Tools to Deconstruct and Construct a Religious Faith (Part II)
Having undertaken this critical examination, we now face a different responsibility. It is not enough to identify the limitations of inherited theological explanations or to relinquish convictions that can no longer be responsibly maintained. If Christian faith is to remain meaningful within the world as we are increasingly understanding it, we must also consider what a reconstructed Christian theology might affirm within this new world, how its claims may be justified, and what kind of religious life those affirmations might encourage.
Our approach begins with a distinction fundamental to this larger project: reality is not identical with our descriptions of it. In our previous series, we began by asking a foundational question: "What is reality?" This inquiry led us into independent philosophical investigations through which we developed a philosophical ontology described as Embodied Relational Reality (ERR), followed by a philosophical metaphysics described as Generative Relational Realism (GRR). Through these investigations, we explored the possibility of understanding existence as fundamentally relational, responsive, open, and generative.
Yet these philosophical proposals were neither developed to establish divine reality nor intended to require a Christian interpretation of reality. Philosophy is not inherently a theological enterprise, although the two disciplines have frequently entered into productive conversation together. Philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Søren Kierkegaard engaged theological questions, while theologians such as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and process theologian John Cobb incorporated philosophical reasoning into their theological investigations. Nevertheless, for our purposes, we have deliberately maintained the independence of philosophical inquiry so that our understanding of reality might develop without being required to validate inherited religious convictions. Only afterward would we consider whether such philosophical insights might provide a suitable foundation for constructive Christian theology.
Similarly, Christian theology is not, in itself, an independent philosophical study of reality. Rather, it represents a religious and confessional interpretation of reality developed through Christian Scripture, tradition, experience, and reflection. Thus, for many Christians over the centuries, their inherited theological understanding also functions as their operative philosophy or worldview. This becomes problematic when historically developed theological interpretations are mistaken for unquestionable descriptions of reality, or when their underlying philosophical assumptions remain unrecognized and protected from criticism. This was partly alluded to in essay 6.
Consequently, although philosophy and theology both employ reason, interpretation, and critical inquiry, they differ in their starting commitments, purposes, and methods of investigation. For our purposes, relational philosophy provides an independent philosophical understanding of reality from which Christian relational theology may develop its own constructive interpretation. Neither inquiry should be made subordinate to the other, and both must remain accountable to philosophical criticism, historical scholarship, and contemporary knowledge.
Importantly, the philosophical foundations developed through ERR and GRR are not restricted to only Christian interpretation. Their integrative relational understanding of reality also remains available for examination and possible interpretation within Jewish, Islamic, Eastern religious, and including non-religious traditions. Whether and how these perspectives might contribute to distinctive relational theologies or philosophies within other traditions remains a question for subsequent investigation. Our immediate responsibility, however, is to develop a genuinely Christian relational theology in its own historical and confessional language without compromising the independence of the philosophy upon which we draw.
Within this framework, we propose to reconsider Christianity through its central confession that God is love. Rather than organizing our understanding of God primarily around sovereignty, holiness, omnipotence, or judgment, we will ask how these inherited theological categories might be understood when divine love becomes their central governing principle. This reconsideration will then lead us into questions concerning creation, divine presence, panentheism, revelation, Trinity, Jesus Christ, incarnation, resurrection, salvation, suffering, and hope. Our intention is not to abandon the distinctive language of Christian faith, but to investigate how its theological commitments might be understood anew within an evolving and relational world.
Such reconstruction must remain more than a philosophical accommodation or an exercise in replacing traditional religious terminology with relational language. Christian theology must be capable of explaining what it affirms about God, why those affirmations should deserve serious consideration, and how they differ from alternative interpretations of the same reality. Its proposals must also remain open to historical examination, philosophical criticism, and the ethical responsibilities arising from their practical consequences.
We therefore enter this second part of our investigation neither to restore the certainty we have questioned nor to presume that every Christian conviction must survive unchanged. Rather, we seek to develop a Christian faith capable of learning, reconsidering, and participating responsibly within the world it inhabits.
For if God is love, then the work of theology must ultimately concern more than what we believe about God. It must also be concerned with how divine love might be understood, encountered, and lived through our relationships with one another and the world itself. Hence, a professed faith of a loving God must not only be conversant with the world but live outwardly in love to one another as well as to the world it seeks to proclaim Christ as the Lord of Love.
Having distinguished independent philosophical inquiry from Christian theological interpretation, we must now consider what makes a relational Christian theology possible and what responsibilities accompanies its construction. Our task is not to develop an entirely new religion, nor simply to translate inherited Christian doctrines into contemporary philosophical language. Rather, it is to examine whether the Christian faith, understood through its historical traditions, confessional commitments, and continuing religious experience, may be constructively reinterpreted within an open and relational understanding of reality.
