of instances, in the traditional liturgies, of emphasis on the sheer love of God, His being affected by human attitudes and responses, and the tender relationship which He intends between Him and His children. Yet I think that I do not exaggerate when I say that the chief impression received by an observer is precisely the divine impassibility, the intransigence of the divine demand, and the requirement from men of a servile obedience rather than life in ‘the glorious liberty of the children of God’.

At the same time that Christian theology has so emphatically insisted on the divine absoluteness (taken in the sense which I have indicated), there have always been elements in that theology which have suggested another idea. In some of the greatest of the Church’s teachers there has been a strange ambiguity. In St. Augustine, for example, the personal relationship of man with God, as well as the deepest nature of God Himself, has been interpreted in terms of a love which the theological structure would seem to render almost absurd. St. Thomas Aquinas was also a ‘double-man’, in that while he accepted and sought to develop a Christian interpretation of Aristotelian ideas in which Aristotle’s ‘unmoved mover’ was given priority over the relational view of God, at the same time in his own sermons, prayers, and occasionally throughout his writings there is the stress on exactly that relational view. This kind of internal contradiction seems to run through much traditional theology; it finds explicit expression in Luther’s dichotomy between the terrible God, who put him not only in awe but in utter terror, and the tender and loving God whom he knew in Jesus Christ as the savior, the loving friend, and the gracious Father of men.

The real question is whether we are to make absolutely central in our thinking the ‘love of God which was in Christ Jesus our Lord’ or in one way or another regard that love as so adjectival to the divine substance that it appears to be irrelevant. Indeed, to talk of ‘substance’ here is in itself misleading; for the use of that term, despite all the protests of the neo-Thomists and others, is certain to bring us to think of God in terms of unchanging and unchangeable inert stuff -- and to do that is to deny, ab initio, the possibility of a God who responds in complete faithfulness and with the utter integrity of His own nature, yet with deepest awareness and sympathy. In other words, we find it difficult if not impossible to move from the model of deity as primarily substantial being, existing in and of itself, to the model of deity as genuinely participant and really affected by what goes on in His world.

It is the purpose of this chapter to argue, from many different sides, that another way is required. This is the way which is provided if we adopt, not the so-called ‘classical’ view of God, but the ‘neo-classical’ view -- a view which stresses the relational aspects as being much more than merely aspects -- as being, in fact the basic reality of God Himself. Unquestionably this will present very difficult problems for Christian theology and especially for the sort of theology which has been conventional during most of Christian history. Yet there is nothing sacred about that theology as such; for what is abiding in Christian faith is not this or that theological formulation, however widely accepted, but exactly what Professor Emmet has said: ‘the life of the founder’, the ‘new relationship to the transcendent’ which that life has disclosed, and hence the total impact of Jesus Christ on men, in all its richness and depth. If this is the abiding Christian ‘thing’, then theologies may be subject to change, as we come to understand more and more adequately what is being disclosed to us in the person of Jesus Christ. And what is being disclosed, I repeat, is the utter centrality of love.

We need not blame our fathers in the Christian tradition for what they did, although we may regret much of it and wonder how ever they could have said what so often they did say. What is required is to understand how, under the particular circumstances which were naturally theirs, they took the positions they did. But this does not entail our taking those same positions, especially in respect to such a central point as this one. The requirement from us is to do for our time, in the light of a deeper apprehension of the centrality of love, what in their own way they sought to do in their time. This will mean, I am certain, that we shall be obliged to give up that model of deity which, with the best intentions, they accepted from the general philosophy of the time. But it will not mean that the true ‘intentionality’ (as I may phrase it) which was theirs will be forgotten.

If we have available a philosophical conceptuality which is more congruous with Christian love, we shall be prepared to use that conceptuality in the task of theological re-construction. Yet in doing so, we must have the wit and wisdom to discern that in their insistence on the divine changelessness and even on the divine impassibility, they had hold of something important. We cannot phrase it as they did; but we can see that what they were talking about was the utter reliability of God, His faithfulness to His purpose, His inexhaustibility, His never ceasing to be and to act in accordance with His undeviating purpose of love. If they felt themselves forced to express this ‘intentionality’ in terms of a philosophical concept which for us is incredible, this must not suggest that the between the deepest instinct and desire which was theirs and ‘intentionality’ in and of itself was wrong. There is a difference the particular language (and with that language, the philosophical notions which it entailed) which they employed in stating that instinct and desire.

