Wednesday, March 30, 2022

Marjorie Suchocki - The Heart of Process Theology





The Heart of Process Theology
by Marjorie Suchocki


What follows is my abridged commentary of Dr. Suchocki
as I heard and understood her. Enjoy. - R.E. Slater



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"Everything is related to everything else... No thing is an island unto itself. This is the heart of relational process theology."
- Marjorie Suchocki, Process Theologian [as abridged by R.E. Slater]

"A relational, process theology isn't afraid of the sciences, but embraces and delights in the sciences. It enhances the sciences and increases the wonders of this world." 
- Marjorie Suchocki, Process Theologian [as abridged by R.E. Slater]


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What Is PROCESS Theology?
A Conversation with Marjorie

by Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki

The 21pp .pdf link here - 



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Marjorie Suchocki - An Introduction to Process Theology
Feb 13, 2015



Check out (http://www.whitehead2015.com) -- Seizing an Alternative Conference
Marjorie Suchocki: "An Introduction to Process Theology," Jan. 27, 2004.



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"Because creation is relational there exists a communal well-being throughout the cosmos. A divine, universal, unbounded grace permeating creation with possibilities of future wellbeing. A presentness of care founded and sustained by the Creator-God's relational presence of love and provision of generative wellbeing which can be found everywhere should we allow God's presence not only to be, but to become."
- Marjorie Suchocki, Process Theologian [as abridged by R.E. Slater]

Process theology makes sense through the presence of prayer which is open to the influences of God through ourselves and others and creation. Our prayers are requests for God to act into-and-through the lives of His creation regardless of geography. God hears everywhere and can act everywhere.
- Marjorie Suchocki, Process Theologian [as abridged by R.E. Slater]





God's whispered words of love flows through all, dwells within all, binds all to all else. Everything is relational because God is relational. In God's world it is not the particle which is important but its relationship to other particles which may then propagate the fullness of possible being through the potentiality of possible becomings.
- Marjorie Suchocki, Process Theologian [as abridged by R.E. Slater]


Process Theology makes sense in a world where evil occurs and where redemption may occur. Where the responsibility of creational freedom is placed upon creation itself. And within our freedom God may enter and create redemption from freedom gone wrong - commonly described as the harming affects of sin and evil upon God's creation. God can-and-will take the awful things of life and bring intentional redemption into those living streams of suffering and death. This is how a process God of beneficial relationships works.

- Marjorie Suchocki, Process Theologian [as abridged by R.E. Slater]





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Marjorie Suchocki - The Heart of Process Theology
Aug 30, 2021



Marjorie Suchocki speaks to the key ideas of Process Theology.



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Marjorie H. Suchocki - Prayer in Troubling Times
A Process Perspective, 2010
Feb 9, 2021


In this 2010 video, Marjorie Suchocki discusses the place and relevance of prayer in process perspective. Through personal narrative and concrete examples, she addresses the challenge of God's activity in the face of truly troubling times. Arguing against the notion that there is a God "up there" to which we pray, Suchocki expounds the fundamental conviction of process theology: God is immanently present to all things and in attentive relationship to all contextual experience. The immanence of God is not coercive, but pervasive and persuasive, constantly adjusting experience to the Good. This framework, Suchocki argues, opens up a new way of understanding how prayer influences God and the world in relation to what is possible for both.


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Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki

Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki (born 1933) is an author and United Methodist professor emerita of theology at Claremont School of Theology. She is also co-director of the Center for Process Studies at Claremont.

Suchocki earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from Pomona College in 1970 and both Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in religion from Claremont Graduate School in 1974. She taught at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary from 1977 to 1983. From 1983 to 1990 she was professor of systematic theology and dean of Wesley Theological Seminary. In 1990 Suchocki returned to Claremont School of Theology, where she held the endowed Ingraham chair in theology and joint appointment at the Claremont Graduate School until her retirement in 2002. She has held visiting professorships at Vanderbilt University in 1996 and 1999, and at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1992.

Since 2001 Suchocki has been director of the Whitehead International Film Festival. She is considered along with John B. Cobb and David Ray Griffin as one of the leaders in the field of process theology.