Christianity has never existed apart from the philosophical and cultural worlds in which it developed. Its earliest communities inherited the religious traditions of Judaism, interpreted their experiences of Jesus through Jewish Scripture and expectation, and subsequently engaged the philosophical languages of the wider Greco-Roman world. Across succeeding centuries, Christian understandings of God, creation, incarnation, salvation, and human destiny developed through continuing encounters with philosophical reasoning, historical circumstances, and religious experience.
Consequently, constructive Christian theology is not an unprecedented departure from Christian history. It participates in Christianity's longstanding practice of reconsidering its inherited understandings. What distinguishes our present undertaking is our determination to recognize that process explicitly and to allow contemporary knowledge to participate in the examination of religious claims without requiring its findings to conform to predetermined theological conclusions.
Relational Philosophy and the Christian Theological ProposalOur philosophical investigations through Embodied Relational Reality and Generative Relational Realism provide an interpretive framework in which relationships are not merely secondary connections between independently existing things. Rather, relational existence, responsiveness, differentiation, and generative becoming are considered fundamental to how reality is constituted and develops.
These investigations share important concerns with the process philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, and with the theological contributions of John Cobb, David Ray Griffin, and Thomas Jay Oord. Their work provides substantial resources for examining reality, experience, divine action, freedom, and the relationship between God and creation. Nevertheless, neither their philosophical conclusions nor their theological proposals should be regarded as doctrines our own investigations must necessarily reproduce.
Our developing relational philosophy remains an independently revisable account of reality. Traditional Christian theology may draw upon its insights, but must also explain what its own religious interpretation contributes. To affirm that existence is relational is a philosophical proposition. To affirm that relational reality is continuously accompanied by a loving God is a further theological claim requiring Christianity's own examination.
This distinction allows our theological inquiry to proceed without confusing philosophical possibility with theological certainty.
What Makes Relational Theology Christian?The Christian character of this undertaking arises not simply from accepting relational metaphysics, but from its continuing engagement with the distinctive historical and confessional inheritance of Christianity.
Christian faith interprets divine reality through the religious history of Israel, the life and teachings of Jesus, the testimony of his earliest followers, the development of Scripture, and the church's continuing reflection upon God, Christ, and Spirit. Its theological vocabulary includes creation, covenant, incarnation, Trinity, crucifixion, resurrection, redemption, salvation, reconciliation, and hope.
These concepts possess complicated histories and have received differing interpretations across Christian traditions. Their historical development does not make them irrelevant, but neither does their inherited authority establish that every traditional formulation must remain unchanged.
Our responsibility is therefore to examine what these Christian affirmations might mean within a relational understanding of existence while preserving their distinctive theological significance. We must not reduce incarnation to ordinary human kindness, resurrection to a general metaphor of renewal, or divine love to an ethical preference merely because such interpretations are philosophically convenient. If these convictions are to remain meaningful, their reconstruction must address the substantive questions they originally sought to express.
The Responsibilities of Constructive TheologyA responsible relational Christian theology must satisfy several intellectual and practical obligations.
It must remain historically attentive, recognizing that Christian texts and doctrines developed through human interpretation rather than appearing as complete explanations independent of history. It must remain philosophically coherent, examining whether its understanding of divine reality, agency, freedom, and creation can be sustained without contradiction or unnecessary appeals to supernatural intervention. It must remain open to the examination of competing interpretations, including those that understand religious experience without affirming divine reality as modern scholarship seems to do.
Furthermore, its claims must possess theological significance beyond simply redescribing scientifically understood processes in religious terms. If we speak of God's presence, love, responsiveness, or participation, we must explain what these affirmations contribute to Christian understanding and why they warrant serious consideration.
Finally, Christian theology must remain ethically accountable. An understanding of God that encourages domination, exclusion, indifference, or the protection of unjust power requires criticism, however firmly its advocates believe it to be biblically authorized. Conversely, a theology centered upon divine love must examine how its convictions become visible through justice, compassion, reconciliation, and responsible participation within creation.
These responsibilities do not guarantee the correctness of our theological conclusions. They establish the conditions under which we may investigate them faithfully.
We are therefore prepared to consider the conviction around which our constructive theological proposal will be organized: God is love. Not as a conclusion established by relational philosophy, nor as a religious expression protected from criticism, but as a distinctly Christian confession through which we will reconsider the character of God and the meaning of divine participation within an open and evolving world.
Our constructive proposal begins elsewhere. We take seriously the Christian confession expressed in 1 John 4:8 and 4:16 that God is love, asking what follows when love is not merely one attribute among others but the governing character through which every divine attribute must be reconsidered.
This conviction does not originate in relational philosophy. It belongs to the Christian tradition itself, particularly its interpretation of the life and teachings of Jesus. The command to love God and neighbor, the call to love one's enemies, the practices of mercy and forgiveness, and Jesus' identification with the vulnerable provide important Christian witnesses to the character of divine love. These witnesses do not eliminate the Bible's differing portrayals of God, including narratives of divine violence, wrath, and judgment. Rather, they invite Christians to examine how these inherited descriptions should be understood in relation to the love they confess as central to God's identity.
