Process, Poetry & Post-Structuralism
by R.E. Slater
Side Note: I write this in 2021, ten years after posting here in 2011, to tell the reader that relationality is an immanent quality of process theology even as it cannot be entertained in classic theistic structures which lean heavily on transcendence of the divine - or God's apartness - from creation. Thus panentheism (not pantheism) must go hand-in-hand with relationality.
Too, I came up from the biblical side or Arminianism to get to this point not realising that "Open and Relational" theology is a major tenant of process theology and is more aptly described as "Open and Relational PROCESS" theology. Hence, two sides describing the same coin - one biblically and the other philosophically. Coincidental? Perhaps. Beautiful? Absolutely!
One last, it seemed natural to me to place together open theism with relational theism. Apparently many scholars resisted this joining which felt better together and apart from one another. Which is why I shall go on to always place an open future with a relational future. Eventually Tom Oord go on to become great friends who also came up from the Arminian (sic, Wesleyan) traditions even as I did my own Baptist traditions. Too, we both had to excised Calvinism from our biblical constructs in order to better grasp process theology. - re slater
I would like to propose a synthetic position between Classic Theism on the one hand, and Process Theology on the other hand. To borrow a term from process theology - that had once been considered but later rejected - to call it Relational Theism and go on to then explain this position as "Seeking a Postmodern Relational definition of Classic Theism."
It is an attempt to reconcile classic theism's theistic base without finding the need to move to the alternative panentheistic base of process theology. It neither disavows nor declaims process theology's statements of the Divine but wonders aloud if these statements couldn't better be described through relational terms from a theistic foundation that separates the substantive vs. the pervasive elements of process theology's discoveries back into relational theistic terminology.
And to those open and process theologians who are better versed in this philosophical research than myself, I ask for their help and assistance in developing the argument for the case of Relational Theism as a mitigating position between the classic and postmodern positions. I believe there is a validity to this effort that needs further exploration and a positive voice of research.
I should further note that this synthetic position may be unrelated to Thomas Oord's similarly voiced position that I only later discovered shortly thereafter. And although Oord does seem to lean in the same direction with mine own thinking it seems to require the correspondent terminology and language that currently fills process theology's research and development.
Perhaps, however, I am totally off base and we can only declare for either classic theism/open theology on the one hand, or for process theology on the other, with neither of the twain intermingling between their philosophical bases. Perhaps too, these are simply different halves of the coin, one looking at the Godhead from a deterministic viewpoint and the other from a non-coercive viewpoint. Only time and effort will tell if this is true. In the meantime I would suggest a better familiarity with both positions theological in this post-structural / post-modern age of philosophical denouement within the mystery of the Divine.
R.E. Slater
December 29, 2011
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| Post-Structural Process Theologian Catherine Keller |
Process, Poetry, & Post-Structuralism
with Catherine Keller:
Homebrewed Christianity 112
by Tripp Fuller
July 20, 2011
Catherine Keller is clearly one of the most brilliant theologians taking residence on our planet and she is our guest this week on Homebrewed Christianity!! We have done a bunch of process theology on the podcast but we haven’t had a process thinker who connects Whitehead with Deleuze and Derrida so sit back, relax, and get ready for a whole world of new ideas for your theological imagination. Catherine has a ton of books (On the Mystery is a book for everyone), Facebook author page, and a super-spiffy Professor page at Drew University (plus tons of free lectures\chapters for your reading).
Catherine is a theological poet…theology needs more poets!!! Many thanks to Catherine for sharing her imagination and time. May you all join the Nicolas of Cusa fan club.
- Nick & Josh Podcast & Nick’s Book of Hopeful Skepticisms
Homebrewed Audio Interview
(1 hr 23 min)
Enter website below and press the "play" button on the bottom:
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~ Some Definitions ~
Structuralism
Today structuralism is less popular than approaches such as post-structuralism and deconstruction. There are many reasons for this. Structuralism has often been criticized for being a/historical and for favoring deterministic structural forces over the ability of people to act.
In the 1980s, deconstruction and its emphasis on the fundamental ambiguity of language - rather than its crystalline logical structure - became popular. By the end of the century structuralism was seen as an historically-important school of thought because of the movements that it spawned, rather than structuralism itself, as having commanded attention.
Deconstructionalism
A term introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. Although he carefully avoided defining the term directly, he sought to apply Martin Heidegger's concept of Destruktion or Abbau, to textual reading. Heidegger's term referred to a process of exploring the categories and concepts that tradition has imposed on a word, and the history behind them. Derrida opted for deconstruction over the literal translation destruction to suggest precision rather than violence.
In describing deconstruction, Derrida famously observed that "there is nothing outside the text." That is to say, all of the references used to interpret a text are themselves texts, even the "text" of reality as a reader knows it. There is no truly objective, non-textual reference from which interpretation can begin. Deconstruction, then, can be described as an effort to understand a text through its relationships to various contexts.
Post-Structuralism
Writers whose work is often characterised as post-structuralist include Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva.
The movement is closely related to postmodernism. As with structuralism, anti-humanism, as a rejection of the enlightenment subject, is often a central tenet. Existential phenomenology is a significant influence; one commentator has argued that phenomenologists are post-structural existentialists."
