Tuesday, June 14, 2022

Christianity in Process - 2a, Catherine Keller










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Christianity in Process
Joining God in World Solidarity

June 7, 2022

I am so pumped to have Catherine Keller back on the podcast and helping to kick-off our new HBC class – Christianity in Process (which starts this week). This conversation is peak zest!

In this conversation we discussHow Catherine Keller found Process theology via John Cobb’s Christ in a Pluralistic Age

  • the problem of evil and suffering
  • the Omnipotent deity inspiring atheism
  • the lure of Whitehead’s vision for Keller
  • at the intersection of process feminism & panentheism
  • Keller shares about the process of teaching Process Theology
  • what is theopoetics?
  • the presence and purpose of God in the midst of suffering
  • what is role of mystery for the theologian?
  • reflecting on the participatory language of the New Testament
  • Prophecy is NOT Prediction – it is a dream reading!

Catherine Keller is George T. Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology in The Graduate Division of Religion of Drew University.

If you are new to Catherine Keller and Process Theology this is the book to start with – On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity In Process.



Katherine Keller joins Christianity in Process




Previous Podcasts with Catherine Keller


Catherine Keller is George T. Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology in The Graduate Division of Religion of Drew University. 

If you are new to Catherine Keller and Process Theology this is the book to start with - On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity In Process.


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PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT (unedited)

Helen, to kind of, you know, in a sense Luer everyone does spend more time with them.

Yeah, thank you that interrupt me if I go on too long.

You interrupt you. If you talk about like its concept of God and what the Lord view if I do that, Catherine, I will have to ground myself. Alright. I just want to say no, all day long. I was like, I'm going to ask this question I want you to ask it, but what about me? We'll see what the initial aim is.

Yes, right. So I should say just, you know, in terms of that, that this background motivations and experience of the contradiction with suffering was was big. After that period of my life by the time I was finishing high school, I had become a feminist that was then in the early 70s, and, and light and I went to seminary as a feminist and because I got some signal that there was something called feminist theology that was just beginning. Like the first book, by Rosemary Radford, Ruth was out. There was Mary Daly's, beyond God the Father that exploded just as I went to seminary. So the feminist question the criticism of God as a big patriarch and heaven, that was already really important to me before process thought, and I was drawn to mysticism, and that that was that was before so this just to have that forcefield clear that that that then was really needing an understanding of God if I was going to stay a Christian that was not about the divine patriarch and his super son. And so I, I was very fortunate to encounter through this divine era us this opening into Whitehead and then to John Cobb, a whole new understanding of the god world relationship, and I am quite comfortable calling it pan and theism I think John Cobb doesn't really like to use that language so much, but it's not a deep disagreement but the notion of pan and theism and that all is within God fits I think, with my mystical sensibility, you know, sort of this, this divine infinity in which everything lives and breathes and has its being, though most of us are pretty unconscious of it most of the time at this time. So that that basic sense of all being in God and God, therefore being in all and all things, beer and all things in some interestingly, endlessly varied and perspectival way that's very mystically meaningful to me. And I found I found that in in this process, vision of the relationship of God to the world