To begin with love is therefore not to abandon Christian theology. Rather, it is to reconsider its governing principle throughout our understanding of God's very Self, relational being, divine character, purposes, and generative will.
If love expresses God's governing character, then holiness cannot be understood as God's defining attribute above all others, conveying a sense of august separation from an impure creation which God created in love and to be in loving fellowship and relationship. Consequently, holiness might instead be understood as the integrity, faithfulness, and life-giving character of divine love. In this sense, holiness expresses the trustworthy and unwavering nature of God's love rather than a competing divine quality capable of overriding it.
This distinction becomes especially important when theological interpretations shape religious behavior. Throughout Christian history, appeals to divine holiness have at times been used to justify the exclusion, condemnation, persecution, or mistreatment of those regarded as impure, sinful, heretical, or otherwise unworthy of religious belonging. When holiness becomes detached from love, religious communities may come to regard acts of rejection or coercion as expressions of faithfulness to God, even when those actions contradict the love they profess. A relational Christian theology must therefore ask not merely whether an action is defended in the name of divine holiness, but whether it expresses the love, dignity, mercy, and justice through which God's holiness is to be understood.
Similarly, sovereignty need not require exhaustive control over every event. Within a relational understanding, divine sovereignty may express God's enduring faithfulness to creation and God's capacity to participate meaningfully in its unfolding possibilities. Such sovereignty would not be measured by the ability to determine every outcome, but by the constancy of divine love amid a world possessing genuine freedom and contingency.
This reinterpretation also challenges religious uses of sovereignty that elevate authority over compassion or obedience over moral responsibility. When divine sovereignty is understood primarily through command and submission, religious leaders may claim an authority that places their decisions beyond question, treating disagreement as rebellion against God. Yet if God's sovereignty is governed by love, human expressions of religious authority must likewise remain accountable to the well-being, freedom, and dignity of those whom they affect. Divine sovereignty cannot become a theological justification for human domination.
Divine power requires particular reconsideration. Classical Christian traditions have interpreted omnipotence in different ways, often distinguishing God's power from arbitrary or contradictory action. Nevertheless, popular understandings of God frequently associate divine greatness with the ability to accomplish any desired outcome through divine unilateral intervention.
A relational theology asks whether power understood primarily as control adequately represents the God Christians encounter through Jesus. What if divine power is expressed through persuasive love, relational responsiveness, and the creation of possibilities rather than coercive determination? Such a proposal does not diminish the significance of divine agency. Rather, it reconsiders what divine power means when God's purposes are understood through loving participation rather than unilateral control.
This distinction also possesses implications for Christian discipleship. If divine power is understood through coercion, believers may be tempted to imitate that power through religious compulsion, political domination, or the suppression of dissent. But if divine power is fundamentally loving and noncoercive, Christian participation must likewise resist the temptation to impose religious convictions through force, intimidation, or the denial of another person's freedom.
Divine judgment likewise requires reconstruction. If God is love, divine judgment cannot be considered independently of justice, healing, accountability, and the restoration of damaged relationships. Love does not render wrongdoing insignificant. On the contrary, genuine love must take seriously the suffering caused by exploitation, violence, cruelty, and indifference. Yet judgment understood through love seeks more than condemnation or retribution. It asks how evil may be resisted, victims honored, responsibility acknowledged, and the possibilities of reconciliation pursued.
Here again, theological interpretation carries practical consequences. When divine judgment is presented primarily as punishment or exclusion, religious communities may regard their own acts of condemnation as participation in God's righteous purposes. But the confession that God is love requires a different standard of discernment. Judgment must not become permission to humiliate, dehumanize, or injure those whom a community considers sinful or unworthy. Neither does love require overlooking injustice, abandoning accountability, or demanding reconciliation from those who have suffered harm. Rather, love requires that the pursuit of justice remain attentive to the dignity of persons, the protection of the vulnerable, and the possibility of transformation without denying the seriousness of wrongdoing.
These reconsiderations reveal that our understanding of divine attributes is never merely an abstract theological exercise. The God a community imagines and proclaims influences the kinds of authority it legitimizes, the behaviors it encourages, and the relationships it considers morally appropriate. A theology that places holiness, sovereignty, power, or judgment above love risks reproducing those priorities within its own religious life. Conversely, a theology in which love governs every divine attribute must allow that confession to reshape not only its understanding of God but also its practices of worship, leadership, discipline, justice, and communal responsibility.
These interpretations do not resolve every difficulty within inherited Christian doctrine. They establish a governing question:
Can our descriptions of divine holiness, sovereignty, power, and judgment remain faithful to the character of love we confess in God, particularly when those descriptions are invoked to justify how we treat one another?
