Tools to Deconstruct and Construct a Religious Faith (Part II)
A Note on Our Theological MethodAs a reminder, our relational investigations into reality across the Reality & Cosmology and Reality & Metaphysics series were not undertaken to construct a philosophy of reality for the purpose of proving Christian doctrines such as the incarnation, Trinity, crucifixion, resurrection, or salvation. Rather, these inquiries into reality gradually led to the development of an independent philosophy of reality which we subsequently brought into dialogue with the Christian faith to examine the applicability and possibilities for reconstructing Christian theological language within a relational understanding of existence utilizing contemporary experience.When doing so two goals were to be preserved. First, to take the church's central confessions seriously while reconsidering their meaning within a philosophical understanding of relational reality. And secondly, to allow a relational interpretation of the Christianity to remain philosophically responsible, historically attentive, and open to further investigation, criticism, and development.
Because of these commitments, a certain ascriptive tension will remain throughout the present Prehistory series. This is the contemporary tension that arises when examining religious beliefs through historical, scientific, and philosophical inquiry while affirming theological convictions concerning realities that such inquiries cannot independently establish. Religion may be examined through many forms of critical investigation, but its distinctive confessions concerning divine reality ultimately remain matters of faith rather than independently demonstrated knowledge. This is the enduring tension within not only Christian theology but other global faiths as well.
Consequently, our purpose is neither to demonstrate the truth of Christian faith through metaphysical argument, nor to diminish its confessions because they cannot be independently demonstrated through critical scholarship or scientific inquiry. Instead, we seek to develop a relational understanding of Christian faith and theology, affirming its central confessions while exploring what their interpretation and practice might look like within an open, relational, and continually-becoming world.
Finally, when approaching this subject, one may reasonably expect a relational Christian theology to preserve Christianity's confessional integrity while also anticipating a relational reorientation, a revised theological grammar, and a relational interpretation of Christianity's traditional teachings. This constructive undertaking will proceed through three distinguishable-yet-related layers: i) an independent relational philosophical realism layer, ii) a relational theological interpretation of reality, and iii) a distinctly Christian relational theology developed through the church's historical confessions. Each layer will build upon - and enter into - dialogue with the preceding layer without surrendering its own integrity. In this way, our theological reconstruction seeks to remain philosophically responsible, historically attentive, and open to further investigation, criticism, and development.
Moreover, it is expected that there will exist an inherent tension between the second and third layers - particularly when relational theological interpretations encounter inherited Christian doctrines shaped by earlier metaphysical assumptions that are not themselves relational. Our task is not to eliminate this tension by abandoning Christian confession, but to examine and reconsider Christianity's inherited explanations through a relational understanding of reality.
What does it mean to confess that Jesus is God incarnate within a world already permeated by divine presence?
How might the eternal Word and the historical humanity of Jesus be understood in genuinely relational terms?And how should contemporary Christian theology engage the historically developing interpretations through which the church came to articulate this confession?
What then distinguishes this incarnation from God's universal presence?And how might the confession of divine and human existence as united in Christ, remain substantial questions requiring further theological and philosophical investigation?
Within relational theology, these Christian traditions become especially important because they present possibilities for understanding divine power through self-giving love rather than domination.
Relational theology does not dismiss these concerns. Rather, it asks how the Christian confession of Trinity might be reconsidered when relation, responsiveness, and love become fundamental to our understanding of divine reality.
Such intellectual humility does not necessarily weaken Christian faith. It may instead allow Christian confession to remain responsive to the reality it seeks to understand, rather than becoming captive to explanations that can no longer be responsibly sustained.
But this conviction cannot remain merely doctrinal. If Christ is understood as the embodiment of divine love, then Christian faith must examine what that confession means for its understanding of suffering, forgiveness, reconciliation, redemption, and the transformation of human life.
Yet the meaning of the cross has never been expressed through a single theological explanation. Early Christian writings interpreted Jesus' death through inherited Jewish Scriptures, sacrificial traditions, images of covenant, suffering, liberation, and vindication. Subsequent Christian theology developed differing accounts of how the cross might reconcile humanity with God, including interpretive understandings of ransom, moral transformation, substitution, satisfaction, and victory over sin and death. Our relational theology approaches these traditions through the governing confession that God is love.
Historically, crucifixion was an instrument of Roman imperial punishment, employed to humiliate, terrorize, and execute those regarded as threats to established authority. Jesus' death therefore belongs first to the political and religious circumstances of his historical world. Its occurrence should not be confused with the later theological interpretations through which Christians later came to understand its significance.
This distinction becomes especially important when the cross is presented as an act of violence required by God. Within certain Christian explanations, divine justice is understood to demand punishment that Jesus receives in humanity's place. Although such theories differ considerably, some formulations risk portraying God as requiring the suffering of an innocent person before divine forgiveness can become possible.
If divine love is God's governing character, we must ask whether such an understanding adequately expresses the God revealed through Jesus' teachings and life.
