Having established a philosophy of relational reality, the following brief series will begin developing a relational theology through which Christian faith may responsibly inhabit a world disclosed by contemporary science, history, scholarship, and lived experience.Contemporary societies inhabit intellectual, scientific, historical, and cultural worlds markedly different from those of the ancient biblical writers, including the Jewish and Greco-Roman cultures within which the New Testament and early Christianity developed. Moreover, many teachings described as “biblical” also contain interpretations not only formed through those ancient worlds but through later developing Christian traditions. These teachings will therefore be reexamined and recontextualized within relational reality, asking how the inherited language of God, creation, Scripture, Christ, salvation, and hope may be understood relationally today.In this sense, we are not merely rearranging the metaphysical furniture within an inherited theological house. We are examining its foundations and, where necessary, relocating the house within a more relational geography and ecosystem. This work is needed if Christian faith is to remain conversant with contemporary knowledge and responsive to contemporary life. The visions of ancient cultures should not be discarded, but neither should their interpretations be inscribed permanently in stone and imposed unchanged upon worlds they could not have known.This means that a living and responsive faith requires reinterpretation, fluidity, and recontextualization. It must be able to receive the wisdom of its traditions while reformulating their meanings within a philosophical foundation more congruent with the reality we now inhabit. This is not a rejection of Christian tradition, but an effort to help that faith tradition become living, truthful, and relationally vital within the world it lives.
Reality is the state of things as they actually exist, rather than as they are imagined, wished, or falsely apparent.Google AI then completed my inquiry by adding,
In actual existence, reality is the true state of everything that is real and exists independently of our thoughts or desires. That reality can be divided into historical facts, scientific truths, and a physically measurable world.
"In contrast to reality, fantasy is often substituted for facts and truth, while at other times reality gives an appearance to things that is either true or false.
Once this short series is completed, we will return to the wider philosophical exploration undertaken within the Reality & Metaphysics series. Several alternative approaches have already been examined through essays on Materialism, Mind, Cosmic Mind, Dualism, Monism, and Idealism, while other philosophies and philosophers remain to be considered on their own terms. These historical approaches have variously emphasized substance, matter, mind, unity, division, process, or supernatural agency rather than the relational account we have been developing. Our purpose is not merely to dismiss them, but to understand what each makes visible, what each leaves unexplained, and how each might challenge or enlarge our own interpretation of reality.
For now, we will pause our philosophical exploration for this short but consequential series. This interruption will introduce relational theology to readers who may be encountering relational thought for the first time, while also allowing an initial exposition of relational theology to test the philosophy from which it arises. Relational philosophy will help us reconsider Christian faith; conversely, Christian questions concerning God, creation, suffering, freedom, Christ, hope, and participation may reveal where relational philosophy remains incomplete and where relational theology will require further assessment. The movement will therefore be reciprocal: philosophy helping theology find a contemporary form, and theology returning new questions to the continuing development of relational philosophy.
Of note, philosophy and theology often address similar questions concerning reality, knowledge, meaning, value, human existence, and responsible participation. Their relationship is therefore close, but they are not identical. Philosophy examines these questions through reasoned inquiry, conceptual interpretation, lived experience, and critical reflection without necessarily committing itself to a religious confession. Theology makes an additional interpretive movement: it understands reality in relation to God through the resources of faith, Scripture, tradition, worship, community, experience, suffering, and hope. Faith makes the confessional commitment; theology reflects critically and constructively upon that commitment; and philosophy helps provide the concepts, questions, and discipline through which theological claims may be examined.
The purpose of this series therefore is neither to destroy Christianity nor to protect every inherited formulation from reconsideration. It is to ask whether Christian faith may become more intellectually honest, historically conscious, philosophically grounded, spiritually alive, and theologically renewed. Can biblical literalism be relinquished without relinquishing God? Can the humanity of Scripture be acknowledged without reducing Scripture to irrelevance? Can Christ be confessed without restoring a supernatural order imposed upon the world from beyond it? Can prayer, miracle, providence, incarnation, and resurrection be understood within relational reality while remaining genuinely Christian affirmations? Can faith inhabit a world that is embodied, generative, evolving, open, and unfinished?
The first essays in this short series will not prove that God exists. Neither will they prove that God does not exist. Historical scholarship can investigate texts, traditions, institutions, communities, and events. Science can investigate the natural processes through which the cosmos, life, and humanity developed. Neither method, by itself, can close every metaphysical question or determine every possible theological interpretation of reality.
This limitation should not be misunderstood as a defect. A method becomes trustworthy partly by recognizing the kinds of questions it can answer and the kinds it cannot. Genetics can investigate relationships among populations. Paleoanthropology can examine fossils and reconstruct aspects of hominin development. Archaeology can study settlements, tools, burials, inscriptions, and material cultures. Historical criticism can compare manuscripts, identify sources, analyze literary forms, and situate biblical texts within their ancient environments. These disciplines do not fail because they cannot demonstrate God. Demonstrating God is not the work their methods were designed to perform.
The reverse is equally important. Theology cannot determine the age of a fossil, reconstruct population genetics, establish the sequence of glacial periods, or decide the compositional history of a text by appealing to revelation. A doctrine cannot overrule an archaeological layer. A confession of faith cannot make a worldwide flood appear in the geological record. A theological need for a historical Adam cannot produce a genetic bottleneck that the evidence does not support. When theology crosses these boundaries, it does not defend faith. It confuses distinct forms of inquiry and asks religious conviction to perform work for which it is not equipped.
We will therefore distinguish among scientific inquiry, historical reconstruction, philosophical interpretation, theological construction, and religious confession. These activities may inform one another, but they are not interchangeable.
Scientific inquiry asks how natural processes operate. It observes, compares, measures, models, tests, and revises. Historical inquiry asks what may responsibly be said about past persons, texts, communities, and events on the basis of surviving evidence. Philosophy asks what kind of reality might best account for what we encounter and what concepts are required to interpret it. Theology asks how reality might be understood in relation to God. Religious confession goes further still: it declares which interpretation a person or community has chosen to trust, inhabit, and embody.
