Essays with John Cobb:
Processual Immortality
by Dr. John B. Cobb, Jr.
June 1998
Is God Personal?
Publication Month: June 1998
Dr. Cobb’s Response
Editing of Content Structure by R.E. Slater
I.
Question
Dr. Cobb, I’ve just started reading C. Hartshorne’s Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes. The one response I find least satisfactory is his observation on immortality. What are your views?
Response by Dr. Cobb
Christians have varied ideas about “immortality” and tend to cover up their differences with vague rhetoric. Behind that rhetoric I encounter three general views with lots of diversity within them:
- Some reject any notion of a reality other than our actual experience here and now between birth and death:
- They think that affirming anything of that sort is religiously damaging, because it encourages dualistic and otherworldly thinking.
- They believe that it has disparaged and distorted the real values of life here and now. They also believe that there is no valid reason to suppose that any other reality exists.
- If there is any “immortality” it lies in the reabsorption of our bodies [and works] into the ongoing processes of nature and the influence of our lives, however slight, upon the future.
- Some believe that the Christian faith holds out the promise that in the “end” all that has been still is in some fulfilled or perfected way. Tillich, Barth, and Pannenberg all seem to assert something like this. This belief is required to undergird the meaningfulness of our otherwise utterly transient existence individually and historically.
- Others hold to the belief in continuing life after death either immediately or after the end of history. To them simply preserving what has been is quite unsatisfactory. Christian hope is for new life, a fulfilled and transformed life.
Process theologians can be found in all three camps.
What may be thought of as “standard” process theology falls in the second one. This is Whitehead’s Consequent Nature of God and is the emphatic position of Hartshorne.
Of course, process theology has the distinctive note that it is each occasion of human experience that is retained in God (along with nonhuman occasions), and that this immortality is immediate. Marjorie Suchocki has developed this notion in such a way that it incorporates many of the values of the third camp as well.
Although Whitehead’s emphasis falls here, he also recognizes that his metaphysics allows for continuing existence of primarily mental occasions after the death of the body. This is unusual in the history of philosophy, since most metaphysical systems have either demonstrated the necessary truth of personal immortality or shown its impossibility. In Religion in the Making Whitehead states that continuation of the life of the soul is a question to be settled empirically rather than metaphysically. Some process theologians believe that empirical evidence is favorable to this belief.
II.
The question is also one of judgment as to the religious value of such beliefs. It is rare that those who do not see religious value in the hope for new life after physical death judge the evidence favorable or even examine it with much interest. Hence, in fact the judgments of positive value and of factual likelihood tend to go together, although there may be some who would like to believe is such [a] life but who think that to do so would be wishful thinking.
I count myself among those who think that belief in life after death can function positively today. I say this despite the extensive harm that it has done in the past, especially when salvation and damnation were defined in terms of such post-mortem existence. Today the danger to a proper valuation of human life here and now seems to arise more from the tendency to view people as simply what they appear to be, in terms of their social functions, or, even worse, reductionistically, as what they can be seen to be in the physical sciences. The doctrine of the soul, which once functioned to disparage the body may now be needed to preserve even the body from trivialization.
Because I think there is need for an understanding of the soul that indicates its partial transcendence of the body as scientifically understood, I am interested in the evidence for this transcendence including that of the soul’s continuation beyond physical death. But my attention to this matter has been sporadic. Anyone who is seriously concerned should read David Griffin. He has an excellent chapter on this topic in God and Religion in the Postmodern World.
As that chapter shows, there is a close connection among process thinkers between interest in parapsychological phenomena generally and concern about life after death. The former, if they occur, indicate a partial transcendence of the soul in relation to the physical body. It is this partial transcendence that makes the idea of the soul’s life apart from the present physical body conceivable. Griffin has written an entire book on parapsychology, the most thorough philosophical study of this topic in this generation.
III.
Strictly speaking, the soul’s survival of death need not amount to “immortality.” Indeed, for process thought the notion of any form of creaturely existence enduring forever seems inherently implausible. The only immortality would seem to be in God, as both Whitehead and Hartshorne have emphasized.
My own way of speculating about these matters is to stress that (i) personal identity is far from complete even in this life. Also, (ii) the Christian ideal is that we love others as we love ourselves. Really to do that would mean that our concern in each moment was for the whole future that we could influence, not focused on our personal future. One who has attained to that state will not be concerned about personal continuity beyond death. But others are, and God may give us that continuity as long we need or want it. But that will not be forever.
