Why Process Theology is Universal
for All Secular and Religious Worldviews
by R.E. Slater
December 19, 2021
Updated December 9, 2022
The winter morning is still black outside and I've got my son's family here for the week of Christmas so today's post will not be especially long but hopefully profound.
I woke up thinking about a statement I read on one of my Facebook groups known as Process Philosophy for Everyone (I also belong to several Open theology groups). This was written by someone hoping that Process Christianity (aka Process Theology) might become it's own Christian denomination. And though I sometimes wish this might be true I also realize the error of thinking in the statement: "I believe Process should have its own denomination."
Now let's think about it... Why should this not be something any Process Christian would want? Why?
One reply I read simply stated the obvious:
I think process having its own denomination would be a horrible idea because it would deprive all the other communions of the process influence. - CT
So here's my several thoughts of the subject... which I think is a very good question to ask:
1 - Process Theology is a base theology for all Christian groups - whether process based or not. However, Process Theology is not intended for just one sect or denomination. It is at its best in influence when adapted and adopted (correctly, one hopes) into all systems of denominational or sectarian Christian theology and thinking and not simply found in one movement, denomination, church or fellowship. It would be like hiding one's gospel light under a bushel basket unused, unthought about, and hidden from its many applications and influences which it can have....
Process theology works best when embraced by all kinds of Christian faiths... including all non-Christian religions. You see, process theology is but a reflection of the larger metaphysic of process philosophy. A philosophy by its nature reflects how a cultural era thinks about itself and others. Process is how the world works. Similar to past philosophies like Platonic thought, Process Philosophy is an integral theory of all previous philosophies, sciences, disciplines, outlooks, perspectives, and cultural world views. You can find it in ancient cultures and in the bible. The trick is to look for it to find it. Though not expressed as exactly then as now still, you will the nature of the cosmos as one which works in relational processualism to itself as a living, organic organism.
2 - Process Theology, like it's sister idea, Process Christianity, is greater than any one Christian movement... even it's own, should there ever come to be one. That is to say, if one looks backwards into time you will always find a processual idea within a cultural religion. Why? Because life, like nature around us, moves processually. But again, unless you look for it you will not find it. It took an English philosopher, AN Whitehead, to complete the earlier German philosopher Hegel's idea of process. Where it stopped Whitehead moved it forward as a contemporary of - and fellow British Academy member of the Royal Academy of the Sciences - of Einstein's and other scholars.
As example of processual cause-and-effect consider the Emergent Church of the 1990s -2010s, It was a movement spawned from within conservative (non-progressive) Evangelicalism (1950s forward)... even as Evangelicalism itself was an outgrowth from within an earlier 1900s cultural era known as Fundamentalism which was composed of Billy-Sunday-like Fundamentalist congregations. Eventually the Emergent Christian movement (Dallas Willard, Brian McLaren, etc) was absorbed into Evangelicalism's Progressive Christian movement (1960s and forward) which has been so strongly reactionary to the Trumpian dystopia of the errant Conservative Evangelical church of the 2000s.
That said, if Process Christianity is ever bottled up into a movement or a denomination it'll eventually play out against itself - or worse - become removed from itself altogether by some deviant social-religious force or imagination. This result would be unwanted and harmful to the very nature of process theology as a metaphysic of fact rather than a metaphysical philosophy of the moment. Further, true to its nature, as we as humans come to understand the quantum sciences and how our eco-cosmology works, process philosophy itself will grown processually in its nuances and perspectives. Why? Because this is how the world works. It doesn't stand still. Nor do we. Our grasp of its operative organic elements will always move forward in our responses to our understanding. The nature of a process universe moves with itself according to its nature. It's processual essence won't change but its processual outcomings will.
3 - I think of Process Theology as I would a basic truth of the Jesus Gospel but more so... it's a way of seeing the world through the lens of a processual God's love and beauty. It brings out the processual reality of God and God's creation in a greater sense then I could find through the Westernized Christian doctrinal statements, creeds or dogmas of God. Process Christianity is, in itself, a way of reading the bible without becoming its own hermeneutical interpretation to the bible. Essentially, a good philosophy permeates everything around it and can be identified in ways which leave it essential and open ended.
As example, a Westernized reading of the bible portrays God and the bible's message through neo-Platonic Hellenization of human and spiritual categories. If reginned to reflect a process view instead of all eclectic philosophized Western views over the past two millenia the essentials of the today's evangelical dogmas will change dramatically. For myself, I am simply taking my evangelical reformed understanding of God and the bible and applying a process viewpoint over it. When doing so some theology must be removed; some adapted; and some wholly rewritten. More than likely, my view might be that of a process-based progressive post-evangelicalism. But their are other Christian Process theologians who come from Lutheran, Catholic, Orthodox, or post-Christian experiences who will write of God in a different sense than I do. Through all of these perspectives a consensus of opinion will develop as to what the core of a Process Christianity might look like and become. Hence, when taking up a process-view of supernatural (God) and natural theology (the sciences) there will be a variety of opinion hopefully expanding upwards and centered in God's Love, Unity, Beauty, and Transformative Healing. This is what I would expect from a positive influence of process theology upon the Christian faith.
4 - Though biblical interpretations have been helpful to the Christian church - that is, "ways of reading the bible to help sort out its teachings" - they can also become both problemmatic and unhelpfully polarized and systematized. Process Theology should never be thought of as any one interpretation of the bible, nor even as a re-systematization of the bible hermeneutically. Rather, process theology, like process philosophy itself, is an underlying feeling within creation and how it responds to its Creator and the world at large. Remember, the world at large is a processual relational organism. Not a thing but more like a dynamic "Being" in its entirety. We are not addressing an idea so much as attempting to understand who we are in our individual and corporate structure to one another.