The distinctions matter because confusion often enters when one inquiry silently assumes the authority of another. Scientific findings do not become atheistic merely because they do not invoke God. Historical criticism does not disprove revelation merely because it reconstructs the human development of Scripture. Philosophy does not become theology simply because it leaves open the possibility of transcendence. Theology does not become knowledge in the scientific sense merely because its affirmations are deeply held.
The theological interpretation eventually developed in this series will therefore be openly identified as interpretation. It will not be concealed inside supposedly neutral scholarship. After examining what may responsibly be known about human evolution, deep prehistory, biblical origins, and the development of religious narratives, we will make an explicitly Christian commitment: God is real, creation is ongoing, and the divine life is decisively disclosed through Christ within the continuing relational becoming of the world and stellar cosmos.
That confession will not be presented as a conclusion forced upon every reader. It will be my own chosen theological interpretation of reality. Other readers may examine the same evidence and remain agnostic, become atheists, adopt another religious tradition, or construct a different theology.
The existence of these discoveries do not make Christian confession impossible. It reminds us that confession is not illusion, collusion, confusion, nor delusion. Rather, faith involves sound judgment, a bit of trust, continuing orientation, and a steady enough commitment to abandon certainty, that a person of faith may be willing to be led by doubt and uncertainty, while allowing more than one possible conclusion to be held in tension.
This is what is meant by epistemic humility. To be secure enough in one's faith to explore it. And open enough to allow it to be challenged.
If God is the God of the real as all Christians attest, then our view of the real must be willing to ask "What is real?" Relational philosophy and theology is one possible interpretation of reality. But because of its challenge to past non-relational philosophies upon which traditional church theology has been constructed, it will challenge those traditional interpretations and require a bit of reorientation to the Christian faith.
In summary, any interpretation of reality must remain accountable to evidence, coherence, moral consequence, and lived reality. Faith may move beyond what can be demonstrated, but it should not contradict what responsible inquiry has discovered. Theology may interpret the world, but it should not require the world to be other than it is.
Every theology therefore presupposes something about reality, whether it admits this or not. It assumes something about causation, time, agency, matter, mind, freedom, value, and the relation between God and the world. Traditional Christian theology developed through sustained engagement with ancient philosophical categories, especially substance, essence, form, perfection, immutability, and hierarchical causation. Those categories helped generations of theologians articulate their faith, but they were never religiously neutral or historically timeless. They belonged to particular intellectual worlds as we have shown in the Reality & Cosmology and Reality & Metaphysics series.
Our question is not whether Christianity should have been interpreted philosophically. It always has been whether it knew it or not. Our question is whether inherited philosophical assumptions remain adequate to the reality we now encounter.
Generative Relational Realism begins elsewhere. Relation is not something that happens after independently existing substances have already been formed. Relation belongs to the constitution of whatever becomes. Entities achieve provisional identity through patterns of relation that persist, change, respond, and sometimes dissolve. Process names the dynamism of relation, but relation is ontologically prior in our account. Reality does not consist first of self-contained things that later enter connections. Rather, things or substances themselves emerge and endure relationally.
Relational responsiveness is the primitive activity of this world. This does not mean that every entity feels, experiences, thinks, or possesses consciousness. Experience emerges within sufficiently organized forms of relational responsiveness, and consciousness emerges later within still more complex organizations. This distinction separates our developing philosophy from forms of panpsychism and from Whiteheadian accounts that place feeling or experience at the foundation of actuality.
The world described by this philosophy is generative because relations produce more than repetition. Under conditions of constraint, interaction, feedback, and historical inheritance, new organizations and capacities emerge. Life appears within material processes. Experience appears within life. Consciousness appears within complex embodied systems. Agency develops rather than arriving fully formed. And freedom becomes possible within structured histories rather than existing as absolute independence from causation.
The future within such a reality cannot be merely the unfolding of an eternally completed script. If novelty is genuine, becoming must contribute something real. The future is constrained by what has already become, but it is not exhaustively predetermined by the past. Possibilities are neither limitless nor already settled. Reality advances through the interaction of inherited conditions, present relations, emergent capacities, and unrealized alternatives.
If this relational account of reality is to be philosophically serious, it must first allow itself to be tested by the reality it seeks to describe. It must remain accountable to scientific discovery, historical inquiry, lived experience, moral consequence, and criticism from other philosophical perspectives. Relational philosophy does not stand above these disciplines as their final judge, nor may it predetermine what they are permitted to discover. Its helpfulness lies in making underlying assumptions visible, connecting otherwise separated fields of inquiry, testing interpretations for coherence, and asking how their consequences affect the world in which we participate.
Science, history, philosophy, and theology perform different but related kinds of work. Scientific inquiry investigates natural processes through observation, measurement, modeling, and revision. Historical inquiry reconstructs the past through surviving evidence. Philosophy examines the concepts, assumptions, and larger interpretations through which those findings are understood. Theology interprets reality in relation to God, while Christian confession declares the form of theological interpretation a community chooses to trust and inhabit. None of these inquiries should simply absorb the others, and none is free from the responsibility to distinguish evidence from inference, interpretation, and speculation.
Relational philosophy can therefore be helpful across the entire field. It may caution science against turning methodological naturalism into an unsupported metaphysical claim that only scientifically measurable realities exist. It may help historical inquiry attend to the networks of culture, power, memory, material conditions, and interpretation through which human events become. It may test philosophies that begin from isolated substances, disembodied minds, or closed causal systems. It may also help ethics move beyond isolated individualism toward responsibility for the relations through which persons, communities, societies, and ecosystems live.
Within this wider conversation, theology must also allow itself to be tested and, where necessary, reoriented within the relational reality it seeks to describe. This helps us recognize the philosophical assumptions used when interpreting the Bible and constructing doctrine. It also restrains theology from overstating its conclusions or requiring reality to conform to inherited beliefs.
We cannot describe an open and generative reality and then restore a completely predetermined future because an inherited reading of a biblical text or doctrine of providence seems to require it. Nor can we claim that entities emerge through relations and then describe God as the one being for whom relation is merely optional. Within Christian relational theology, God is not the exception to relationality but its unsurpassable expression - relationally within God’s Self and in relation to creation. Nor can we insist that causation occurs immanently through relational processes and then introduce external divine intervention - the interventionist supernaturalism described below - whenever inherited belief demands an exception.