Our process-relational proposal does not begin with the assumption that God required Jesus to be executed. Rather, the crucifixion may be understood as the historical consequence of Jesus' encounter with religious and political powers unwilling to accommodate the kind of life and community associated with his proclamation of God's kingdom.
Within Christian confession, the cross can then be interpreted as a profound disclosure of divine solidarity with those who suffer under violence, exclusion, injustice, and the destructive exercise of power.
God's love is not understood as the cause of the violence inflicted upon Jesus, but as the loving presence that neither abandons him nor endorses the forces responsible for his death.
This distinction does not remove the theological significance of sacrifice or self-giving. It asks us to reconsider what those concepts mean. Love may involve costly commitment, vulnerability, and the willingness to suffer rather than betray its purposes. But suffering is not inherently redemptive, nor does violence become holy simply because religious communities assign it divine significance.
The cross, understood relationally, reveals neither the necessity of divine cruelty nor the triumph of coercive power. Rather, Christians may confess in the crucified Christ the enduring faithfulness of divine love amid humanity's capacity for rejection, violence, and destruction.
Resurrection, Historical Testimony, and the Possibility of New Life
The Christian proclamation does not end with Jesus' crucifixion. Its earliest surviving writings testify to the conviction that Jesus had been raised from the dead and that his followers encountered him as living beyond his execution. Thus the resurrection of Jesus became central to Christian understandings of Jesus' identity, the vindication of his life, and the hope that death and injustice do not possess ultimate authority over God's loving purposes. And yet, the historical and theological questions surrounding Jesus' resurrection must also be distinguished in contemporary terms by historical scholarship and scientific inquiry.
This means that historical scholarship can investigate the development of resurrection belief, the surviving testimonies of Jesus' followers, the literary formation of resurrection narratives, and their relationship to Jewish expectations concerning resurrection and divine vindication. But it ultimately cannot directly recover the original experiences in their entirety - nor can historical investigation establish the metaphysical reality of resurrection simply from the existence of subsequent testimony.
This means that Christianity may continue to interpret its faith traditions as bearing witness to something more than the continuation of Jesus' memory. That something more being Jesus' resurrection for the salvation of humanity.
Consequently, relational theology must therefore resist two premature conclusions. i) We should not insist that the truth of resurrection has been historically demonstrated through the biblical narratives. But, ii) neither should we automatically reduce resurrection to a metaphor for moral renewal, the survival of Jesus' teachings, or the psychological recovery of his followers.
The Christian confession of resurrection affirms that God raised Jesus Christ from the dead, revealing that divine love is not finally defeated by the violence that brought Jesus to his death. This confession belongs to Christianity's foundational understanding of Christ and its hope that God's relationship with creaturely existence extends beyond the limits of biological mortality. Relational theology receives this confession as a substantive Christian affirmation while undertaking the further task of examining how resurrection, divine action, and continuing existence might be understood within an open and relational creation.
This conviction raises difficult questions:
What might personal continuity mean beyond biological death?
How should resurrection be understood within a universe whose natural processes include mortality, transformation, and irreversible loss?
And what kind of divine action would resurrection involve if God's loving participation is noncoercive rather than an occasional (miraculous) supernatural interruption of nature?
We cannot resolve these questions merely by appealing to religious certainty or by substituting relational vocabulary for traditional miraculous explanations.
Process-relational theology provides resources for investigating the meaning of death and resurrection. If the experiences of creation genuinely enter into God's relational life, then the value and history of a creature's existence are not simply erased when its biological life ends. The world's experiences contribute to the continuing divine experience of creation.
Such an understanding offers a theological account of enduring significance within God, although it does not, by itself, establish the continuation of individual consciousness, personal identity beyond death, or the particular manner of Jesus Christ's resurrection. It is a faith position which Christianity claims in its confessions and teachings.
As part of Christian faith it confesses that God raised Jesus Christ from the dead. Our constructive relational theology does not suspend this confession until historical investigation or independent philosophy can demonstrate its truth. Rather, it accepts resurrection as a substantive Christian affirmation and asks how the reality Christians confess might be understood within creation's relational and evolving existence.
Questions concerning transformed embodiment, personal continuity, divine agency, and the relationship between resurrection and natural mortality therefore remain open to theological and philosophical investigation. Their unresolved character does not require abandoning the confession, nor does the confession authorize us to claim knowledge of its precise metaphysical constitution.
That distinction must remain clear. It is how relational theology would resolve critical scholarship and scientific inquiry. To accept faith as faith and enter into Christian confession from a relational perspective rather than a position of denial. Thus acknowledging the Church's confession that God raised Jesus Christ from the dead, while asking how the nature of death and resurrection remains in relational relationship to divine action, personal continuity, and embodied existence.
Resurrection is therefore neither reduced to the survival of Jesus' influence nor presented as an event whose divine meaning can be independently established through historical investigation. Christians confess that the crucified Christ lives within God's enduring faithfulness, even as the ontological meaning and manner of resurrection remain matters for continuing inquiry.
This preserves resurrection as a substantive Christian claim rather than merely a poetic or mystical symbol, while acknowledging that its ontological meaning cannot be settled by historical evidence or relational philosophy alone.