One feature of Whitehead’s conceptuality is highlighted in discussion of this topic. It accents empirical inquiry and the diversity of faith perspectives. On most questions, therefore, it leaves open a variety of answers. Those of us who adopt his views still have to work out our own beliefs. But those beliefs will nevertheless be deeply affected by the fact that we view reality in terms of process.
* * * * * *
My Process Observations on Immortality
by R.E. Slater
November 17, 2021
I.
Process theology is as much about a process-based philosophical view of life as it is theological. That is, however we come to know process philosophy is to that degree how it may better help to explain our ideas of God, life, living, duty, calling, work, church, and society among other things.
At once, process thought states that whatever is happening here in this life, in our mortal state of being and becoming is exactly what is happening everywhere else throughout creation and any other non-matter or spacetime form anywhere else. In Platonic terms, process is process whether here or in the next life. In non-Platonic terms, process is a constant whether here with us now or with God now or with God later when we are no longer living. Process is a constant throughout God's world both physical and spiritual.
That said, then immortality should be no different now in this life then it will be in the next life, whether we go on as bodiless souls or we simply cease to exist and become part of the process flow of the universe. Let me say that the Christian hope is that all souls continue onwards after death but process thought does allow for both this idea as well as the idea that our souls - like the cosmic soul - simply folds into the process flow of history and event no different then as it currently doing so now. In either sense, our lives and live's work continues in God in one manner or another.
This does not particularly bother me as my trust is in God to do the right thing by the creation He breathed onto to make it as it is both now and forever. To be the created is to be finite, mortal, in some sense ending. But in God, all is made alive and its weight - or the weight of our existential mortal moment - will not be forgot or eclipsed in God. We are and will continue in some sense to be at death because God is.
For the literal Christian hoping for crowns, friends, mansions, and healing let's simply say "yes" this may be.... However, if these bible concepts are more figurative than literal the same will still apply. There will be a sense of gratitude and wellbeing, a society of some sort, an identity found in shelter and community, and the personal healing of one's psyche, soul, spirit, mind and heart. All things are because God is. God is the First Process which gives all other processes its energy, flow and future in becoming beyond any becoming we could realize in our lifetimes or in the lifetimes to come.
II.
In part II above Dr. Cobb wishes to convey that this life be product NOW. To useful NOW. To contribute to the meaningful flow of life's rhythms and harmonies against all that which is disruptive and harmful to the processual flow of life.
That a proper doctrine of the soul and of others is see our lives in the love and healing of God as it can be given the many times harsh localities we must live our lives. While also viewing the same of the lives of others as contributing souls to the wellbeing of mankind and this earth.
To the extent that our doctrinal views of the soul and of mankind becomes religiously harsh or cruel to the existence of ourselves or others is the extent to which we must repent and learn to lean into healthier practices of our spiritual worship life which allows God to unchain us from our guilts and sins.
Beating or denying one's body to please God is usually not what is meant by God who has granted us breath and health to positively contribute into this life be it ever so humble as that with a spouse, a family, a community or church. We are unable to do this if we have starved ourselves from unusefulness, become overly sensitive or crushed by guilt and shame, or harmed ourselves in ways that we are the ones needing ministry rather than giving ministry to both the harmed and the damaged as will as the whole and healed.
Repentance in Jesus starts with personal health. It does not condone harm to self or others. But it does request we submit to God and learn to love ourselves as God loves us and wishes us to be, as we can be, given the constraints of our circumstances.
III.
I like the idea that we are building into immortality the works of our mortal life. Simply, any work done which is loving and healing does now transfer immediately in this life and "the next" into meaningful flows of processual being and becoming. That our lives are never fully realized, nor can be, but in God, all things can be brought to fruition and multiplied over-and-over again by His Spirit.
To live our lives unconcernedly about either death or immortality and to live our lives concernedly as fully as we can, by God's good graces, now with our loved ones and to all we would meet. It is to God we live, and move, and have our being. All other concerns are light and passing in this life. Be who we are and do it as well as we can given our frailities and temptations and trust God to make up the difference which we cannot, in ourselves, make up.
This is the promise of life in God both now and everlastingly. That God can and will use all that we give Him and use it wisely, folding it into the everlasting flows of life both now and future as given to us by the Lord of Life and Saviour of our Souls.
R.E. Slater
November 17, 2021
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