relationship that's beginningless and endless, and that startles people that we don't have just this sort of once for all priyad co X ne Hilo, the creation from absolutely nothing at some single point of time or at all beginning of time by an absolute, omnipotent act of will. That's the traditional view. I've written a whole book demonstrating that it's not the biblical view, and that it's not the process view. basis the deep looks at that second verse of Genesis says there's no nothing there. There's you there's already be Earth toe level, who the earth and a kind of freeform state and there's darkness over the face of this endless deep and there's the spirit hovering over the my in the sea, there's no nothing. There's an eternal God eternally in relationship to this potentiality and there is a point where it begins to take the form of this world, this universe and and who knows what other ones there have been our Yeah, but this one, yes. This one bangs on in and that so that that sense of, of God not creating from an absolute nothing that's crucial. In Process theology. And the world doesn't just then unfold from an absolute nothing to some absolute end. You know, the endpoint and I've written a couple of books on the apocalypse showing that the biblical apocalypse is not the end. It's the end of the book. But it's a new beginning. And it's not just some supernatural thing after everything's destroyed. No, there's lots of destruction as there has been as there will be, but it's not an absolute ending any more than an absolute beginning. And that's very Whitehead in I've just tracked it out in more biblical terms over the course of my life thinking and writing, communicating with folks. So the sense of the god world relationship is everlastingly going on that God's always entangled in some kind of creative process. And therefore, in some kind of creation might be totally different than ours might be some world with 18 dimensions or two dimensions, who knows beyond our conception, but in our world, that creative process goes on and on and on. And on billions of years. We do know about, you know about how billions of likely galaxies now as well. So it's an almost unfashionably creative unfolding. But what some meaningful about it is it's not just the absolute controlling you know, starting point moving to the absolute controlling final judgment and then supernatural you know, bliss, that that's too simple that there is this creative involvement that characterizes the whole the whole divine process with the world right versus pride picks up that chaotic early formative art in my in my family life, and this process with, with Whitehead is never purely orderly. As he said, Yeah, so complexity for him emerges at the edge of chaos. And that's just like Genesis one, two, because the toe goes right there by those right there. So that bit me personally in my life, this sense that this divine creative engagement is at the edge of chaos. It's calling for thrush forms of Order from Chaos like I didn't know what I was going to shape in response to your question. There's a kind of watery chaos that is my mind all the time it kind of darkness over the face of it. And you ask a question, and it calls for, you know, some kind of response. And so our conversations creating its own order right now, but it's a fresh order. It's not when we have all worked out in advance. Our past work comes into what our past worlds our past stages of this relationship, but something fresh is unfolding. And maybe what we call God is is inviting that. So that's what I see happening. God is inviting and experiencing everything happening in the world. That all sounds terribly positive. And of course, a lot of things that are happening in the world are but a lot of things are not nearly as positive. It's like this conversation. There's a war going on. There's unbearable suffering in the world going on. What's so important about process theology is God's there in that in that suffering, but still calling every being suffering, that God is not the cause of that suffering. God, God has called forth and keeps calling for a very free world with increasing levels of freedom. The more complex the creature is, the more choices it has to make, the more rich the complexity of a world or have a society or have a creature. The more room for error there is, the more creative possibilities there are, the more possibilities for destruction. And so we're in a world that's way more full of destruction and then a universe where maybe there will just be little quantum electronic bursts of energy. That might be very lovely, but very vibrant. But God has apparently been interested in calling forth really interesting worlds, and apparently finds more interesting these levels, levels and levels of creative freedom. So what's important is that God seems to be encouraging the creativity but not controlling its outcomes. So that there's a shadow side the destructive potentials always there. And so this other thing that's so important in process thought, in addition to the idea of the lure, the initial aim from God is that whatever God happens, whatever, whatever happens, in response to God's moment by moment, call to every creature mostly unconsciously, whatever happens in response, God feels it. God doesn't just know it. God isn't just some cognitive apparatus of the universe. God is moved by everything that happened. So we hear it's not Aristotle's unmoved mover, mover, but Charles Hart so we're in dunk Hobbs teachers. Most moved roofer God is moved by everything that happens God that which means God is affected. God feels whatever happens and that means that God suffers with those who suffer. So God, God doesn't fix it. God isn't the fix it man of the universe. That God isn't there to take control. And that's what an intervention is. God can just keep calling other preachers, others to come to support God can call for more compassion, more love than others, if they will respond, that God doesn't fix it. God calls for the repair of the world and Tikun Olam, but God doesn't. doesn't do it. But God, God feels with the feelings of the creature. So this compassionate God this is very different from the dispassionate God that so many of us have received from our traditional Christianity. So it's a it's a, it's a passionate and compassionate relationship to the world. It's not dispassionate and yet, it's passion and it's compassion. This divine engagement is never that of control. It's always that of a relation of internalization and then calling to the new moment offering the new possibility offering perhaps, a better possibility.

This is a brief technical question in a moment of God in the world interacting. How do you understand in your process perspective, the role of the past coming into it, the role of the of the luer coming towards it. And, and you mentioned in what you were saying the creatures agency that the complexity of the creature and its attentiveness, like where it's directing, it's kind of Consciousness Changes the kind of the level of responsiveness How would you describe that because I feel like that is a of one of those. I don't know, nuggets of insightfulness that when you understand how a process thinker is picturing the way the past and the possible, in some sense kiss and each moment of becoming then then you can start to work out a lot of the theology but that's one of the unique parts I think about a process pain in theism. is it's not about space, where there's some infinite space and all the finite things are in it and the nice substances wrapped up in an infinite substance. The pantheism is something that happens moment to moment all these little God world kisses and they see how much arrows of the Divine insistence finds existence in the response.

