Process vs Classic Church Theism:
Cobb v Geisler
Part 4
by R.E. Slater
Process Theology Debate:
Norman Geisler vs. John Cobb
Posted: Aug 21, 2021
De Veritate Apologetics and Philosophy
In this debate, Norman Geisler defends the position of
classical theism against the process theology of John Cobb.
Comment: "As a former evangelic I totally understand the need for evangelicalism to claim victory in this debate. But now, as a process guy, I see all too plainly the obtuseness of Geisler's claimed victories and how he argued from his own self-referential and self-reinforcing theistic systems purposely putting words into Dr. Cobb's speech as well as into process thought itself. Words, Ideas, and Iterations that simply aren't there. Geisler was fighting for his version of God. The process people I know are fighting for a better version of God than the one the church has lately been expressing. - re slater
Pleases note: Part 2 of this video is not on YouTube video - nor could I locate it anywhere except here as linked below." - re slater
Overview: Geisler defends Evangelicalism
"Process Theism versus Classical Theism" - Click here to hear Part 1 and Part 2 of a fascinating debate from the 1980s between Norman Geisler and John Cobb on Process Thought (a.k.a. Process Theism, Process Theology, Process Cosmology, Process Philosophy) and the panentheistic God-world model of process philosopher A.N. Whitehead. John Warwick Montgomery was present at the debate and told Norm that he had just totally destroyed Process Thought.
However, as stated above, Geisler had simply barked out his own convictions without any attempt in his life to ever consider process theology as helpful or insightful. Years later we find Geisler's evangelicalism in the toilet. Instead of fighting Norm should've been listening. - re slater
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Earlier Posts
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The Story of the Bible 4
"Every good theology needs a great philosophy to rest upon
even as a great philosophic-theology must rest on love."
- R.E. Slater
The Process God of The Bible, Part 1
One of the things which attracted me to process theology is it's brokenness. How it shares in the suffering of others offering compassion and help to those in need. I've never have seen this with stricter religious dogmas placing beliefs over goodness and kindness.
Process theology is one of those approaches to God which sees God as loving and good in all that God did, does, or will ever do. No biblical floods which wiped out the world, no plagues upon Egypt for not worshipping Him (or Her; since I write as a man I usually use the masculine pronoun instead of feminine or neutral Other). No fiery Armageddon end to the old earth.
Why? Because it runs counter to who God is. God is Love. By this quality all other qualities of God are mitigated. When angry God's love allows perfect, loving justice, not officious divine fury. When moved to great revenge God's love makes God incapable of acting in this way as God strives to help and save.
Freewill worlds are not the kind of worlds where one might find a God controlling all outcomes. Influencing all outcomes... Sure! But indetrminant (open) freewill (relational) worlds are the kind of worlds which God's love necessarily brought forth creational freewill as part-and-parcel of God's loving Image (Imago Dei). In those undetermined, freewill worlds we have a loving God who is present in loving actions. Each action producing its own streams of processual consequences. But with each-and-every consequence process theology says God's love permeates all things to do the loving, kind and good thing as He can in a freewilled world besotted with sin and evil.
When the ancient world flooded as the Genesis account tells us in Noah's story it was because of quasi-regional natural events - even as we see today in places around the world being flooded out by storm and wind, fire and climate change. When the plagues descended upon Egypt such plagues resulted from natural events... one asks how, in what way, would God have sent such plagues of hardship and suffering. Can a loving God do such a thing or were these natural events complexly colliding at the same time in the same area? To myself, it sounds like God was somehow involved... but does divine activity elicit judgment if God is love. These are the kinds of questions process Christians hold back on and are much less reticent to calm evil as God sent unlike our Calvinistic brethren (of which I was one not too many years before).
What I am trying to say is that God is not, and cannot be the catch-basin for all the sin and evil done in this world. Sin and evil more likely are simple descriptors of a freewilled creation not acting in accordance to it's divine Imago-Dei nature. A nature structured towards wellbeing, not harm. God is love. God cannot harm. God would not harm. But harm does result when living in a freewilled creation. God's freewill Nature is always TO BE and CHOOSE TO BE love at all times over all other emotions, actions, and judgments.
Thus we ask the questions of good and evil? Of right and wrong? Of whether God cares or not? Whether God is present in our sufferings or not? Or whether God can do anything for us in a world of many possible evils such as the one we are presently witnessing under a cruel war waged by the Russian leader Putin claiming God is on his side to bring the world back to an Imperial form of Christiandom (which, of course, I find conveniently stated as propaganda to those poor Christians caught in a conflict nobody wants and everybody understands as a land-to-power grab).
And so, process theology approaches the subject of the problem of sin and evil (e.g., theodicy) by always reaffirming God's steady love at all times, for all people (and creation), and in all events. Process theology will not affirm a controlling, determining God moved by wrath and anger.
In process thought, God is in the life-affirming struggle found in the event of time and being itself. That all possible actualities concrease based upon their potentialities for bringing wellbeing into that event. Said in another way, God does not control creation but fills creation with divine possibility moment-to-moment to become its truer self rather than it's untrue self. To find its lack in God's Self and not in something else baser and unloving.
Summary
The very first thing I learned about process theology is that it speaks to God's love and that we, as God's followers, must learn to speak this same language that God speaks - and has spoken - to us in His holy person, Jesus Christ.
Love is the summa cum laud of the Christian faith. If the Christian faith is unloving then it does not speak for God but for it's self, it's own "rightness," it's own "truth."