In any event, the point of this chapter, intended to prepare the way for further discussion of what I have styled ‘another’ (and I am convinced a better) theological approach, is simply to insist that we can only be loyal to our ancestors in the Christian tradition, but above all loyal to the chief stress in the faith which that tradition has conveyed to us, if and when and as we are ready to put stress on love’s centrality -- and to use that as our key to the whole theological enterprise.

Now almost all Christians would agree that Wesley was correct in writing of God that ‘his nature and his name is love’. It would seem obvious to them that this is the Christian claim and many of them would say, if they heard us stress the absolute centrality of this assertion, ‘Of course, that is taken for granted’. Right there, I think, is the problem. We simply cannot ‘take it for granted’ that ‘God is love’ and let matters rest there. Failure to go further, failure to see the shattering nature of that assertion, is the reason for an enormous amount of misunderstanding and the occasion for an even larger amount of misinterpretation of the Christian doctrine of God.

This was brought home to me not long ago when, after a lecture on the subject of ‘process-theology’, in which I had stressed the Johannine text, a member of my audience rose to put the following question: ‘Of course it is the Christian faith that God is love. But unless God’s love is backed by His power, what guarantee have we that it will triumph in the end and that Mother Julian’s conviction that "all shall be well" will be vindicated?’

The short answer to the question would have been that my questioner obviously did not himself believe that God’s love is very important. If love, in order to be truly effective, must be associated with coercive force -- as he indicated was to him essential -- then it is apparent that love is not recognized as supreme. What is supreme is power. He was saying that love is a very fine thing, that there ought to be more of it, that in some way or other God does care, but that in the long run the really effective instrument in God’s control of the world is His capacity to coerce. It is as if someone offered us, with his left hand, the gift of love; and then, with his right hand, made a fist at us and said, ‘If you won’t accept love, I’ll knock you down’. In other words, in such talk love is not the basic dynamic in the world; it is not the deepest and highest reality; it is not the essential definition of God. And so all the verbal assertions that ‘God is love’ really amount to nothing; they are only verbal assertions, with no genuine grounding in the structure of things and in how things go in the world. In my judgement, this is a denial of the central insight of Christian faith; it is the ultimate treachery.

Part of the problem, of course, lies in the meaning of power. If by power we intend to signify, as most often is intended, the use of coercive measures whether these be overt or subtle and hidden, then it would seem that to ascribe such a quality to God as His chief characteristic -- as in fact, if not in word, is suggested when people talk as did my questioner -- is a denial of the point of Christ’s disclosure of God. Yet there is a sense in which love itself is powerful. By this I mean that although love will not use coercive measures, driving people to do what they will not do otherwise, making them (as the phrase has it) act in contradiction to their own freely chosen decision, love is the most powerful of all agencies in the world. This is because love can win response when nothing else can do so; it can lure, elicit, attract, incite -- and in this way it can accomplish its ends.

Yet at the same time the ends which love would accomplish are not the selfish sort which would imply that the lover is seeking his own fulfillment without regard for the loved one. On the contrary, the ends which love seeks to accomplish and which only love can accomplish are always ends which are mutually shared and in which the loved one finds his fulfillment too. In other words, when love is central to the picture, we see ends and means to be ‘of a piece’ -- the end is loved shared, the means is the sharing of love.

I believe that considerations of this sort are of quite enormous significance today. It might be said that the history of the past half-century is the story of human attempts to secure world-community, the triumph of righteousness and justice, the establishment of understanding among the peoples of the earth, but always through the exercise of some variety of coercion. The result has been anything but what was initially desired. The utter bankruptcy of power, in the coercive meaning of the word, is apparent.

This, I take it, explains the revulsion of so many young people -- to take but one obvious example -- from the political game, their contempt for warmongers and their unwillingness (as in the United States) to participate in a conflict which they feel will accomplish nothing save further suffering. Hence there is a surprising rediscovery of love among modern youth as the only means to the end, and at the same time an insistence that love is also the end to be sought. We may dismiss these young people as ‘idealistic’, even when at the same time they are criticized for being too ‘realistic’ in (say) their approach to human relations, especially in sexual matters. We may dismiss youth as being unwilling to be, as we think older folk are, starkly ‘realistic’ about the fact of power and its necessity in national, international, social, economic, industrial, and other areas of human society. But such criticisms, either of the ‘idealism’ of youth or of their ‘unrealistic’ appraisal of the situation, come very ill from people like ourselves. It is precisely our settling for the use of power, our unwillingness to ‘try love’, and our cynical distrust of the possibilities in love as means towards love as an end, which has brought us to the state we are in.