Books

  • God Christ Church: A Practical Guide to Process Theology, Crossroad, 1982 (227 p.), ISBN 0-8245-0464-X, revised ed. 1989 (263 p.): ISBN 0-8245-0970-6
  • The End of Evil: Process Eschatology in Historical Context, State University of New York Press, 1988, ISBN 0-88706-724-7
  • The Fall to Violence: Original Sin in Relational Theology, Continuum International, 1995, ISBN 0-8264-0860-5
  • Trinity in Process: A Relational Theology of God, (coeditor with Joseph A. Bracken), Continuum International, 1996, ISBN 0-8264-0878-8
  • In God's Presence: Theological Reflections on Prayer, Chalice Press, 1996, ISBN 0-8272-1615-7
  • The Whispered Word: A Theology of Preaching, Chalice Press, 1999, ISBN 0-8272-4239-5
  • Divinity and Diversity: A Christian Affirmation of Religious Pluralism, Abingdon Press, 2003, ISBN 0-687-02194-4

External links

  • Works by or about Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki in libraries (WorldCat catalog)


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COMMON QUESTIONS & ANSWERS
OF PROCESS THEOLOGY

by R.E. Slater


Jesus is the music we seek to hear


What are the four main branches of philosophy?
  • metaphysics - being and becoming
  • epistemology - knowing
  • axiology, and - inherent value pertaining to i) aesthetics and, ii) ethics
  • logic - forms of reasoning

What is Process Philosophy?

Process philosophy is an early 20th-century school of Western philosophy that emphasizes the elements of becoming, change, and novelty in experienced reality. It opposes the traditional Western philosophical stress on being, permanence, and uniformity.

Often times Process Philosophy is equated with Panentheism. What is it?

I

In pan-en-theism, the Spirit of God is present everywhere (sic, omnipresence) whose universal Spirit in the same instance transcends all things created (thus emphasizing God's ontological difference from creation). Meaning, God is in some sense "greater" than the universe.

Conversely, pan-theism asserts that "all is God" or, expressed differently, all that is (such as creation) is God's very self. That is, there is no difference between God or creation in any way, shape, or form. God is "the All" and "the All" is God. Typically confessed in South & East Asian religions - notably Sikhism, Hinduism, Sanamahism, Confucianism, and Taoism.

It is important to know that though Process Theology distinguishes God from creation ontologically, it also teaches God is within the world sustaining it, imbuing it with possibilities for loving wellbeing, indwelling and urging the world away from its "dark side" and towards its "light side" as provided to the world through Jesus' death to sin-and-evil and resurrection unto light-and-life.

II

Lastly, the church's more traditional teaching of classic theism leans into God's "apartness" from creation. That is, it emphasizes God's transcendence from the world and can be found in  the Baha'i Faith, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, as well as Christianity.

Importantly, process theology states the necessity of God's immanence as a requisite "job description" to God being Creator while not denying God's ontological difference from Creation. Though God could be independent from His Creation God cannot be, and will not be, as the Creator. It becomes a philosophically moot question of divine Beingness to the more important observation of God's Love which will never leave but always abide with creation. Unlike the Greek gods who abandoned mankind the Hebraic God of Christianity will not. God is as bound to us and we are to God.

What is Process Theology's History?

Process theology might be described as a neoclassical theology because of its intentional-and-metaphysical differences with popular Platonic and Neo-Platonic philosophies supporting Greek Hellenized forms of religious belief found throughout the history of the church... even up to the Modern Era of the 20th Century.

Process theology is a school of thought influenced by the metaphysical process philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) and other process philosophers around the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It may also be found in the non-Platonic philosophers of Ancient Greece as well as in earlier Semitic cultures such as the Hebrew religion.

How is Process Theology different from Classical Theology?

I

A criticism of process theology is that it offers a severely diminished conception of God's power. Process theologians argue that God does not have unilateral, coercive control over everything in the universe. However, a process theologian would ask the details of "In how, and in what way" does God not control outcome? Plainly process-based panentheism would state that God is in the very substance of creation itself recharging its freely evolutionary character from stages of darkness to stages of light. Control is a very American word bespeaking forced progress over all obstacles. Divine Sovereignty is unlike American Destiny or the Roman Will of the Caesars and Senate, or the Dominance of the Egyptian  Pharaoh over all other cultures. Divine Sovereignty works with and within a freewill creation; it lends a redemptive kind of weakness which might empower the world towards love and wellbeing; it is measured by God's selfless, sacrificial, servanthood to not only man but all created things in restoring atoning, renewing, healing redemption to all. Control is a very un-sovereign kind of description of God's innate power.