Broadly, no interpretation should contradict the reality upon which it is being constructed. This principle does not subordinate God to a human philosophical system, nor does it turn relational philosophy itself into theology. Rather, Christian relational theology interprets the relational character of creation as bearing witness to God’s relational presence and activity.
Therefore, every statement about God - including biblical and doctrinal statement - is made through human concepts developed within our encounter and understanding with reality. If a theological concept requires us to deny the relational reality we inhabit, we must reconsider that concept before requiring reality to conform to our interpretation.
The same discipline applies beyond theology. Scientific models must remain open to new evidence; historical reconstructions must acknowledge the fragmentary character of their sources; philosophies must disclose their assumptions and remain corrigible; and ethical systems must be tested by their consequences for actual lives and relationships. Relational philosophy does not eliminate conjecture, imagination, or uncertainty. It provides a framework within which creativity and novelty may be encouraged while overstatement is constrained, connections are examined, and responsible participation in an evolving world becomes possible.
The relational theology anticipated here will not return to, nor support, interventionist supernaturalism. This form of teaching assumes two factors. 1) It presumes the interruption of reality as it normally operates by its own natural processes and, 2) the entry of an external, and superior, divine order into reality's normal operations that will suspend, override, or replace reality's natural processes. Within this theological understanding, God then becomes the exceptional cause invoked externally outside of reality whenever ordinary reality cannot produce the desired religious result. Thus the description, "interventionist supernaturalism." This form of non-relational teaching is commonly found within the Bible which conceives of God as operating by divine will, and liberty, whenever humanity needs help, goes astray, or requires divine judgment.
Here are several examples of supernatural theology that is deeply embedded throughout traditional and popular Christianity today. Firstly, the creational event is understood as an external divine command whereby humanity is introduced through a special act separate from actual evolutionary history; next, divine revelation becomes externally imposed truth placed into fertile, chosen, hearts-and-minds; that miracles occur through the suspension of natural processual agencies and regularities. Moreover, the act of divine incarnation may be imagined as God entering embodied history from outside physical reality; Christ's resurrection is observed as divine power reversing death beyond the conditions of finite life; and divine providence as the unilateral guarantee of history’s non-open, predetermined conclusion exclusive to natural processes own evolving course.
As disturbing as these examples are to supernaturally-oriented Christians, it may be pointed out that these affirmations need not necessarily be abandoned nor understood in the way they have been commonly believed and taught. The problem arises when each supernatural event is interpreted according to the same interventionist pattern. That is, the world proceeds naturally until God decides to intervene.
The purpose here is not to remove Christian confession until nothing distinctively Christian remains. It is to realign Christian confession interpretively with relational reality - rather than say, a substance-based reality. Creation, revelation, miracle, incarnation, resurrection, prayer, and providence ALL remain theologically real, but they must be understood as divine activity expressed within-and-through the relations by which creation exists-and-becomes, rather than as supernatural interventions imposed upon it from outside. This is therefore not the elimination of Christian faith but its relational reconstruction from a relational point-of-view.
Further, a supernatural theology appears to protect divine freedom, but in practice, it creates a God who competes with the world's supposedly imputed, God-endowed, agency. Which is to say that the more completely natural processes are allowed to explain an event, the less room there will be for externally imposed divine intervention. Supernatural theology consequentially pushes God toward presumed gaps, anomalies, unexplained origins, and violations of natural regularity. Conversely, in concerted closure of such metaphysical gaps and anomalies, scientific understanding explains observed "irregularities and mysteries" in scientific language and methods thus removing supernatural explanations in normal, naturalistic terms. And because of the advance of science, supernaturalism has less-and-less to do in its imposition of an external God upon an evolving world of open and relational processes.
Hence, a relational theology refuses this constructed competition of the supernatural versus the natural. Relational reality is not understood as an independent order standing above God, nor as a container which God must submit. It rather names the relational character of existence within reality itself - a character which includes both, i) the relationship between God and the world, as well as, ii) a world in relationship to itself. Thus and thus, whatever a relational God relationally does, must therefore be expressed within and through the relational reality by which God relationally created within a world that relationally exists, relationally evolves, and relationally becomes.
The central thought then is that a relational philosophy works with a relational theology together in concerted union, each with the other. Not alone. Not apart. Not separately. But together relationally as one affects the other. That reality is relational because God is relational. And because God is relational, God's creation experiences a relational existence.
This would be a pervasive religious interpretation of a relational philosophy regardless of religious confession. It can also be a Christian expression of reality based upon Christian interpretations of God and the world. And, it can finally be an agnostic or atheistic expression of reality without any need for religious interpretation. Simply stated, human existence experiences reality relationally. A philosophy is not religiously determinative. It is simply a conduit through which religious interpretation may be made, or not made.
---
Continuing with our Christian observations...
God is therefore not absent whenever a process can be described naturally.
It is important to recognize that scientific natural explanation and theological interpretation operate at different levels. To explain the development of life through evolution is not to explain God away. It is to describe the history through which life actually emerged under a relational God's relational activity within a relationally evolving cosmos.
Which next brings us to how God co-exists with the world relationally - or in the case of traditional Christian teaching, does not co-exist with the world relationally.
There are several religious positions related to God's co-existence with creation and humanity. The first is pantheism which describes God and the world as one-and-the-same. Not only is there a spiritual-and-bonded unity between the two but God is described more as an impersonal force, law, or substance rather than a supernatural presence, or person, answering prayers and making conscious choices.
The second position is the traditional Christian teaching of classic theism which is the philosophic and theological view that God is the ultimate, uncaused, and self-sufficient source of all existence. Its historical roots draws upon biblical traditions, Greek philosophy, Neoplatonism, Augustine, medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy, and Thomas Aquinas. It teaches:
- Divine Simplicity: God has no physical or metaphysical parts; God's essence and existence are identical.
- Aseity: God exists entirely from Himself and depends on nothing else.
- Immutability: God cannot change in His character, essence, or purpose.
- Impassibility: God does not experience emotional changes or suffering caused by external forces.
- Eternity/Timelessness: God exists outside of time without a beginning or an end.
- Omnipotence, Omniscience, and Omnibenevolence: God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good.
