We, in the open and relational process world, say that God is a loving presence in the universe, beckoning creatures on our planet, through a process of evolution, to a variety of forms of life, two of which are giraffes and crocodiles. Are-predator-prey relations a result of God's beckoning? Is it God's will that creatures eat one another? Why so much suffering? Is it truly reasonable to speak of a God of tender love, when there's so much violence? I struggle with this. Read the page and help me out.
Questions for Open and Relational Theologians
Divine love is pluriform: God loves in numerous ways to promote the well-being of people, other creatures, and all creation. - Thomas Oord
Where is God for the Dying Giraffe?
"It was a beautiful, peaceful day as I sat in a blind overlooking a small lake at the Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. Since this reserve is home to the Big Five, I was on high alert to see as many beautiful animals as possible.
Nature did not disappoint, at least not at first. I had seen and shared space with a huge number of beautiful creatures as I sat munching on a sandwich and marveling at what I was experiencing. Soon, a gorgeous giraffe came up to quench its thirst. Since giraffes are so tall, they have to splay their front legs out quite far to lower their heads for a drink which makes them vulnerable. The spreading of their legs is a very gradual, slow, and deliberate process. And, once they are down, they cannot move quickly back to a standing and running position.
As this graceful giraffe began its drinking vigil, it became a victim of crocodiles. They were in hiding and surged up from the water bringing down this innocent animal who was simply trying to get a drink.
Needless to say, I was not only startled but bereft. The giraffe struggled and cried out. I wanted to help it but, of course, I could not. Nature was in process and I was only a witness. I had seen other kills like lions taking down a springbok or zebra, but there was something about this kill that overwhelmed me. The giraffe was so very vulnerable. It was not a fair fight or in any way merciful. It almost seemed like the crocodiles were taking delight in the suffering of their prey as it struggled to free itself from their grasp. Instead of just chomping the juggler, the crocs took turns maiming and drowning the giraffe as it cried out. I wanted to shout out to the mean crocs to let go!!!! My empathy for the giraffe and my dismay at the crocs' seeming cruelty did not save the giraffe. I felt as helpless as the dying giraffe."
- Nita Gilger, There can be Sadness in Holding On
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Does God Love Animals?
Dear Dr. Jay McDaniel,
Thank you for recommending that I learn about open and relational (process) theologies with their idea of a relational, loving God. I like much of what they say when it comes to human beings. But it's the other ninety-nine percent of life, including the animals, that makes me doubt the God even of open and relational theology.
As you know, I gave up on God many years ago because “he” seemed so callous when it comes to animals and their suffering.
I gave up on Christianity, too. Some of my Christian friends say that animals don't really matter to God, that they are "put here" just for us to enjoy. They seem not to care about animals at all, except maybe their pets. But even the more ecologically-minded among them talk more about "global warming" and "environmental destruction" than about individual animals. They are concerned with about the web of life but not nodes in the web, about endangered species but not vulnerable animals.
Here I'm not talking about vulnerable animals under human subjugation: the animals we eat for food, or use in scientific experiments, or ride in rodeos, or abandon on the streets. They matter to me a lot, but they're not the ones I'm concerned with here. Take a look at the photo above of the giraffe being eaten by crocodiles and read the account. Let the giraffe be the "vulnerable animal."
You explained that, for some open and relational (process) theologians, animals do matter. For them, you said, God shares in the suffering of individual animals and seeks their well-being, even as God also seeks the well-being of human beings and the planet as a whole. I asked what I might read and you mentioned your own book of many years ago: Of God and Pelicans: A Theology of Reverence for Life. You also pointed me to a more recent book by Bethany Sollereder called God, Evolution and Animal Suffering: Theodicy without a Fall and one by Thomas Oord called Pluriform Love: An Open and Relational Theology of Well-Being.
You recommended Dr. Oord's book as the one I read first, because it introduces open and relational theology in a general way. I just finished the book and am left with five questions. All are subsets of a single question: Where is God for the Dying Giraffe? I hope you might share the five questions with him or with other open and relational thinkers. Here they are:
- How does the giraffe feel God's presence, even if in an unconscious way? Is God's presence what process theologians call an initial aim: that is, a lure to live with satisfaction relative to the situation at hand?
- Do crocodiles also feel God's luring presence? Do they, too, feel God's immanence as a lure to live with satisfaction? Is their hunger a response to God's lure?
- If God lures the giraffe and the crocodiles toward these competing aims, is God conflicted? Or does God take sides?
- Nita Gilger writes:
"The giraffe was so very vulnerable. It was not a fair fight or in any way merciful. It almost seemed like the crocodiles were taking delight in the suffering of their prey as it struggled to free itself from their grasp. Instead of just chomping the juggler, the crocs took turns maiming and drowning the giraffe as it cried out."Would the giraffe's suffering be an example of what you call genuine evil? I'm not blaming the crocodiles here. But I am talking about the giraffe's pain.