That force must sometimes be employed is not to be denied -- very likely there was no other way in which Nazism, for example, could have been defeated in the short run; I am not advocating complete pacifism in every situation. But I am insisting that for Christians at least their religious conviction should be clear and the consequences of that conviction in their list of priorities as to means should be equally clear. If we must use coercion, then let us know that we are doing so; let us admit honestly that insofar as this is done we are not obeying the perfect divine will; let us recognize that at best the use of such force is a pis-aller, not the entirely right thing. And if and when force is used, let us not hallow it by thinking of God as essentially such coercive power. Above all, let us be repentant of the use we make of force and let us act, once force has been used, in such a manner that its evil sting is (if not removed then) drawn and the poison which it injects into the life of men is drained Out by the renewed employment of loving action, concern, caring, and self-giving. Only so can we in any sense justify the force which we may have felt impelled to use in this or that given circumstance-we can never glory in coercion.

But I must return to the main point of this chapter, which is that we must decide, once and for all, whether we are to give priority in our thinking about God to the concept of love or to the concept of power. Yet that is not quite the right way to put it, since we are not dealing with concepts (which are abstract ideas) but with what nowadays would be called ‘models’. What model, then, is to be chosen? If we chose power for our model, thinking of God in terms of a person known to us who exemplifies this quality (we must think in this fashion, however anthropomorphic it may appear, although we must carefully qualify’ our model), it will follow that love will be adjectival and in a secondary place. On the other hand, if we decide for the model of love, thinking of God as more like a human lover (but with defects, imperfections, frustrations, distortions removed), it will follow that whatever power is exercised by Him will be loving in its essential quality.

This theological decision has consequences in practically every area -- I should venture, even, to say in every area -- of faith. An obvious instance has to do with the relation of grace and freedom. For centuries, men have worried about this problem: if God’s grace is indeed His activity, coming before and present in every good human act, how can such acts be truly free and responsible acts on the part of the human agent? If God acts, then man’s response is not truly his own. If a human act is genuinely free, then where does God come into it? So the problem has been posed. But surely that way of stating it presupposes that God’s grace is coercive power. The model which has been assumed, before the problem is discussed, makes possible only the absolutely over-riding quality of God’s action, man being only a puppet in God’s hands. Or, from the other side, it is human agency which is in control and God can ‘enter in’ only as a sort of extra.

If the model of God is taken from the realm of loving relationships, however, things are seen very differently. In that case, God does not force His human children, nor do they act in entire independence of God’s concern. The divine love is prevenient to, active in, and unfailingly related to everything that is done by men; but the way in which love works is through the luring, attraction, solicitation, invitation, to which we have referred. God’s action is first, since He always loves men and surrounds them with His loving action -- but it is genuinely loving action and hence not pressure of a coercive type. On the other hand, man too is active, but his activity is also in love; he responds freely to the love which is given him and in that response he knows that he is truly ‘being himself’, for he was intended by his creation to be a responding lover and in no sense a marionette pulled by strings manipulated by God -- certainly not the victim of the divine coercion.

One could go through the catalogue of Christian doctrines and discover how in each of them a radical alteration will follow once we have decided that love, not power, is the decisive fact in God’s ‘ways with men’. It is obvious that a corollary is the recognition that love is always a relationship; and a relationship involves two who are in it -- God to man, man to God -- in which each of them is not only acting in a causal manner but also being acted upon in an affective manner. How different would be our thinking about the Atonement in such a context -- to take but one other example. To take still a third, the understanding of the Incarnation would no longer fall into the dangerous trap of either ‘God-made-man’ or ‘only’ a very good Man who knows and serves God in a unique fashion.

Thus we can see that many, if not all, the most difficult questions in theological discussion have been vitiated by a peculiar variety of what Gilbert Ryle has taught us to call the ‘category-mistake’. We have taken a set of ideas from one category -- the force category -- and have applied them almost without qualification to another category -- the God-man relationship. What we should have done is to see that in the ‘Galilean vision’, as Whitehead called it, we have the clue to the proper category for use in the God-man relationship; the category is ‘love in action’, the divine Lover acting and the human intentional lover acting too. And then we should have found that the situation was very different from what it seemed to be when power was used as the interpretative key. Once accept the disclosure of God in Christ (and in all that is Christ-like in human experience, for we ought not to be exclusively christo-centric in the narrower sense); once take that disclosure with utmost seriousness -- and then God as ‘pure unbounded love’ becomes central in our thinking. It makes all the difference-and in my judgement, this difference is what Christian faith is about.

