Process Christianity Has Many Forms which are Distinctly Different from Traditional Christianity

Process Christianity Has Many Forms which are

Distinctly Different from Traditional Christianity

by R.E. Slater

Presently I wish to expand Christianity towards Process Theology layered with Open and Relation Theology. I describe this form of Christian faith as Process Christianity. It is a new way of biblically thinking about God and the Christian faith along with religion in general. One which I have been tinkering around the edges on for the last several years and now believe may be ready to be shared in more concrete forms of thought and practice. To it I have also been adding Progressive Christian thoughts and ideas re social justice et al. Though Progressive Christianity is unrelated to Process Christianity they, together, form a helpful binary speaking Jesus into the world of man and creation.

Moreover, I consider my former education and training in Evangelical Theology built upon Covenant Reformed Theology to have assisted me in taking Christianity's traditional systematic forms by re-expressing them into broken religious cultures. A Christianity which I believe is perhaps more ready to consider newer, more successful forms of thought and deed within contemporary expression of  the Christian faith. How it might look at the world and itself. Perhaps critique itself more honestly. Perhaps even release itself from ungodly Christian beliefs and practices holding it back from serving Jesus more faithing than is being observed in parts of its wayward fellowships.

Let me begin...

Introduction

The bible for me reads of God's Love. And where it fails, as it often does with God's people, we read of unloving acts within the bible by religious people saying, "God told them to kill, to murder, to stone their son or daughter." Religious people probably have been the greatest threat to the Gospel of Jesus since Abraham set out at the command of God from Ur of the Chaldees. Where Jesus says to love and to serve mankind in love and kindness, the religious zealot stands up and shouts exclusion, discrimination, and ugly bastardized "forms of holiness" marked by fleshly deed or act supposedly to show one's fidelity to God (abstinence, mortifying the body, diet, duty, isolation, etc).

This is a God I don't know. A God built in religious man's image of pride and legalism.

So yes, I read the bible differently from some of my conservative brethren whom I came up through the ranks within church, bible school, seminary, ministries, and fellowships. Not all our zealots of the bad kind. Many are zealots of the good kind knowing right from wrong. Knowing wisdom from foolishness.

And yes, if for nothing else, Christianity must be about love and forgiveness, mercy and grace, newness and reclamation of new from old, from darkness to light, from death to life. Through all of this God has provided redemption through His Son Jesus who, paradoxically, is God's very Self who offered Himself up for creation's salvation.

The God of the Possible

Speaking of Jesus, as a Process Theologian I see God embedded into every structure of His creation. There is not an area where God cannot be "found". But unlike pantheism which says God is creation and creation is God, panentheism says that God is distinctly the first process of all creation which processes burst from His Being or Essence into creation.

God is not creation but is embedded fully into creation as its first process subtending all future relational processes. Process which, like God's own divine Essence, are full of freedom, agency, novelty, creativity, and wellbeing... as much as it can be expressed in a fallen world of rogue agencies.

Classic church dogma describes creation as something with a fallen or sinful freewill agency. But to be more accurate, creation is as full of God as it is of agency because agency - not the sinful, fallen part - is a part of who God is. God is a freewill Being. So too is creation which he "birthed" (non-Jewish, creatio ex nihilo) or "organized" (Jewish Shalom, creatio continua).

So, to be clear, creation and creational processes are a divine thing. A beautiful thing, struggling as much as mankind is, with the blessing of freewill. We may look as much on a sunset and see beauty as we may on one another.

Further, Process Christianity tends to acknowledge the beauty of creation while admitting its fallenness. Whereas traditional Christianity tends to acknowledge the ugliness of the world and people while sometimes admitting (grudgingly, it seems) that it can be beautiful.

The dilemma the traditional church fights is binary dualism. Whereas Process Theology would see a thing or a system in its "wholeness, completeness, in solidarity with itself to all things." So, Process Theology stands more on the side of Hebraic thought rather than the Westernized binary thought of the traditional church.

Process is Everywhere

Now let me say something radical... even as (cosmo)panexistentialism is found throughout process creation, so too is (cosmo)panpsychism.... That is, creation "feels" itself, or reacts to itself, throughout the body of its "living organism". Which means that all created things carry God's Self as first process in some manner within it. Whether we describe this feeling as an energy or a force, a sentient feeling or compassion, a consciousness or not, in some way the universe moves within and without itself in whole and in part.

This does not mean that process theology bends towards the ideas of New Ageism or Buddhism in some fashion, but that by its definition some cults, religions, or lifestyles may identify more readily with it than other faiths or life philosophies which stress individualism, isolation, or self-centric living. Disney's Lion King calls it the "circle of life". Process thinking takes the circle of life and expands on its theme in every direction.

So then, as God is relational - so is creation (cosmopanexistentialism, more broadly). As God feels - so does creation (cosmopanpsychism, more broadly). The God who is distinctly different (ontologically) is also distinctly a part of creation through-and-through-and-through (metaphysically).