Within process and open relational theology, divine love has frequently been understood as persuasive rather than coercive. Thomas Jay Oord's concept of amipotence, or the power of uncontrolling love, provides one contemporary expression of this approach. Although relational theologians differ in their accounts of divine agency, they share a concern that genuine relationship cannot be adequately represented through unilateral determination.
Our developing Christian proposal similarly considers whether God relates to creation through continuous presence, persuasion, invitation, and responsiveness. Within such an understanding, creaturely existence possesses genuine significance because its possibilities and outcomes are not merely the unfolding of an already completed and divinely predetermined plan. Human decisions matter. Natural processes matter.
The future remains genuinely open and consequential because what becomes actual is not simply the execution of what has been eternally settled. Rather, both humanity and the wider creation participate in shaping what becomes, exercising their own forms of agency, responsiveness, and generative capacity according to their differing natures and possibilities. Creation is therefore not merely the passive recipient of divine intention, but an active participant in its own continuing becoming.
Under this interpretation, God is not absent from creation, nor merely observing its development from beyond the world. Divine love accompanies its becoming, responding to what occurs while offering possibilities for life, relationship, healing, and renewed participation.
Nevertheless, this account raises difficult questions. What does divine persuasion mean beyond the language of human experience? How might God's agency be distinguished from the causal relationships already present within nature? And does noncoercive love adequately explain God's relationship to suffering, injustice, and the persistence of evil?
These questions cannot be answered simply by declaring that love is persuasive. They require the further investigations of divine presence, creation, and suffering developed in subsequent sections.
One final difficulty deserves acknowledgment. When Christians affirm that God is love, are they describing divine reality or projecting their highest moral aspirations upon the universe?
The historical development of religious language makes this question unavoidable. Human beings have understood divine character through the moral, political, and cultural categories available to them. Our own preference for love over domination also arises within a particular history of human experience, ethical reflection, and Christian interpretation.
Consequently, the confession that God is love cannot establish its own truth merely through its moral attractiveness. Nor does the relational character of reality demonstrate that its fundamental processes are benevolent. Relationships may sustain life, but they may also involve exploitation, deterioration, destruction, and suffering.
Our proposal is therefore a Christian theological judgment concerning how divine reality may be understood, informed by the Christian witness to Jesus and evaluated through its coherence, interpretive significance, and ethical consequences. Its faith conviction is that love provides a more faithful organizing principle for Christian theology than coercive power, absolute holiness, or austere sovereignty, while recognizing that this conviction remains open to criticism and further examination.
And so, if God is love, then creation cannot be understood merely as an object of divine control. It must be reconsidered as a world of genuine relationships, possibilities, vulnerabilities, and becoming, within which divine presence may be continuously expressed.
This brings us to the relationship between God and creation, and to the possibilities of a Christian panentheistic understanding of reality.
Christian theology has traditionally confessed that God is the creator of heaven and earth. Yet the meaning of creation has been interpreted through differing understandings of divine power, cosmic origins, natural order, and God's continuing relationship with the world. Some theological explanations have emphasized creation as the completed accomplishment of divine intention, subsequently sustained and governed by God's providential authority. Others have emphasized an ongoing dependence of creation upon God, recognizing divine activity as continuously significant to the world's existence.
Our relational theological proposal begins with the understanding that creation is neither a static arrangement of finished objects nor the mere unfolding of a predetermined divine design. Rather, the universe possesses an evolutionary history characterized by differentiation, interaction, emergence, contingency, and generative becoming. Stars form and perish. Galaxies develop. Living organisms evolve through natural processes. Ecological relationships emerge, change, and sometimes collapse. Human beings participate within this same history, possessing capacities for consciousness, imagination, moral judgment, and responsible agency.
Our relational Christian theology therefore approaches creation principally through the understanding of creatio continua, or continuous creation. Rather than organizing our understanding around creatio ex nihilo, the traditional doctrine of creation from nothing, we emphasize creation as an ongoing, relational, and generative reality. The universe is not simply the finished consequence of an original divine act, subsequently unfolding according to a predetermined plan. Rather, creation continues through the emergence of new relationships, possibilities, forms of organization, and expressions of becoming.
Within this relational understanding, God is not merely the origin of creation but its continuously present and loving participant. Creation possesses its own genuine capacities for responsiveness, agency, and novelty, while divine participation accompanies its unfolding without unilaterally determining its outcomes. Thus, creation is neither an independently self-sufficient reality abandoned to its own processes nor a passive instrument of divine control. It is a continuing relationship of creative participation within which new actuality genuinely comes into existence.
These developments belong to the natural history of the universe and do not require supernatural explanations to account for their occurrence. Our philosophical investigations through ERR and GRR interpret this developing reality through relational existence and generative becoming, while our Christian relational theology interprets this same relational reality through creatio continua, understanding creation as a continuing relationship of divine love and creaturely participation. Its future is not simply waiting to be revealed, but is continually constituted through the relationships, possibilities, and creative capacities of the world itself. Creation, understood relationally, is therefore both a received reality and an unfinished relationally becoming process.