Yeah, it is a very intimate presence of the infinite in every finite moment of experience. Yeah, so it's not a great static infinite spaciality. But it's the space time of happening. About happening. Yeah. It's a cosmic habit they get there are billions times billions of happenings, but our focus is always drawn to what's happening. Here. Now, here now because here now is in some sense, receiving everything that has already happened to the universe, but from a very limited perspective. So yeah, you ask the question beautifully, it's really a question about the the past, the present and the future. Because into each each present moment of becoming which is what the creature is as what you are is it that's what I am we are moments of becoming right now. And right now and right now. So you trip are slightly different from the trip. Have a moment go at a moment ago and slightly different, not so different that we need to change our names. But there's continuity there's rigorous deep continuity, but the the for Whitehead different process thought be the actual occasion, the actual subject is the is the event here and now. That is shear present tense. But that shear present has what as its content, the whole past its whole history. So the past flows in that's our relations even you are in my past there. It takes a split second, for for my retina to my hearing to process, the wavelength, visual and auditory coming from you know that sort of anything we can see with our senses. It takes some split seconds to process so everything that is the content of the present is an influx from the past the immediate past but also the deep past mean I've already been talking about the really deep past like close to seven decades past of of my family history, my own personal participation in it. And all of that present, as is yours what you were telling me about your family vacation coming up and those plans that's already part of your family history. You know, those are plans. So we all and as part of my history now because I heard the story. So we we have the whole history of ourselves, our families, our friends, our communities, that our nations our planet as well. And our universe in some way but ever more abstract. That whole history flows kind of oceanic. We like the role of a wave into the moment that wave of the universe and its past crashes on the shores of the present moment. And so that paths we take in but we have to integrate it somehow mostly unconsciously. We can't process very much consciously. We can process some of what we're perceiving some of what we remember some of what we feel but don't consciously remember we process as much as we can, moment by moment. Sometimes we're much more limited than other times and sometimes limited by traumas or by terrible educations or by formations that screen out a whole lot. Sometimes we're gifted with the richer sense of the past, flowing in with all of its complexity. That past flows into that sheer present, and we try to do what we can to integrate it and organize it. It's called the compress. It's becoming concrete to make it concrete in this actually COVID occasion of becoming. But what's what's making that really possible well in process theology, there's that lower, there's that lower and what is that lower that lower for that is the divine calling Whisper of the Divine. Well, it's a whisper of new possibility of fresh possibility of something not already exactly realized in the past, something fresh possible here and now that will allow me to integrate that past a little better than I would on my own. If I can just somehow feel that more somehow take it in. In a way you can say God is calling us from the future.

But it's not a pre established already set future. It's God offering possibilities for a richer future. And of this, this endless artists palette of possibilities that that God carries and offers so that there's that war of the future. That that calls us to integrate the past, more meaningfully, and in a way that will then offer itself more positively more constructively. More healing like to the future so it's always an incredible dance, isn't it? Yeah. But the past and the future, that you in the present have to do but you becoming already the next, the next and the next moment of your present. So it's an incredible temporality. That is, it's just so rhythmic universe is such a rhythmic dance for Whitehead, but it's a dance of the present tense and he's taking in the endless endless corral of the past and moving towards towards future, not a preset future. That's why it's not a finalist kind of eschatology of reset endpoint, but it is its own eschatology there is constantly this calling of of the future to the President making something new out of the past.

I love that but I mean, I am not surprised I do. You just demonstrate to me that you are indeed Katharine Keller, and the way moment by moment, I know but, but there's enough coherence. Like Joe Bracken Joseph Bracken is another week where you'll get a visit with would say that you deserve the title society. You know, because of the constancy of character and the provocative response. So, in you mentioned earlier, having spent some time working at faced with a deep and the doctrine of creation, and when you describe, right the the way he just did that every moment in some sense is this is this meeting of the past and the possible futures and the creaturely contribution in the present. When you mentioned kind of the Creation out of nothing isn't even in the Bible, that implies that it you know, it showed up in the tradition for a reason. Right and and you also in that book, spend some time contrasting what's happening in Genesis with what happens in the Enuma Elish, which, I mean, I read it in high school. So I imagine a lot of people are, you know it was assigned. I wouldn't I probably didn't would have been reading pagan texts, but nonetheless, they were there. I'd love for you to take some time to talk about how, as, as a process theologian, and a feminist and someone that engages in kind of deconstructive reading of texts, how Whitehead helps you look at the actual Hebrew text in Genesis, and then the kind of criticism of abstractions and the criticism of inherited interpretations of that text. It helps you pull it back to then discover this kind of generative creativity. Why would the chaos Moston such that, in some sense, was getting echoed in your previous answer, but for those that may not be familiar with the Genesis texts, and then the connection with this historical section, is historical connections, and then the kind of criticisms that feminists bring to that depiction of power and violence and such give us an invitation to what was going on in that work.