Carpe Diem - Gloria Soli was designed by Joachim Metz in 2005

A Redeemed Process Creation

Which brings me to Jesus. We have noted that in a process creation there exists a panpsychic connection of some kind - or a feeling of some kind - which is resident throughout creation. So too is freewill agency bound (or birthed) from God to creation in some manner.

All of God's goodness, love, healing and wellbeing is resident within creational process even as it contends within itself what to do with those godly qualities of novel restoration. One kind of quality derives from God. Another kind of quality derives from the created thing. Anything not good, not loving, not healing or producing wellbeing are shades of the possible, the potential, of opportunity which can be borne within creation unto itself and to God.

Creation is a good thing. But it needs a revitalizing redemptive agency. This agency is God's Self through Jesus, as the Son of the Triunity responding to the Father of the Triunity through the revitalizing power of the Holy Spirit of the Triunity.

Creation “as it should be” has been given its energy drink, its Gatorade, its blood transfusion through Jesus's atoning work of salvation. Creation has been empowered to become, to be more than itself, to bring beauty into a world of potential, of the possible, of the opportune. Freewill submitted to the resurrection power of Christ is the energy force of the future. This speaks to Process Restoration and Renewal through time and event.

A Process God of Beauty

Finally, in some folks beauty can be found as a little bit or none at all. In others, perhaps more sensitively attuned to "Godness" or beauty, it can be felt or seen a bit more fully. Jesus was full of Godness. God, as the Incarnate God (OT Scripture describes such a divine Being as Messiah, God Come in the Flesh), uses the structure of His creation to provide a conscientiously divine way to offer atoning redemption within the deep processes of the world.

As such, within the world of creation, or the cosmos as the bible calls it, can be found a teleology striving towards valuative atoning redemption. Even in the violence of the storm one can feel its energy seeking release from an oppressive agency driving it forwards (now I speak here in metaphorical terms using phenomenological language). But wherever one turns their attention in this world one can see God in some way or manner or form through the thing created. In its beauty but not in its sin or evil.

Process Theology does this too. It seeks to see God everywhere, in every moment, through every event. But rather than to describe God in the Westernized Greek Platonic forms of an omniscient eternal Object, Process Theology describes God as moment-by-moment process event wherein God inhabits the very processes He subtended at the birth of creation.

There are no eternal objects in reality, only in human existential thought describing the world around us phenomenologically. Process removes the God who is far away, who is transcendent above us, who is so holy and perfect as to be untouchable, unreachable by his creation which groans for God.

Nay, Process Theology says this Process God is everywhere. That God is here now, not far. That God is embedded all around us and not some eternal object we cannot reach. That God's holiness and perfectness is being exhibited and felt at every moment around us for our good and wellbeing as much as it can be in a fallen creation.

That we can touch God in the embrace of another. That we can see, smell, hear, speak to God in the earth we walk and the society we keep. The object is the event. The event is God. A God present with us because this is how he made the world. Though ontologically different from us in His Being God is metaphysically with us in every facet of creation.

The God Who Is the Future

Which also answers the question of whether God knows the future. If God is perceived to be an eternal object this would be important to know. But as embedded process subtending future processes it is a moot question.

God is not an Object but an Event. So is our life. It is composed of the ever present here-and-now as it flows from our past into our future. Succinctly, the past-present-future for creaturely things is an "always present". We remember the past, we feel the present, and we perceive some form of our future rightly or wrongly. But the moment we live in is the present NOW.

Even as our lives are lived as a present event, so too does God flow through all past and present events into the future. God doesn't know the future because it is unknowable - even to God (this is Open Theism). Rather, God is the FUTURE. As event expands forward into timeful event even so does God flow presently with the flow of all things past and present. God therefore is a process, not an object.

Yes, yes, yes, this is hard to imagine. It hurts one's head to step away from what we think we know into the quantum creational structures which we are coming to know within the sciences. But the sciences are describing what Whitehead found. He found a kind of reality which can only be described as a process reality. Not a phenomenological reality which we make up as temporal, immortal beings striving for eternality.

The beauty of Process Christianity is that it can let go of its fears and uncertainties and simply learn to be beautiful, loving, life-makers instead of death-eaters. We flow through time as much as our Father-God Creator does.

Mind you, NOT "float" through time, as some blithely do through life. But "flow" through time as an active energy creating meaningful presents and subtending moments into the ponds of life we are thrown. Ripple upon ripple, perhaps building into tidal waves of magnificent, godly change. We don't know. We do not live our lives for ourselves but within the lives and eventful structures around us. Each life and each event making their own ripples and currents. Into these waters we must learn to swim, kayak, canoe - or even, create new streams, rivers and oceans.

Some wish to build earthen dams, stony forts, and occupy geographies where time stands still. For the Process Christian we wish to seize the moment, Carpe diem!  The choice is our as it ever was. 

R.E. Slater

April 29, 2021