- Panentheism differs from pantheism because it does not identify God with the universe. It affirms that all creation exists within God while God’s being is neither identical with nor exhausted by the created order.
- Panentheism differs from strongly external forms of classical theism because it understands creation as existing within God’s encompassing life rather than as an order existing outside God and awaiting divine action from beyond itself.
Too, within panentheism, divine transcendence need not mean that God is spatially or ontologically remote from creation. It may name God’s inexhaustibility beyond every achieved form of reality. Divine immanence need not mean that God is identical with every event. It may name God’s intimate presence throughout the relations by which the world exists and becomes.
Panentheism is not a convenient label that resolves every theological difficulty. Questions remain about divine agency, freedom, suffering, evil, novelty, prayer, providence, incarnation, resurrection, and the relation between God’s life and the world’s becoming. Nor has this prelude yet developed the doctrines necessary to answer them. At this stage, panentheism establishes a direction for a relational theology rather than a completed system:
A relational God is neither a God standing outside the world nor a God reducible to the world, but a God within whom the world exists, relates, and becomes.
This is where the present inquiry begins. It does not abandon God when it leaves interventionist supernaturalism. It seeks a more pervasive understanding of divine presence: not a God who occasionally enters creation from elsewhere, but the relational God who has never been absent from creation at all.
Christian faith confesses that the world is God’s creation. This confession does not itself tell us when the universe began, how stars and planets formed, how life emerged, or through what histories humanity became. These are questions for cosmology, geology, biology, archaeology, and the other sciences. Theology begins elsewhere: it receives the world those inquiries disclose and asks what it means to confess that this evolving, unfinished, and astonishing reality exists within the creative life of God.
For traditional, orthodox, and evangelical Christians, the central confession therefore remains unchanged: God is Creator. Evolution does not replace that confession or make God unnecessary. It changes our understanding of the history through which creation has unfolded and invites theology to consider how God has been present throughout evolutionary history.
Creation therefore need not be restricted to a single originating act in a remote beginning as conceived by the ancients. Whatever the ultimate origin of the cosmos may have been, creation is also the continuing history through which possibilities become actual, relations form, structures endure, life develops, and new capacities emerge. Stars form, elements are produced, planets assemble, chemical systems interact, organisms diversify, ecosystems develop, consciousness appears, cultures arise, and persons become within communities. Christian faith may receive this entire history as creation rather than regard natural processes as evidence of God’s absence.
To affirm the integrity of natural processes is not to make them independent of God. Relational theology understands them as creaturely processes continuously sustained within divine presence. God does not need to insert each new form into the world from outside, determine every mutation, or redirect every event toward a predetermined result in order to remain Creator. Natural processes possess real histories, agencies, regularities, contingencies, and constraints, but they do not exist apart from God. If creation exists within God, then the processes through which it becomes belong to God’s continuing creative relationship with the world.
Evolution consequently describes neither a creation abandoned by God nor a mechanism operating where God is unnecessary. It describes part of the history through which life has actually become. Humanity’s evolutionary continuity with other creatures need not diminish human dignity or threaten faith in God. It may instead deepen our sense of creaturely belonging, enlarge our kinship with the living world, and increase our responsibility for the forms of life whose future is now affected by our choices.
An evolving creation does not remove divine purpose, but it does ask Christians to reconsider what divine purpose means. Life’s history contains beauty, complexity, cooperation, awareness, and love, but it also contains predation, disease, catastrophe, extinction, and immense suffering. Christian faith need not protect divine purpose by claiming that every event was individually arranged as a necessary step toward humanity or toward some completed design. Such an account risks making everything that happens indistinguishable from the will of God.
Relational theology may instead understand divine purpose as God’s faithful presence and continuing call within an open creation. God sustains possibilities for life, relation, freedom, communion, healing, beauty, and value without unilaterally determining every outcome. Created beings and natural systems participate genuinely in what the world becomes. Their freedom, limitation, creativity, suffering, and response matter within the continuing God-world relationship.
Creation is therefore neither a finished object delivered from beyond the world nor the execution of an eternally completed blueprint. It is the continuing gift and history of a world existing within God, becoming through real creaturely relations, and remaining open to what divine love and creaturely participation may yet bring forth.
Christian faith has often understood divine omniscience to mean that the entire future already exists within God’s knowledge as one completed and unalterable history. Every event may appear free from the creature’s limited perspective while remaining eternally settled from God’s perspective. This view has offered many Christians assurance that history cannot escape divine control. Yet it also raises difficult questions about freedom, prayer, suffering, moral responsibility, and whether anything genuinely new can become.
Relational theology approaches divine knowledge differently. If creation is still becoming, then the future does not yet exist as a completed collection of events. It exists as a developing field of possibilities shaped by what has already occurred, what presently exists, and what creatures may yet choose or become.
Christianity has traditionally taught that God knows the past completely, knows the present intimately, and comprehends every possibility, tendency, danger, opportunity, and potential consequence available within the world. Relational theology affirms that possibilities are known as possibilities rather than as completed facts that have already happened. Yet divine knowledge need not be imagined as the exhaustive enumeration and micromanagement of every infinitely branching arrangement, moment-by-moment, part-by-part. God may know creation participatively from within the relational processes God continuously sustains. Yet the subtending processes of reality possess their own regularities, agencies, constraints, and possibilities; they do not require continuous divine manipulation in order to remain within divine knowledge and presence. God’s knowledge may therefore be understood as relational rather than managerial: not as an External Calculator of every conceivable future, but as an unsurpassable awareness of creation as it actually exists, responds, and becomes.
This does not make God ignorant or diminish divine knowledge. An open future is not a hidden object that God fails to see. It is a future whose concrete form has yet to be created. Perfect knowledge of an open future means knowing it truthfully as open. God knows creation as it actually exists and knows the relational processes, inherited conditions, constraints, and emerging directions through which new possibilities arise, without those possibilities having to exist beforehand as an infinitely catalogued future.
Now for readers unfamiliar with relational philosophy, an open future does not mean an unconstrained or chaotic future. Every present moment inherits conditions from the past. Bodies, environments, histories, institutions, relationships, and previous choices establish real limits on becoming reality. Yet these conditions do not determine every outcome. Relational reality contains constraint and possibility together. What has already become shapes what may become next without reducing the future to the mechanical repetition of the past.