Panentheism affirms that all creation exists within the encompassing life and presence of God, while God is not exhausted by creation. In its familiar expression, God is in all things, and all things are in God. Unlike pantheism, which identifies God with the totality of reality, panentheism preserves a meaningful distinction between God's Self and the cosmos/universe/world while affirming their profound relational intimacy.
Christian interpretations of panentheism differ considerably, particularly concerning divine transcendence, creation, temporality, and the relationship between God's being and the world's becoming. Our proposal does not require adopting every feature of an existing panentheistic system. Rather, it develops a distinctly Christian-based, process-relational understanding, in which the confession that God is love finds expression through divine presence, responsiveness, and reciprocal participation within creation's unfolding life.
This relationship is not merely one of divine omnipresence, as though God were everywhere present while remaining unaffected by what occurs. Rather, the relationship between God and creation is genuinely reciprocal, although not symmetrical. God continuously accompanies creation through loving presence and generative possibility, while creation contributes its own unfolding experiences, relationships, and actualized possibilities to the divine life. The world does not merely exist before God as an object of divine knowledge. Its becoming genuinely matters to God, and what occurs within creation becomes part of God's own relational experience.
Such an understanding does not identify God with the totality of natural processes (thus avoiding pantheism), nor does it suggest that every occurrence expresses divine intention (such as sin and evil). Creation possesses genuine agency, contingency, and the capacity for both flourishing and destruction. God remains distinguishable from the world even while receiving and responding to its unfolding actuality. Thus, panentheism preserves both divine intimacy and divine distinction without separating God into a supernatural realm apart from creation.
Within this interpretation, God's presence is not confined to sacred places, extraordinary religious experiences, or occasional interruptions of natural processes. Divine presence accompanies the world in its entirety, including those dimensions of existence ordinarily regarded as secular, material, biological, or cosmological. This does not diminish the distinctive significance Christians attribute to Jesus Christ, Scripture, prayer, worship, or the Holy Spirit. It does, however, challenge the assumption that God must be absent from ordinary reality unless specially introduced through supernatural intervention.
If God is continuously and relationally present to creation, then divine presence is not something that must repeatedly enter a world from which God was previously separated. Rather, the theological question becomes how Christians may recognize, understand, and participate in a divine relationship that already accompanies creation's ongoing becoming.
The question of divine presence leads necessarily to the question of divine action.
Traditional Christian explanations have frequently appealed to supernatural intervention to account for extraordinary events, answers to prayer, miracles, providence, or the fulfillment of divine purposes. In such accounts, God may be pictured as an agent acting upon the world from outside its ordinary causal relationships.
A relational and panentheistic theology proposes a different understanding. If divine reality is continuously present within creation, divine action need not be conceived primarily as an external force periodically interrupting natural processes. Rather, God's participation may be understood as a continuous, loving, and generative relationship with creation, through which divine persuasion invites possibilities for becoming without overriding the world's own causal agency, responsiveness, or freedom.
Under this proposal, God participates through loving persuasion rather than unilateral determination. Divine intention is expressed through the invitation toward life-giving possibilities, relational flourishing, reconciliation, and creative development thus involving creational and human agency (traditional Christianity's so-called "free will"). Yet these possibilities do not become actual solely because God desires them. Their realization depends upon the responsiveness, capacities, limitations, and interactions of the world itself.
This distinction is essential. Nature possesses genuine causal agency. Human beings make decisions whose consequences cannot simply be attributed to divine intention. Biological processes develop through evolutionary histories. Physical events occur through natural relationships, including those that produce destruction, suffering, and death.
Consequently, we should resist interpreting every occurrence as something God specifically intended. A world possessing genuine freedom, contingency, and generative openness also possesses the possibility of tragedy, failure, and unrealized good.
Nor should we assume that identifying the natural processes through which an event occurred identifies a separate divine mechanism operating behind them. To speak of divine participation is to offer a theological interpretation of reality, not to claim scientific detection of God's activity.
Nevertheless, a substantial question remains:
"If God's participation cannot be distinguished empirically from the natural world's own causal relationships, what meaningful content does the affirmation of divine agency possess?"
Our developing theology must take this question seriously. Divine presence cannot become merely another name for natural causation, just as divine love cannot be reduced to the emotional or moral preferences of human beings. A constructive, contemporary Christian account must consider whether divine agency expresses a distinctive relational intention and responsiveness within creation, even though its existence and operation cannot simply be established through scientific investigation.
Panentheism also requires us to reconsider divine transcendence.
Within some inherited theological understandings, transcendence suggests God's existence beyond the world, sometimes emphasizing divine independence, perfection, immutability, or separation from creation. Yet transcendence need not require distance or relational absence.