To take that key with such utmost seriousness and to use it with equal seriousness in the re-framing of Christian theology, will obviously require some very drastic changes in our ways of envisaging what the theological enterprise is all about. We may fear such changes; there is a tendency on the part of theologians to like things to continue as they have been. Yet risk is an element in life and it is also an element in all faith that is worth anybody’s having. But on the other hand there would be a wonderful release of energy in thus accepting love’s centrality, since love is a releasing (as well as a demanding and dangerous) matter.

Let me close with a little story -- one which happens to be true in essence, even if there is a bit of embroidery in the way in which it was told to me many years ago. Perhaps it will illustrate my point about love and at the same time show that this emphasis is not entirely new in Christian thought.

In the reign of Charles I there was in Scotland a covenanting minister Samuel Rutherford, who was minister of Anworth in Galloway. One Saturday evening he was catechizing his children and servants. There was a knock at the door. He went to it, and the stormy wind blew in so that the tall tallow candles flickered and he could hardly see a venerable old man who stood muffled up in the rain. ‘May I come in?’ said the old man, ‘And wouldst thou give me shelter for the night?’ Rutherford at once said, ‘Yes, right gladly. Come in and we will give thee porridge, but not before we finish our catechism.’ ‘I thank thee’, said the stranger, ‘and I shall be glad to take my share in the catechism with the others, if thou wilt.’ So Rutherford went on asking questions around the family circle. It so chanced that when he came to the stranger, the question was, ‘How many commandments be there?’ ‘Eleven’, answered the stranger. ‘Alas, sir’, said Rutherford, ‘I had thought that one so wise and venerable of aspect would have given a better answer. There be but ten.’ ‘Nay, kind host’, replied the stranger, ‘in truth there be eleven commandments.’ Said Rutherford, ‘But that cannot be; there are but ten.’ The stranger then went on, ‘Hast thou forgotten? There was One who said, "Behold, I give you a new commandment, that ye love one another."’ Rutherford sprang to his feet. "Who art thou?’ he gasped. ‘I am James Ussher’, said the stranger, ‘and I have come hither in private that I might have speech with thee.’ It was the famous Archbishop Ussher, Primate of Ireland and one of the most eminent scholars of that day. ‘Welcome indeed thou art’, said Rutherford, ‘thou wilt remain here, but tomorrow thou wilt preach in my church.’ ‘Yes, gladly’, said the Archbishop; his eyes twinkled as he added, ‘I think I have chosen my text already. Shall it not be from St. John’s Gospel, Chapter 13 verse 14?’

The text which Archbishop Ussher proposed runs like this: ‘If I, then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another’s feet.’ It is found in that place where the Fourth Evangelist gives the account of the foot-washing in the Upper Room and where he cites the words of Jesus about the ‘new commandment’. It is based on, indeed made possible by, the earlier words which the Evangelist writes as he begins this account: ‘Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he came from God and was going to God . . .’ And that sentence assumes the truth of the even earlier words in the gospel narrative: ‘Jesus . . . having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end. . .’

The Lord came from God precisely in order to love, in order to be the humanly visible instrument of the divine Charity. Christian theology, in my conviction, is nothing other than the explication and application of what that statement means.

At several points in these chapters I have spoken of God as ‘supreme affect’. This term I have borrowed from Schubert Ogden, who uses it in his fine book The Reality of God, a book to which I acknowledge my debt in the preparation of these chapters. At the same time I acknowledge him as the author of this phrase. In Ogden’s book there is a chapter called ‘The Promise of Faith’ and I should like to commend it to you, for it seems to me that with a rather different approach, yet much more adequately, Ogden says in it much that I have been trying to suggest in what I have been putting before you.

Ogden’s essay concludes with an honest statement that he does not, at the time of writing, see that such a portrayal of ‘the promise of faith’ as he has drawn -- and I remind you that since he and I have said much the same thing, this would be true of my own presentation -- necessarily entails what he calls ‘subjective immortality’, the persistence beyond death of the conscious self. Yet the portrayal still holds good, he claims; and he goes on to say that it is precisely because he is trying to think and write as a responsible Christian theologian that he feels obliged to affirm that such personal persistence is not in and of itself, by necessity, utterly integral to Christian faith. And I agree with him.