Some have argued that the term "post-structuralism" arose in Anglo-American academia as a means of grouping together continental philosophers who rejected the methods and assumptions of analytical philosophy. Further controversy owes to the way in which loosely-connected thinkers tended to dispense with theories claiming to have discovered absolute truths about the world. Although such ideas generally relate only to the metaphysical (for instance, metanarratives of historical progress, such as those of dialectical materialism), many commentators have criticized the movement as relativist, nihilist, or simply indulgent to the extreme. Many so-called "post-structuralist" writers rejected the label and there is no manifesto.
Metanarrative
In critical theory, and particularly postmodernism, a metanarrative (from meta/grand narrative) is an abstract idea that is thought to be a comprehensive explanation of historical experience or knowledge. According to John Stephens it "is a global or totalizing cultural narrative schema which orders and explains knowledge and experience". The prefix meta- means "beyond" and is here used to mean "about", and narrative is a story constructed in a sequential fashion. Therefore, a metanarrative is a story about a story, encompassing and explaining other "little stories" within totalizing schemes.
In postmodern philosophy, a metanarrative is an untold story that unifies and totalizes the world, and justifies a culture's power structures. Examples of these stories are nationalisms, religion, and science, to name a few. Metanarratives are not usually told outright, but are reinforced by other more specific narratives told within the culture. In the case of Christianity, the school Nativity play is a good example of this.
Process Theology
A school of thought influenced by the metaphysical process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) and further developed by Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000). While there are process theologies that are similar, but unrelated to the work of Whitehead (such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin) the term is generally applied to the Whiteheadian/Hartshornean school.
For Major concepts - See:
- God is not omnipotent in the sense of being coercive. The divine has a power of persuasion rather than coercion. Process theologians interpret the classical doctrine of omnipotence as involving force, and suggest instead a forbearance in divine power. "Persuasion" in the causal sense means that God does not exert unilateral control.
- Reality is not made up of material substances that endure through time, but serially-ordered events, which are experiential in nature. These events have both a physical and mental aspect. All experience (male, female, atomic, and botanical) is important and contributes to the ongoing and interrelated process of reality.
- The universe is characterized by process and change carried out by the agents of free will. Self-determination characterizes everything in the universe, not just human beings. God cannot totally control any series of events or any individual, but God influences the creaturely exercise of this universal free will by offering possibilities. To say it another way, God has a will in everything, but not everything that occurs is God's will.
- God and the universe are interdependent realities (panentheism, not pantheism or pandeism). Some also call this "theocosmocentrism" to emphasize that God has always been related to some world or another. This speaks to the idea of immanent relationality.
- Because God interacts with the changing universe, God is changeable (that is to say, God is affected by the actions that take place in the universe) over the course of time. However, the abstract elements of God (goodness, wisdom, etc.) remain eternally solid.
- Charles Hartshorne believes that people do not experience subjective (or personal) immortality, but they do have objective immortality because their experiences live on forever in God, who contains all that was. Other process theologians believe that people do have subjective experience after bodily death.
- Dipolar theism, is the idea that God has both a changing aspect (God's existence as a Living God) and an unchanging aspect (God's eternal essence).
Alfred North Whitehead
Gilles Deleuze
John B. Cobb
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Our "Spooky Connectedness"
or
"Why I Love Catherine Keller"
by Jeanyne Slettom
November 8, 2011
People who write about process theology can be eloquent and inspiring, or intellectual and demanding, but for sheer poetic beauty no one surpasses Catherine Keller. Catherine writes as a theologian, yes, but also as someone who could as easily have gotten an MFA in writing as an MDiv and PhD in theology. Her writing aims for the liminal space in your psyche, where it emits flashes that illuminate your understanding and point you toward new possibilities.
I was reminded of this all over again as I read Beatrice Marovich's interview with Keller in Religion Dispatches (November 2, 2011, "Quantum Theology: Our Spooky Interconnectedness"). The interview is about a book Keller is writing, called Cloud of the Impossible: Theological Entanglements. In it she brings together Nicholas of Cusa and quantum physics, specifically, quantum entanglement, to reflect on the multiplicity of relations--between people, between disciplinary fields, between human and divine--that comprise our lives.
More than that I hesitate to say--I haven't read the book, only the interview! But her comparing Cusa's either/or "cloud of impossibility," where, as she says, "two different things that you believe come into conlfict and contradict each other," with the particle-wave uncertainty of quantum physics reminds me of my favorite comparison between Whitehead and Jung. Whitehead writes of turning conflicts into contrasts; Jung writes of holding the tension of polar opposities long enough for a "transcendent third"--a third element that includes and transcends the two--to emerge. In both Whitehead and Jung, a useful metaphor is a container large enough to hold opposing ideas without obliterating one or the other.
Our world is in terrible need of that container, give the increasingly dire struggle between economies of life and economies of death. And of course the transcendent third is not necessarily the best solution. We have already seen the polarity of Republican/Democrat resolved into the larger container of Wall Street and shadowy plutocrats--a disheartening development, to say the least, but one that calls not for despair but the search for a still larger container.
It is this--the insistence of possibility within impossibility--that appeals to me about Keller's project. Her language is both theological and scientific, but in preaching language, "possibility within impossibility" boils down to one thing: hope. And no matter what language we speak, that is something we all need.
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