- Why, from an open and relational perspective, are there predator-prey relations in the first place? I know that, according to Thomas Oord, God did not set up the initial conditions of life on earth single-handedly. But did God play a role in bringing about predator-prey? If so, is God still loving and empathetic? Would it not be more plausible to say that God doesn't really care about individuals? And if that's the case, would God really be all-loving?
I hope you'll share these questions with Thomas Oord or some other open and relational thinkers? For my part, I'm still doubtful of God. It seems to me that, if there is a God, "he" doesn't really care about individual animal lives, and that we who do care are, in our way, more loving than God. I hate to say this, but I can't think of a way out.
Need help,
Delores
Pluriform Love: An Open and
Relational Theology of Well-Being
"The God of uncontrolling love acts moment by moment and exerts causal influence upon all. God acts first as a cause in every moment of every creature’s life. Creatures feel this influence, even when they are not conscious of it. There is no time when, and no location where, God is not present and influencing.""God does not create evil, and God did not singlehandedly determine the conditions for it to occur.""We can solve the primary dimensions of the problem of evil by saying God can’t prevent evil singlehandedly, empathizes with the hurting, works to heal, endeavors to bring good from bad, calls creatures to join in overcoming evil, and does not create evil."
Why Isn't Divine Love Enough?
by R.E. Slater
As you can see here in these postings there is the introduction of the problem of sin and evil without any conclusion and has been left for the reader to try to answer.
Let's first assume the general teachings of the church that creation is good, and holy, and loving. This is how it was originally created as shared in the Genesis story about the Garden of Evil. Typically, the church then goes on to assert that at the Fall of Adam and Eve all of creation then fell with them.
And here lies the paradox. How could a "perfect" creation fall? Was it ultimately a failure of God's? Was God not wise enough, far looking enough, not persuasive enough in His work of creating creation?
Or perhaps God was not strong enough, too weak, too relenting, to permissive with creation?
Just what was creation's raison d'etre if it were not to become the very thing God wanted it to be? How could a good, loving God create such a paradox? Especially one that looks like a disaster on every level?
- A creation which is physically conflicted - human disabilities for instance or those "tweener" stages of evolutionary development responding too slowly or too quickly to the conditions around it?
- Or a creation which is psychologically conflicted - something along the lines of the Apostle Paul who said, "We/It wishes to do good but cannot do good."
Therefore did that which is good become a cause of death for me? (Romans 7.13)
- Or a creation which is spiritually conflicted?
"...but I know you, that you do not have the love of God in yourselves." (John 5.42)
In everyway which we might describe creation we find its fallenness, not its holiness, goodness, or love. And yet, creation's very definition is not by its lack, but by its very character as birthed of God IN God's very image (Imago Dei).
Creation may be described as sinful or fallen but its truer character or nature is that it IS of God, is SUSTAINED by God, and will be COMPLETED by God. During all these phases from birth to life to death God is the One who defines us - as well as our fallenness from God's divine love.
Whatever else you know of church teachings remember WE are OF God birthed to LOVE, to BE, and to BECOME. Death is the completion of this cycle. It is the next step towards God's intended BECOMING. Death is not the end, except as the end of pain, suffering, tragedy, sin and evil. Death is the next step towards discovering LIFE in its intentional design when first presented to a freewill creation.
Moreover, God did not "rule" creational freewill... freewill came from God's Person in the form of love... NOT by divine fiat as the church so blithely proclaims so wrongly. God births God's Self.
When we give birth to children we do not RULE how they shall become. NO. Children our birthed out of the essence of their parents with capacities both wonderful or horrifying. As parents we give children love, loving direction, loving care, and loving openness that they may become a loving version of their Father God Creator... along with our talents and abilities.
None of these character qualities can be RULED into becoming. We take what's there in the modeling clay and to the best of our abilities mold children into images which may give life, freedom, beauty, and kindness into this world.
So has God. Not by fiat but by love.
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| Small Ukrainian Child |
Creation is fallen. We are fallen. No amount of (i) human ability (sic, Mother Teresa), or (ii) religious activity (sic, the Pharisees of Jesus' day such as the Apostle Paul once named Rabbi Saul for his energetic zest of Judaism), or (iii) physical denial (sic, Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox slavish, monkish rituals of chastity, abstinence, or chastisement of any kind) may produce atoning redemption.
No, Jesus alone is the One through whom atoning redemption comes. Jesus, as God in the flesh incarnated, who sacrificed Himself physically, psychologically, and spiritually, that in all areas of human living - or creational becoming - we might be freed from sin and enabled by God's Spirit to lean into - if not wholly lean into - lives of love and loving embrace.