A responsive God participates within this openness. God calls, accompanies, sustains, warns, inspires, receives, and responds. The biblical traditions themselves frequently portray God in living relationship with creation: hearing cries, responding to suffering, entering covenants, receiving prayer, grieving violence, forgiving repentance, and calling communities toward justice and mercy. These portrayals may not provide a single systematic metaphysics, but they resist the image of a God for whom relationship is merely apparent because every response was eternally fixed in advance.
Divine responsiveness does not mean that God controls every creaturely decision or guarantees every desired outcome. God’s call toward healing may be resisted. Opportunities for justice may be refused. Communities may choose fear, domination, and violence. Natural systems possess their own histories, agencies, regularities, and vulnerabilities. Human choices and social structures make real differences. In an open creation, what creatures do matters because the future is not merely something that happens to us; it is also something in which we participate.
Prayer becomes especially significant within this relationship. It is not an attempt to persuade a distant ruler to suspend the world’s processes for our benefit. Prayer is genuine participation in the God-world relationship. Through prayer, persons and communities become attentive to suffering, open to wisdom, strengthened in courage, joined in solidarity, and redirected toward possibilities they might otherwise ignore. Prayer may change circumstances partly by changing those who become capable of acting within them, but it cannot be reduced to psychological self-transformation. Christian prayer also expresses trust that God receives our lives, responds within the limits and possibilities of each situation, and accompanies creation beyond what we can understand or accomplish alone.
Providence likewise need not mean that every event was secretly arranged. It may name God’s faithful presence within whatever occurs, continually calling creation toward healing, resistance, reconciliation, courage, and renewed possibility. Relational providence does not require Christians to call catastrophe good or pretend that suffering was necessary because it happened. It allows us instead to ask where God may be found within suffering and how divine and creaturely love may participate in bringing life from conditions neither God nor creation should be said to desire.
An open future therefore need not threaten Christian hope. It gives hope meaning. If everything were already settled, hope would be only our ignorance of a completed outcome. Within relational theology, hope is trust in the faithfulness of God amid possibilities that remain genuinely unfinished. God does not promise that nothing terrible will occur. God promises relational presence, continuing possibility, and a love that neither abandons creation nor ceases calling it toward life.
Miracle presents one of the most emotionally difficult questions for a relational theology. Many Christians have learned to associate God’s reality with events that natural processes could not produce. If every event occurs within relational reality, they may understandably wonder whether anything distinctly miraculous remains.
The answer depends partly upon what is meant by miracle. If miracle is defined exclusively as the violation of nature by a divine power entering from outside creation, then relational theology cannot preserve that definition. But relinquishing interventionist supernaturalism does not require relinquishing wonder, grace, healing, divine action, or the possibility that reality may become open in ways we could not have anticipated.
An event may occur within nature without being ordinary, predictable, or fully understood. It may emerge through the capacities of creation while remaining extraordinarily rare, personally transformative, historically consequential, or resistant to present explanation. Scientific explanation and theological meaning do not cancel one another. Understanding neurobiology does not make love unreal. Describing immune response does not make healing insignificant. Reconstructing the social conditions of reconciliation does not explain away forgiveness.
A relational understanding of miracle begins with the confession that God is never absent from creation. If the world already exists within divine presence, God need not break into it from elsewhere. Divine action may occur within and through creaturely relations, embodied agencies, natural processes, communal responses, and possibilities not previously realized. The miraculous may be recognized not in the interruption of relational reality but in its astonishing generativity and its openness to grace. Thus the development of a generative relational realism.
Christians may therefore speak of life, consciousness, love, forgiveness, moral courage, healing, and reconciliation as miraculous without claiming that their natural histories are unreal. A person may relinquish hatred that has shaped an entire life. A community may resist dehumanization when fear seems overwhelming. Strangers may risk themselves for one another. A wounded relationship may reopen to trust. Such events do not suspend relational reality. They reveal what relational reality may become when grace, courage, freedom, and responsive love converge.
Nor need this account of reality turn everything unusual or emotionally powerful into miracle. Nor does it need to decide every biblical miracle before historical inquiry begins. Biblical miracle stories arose within ancient cultures and were remembered, transmitted, interpreted, and shaped within believing communities. Some may preserve memories of unusual events. Some may employ symbolic, legendary, liturgical, or theological forms. Many do more than report natural wonders: they disclose liberation, compassion, judgment, restored community, and hope.
Historical scholarship should examine these narratives without having its conclusions predetermined by either belief or disbelief. Theology follows rather than replaces that inquiry. It asks what an event or narrative reveals about God, human possibility, communal memory, or the renewal of damaged relations.
Resurrection presents the decisive Christian question and cannot be treated merely as one example among others. Christian faith confesses that God raised Jesus from the dead. Relational theology should not reduce that confession to the survival of Jesus’ moral influence, the persistence of his historic memory, or the concerted determination of his followers to continue his work of love and forgiveness. It must remain open to resurrection as a real divine act while refusing to explain it as an external violation imposed upon an otherwise Godless material world.
This prelude cannot yet explain what such an act means metaphysically or historically. It can only establish the boundary within which the later inquiry will proceed: resurrection must be considered within embodied and relational reality, where death is real, God is present, and no life is finally self-contained. Christian confession may affirm more than historical or scientific method can demonstrate, but it should not demand that history or science pretend to know what their methods cannot establish.
Miracle within relational reality therefore remains neither supernatural interruption nor mere metaphor. It names the faithful Christian interpretation that creation may become newly open to life, healing, liberation, and unforeseen possibility through the relational presence and activity of God.
For many Christians, the authority of Scripture has been joined so closely to "biblical inerrancy" that questioning one appears to destroy the other. If the Bible contains historical limitations, differing voices, legendary traditions, ancient cosmologies, or morally troubling portrayals of God, then Scripture may seem no longer trustworthy. This fear deserves understanding because the doctrine of inerrancy often serves as more than a theory of texts. It becomes the foundation upon which certainty about God, Christ, salvation, morality, and eternal hope has been built.
Relational theology does not begin by asking Christians to discard the Bible. It asks whether the canon of Scripture may remain sacred and authoritative without being treated as information delivered untouched by human history. If God relates to embodied persons and communities rather than overriding their humanity, revelation should be expected to bear the marks of language, memory, culture, conflict, interpretation, and development.