I do find I turn to that work, often. Because Because the question of the creation is constantly with us, isn't it and it haunts many of us because we think about the creation now in its particular terrestrial forum as as very fragile and we think about it environmentally and in terms of climate change. And so it becomes important to new ways to think through the story of creation. The story of creation that a lot of us received is is thought to be biblical. It's just if you look seriously at Genesis one, it doesn't it doesn't map one to it. But you know, biblical passages are all there to be interpreted. They're rich and very ancient metaphors. So x ne Hilo is fair game as an interpretation. It's just not fair to say that it's the only possible true interpretation. But yeah, so most, most folks are taught to see a god have total power, creating everything out of nothing. And of course, it's a he God and it was a patriarchal time in human history. So I'm not saying the Bible wasn't patriarchal. It's just that it presumes the maleness to because men were in charge of the social orders and Israel would have been in big trouble. It's already big enough trouble, but it hadn't, you know, drawn on its patriarchal forces. So that's in there, the patriarchy, but very differently than say the Enuma Ailish which was very influential Babylonian texts, Babylonian, Sumerian, it were typical of other ancient texts that were or you have actual warrior Gods you have Mardu as a young warrior God that a son of Tiama to sort of original goddess giving birth to the world, but he decides to lead a revolt against her imagine that he actually leads leads a little divine army of the children of Tina to kill her to consider her a monster and to kill her and to take over the universe and that's enshrined as divine truth. And then these great civilizations, that's Samaria and Babylon. So that's truly patriarchal power warrior power of control and then he reshapes permeates the world

you know, in his own image, but you don't have the warrior creation in Genesis. You have this calling forth out of out of the chaotic room like saltwater or the town, the deep and you have bought then step by step calling for saying, Let there be let there be. It's not the language of of a commandment. It's the language of invitation. You know, let there be light, and there was light. And what does God say? He says, Oh, it's good. It's like God, react responds with, with this delight to what comes forth from God's calling. So I read it as very Whitehead, as God is luring giving out these possibilities, you know, for light and then for materialization of, of actual, planetary and stellar bodies and then for creatures of different kinds and complexities. And the elements cooperate, God asked the waters to bring forth once the waters have come forth and asked and then the Earth has come forth. I ask the earth also to bring forth creatures. So God seeks as much collaboration as possible in that creative process. And it's always calling calling and then saying, Oh, good. And then when it's all together a manifest that's the that's all. That's when God says. Very good. Some Christians grow up thinking it's because we've been created in the image of God. That's why God says very good. No, it's all things together. And God saw that it's very good, including us. Very special, interesting creatures. So you can see how I got all into that, that exegesis of that text because it seemed to suggest an alternative kind of power even though it's, you know, from about 3000 years ago, possibly, or at least 2500. And still patriarchal, but it's opening up to another understanding of power that feminist theologians could work with, you know, we didn't have to just cut ourselves off from from the biblical tradition. We could we could hear something calling there and see how it keeps calling and finds perhaps its most radically gentle voice in in Jesus of Nazareth. And how that that callings are pretty good where God's creation then in one of the parables is like, like a sea being so that's the power of God to just distribute seeds. It's a perfect image of the divine law are the seeds of possibility. are distributed, and it's up to us to respond and we might respond like stone or like hard ground or like something with thorns is the one that or we might respond like, like good Earth. And really let it let this define more. It take root in us with us. So that's sort of how I do my own feminist, you know, Christian, theological reading of the Bible in in process. terms.

One of the things that strikes me about what you just said, is in many ways, both in thinking through the parables and the way it depicts Divine Presence and activity, thinking through the Genesis, Texas that there are unspoken presuppositions that lie at the heart of most of the kind of the dominant Imperial patriarchy or friendly Christianity, right like it one of the things you do, I think, well in both of those examples is like, I mean, even the Genesis texture like well, there's, there's this see, there's the formless void, and all that's prior to anything happening. Just like you're like, Well, if you take the Bible literally right, there's all these things there God is second and then in that's not you projecting that's like just reading right in the text does not say God creates them, right the sea and the formless void but creates within them and there so in some sense, the legacy of hierarchy patriarchy this top down coercive interventionist want logic of the One Power turns the prime Okay, the primal chaos into a threat and it's not a threat to creation. It's a very place creation takes place. And I think that same kind of thing happens when you take the teachings of Jesus or you know, in the parable of the seeds, or there's so many places where the actual language of Scripture describes something that coheres much more closely to a process vision. But then those unspoken presuppositions we have, then tell us like, well, as you begin to execute this text, here are the assumptions we should be we should begin with. What has been your experience as someone that has spent years introducing kind of critical faithful reflection on the Christian tradition to future ministers at coming up against those unspoken presuppositions? It what does it mean to wrestle with them in positive ways? Because I imagine some people taking the class spending six weeks with John, hearing from different process theologians are like, Oh, I love this stuff. This is amazing. Oh, we're going to talk to Catherine's Great. Others are sitting there with those presuppositions they've internalized and assumed like this has to be and then they probably already pulled out their Bible to make sure that we weren't making that up. You know, as someone who doesn't just think process and theologically but the process of teaching Do you have do you have wisdom as to how we process undoing and thinking through those unspoken presuppositions?




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