A relational interpretation may understand divine transcendence as God's inexhaustibility: divine reality is not identical with any particular creature, natural process, historical achievement, or even the totality of the universe's present condition. God's life and possibilities are not exhausted by what creation has already become.
At the same time, divine immanence expresses God's intimate and continuing relationship with the world. Creation exists within divine presence, and its becoming genuinely matters to God. Within our process-relational understanding, God does not merely observe an unfolding creation whose experiences are already eternally known and settled. Rather, God experiences the world's becoming moment by moment, receiving into the divine life the novelty, suffering, beauty, creativity, and possibilities actualized through creation's continuing development. Each newly actualized moment contributes something genuinely new to divine experience. God therefore participates not only as the loving presence accompanying creation but also as the relational recipient of creation's ongoing becoming.
This understanding does not suggest that God's existence depends upon creation or that divine love becomes unreliable through change. Rather, it distinguishes the constancy of God's loving character from the developing richness of God's relational experience. God's love remains faithful while God's experience of the world grows through the world's own creative advance. Divine responsiveness is therefore not an occasional adjustment to an otherwise completed divine knowledge, but belongs to the very character of God's continuing relationship with creation whether those experiences are good or bad. In this sense, the world becomes within God, and God genuinely experiences what the world becomes.
This understanding raises important questions concerning divine knowledge, temporality, and the traditional doctrine of divine immutability. If God genuinely experiences creation's unfolding novelty, then divine knowledge must be understood in relation to an open future whose possibilities have not yet become actual. God's experiential life is therefore responsive to what creation becomes, rather than consisting solely of an eternally completed knowledge of every future occurrence.
Within our Christian process-relational theology, divine faithfulness does not require an unchanging - or immutable - divine experience, but an unwavering love through which God continually receives, responds to, and participates in the world's unfolding actuality. God's loving character remains constant, while the richness of divine relational experience continues to develop. Thus, God's enduring faithfulness and God's genuine responsiveness are not competing characteristics, but complementary dimensions of divine love.
Such a proposal also requires maintaining the distinction between God and creation. If we identify every natural event directly with divine intention, we risk attributing the world's violence, indifference, and suffering to God's purposes. Conversely, if we identify God entirely with natural processes, the distinctive theological meaning of divine love, faithfulness, and responsiveness becomes difficult to sustain.
Panentheism therefore occupies a demanding interpretive position. It seeks to affirm divine intimacy without divine-world identity, and divine distinction without supernatural separation.
Our relationships with other people, living organisms, ecosystems, and future generations are not incidental to religious life. They belong to the very reality within which Christians confess God to be continuously present and lovingly responsive. Consequently, care for creation, justice, compassion, and the protection of the vulnerable become meaningful expressions of participation in divine love. Yet such participation requires humility, discernment, and the willingness to reconsider our actions, since neither our knowledge of reality nor our understanding of divine purposes is complete.
Within this understanding of creatio continua and panentheism, creation is neither a completed divine arrangement nor a world separated from God's living presence. It is an open and relational reality whose continuing becoming is genuinely experienced by God and whose unfolding possibilities are accompanied by divine love. Yet if God's presence is continuous throughout creation, how might human beings recognize, interpret, and communicate that presence within their own historically developing experiences? This question brings us to the Christian understanding of revelation, Scripture, and the living communication of God.
Yet our developing relational theology raises a fundamental question. If God is continuously present within creation, intimately participating in its becoming, why should divine communication be understood primarily through occasional supernatural disclosures separated from ordinary human experience?
Within our panentheistic understanding of creatio continua, divine love accompanies creation through continuous relational presence, persuasion, invitation, and responsiveness. Divine communication may therefore be understood as continuous rather than intermittent, relational rather than coercive, and participatory rather than merely declarative.
This does not mean that every experience constitutes a recognizable revelation of God or that every religious interpretation possesses equal credibility. Rather, it suggests that divine communication need not be restricted to extraordinary events, particular individuals, sacred institutions, or specially authorized texts.
Revelation, understood relationally, does not begin when God temporarily interrupts an otherwise silent universe. It belongs to a world already understood to exist in continuous relationship with God. The theological challenge is therefore how historically situated creatures might recognize, interpret, and respond to that communication.
From Divine Experience to Human InterpretationHuman beings do not encounter reality independently of the cognitive, emotional, linguistic, cultural, and historical conditions through which experience becomes meaningful. Perception involves interpretation. Memory reconstructs experience. Language organizes what has been perceived and remembered. Religious experience is no exception.
The ancient communities whose traditions contributed to the Hebrew Bible and Christian Scriptures understood their experiences through inherited cultural categories, religious practices, communal expectations, and developing theological convictions. Experiences interpreted as divine encounters were remembered, narrated, transmitted, reconsidered, and eventually incorporated into religious traditions.
