God Is Changing

The way to discover a God compatible with the findings of physics and psychology is to assume that God himself is in a process of change and growth. So believes the small band of U.S. thinkers who are today developing "process theology."

The most pressing issue facing Christian theologians is how to talk sense about God to a secular, science-minded, doubt-filled world. The drastic solution of the post-Christian followers of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is to say that the traditional idea of God is dead and turn to other concerns. Another way, favored by Biblical Scholar Rudolf Bultmann and his disciples, is to see the meaning of God in existential terms. But many U.S. Protestant theologians find it impossible to live without God or to preach him existentially, and the process theologians are trying another way based on the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and his best-known disciple, Charles Hartshorne of the University of Texas.

One of the century's most original thinkers, Whitehead was a gentle, British-born mathematician and philosopher who died in 1947 at the age of 86, after teaching at Cambridge, the University of London and Harvard. In his newly published A Christian Natural Theology (Westminster; $6.50), Methodist John Cobb Jr. of the Southern California School of Theology hails Whitehead as the philosophical peer of Plato, Aristotle and Kant and argues that his complex thought provides a way "to restore the term 'God' to meaningful discourse in some real continuity with its historic use."

Going on from Freud. Although his philosophy was deeply rooted in natural science, Whitehead found it necessary to employ an analysis of human experience as a basis for understanding nature. Cobb finds this approach particularly helpful to the task of theology because it takes into account both the post-Freudian understanding of man and the discoveries of modern physics. Classical metaphysics, says Cobb, got hung up on its static conception of reality; it assumed that a thing had an underlying, unchangeable substance--a notion rendered meaningless by discoveries of nuclear physics. Whitehead's view, more in harmony with contemporary science, is that the fundamental reality in the universe is the fact of becoming or change. Denying that there is any such thing as unchangeable substance in reality, he argued that the enduring objects of the world must be understood as sequences of "occasions of experience"--in other words, a man is the sum total of all the events and experiences in his life. Whitehead believed that the universe was in the midst of a "creative advance," as the possibilities of experience came into actuality.

Classical Christian theology holds that a transcendent Creator called life into being out of nothingness by an act of divine will, and governs the universe from outside creation--all-powerful, timeless and unchangeable. But Whitehead argued that a dynamic world could not have a static Creator who was exempt from the maturation experienced by finite beings. He therefore proposed that God, the source of all unactualized possibilities, was constantly creating within the universe. Thus God, like all other beings, is in some aspects incomplete and is man's companion on the creative advance toward perfection.

Renewal of Ethics. Far from being heretical, argues Cobb, this notion of a developing God is the philosophic concept that is most in keeping with the Biblical testimony of a God who was "deeply involved with his creation and even with its suffering." He also believes that Whitehead's concept of man as a self-actualizing, responsible being in creative partnership with God may be a sensible starting point for a renewal of Christian ethics. Moreover, Whitehead's philosophic emphasis on becoming should help illuminate such church teachings as the "new being" of man in Christ and the present working of the Holy Spirit.

Most Protestant theologians take a cautious view of process thinking. Existentialist John Macquarrie of Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary argues that while the idea of an incomplete God on the way toward perfection is intellectually attractive--it helps explain why an all-powerful Creator has not yet triumphed over evil, for example--it also seems spiritually unsatisfying.

On the Verge? How, he asks, can such a God evoke the awe and reverence that is at the heart of religion? Arnold Come of San Francisco Theological Seminary makes his critical point with an example: "Two men, an existentialist and a process theologian, go to Selma. The existentialist goes saying, 'The love of Christ that has been born in me responds to the brutality and the terror, and because it does, I have to go and stand beside my Christian brothers.' Is this really self-sacrificing love? Or is it really self-seeking love? The process theologian goes too, and he says, 'I go to Selma because God is moving in history, and here is the great historicultural event of our day--the racial revolution--coming to a crisis. God is there because God grows in history, demanding me to come.' Where is God now? Is he on one side of the picket line? Or is he on both perhaps? To find him remains the problem."

But both Macquarrie and Come respect the movement, and others feel that the process thinkers--such as Cobb, Union's Daniel Day Williams and Schubert Ogden of Perkins School of Theology--may be on the verge of an exciting event: the articulation of a U.S.-bred philosophic theology that might eventually develop into an alternative to that ubiquitous Teutonic import, existentialism.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.