If anything, we should develop a processual hermeneutic admitting to this fact when reading the bible, but then process will infill-words with expansive meaning. Thus, divine inspiration is not a one-and-done experience by some people in the bible of the best but an ever-expanding and deepening reality of how God continually communicates his love and loving presence to us. If there can be any hermeneutical reading of the bible it should be through the lens of love and how the ancients, as we do today in the church, fail to love and look to solutions of harming legalism, violence, and war. The bible simply shows to us how we and the Israelites back then failed to love. And more saddeningly... how we, as divine emissaries then wrote and worshipped a God of our own sinful making... of a God of wrath and judgement and doom. God is not this. God was never this. God is a God of Love. But our message of God, beginning in the bible, showed how quickly we like our rules and rites and do's and don'ts. My friends, God is love and though process theology might be used to state otherwise, the direction in which I find the most hope and redemptive healing in preaching and writing of a God of Love, Hope, Beauty, and positive transformative Redemption. So then, we today, pick up where the people of the bible left off. The Spirit of God places words and actions into our hearts and it is from these words and actions which we must respond.
4a. Past interpretations - or, hermeneutics - of the bible might include a Dispensational reading of the bible through Reformed Christian traditions. Or, its polar opposite (and my own personal preference) of a Covenantal reading of the bible through the same Reformed Christian traditions. Process theology is not this. It is not a "systematic interpretation of Scripture" but the underlying flow of life much like a philosophical reading of how humanity and creation are drawn into and out of the particulars of the bible within their cultural eras.4b. Current interpretations of the bible which aren't so much a hermeneutic to themselves but act more like Jungian Archetypes or better, biblical themes of Scripture, may help enlighten what a hermeneutic like Dispensational or Covenant Theology are attempting to portray in their Scriptural metanarratives. In my capstone senior thesis at a fundamental evangelical seminary for my M.Div. degree I wrote of eleven meta-themes in the bible. Here are a few: Christ as the Mid-Point of Salvific History (aka Oscar Cullman); the Discontinuity and Continuity of community practices and beliefs within the bible (aka John Feinberg); the Remnant of God in Community Transition through the four major Promise Covenants of the bible: Abrahamic, Mosaic, Davidic, and New (aka, God's Design by Martens); and so on. Looking back, each of these themes could be re-cast through process theological senses... which means, anything Christian written in the past could also be recast in Process terminology.
Thus, Process theology should never be systematized but is more like a thought, a smell or aroma, a taste (salt, sugar), a background sound (birdsong, praise hymns in our heads), or as a kind of sensory feeling or emotion. A Process Christian reading of Christianity is more like a feeling or impression as much as it is statements into, on top of, or overlays to, past creedal statements of God, Christ, the Church, Sin, Love, etc.
5 - Process theology, broadly, is not simply for the Christian faith. It is for all global faiths. All global religions. It is that big. And can at once be that nebulous... as it should be. Any theology of God, of mundane living, or philosophical sense of life, can be recast is process terms of theology and philosophy. Buddhism rejected Hinduism for its lack of cosmic connectedness and yet both reveal a process way of thinking in the Chinese and Indian cultures to a greater, or respectively lesser, extent. Process Christianity is simply another way of identifying with other world religions a language of commonality with one another. As Christianity and Islam have many good comparisons with each other as monotheistic (sic, non-polytheistic) faiths, so too does Christianity share foundational commonalities with other non-Christian religions via Process Theology and Philosophy. Process thought, if true, should be seen everywhere and not just in Westernized Christian thinking.
6 - Lastly, Process Christianity is more of a broad identifier - or a broader outlay - of the Christian God and Christian Creeds. As Progressive Christianity is a kind of social justice and environmental movement within the Christian church, so Process Theology might further enlighten and provide a depth of Christian foundation for this Progessive Christian movement within Evangelical Christianity (which necessarily includes Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox faiths and flavors of the Christian Church). Especially as Progressive Christians separate themselves from their alt-religious right elements of Americanized soft fascism working against an expanding democracy attempting to bring social justice to all members of one's nationalism. That is, all minority groups are to be lifted up onto a level CIVIL playing field and no longer kept within the confines of white Christian supremacy.
This we see in America's present internal divisions as the Jesus-following Christian church determines to no longer incorporate white Christian nationalism within its coffers. Hence, Process Theology will give Progressive Christians a better, more democratic (and theologic) basis to their movement, than can past inhumanitarian doctrines of the Christian church such as Franklin Graham's Christian Dominionism or the Charismatic idea of Kingdom Law over Grace taught by Kingdom ReConstructionists. Both theo-political groups wish to integrate Church with State so that America's constitutional laws reflect religious ideas about which groups are loved by God and which are not acceptable to God. Conversely, Process Theology argues for the basic freedoms of all people, not just some. How we understand God in God's love will always inform a Christian gospel of Christ's love over Westernized Christianity's presumption of God's wrath and hate.
At this point I must discontinue, with apologies. My three year old grandson has just arrived to play the piano and then I believe we have a date to punch balloons into the air and catch them on our noses. Perhaps a few here might offer additional criteria on Process Theology's need to stay helpfully philosophical without becoming unnecessarily weighted down by localization. As example, Ecological civilizations come to mind. They must be underlaid by process thinking but left to adopt forms of beneficial capitalism or socialism re community distillation and self-interest. Similary with process theology in its many forms and conventional humanitarian outcomes.
Merry Christmas to All,
R.E. Slater
December 19, 2021
Updated December 9, 2022