As our preceding historical investigations emphasized, the original experiences underlying many ancient religious claims are no longer directly recoverable. What remains is the historical testimony through which those experiences were interpreted and transmitted.
An experience understood as divine communication is therefore not identical with the narrative describing it, nor is that narrative identical with the doctrines subsequently developed around it. Between experience and tradition stand processes of memory, language, selection, communal interpretation, and institutional authorization.
Within our relational theology, this distinction does not deny the possibility of divine communication. Rather, it recognizes that religious testimony remains a historically mediated interpretation of an experience understood to possess divine significance. Neither the intensity of that experience nor the authority subsequently assigned to its interpretation guarantees its accuracy.
Consequently, the possibility of divine communication must be distinguished from human claims to possess complete or unquestionable knowledge of God's purposes. God, if genuinely present and communicative, remains greater than the interpretations through which humanity seeks to understand divine reality.
Scripture as Inspired and Historically Developing WitnessChristian traditions have frequently described Scripture as divinely inspired, although they differ concerning the meaning of inspiration, biblical authority, and the relationship between divine and human authorship. Some approaches regard the biblical writings as protected from error, while others understand inspiration through the religious experiences, creativity, and historically situated interpretations of their authors and communities. Our constructive proposal follows this latter direction while seeking to preserve a substantive Christian understanding of inspiration.
The Bible is a collection of writings composed, edited, transmitted, and interpreted across extended periods of religious development. Its historical formation belongs to the very process through which its testimony became available to succeeding generations.
Within a relational understanding, inspiration need not be identified with supernatural dictation or the removal of ordinary human limitations. Rather, it may be interpreted through the heightened responsiveness, imagination, moral discernment, and religious creativity through which individuals and communities seek to understand their relationship with divine reality.
Such inspiration remains embodied within human experience and does not guarantee that religious interpretations are historically accurate, morally adequate, or permanently complete. Nor is inspiration necessarily restricted to biblical authors or Christian communities. More generally, divine inspiration may be broadly thought of as God's everyday communication with creation. Which also means that "biblical inspiration" falls within the vernacular of divine communication.
As such, within our panentheistic theology, divine love may be understood as continuously inviting greater relational awareness, compassion, justice, reconciliation, and creative responsiveness. Human inspiration could therefore be interpreted theologically as one expression of creaturely participation in this continuing divine relationship, without claiming that such participation has been independently demonstrated.
Scripture consequently remains foundational to Christian faith, not because every statement must be accepted as an infallible disclosure of divine knowledge, but because its writings preserve the formative histories, experiences, convictions, conflicts, and theological imagination through which Christian understandings of God developed.
This understanding also requires reconsidering biblical passages portraying divine violence, exclusion, conquest, punishment, or unquestioned religious authority. Such portrayals cannot be insulated from criticism merely by declaring them inspired. They must be examined historically and interpreted through the governing Christian confession that God is love.
A biblical text may possess enduring religious significance without every action attributed to God providing an adequate understanding of divine character. Responsible interpretation therefore requires distinguishing what ancient communities believed God demanded from what contemporary Christian theology can responsibly affirm concerning divine love.
Revelation, Jesus Christ, and the Discernment of Divine CharacterChristian revelation cannot be understood solely as a general feature of religious experience. Its distinctive theological claims also concern Jesus Christ.
Within Christian tradition, Jesus has been understood not merely as a religious teacher but as the decisive disclosure of God's character and purposes. The language of incarnation, divine sonship, and the Word made flesh expresses Christianity's conviction that Jesus possesses exceptional theological significance.
Within our relational understanding, this distinctively Christian confession need not imply that divine communication was otherwise absent from creation, but that Christians recognize in Jesus a particularly significant disclosure of the divine love they confess as continuously present throughout reality.
Our relational proposal takes this conviction seriously while recognizing that the Gospel accounts and subsequent Christological doctrines represent historically developing interpretations of his life, teachings, death, and significance.
Within our confession that God is love, Jesus becomes the central Christian reference through which claims about divine character may be evaluated. His teachings concerning love of neighbor and enemy, forgiveness, mercy, reconciliation, and care for the vulnerable provide resources for reconsidering inherited understandings of holiness, sovereignty, judgment, and power.
Nevertheless, appealing to Jesus does not eliminate the need for interpretation. The New Testament contains differing theological emphases, and Christian appeals to Christ have themselves sometimes justified coercion and exclusion.
The theological significance of Jesus therefore requires both Christian confession and continuing critical discernment. The fuller questions of incarnation, Christology, resurrection, and relational Trinity belong to the subsequent sections of this essay. Here, our concern is that Christian understandings of revelation remain accountable to the character of divine love Christians confess in Jesus Christ.