The Bible bears these marks everywhere. Its traditions were remembered, retold, written, combined, revised, disputed, preserved, and canonized within communities. Its texts reflect ancient cosmologies, patriarchal societies, priestly institutions, prophetic protests, wisdom traditions, political struggles, imperial crises, and developing interpretations of God. Its authors did not stand outside their historical worlds, nor did inspiration remove the conceptual limits of those worlds.
To recognize this humanity is not to declare revelation impossible. It is to understand revelation relationally. Divine encounter, if real, is received and expressed by historically situated people. They interpret what they encounter through inherited languages, symbols, expectations, experiences, and limitations. Their testimony may disclose something real about God without becoming infallible in every statement.
The presence of human interpretation does not prove the absence of divine encounter.
Every meaningful human relationship is interpretive. Love, grief, beauty, obligation, and the presence of another person are encountered through bodies, memories, language, and history. Religious experience is not uniquely disqualified because it is mediated. It must, however, remain open to discernment. Claims of revelation may contain profound insight, but they may also be mistaken, culturally limited, self-protective, violent, or used to authorize inhuman and unloving power.
Scripture has preserved this struggle. It is part of its written record. A record that is often incomplete in its collected canon of manuscripts. Biblical writers argue with earlier traditions, they reinterpret inherited laws, challenge kings and priests, protest suffering, question divine justice, revise expectations, and place differing theological voices beside one another. The Bible’s plurality need not be treated as a defect. It may reveal generations of communities wrestling with God and with the meaning of faith amid changing historical circumstances.
Biblical authority therefore need not mean that every statement is equally, permanently, and literally correct. Scripture may exercise authority by drawing communities into its continuing witness, argument, warning, memory, lament, promise, and hope. Its claims must be read historically, compared internally, examined ethically, and interpreted through the relational trajectories of love, mercy, justice, liberation, forgiveness, reconciliation, and care for the vulnerable.
For Christians, Christ becomes a decisive interpretive center. This does not mean that every biblical difficulty disappears by quoting Jesus. It means that portrayals of God, power, holiness, judgment, and neighbor must be reconsidered through the God disclosed in Christ’s service, compassion, enemy-love, solidarity, forgiveness, and self-giving love. Scripture bears witness to Christ; it should not be used to authorize forms of domination that contradict the life to which that witness points.
Biblical portrayals of divine wrath, punitive judgment, conquest, and divinely authorized violence must therefore be interpreted through this Christ-centered disclosure of God. Such portrayals may preserve ancient communities’ attempts to understand catastrophe, justice, enemies, and divine power without providing the final Christian definition of God’s character. The violence produced by human beings and their institutions should not be transferred onto God as though divine anger were its hidden author.
A human Bible may initially sound like a diminished Bible. It may instead become a more profound record of faith communities seeking, resisting, misunderstanding, rediscovering, and responding to God across history. Its authority no longer depends upon pretending that humanity has been removed from its pages. Its sacredness may be discovered precisely within the long relational history through which human beings encountered God, struggled to understand, and preserved their testimony for communities still learning how to listen.
The most demanding question concerns Christ. Christian faith cannot be reconstructed merely by retaining Jesus as an admirable moral teacher after every theological claim has been removed. Christianity confesses something stronger: God is decisively disclosed and encountered through Jesus Christ.
Relational theology must therefore become more than a philosophy of interdependence decorated with Christian terminology. It must ask how Christ may be confessed as God’s embodied self-expression within relational reality. This question cannot be answered by separating Jesus from the biological, cultural, political, and religious histories through which his life became possible. Christ belongs fully within the history of creation, humanity, Israel, language, community, empire, suffering, and hope.
Incarnation need not mean that a distant God entered a material world from which God had previously been absent. If creation already exists within God, incarnation may be understood as the intensified and decisive embodiment of divine self-expression within creation. God does not reject embodiment in order to become present. In Christ, Christian faith confesses that the relational character of God becomes personally and historically disclosed through a fully embodied human life.
This also preserves the humanity of Jesus rather than treating it as a temporary covering for divinity. Jesus experiences dependence, relationship, learning, conflict, vulnerability, suffering, and death. His life belongs to a people and a history. His words arise within Jewish traditions. His ministry occurs under imperial occupation. His relationships, actions, parables, healings, confrontations, and table fellowship reveal a life formed and enacted within the material conditions of his world.
Yet Christian confession says more than that Jesus exemplified admirable relational values. It affirms that within this human life God’s own character and purpose became decisively disclosed. Love appeared as vulnerability rather than domination. Power took the form of service. Holiness crossed boundaries of exclusion. Forgiveness reopened damaged futures. Solidarity entered suffering. Enemy-love resisted the reproduction of violence. Reconciliation became the work of God within human history.
Relational Christianity begins with the confession that God is love. Love is not one divine attribute competing with power, holiness, justice, or judgment; it is the relational character through which every divine attribute must be understood. God’s power is love’s power to create, sustain, liberate, heal, and reconcile. God’s holiness is love’s incorruptible integrity. God’s justice is love’s opposition to whatever dehumanizes, exploits, and destroys. Divine judgment may therefore be understood not as punitive wrath imposed from outside but as the truthful exposure of damaged relations and the call to their healing.
The economic Trinity offers one way to speak from Christian encounter without pretending to comprehend God’s inner life completely. God is encountered as the originating and sustaining depth of creation, as divine self-expression embodied in Christ, and as continuing relational presence named Spirit. Father, Son, and Spirit are not three supernatural agents entering the world from elsewhere. Trinitarian language expresses how Christians have experienced and interpreted the one God in living relationship with creation.
This prelude does not settle every question about Christ’s divinity, preexistence, incarnation, two natures, or the development of later Christian doctrine. Historical and theological inquiry will need to examine how the Jewish teacher Jesus became confessed as Messiah, Lord, Son, Logos, and God incarnate. Christian confession need not fear that history. If Christ is truly embodied within human becoming, then the development of Christian understanding belongs to the history through which Christ has been interpreted.