One last, I may be presently persuaded that the process kind of faith I wish to follow is loving and following an Incarnation Christ, but if after all its conjectures and suppositions and speculations if it does not result in the outcome of seeing God's love more clearly across all of my past Christianized God-beliefs and doctrines, than process theology is yet another bankrupt and futile path unworthy to be tread. We follow Jesus. We do not follow an institution, religion or men. Process Theology speaks to Jesus and is learning to speak more and more about Jesus as it grows up and matures. I wish to be one of those who help speak of Jesus more clearly.
My Story, Part 2
A few years ago my wife and I built a house. Not intentionally. No, we bought an older home vacated for five or so years by the death of its widow whose husband had passed on before her. It was kept up and rented out to a family member while it lay on the market unsold over a several year period. Finally it came to us. We bought it. Were thrilled to have it. And decided to do light renovation work by replacing the electrical wiring, older, rotting plumbing lines, and masses of cardboard insulation across all attic spaces.
We began the project and were about 45 days into it when discovering one day the entire wooden foundation was warped and rotted. We were under the belief that the house sat on a poured cement foundation by the inspectors we paid to tell us about our purchase before completing its sale. At this discovery the old house soon became a money pit as hard earned savings were spent to jack the house up 16 feet into the air - including the garage - remove all the lower attached levels including the lower floor/basement, drop off all the wings, while keeping but expanding by half again the main trunk of the 34 year old home. Our purchase intentions went from a remodeling / light renovation job to major renovation within days.
It was heart breaking. The upper floors of the house had already been gutted, we were living in the lower level, and now we had to vacate in order to do a full restoration. We couldn't sell it as is (too much money lose) and couldn't remodel the first floor as it sat upon a rotting foundation. We had nowhere to go but forward into a total rebuild.
So for the next 14 months we dealt with the loss of funds, monetary outflow, taxation problems across the board, the expense of financing a large project no bank would touch, no access to builder loans, and about every headache you can imagine as the old house was stripped and became a new house from foundation to chimney.
No longer would the old house sit on failing wooden walls but on solid, 12 foot high poured cement walls. After 8-9 months of demolition and rebuilding the expanded structure, the house was jacked down and rebuilt as it was meant to be built in the tradition of a contemporary prairie-styled home. However, though the project is now done the decisions we made during four years ago continue to haunt us. We went from a paid mortgage to a new mortgage and have done exactly backwards what the financial experts tell retirees to do. It has been a headache and one of our own making when not deciding to take a huge loss and walk away.
Now perhaps I have said too much. It is a story many others have repeated due to floods, fires, storms, civil war, famine, drought, loss of crops, loss of job, displacement, illness, death of loved ones, lawsuits, criminal indictment, drugs, drinking, addictions, mental or physiological imbalance, family problems, divorce, children with medical ailments, aged cars, broken down heating systems, etc and etc. In one way or another, if you live long enough, hardship will challenge each of us to rethink how we might respond when difficulty comes as it surely will no matter how careful you try to be.
And having been through several personal hardships more than once, none have been easy to remove or lightly travelled over. Each, in their own way, have been devastating in their own way, as I write thinking of job loss, two miscarriages, a wrecked car knocking me unconscious with blood coming off my skull, and a policeman taking me home by 9 in the morning to discover my wife in tears having lost her second child and me telling her I had finished my job and was let go an hour earlier which is why I was driving home before being plowed into by a large van illegally turning onto the road. No job. No money. No first child. No second child. And married by now six years. Only heartbreaking grief. And yes, we've been through many other difficulties spiritually, personally, and physically. Nothing has been easy in this life.
I suppose suffering and experience are our best teachers but each of us can testify to the fact that we each wish it were some other way. That life would be beautiful, carefree, with very little hardships, if none. So too with the narrative found throughout the bible. Every prophet, priest, scribe, tribal or village or clan leader, family member, shepherd, carpenter, pottery maker, home maker, king, soldier, and child has come to God during their time on this earth and have asked the kind of questions one cannot easily answer in this life.
I was raised in a religious tradition which asked these same questions and tried to help fellow believers make sense out of their lives when harm and ill befell them or on the church's membership. Our church fellowship have always, always been meaningful to us, even though I may have approached their questions with other lines of thoughts and helps than the ones being leaned into by the afflicted one or the church. Nevertheless, I also knew then - as I know now - that our Lord comes to us we are because God is big enough to guide and counsel us from our present circumstances however difficult.
Conclusion
Thinking back to my housing project, the two choices I had on day 45 was to completely demolish our newly purchased home or completely gut it and build it back to completeness from its skeleton structure which had been laid bare. I chose the latter even though the former would've been far easier and less aggressive.
Theology works this way too. When in Part 1, I shared my solitary time spent in a wilderness of devastation, doubt and uncertainty, I had two choices. Leave my Christian faith and attempt a resurrection of some sort on my own as many have done in the past. Or, I could stay with the remnants of my Christian faith, discover what those deconstructed remnants might be which I might reconstruct as new cornerstone and foundation stones, and reconstruct all that lay above and below using the latest and greatest theologies and philosophies of the time.
I've chosen the latter by first leaving Calvinism and its neo-Christian counterparts while keep what Reformed traditions I could. Then taking up Arminianism (sic, Methodism, Wesleyanism, older Baptist traditions). From Arminianism the Lord somehow guided me without outside influence or readings into open theism and at the same time relational theism.
At the time I was writing about these theologies I felt they belonged together and wrote for awhile about how open AND relational theology fit together as natural contemporary outgrowths from Arminianism. All bible based. All from the biblical pages. Next I began working on my Baptist and Reformed teachings moving towards Emergent and Progressive Christianity, and finally coming across what I was looking for. What was it? The long and short of it is rebuilding my biblical Christian faith on a better philosophic theology than the one I had inherited, had become traditionalized, and was holding Christianity back from loving and ministering as it should.
Peace, my friends. Peace.
R.E. Slater
November 12, 2021
Published March 14, 2022
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