Christian theology has long interpreted the Holy Spirit as God's living presence among believers, inspiring, illuminating, comforting, correcting, and sustaining the church. Within our process-relational reconstruction the Spirit's presence and activity are not restricted to Christian communities. Rather, Christians understand their own experiences of God's universally communicative presence through the distinctive theological language of the Holy Spirit pertaining to Christ and the Scriptures. Such participation may invite renewed understanding, ethical transformation, and loving relationships both within and beyond the church.
Such an interpretation preserves the theological significance of the Spirit without requiring that every intuition, religious emotion, or communal conviction be attributed directly to God.
Indeed, Christian history demonstrates that claims of divine guidance can be mistaken and may be used to authorize exclusion, oppression, or institutional control. Discernment therefore requires more than religious certainty. It must remain accountable to divine love, human dignity, the consequences of religious conduct, and the continuing insights of historical scholarship, scientific understanding, and moral reflection.
This is also where God's continuing communication with all humanity becomes especially important. Those outside the Christian faith, including individuals who profess no religious belief, may sometimes recognize and respond to possibilities of divine love more clearly than those whose religious perceptions have become constrained by inherited doctrines, creeds, theological presumptions, or institutional loyalties. Religious conviction does not necessarily guarantee spiritual discernment, nor does the absence of religious belief prevent genuine moral insight, compassion, or responsiveness to the possibilities of love.
Consequently, Christian wisdom requires a willingness to listen beyond its own religious boundaries, recognizing that insights challenging the church's inherited understandings may emerge from the very people it has too often dismissed, excluded, or regarded as spiritually uninformed. If God's Spirit communicates throughout creation, the church cannot presume that its own religious conversations exhaust what God may be communicating to the world.
The Spirit's work, understood relationally, may consequently be confessed not only in the preservation of Christian tradition but also in its responsible reconsideration and reinterpretation, as well as in the wider human pursuit of understanding, compassion, justice, and relational well-being!
Christian communities may discover new possibilities for faithfulness through acknowledging past failures, questioning inherited interpretations, learning from those beyond their religious traditions, and responding more adequately to human suffering. Such possibilities are not restricted to religious believers, for divine love is understood to invite participation wherever creatures possess the capacity to respond.
Lastly, divine revelation, communication, inspiration, and illumination must never become grounds for asserting unquestionable divine authority by religious institutions or individual believers. Human understanding remains incomplete, and religious interpretation must therefore remain open to examination, criticism, and correction.
The church is thus a continuing community in pursuit of daily discernment and critical self-examination, rather than an institution entitled to presume complete access to the divine mind of God. Wisdom seeks counsel and receives correction with humility. To abandon wisdom and humility in favor of unquestionable religious certainty is to lay the foundations for spiritual harm, institutional abuse, and the misuse of authority.
Revelation as Invitation Rather Than PossessionOur reconsideration of revelation leads toward a different understanding of religious authority.
If God relates to creation through continuous, loving, and noncoercive participation, divine communication cannot be adequately represented as the unilateral imposition of unquestionable propositions upon passive recipients. Rather, revelation may be understood as an invitation into relationship, interpretation, transformation, and responsible participation. Its invitation, therefore, extends to all without exclusion.
This does not eliminate the distinctive significance of Scripture, Jesus Christ, or the Holy Spirit within Christian faith. It places them within an ongoing relational history in which divine presence is confessed as continuous while human understanding remains historically situated, developing, and revisable. The church may faithfully preserve and interpret its testimony to divine revelation, but it cannot claim exclusive possession of the divine communication that continually accompanies all creation.
We therefore propose a Christian relational theology in which revelation is understood through God's continuous communication with creation and humanity's developing recognition and interpretation of that relationship; Scripture as the formative testimony of religious communities responding to this divine presence; Jesus Christ as the central Christian disclosure of divine love; and the Holy Spirit as God's continuing relational presence inviting discernment and transformation.
These remain theological affirmations rather than conclusions established by historical or scientific investigation. Nevertheless, they offer a coherent Christian understanding of revelation within a world whose natural history and relational openness need not be suspended for divine communication to remain meaningful.
If God is love, divine communication cannot finally be measured by the unquestioned authority it claims, but by the relational character it discloses and the possibilities for loving participation it invites.
The reconstruction undertaken in this first part has brought us from the confession that God is love toward an understanding of continuous creation, relational divine participation, and revelation as God's ongoing communication throughout the world. We have considered how Christian theology may preserve its distinctive historical inheritance while recognizing that neither Scripture nor religious institutions possess complete or unquestionable access to divine reality.
These foundations now prepare us for a more particular Christian undertaking. If divine love continuously accompanies creation, how might Jesus Christ be understood as the incarnation of that love within an open, relational, and becoming world? And how might the Christian confessions of Trinity, cross, resurrection, salvation, and reconciliation be reconsidered through this understanding?
These questions form the subject of Essay 7b, where our constructive investigation turns from the foundations of relational Christian theology toward the distinctive confessions and practices of Christian faith.