But the very reality of ‘the promise of faith’ raises the question of such personal persistence beyond death -- raises it as a question which should be discussed. And it does not exclude the possibility that such persistence, in some mode, may be a legitimate consequence of the indispensable ‘promise’, even if it is not absolutely entailed by it. Interestingly enough, the fact that in so many prayers used in the Christian fellowship and in so many books dealing with Christian theology, this is spoken of as ‘the Christian hope’, or ‘a reasonable, religious hope’ (in one familiar prayer), may have its lesson teach us. At least it warns us against the wrong kind confidence on the matter, and it prevents us from succumbing too easily to that odd variety of self-centeredness, in the worst sense, which demands ‘immortality’ because it is determined to play ‘dog in the manger’ in God’s universe.

In this chapter I plan to discuss the question and to say something about the ‘hope’, although I know that I cannot provide an adequate answer to the former and I am in no position to speak with certainty about the latter.

In his recent study of process theology, Peter Hamilton has noted that he has found among the young people with whom he has worked as a chaplain and teacher of divinity a willingness to consider very seriously the reality of God but a feeling that talk about ‘personal immortality’ makes no sense. That book, The Living God and Modern World, is the most important British study of process theology; and it should be read. Furthermore, Mr. Hamilton’s remarks on this particular subject should be considered with care, for he represents, I think, in his comment about his own students what is also a prevalent attitude in other circles as well. I mention this for what it is worth, realizing quite well that what people think is no indication of what is true; realizing also that Christian faith is not to be ‘cut’ to the measure of popular opinion. None the less, if it should turn out that one can be a Christian without holding firmly to personal persistence beyond death, this is significant; and since, as I have just been saying, I think that such is indeed the case, I believe that nobody ought to require acceptance of some variety of personal persistence as a pre-requisite for a welcome into the Christian community which is grounded on that faith in God in Jesus Christ which the community exists to make available to men and women in every age.

But this may be beside the point. Let us proceed to the question and to the possible ‘hope’ and see what may be said about them.

First of all I should like to set side by side a negative and a positive consideration, each of them relevant to our question. The negative consideration has to do with that kind of selfishness to which I have already alluded. The positive one has to do with the intrinsic value of personal human existence.

I think that there can be little doubt that a good deal that is said in support of personal persistence after death is based upon a strong individualistic stress on the self. One can have no sympathy with the variety of humility which turns itself into a doormat and invites others to walk on one, in a manner which becomes a strange sort of self-pity masking as humility. Nobody is asked to be Uriah Heep! But it is also possible to be assertive about the self in a less obvious and equally unpleasant fashion. I am what matters; my destiny is the important thing; if God does not preserve me, the universe is a mess and nothing is worth while. ‘Glory for me’, the old gospel-hymn is supposed to have sung -- but the very words show that the hymn is not about the gospel, for the gospel speaks of ‘Glory to God’, in whose ‘glory’ all good is contained.

There is a concern about the self which is healthy and, as a matter of fact and observation, essential to each of us; but there is also a concern about the self which is vicious and unlovely -- and also, I should say, destructive of the very thing it seeks to assert. In the Christian tradition, that sort of concern about the self, ‘the glory for me’ variety, serves as part of the picture of hell. I introduce here, both for a little ‘light relief’ and because it makes my point so accurately, a poem by Rolfe Humphries which he entitled Hell. It may be found in his Forbid Thy Ravens, published some years ago by Scribners (New York):

It is the ‘I, I, I’ that I find significant in that poem. We all ‘visit’ hell, as Humphries has it, from time to time; it is indeed ‘hard enough to miss’, as the possible destiny to which I have referred. But the horror of it, the death in it, and the ‘solitude’ known there, are all summed up in those words ‘in constant iteration: I, I, I’. That is why hell is a ‘God-damned place’. William Morris was right in calling fellowship heaven, and lack of fellowship hell. Sometimes I incline to think that those who selfishly seek for personal persistence, for their own sake, and in the demand that they shall not ‘lose themselves’ in the ‘love and service of God’, are really asking for hell -- and if that is what they are asking for, the kind of person who does ask in this way has already obtained what he sought. He is already in hell.

The positive consideration which I should set alongside this negative one has to do with what I have styled the intrinsic value of personal human existence. This is not a matter of concern for myself; it is basically a concern for the value known and the love seen in others. John Baillie has written eloquently about this in his And the Life Everlasting, where he speaks movingly of the incredibility to him of the thought that this or that friend, whose love has been shown towards him, shall not be accepted as being indeed a lover, with a worth that nothing can destroy. It is for his friend, for the one he loves, that Baillie asks personal persistence beyond death, not for his own self such as it is.