II

Thus, the concepts of process theology sees God not in terms of controlling omnipotence, in the sense of divine coerciveness, but in non-controlling terms measured in divine love. That if God uses any power at all it would be in the form of a guiding persuasion as versus the church teachings of Calvinism advocating a God who uses a coercive, overruling, dictating force succumbing creaturely will to divine will.

Moreover, process theology's biblical bedrock can be ascribed to Calvinism's opposite, that of Arminian theology, emphasizing a freewill creation born from God's Love (rather than by divine fiat). As God's very Self is love and free, so too is the creation God formed out of His Imago Dei qualified, or measured in, divine love and freedom. Even as God is love and free in Himself, so too creation may love and is free in its own self to determine its own wonderous destiny (or darkest of worlds).

III

A process-based corollary to these principles is that God will not, and does not, determine creation's destiny. Creation's destiny is as indeterminant as it is free to do how it wishes.

Destiny, creation's future... humanity's future... is determined by our own actions of loving or not loving. Hence, God does not predestine any to hell as 1) If there were a hell we would consign ourselves, but 2) there is no hell as described in the bible (it became a gnostic eschatological teaching later popularized many centuries later by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy of a Catholic purgatory gone extremely wrong).

Let us repeat the above statements: 1) God does not determine a person's eternal fate, we do. And, 2) how the world operates - and how it becomes - is determined by the world itself. We are free to create our own futures. But... importantly... with the caveat that we do so from within the cosmic framework of love and wellbeing.

The God who created in God's own Image... who indwells God's own creation immanently... is the same God who grants to creation (through His Image of Love) the opportunities and possibilities for a free creation to lean into - and become - one communal organism energized by the greater flow and energies of the Spirit of God who is everywhere present urging all things human, or not human, towards oneness, wholeness, community, and peace.

IV

Lastly, another corollary to the outcomes of process theology is that it teaches of a God who moves along the same cosmic time-line as we do. A God who does not know the future even as we do not know the future. A God who cannot force people to behave in a way which compromises their free will however dark or unloving it may be. A strong God who become weak for our sakes that we might become strong in his love and determination... and then become weak in the service of others. A God who keeps the heavens in their orbits while overcoming the chaos of evolutionary freewill inhabited by a creaturely nature of imagination and wellbeing. A God who gave His life for us (and for creation) that God's Love Wins by winning with us, and with creation, as we submit and obey.


Jesus is the script we wish to play


What are the four types of theology?

The four types include:

  • biblical theology - themes, narratives, typologies, continuance, etc
  • historical theology - how God's people respond to God's Love, or not...
  • systematic (or dogmatic) theology - boxing God into various kinds of religious systems
  • and practical theology - the ministration of God's grace to others, or not...

From the works of Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria and Origen, and Ireanaeus of Lyon come the models of moral theology, metaphysical theology, and pastoral theology. This categorization helps students understand the validity and application of all three models in the study of theology today.


Which Comes First, Philosophical Chicken or the Theological Egg?

Though people assume what one individual believes determines the philosophies one follows, more commonly, what a cutural era enacts through its beliefs and deeds will shaped the micro/macro-regional philosophies arising from a civilization's standards and mores.

A good philosophic theology attempts to create the broadest possible philosophic platform upon which to form the broadest kind of theology which might more clearly see our loving God more truly than how God appears in humanity's man-made religion. Bibliotry, God-alotry, Easter-alotry, faith-alotry are ever present dangers humanity will always face in its most sincerest efforts to be true to God. But if all religion is measured in selfless love, leaving all to God to work out, it would be a far better religion than those measured in doctrines, rules, creeds, and confessions.

Conversely, a theology which ignores, and will not examine, its historical philosophic foundations and inherited religious/cultural milieu - including it's own regional beliefs - will always adhere to a (mis-)doctrine of God more akin to its own image of itself than to the God it is attempting to know and follow.

