Divine Processual Synchronicity is How the World Works...

Divine Processual Synchronicity

Is How the World Works...

A Process Theology of Reality

as we know it and live it

by R.E. Slater

In the theology I've been developing over the years - most recently, process relational theology - I've added concepts which were foreign to my biblical training. One of these is what I call "divine processual synchronicity" (DPS).

Here, I extend the idea of a divine miracle to be a common, everyday, moment-by-moment experience of the would. Having read Mitch Albom's book on the five stones in the river, or William Powell's "Shack," (sic, the chapter entitled, "The Garden") or dozens of other titles old and new, it finally dawned on me that not only is our God everywhere present but also everywhere experiencing and reacting to not only ours, but creation's everywhere experience of the present.

DPS is different from the classic Calvinist idea of God "causing and directing" all things in that God doesn't cause or direct anything. Rather than saying God is "in control" it is more accurate to say God is participating with a wildly "out-of-control" freewill universe in all its chaotic, random, and consequential results in exercising the being of itself.

Synchronicity implies that the Creator God Redeemer does not abandon His creation but fully experiences and participates with it in every way possible by redirecting its urges and displays where possible towards beauty, benevolenvce, and generatively loving actions. This can occur when creation harkens to its Savior Redeemer's loving calls to learn to love and become love. It requires creational obedience in the theological arrangement described as the Divine-Human (sic creational) cooperative I here redescribe as the divine, processually evolving, experience and participation of God in our lives.

Synchronicity says we are not abandoned by God but have hope in evil and harm that God is with us, working about us as God can, and that even in death we are delivered from dark meaningless to processual goodness and beauty at its zenith. It extends the idea that God is 'with' us... not simply up there in the heavens judging and dealing out wrath... but genuinely, and lovingly, with us in the fullest of senses.

Without denying divine Otherness, or divine transcendence, DPS leans into divine immanence with extreme consequences - for a creation without a present and participating God is nonsense. But an uncontrolled - and uncontrollable - freewill creation WITH a present and participating God is a miracle. The kind which surprises, which can morph itself towards divine imagination and creativity, which utilizes the Imago Dei which is present everywhere in creation as its birthright. Which may redemptively re-enrgize a freewilled cosmos by God's more recent divine atonement in Jesus stating the obvious - that we were never alone nor would be left alone. That God is remaking the world, with the world's cooperative help, into become fully what it was meant to become rather than a future fireball aka dispensational teachings.

That is, God is spiritually healing a freewill creation to become what it inherently is having been birthed by God in God's Image and divine Self. Hans Christian Andersen, captured divine processual synchronicity perfectly by his simple phrase, "The whole world is a series of miracles but we're so used to them we call them ordinary things."

R.E. Slater

December 2, 2022