However we phrase this, there is a point here. And I think that within the systematic statement of process theology, a place has to be made for that profound feeling. If, as we shall be arguing in a moment, we may be sure of ‘objective immortality’, the taking into God’s life of every good that has been achieved in the creative process; and if, as that understanding of the world order implies, one of the goods is the agency by which these given goods have been achieved, including at this point the human agent as a peculiarly significant focus -- may it not be the case that not only the good which has been achieved but the agent who has achieved it (himself good, despite defect and the instances of his failure in this mortal existence) will be preserved beyond the ‘perishing of occasions’? If value is never lost, as Whitehead claimed in his Ingersoll lecture on Immortality; and if value is always associated, in the process, with fact -- may it not be that exactly in receiving all that has been done which is valuable, the doer of the valuable is also to be received? May not something like the ‘communion of saints’, in the divine life and usable by the divine agency, be a possibility? After all, ‘personality is in relationships.

I put these two considerations side by side, for what they are worth. At least they help us to see what the question is asking. Now I wish to make three statements which seem to me to be plainly true, either from a serious acceptance of the conceptuality which I have been assuming or from the deliverances of the Christian faith itself. These will help us to get the question in even more accurate focus.

My first statement is simply a repetition of what I have just said about ‘objective immortality’. That each and every occasion or occurrence, each ‘entity’, makes its contribution, negatively or positively, to the creative advance is clear enough. The way in which this is done is by the good which has been accomplished being taken into God’s ‘consequent nature’ -- God as concretely he is, not abstracted from the world but in unfailing relationship with it. Everything that can thus be received is received; we might say that God is a good husband-man who wastes nothing. Anything not received, anything that is negatively prehended, is utterly use-less; it is ‘cast as rubbish to the void’, in Tennyson’s words, because it can make no contribution to the abiding good and its implementation in the creative advance.

Is there anything that is like that? Obviously we do not know. Equally obviously the horror of evil, in all its forms, is not to be denied. But again with equal obviousness, God’s capacity to transmute and transform what is most certainly evil into an opportunity for good cannot be denied by any Christian who has contemplated what we say God did with Calvary. Love such as God is, demonstrated in what God does in that instance, is able to ‘work wonders’ with the very worst of events and (may we not believe this?) with the very worst that men can do and even, I dare to say, with the very worst that men can be. ‘Nothing is lost that can be saved’ -- is there anything or anybody who cannot be saved? Not against its or his free decision, that is to say; for in that case it would be coercion and hence literally nothing worth doing would be accomplished. But love can solicit, invite, lure, entice, in so many different ways and through so many different channels, ‘secular’ and ‘religious’, that one need not be hopeless about the matter. I have said that the only really strong thing is love; and I now add that the divine persuasion, working tenderly yet indefatigably, may very well be able, in the long run, to win free consent. That free consent would be to God, yes; it would also be the realization or actualization or fulfillment of creaturely potentiality.

My second statement has also been intimated at an earlier point. The ‘resurrection of the body of Christ’, in the sense in which I have presented it, is an assurance of faith. I do not need to develop this further, since I have already discussed it at some length.

And my third statement is simply a reference to what I have borrowed from Schubert Ogden, about God as ‘supreme affect’. To him, into him, all good is a contribution. He knows, as such affect, the sting of anguish; he also knows the reality of joy. He takes them all, accepts them all, uses them all, in so far as there is any usability about them. And he does this now, not in some remote future. Mortal men strive and struggle, labor to do their best (and fail), move in the direction of fulfillment through the decisions they make. They die . . . ‘and with God be the rest’, as Browning puts it. To be able to say that, in complete confidence, is Christian faith; and ‘the promise of faith’ is the assurance that this is so. Thus the theocentrism so basic to the biblical witness is reaffirmed. As from God all initiating aims were derived, so to God all fulfillment must go as its ‘final rest’.

Having made those three statements, I must confess that for me personally this is enough. But I have left it still as a ‘question’, not as a complete answer -- the question, namely, whether or not there can be and is personal (viz., conscious) persistence after the death which is the terminus of our mortal pilgrimage. Yet there is what I have called ‘the hope’. I must say something about it.

John Baillie, in the book to which I have referred, places the grounds for this ‘hope’ in two Christian convictions. The first is that God is good -- that He is ‘pure unbounded love’. The second is the resurrection of Christ. For him it is inconceivable that a genuinely good and loving God would permit the annihilation of those persons whom He has created, whom He has so lovingly sustained, and upon whom He has showered such superabundant grace. And it is inconceivable to him that the communion with the ‘risen Lord’, which the fact of resurrection has made possible, should ever be brought to an end -- a communion like that, in which love is shared so richly, has about it the quality of everlastingness, even (as Baillie would doubtless say) of eternity. Nothing, certainly not the moment of mortal death, can destroy it.