Recent examples of good religion gone bad would be that of Evangelical Trumpian Christianity embracing God, guns, and bible under the banners of White Christian  Nationalism as versus a Post-Evangelical Progressive Christianity wishing to embrace people and races of all colors and beliefs....

A progressive Christianity which is willing to examine its beliefs while discontinuing from any actions or attitudes which cannot be identified with 1) Jesus; 2) Jesus' Beatitudes as taught on the Sermons on the Mount; or, 3) the golden rule of "Loving thy neighbor as you would yourself" (sic, cup of cold water kind of stuff such as provision of food, shelter, kindness, respect, listening well to one another, eschewing differences of color and gender, etc).


Jesus is our Lord and Savior we confess and follow


What does it mean to ascribe to a Toxic Theology?

Theology is toxic when it limits spiritual growth and experience to accepting unhealthy beliefs and practices. These would broadly include: An authoritarian power hierarchy which demands obedience along with internal/external policies of doctrinal separatism.

The key difference between religion and theology is that religion is a specific system of belief and/or worship, often involving a code of ethics and philosophy whereas theology is the rational analysis of religious belief, either of which may turn bad.


What are the 10 Major Categories of Systematic Theology?
  1. Angelology – The study of angels
  2. Bibliology – The study of the Bible
  3. Christology – The study of Christ
  4. Ecclesiology – The study of the church
  5. Eschatology – The study of the end times
  6. Hamartiology – The study of sin
  7. Pneumatology – The study of the Holy Spirit
  8. Soteriology – The study of salvation
  9. Theological anthropology – The study of the nature of humanity.
  10. Theology proper – The study of the character of God


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Systematic theology


Systematic theology is a discipline of Christian theology that formulates an orderly, rational, and coherent account of the doctrines of the Christian faith. It addresses issues such as what the Bible teaches about certain topics or what is true about God and His universe.[1] It also builds on biblical disciplines, church history, as well as biblical and historical theology.[2] Systematic theology shares its systematic tasks with other disciplines such as constructive theology, dogmatics, ethics, apologetics, and philosophy of religion.[3]

Method

With a methodological tradition that differs somewhat from biblical theology, systematic theology draws on the core sacred texts of Christianity, while simultaneously investigating the development of Christian doctrine over the course of history, particularly through philosophy, ethics, social sciences, and natural sciences. Using biblical texts, it attempts to compare and relate all of scripture which led to the creation of a systematized statement on what the whole Bible says about particular issues.

Within Christianity, different traditions (both intellectual and ecclesial) approach systematic theology in different ways impacting a) the method employed to develop the system, b) the understanding of theology's task, c) the doctrines included in the system, and d) the order those doctrines appear. Even with such diversity, it is generally the case that works that one can describe as systematic theologies to begin with revelation and conclude with eschatology.

Since it is focused on truth, systematic theology is also framed to interact with and address the contemporary world. There are numerous authors who explored this area such as the case of Charles Gore, John Walvoord, Lindsay Dewar, and Charles Moule, among others. The framework developed by these theologians involved a review of postbiblical history of a doctrine after first treating the biblical materials.[4] This process concludes with applications to contemporary issues.

Categories

Since it is a systemic approach, systematic theology organizes truth under different headings[1] and there are ten basic areas (or categories), although the exact list may vary slightly. These are:

History

The establishment and integration of varied Christian ideas and Christianity-related notions, including diverse topics and themes of the Bible, in a single, coherent and well-ordered presentation is a relatively late development.[6] In Eastern Orthodoxy, an early example is provided by John of Damascus's 8th-century Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, in which he attempts to set in order and demonstrate the coherence of the theology of the classic texts of the Eastern theological tradition.

In the West, Peter Lombard's 12th-century Sentences, wherein he thematically collected a great series of quotations of the Church Fathers, became the basis of a medieval scholastic tradition of thematic commentary and explanation. Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae best exemplifies this scholastic tradition. The Lutheran scholastic tradition of a thematic, ordered exposition of Christian theology emerged in the 16th century with Philipp Melanchthon's Loci Communes, and was countered by a Calvinist scholasticism, which is exemplified by John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion.