The Cross likewise must not be understood as God punishing Jesus in humanity’s place or requiring suffering before becoming willing to forgive. The crucifixion is human violence directed against Christ: the violence of empire, religious protection of its self, political expediency, betrayal, fear, and public execution. In Christ, God enters into solidarity with the victim, exposes the destructive powers that produced the cross, and answers them without reproducing their violence. Resurrection then becomes God’s refusal to allow human violence, domination, and death the final word.
Resurrection remains the Christian affirmation that crucifixion does not possess the final word. It is not merely the persistence of an inspiring memory, yet neither should it be described hastily as God’s external reversal of nature. Relational theology receives resurrection as a real divine act within the God-world relationship, affirming that the life embodied in Christ is not finally overcome by death. Its historical, metaphysical, and theological meaning will require careful development rather than either supernatural assertion or explanatory reduction.
In summary, Christ within relational reality is therefore not a diminished Christ. It is the confession that God’s self-expression belongs fully within creation, that embodiment is capable of bearing divine presence, and that the divine life disclosed in Jesus calls creation toward love, healing, justice, reconciliation, and renewed becoming.
Relational theology does not begin without predecessors. Process philosophy and process theology have long challenged inherited pictures of God as immutable, impassible, coercively omnipotent, externally interventionist, and unrelated to the world’s becoming. Their work has helped many Christians reimagine divine power as persuasive rather than controlling; creation as unfinished rather than completed; and the God-world relationship as living rather than merely formal.
Alfred North Whitehead supplied much of the philosophical architecture from which modern process theology developed. For Whitehead, reality consists fundamentally not of enduring substances but of events of processual becoming, which he calls actual occasions. Each occasion comes into being by receiving and integrating prior realities, a process he describes through the language of prehension and feeling. Consciousness is not universal in Whitehead’s account, but experience - understood technically as feeling or prehension - that belongs to every actual occasion.
Generative Relational Realism begins from a different primitive. It does not begin by claiming that every actual entity feels or experiences. It begins with relation and relational responsiveness. Entities affect and are affected within relational fields, but experience emerges only within sufficiently organized forms of relational responsiveness, and consciousness emerges later within still more complex biological, neurological, and social organization.
For readers unfamiliar with these philosophical distinctions, the difference may be stated simply:
Whitehead begins by asking how actuality experiences its world. Generative Relational Realism first asks how anything becomes constituted through relation at all. Relation is ontologically prior to experience: only entities formed through sufficiently complex relational organization become capable of experience. Without relation there can be no experience, but relation itself need not be experiential; nor must experience be treated as ontologically primitive in the constitution of reality.
This difference matters for theology. It allows us to affirm that reality is relational throughout, without attributing an experiential interior to every entity. It preserves continuity between matter, life, experience, and consciousness while allowing genuinely new capacities to emerge. Nor does matter need to secretly contain miniature consciousness for consciousness eventually to become possible.
Relational theology may nevertheless learn deeply from process theology. It shares commitments to becoming, openness, participation, persuasion, divine-world relationship, and the rejection of coercive control. It also shares process theology’s insistence that what occurs within creation matters to God.
But this project should not merely rename Whitehead’s metaphysics or reproduce the theological systems built from it. Its theology must arise from the developing philosophy of relational reality, from scientific and historical inquiry, and from Christian confession, Scripture, Christ, worship, suffering, community, and hope. Therefore, process theology becomes an indispensable conversation partner rather than a completed system to which our conclusions must conform.
The resulting theology may therefore be described as relational rather than simply processual. Process names the dynamism of becoming. Relation names the constitutive condition through which anything becomes, endures, responds, and participates. The distinction will require further development, but it establishes why this theology may travel alongside process thought without remaining bound to all its metaphysical commitments.
This plurality should not be treated as a threat. Relational reality includes those of faith, those of no faith, and those who remain uncertain. It includes the human and more-than-human world - all creatures great and small - whose existence does not depend upon accepting any theological account. Participation in reality precedes agreement about its ultimate meaning.
Relational philosophy must therefore remain distinguishable from relational theology. Philosophy investigates what kind of reality may best account for existence as we encounter it. Theology interprets that reality in relation to God. Christian confession goes further by declaring the theological interpretation a person or community chooses to trust, inhabit, worship through, and embody.
The movement from philosophy to theology includes interpretation and commitment. Generative Relational Realism does not philosophically compel belief in God, Christ, Trinity, incarnation, or resurrection. It may make a relational account of Christian theology possible and coherent, but it cannot make Christian confession the only possible interpretation of relational reality. Hence, philosophy is itself interpretive, but it is not thereby theology, nor does it necessarily entail a religious confession. This is the work of faith - to make an interpretive commitment that philosophy may render coherent but cannot compel.
My commitment to Christianity is both inherited and reimagined. I receive the language of God, Christ, Spirit, creation, sin, grace, reconciliation, resurrection, and hope from the tradition that formed me. But I also accept responsibility for reinterpreting that language wherever inherited formulations conflict with responsible inquiry, diminish other persons, legitimize domination, or require intellectual dishonesty.
The movement may therefore be stated plainly:
Relational reality → relational interpretation → Christian confession → relational theology → ethical participation
God is not inserted into relational reality as a missing cause, a supernatural exception, or an explanation for what remains unknown. Christian faith interprets relational reality as creation existing within God, becoming through divine presence, and remaining open to possibilities for love, healing, justice, reconciliation, and renewed life.
Relational philosophy does not prove this confession. It is the work of Christian faith to make the interpretive movement toward God’s Self. The Christian faith has always understood God as self-disclosing; but a relational Christianity understands divine self-disclosure as occurring within relational reality rather than being imposed upon it from outside. That is, a relational God reaches toward creation while human beings remain free to respond. Faith then bears witness to this self-revealing God and shares God’s invitation with others, who likewise remain free to receive, reconsider, or decline the invitation to communion.
In this sense, a relational Christian faith becomes deeply evangelical - though without coercion, manipulation through guilt, compulsion, fear, or threatened judgment. By adapting the familiar language of the Roman Road of Conversion and the Four Spiritual Laws, we might express a relational gospel through four movements:
1 - Reality is relational - Nothing exists or becomes entirely by itself.