I believe that Baillie has singled out the two big matters, thus reducing any other ‘arguments’ to triviality. In effect, he says that if God does permit the annihilation of human personality, in its self-conscious awareness as recipient of God’s love, there is something oddly selfish about God Himself. Now I should wish to say that it seems to me that this is a very strong point. If God is truly love, and if love is relationship, and if relationship means sharing, then it would be more like God as He relates Himself to the Creative process to wish to ‘share’ with others that which is good, that which is being done towards good, and that which leads to enjoyment in good. Whether this means also something like the ‘communion of saints’, where the divine love is indeed ‘in widest commonalty shared’, I do not know. But I may be permitted to hope that it does.

As to the resurrection of Christ, I have already spoken about what this means, at least so far as I can understand its meaning. It is life ‘in Christ’, triumphantly victorious over everything evil -- which is to say that it is life ‘in love’, of a type that does indeed have about it the quality of everlastingness and even, maybe, of eternity, although I dislike that word because of its suggestion that temporality is a lesser good or perhaps an evil. If one should seem to be thinking only of those who have encountered’ the historical Jesus, then there would be a kind of unlovely and unlovelike selectivity which would make such talk seem a little absurd. But if one is thinking of life ‘in love’ as an authentic possibility for every man, wherever and whenever he has happened to live out his mortal existence, then I must say that I both understand and find strength in the argument.

As so often, a human analogy helps; and although some contemporary theologians have been chary of using such analogies, one can be encouraged by the dominical employment of them and continue to find them useful. When I think of the love that I know so well between a particular person and myself -- and I am in fact thinking of one particular person with whom I am so bound in love that it remains for me a source of wonder and joy -- I am aware, in a fashion that words cannot adequately express, that there is something so enduringly real in our mutuality in giving and receiving, in our commitment one to the other, and in our hopefulness one about the other, that the thought of its having a terminus cannot enter my mind. ‘This thing is bigger than either of us or than both of us’, lovers often say in one form of words or another. The thing that is ‘bigger’ in such love is the activity of God Himself, I should dare to affirm. Yes, but the two lovers share in that; and by their sharing, they seem also -- at least to themselves, each for the other -- to share in the sort of endurance through all vicissitude which is characteristic of God who is never-failing love.

I do not know whether this also means conscious and personal persistence beyond the death of either partner or of both of them. But I may be permitted to hope that it does. And quite seriously I must add, ‘with God be the rest’. Which, by the way, is exactly what Browning was prepared to say for himself and for his Elizabeth.

We have seen the question, in all its depth. And we have heard about the ‘hope’, with its poignancy and longing desire. It is almost time to end, but I wish to say one or two things more as I bring these chapters to a close. Since I have just used the word ‘desire’, I want to speak of it for a moment -- or rather, to speak of what it is pointing towards. Then I want to return to that grand ‘shewing’ of Mother Julian of Norwich which I quoted earlier.

Desire . . . how much that word has been abused and how much derided! Yet it points towards something that might almost be taken as a definition of what it really means to be a man, even of what it means to speak about God. To say this may seem ridiculous; to many it will seem the sheerest sentimentality. But I wonder if it is either ridiculous or sentimental. In fact I do not really wonder; I flatly deny both charges.

For consider what desire is, as we know it in ourselves, in all our own desiring’. Often desire is used to signify sexual impulses, which are thought to be evil or at the best not very worthy. I have already indicated my rejection of such a view and my conviction that all love, so far as we know it humanly, has a physiological sexual aspect. The only question, in respect to sexual desire, is how it should best be expressed, both for the fulfillment of each person and for the best shared life of the community. Thus sexual desire is a good enough place to start when we think of what desire comes to, in our experience. To say briefly what I believe that to be, let me put it this way: desire is the yearning, affective, deeply-felt urge for fulfillment. It is how love works, when it is not a chilly matter of ‘rational approval’ or a Kantian affair of willing the good -- both of which, in my judgement, are so absurdly inadequate that they need no further comment.