God's Spirit, just like God's Self, does not come by divine rule, dominion, or power. But by loving embrace, entrance, wellbeing, care, kindness, and wholeness, as only God can give any part of creation.
Creation was formed for goodness and wellbeing. Happily death is part of creation that it may one day cease from its groanings and sufferings to come to know a fullness of life not grasped in this life of the in-between.
For between divine birth and a life's end indeterminancy rules. Our passions and evolved abilities drive us towards individual fulfillment, whether man or beast. A crocodile is not a giraffe. A giraffe is not a crocodile. We are not the wind. Nor is the flood like ourselves.
The gift of life isn't a guarantee of avoiding sin and evil. It but begins a life towards fulfillment as well as disappointment, dismay, even ruin. Through it all God's presence is there, living within these creational spaces, living with His creation in the good times and the bad.
We pray for peace for all living things. We pray for peace in this world and ones to come at the hands of our progeny. We pray that societies learn to live with one another in goodness and peace. And we pray we, as human civilizations, learn to live with creation in proper ecological balance and wellbeing.
The cycles of life and death, not unlike the cycles of spiritual life and death, are the only constants in an evolving creation. We do not know its outcome but we do know its Creator. And as Creator, God in His love and wisdom and filling presence goes before us, around us, within us, filling us with His love, and purpose, and desires.
Amen and Amen,
R.E. Slater
March 10, 2022
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| A Covid19 molecule |
An Unsolvable Paradox
Should this help...
This is what I was going to write...
As a process thinker I have come to think about sin and suffering as a result of the divine freedom and love we, as any part of creation has, received. The conflicting result is a supreme paradox to the avowed divine creation of a loving God.
How could such harm and suffering come from such an innocent act as the birthing of the divine IMAGO centered in love and beauty? The purity and self-giving efficaciousness of the act of God stuns me into silence. Surely sin and evil cannot be such a byproduct of so grand a gift??
And yet, the very cycles of life contains within them cycles of pain and death. If I were an Eastern wiseman or wisewoman I would perhaps have a comment as to the necessity for such a Ying-Yang cycle. But I am not. I am Western and Christian in orientation and am not very well acquainted with the religious and moral wisdoms of the East, though I am thoroughly acquainted with the cynicisms of the West.
When I look at the Genesis account of creation I see behind it the struggle of the Hebrew ascetics struggling to answer this same age-old question against their own backgrounds of religious ethics and human morals.
Process theology comes the closest to restoring to me the sense of the love of God in all divine acts of divinity and creation. Of the uncontrolling and necessary gift of divine love inlaid upon the very heart of nature, mankind, and cosmos tells me of the consequential results of indeterminant freewill used to either love or not love.
But there is also the question of death, of pain, of sin and evil. How could a God of life even begin to accede to the realities of love's "other side" of darkness? Where "creational freewill + freewill act" may not be equal to the life and beauty and grand sunsets but more meanly described in harming family dysfunctionalism, personal or societal cruelties, or institutionalized desensitization to the suffering of others?
No, the divine act of love is a mystery. Nor can it be all on creation to act forthrightly when even the act of love is supremely hard to accomplish. And in the divine act of atonement through God's Self as witnessed in God's Incarnational Birth in Jesus, we still see the act of love confounded in a thousand different ways.
Unfortunately sin and death and suffering and injustice seemed the inconsequential acts of not only love gone wrong, but it's opposite ying-yang struggle for personal survival in the face of need using our/creation's baser instincts which overwhelm us in our sense of self to whatever this thing we call life really is.
These are age-old questions which have no simple answers. Not religiously, Christianly, or morally, though many have attempted it many times. The mystery of creational theodicy (e.g., the problem of sin and evil) is a question not only left to theologians to answer but to the despairing mom or dad whose children are at risk of malnutrition, societal harm, continuing health complications, lack of proper clothing, who ask these same questions every moment of their lives.
Peace,
R.E. Slater
March 10, 2022
7 Beloved, let’s love one another; for love is from God, and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 By this the love of God was revealed [a]in us, that God has sent His only Son into the world so that we may live through Him. 10 In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the [b]propitiation for our sins. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God remains in us, and His love is perfected in us. 13 By this we know that we remain in Him and He in us, because He has given to us of His Spirit. 14 We have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son to be the Savior of the world.
15 Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God remains in him, and he in God. 16 We have come to know and have believed the love which God has [c]for us. God is love, and the one who remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him. 17 By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because as He is, we also are in this world. 18 There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear, because fear [d]involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love. 19 We love, because He first loved us. 20 If someone says, “I love God,” and yet he hates his brother or sister, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother and sister whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. 21 And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves God must also love his brother and sister.
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