The Christian hope associated with resurrection consequently becomes more than optimism about life's capacity for renewal. It expresses confidence that the possibilities of divine love exceed the apparent finality of violence, suffering, and death, even while the manner and extent of those possibilities remain beyond our present knowledge.
Salvation Beyond Punishment and Escape
- Christus Victor (The Triumphal Model): Prevalent in the early church for over a millennium, this model views the cross and resurrection as a cosmic battle where Christ triumphs over the powers of sin, death, and the devil, liberating humanity from bondage. It is often associated with early church thought and was later revived by Martin Luther.
- Ransom Theory: Early church thinkers (such as Origen) sometimes framed Christ’s death as a ransom price paid either to Satan - who held humanity in captivity due to the Fall - or offered to God to buy back enslaved souls.
- Recapitulation: Articulated strongly by Irenaeus (and later Athanasius), this view centers on the Incarnation. Christ, as the "second Adam," lives a full human life of obedience through every stage from infancy to adulthood, reversing the disobedience of the first Adam and restoring human nature and immortality.
- Satisfaction Theory (Anselm of Canterbury): Formulated around 1098 by Anselm in Cur Deus Homo, this feudal-language model argues that human sin robbed God of His infinite honor. Because humans cannot pay back an infinite debt, the God-man (Christ) offers His voluntary death as an infinite satisfaction to restore God's honor.
- Moral Influence Theory: Associated with Peter Abelard in the 12th century, this view emphasizes that Christ’s death is not a payment to God or a ransom from the devil, but a supreme demonstration of God's love. This deep expression of love melts the human heart, inspiring repentance, moral reform, and love for God in return.
- Governmental (or Moral Governor) Theory: Developed by Hugo Grotius in the 16th century of the Renaissance, this view suggests that Christ did not suffer the exact punishment sinners deserved, but endured a symbolic or generic suffering. This public display upheld God's moral governance, justice, and law across the universe while allowing God to legally pardon repentant people.
- Example Theory (Socinianism): Also advanced in the 16th century, this perspective denies that Jesus died to satisfy justice or pay a penalty. Instead, He died to provide a supreme ethical example of trusting obedience to God even under extreme suffering, which believers are called to imitate.
- Penal Substitution: Formulated during the Protestant Reformation by John Calvin in the 16th century, this model shifts the focus from God's injured honor to God's absolute law and justice. Because human sin breaks divine law and incurs a righteous penalty of wrath and death, Christ acts as a legal substitute on the cross. Thus bearing the full weight of human punishment to satisfy divine justice, appeasing God's wrath (propitiation) and legally crediting His perfect righteousness to believers (imputation).
- Scapegoat Theory: Inspired by thinkers like René Girard in the 20th century, this view highlights that Jesus died as an innocent victim of collective human scapegoating. Rather than God demanding violent blood sacrifice, the cross exposes and dismantles human cycles of scapegoating and violence.
1 - If God is continuously present throughout creation, salvation need not be understood principally as the movement from a world abandoned by God into a separate realm where divine presence finally becomes available.2 - Nor must salvation begin with the assumption that humanity inherits a divinely imposed condition of guilt arising from a historically original human couple whose disobedience introduced mortality into an otherwise deathless creation.
3 - Further, evolutionary history presents a world in which mortality, competition, vulnerability, and biological transformation preceded the emergence of human beings by immense periods of time. These realities cannot responsibly be explained as consequences of a singular human transgression.
Within our relational understanding, the human realities historically interpreted through the theological category of sin may instead be examined as forms of damaged relationship, destructive agency, moral failure, and the refusal of possibilities for responsible becoming. These conditions require neither an inherited doctrine of original sin nor an explanation grounded in humanity's supernatural separation from God.
Salvation may therefore be understood through healing, liberation, reconciliation, and renewed possibilities for loving participation. It concerns neither merely an inward religious experience nor exclusively a future reward beyond death, but is centrally the transformation of relationships within the world we inhabit. To speak of salvation relationally is to speak of release from destructive patterns of existence, the renewal of human agency, and the emergence of more faithful ways of living with God, one another, and creation.
Within Christian confession, Jesus Christ becomes central to salvation not because divine love is unavailable apart from him, but because Christians confess him as God incarnate, whose life, crucifixion, and resurrection disclose God's own participation in the reconciliation and transformation of creation. His saving significance therefore cannot be reduced to exemplary moral teaching or human ethical improvement. Rather, salvation involves both the divine love Christians recognize in Christ and the possibilities for healing, liberation, reconciliation, and renewed participation that this love continually invites. Christian discipleship becomes a living response to this saving relationship, expressed through transformed relationships, responsible agency, and the practice of divine love within the world.
Atonement and Reconciliation as Relational Restoration
The language of atonement requires particular reconsideration because it has frequently been associated with explanations of how Jesus' death satisfies divine justice or makes forgiveness possible. The Christian tradition, however, contains multiple understandings of atonement as listed out immediately above. No single theory exhausts its historical or theological meaning.
A relational reconstruction of Christ's atonement begins then by asking what has been broken and what might reconciliation require?
Human alienation appears in many forms of damaged relationships, injustice, exploitation, estrangement, and the failure to participate responsibly in the lives of others. Such failures possess personal, communal, and institutional dimensions. They cannot be resolved simply by declaring that a legal penalty has been paid.
Reconciliation requires more than the removal of guilt. It involves truthfulness, accountability, transformation, and the possibility of renewed relationship. Within relational Christian theology, atonement may therefore be reconsidered as the restorative work of divine love inviting creatures away from destructive relationships and toward renewed communion with God, one another, and creation.
This does not mean that reconciliation can always be achieved or that forgiveness requires victims to resume relationships with those who have harmed them. Genuine reconciliation must remain accountable to justice, safety, and the freedom of those involved.
Nor does divine love guarantee that every creaturely invitation toward healing will be accepted. A noncoercive God cannot simply determine reconciliation while bypassing the agency of those whose relationships have been damaged.
Nevertheless, divine love may be confessed as persistently offering possibilities for transformation even where human relationships have become fractured or resistant.
The cross becomes significant within this account because it confronts humanity with the destructive consequences of coercive power while providing, through a generative Christian interpretation, a witness to love that refuses to make domination its governing principle.
The resurrection proclamation extends this confession toward hope that the possibilities of divine reconciliation are not finally exhausted by the violence that brought Jesus to his death.
Atonement is thus reconsidered not as the satisfaction of a divine need for punishment, but as the continuing restorative possibility of relationship through divine love.
This does not eliminate the distinctively Christian meaning of Christ's death. Rather, it locates that meaning within the relational and reconciling character of the God Christians confess in Jesus Christ.
Redemption, Hope, and the Unfinished Work of Salvation
Our reconsideration of salvation and reconciliation raises one final question concerning redemption.
If creation is genuinely open, salvation cannot simply be the predetermined completion of an eternally settled divine plan.
Nor can redemption be understood as a guarantee that every tragedy, injustice, or loss was necessary for some greater divine purpose.
Such explanations risk making suffering an instrument of God's intentions and diminishing the reality of creaturely freedom.
Within our process-relational theology, divine love does not require evil in order to accomplish good. Rather, God responds to the actual circumstances of creation, offering renewed possibilities even where earlier possibilities have been damaged or permanently lost.
Redemption may therefore be understood as the emergence of life-giving possibilities within histories that cannot simply be undone.
The past remains real. Harm cannot always be reversed. Lost lives cannot be replaced by subsequent achievements. Yet the future remains open to possibilities that neither erases suffering nor surrenders every possibility of healing and transformation.
Christian hope, understood relationally, is therefore neither confidence that every event occurs according to divine necessity nor assurance that history will inevitably produce a predetermined perfect outcome. It is a confession of trust in the enduring faithfulness of divine love amid the uncertainties of an unfinished creation.
This hope possesses both personal and communal significance. It invites Christians to participate in the difficult work of reconciliation, to resist injustice, to care for those who suffer, and to pursue possibilities for healing where destructive relationships have prevailed.
Salvation, under this understanding, is not merely something believers receive. It also concerns the transformation in which they are invited to participate and carry forward in their own lives as investments in the future goodwill of all - including that of creation itself.
The Christian language of redemption remains meaningful because it expresses the conviction that the world's present condition does not exhaust its possibilities and that divine love continually invites creation toward renewed relationship and life.
Yet such hope cannot replace the responsibility of human participation. Divine love may invite, sustain, and accompany creation, but living creatures must respond within their own capacities, histories, and relationships.
- We therefore arrive at a relational Christian understanding in which the cross of Christ discloses divine love amid the destructive consequences of coercive power;
- the resurrection affirms Christianity's confession that God raised Jesus Christ from the dead inviting further investigation into the meaning of death and renewed life;
- that salvation concerns the healing and transformation from destructive relationships;and reconciliation becomes an ongoing participation in the restorative purposes of divine love.
If divine love is the governing character of God, then the saving significance of Jesus Christ cannot finally be separated from the restoration of relationships, the dignity of creatures, and the continuing possibilities for life and reconciliation.
This brings us to the question of how human beings respond to these possibilities through consciousness, freedom, community, and daily participation in divine love. It is to humanity, the Holy Spirit, and the practice of relational Christian faith that we now turn.
Christian theology has long understood humanity through the language of creation, the image of God, sin, freedom, spiritual transformation, and participation in divine purposes. These categories have shaped Christian understandings of human dignity, responsibility, moral development, and the relationship between humanity and God.
Yet our relational theological reconstruction invites reconsideration of what it means to be human within a creation that is continually becoming.
Humanity did not emerge independently of the natural world, nor does human existence represent a separate order of reality detached from the evolutionary processes through which life developed. We belong to a long history of biological emergence, ecological relationship, and developing capacities for consciousness, imagination, communication, and social cooperation.
Within our independent relational philosophy, human beings are embodied participants in reality rather than isolated substances possessing relationships as secondary characteristics. Our identities develop through the interactions, experiences, histories, and environments that constitute our lives.
Christian relational theology interprets this same existence through its confession that creation is continuously accompanied by divine love.
Consequently, human dignity need not depend upon humanity's presumed separation from the rest of nature - neither by divine act nor by human sin. It may instead be understood through our distinctive capacities for relational awareness, moral responsibility, creative participation, and responsiveness to the divine love Christians confess as present throughout creation.
The biblical expression image of God may therefore be reconsidered not primarily as a supernatural possession distinguishing humanity from all other creatures, but as a Christian affirmation of humanity's capacity and responsibility to participate meaningfully in relationships of love, justice, creativity, and care.
This does not mean that human worth depends upon intelligence, independence, moral achievement, or any particular cognitive ability. Human dignity must include those whose capacities are developing, diminished, dependent upon others, or expressed differently. These descriptions then would cover the entirety of humanity.
Indeed, a relational understanding of human dignity recognizes that vulnerability, dependence, and mutual care belong intimately to human existence rather than representing failures of it. This then is what is meant by the human race being in the image of God - not a supreme creation, but a creation of all qualities. Humanity is therefore not simply a collection of autonomous individuals standing before God. We are relational creatures whose becoming is inseparable from one another, the earth, and the possibilities of the future.
Freedom, Sin, and Responsible Becoming
Within traditional Christianity, human freedom has frequently been examined in relation to divine sovereignty, obedience, sin, and salvation. Some traditions have emphasized humanity's freedom to respond to divine grace, while others have understood human decisions within more comprehensive accounts of providence and predestination.
Our process-relational theology begins with the conviction that human decisions possess genuine causal significance and resultant behaviour. That the future is not simply the unfolding of an eternally completed divine plan. But that human beings participate in shaping what becomes actual through their decisions, relationships, institutions, and collective activities.
Yet freedom is neither unlimited independence nor complete self-determination. Human agency develops within biological conditions, social relationships, inherited circumstances, cultural expectations, and material limitations. We do not choose every condition of our existence, but our responses contribute to the possibilities that subsequently emerge.
Within this understanding, human "wrongdoing" is examined through the distortion, neglect, or destruction of life-giving relationships and responsible becoming. Christian tradition has commonly interpreted such failures through the language of sin, but our relational reconstruction does not require that wrongdoing be understood as an inherited metaphysical condition separating humanity from an otherwise absent God.
Rather, moral failure becomes evident wherever human participation diminishes the dignity of others, damages creation, sustains injustice, or refuses possibilities for compassionate and responsible relationship. Such failures possess personal, communal, institutional, and ecological consequences that demand accountability and transformation.
Conversely, spiritual transformation may be understood as the continuing reorientation of human life toward more adequate, if not more fuller, expressions of love, justice, reconciliation, and relational responsibility.
Christian language has traditionally described such transformation through repentance, conversion, sanctification, discipleship, and growth in grace. But within our relational theology, these categories retain significance when understood as ongoing relational processes rather than completed religious achievements. It also is continuous with, and in sync with, humanity's evolutionary becoming, rather than imputed as a separate, independent, metaphysical state of being as traditional theology asserts.
Repentance involves more than remorse. It requires recognizing the consequences of one's participation and becoming willing to respond differently in relationally healthier ways of behaviour, action, speech, and attitude.
Nor is sanctification an escape from ordinary human limitations - as many converts would impose upon themselves in unusually harmful way. But the continuing transformation of relationships, desires, habits, and practices toward greater faithfulness to divine love. Essentially, sanctification re-engages a penitent back into relational living with all about itself, including with nature, rather than demonstrate acts of holiness in withdrawal, acts of harm, or presuming forms of "cleansing" are required.
The Christian life is therefore not an attainment of spiritual perfection, but an unfinished participation in the possibilities of becoming more loving and responsible. The metaphysically imposed theological concept of perfection is a misleading and non-relational description of relational reality formed through reconstructed religious beliefs citing impossibly unattainable standards for human behaviour and activity.
However, learning to love in generatively healthy ways both of one's self and those around us, can be an activity that is reasonable and attainable. Importantly, it will involve relational communication between the supplicant and those around him/her - as well as disengagement, perhaps for a time - from non-generative environments.
The Holy Spirit and the Formation of Christian Life
Our earlier discussion of revelation affirmed that the Holy Spirit's communication is not restricted to Christian believers, religious institutions, or exceptional spiritual experiences. Within our panentheistic understanding, God's loving presence accompanies all creation, inviting responsiveness according to the differing capacities of created existence.
We will now consider how Christians may understand their distinctive participation in that continuing divine relationship between God and creation, humanity, and with one another.
Relational Christian theology has traditionally associated the Holy Spirit with regeneration, spiritual gifts, illumination, sanctification, consolation, and the formation of the church. These affirmations express the conviction that Christian life involves more than intellectual agreement with religious doctrines. It concerns the practical transformation of persons and communities.
Within our process-relational reconstruction, the Spirit may be understood as God's continuing invitation toward possibilities of loving participation. The Christian believer does not possess the Spirit as an exclusive religious entitlement, but seeks to recognize and respond faithfully to the divine presence understood to accompany creation already.
Nor is the Spirit of God provided to the Christian, or the Christian attitude alone. But is the everyday experience of all humanity irrespective of faith or its variable standards of presumed religious perfection.
The Spirit is God's every day communication to creation and humanity not only of love but of loving generativity across the lives of all humanity. To become participants within this relational paradigm rather than stepping outside of it for reasons of "becoming more perfected, sanctified, holy, and so forth." Love requires relational participation, the daily concourses of give-and-take, learning, failure, teachability, help, and helping influences. One learns how to love as much as attempting to love. It is not a singular activity.
This distinction also changes how spiritual maturity is evaluated.
Religious certainty, doctrinal familiarity, institutional loyalty, or the intensity of spiritual experience cannot themselves guarantee growth in love. Comparatively, a person outside Christian faith may demonstrate compassion, wisdom, and moral responsibility more consistently than one who claims divine guidance. Thus, love is the quality of attitude-and-activity which all humanity may participate.
Accordingly, Christian spiritual formation must include the humility to recognize truth and goodness beyond the church's sometimes rigid and inflexible boundaries and the willingness to learn from those around us whose experiences challenge inherited religious bigotries and assumptions in how to practice and be love to those around us.
Within Christian discipleship, the traditional language of the fruit of the Spirit remains especially meaningful. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control describe relational qualities through which spiritual transformation may become visible in ordinary life.
Such qualities do not establish supernatural causation. But are humanity's conscious experience of life which may provide to all humans - including those professing a Christian theological vocabulary - descriptive forms of language which believers understand as responsive to the Spirit's espousal of divine love.
The Spirit's significance is therefore expressed not merely through what Christians profess to receive from God, but through the relationships, responsibilities, and ethical practices that emerge from their participation.
Prayer, Worship, and Relational Communion
Prayer presents a particularly important question for a theology that understands divine love as noncoercive.
If God does not unilaterally control events, what does it mean to ask God to intervene, heal, protect, or alter the circumstances of human existence?
Traditional Christian prayer has included petition, thanksgiving, confession, lament, praise, and contemplation. These practices need not be abandoned simply because divine "controlling" agency is reconsidered.
Within relational theology, prayer may be understood as both divine and human intentional participation in a relationship already present between God and creation.
Prayer does not summon an otherwise absent God, nor does it provide privileged access to divine attention. Instead, it may cultivate awareness, honesty, receptivity, gratitude, compassion, and responsiveness to possibilities that might otherwise remain neglected.
Petitionary prayer retains significance as the expression of genuine human need, longing, and hope. Yet it need not be interpreted as an attempt to persuade God to i) abandon supposed divine indifference or ii) exercise coercive control over natural events.
Moreover, a prayer for healing may express solidarity with those who suffer while inviting the praying fellowship or community toward attentive care, medical assistance, practical support, and sustained companionship.
A prayer for justice may become a commitment to resist injustice. A prayer for peace may invite participation in reconciliation. A prayer of confession may lead toward accountability and changed conduct.
None of these interpretations requires reducing prayer to self-directed psychological activity. Within Christian confession, prayer remains an expression of communion with a living, responsive and present God who receives creaturely experience and accompanies its unfolding possibilities.
Nevertheless, we should not presume that particular outcomes establish whether God has heard, favored, or rejected those who pray. Such interpretations can inflict additional suffering upon those whose prayers remain unanswered.
Worship likewise becomes more than an act of submission to divine authority. It may be understood as the communal celebration, remembrance, and practice of divine love through which Christians reconsider their relationship with God, one another, and creation.
The significance of prayer and worship is therefore not measured simply by religious intensity, but by the ways these practices deepen relational communion and responsible participation.
The Church as a Community of Relational Participation
The church has historically understood itself as the body of Christ, a community of discipleship, worship, fellowship, and witness. Yet Christian institutions have also participated in exclusion, domination, exploitation, and the protection of religious authority against criticism.
Our relational theology requires both realities to be acknowledged. The good and the bad. The repentant and the unrepentant. The penitent confessor and the non-confessor.
If God is love, the church cannot define its faithfulness solely through doctrinal agreement, institutional preservation, or the defense of inherited authority. Its practices must remain accountable to the loving character of God it professes.
The church's distinctive Christian identity arises through its historical relationship with Jesus Christ, Scripture, worship, and the confession of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Yet these inheritances do not establish an exclusive possession of divine truth or exempt its institutions from moral examination. Rather, the church becomes a continuing faith community of interpretation, correction, reconciliation, and responsible participation.
Christian fellowship should therefore encourage intellectual honesty, mutual care, freedom of conscience, accountability, and a willingness to reconsider practices that damage persons or communities.
Its witness is not strengthened by controlling the beliefs and conduct of others through religious intimidation, guilted accusations, exclusion or excommunication. It becomes more credible when its members demonstrate compassion, justice, hospitality, and the courage to acknowledge their failures.
Within this understanding, Christian mission need not be expressed primarily through religious conquest or the expansion of institutional authority. It may instead be understood as participation in the reconciling possibilities of divine love, expressed through service, dialogue, generosity, and the invitation to share in Christian faith without coercion.
The church does not create God's presence in the world. It seeks to participate faithfully in God's ever faithful and loving communion with all God's creation without exclusion.
Thus, Christian discipleship becomes a living expression of the theological reconstruction developed throughout this essay. Faith is not merely belief concerning God, but a continuing relationship of learning, responding, receiving, and giving within creation's unfinished becoming.
To live relationally as a Christian is to participate in divine love through the ordinary yet consequential relationships of human existence.
But such participation occurs within a world where suffering remains unavoidable, injustice persists, and the possibilities of love are frequently resisted or destroyed. We must therefore consider what Christian hope and responsibility mean when divine love does not guarantee protection from tragedy or the successful realization of every good possibility.
Traditional Christian theologies have offered differing explanations for suffering, including divine punishment, the consequences of sin, the testing of faith, the formation of moral character, and the mysterious purposes of providence.
Yet each explanation becomes ethically troubling when applied indiscriminately to particular experiences of harm.
To tell those who suffer that their pain was necessary for God's purposes may diminish the reality of their loss. To interpret natural disasters as divine punishment may attribute destructive events to a God whose governing character Christians confess to be love. And to suggest that victims suffer because of insufficient faith may compound injustice with religious condemnation.
Our process-relational theology rejects the assumption that suffering must occur because God has predetermined it.
Creation possesses genuine causal agency, contingency, and an open future. Natural processes operate through relationships that may generate life and flourishing, but may also produce destruction, limitation, and death.
Human beings likewise possess capacities for generosity and cooperation alongside possibilities for violence, negligence, and exploitation.
Within this world, suffering is not necessarily divinely intended, morally deserved, or instrumental to a greater good. It may instead arise from the vulnerabilities and contingencies of embodied existence, from destructive human choices, and from natural processes whose outcomes are not governed by moral intention.
Such an understanding does not resolve every philosophical difficulty concerning suffering. It does, however, refuse to make God the author of every tragedy merely to preserve an inherited doctrine of exhaustive divine control.
Divine Love Without Coercive Control
Our understanding of suffering follows from the conviction that God's power is fundamentally loving and noncoercive.
Within some theological traditions, God is understood as possessing the unilateral capacity to prevent every evil, even if the reasons for permitting suffering remain unknown. This creates an enduring difficulty: If God can prevent every instance of suffering but chooses not to do so, how should divine goodness be understood?
Process and open relational theologies approach this difficulty by reconsidering the nature of divine power itself.
Within our constructive proposal, divine power is inherently noncoercive. God participates continuously through persuasion, invitation, and responsiveness rather than exercising unilateral control over creatures, relationships, or natural events. Further, creation possesses genuine agency and causal capacities whose consequences cannot simply be overridden without contradiction to the relational character of existence.
God's failure to prevent a tragedy need not be interpreted as divine indifference, punishment, or a hidden decision that the tragedy should occur. Rather, the world possesses possibilities and limitations whose outcomes arise through the interactions of creation itself.
Divine love accompanies these circumstances, offering possibilities for healing, resistance, endurance, solidarity, and renewed participation without guaranteeing that every desirable outcome will become actual.
Such an understanding must not be presented as a complete solution to the problem of suffering. The precise meaning of divine persuasion, the extent of God's possibilities for action, and the relationship between divine agency and natural causation remain substantial theological questions.
Nevertheless, this proposal allows Christians to reject the claim that God intentionally causes or permits every instance of suffering as part of an immutable divine plan.
The world may become otherwise than God lovingly desires. And that possibility is essential to our understanding of genuine creaturely freedom and an open future.
Divine Solidarity and the Experience of Suffering
If God genuinely experiences creation's becoming, then suffering possesses significance within divine relational life.
Our panentheistic theology affirms that the world's experiences contribute to God's ongoing experience. The suffering of creatures is therefore neither unknown to God nor observed from a position of detached indifference or abandoned presence. Divine love receives and responds to the world's pain, loss, beauty, and emerging possibilities.
Within Christian confession, the crucifixion of Jesus becomes an especially significant expression of this divine solidarity. Christians may recognize in the suffering Christ the refusal of divine love to abandon those harmed by violence and domination.
Yet divine solidarity with the world must not be confused with the claim that suffering is necessary for divine fulfillment, holiness, sanctification, nor salvation. God does not require creaturely pain in order to become loving, nor does the suffering of one person become justified because another eventually discovers meaning through it.
Love takes suffering seriously precisely because suffering can destroy possibilities that might otherwise have emerged. Some losses cannot be repaired. Some injuries permanently alter the course of human lives. Some acts of violence eliminate futures that can never be restored in their original form. A responsible relational theology must acknowledge such irreversibility rather than promise that every tragedy will eventually be explained as beneficial.
Nevertheless, irreversible loss does not mean that all future possibilities disappear. Within an open creation, renewed relationships, compassion, justice, and forms of healing may emerge even after profound suffering. Our relational Christian confession is that divine love participates in the offering of such possibilities without making the suffering that preceded them necessary or good.
Hope Without Predetermined Outcomes
Christian hope has frequently been associated with resurrection, redemption, eternal life, and the eventual fulfillment of divine purposes. Within our relational theology, hope cannot depend upon certainty that every future event has already been determined or that history must inevitably reach a predetermined condition of perfection.
Why? Because the future remains genuinely open - both now and eternally.
This means that the realization of life-giving possibilities depends upon the responsiveness, capacities, and participation of creatures within their developing relationships in the present moment. If no one or no thing comes to help than possibilities may turn negative and not positive. Relational participation means relational responsiveness not simply from God but from creation too.
Hope is therefore neither passive expectation nor confidence that God will accomplish everything independently of creaturely participation.
Rather, Christian hope may be understood as trust in the enduring faithfulness of divine love, even when the outcomes of particular relationships and events remain uncertain. Such hope does not guarantee that every injustice will be corrected within history, that every relationship will be restored, or that every experience of suffering will be overcome.
But it does affirm that the possibilities of loving participation are not exhausted by the world's present condition.
The Christian resurrection confession gives this hope a distinctive theological expression. Yet, as we have already considered, the precise meaning of resurrection and the possibilities of personal existence beyond biological death cannot be established through historical testimony or relational metaphysics alone. Our hope therefore remains confessional rather than demonstrative.
Its practical significance is nonetheless substantial. Hope invites participation even when success is uncertain. It encourages perseverance without guaranteeing victory, compassion without assurance of reward, and resistance to injustice without presuming that every effort will achieve its intended outcome. To hope relationally is not to deny the vulnerability of existence, but to affirm the continuing significance of loving participation within it.
The Ethics of Divine Love
The ethical implications of our theological reconstruction arise directly from its governing confession that God is love.
If divine power is noncoercive, Christian conduct cannot be faithfully modeled upon domination. If divine presence accompanies all creation, the dignity and well-being of others cannot be treated as incidental to religious life. If the Holy Spirit communicates throughout creation, wisdom cannot be confined to only those who profess Christian faith.
And if creation's future remains open, as it is, than human participation possesses genuine consequences.
Christian ethics must therefore become more than obedience to inherited religious regulations. It must involve discerning how our decisions affect the relationships, freedoms, vulnerabilities, and possibilities of others.
Such discernment requires attention to consequences, historical understanding, scientific knowledge, social responsibility, and the testimony of those whose experiences have been neglected or dismissed.
Love is not merely an emotion or a general preference for kindness. It may require protecting the vulnerable, confronting injustice, challenging destructive institutions, accepting correction, and resisting forms of authority that diminish human dignity.
Nor does noncoercive love require passivity in the presence of violence or abuse. Protecting those who are threatened may require firm boundaries, intervention, and accountable forms of restraint. The rejection of domination does not eliminate the responsibility to prevent harm.
Within Christian faith, these responsibilities find an important expression in Jesus' teachings concerning love of neighbor and enemy, mercy, justice, reconciliation, and the refusal to make coercive power the governing principle of religious life.
Yet Christian communities must also remain willing to learn from those outside their traditions. Religious identity does not guarantee moral wisdom, and the confession of divine love cannot exempt its adherents from outside criticism.
Indeed, a theology organized around love must judge its own institutional conduct by the same moral responsibilities it commends to others. It is to practice its own preachings.
The ethical credibility of relational Christianity therefore depends not simply upon the coherence of its doctrines, but upon the very relationships and practices those doctrines encourage.
A church may confess that God is love while acting through exclusion, intimidation, or domination. Where this occurs, its conduct contradicts the theological character it professes.
Conversely, the practice of compassion, justice, humility, reconciliation, and responsible care provides a living expression of the relational faith we seek to reconstruct.
The Persistent Responsibility of Faith
Our examination of suffering, hope, and ethics brings us toward the practical heart of Christian relational theology.
We have proposed a Christian understanding in which God continuously accompanies creation through loving participation, receives its unfolding experiences, and invites creatures toward possibilities for life and relationship. Yet this does not remove the uncertainties, vulnerabilities, and responsibilities of human existence.
Theological reconstruction cannot guarantee that our interpretations are correct or that our participation will always achieve the good we intend. Faith therefore requires continuing examination, humility, openness to correction, and a willingness to respond to new knowledge and changing circumstances.
The Christian life, understood relationally, is neither the possession of final religious certainty nor the passive observance of an already completed divine plan. It is an unfinished participation in the world's becoming, undertaken through the conviction that love remains worthy of commitment even where its possibilities are uncertain and its fulfillment incomplete.
To confess that God is love is therefore to accept responsibility for how that love is understood, practiced, and made visible within the relationships through which creation continues to become.
This is the ethical responsibility toward which our constructive Christian theology has been moving. It prepares us to conclude by considering whether Christian faith, reconstructed through relational reality and divine love, can offer a coherent and responsible way of understanding and participating within the contemporary world.