If this be what desire in man comes to, what about desire in God? Here I wish to contradict the thesis of Anders Nygren’s great work Agape and Eros. As you will recall, Nygren insists that in God there is no eros (the Greek word, by the way, for what I have been calling ‘desire’, which significantly also in Greek means ‘love’); in God there is only agape, which Nygren interprets to mean the love which gives without regard either to the value of the recipient or the urgency on the part of the giver to receive a returning love. I believe that this notion is biblically unsound, in view of much that is said about bride-and-bridegroom, husband-and-wife, lover-and-beloved as symbolic of God’s relation to the world. I know that it is psychologically untrue; I am sure that it is existentially nonsensical. Theologically, it is disastrous. God is love; and in His loving He both gives and receives. He shares; He opens up and delights in mutuality. Unless this be the case, the Christian faith is sheer absurdity and should be rejected out-of-hand, for the God about whom it is talking cannot be the God Nygren presents. In fact, as somebody has pointed out, Nygren’s God of sheer agape, in the meaning he gives that word, is a moral reflection of the untouched, unmoved, self-sufficient deity as ens realissimum -- note the neuter gender -- which Christian theologians have tried to join with the living, loving, caring God of the Hebrew-Christian scriptures -- and have failed.

God as desire, or as I have put it earlier as the great Desire-for-good, is the yearning God, seeking to fulfil others in relationship with them, and by that very token seeking their returning love, which because it is given to Him freely is also His own fulfillment, His own enrichment. A view of God as one who can receive nothing because He already has or is everything is a pagan conception; it is an idol which no Christian should pretend to worship. Nor does he, since worship can be given only to the lovable, the perfectly lovable. Cringing fear is appropriate in the presence of such an ‘absolute’ as sometimes has been named God and only humiliating cringing is appropriate in the presence of a deity conceived after the analogy of the worst type of man we know -- namely, the one who is so self-contained and unrelated that he wants and needs and welcomes nothing, since he is entirely self-sufficient. Aristotle’s so-called ‘magnanimous man’, in the Nichomachean Ethics seems to me a ghastly model for God, with that man’s ‘remarkable condescension’ but with his incapacity genuinely to share.

Furthermore, as G. K. Chesterton once acutely remarked, the Buddhist image of Gautama is a squatting man, with eyes closed, absorbed in inner thought, and possessed of the kind of peace which is had through rejecting all desire. On the other hand, the Christian symbol is a Man hanging on a Cross, with His eyes wide open, embracing in passionate yearning the whole of the world. So George Tyrrell wrote. The contrast is significant. Certainly the one God is at work in Buddhism, but it must be in spite of that image of Gautama. Yet the Buddha was right in saying that desire is the cause of the world’s suffering. It is, because to love with desire is to suffer. He forgot to say that it is also the cause of the world’s joy, since to love with desire is the only way to abiding happiness, in the true meaning of that much mis-used word. God both suffers and rejoices -- and the picture of Him as experiencing both is the unique thing about the Christian affirmation of Him.

Now I must say something more about that quotation from Mother Julian: that the world continues because ‘God made it, God loves it, God keeps it.’ It seems to me that we have here the basic grasp of ‘how things go’ which enabled Mother Julian also to see that ‘all shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well’. The two together give us the ground for the ultimate optimism which in Christian faith conquers all provisional pessimism. She knew that ‘the world is in God’s hands’, as the negro spiritual says -- God made it, God loves it, God keeps it. Everything is safe that is worth saving. So no Christian need fear. Hence, as I have quoted Kirsopp Lake as saying, faith is not ‘belief in spite of evidence’, although the evidence from time to time may be very powerful and disturbing to us; it is ‘life in scorn of consequence’ and it is an adventure and a risk and a challenge.

Faith is an invitation to become lovers. That is what it works out as, in practical experience, when its significance is rightly apprehended. It points to God as cosmic love and cosmic lover, who gives to everything its beginning by providing its ‘initial aim’. It points to God as active lover as it sees Him supremely active in the Man Jesus and in all who participate in His Spirit. It points to God as the lover who not only gives but receives and cherishes what He receives, as it sees Him to be ‘the supreme affect’, in whom all good finds its home. It points to Him as love faithfully and everlastingly at work, as it recognizes that He will use whatever good He receives, along with His own urgent desire for good, in furthering the expression of love in the creative advance which is the world.

The traditional scheme of the last things will no longer serve us, I have said; yet that scheme did confront men with the Christian faith and it did make them face ‘reality’ with honesty and humility. The purpose of this book has been to suggest ways in which what that traditional scheme did for our ancestors may still be vital for us today. That is all I tried to do; and I hope that with all their inadequacies and imperfections, these chapters have brought to your attention some, but not of course all, of those consequences of the faith which we share.

Let the conclusion be, not mine, but Robert Browning’s, from A Death in the Desert: