What attracts me as a Christian to process theology? Mainly its expansiveness to include others of different faiths, religions, races, cultures, and beliefs behind its central tenants of love, unity, peace, goodwill, social and environmental justice, and so on. It is a binder, a healer, a way to envision a better future.
What this does not mean is that Christianity as a faith loses its historical character of God-ness, Jesus, or Holy Spirit filling. But what it does mean is that Christianity loses its un-Godness, un-Christlike-ness, and paucity for Holy Spirit imagination, transformation, and reformation.
Process is also eclectic. It does not need to take from any one direction, system, theology, or philosophy to be itself. It takes each of those streams of tradition and enhances them, binds them to humanity and creation, updates them into current contemporary thought, science, discovery, and work. It is a binder. A unifier. It frees traditional thinking to look past their meager, darker borderlands to broader vistas. To imagine the Word of God as a multi-hued prism or spectral array which would permit Eastern, Continental, Western, and Near-Eastern traditions to consider, "What if."
Process is also eclectic. It does not need to take from any one direction, system, theology, or philosophy to be itself. It takes each of those streams of tradition and enhances them, binds them to humanity and creation, updates them into current contemporary thought, science, discovery, and work. It is a binder. A unifier. It frees traditional thinking to look past their meager, darker borderlands to broader vistas. To imagine the Word of God as a multi-hued prism or spectral array which would permit Eastern, Continental, Western, and Near-Eastern traditions to consider, "What if."
So here's the scary part for strict traditionalists - they may have to relax their boundaries. Scary indeed. But what if those boundaries came down because of love and understanding for where another is coming from when viewing the worlds of oppression those views were forced to free themselves from? What if, rather than labeling, we say, "Oh, my tradition has given me the wrong impression of what people were struggling for? Or, the reigns of abuse they needed to be freed from?" This is the more valid approach rather than relenting to a criticising, excluding faith position more willing to judge and ostracize others than help.
The Christian faith is a magnanimous faith - not a reproaching faith. Jesus taught God in many languages, vernaculars, and within hostile environments. Why should the Christian faith be any different unless it is not true and has something to lose? Unless all it believes cannot be bigger than itself in honor to the Father-Creator of all? Unless it prefers sticking to its own slogans, beliefs, and exclusions? If God is God than God is other than exclusion which the Christian tradition has created through its denominational crusades and holy wars of jihad upon the world. It should expand Jesus to the world rather than delimit Him to a few pulpiteers speaking lies in clever eloquence, oratory power, and selective beliefs.
As such, over the past 90 years since Alfred North Whitehead’s seminal publication, "Process and Reality," North's relational, open, organic worldview has taken shape in a myriad of unique ways. It has been said that Process Theology is one of the most important movements in 21st Century American liberal theology, in connection with liberation theology, feminist theology, eco-theology, religious pluralism, religion and science, panpsychism, panentheism, postmodern, and the list goes on.
Christian based Process theology can touch each one of these modern trajectories and can both bring and find enlightenment to its rich church legacies if it is willing to try. If not, the barriers still remain high, the gospel delimited by its professors, and God's salvific healing to the world in Christ remains meaningless to a world designed to be organic, holistic, complexly networked, and redemptive.
Finally, process theology is not strictly a Christian, Western, or Continental phenomena. There are religious followers from around the globe who find aspects of process thought illuminating for their own respective traditions. Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and other thinkers have infused their religiosity with process relational thinking in extremely fruitful ways. But where do we go from here? What will the future of process theology look like? These are the key questions from which only a post-modern society may answer as it slips backwards into post-truth nationalism, patriotism, and divisive labeling for gain, power, notoriety, and infamy. For once, in contemporary theology, there is a definitive solution which is broad enough to transport the Christian faith into all areas of life and not just a secular, religious, denoministic view of life. It may transform itself into a sepulcher of holiness permeated with love, healing, real hope, and Spirit-filled transformation.
R.E. Slater
December 1, 2018