2 - God is relationally present - God does not enter creation from elsewhere but is already present throughout its becoming.3 - God invites rather than coerces - Divine love calls creation toward healing, justice, reconciliation, and renewed life without determining its response.4 - Faith responds through participation - Christian faith receives God’s self-disclosure in Christ and participates in divine love within an open and unfinished world.
The “conversion” here is not escape from the world into a supernatural order. It is an awakening to God’s presence within relational reality and a commitment to participate in what divine love is inviting the world to become.
That is indeed evangelical - but relationally evangelical: witness without coercion, confession without compulsion, and invitation without domination. Once this interpretive movement is made, relational theology must remain accountable to the reality it claims God creates and loves. Christian confession cannot require science to deny its evidence, history to conceal its findings, other persons to surrender their integrity, or society to accept religious power without moral accountability.
Every worldview eventually reaches questions that evidence alone cannot decide, and every person lives through some orientation toward what is real, valuable, and trustworthy. The responsible task is to distinguish what evidence establishes from what faith interprets and confesses, and then to embody that confession honestly without imposing it upon others.
At which point in this series, we come to an internal pressure. It partly arises from the distance between what many Christians have been taught to believe and from what responsible inquiry now discloses. It comes from people who fear that accepting evolution will cost them God, that reading Genesis historically will cost them Scripture, that acknowledging legendary narrative development will cost them biblical authority, or that questioning supernatural intervention will cost them Christ. It comes from those who encounter contemporary scholarship to feel that everything once trusted has been taken away. This is pressure #1.
There is also another pressure, an external pressure, which comes from the public consequences of applied theology. Beliefs about God, authority, Scripture, human nature, providence, judgment, power, and the future do not remain inside churches. They influence families, education, politics, law, science, social belonging, and the treatment of neighbors. In periods of societal chaos and upheaval, unexamined religious certainty can intensify fear, tribalism, authoritarianism, scapegoating, and resistance to evidence. Christian faith should instead cultivate truthfulness, humility, courage, mercy, justice, reconciliation, and responsible participation. This is pressure #2.
This does not mean that every inherited doctrine is responsible for social disorder or that Christians who retain traditional beliefs act without compassion. It means that theology cannot claim exemption when examining its consequences. A faith that speaks publicly must be willing to explain how its claims correspond with contemporary knowledge and what kinds of communities, conduct, and power they produce.
Those willing to consider a relational approach are invited into this reconstruction without being asked to abandon God, Christ, Scripture, or Christian hope.
Those who reject it remain free to do so. But the responsibility then remains upon every theological tradition to explain how its account of God and reality engages evolutionary science, historical scholarship, religious plurality, ecological crisis, political instability, technological power, human suffering, and the moral failures of Christian institutions. This is the downside of refusing movement.
Refusal to consider relational theology does not remove the questions that made its development necessary.
As mentioned earlier, this interruption also serves the continuing development of relational philosophy itself. By constructing an initial relational theology before the philosophy itself is completed, we may discover which concepts remain insufficient for speaking about faith, suffering, divine and creaturely agency, hope, and participation. Relational philosophy will help interpret theology, but this provisional theology may also return new questions to relational philosophy. As such, each becomes a conversation partner in the further development of the other. This is deemed a positive.
The essays that follow will therefore move through several connected stages. The introductory prelude here in this essay establishes the method, theological direction, and boundaries of the inquiry. The next five essays will examine -
- human evolution and its relational interpretation,
- the immense human prehistory that had accumulated before the age of writing,
- the ancient worlds and narratives behind the Bible,
- the survival of faith after historical understanding,
- and the construction of an affirmative relational Christian theology of God, creation, Christ, Spirit, salvation, and hope, which we have partly begun here.
The order is deliberate. In relational theology we do not approach inquiry without faith commitments, but neither will we allow doctrine to predetermine what evidence doesn't disclose. We will ask what may responsibly be known, distinguish what remains uncertain, examine how ancient interpretations developed, and acknowledge which inherited formulations can no longer bear the weight once placed upon them. Theology will then respond not by denying what has been learned but by seeking a faithful Christian form within the world we actually inhabit.
This series is therefore both an interruption and a test.
- Can relational philosophy help Christian theology find a contemporary form without becoming its master but its guide?
- Can Christian confession remain intellectually humble without claiming certainty it does not possess?
- Can faith become historically conscious without dissolving into mere cultural inheritance?
- Can God be real without being imagined as an external supernatural intruder into creation?
- Can Christ be confessed as God’s self-expression while remaining fully embodied within human history?
These questions will not be answered all at once. But they can no longer be responsibly avoided.
Philosophy will help theology find a contemporary form, and theology will return new questions to the continuing development of relational philosophy.
The preceding sections have not proved that God exists, nor have they attempted to make Christian faith the unavoidable result of relational philosophy. They have instead established the direction of the inquiry. That Christian faith may receive relational reality as creation, understand divine action without external intervention, affirm an open future without abandoning providence, read Scripture without inerrancy, and confess Christ without removing him from embodied history.
What follows is therefore not a philosophical theorem but a Christian confession. It gathers the commitments that will guide the essays ahead while remaining open to correction, development, and deeper understanding.
A Relational Christian Confession
but love as the relational character of divine life.
God’s power is the power of creative, and healing, love;
God’s holiness is love’s incorruptible integrity;
God’s justice is love resisting whatever diminishes life,
Who calls damaged relations to restoration.
September 24, 2026
Relational reality → relational interpretation → Christian confession → relational theology → ethical participation
The next essay turns to the evolutionary history of humanity: the shared roots of the primate family, the distinct emergence of the hominin branch, and the many human species through which our lineage became.
Clayton, Philip, and Arthur Peacocke, eds. In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God's Presence in a Scientific World. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2004.
Cobb, John B., Jr., and David Ray Griffin. Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976.
Enns, Peter. Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament. 10th anniversary ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015.
Keller, Catherine. On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008.
Oord, Thomas Jay. The Uncontrolling Love of God: An Open and Relational Account of Providence. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015.
Peacocke, Arthur. Theology for a Scientific Age: Being and Becoming - Natural, Divine, and Human. 2nd enlarged ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993.
Ricoeur, Paul. Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Edited by Mark I. Wallace. Translated by David Pellauer. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995.
Walton, John H. The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected ed. Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press, 1978.