In the 19th century, primarily in Protestant groups, a new kind of systematic theology arose that attempted to demonstrate that Christian doctrine formed a more coherent system premised on one or more fundamental axioms. Such theologies often involved a more drastic pruning and reinterpretation of traditional belief in order to cohere with the axiom or axioms.[citation needed] Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, for example, produced Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche (The Christian Faith According to the Principles of the Protestant Church) in the 1820s, in which the fundamental idea is the universal presence among humanity, sometimes more hidden, sometimes more explicit, of a feeling or awareness of 'absolute dependence'.

Contemporary usage

There are three overlapping uses of the term 'systematic theology' in contemporary Christian theology.

  • According to some theologians in evangelical circles, it is used to refer to the topical collection and exploration of the content of the Bible, in which a different perspective is provided on the Bible's message than that garnered simply by reading the biblical narratives, poems, proverbs, and letters as a story of redemption or as a manual for how to live a godly life.[citation needed] One advantage of this approach is that it allows one to see all that the Bible says regarding some subject (e.g. the attributes of God), and one danger is a tendency to assign technical definitions to terms based on a few passages and then read that meaning everywhere the term is used in the Bible (e.g. "justification" as Paul uses it in his letter to the Romans) is proposed by some evangelical theologians as being used in a different sense to how James uses it in his letter (Romans 4:25, Romans 5:16–18 and James 2:21–25). In this view, systematic theology is complementary to biblical theology. Biblical theology traces the themes chronologically through the Bible, while systematic theology examines themes topically; biblical theology reflects the diversity of the Bible, while systematic theology reflects its unity. However, there are some contemporary systematic theologians of an evangelical persuasion who would question this configuration of the discipline of systematic theology.[citation needed] Their concerns are twofold. First, instead of being a systematic exploration of theological truth, when systematic theology is defined in such a way as described above, it is synonymous with biblical theology. Instead, some contemporary systematic theologians seek to use all available resources to ascertain the nature of God and God's relationship to the world, including philosophy, history, culture, etc. In sum, these theologians argue that systematic and biblical theology are two separate, though related, disciplines. Second, some systematic theologians claim that evangelicalism itself is far too diverse to describe the above approach as "the" evangelical viewpoint.[citation needed] Instead, these systematic theologians would note that in instances where systematic theology is defined in such a way that it solely depends on the Bible, it is a highly conservative version of evangelical theology and does not speak for evangelical theology in toto.
  • Normally (but not exclusively) in liberal theology, the term can be used to refer to attempts to follow in Friedrich Schleiermacher's footsteps, and reinterpret Christian theology in order to derive it from a core set of axioms or principles.[citation needed]
  • The term can also be used to refer to theology which self-avowedly seeks to perpetuate the classical traditions of thematic exploration of theology described above – often by means of commentary upon the classics of those tradition: the Damascene, Aquinas, John Calvin, Melanchthon and others.

In all three senses, Christian systematic theology will often touch on some or all of the following topics: God, trinitarianism, revelation, creation and divine providence, theodicy, theological anthropology, Christology, soteriology, ecclesiology, eschatology, Israelology, Bibliology, hermeneutics, sacrament, pneumatology, Christian life, Heaven, and interfaith statements on other religions.

See also

References

  1. ^ Jump up to:a b Carson, D.A. (2018). NIV, Biblical Theology Study Bible, eBook: Follow God's Redemptive Plan as It Unfolds throughout Scripture. Grand Rapids: Zondervan. ISBN 9780310450436.
  2. ^ Garrett, James Leo (2014). Systematic Theology, Volume 1, Fourth Edition. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers. p. 20. ISBN 9781498206594.
  3. ^ Berkhof, Louis (1938). Systematic Theology. Grand Rapids, Michigan. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. p. 17.
  4. ^ Garrett, James Leo (2014). Systematic Theology, Volume 2. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers. p. 138. ISBN 9781498206600.
  5. ^ "Categories of Theology". www.gcfweb.org. Archived from the original on 1 April 2015. Retrieved 18 September 2014.
  6. ^ Sheldrake, Philip (2016). Christian Spirituality and Social Transformation. Oxford Research Encyclopedias.

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